The Dispatch Podcast - Fear and Looting in Los Angeles | Roundtable

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

Steve Hayes, Sarah Isgur, David French, and Jonah Goldberg break down what counts as an “insurrection” after the L.A. riots—and why the chaos might be hurting Trump in the optics war. The Agenda:—Unrest in Los Angeles—In defense of norms—What is an insurrection?—Polling on Los Angeles unrest—"Worse the better"—Tulsi Gabbard's strange nuke video—SANE / FREEZE part two—NWYT: Child rot summer Show Notes:—Jonah Goldberg on Trump and carnage —Weekly Standard piece on immigration The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Dispatch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and regular livestreams—⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, everybody. Just a quick note that we recorded this episode before Israel's strikes on Iran on Thursday evening. For full coverage of that, please see Friday's Morning Dispatch, and we'll be talking about it next week. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve. Steve Hayes. On this week's episode, we'll be discussing the riots in Los Angeles and President Trump's response, calling up the military. We'll also talk about Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, and a strange video that she released on social media this week, wondering about the possibility of nuclear annihilation. And I'm not worth your time. We'll debate sending your kids to summer camp and offering them structured activities over the course of the summer or allowing them, in the words of the New York Times, to kid rot. And lounge around. Finally, a programming note. With Sarah Isker, long-time host of the Dispatch podcast, taking a bigger role at Dispatch Legal and Skodas blog, she will no longer be hosting the dispatch podcast, but will be with us as a regular panelist. And joining me and Sarah today, David French and Jonah Goldberg.

I want to jump in right away to talk about the big news of this week. We'll start with immigration unrest in Los Angeles and a possible. changing role for the U.S. military. By way of introduction, last Saturday in Paramount, California, largely Hispanic community in Los Angeles County, federal agents assembled to prepare for another in a series of immigration enforcement raids in the area over the past two weeks. Protesters assembled to confront the feds, and when the sheriff's department personnel arrived to reinforce the federal agents, the confrontation escalated, with federal officers firing tear gas into the crowd and protesters throwing bottles and other projectiles at law enforcement.

These confrontations grew in geography and intensity, and on Saturday night, President Trump posted a statement on truth social. If Governor Gavin Newscombe of California and Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles can't do their jobs, Trump said, then the federal government will step in and solve the problem. Riots and looters, all caps, the way it should be solved. Trump then ordered 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles, and two days later announced 7,000. hundred Marines were ready for deployment. There have been many more disturbances over the course of this past week with law enforcement, again using tear gas and rubber bullets, at times attacking journalists and rioters setting fire to cars, pelting police vehicles and cops themselves,

with rocks and looting an apple store, among other locations. The rhetorical response was predictable with Trump critics warning that fascism is truly here and supported the president celebrating a return to law and order. Jonah, to you first. Donald Trump ran on ending illegal immigration, tightening up the southern border, engaging in mass deportations of anyone in the U.S. illegally. Many communities in Southern California have refused to cooperate with federal immigration efforts. They've rejected requests from the federal government to transfer illegal immigrant criminals to immigration and customs enforcement officers, or even give ICE a heads up when they're releasing those criminals back on the street. Isn't Trump just using the tools available to do what he was elected to do? Yes, he's using the tools available to do the things he's elected to do.

He's not just using them. I think a lot of this, for me, a lot of this comes from a question of just basically trust. We've watched since election, not even inauguration, since election, Trump and his minions laying down the predicates for this idea that he should have war powers. He's invoking war powers, in effect, in all of his trade stuff, or a lot of his trade stuff. He's invoked the Alien Enemies Act. He's invoked the trading with the enemies act. He talks about political opponents and those disloyal to him as traitors committing treason. He rhetorically sets up this worldview that says, you know, going back to American carnage,

America's at war, he's a wartime president, but our real enemies are the domestic enemies at home. He campaigned saying our real enemies are the enemy within, all that. that kind of stuff. And in that climate, his legal arguments have been pretextual and all that. And so I have no problem with cracking down on rioters and looters. I have no problem with enforcing immigration laws. I have a lot of criticisms for state and local authorities in California for dragging their feet and playing games. At the end of the day, though, I don't trust that Donald Trump is doing this based upon the merits of the specific context in California. California. I think he's been pushing the envelope on a whole bunch of fronts to create the

permission structure to give him war powers. And that is problematic for me. And, you know, a lot of people look down on me for and mock me for talking about democratic norms. A big democratic norm, which is just a norm, it's not a law, is waiting for a governor to ask for help with the National Guard. Another big democratic norm, which goes back to British fears of the standing army and the Norman yoke, never mind ancient Rome, is not using military troops on American soil. I don't think these Marines are going to do anything particularly bad. Apparently, when they leave their station, they're going to be without ammo. That's great. That's fine. But it's this provocative thing to create a climate,

to troll Democrats, to get them to overreact, so then he has more permission to push the envelope even further. And I just don't think this thing ends well. David, to Jonah's point, it sure felt like Donald Trump and his supporters were quick to assert a federal role to call up the military definitely felt like they were looking for the fight. On the other hand, he did not invoke the Insurrection Act and might have been a flash of restraint. So two questions to you, is what he's doing legal, and what can these guard troops and Marines do? Yeah, I think in all likelihood, it's going to be legal. There is a weird ambiguity in the statute surrounding the National Guard that seems to talk about where do these orders come from?

