The Dispatch Podcast - Grappling with a Post-Roe America

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

Jonah and Chris Stirewalt join Sarah to talk about the political aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization as states begin to grapple legislatively with the post-Roe era. Will we reach a consensus on what life means in the womb? Our hosts also discuss the nature of Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony during the surprise January 6 select committee hearing and the risks with the Democrats’ 2022 election strategy.   Show Notes: -TMD: Surprise Witness Blows January 6 Investigation Right Open -The Dispatch: Donald Trump’s Fractured Inner Circle -The G-File: Democrats Have a Funny Way of Expressing Concern About ‘Our Democracy’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Jonah Goldberg, and we have contributing editor Chris Steyerwald. He's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the new political editor at News Nation. Plus, a new book, Chris? Man, I don't need this much glory, lot, and honor just to be part of a wonderful podcast such as this. I would be content just to be your colleague and friend. I mean, it's just been so long since we've had you on. I feel like we need to run through the full thing, but you literally have a book coming out in like six weeks. I do. It's called Broken News. And I am not ashamed of it, which is I think Jonah, Jonah will agree. I hope that that is a good feeling to have when a book

comes out to you. You're like, yeah, okay. I'll buy that. Like, I'm not embarrassed. So it's a book about the media and politics, and I'm not ashamed. All right. That is about as good a plug as we give on this podcast, not ashamed. And we're not ashamed to have you here today. All right. Plenty to talk about. We will start with the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. We'll talk about the fallout from this week's January 6th hearing, and the Democrats have spent over $42 million in Republican primaries propping up MAGA candidates. What does that mean? Let's dive right in. Let's start with Roe v. Wade.

I've talked to Jonah plenty about this. Chris, you're the one I want to hear from. Reactions, thoughts, feelings. Well, I wrote about this for my dispatch column this week. I don't know. Time is a flat circle. I was stranded in, not stranded. An unexpected stay over in Denver as the American airline industry

continue to go through some growing pains. But here's what I figure. The generation of men and women who were born in the first two decades of the 20th century, particularly the 16 million who fought and served in the Second World War, made a consensus for the United States. And it was formed in a very painful way, right? The experiences of the 25 years after the, you know, the Second World War, were very wrenching. Much of it was needed on matters of race, on matters of gender, on our freedoms as Americans. And at the end, by the, you know, the mid-1970s was one of the worst periods in American history, right? Truly, we forget how much political bombing, you know, how terrorism was part of life.

We fled Vietnam, abandoning our allies to certain death. the vice president resigns, the president resigns, and different scandals. It's a real disaster. And Roe was part of, along with, you could mark Roe, you could also mark Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon as an urgent effort to form a new consensus in the post-Watergate reforms that happened. And we used it for 50 years, right? We have been my generation and others have been dining out on the work of, and I hate the greatest generation, but that generation's work of making a consensus. We have exhausted it, and now we are going through the wrenching period of our own of making a new consensus, and it will not be satisfactory to anyone entirely. It will take

a long time to really get it there, and it's going to suck, but it's necessary, and we have an opportunity to make it better. I'm not the broom behind your elephant, Chris, but I just want to clarify something for you. Yes. When you say you hate the greatest generation, you mean you hate the label. You don't actually hate all the members of the generation. No, Jonah, I I do. I do. You know what? Let's start with the boys of Puan Du Hock. Overrated. No. Yes. There have been many, there have been many great generations in American history. And Lord, hear our prayer, the greatest generations are still to come. Chris, the question I keep getting, though, is will we reach consensus? Because when you look at Europe, of course, they didn't have Roe v. Wade. Their tectonic plates continued to shift little by little.

And so they all have a pretty solid ground on this. But for 50 years, we haven't done that. Are we just going to start back at 1973 and reach that consensus like they did? Or has something changed fundamentally because of the intervening 50 years? So, you know, Americans, we have a rights-based society. And that's different than most of Europe, right? We understand natural rights differently and our rights differently and think about things in different terms. I would say that on issues like similarly challenging issues, like capital punishment, for example,

America has come to a consensus, right? Some states have the death penalty. Some states don't have the death penalty. And it takes time to work out. This one is much more challenging because of that rights-based understanding. When you have rights that are in conflict, right? So you have people who are standing up for the rights of unborn children. and you have women who are standing up for their rights to have control over their reproductive lives.

And when the rights are at odds and you can't, this is not going to be easy to solve. I do believe that what will happen over time is that it will form and we will tire basically of the subject. But right now, especially for the people who are on the losing side of this debate, this is just absolutely incendiary. But I believe, give it a decade, give it 15 years. Well, water will find its own level. Jonah, is this going to be, compare it to another political culture war topic, guns, immigration, health care. What is this going to be more like in the next few years? That's an interesting question.

