The Dispatch Podcast - Groundhog Year | Roundtable

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle joins Sarah Isgur, Mike Warren, and Steve Hayes to discuss President-elect Donald Trump’s interesting (?) press conference and the media's rapid (yet possibly irresponsible) response. The Agenda: —Trump is back —Sarah's Greenland-curious —Zuck ends fact-checking program —Our partner program with Meta —All the lonely people —The one influencer Steve tried remembering —LA County fires: is it a policy issue? —Blame the Republican In Closest Proximity —Release the fact-checkers 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 weekly livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Check. Close the garage door? Yep. Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision? No. And you set up credit card transaction alerts, a secure VPN for a private connection and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web.

Uh, I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit TELUS.com. Total Security to learn more. Conditions apply. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isger, and boy, we've got a fun lineup today.

Mike Warren, Megan McCartle, Steve Hayes. And today is January 9th as we record the Dispatch Podcast. At my house, at least, we're going on three weeks of no school and four days of snow days. So, Mike, I'm speaking to you here. How you holding in there, fellow no school parent? Well, I went into the dispatch office yesterday, raved the snow and the ice. So that tells you how I'm doing. You've come up with a really good strategy, though, at your house for today. Yeah, we're going to have a movie marathon, apparently. I wasn't consulted. I'll be working, but the Star Wars movies will be rolling.

in the war in basement. I hope you're not going to allow them to know about the prequels. Oh, they are obsessed with the prequels. They think they're better than the original. Don't even get me started. I mean this kindly, but you have failed as a parent. I'm sorry. Does she mean it kindly?

That's not news to me. All right. Shall we start Steve with Donald Trump's press conference this week? The president-elect giving a far-ranging press conference. Several things stood out, I think. One, the fact that Joe Biden, as president, hasn't given such a wide-ranging press conference in months, a year at least at this point. He has been giving interviews, sort of exit interviews, if you will, to various outlets. But friendly reporters, certainly. Susan Page had one in USA Today. But nothing like what Donald Trump sort of showcased this past week. You know, the headlines are what he said about, Greenland, Canada, Panama. We need Greenland for national security purposes. I've been told that for a long time,

long before I even ran, I mean, people have been talking about it for a long time. The Panama Canal is vital to our country. It's being operated by China, China. And Steve, Joan is not here so we can say whatever we want about him. It's not necessarily new for conservatives to think that, yeah, we shouldn't have given up the Panama Canal. Yes, buying Greenland with all of its natural resources isn't a terrible idea. The history of Canada is a little more complicated, as others

have pointed out, right? 13 colonies rebelled. 13 stay loyal. And we've been running this experiment ever since. So I'm a little iffyer on Canada. But just from a policy perspective, Steve, is anything that Donald Trump said outrageous? I mean, maybe we should call the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America. We get to call it whatever we want. Why are we calling it that? Yeah, I would say, taken one by one, and given that historical context, which matters, you know, you can make a case that each of these is a serious or semi-serious proposal on its own. I think it's taken collectively and given some of the ways that Donald Trump described what he's doing, that it becomes more problematic. I mean, you know, at one point in the press conference, Trump was asked about Panama, who was asked about Greenland and whether he would consider using force.

whether he would rule out using force or some kind of military action to, in effect, get what he wants. And he said no. And then he was asked again, and he said no again. And you assure the world that as you try to get control of these areas, you are not going to use military or economic coercion? No. I can't assure you. You're talking about Panama and Greenland. No, I can't assure you on either of those two.

I would say, you know, as someone who supported the Iraq War, who supported Afghanistan, you know, lots of reasons for people to criticize the execution of those wars, execution of conflicts. But, you know, Donald Trump and the America First crowd has been sort of going after neocons ever since. And one of the sort of central charges is that people who, you know, advocated what the U.S. did in Iraq, supported what the U.S. did in Afghanistan, were imperial. that we wanted to go in and take over countries and seize them for our own. And that was really never what was at stake. And Donald Trump has been sort of leading the charge and criticism of those efforts. And here you have him saying, in effect, yeah, I'm willing to use the military to go in and take over these countries if we need to because I want to, in effect. And I think that's sort of the bigger takeaway. You know, what I think is hard to deter.

at this point is how much of this is just Trump being Trump, and how much of this is sort of an emerging foreign policy from Donald Trump. Certainly, some of his followers are taking it very seriously. And, you know, I think that alone could be reason for Donald Trump to take it seriously, even if he didn't start out with this as sort of a well-shaped foreign policy doctrine. Mike, can I tell you my concern, which is basically everyone's following falling into their old patterns. Donald Trump gives a press conference where he says random things

over the course of a long time and the ones that you can sort of take from their context and sound sort of the silliest or most outrageous, get all the attention. Nothing ever happens with those things, but we spend sort of weeks on think pieces on whether the flag could really have a 51st star.

And then there's all this stuff that's actually happening that would take sort of effort, real reporting, actually educating people, and we don't spend any time on that. A whole lot of time on, you know, the sort of sugar high and nothing on the vegetables. So look, on the one hand, buying Greenland is still very interesting to me.

Everything has a price. What is the price? What's the tradeoff? What else could we spend that money on? What would we actually get from Greenland in the short term, in the long term? Yada, yada, yada. All of those are interesting conversations,

but they're not conversations we're having, because I feel like instead it's like, uh-huh, Donald Trump wants to invade Greenland. And it's like a punchline that the left can chuckle at and the right can get outraged that they're laughing at Trump at.