Are they coming through the governor? Are they coming through the president? there is a, it's a very strange ambiguity that I've not seen somebody really fully rationalized yet, and which tells me that the court's probably going to lean out of it since it's going to involve the deployment of troops into an actually violent situation. So I'm not going to say for certain, we've not seen a deployment like this. But in all likelihood, if push comes to shove, I think they're going to say it's legal. When there, when there is violence, violence. And that this is when Trump's, and there's an ambiguous statute, I think this is when a

court is most likely to lean out of the situation. And so that's why this dynamic is so dangerous because, I mean, Jonah's exactly right. I was talking the other day about, Trump reminds me of that the movie 300, The Rise of an Empire, when Xerxes walks out to the edge, surveys all of the people, and he says, for vengeance sake, for glory's sake, war. And the crowd just, you know, cheers, thunderous cheers. And in this case, some evil idiot, far-left duffices go, okay, okay, let's call and burn some waymo cars. Just want to state for the record to the Cylons, I had no part in burning your brothers. No part in this at all. Leave me alone when your judgment comes, but...

Just to be clear, David has now done Battlestar Galactica and a sequel to 300 that I didn't know existed. I don't have any idea what David is talking about. This is totally lost on me. I think he's talking about war. I think I get your big point. I kind of like the cut, though, because it's

like your point about Battlestar Galactica and Waymo is very much like men in black with the guy from the cockroach planet and American cockroaches. Yes. Like, there's this solidarity thing going on. I like it. No, I know. I know. Perfect movie reference, Jonah. Further. Thank you. Further lost.

Wait, can we just, Steve? Steve, I'm hijacking. Can we sidebar? We knew this was going to happen. Have you all been in a Waymo? Never. I'm the only one who's been in a Waymo? Oh, this is awesome. Okay, so it's so much weirder and cooler than you even think it's going to be. But we're driving like a normal, you know, Uber in a, like there's two lanes on each side. and we're in the right lane

and the car in front of us is like, you know, I don't know, whatever, it stops. Like Uber eats maybe to go pick up the food and get back in the car. Well, a human driver would go around that car because you would see someone get out and know that that car's not going anywhere.

Not Waymo! And there's nothing to do about it. You just sit there for like seven minutes. Behind the car. It doesn't move, really? It did not move. Now, I do know some people. People in my family who drive like that, actually.

It's sort of frustrating. Sounds like Wisconsin drivers generally to me. We never pass. No, you go. No, you go. Okay, hijacking back. Sarah, Rich Lowry, our friend at Nashville, you had a piece this week, sort of poking fun of people who think that this is sort of maybe the arrival of a new authoritarianism here in the United States. and called reactions a little bit like David's part of the absurd L.A. freak out.

Are we right to be concerned about this? I mean, is this just Trump being Trump? Okay. So there's the political part of this and the legal part of this. And Jonah of David have spoken a little to both of them, but I think you have to understand each and the other's context to be able to answer that question. So, for instance, the word insurrection is being thrown around a lot. And of course, everyone, like, runs to the Insurrection Act, which would allow United States military members to actually engage with violent civilian populations. That would be, I think, a difference in kind, if you will. But you have to understand why they're using the word insurrection. It's not had anything to do with the law. It's everything to do

with January 6th. It's the political. side of this. The left called January 6th an insurrection. And the right has, you know, had this their hackles up about it, this like badge of shame about it. So it's really important to now say that the left is engaged in an insurrection. It has nothing to do with the legal elements of the Insurrection Act. They need to use the word. So at this point, I'm not concerned. I don't think there is any break in tradition for calling up the National Guard or even the military to assist law enforcement. Right? So like the way it works without the Insurrection Act is that the National Guard and military members basically think of it as like the Insurrection

Act would allow them to interact with civilians. Without the Insurrection Act, they can only interact with law enforcement that's interacting with civilians. They can assist law enforcement. They can back up law enforcement, but they can't be the ones to do any of the, like, clashing with civilians. You know, I see a lot of these articles that are like, this hasn't happened since the civil rights, you know, movement. And I'm kind of thinking to myself, I don't know that that's the example you want to give is, OMG, it hasn't happened since. That was a pretty important time to have the National Guard called up without a governor's permission. So I think that the left is, And the left is an unfair way to say this.

I think the people who are cheering on what's going on in L.A. and participating in what's going on in L.A. are be clowning themselves, be clowning what they stand for. And if they were being paid by Donald Trump, I don't know what they'd be doing differently. Fair point. I mean, if we go to the politics of this for just a minute, Joni, you wrote this week that something very much along the lines of what Sarah just said,

If this makes Donald Trump seem stronger, this is all to the benefit of Donald Trump politically, thus far, because the, the riders and the images that we're seeing on our TV screens might make sort of an ordinary non-Trump Republican disgusted by the looting of the Apple store or the pelting of cops in the head with, with rocks. Because dot, dot, dot, enforcing our current immigration laws. Right? Like, what? Right. Is there a point at which, you know, Joanie, you said earlier, this doesn't end well. End well for whom? Is there a point at which this does become politically problematic? For Trump, there's a new Washington Post poll out. I don't have it in front of me just over the past couple days after the calling up of the National Guard and the stuff that we've seen, the violence that we've seen. and Trump is underwater and is handling of what's happening in Los Angeles, 3752. That doesn't sound like a very promising poll result if you're a Trump supporter.

Yeah, I've also seen polls showing how he's, like, immigration remains one of his best issues. And I agree, there's a lot of churn here. All that said, it's funny. So I wrote about this yesterday. I went looking for, because I think this is, I think that the propaganda of the deed is the anarchists in the progressive era called it, this idea of taking direct action, domestic bombing, blowing things up, setting things on fire, all that kind of stuff. The left has convinced itself, including now on the big chunks of the academic left. If you go and you look through the course

catalogs of places like Columbia and Yale, they teach whole seminars on the history of protest, and it's always in this sort of like we are on the right side of history kind of framing. but there is this mythology and nostalgia for the 1960s and before that for the Sakon-Vanzetti era that says this stuff is politically wise for the left and it virtually never is at least in electoral terms right there is an argument that you get like urban renewal programs after urban rioting in the 1960s and that's a separate argument of Fred Siegel's but in terms of electoral politics the MLK riots in 68 almost surely got Nixon elected as the law and order guy.