Something where the middle wins, something where the base takes both sides to the extreme and they never talk to each other because they both want the issue. What should I think of this like? um well as we talked about on dispatch live the other night um and how i i wrote in my column earlier this week uh with with regards to the conservative movement i think the analogy is the end of the cold war where one of the legs of the three-legged stool of conservatism has been knocked out and you're going to see new factions all over the place but that's not what your question was um i guess i would say we could be let me put it this way

we could be entering into a time that is at moments analogous to different to various moments either prior to the passage of prohibition or the repeal of prohibition like there's going to be a lot of tumult interesting right and you're going to have people wanting prohibition

right across the country but I don't I really want to avoid civil war analogies because like this and we were talking about before we started how part of the problem is is that when you get a fundamental question about how to define a human being federalism gets kind of messy um and complicated and um and i don't think we're going to a civil war anyway but you can kind of it gives you a greater appreciation about how finding a compromise on slavery was so freaking hard um because it really was a binary thing for a lot of people and And I'm glad the right side won that argument, although Cornell just took down a bust of Lincoln because apparently they disagree.

That's a comment for another time. So I think that it's, when I say it's like prohibition, I think it's because you have so many people bought into extreme positions as sort of Chris was saying that it's just going to, I mean, there's a reason why other than his wrath, God made the Israelites. wander in the desert for 40 years. It was because they needed to get the sort of slave mentality out of their heads. They needed to get their unbelief out of their heads. Similarly, I think there's a whole generation

of political leaders and religious leaders and secular progressive activists who are so bought in and control and have the reins of the various institutions and factions that they have that it's going to take a while for people to say,

hey, you know, you're not the most useful part of this conversation and you're not helpful to find a solution and that means for the next few years it's going to be and few broadly defined it's just going to be an incredible amount of tumult I mean it was kind of amazing right before we recorded President Biden had his press conference at the NATO summit and he said the one thing that is under based and I'm grossly paraphrasing but this is the gist of it the one thing that is undermining America standing in the world and the stability of the United States as the leader of the free world are the extreme decisions of the Supreme Court.

And that I found to be an interesting framing in the history of foreign affairs and domestic politics. Chris, is there room politically for people in the middle on this issue? Will we see politicians emerge with consensus ideas who actually can get traction? Well, in some states, yeah, for sure. You know, this is an issue on which this is like, you mentioned immigration, there is a consensus on it, it's just not politically viable

because of our crappy primary system. But yes, most Americans are in accord on the, we are a pro-choice country that favors a lot of restrictions on abortion. When you get down to what's the plurality position, the majority position in America is Americans want access to legal abortions overall, but don't like them after the first trimester. And if you could do a national plebiscite where you really had turnout, you know, I'm direly opposed to mandatory voting, but if you had real mandatory voting and you could really find out, you would see that you would easily pass a ban after the first trimester. But, you know, maybe think about it this way. If this decision had come down a decade ago, Donald Trump would never have been

president, right? Abortion is such a, it has been, such a powerful, annealing force inside the Republican Party since the early 1980s, right, since really Reagan, right, and the Christian coalition and bringing that stool, as Jonah referred to it, bringing that together. And now the issues will for Republicans, so if the Republicans had nominated Donald Trump in a post-Post-Roe world, what was the biggest argument that people made, that Republicans made, of good conscience, made on behalf of Donald Trump, which was, yes, yes, yes, he's terrible, but I can't give Hillary Clinton those Supreme Court picks because of abortion. And that was the moral argument made in favor of Donald Trump.

Well, if you take that away, what are you down to? And this is why, by the way, one of the reasons that the trans obsession on the right, like this really, like, intense, all of this energy, and it's on both sides. It's reactionary, certainly. But I think the culture, right is going to move on to more exotic issues now, and I think that will change the Republican Party in considerable ways. So, Sarah, can I turn the tables on you for a second? Yeah. Since, among other things, you are the only lady on this podcast, and you shouldn't be able to

hot. I've got lady parts. I've got lady parts. So you asked, can we find politics? politicians who have compromised. So this is partly media bias question, not accusing you of it, but and partly a framing question. The weird irony, it seems to me, is that the people with the most reasonable is in the eye of the beholder on this stuff, but the people with fairly colorable arguments to be the compromisers are among the most hated people in American

politics according to the mainstream media so like ron de santis he could basically have his state legislature declare ham sandwiches to be bald the new god right and they would do it and um not the worst choice not the worst choice he's he's not going to ask them to uh ban abortion he's sticking with the 15 week um limit which he got past last April. And if you're just doing it on paper, right, if you're not going to get so caught up and if you're going to talk about this, this plurality position that Chris describes, that's the compromised position. Meanwhile, the Democrats who quote unquote want to codify Roe, which is, in fact, the extreme position. And so the question is, will we ever be able to have the sort of the debate or

the media recognize that, in fact, you know, allowing for first trimester abortions pretty much, on demand, but then more restrictions in the second and third trimester is, in fact, the compromise position and not the extreme position. And you disagree and think it's not, it is an extreme position. Nope, I agree with you. And my answer is no. And I'll tell you what I think this is analogous to, which is voting rights issues. That if you go through the most recent round, you know, Joe Biden gave that speech in Atlanta

in, what, January or February of this year, where you're talking about? about the 19 states that had passed restrictions to voting that this was Jim Crow 2.0. But when you went and actually read which 19 states and laws he was talking about, first of all, four of them had Democratic governors. And now they were mixed, let, you know, not trifecta Democratic states. They had often Republican House or Senate or whatever else. And, you know, several of them made voting easier. in some respects, harder in some respects.

And so it goes to like, well, which do you think is a more restrictive voting state? 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. voting, but only for seven days or 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. voting, but for 17 days. I think that's just a, like, a different question. One of those states is not Jim Crow 2.0. And so I, and yet, the narrative from the media to this day hasn't changed. it is that there is massive voter suppression going on in half the country sort of regardless.

And so I think you're not going to get away from that narrative idea that and I mean, you're seeing it this week. You know, that 15 week ban that Mississippi upheld,

I haven't seen many reports about that being totally within the mainstream of modern societies and other countries, instead, you know, it's women will die. So, yeah, I think, I think maybe you end up there eventually, but the Voting Rights Act stuff doesn't give me a lot of comfort on that front. Don't you all figure, though, that some Republicans are going to oblige them. Oh, they already are. Yeah. I haven't read all the news since last night or today. But I would imagine that given what a colorful quilt of people make up our nation's state

legislatures, that there's going to be some real hot tickets out there on this stuff and that a bidding war is going to take place. So DeSantis now says we can let it stand. But what about when Greg Abbott's like, oh yeah, well, try this. And we watch them do it on their dumb internet laws and stuff like that, where these states will get into a bidding war to set what the new standard for pro-life means. And this is, and this is how this stuff works. This is how the ideological slide happens, which is it's a ratchet. One state goes here and then somebody has to match it.

And the national, I'll put it this way. The national right to life is not going to disband. They're not going to say, guys, we did it. We achieved our 48-year goal. they're going to take this as far as they can in every state, and there will be a bidding more. That seems clearly true, but it makes it all the more important to talk about a 15-week ban, as, as Jonah said, like whether it's the compromise position or a reasonable position, something like that. You know, I've heard now Republicans or conservatives talk about absolutely, yeah, banning women from crossing state lines to get an abortion in another state that, you know, when it was brought up that if you,

for instance, ban abortion after conception that you would end up making a lot of fertility treatments illegal? And a reaction I heard was good. IVF is immoral and we should ban it. And I was like, that is not going to be the politically popular position that you think it is. I saw somebody at the Heritage Foundation said, well, we don't want to imprison the mothers who are seeking abortions. We should have an involuntary psychiatric commitment for women who are seeking abortion. That's going to go great. You can just see how when they're like, look, ladies, you're just feeling crazy. So what we're going to do is we're going to lock you up for a while until you come to your senses and we explain to you what you really want.

The firebombings will commence in five, four. I mean, geez, Louise. Bobby, interested to see, especially that Ron DeSantis Abbott battle, because you're exactly right. We've seen them do this on other topics and other culture war topics. And yet, at least for this moment, haven't seen it on abortion yet, although Ken Paxton, the Attorney General of Texas gave an interview where he said he would absolutely defend a Texas state law that criminalized sodomy. Again, this was the basis of Lawrence v. Texas, the case that Justice Thomas in his concurrence said should be revisited because of the substantive due process foundation that it lays upon. And I was like, really, Ken Paxton, you're going to, he's like, let's take it to the Supreme Court.

Sodomy is the midterm issue that's going to really seal the deal for Republicans. They just need to get back on the sodomy question, because that's where the voters are, right? That's where the persuadable voters are. I mean, that's a sodomy question mark. It's not even gay marriage. It is putting someone in jail for their private bedroom behavior. An act of Congress. Oh, it's an act of Congress.

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Let's move on to our next topic, which is the January 6th hearings. This week, a 25-year-old aide to former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, gave, I mean, pretty bonkers town testimony to the committee. It was a sort of emergency meeting of the committee. They'd given the public less than 24 hours notice. A lot of what she testified to was things she overheard. Some of what she testified to were things that she was told from other people. people. Her credibility now, the focus of everything involving the January 6th committee, because in some ways it involves their credibility, the Secret Service saying that they have

released everyone involved to give testimony under oath. Chris did this undermine the January 6th committee when it turns out that they didn't ask the Secret Service whether they would corroborate her testimony or rebut her testimony and instead just put a 25-year-old out there to dry. I don't think that, well, I don't pretend to know all the facts. I know that they had talked to at least one agent, I think, but I don't know what all they did. And we should also point out here, this is a matter with real consequences for, our government in the future, because, of course, we, there is a compact between presidents and the Secret Service that goes back to Abraham Lincoln about we will, we will forget everything,