I was thinking, okay, because I wanted to make this parallel argument that this could end badly for Trump, too, and I tried to look for examples of when presidents overreacted to domestic unrest and paying a political price for it, I was like, oh, Kent State, right? No, Kent State was in 1970. Nixon goes on to win 49 state landslide in 72, so it's not Kent State. The only one I could find was Herbert Hoover and the bonus arm. where you had a lot of American soldiers from World War I who were kind of shafted on their compensation for the war, wanted their bonuses moved up earlier than was planned.

They brought their family and their kids, and Douglas MacArthur on the orders of Herbert Hoover came down on them really, really hard, and I think Hoover would have lost anyway in 32, but everyone thought that this really hurt his chances. That's the only one. That's not a great precedent for the hippies, right? That is not a great, like a bunch of American veterans who fought in World War I wanting money that is owed to them is different than the set fire to Waymo crowd. By the way, can I just footnote that one of the big things that Nixon promised in that election in 68 was to appoint Supreme Court justices who would be law and order Supreme Court justices. Now, he replaces Earl Warren with Warren Berger, which he got it wrong.

He got it wrong, but that was the point. but it also got you William Rehnquist. And if you want to talk about like sort of the history of the court and the rise of the conservative legal movement, it really stems from Nixon getting Warren Berger wrong and William Rehnquist having this little foothold of conservatism on the court all because of the civil unrest in the 1960s. So it had today huge implications. Just the closest circle is, I think this is really bad for the Democrats. I think it's really bad for the left. I think the Democrats have this unbelievable inability to speak, to seize the median voter high ground on this kind of stuff.

They say, a lot of them say the right thing. People are wrong when they say the Democrats aren't condemning violence. They are condemning violence. But whenever they condemn violent, there's always a butt. And everything after the butt is the stuff that they really want to sell and they really feel. And that's what comes across. And it makes the stuff they said before the butt. seem eh so i think this is very good for donald trump i think there are lots of good reasons to want

to put down these kind of rights and there are a lot you know rich is right you know like like enforcing the law is the law and historically these riots can start small and then there's social contagion to them i was talking about this with mike monahan this week the very political protesters create space for apolitical jack wads to go looting um in part because police resources are distracted. So these things can spiral out of control, and there's a solid argument to nip it in the bud, but I disagree with slightly with one thing that Sarah had said

about how this isn't a violation of tradition. This is a violation of tradition. Like the tradition is governor asked for this kind of help. The tradition is you don't lean into it and talk about how this executive order applies to all 50 states rather than like a discrete event in one place. I agree with you that part of the reason why they're talking about insurrection is because it's sort of like how Trump took over the word, the term fake news to turn it against people

who used it against him early on. I agree that's part of it. It's also because people like Stephen Miller have been trying to create this climate and this sort of atmosphere that makes their implausible arguments in court sound plausible outside of court. Can we just say that Jonah's like biography when he writes it should be called after the butt? Yeah. I'm not going to say anything about that.

So, David, I didn't expect this to conversation to go this way, actually. I thought I was in part sort of steelmaning this by leading with the Trump position and didn't expect both Sarah and Jonah to say the things that they've said. There's got to be a point at which this is too much, right? I mean, we all remember that Mark Asper, Donald Trump's Secretary of Defense, at the end of his first term. So the president wanted to shoot protesters in the legs. Just shoot them in the legs.

We've seen Cash Patel, Donald Trump's current FBI director, say that if you hit a cop, you're going to jail. And this is the same guy who raised money for legal defenses of the January 6th rioters and insurrectionists back then. I mean, at a certain point, it's at the very least, hypocritical of them to be making these arguments. And beyond that, there is a point at which it's going to be too much. And if this spins out of control and they respond as I think, well, at least I expect them to respond, which would be tough and perhaps over the top,

that it won't be to Trump's benefit. No? Yeah. You know, there was this chart that we all talked about a bit yesterday that was, do you support Trump's objectives and do you support Trump's methods? And on immigration, it was very clear. A clear majority supported Trump's objectives. And then also in a clear majority opposed his methods. And this is the Trump phenomenon in a nutshell. The fact that a clear majority supports his objectives explains a lot of his political resilience. The fact that a clear majority don't like his methods demonstrates his political weakness. And I think the Democrats, and have the exact opposite problem, that because they're the only opposition to Trump's methods, Trump's methods give the Democrats' life, but because the public doesn't really support a lot of the Democrats' objectives that inhibits their success. And so I thought that was an incredibly short way and concise and accurate way of describing the moment. And so I think right at the moment, the more you see Waymo cars burning, the more you see stores looted, the more people would support

the objective of law and order in the streets. But that will switch the instant that there is some extraordinarily excessive use of force or some extraordinarily excessive power grab beyond this. And the thing that makes this moment so dangerous, it isn't really and truly the extent of the violence, say, in L.A. It was pretty localized. I don't want to be one of these people to say it was nothing. You mean L.A. 92? No, no, no. If you're going to talk about Currently, I'm talking about why the current moment is so dangerous. If you look at the extent of the violence we just saw in L.A. or Paramount, it was pretty localized. It was manageable. That's not to minimize it. It was bad, but it was pretty localized. And history is full of examples of people taking manageable problems and blowing them up for their own purposes. And versus a class of leadership that looks at a manageable problem and says, how can I minimize this impact? You now have a leadership that says, how can I take a manageable problem and maximize its impact?