right? If we get to the point where Secret Service agents are forced to testify about the gross things that presidents do, I mean, you can imagine, if you had served under, while Lyndon Johnson was president, you would still be pouring bleach, right, through your eyeballs for the terrible stuff that you saw that that wretched man do. Although in fairness, Bill Clinton tried to make the case that Secret Service could not testify against him. And that was rejected by the court that, at least legally speaking, the Secret Service had

no privilege. From a legal standpoint, I understand. I'm just saying, if we want to keep presidents safe, presidents have to, presidents have to feel comfortable governing and being themselves around Secret Service agents. one of the things, speaking of Bill Clinton that we talked about, that you just mentioned, if Clinton's assignations, secret assignations were taking him to unsafe places, unsupervised time, that this opened him up to peril and therefore the country. So I would just say this becomes a very tricky space,

and I don't know how those considerations affected how everything has been handled. But that's a very long way to say this. The people who are going the hardest after this young woman are the same people who a lot of them were the same people who were saying, well, this doesn't matter. This just doesn't matter. Well, apparently they were watching. And I will also say the way that the committee did this was tremendously effective, right? Because normally hearings are boring, right? I did one.

I didn't say anything I hadn't said to you, right? There was no, there was no like, I can't believe it. What? You're saying Joe Biden is the president? I can't believe it. There was no. I'm still mad at you for not finishing your testimony by saying, no, you won't. This is a podcast.

No, you won't. I would have totally done that. I wish you would have pointed it out. You're excused. No, I'm not. This is a podcast. But I think the way that they did this, so hearings are terrible and mostly awful in American. One of the ways that Congress fails to be Congress is that it cannot perform its oversight duties because of television cameras and the hoorishness of politicians and the need to be famous.

and most hearings devolve into useless soundbite machines where, you know, the, you know, the Masey Hironos or the Ted Cruz's or whoever are doing their little C-SPAN-Thesbianism. This committee has functioned differently and for a lot of different reasons. Kevin McCarthy's error in trying to deep-six the whole thing by pulling all his members off when he couldn't get people who are a target of the pro, on the committee stacks up as a worse and worse. Look, I think I'll cut to the chase just to say long term, this is good for the Republican Party. This is a hygienic activity that needed to

happen that the Republican leaders in Congress could not bring themselves to do in a different way. This is what they get. In long term, it's good for the Republican Party because if the Republican Party could nominate Donald Trump again after what he did, it's, you know, it's invalidating. It's way worse than Williams Jennings. It's way worse than Democrats thrice nominating William Jennings Bryant. And so it would be an odium. So I think this is long-term good for the hygiene of the republic. Jonah, did Kevin McCarthy make the right decision not finding Republicans who could sit there and cross-examine a Cassidy Hutchison and say, so wait, you didn't hear this yourself? Did they ever tell you anything else that they exaggerated? You said

that he was in the beast, but we're watching video that he's in the SUV and the beast, you can't get to the steering wheel. There's a panel in between the two. So, I think I asked you this question last week. Jokes on you, friend.

I think it's a fascinating question because, I mean, first of all, you can't do, you know, some historians said history does not provide alternatives, right? You just don't know what did what door number two would have led to um in so i'm sort of as part of your answer last time i believe um sarah you you pointed out that like part of the problem republicans have is that

they don't actually have good rebuttals on the top line the main thrust of the narrative right they can they can say oh that wasn't the beast that was a different car and they can say well so and says that he didn't tell you that story, but they can't rebut the major thrust of the allegations very well, you know, because it's pretty obvious what happened. And we know this in part from inference because you're not hearing them make these cases outside of the hearing room, right? I mean, the trick to watching these hearings is to completely ignore every one of the committee members, including Liz Cheney, right? I mean, like, I love Liz.

I think she's being heroic and all that. But virtually every single witness at this thing, except for two African-American election workers and our own Chris Dyerwald, and I'm forgetting somebody else. But they were basically all proud Trump supporters, Trump supporters, Trump voters, Trump cabinet members, Trump family members, Trump administration members. And the, and their, all of their testimony is in some ways politically against interest. And, and it's factual. And all of the people who have equal or greater access to the facts are either pleading

the fifth or defines containers. And at some point, that should be somewhat telling. And so in some ways, I think this is the best of all possible worlds, or at least it was prior to Cassidy Hutchinson. It was the best of all possible worlds for McCarthy because the adversarial, if there was good face adversarial stuff, it would have served, this is a point, Annie McCarthy and Jonathan Turley keep making on Fox. It probably would have served to reinforce the major takeaways of these hearings

because they don't have much to work with to rebut that said one of the like if they could have jim jordan all that you could totally see jim jordan playing dirty pool and like leaking to the trumpists what they're going to what the questions are going to be leaking here's the evidence that we have you got to nail down this witness you got to get them back in the fold that kind of thing and that might have been to trump's advantage i don't think it would be to to the republican party's defense. I totally concur. And I think this is, these have been bad for Kevin McCarthy and Donald Trump, but I think good long term for the Republican Party. I concur completely. I think that this is a real problem for the committee, this last hearing that they did with