And that is what leads you down a train of decisions. And again, the far left is all too ready to oblige him on all of this stuff. They are spoiling for that street fight as well. I mean, it's a fringe, but it only takes a few people to create an awful lot of chaos. And that's what makes me worried is they're just at every turn wanting to maximize, not minimize what's going on. Politically, I just think Newsom is in a losing spot having to say, um, the reason I didn't want you to come here is because we were going to let this all happen and not worry about it too much. And by you coming here and enforcing law and order, you've escalated it. I just think that politically, that's a losing argument. Now, police tactics wise, that in fact is what the police often do. But

when you're having to make, like, well, we're going to let your business burn because in the long run, fewer businesses will burn if we let just a couple of them burn this time and let people, like, work out their temper tantrums. And Donald Trump getting to say, no, I will not tolerate this kind of unrest. And Gavin Newsom will. I think Gavin Newsom, you know, for all of the work he had done over the last four months, I mean, it hasn't been that long, to sort of position himself as the center left somehow on, for instance, transgender participation in women's sports. He's just, like, blown it up and then some. Far more people are going to hear about Gavin Newsom saying,

it's okay to have a little bit of rioting than they were ever going to hear about his, you know, sit down with Charlie Kirk or whatever about sports stuff. Yes, I see it a little differently. I mean, I take your point, and I agree Newsom's got a worse argument. At the same time, one of the reasons why I think this thing ends back. sadly, is the incentive structure for everybody is contrary to the public interest. I think Gavin Newsom is looking at this and saying, okay, I'm the only one on TV standing up against

Donald Trump. That is great for my resistance cred with the primary voters. The hippies are the anarchists, whatever we're supposed to the protesters, you know, the Antifa types, they have a Marxist-Leninist, and I'm not making up, you know, like pejoratives here. They have a worse, the better philosophy that they want more chaos. They think chaos is good for them. The center will not hold and that redounds to their benefit. Just because they've been proven wrong by 150 years of history does not seem to matter to them. The Democrats cannot get out of this doom loop spiral about how they talk about this stuff because they're so afraid of losing their base that they always have to have these to be sure arguments. And then the media, the one I find the most hilarious, and I don't like

doing a lot of media criticism anymore. But like, I watch CNN, you know, where I'm a contributor, I watch MSNBC where it's even more pronounced. Fox is a different story. Fox will run the one waymo burning for the next thousand years, right? So that's their incentive is like just as they would recycle old immigrant pictures of immigrants racing across the border for years because it was great video and it underscored the point they wanted to make, they will be taking images from the last three days and rerunning them forever, even if there's total. total peace and quiet all over the place. But at CNN and MSNBC, you have these people who are saying, you know, who are making all of these arguments that a lot of our friends on the right are heaping

scorn on, that there's a very isolated area, wasn't this much. It was Trump was trying to escalate. Most of L.A. is fine. Yaddy, yada, yada. They're making all those arguments, some of which have real merit to them. Some of them don't. Whatever, it doesn't matter. But the sort of center-left pundit types and political analysts on TV are saying that this has been wildly exaggerated and it's not nearly as big a deal as Trump says. Meanwhile, they're saying it over video of burning cars and rocks going through cops windshields because cable television news cameras cannot look away from that kind of stuff. It's the mostly peaceful problem from 2020. It is. Same exact thing. Well, the riots were mostly peaceful and you're like, okay,

well, I'm looking over here, and there's a bunch of stuff burning in a bunch of different cities. And I don't mean to make light. There was a horrible plane crash, Air India and all that. But news crews do not, cable news networks do not send camera crews out to film planes safely landing. But when they crash, the camera must be on it. And that's the same thing with this riot stuff. They undermine their own credibility with the legitimate footage that they're showing because that's what cameras are supposed to be on is dramatic scenes. By the way, can I just say that, like, this goes to Jonah's anti-transparency riff that I have fully adopted as my own, which is imagine what this conversation and debate would be like without ubiquitous cell phones and news cameras.

If only newspapers covered it. If only newspapers covered this, you would have a very different political conversation right now. Well, I mean, I do think it's fair to say that the political conversation is not only based on our perceptions of these images, but also the sense that people. have of who is being targeted by these immigration enforcement activities. Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report, friend of the dispatch, made a very interesting point yesterday when she pointed out that individual aspects of Trump's deportation policy are mostly unpopular, even among his base, but his overall job approval rating on immigration has been positive. And she asks why the disconnect, and points to a CBS poll that finds 53%, including 47% of Latinos,

think violent criminals are the ones being deported and targeted by these actions. And I think that there's a real difference between what Trump was doing in the first term and what he's doing today. And forgive me for the long setup, but I want to go to a piece that the Weekly Standard, God rest it. Seoul, published in July of 2017, my friend Tony Massia, he went and hung out with ICE as they were doing these exact kinds of raids in the summer of 2017. So six months into Trump's first term. And as he's going on these raids, he writes, the Los Angeles Ice Office hunts for illegal immigrants like this every day. Its nine fugitive operations team covers seven counties. Ice doesn't like calling these activities, quote, raids or, quote, sweeps. As those terms sound as

though agents are indiscriminately rounding people up. It prefers, quote, targeted operations, unquote, which emphasizes that these are precise efforts, named it particular undocumented immigrants with criminal histories. In 2017, 91% of those arrested by ICE in the area had criminal convictions, and ICE insists that it targets only criminals. Compare that to today. There was a terrific Wall Street Journal report in the middle of this week about Stephen Miller, Deputy White House Chief of Staff, and really the architect of Trump's immigration policy, went to speak to ICE leaders to let them know that the president was frustrated there

hadn't been more deportations early in his second term. And the journal reported gang members and violent criminals, what Trump called the worst of the worst weren't the sole target of deportations. Federal agents needed to, according to Stephen Miller, just go out there and arrest illegal aliens. Could some of the public polling on this be explained by this disconnect that people think that all they're doing is targeting illegal aliens with long criminal histories, the worst of the worst, when in fact they're actually not doing that, David? Yeah. And you know what really helps the public perception that they're just targeting the worst to the worst and they're just getting criminals, burning the Waymo cars and throwing the rocks and all of that. So, yeah, I do think, again, this objectives versus methods issue is just going to come up and it's been coming up over and over and over. And had you not had that explosion of violence in that moment, I think you would have had more public momentum around the conversation. about how Trump is doing all of this, because it's not just the going to a Home Depot and sort of