Cassidy Hutchison. And while Jonah, you are exactly right that saying, well, she got the car that he was in wrong, or the person didn't tell her that story exactly, or the person was exaggerating when he did tell her the story, you know, who cares that he lunged at the steering wheel? That's not really the point at all. The point is actually something that Donald Trump has already said publicly many times that he wanted to go to the Capitol that day. And the real legally relevant part of her testimony was whether he knew that people in the crowd were armed at that point because he had said, you know, let them through the magnetometers without checking them for weapons.

But just what the other legally important thing is the Giuliani conversation where they clearly were planning some big thing about going to the Capitol on January 6th. This wasn't a spontaneous crowd going. But anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt. I just think those are the two important legal things. Fair. But the problem is that it now, I think, I think one of the things that the committee had going forward in my mind, and I've obviously complained that I think for someone like me, I really rely on an adversarial process to discern where the truth lies. And it has been a disservice for viewers like me who are like, well, but no one's there to, you know, rebut this at all. And I want to see the weak rebuttal to know that the rebuttal would be weak type thing. But at least up till this point, I have been somewhat comforted by the idea that it's, you know, sure,

people, all the people who agree with this narrative are on the committee. You can say it's bipartisan or not bipartisan, whatever you want, but they definitely all agree with that single narrative. But we've been hearing from so many Trump officials that in some ways it has been bipartisan or adversarial in that sense and that that has worked to the committee's advantage. What they've done here, unfortunately, it seems to me, is they put out information that they didn't press when they put her in the witness chair and now you have this cyclone going on around her

of people undermining her credibility. I actually, it doesn't matter in the end to some extent. Like, again, because we already said, it doesn't matter whether he grabbed the steering wheel. It doesn't matter which car he was in. You know, the things that they're disputing about her, testimony, you're right don't matter in some sense. But in another sense, I do think it massively undermines the committee not having that adversarial process because it shows what happens when

everyone wants to believe what she's saying. It's that difference between can I believe this and must I believe it. They never said to themselves, must I believe that he lunged for the steering wheel. Instead, they said, can I believe that he lunged for the steering wheel? Of course I can. We don't need to go and try to corroborate her testimony before putting this out there. And if that's the case, they've been so scrupulously just the facts, ma'am up till this point, it now undermines all of that. And I think that is a huge problem for the committee that has otherwise been really, has built up their credibility over weeks now. So I've been all over the place in my head about this, and there are moments where I agree with you entirely, and there are moments where I'm not sure.

I think your position is entirely defensible and probably right, but let me open up a jar of galaxy brain for you. And this is something I hear from people. I'm not saying I necessarily subscribe to it, but I hear from people quite a bit. This is hearsay. This is hearsay. It is hearsay. I hear people say that this is baiting the Trump people, right? This is baiting all sorts of witnesses that now need to be under oath to impeach her testimony, right?

It's fine to say on OAN she's a lying pawn of the deep state, right? It's another thing to hold your hand up and swear under penalty of perjury or contempt of Congress, she's lying, right? And the people who they want to get to testify don't know what else the committee already knows and don't know whether or not they could get busted in a lie. And politically now, look, I get that there are all sorts of people who say the allegations from Hirschman about this note that he says he wrote and she says she wrote, the allegation about the secret.

This is one of the weirdest controversies. This is a note that is handwritten that she has testified under oath that she wrote dictation from Mark Meadows and that he has testified. under oath that he wrote. First of all, this is like, I don't remember how old he is, but like a your age man versus a 25-year-old female, and I just find it hard to believe that on spec we can't tell who wrote it. Yeah, no, I agree. It's very strange.

And also, like, my wife of the Fair Jessica was fairly livid about this because her interpretation of it was that this guy wants credit. for this good thing and wants to deny it to her, even though she was not claiming credit for it. She was saying she was taking dictation. So it's not a materially important fact in that sense because it was clearly showed that they knew that they were crying.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. But my point is, if you want to push back on this stuff, if the Trump people really want to say the important stuff that she alleges didn't happen, you can't do it on, you know, the Mark Levin show. You got to do it on the road. And that's where I think that this is the argument that people make. I don't want to say I think, because I go back and forth about this,

is that this is part of some master strategy to entice more people to come in and testify. What do you make of it? Too clever by half? Too clever by half. because they don't need that to win this. They do just need to go on Mark Levin. This isn't a criminal trial. It isn't, and it doesn't really matter.