sweeping through and, quote, find the illegal aliens. Well, how do you do that? It requires a lot of things like, can I see your ID? Can I, you know, and you start to get into can I see your papers, please, kind of phase of all of this stuff that a lot of people have been talking about. But, you know, the thing that is, if this, if this violence had not happened, that conversation about methods would have been moving down the tracks, because it's not happening in isolation. We're seeing judges order, for example, the release of individuals who are swept up, these foreign students who are swept up and detained as a result of their constitutionally protected speech. And so what this does is it plays exactly, exactly into the hands of the way

that not just Trump and his people, but the whole MAGA movement views the left. And really, you have to get your, get into the heads of the MAGA movement because in the MAGA movement, number one, does not think January 6th was all that violent that it was all completely overblown. And they have the complete reverse view of 2020. They will say cities burned and they won't be using it as intentional hyperbole. They'll, they're sitting there believing like whole city centers burned, you know. And so there's a sense of violence on the left that's super ample. a sense of violence on the right that's very minimized. And then you heard all up, and I'm sure you guys heard this in the run up to the 2024 election. If Trump wins again, they'll come out into the streets. There will be more violence. And so you've got this notion, you've got a whole group of people who are absolutely expecting this, absolutely spoiling for this moment in many ways

almost seem to want it to happen. And that's been the theme of the moment. But I think that's that's the right theme of the moment because it captures how dangerous it really is. Here's the thing, Steve. I think that people, I think this is one of those polling errors that I like to talk about where polling can't really capture what people think. Nobody is going to say that they like indiscriminate roundups that, you know, get grandmothers and upstanding citizens. However, there is a different strategy from 2017 and now.

The strategy in 2017, as you said, was find the, prioritize the worst offenders and get them out first. That takes a lot of resources. You've got to prioritize them. And then you've got to find those people. The strategy now is disincentivize people from coming. So. And encourage them to self-deport. It could be next. So like the randomness is in fact the strategy. Because you never know when you're going to get picked up. And like a lot of people, I think, could come to the country thinking, well, I'll never be a violent criminal, so I'll get to stay. I'll be the lowest on the priority list. They're never going to deport me because it's so unpopular. So I think you ask people, do you like random roundups? They're going to say

no. But when they see that people are no longer coming into the country illegally at all, that, like, you don't need border enforcement because the people themselves are choosing not to come, then, yeah, they like the strategy and they like the results. And they're not going to vote that they didn't like the tactics. Yeah, that's a very good point. Especially when they disagree with the Democrats' objectives. Because it does circle back to the Trump objectives in many of these areas are more popular than the Democrats' objectives in these areas. And so the Democrats for their entire political survival are having to essentially wait for Trump to fail. And if the failure is big enough, it kind of swings back to them, but their underlying objectives are

popular. And so around and around we go. And the idea that you're here illegally, you broke our laws in coming, but therefore you have like a right to stay or a right to riot if you're not allowed to stay and to burn things and take over an American city because they're enforcing the laws that you knew about when you illegally crossed the border, again, politically, a losing argument. Yeah. Also, yeah, I think the nutshell of this is if you're talking about women being snatched off the street because of legal immigrants being snatched off the street because of something they wrote in a college newspaper and whisked off in the dead of night, the White House is on defense. If you're talking about arresting people waving a Mexican flag as they stand on top of

a burning car, that's the argument Trump wants to have all day long. And I think they will continually look for opportunities to keep the argument focused on that kind of stuff. All right. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch Roundtable. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style.

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of a website or domain. You're listening to the Dispatch Roundtable. And before we get back to the action, I want to let you know what's going on elsewhere here at the dispatch. This week on the Remnant podcast, Michael Moynihan, host of the Moynihan report, joins Jonah Goldberg to discuss Greta Thunberg being kidnapped by Israel and the Los Angeles riots and the ramifications for both the Trump administration and the Democratic Party. Search for the Remnant in your podcast app and make sure you hit the follow button. Now let's jump back into our conversation. There was something very weird this week, a three-minute video that was released on social media

by our Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. And in this video, she was ostensibly reflecting on a recent visit she made to Hiroshima, Japan, where the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb, but she used it to the video to excoriate elite war mongers, quote unquote, for bringing the planet close to nuclear annihilation. And we're going to play a clip of that video now. This is the reality of what's at stake, what we are facing now, because as we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before. Political elite and war mongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.

Perhaps it's because they are confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won't have access to. So it's up to us, the people, to speak up and demand an end to this madness. We must reject this path to nuclear war and work toward a world where no one has to live in fear of a nuclear Holocaust. What are we to make of this video and Tulsi Gabbard? Well, first of all, I just want to say how wonderful I think it is that former congresswoman, presidential candidates,

and current directors of one of our major intelligence agencies have the courage to attack elites. because, you know, she's clearly one of the people. Yeah. Yeah, look. Jonah says that, but I saw him practicing his duck and cover drills under his desk this morning. It may have looked like that's what I was doing, but it's a different thing. We'll talk about it later.

We'll talk about it offline, Sarah. So I have a lot of different views on it. One, I think she's nuts. I think she's legitimately nuts. I've never understood. I have good friends on the sort of paleo world. We've always had this really soft spot in their hearts for her as like a completely. You mean their diets?

Very, yes. Are they vegans? There's a certain sort of. You mean paleo-conservative. I mean the nationalists, old-style, nativist, isolationist, whatever, pick, take your pick, right, who thinks she's just the bees' knees. And I've never seen it. I've been always sort of impervious to it. I think she's from a kooky milieu in a kooky place in Hawaii.

And I think she's a classic. example of, and, you know, one of my long-time gripes is the people who say, give peace a chance, only say it to basically decent countries with well-formed consciences, right? Gandhi can say it to England. Gandhi can say it to America. The Gandhi imitators can say it to America, you know, but they never say it to Hitler. They never say it to Saddam Hussein. They only say it to the people with consciences, right? She's one of these people who only wants to call people who don't like war mongers, war mongers, right? So, like, she takes Bashar Assad's side.

She takes Vladimir Putin side. This is, so one of the things that's fascinating to me about it is that this is such un-reconstructed 1980s, sane-free's Soviet horse crap. And the idea that the director of national intelligence is trying to cram this down people's throats, imagine if this thing was entirely. historically and theoretically and theoretically accurate, right? Imagine I agreed with it 100%. I still have no freaking clue why the director of national intelligence is making social media

videos where she's narrating them to camera. It's just such an unbelievable waste of her time and so proves that she's not qualified for the job. And it's another example of cabinet secretaries auditioning for Trump's attention. The thing I think is most pernicious about it is, you know, I started with my whole rant about how Trump is all about the pretexts and trying to foment a sense of crisis that maximizes the president's powers under our constitution and gives him the widest latitude to do whatever he wants.

The argument that we are closer to nuclear annihilation than ever before is a classic attempt, usually used by the left. And then again, hey, she's from the left to freak people out, to get them to agree to policies they would not agree with and not go along with, were they not. freaked out and panicked. And so it would have been easier if you said what doesn't bother me about the video? And I could have said, well, the lighting was pretty good. So, David, I want to try to make sense of what's happening here beyond this just random three minute video. You know, there's this pitched battle inside the administration on what to do in particular with respect to

Iran. And, you know, we're at this point where the U.S. is about to hold its sixth set of negotiations with the Iranians on the potential of a nuclear deal. And Tulsi Gabbard was not, it has been reported, at a retreat that Donald Trump held at Camp David last weekend with many other senior officials to weigh in on how the Trump administration should, should pursue these talks. Is this some weird attempt of hers to be part of that conversation? And she thinks, hey, put this out on social media. Donald Trump loves social media. I can make my case.

I'm all with you on the following. Is this some weird attempt of her to dot, dot, dot? Yes. Weird attempt. Yes. To do what? not sure but you really do raise i think a very interesting point about the nature of this administration and the way that maga has kind of morphed and changed over the years i don't think people fully

realize who are sort of outside of it entirely how much maga really kind of morphed into a coalition of cranks with a lot of different ideas about the world and often competing and irreconcilable ideas about the world but in common had this disdainting disdain of elites and this disdain of the establishment on front after front after front, whether it's national security or public health, you name it. And they were all under the banner of Donald Trump. But at some point when decisions have to actually be made, these competing strains come out. So you've had this war of words, for example, between Mark Levin and Tucker Carlson, for example. You hear about all of this infighting the administration over a potential

Iranian attack because taking on Iran, this question has an answer that one or more faction in MAGA won't like because MAGA included people who said the Democrats have been way too weak on Iran for year after year after year. I remember when I was doing an interview with Barry Weiss on her podcast over the election, that was one of the strongest points of pushback on supporting Harris was Trump was going to be tougher on Iran. At the same time, you have this whole other coalition, sort of the Tucker extended universe that is like, no, we are absolutely turning on the page on all of that aggression. There's no, if you don't want a new war, if you want peace, vote for Trump. At some point, these two factions were going to have to, we're going to read,

there's going to be a decision point between these two factions. Trump's going to make the decision, and I fully expect the other faction to fall in line publicly. but this is an example of how MAGA isn't really necessarily a movement centered around policy aside from immigration restriction or, say, tariffs at all. It's really centered around oppositionalism under a banner of Donald Trump, but at some point the opposition has to make decisions, and when that happens, the divisions emerge. Yeah, I mean, it's really not the case, Sarah, that when Jonah says, you know, she was effectively pro-Syria and pro-Russia, pro-Pooten.

That's not really an exaggeration. I mean, that's basically where... Which is what you'd expect from Jonah. I mean, no. I mean, that's what's so surprising. Jonah wasn't just exaggerating for a fact. He was actually describing things more or less as they are. And, you know, I think David's right.

She certainly falls on the Tucker Carlson sort of piece through capitulation side of the split in the Trump administration. administration. Do you have any sense of how much sway she really has? She's been giving the president his presidential daily brief, which I am told is a misnomer in at least one respect in that it's not really daily. But it is often very brief. I don't think the president likes to sit and listen to intelligence product. It's unclear, at least in the people that I've talked to, how much she's relying on finished product from the intelligence community to provide the president, which is what

most presidents in the past have taken in during the PDB, and how much of it is just Tulsi Gabbard telling Trump what she thinks. Do you have a sense? I mean, is there a reason to believe that she's not an active participant in some of these discussions. Yeah, look, here's the argument that she's not an active participant, which is she sits atop a whole bunch of people who don't share her worldview. Like the actual people who work in the intelligence agencies in apparatus, I don't know what the plural of apparatus is, simply aren't anywhere close to where she is. So she's isolated

in several ways. Within the administration, it's. she's not considered a power center. And then within the intelligence community, she's not considered a power center because she has no team within the intelligence community. That's the argument that she is isolated. The argument that she's not is something sort of like the RFK argument that by having relatively here, high name ID, putting out videos like this that lots of people watch, that is its own power center. She has FaceTime with the president. That's power. So I by no means want to say that it doesn't matter that Tulsi Gabbard is where she is. It does, but not as much as it could, I guess.