I mean, I'll put it this way, Sarah. In many, many ways, you are a special demographic, right? Oh, I know. Right? So the people, the number of people in America who are like, I see that the president openly tried to commit a coup. I saw him do it. But I want to know the nitty-gritty legal details.

Like, for me, for me, I, for me, I don't care the criminal prosecution part of the, there are a lot of Democrats who are really, really thirsty for criminal prosecutions here. They want John Eastman prosecuted. They want Rudy Giuliani prosecuted. And I suppose that there is a consequences thing here that would be important to prosecute people who commit crimes. But this is a political, that we have a political. problem that requires a political solution. And the political problem is that many in the

Republican Party refuse to acknowledge what Donald Trump did, right? That's the problem. And as Jonah has said many times, you can't move on from something that you haven't already processed and said, yep, that's correct. Donald Trump tried to commit a coup. He did, I think, I guess, no president has ever come close to doing what he did. And he threatened one of our greatest birthrights, perhaps our greatest birthright, going back to John Adams and then with Thomas Jefferson, the peaceful transfer of power. So getting Republicans to admit what Donald Trump did and sufficient enough numbers is really important for the country, right?

And this is where good faith Democrats part company with the kind of folks who are getting Doug Mastriano nominated for governor of Pennsylvania on a platform of promising to pre-steel the next election. So yes, I don't, here's what the unfair part is, is that history will remember Donald Trump throwing a cheeseburger across the room in a fit of rage. Was it a cheeseburger? Was it a club sandwich? In what room, was it mayonnaise or was it ketchup? Those details will get lost. And if Trump is unfairly alleged to have done these things, it will stick to him no matter what, because people love detail, right? That's what we try to put in a news story. That's what we try to put into a column. We want to pack it with details because

that's what makes it sticky. So that part is unfair. But I think in the, in the, I doubt this is the committee's last blockbuster witness. And I bet that the narrative will move on from here. So on the flip side, I think that, you know, and we tell this to young people all the time, especially those looking to go into any sort of, you know, press secretary communications role. all it takes is one time for you to say something untrue and your credibility is gone forever. You have to be right every single time. And I think now there is, it doesn't matter what the committee does. It doesn't matter if they have a bombshell coming up.

Because everything now, they will have that pre-made rebuttal of, yeah, but remember the last. Nobody who's making that argument is persuadable. There's no, there's no one who is going to say that. I don't think anyone's persuadable, really. My point is that before, to Jonah's point, they didn't really have particular pushback to anything the committee was saying. Instead, the pushback was nobody's paying attention.

We're not watching this. Now they have the pushback. The committee handed that to them, and I think that was a sloppy mistake to make. I don't know what they have or how it will go, but if Republicans are hanging their hat on that they're going to make this better for them by going after this witness

and discrediting her statements, if that's where they are, they're in a very bad place. I disagree. I know you do, but I'm just, I'm here to tell you that there are persuadable voters in America, and the Republicans who are fixated on this committee are not among them.

With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot track side. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful benefit. backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at mx.ca.com. Let's use that, Jonah, to segue to your column this week, which is like a song that I wish to be sung from the rooftops. And that is the steroids on which,

at least at this point, it really seems contained to the Democratic Party of the Claire McCaskill strategy of picking your opponent. And so Claire McCaskill wrote a piece, she wrote a book, but then that was published in, an excerpt of it was published in Politico in 2015, that she spent a million plus dollars making sure Todd Aiken won the Republican nomination in Missouri. And she said it was a gamble, but it was a risk worth taking so that she could stay in the Senate. We have now, it was like a trickle at first of other people thinking that was an interesting strategy because obviously it did work for Claire McCaskill in one more term she got from that gamble. But as you pointed out, it's so much important work. I know.

In that last term. But now it's seen as the go-to strategy on the left is to pick the most extreme Republican candidate, one who thinks the election was stolen, you know, Q anonanon adjacent, because they think they will be easier to beat with some of these independent middle-of-the-road voters. In an election year like this, Jonah, that with an economy like this, with gas prices like this, it's a hell of a gamble to take with democracy,

and you made some really smart points about it. Tell us about those smart points. So, I'm agnostic about the Todd Aiken strategy. I mean, it's hardball, it's ugly. he's a bozo I'm not you know I probably would have written in some third person

if I lived in Missouri back then because I wouldn't have voted for either of them but the stakes were pretty low right whether you whether the three of us believe that our democracy

faces an existential threat from these Q and on adjacent election denying Trump is maga types, 2,000 mule superfans, whatever, doesn't matter in this context. Because the people who are saying that they pose an existential threat, that they are fascists, that they will end our democracy, that they will overturn the Constitution and that they are authoritarian and they will complete Donald Trump's attempted coup, the people who are warning

about that, basically by which I mean the entire green room of Morning Joe, that those people have either support or are saying nothing about the fact that they're picking these crazies over more moderate republicans. I mean, the case that enrages me the most is Valdeo, the, yes, California congressman who voted to impeach the president. And his life has been hellish ever since. and in the wake of his vote to impeach, every single, like, liberal talking head and Democrats was like, this is heroic,

these kinds of patriotic, civic-minded, decent law-abiding Republicans are a vanishing breed, woe betide us, let me turn my concern trolling to 11, you know, the whole thing. And then Democrats spent more much, on his opponent, I'm sorry, they spent money running ads attacking Valdeo for voting to impeach Trump. Yep. They spent money literally denouncing his vote to impeach because they thought that would help get some maga nut election denier, the nomination in the Republican Party.