I found the video, by the way. I watched it as I do with anything you send me, Steve, with as much, like, sort of skepticism of your point of view and sympathy for Gabbard as I possibly could. It was just really confusing. Like, you played the clip about, you know, nuclear war and wanting to avoid that. I think a whole lot of people would watch that and be like, yeah, that sounds good. I haven't heard a lot about us being on the brink of nuclear war recently, but okay, I also don't want to be in nuclear war. Fair enough.

But the whole front part, like she visited Hiroshima and here are the horrors that were visited Hiroshima. Here's how bad this all was. That's how it starts for about two and a half minutes. there is no mention of why a nuclear weapon was released in Japan. Yeah. And a second one was released in Japan. No mention of the fact that, well, I don't want to get into like nuclear history of the United States.

But I, again, with my most sympathetic ear, it felt to me like her point was, who cares why that happened? The point is nuclear war is really bad. It hurts civilian populations. You don't want that happening to you. but that's not really how she was saying it for two and a half minutes. Yeah. And for someone who, you know, is from Hawaii in particular, it felt odd. I mean, the whole thing was weird.

It felt like out of some context that we're like not aware of. Like maybe she knows a lot that we don't know. I get the joke. Like she's, you know, the head of intelligence or whatever. But nevertheless, I was sort of like, where is this coming from? Because as someone who used to do this for a living, it's not like she randomly went to Hiroshima. She went to Hiroshima to make this video, right? So, like, she, this has been in the works, obviously, for quite a long time in order for her to say,

I went to Hiroshima, and here's what I saw, and it's horrible. So, like, what? I don't know. I'm a little confused myself. Yeah, I thought it was bizarre that she would do this, given her position. But it was a reminder that a lot of times the people who advertise themselves as the most America first in our public debates are the quickest to blame America for things. Yeah, just to be clear, like, which was more important, not dropping an atomic weapon on Japan or 100,000 American lives? Right, right.

And then when they still didn't surrender, how about another 300,000 American lives? Did you want to invade Japan? Was that the better option? Because she didn't talk about tradeoffs. And you know me, that's my big thing. Every decision that we make in our government and in our public policy is a tradeoff. She never mentioned any tradeoff. Right. Also, there are these things that happen in our crazy, wacky Japanese game show of American politics where you're like, you've got to remember, somebody thought this was a good idea at many different stages of production. This wasn't like a gaff where you just said something weird and like, oh, I can't believe that came out and I'm out. They looked at edits of this. They probably went over scripts, right? It's sort of like the bud light taking the transgender person.

Like people signed off on this a lot. And then they're like, whoa, this turned out not to be a great idea. I mean, unless your goal was to provoke and to create exactly this response, which you never know. I mean, one person's gaff now is another person's troll. No, that's fair. And I think, you know, so your point about how there's a lot of different factions of whack jobs in MAGA, I think this, I wrote about this last week, that the Musk-Trump fight, which we're blissfully not talking about, was just the first sign of these schisms. There are real schisms. The restrainers versus the, you know, pro-Israel people, that one, those are not reconcilable positions.

and there are people who are on getting circling back to the immigration stuff there are people in trump orbit who will celebrate a kent state type moment when people are shot in the street and there are other people who are going to say this is not what i had in mind and um hopefully there'll be a lot more this is not what i had in mind people than the kent state people or and i just want to remind people don't trump lavished you know respect is the wrong word, but respect for the Chinese Communist Party for crushing Tiananmen in 1990. He is a longstanding view of this propaganda of the deed thing, of like showing strength and that kind of thing. And I think that there are people, like Tulsi Gabbard comes from one wing of this weird constellation of people who have different theories and different strategies available to them about how to win influence in public debate. I just don't think this is going to go very far. We're going to take a quick break for some more ads,

but we'll be back shortly. And we're back. You're listening to the Dispatch Roundtable. Let's jump back in. Okay, jumping from nuclear annihilation to kid rotting, which was a phrase that I had not heard before. The New York Times published a piece about it this week. The basic question in this New York Times piece is,

what should parents do with their kids over the summer? Is it okay for kids to engage in what the Times describes as indulgent lounging, basically allowing kids to do nothing, rejecting the over-planning some parents do to keep kids occupied with camps and activities and pre-college prep stuff for pre- and early teens? Sarah, do you have a view on the appropriateness of kids, probably kids a little, bit older than yours, just having the summer to do nothing versus sending them to camps, getting them involved in activities, stepped up sports, where do you fall on kid rotting? So I don't want to toot my own horn, but today at 846 a.m., I officially had kept a human alive for five years. So it is the Briscuit's birthday as we record this. you're right. I think this applies to kids older than my kid. You can't really just leave a five-year-old to his own devices, though that's pretty much what I did this morning when he bounded into my room two hours before his normal wake-up time. Really excited that it was his birthday. I later found him with a bag of Doritos and some Legos. And like, that seemed pretty fine to me. Like Doritos for breakfast on your birthday? Sure.

Happy birthday, yeah. Did you call that duck and cover too? Here's what I have learned in five years of parenting. This will shock people. Your kid is not you. Your kid is also different than other kids. So, like, parenting strategies that may be good or bad for other parents may or may not be good or bad for your kid. And I will read here a quote from Justice Jackson. other cases

I knew this was coming. I knew this was coming. Allegations and different records may lead to different conclusions. Like the Brisket who again like is nothing like me is a very intense focused

bordering for a five year old on perfectionist kid. Him rotting is a really good thing for him. But I will tell you the little one, dude, that one's like a frat star in training already. He's 21 months old and like, yeah, he might need a little more structure. Camps might be really good

for him because him rotting is not, yeah, it just doesn't have the same effect as it will on his older brother. Again, I'm just guessing here. So, yeah, I mean, I know this is like the most helpful answer in the world, but let other parents do what they think is best for their kid and don't worry about it. Although I will say, can I just tell you I had this really interesting parenting moment? because I am, I'm more on the free-range side. I think it's really, especially for the brisket, it's really important for him to have, like, independence because he can be so focused that, like,

very rule-oriented, whatever. Okay, so we were at the airport, and he wanted, um, he wanted, like, a cookie from Wendy's or something. Wendy's is across the, like, hall from the little airport playground. And I was like, all right, so I dropped him off in the playground. I was like, you stay here. I'll go get the cookie and I'll come back. I don't know whether this was a good thing.

Honestly, like, I second-guess my choice. But, oh, my God, the other parents, like when I came back with the cookie, there was a group, a whole thing of mothers, you know, worried that they had just found, like, an extra child that they were about to take with them on some plane flight.

So, again, maybe don't take advice from me anyway. We will take advice from you. And for those new dispatch podcast listeners, the brisket is the nickname for Sarah's oldest, which was given in utero. So now more than five years ago, which is... That's right. She doesn't look like she had a brisket in the oven.

Yeah, sort of... It was just a bun. He came out the same weight as the brisket we had smoked just that weekend. 8 pounds, 6 ounces. Jonah, when you were growing up on the Upper West side of New York City, were you part of roving gangs of no-gooders, doing nothing with your unstructured time in your preteen and early teen years? Or were you a summer camp kid?

Went to summer camp for two summers? Did not like it. Second summer was better than the rules? Yeah, because the rules. Like, you will be made to enjoy playing soccer in 100 degree heat. No way will not. I see it kind of differently. And part of this comes from my own experience.

My daughter came of a, as an only child, came of age right in the, I would say the sweet spot, but the sour spot of what Jonathan Haidt describes about the problems with devices and phones and stuff. And she's turned out to be a great kid and a great young woman and all that. But phones were not good for her. And they're not good for a lot of people. And one of the things I think it's very hard to explain to kids. because we all have had this experience, but how valuable boredom is at a certain age?

Yes. At most ages, I will say, before adulthood. Yeah, but like, and it doesn't have to be, like, I'm all in favor. If you can afford it, if you have the means to, you know, spend a month at the lake, go spend a month at the lake with your kid, right? But, like, don't give him devices to fill up every moment of consciousness

that robs them of boredom because what boredom does is it forces you to start like doing things you otherwise wouldn't do just to fill the time and that's how you discover new interests it's like i mean david and i are much more of the sort of sci-fi fantasy kind of dorks and like some of that came from having nothing else to do so you're like you pick up this book and you start reading it and devices really rob you of that motivation in a way that I so I don't I think the real rot is spending a lot of time on on tablets and screens other than that camp is good I agree with darling Sarah camp and activities are good for some kids better for other kids not so great for some others you have to know your kid a bit but like those long drives where you end up your kid

ends up reading stuff that they otherwise wouldn't those are really valuable too yeah to just just to pick up on on jonah's point it's it's one of the funniest exchanges i have on a regular occasion with my eight-year-old is when we're driving around town and she does not i do not let her be on phones or devices and i'm pretty strict about it and you know inevitably 10 minutes into the drive she she announces i'm bored and I say good. It's good for you to be bored. Daydream. Think about having a fun time on the beach.

What are you going to do playing with your friends next time? And she gets so frustrated by this that I think boredom is good. But yeah, you miss so many things. I mean, this is a little bit different because I'm taking us into road trips rather than mere summer kid rotting. But, you know, you miss so much. on a long road trip. My family does a ton of driving. And we usually try to give kids, the older kids anyway, some time that they can be on their iPad and watch a show or what have you. But then the rest of the time, I want to reserve for our families so that we can sort of relive

the stuff that I did on big road trips as a kid, which was, you know, listen to hour after hour of Tony Robbins tapes that my dad subjected us. too. Oh, man. And you can imagine that's like, you know, going through boot camp together. You have this special bonding with your siblings if you've had to listen to Tony Robbins for, I mean, at all really, but for hours. This is the way he is. It explains so much. Very into self-development. Yeah. David, what's, is there a right answer? I'm where Jonah and Sarah are. It sort of depends on the kid and depends on the moment. But do you have a strong view one way or the other on the question of kid rotting and structure? I mean, I appreciate the piece because I do like anything that is

pushing forward something this is here is an alternative to this sort of like, especially that, you know, battle him of the tiger mother kind of mindset that's in a lot of different places, you know, in maybe disproportionately represented amongst the readership of the times, perhaps. that says they got to be on it. They got to be doing stuff. It's got to be maximizing time. So I'm very glad for a voice that says, and maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe for some kids, this isn't the best. And so, yeah, I love it as, and I do think, and I agree with everybody else. I've had three kids, 26, 24, 17, two little grandchildren, four and two. So I've been doing this for a while. And kids are different. They're really different.

And, you know, look, our youngest goes to a camp that has no phones, no tech at all, nothing. And it's a really tremendous time. All of the other kids are in that same boat, no tech, nothing. And they love it. Absolutely love it. It's been great for them. Now, does that mean that all summer camps are great for all kids? Nope.

Nope. But I do like pieces that sort of say, have you considered this? this alternative that might be cutting against the grain. Because guess what? Not all our kids are the same and some cut against the grain and some need to learn more about cutting against the grain. So I found it very interesting. Is it part of the problem that the kids who need to rot are the ones that are getting over-scheduled and the kids who need a little scheduling are the ones who are rotting? Yeah, it's probably right. Yeah. But wouldn't we all agree to end on a note of agreement that it'd be great to see Jonah play soccer in 100 degree heat if there were videos of

that especially having watched Jonah play kickball where he was actually surprisingly good at kickball but was very intense and drilled a kid in the head with a ball as he was trying to throw the kid out as she was running to home I would love to watch you play soccer don't hate the player hate the game Steve that kid that kid knew what he was getting himself into. And it's probably the better for it. Learned important lessons. That's it for this episode of the Dispatch podcast. Thank you for joining us. We will talk to you again next week. Thank you.