It is so profoundly cynical. And if they're either they don't believe the threat to democracy stuff. And in which case, they are actually damaging democracy by saying that democracy is in peril and in heightening the sense of polarization and extremism. Or they do believe it, but they are so much more concerned about their short-term political gain that they are willing to roll the dice on this strategy of bringing people into the government that they themselves think pose an existential threat to America. It is grotesque.

It is the most rotten thing right now. in the business that I can think of. But Chris, wait, my question to you, real quick, before you dive into that, what is the Democrats best argument for why they're doing this? What do they say when confronted with a Jonah Goldberg type opinion? They don't say anything because they run them through super PACs. Well, I saw in Pennsylvania, the Josh Shapiro campaign said that, in fact, Mastriano was already going to win the nomination.

He was so far ahead that they were just getting a head start on running against the person who clearly was going to be their opponent. They weren't trying to help him win the primary. That was a done deal. And he won by, what, 23, 25 points. If you think that their ad buy pushed him over the line, you're kidding yourself. And so their argument is we're not propping these people up.

We're running ads against them. It's not like we're saying, Mastriano is a great guy. And I think, I especially think with the Josh Shapiro argument in Pennsylvania, there is something to that. Well, I... What about the Prisker thing in Chicago? Anyway, we go on to Chris.

I make a very specific habit of not listening to what partisans say about things, because what do you expect them to say, right? What are they going to say like, ah, you're right, you caught us. We're the worst. So who cares? The... For me, and this is what I wrote about in my note last week, subscribe to Starwaltisms. But I talked to the woman who is not...

now the Republican nominee for governor in Colorado, who is a victim of one of these. Now she's going to run against Jared Paulus. And as you say, Colorado, you know, this is a year that Trump lost Colorado by like, I forget, 11, 12 points, whatever, a doughty margin. But Republicans can win statewide in Colorado. She won statewide in Colorado. She got elected to the Board of Regents for the university system. And I talked to her, and here was her experience.

she was way up, way ahead, and then low and behold, right at the end. And I wonder, by the way, if this wasn't a factor in, what's the name of the woman who rose in the Pennsylvania Senate race and almost cost Oz his nomination? Yeah, I don't remember her name right now. Yep. But what, but I'll look it up. But in a similar burst, so I do wonder about the provenance of all of her. eyes. But here is this candidate. I'm sorry, I can't remember your name nominee, but here in the question of middle-aged men remembering, think, oh yeah, it was Kathy Barnett in Pennsylvania. Thank you,

Caleb, who has Google on his phone. But the phenomenon, her experience was in Colorado, way up, and then the Democrats start in heavy rotation with this ad propping up the underdog, a guy who was sort of a perennial candidate. This is a guy who had a proposal to create the electoral college for Colorado so that they would not have direct popular election of governors and statewide officials anymore, he's a real fringeo. And all of a sudden, his numbers go through the roof and the race moves into a dead heat. She ended up winning, but she was desperate there at the end. What Democrats have done, so look, this is, Claire McCaskill didn't invent this.

This is an ancient practice, right? Fiddling with the other side's primary is as old as primaries, right? Under my, and if you go back to the time before primaries, fiddling with the nominating process on the other side, a longstanding tradition. And as Jonah said, politics is rotten, right? People do all kind of rotten stuff in politics, and it's fine. Remember Operation Chaos? Remember there?

I was going to say. Yeah. Yeah. Get the, go vote. Voting for Al Sharpton and the primaries to get them to be the nominee. You better go vote for Barack Obama. said Rush Limbaugh, because what you've got to do is make him the nominee because he'll be way easier to beat than Hillary Clinton.

So this is not a new thing. But Jonah Goldberg is 100% correct. The stakes are simply too high, right? It's just you cannot put people in office. And, you know, everybody's seen the ads, but I watched a bunch of the Colorado ads. And yeah, they're attack ads, but they're attacking them for. loving Donald Trump too much, being too conservative, being too pro-life, all of the things that are catnip for Republican primary voters. And it's rotten, it's dispatriotic, and Democrats who are

increasing in number opposed to this. I read the story in the New York Times of these billionaires who gathered Democratic donor billionaires, including the guy who founded LinkedIn, and speaking of crimes against humanity, but the guy who founded LinkedIn and these other mega-donors getting together and say, what can we do to prevent these nuts from getting in at local and state offices and desperate to prevent this from happening? Where do they find allies in the Republican Party to do this? What can we do? Well, on the other side of their own party, you have people dropping tens of millions of dollars to put the worst kind of folks in positions of power. It's really rotten. And with that, we're going to move on to our last segment, which is not worth your time.

And today's not worth your time is Jonah Goldberg's Twitter feed. He attacked spiders on his Twitter feed, citing an attack ad of his own, published by the Daily Mail, UK. I mean, not a reliable source to begin with, I might say. Mother says she almost lost her leg to spider bite infection. So first of all, yeah, that happens. If you get a spider bite and you don't get that treated and it's the wrong kind of spider, yeah, it can be pretty serious. Jonah uses this, though, to go after all spiders, including the beautiful, loving garden spiders

that you see every morning. Jonah says, and yet Sarah continues to support spiders shaking my damn head. Not worth your time. The spiders that you have come to know and love in your life are. of no threat. Do not let Jonah use his fear-mongering, his hate to infect your life

because spiders are our friends. So I did not know this is coming. I feel like this is a unprovoked attack. Wrong on spiders. Wrong for America. I am proudly

bigoted and prejudiced in my allegiances to the in the animal kingdom. The cuter, the more aesthetically pleasing you are to the human gaze, the more I like you. Jumping spiders are so cute. You haven't been watching all the TikToks

where they do little baby voices for them. Yeah, the reason they have to do baby voices for them is because they have to anthropomorphize them because spiders are hitting. is. I have a truce with spiders. I don't need to like or dislike them. They do a good job that I'm in favor of. And as long as they don't touch me or really get within, you know, a close proximity within arm's reach of me or my family, they can do whatever they want to do. But if they get in the hot zone, they're going down. But I'm, so I'm, I feel, you know what? I feel about spiders.

the way that I feel about the FBI. Like, I won't go around them if they don't want to come around me. And that's fine. They have work to do. I understand. So let's just keep it that way. I think that's fair. Okay, so I want to throw something out here.

I put it in our Slack channel. Yeah. I found this on Twitter. It's called a Spalax. Do you know what a Spelax is, Sarah? No, and I actually questioned whether that was even a real video. So if you look it up, it's S-P-A-L-X. It's a thing.

and it's a part of the sort of the I just want to state there are very few animals that I am not very very familiar with and yet you did find one it was the spalax it looks like a kind of mole rat right yeah it's like a cousin to the naked mole rat but this one isn't naked it is well dressed so it's kind of better looking and and maybe it's because I just recently did a podcast with jane norlinger and we got really pedantic about word usage which I enjoy doing. But when I looked it up this morning, the part of the Wikipedia thing on it says that they, they are completely blind and have a subterranean lifestyle. Now, who am I to say the subterranean lifestyle? But the question I have is, if you don't have eyes in the first

place, can you say something is blind? Oh. Yeah, I mean, I also will say that as a trivia a question, I did not know that there were mammals without eyes. So I feel like that alone was really new information to me. I knew we had, you know, some creatures on the planet, but they were like deep sea, you know, things that didn't need light photons type thing. So I will say, Jonah, despite your spider bigotry, and I just want to note, like, bugs are welcome in my house and they all get special escorts back outside, except the spiders because they can live inside.

They're doing a job here, and I appreciate them. And I don't think they'll live outside. They're meant to be inside spiders. This thing is awesome. I love this thing. But Sarah, like the thing about no eyes, right? I mean, like, trees have no eyes. You would not say, oh, you know, that oak is blind, right?

Don't they, John? Yeah, and it's also interesting from a brain standpoint. We talked about this on the opening of the book club podcast that we're doing for dispatch members that, you know, we'd say, like, oh, that's the seeing part of your brain. Like, that's the space where audio stuff. That's not really true. Our brains do organize around the senses coming in, but it's all just electrical impulses.

And even for an hour, if I blindfold you, the other parts adjacent on your brain will start encroaching into your visual receptors in your brain. And so presumably this mole rat actually does have spatial reasoning that is coming from different senses, like, for instance, we know bats use echolocation. Some animals use magnetic poles, for instance, to be able to do their spatial reasoning. So probably he's not blind in the way that we would think about it. It's not that he doesn't have a sense of the space around him.

He probably has something very close to what we would think of as vision. It's just not through the electrical impulses coming through a cornea and a retina. So Spalex may say, you know, that smells very far away. That's right. Yeah. Definitely. I wish I could say the same of you. Well, while Jonah's spider hatred may not be worth your time, I think his love of the

Spalinks is very much worth our time. And I appreciate you bringing it to our attention, Jonah. Thank you. And with that, we will talk. to you all again next week, and I'd said it exactly that way so Jonah wouldn't be able to say. No, you won't. This is a podcast. Happy Fourth of July. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

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