And like, we're off to the races and it's 2017 all over again. I don't know. Why, when are we going to cover the Trump presidency? Well, whose fault is that? Whose fault is it that we are all sent into a tizzy? Now, I will grant Sarah.

Like, I had flashbacks watching that entire president. conference on Tuesday morning, I felt like I was eight years younger. I was just like, oh, we're back. This is exactly what it was like when I was covering the Trump White House and transition and just watching these things unfold, you know, Fidel Castro like, right? I mean, it was a press conference only at the end, only in the last like 20 minutes, because otherwise it was just a stream of conscious ranting by Donald Trump. But I think this is the first. And this is where I do think it is not so simple as you maybe suggest, Sarah, to just, like, cover what's actually happening, which is that this is how Trump operates.

He says things that are, you know, outlandish or maybe somebody would call them crazy, somebody would call them, you know, brilliant if you're a Trump fan. Oh, he really trolled the media on this. And yet it's like he also means it. he also doesn't mean it because he doesn't even really know what he's willing to do or what he's willing to sort of, you know, spend political capital on or spend his time working on. He says what he thinks in that moment and just kind of works ad hoc from whatever he said. If people are, you know, if the libs are losing their mind about something, maybe that's something he's going to pursue because it really gets his people excited. I don't know if he always knows what that's going to be before he says it. He's such a creature of the crowd and feeds off that energy.

So it's from an actual, these sort of serious policy questions, like, what would it actually take to Annex Greenland, for instance, an idea that I'm with you and Jonah that, like, it sounds like actually a nice idea. I don't see why we couldn't do it or why we shouldn't do it, why we shouldn't work with the Danes to figure out a solution. But, like, you know, there are actual things that would have to happen discussions and negotiations that Donald Trump, I mean, maybe he started those. I don't know. He's certainly not giving us any information about that. And when you ask him questions about these sorts of things, how would you do this? What would you do

as people did in that press conference, you know, it's sort of, you could tell he's kind of making it up as he's going as well. So what are we supposed to do as members of the media, as reporters and journalists, just keep asking questions, keep trying to take this stuff seriously. He is going to be the president of the United States, actually try to figure out how this happens. After he mentioned the thing about rename in the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America, I wasn't the only one who thought of this, but I started to look up, look, how do you actually do that? And it turns out there's a board that's a part of the United States Geological Survey, which is a part of the Department of the Interior that actually reviews geographic names and does this kind of with regularity and they sort of know what they're doing. So that would be a good, that would be a good journalistic pursuit is to actually figure out who is he going to put in charge at that board.

How will the board sort of get, take this directive? will he issue a directive or is he just saying it in a press conference and then moving on to something else like that's hard that's like the hard work that's like the boring work of but that's like what we should be doing and you know whatever you know whatever the outrage is like I don't know I'm just done with the outrage like I'm done with worrying about it worrying if I'm outraged too much or not enough like just there's too much there's too much work to do Megan I think Mike has struck on something that was my sort of instinct as well I felt like the first Trump presidency, he would say something. Everyone would chase after it. And there'd be a

zillion stories about why Trump can't do that thing he said. And I think at minimum, what I would like to see this time is a lot more focus on how Trump could do what Trump said. So Mike's point about renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America. Instead of saying like, he can't do that, that would cause this, this and this. And they sort of like, you know, breathless takes. Like, no, okay. How would you do it? Well, you'd go to this. board. You'd want to appoint people to that. He has the power to appoint them. They have these terms. Has he made any appointments to that? No, not yet. That, to me, is a far more interesting if you're going to cover it. Or don't cover it and say, but here are the things that were actually

on his schedule this week, none of which involved the Geological Survey Board. Instead, he seems far more focused on his appointments at the Department of Justice, for instance. And here's why, because actually they're talking a lot about how to implement mass deportations in every single one of these personnel interviews. So, if you assume that where he spends his time is where he's spending his mental focus of what he's actually going to do,

they seem really still quite focused on immigration and not at all focused on Greenland, Canada, Panama, or the Gulf of America, which again, I agree with him. Has a nice ring to it. Megan, thoughts? Look, I think you have to think of this as kind of like, think of like a 39-year-old man who would still like to believe

that if he really focused and got into shape, he could run a marathon. And like, that is how you have, that is the spirit in which you have to take these sorts of remarks. Is don't, I mean, look, I'm all for invading Canada, a 54-40 in fight. It was a mistake to allow those traders to secede from the rightful land of North America.

But I suspect that neither Trump nor his followers really have an appetite for getting the U.S. Army over to Canada to grab the Alberta Tar Sands and the critical Khebesois-Poutin belt. And every time we've tried, we haven't been particularly successful. I mean, the Battle of Quebec back in was that 77, 78? And I mean 17, 78. And then 1812, we failed again.

Okay. So that's fair, but I would point out that things have evolved a little bit since then. My favorite story about the Canadian military is that they had a government commission, I believe, in the 90s. You mean the 1990s? I think it was the 1990s, 18. I don't know. When you're my age, it all kind of blurs. But that the commission to sort of assess. assess the state of their armed forces and talk about modernizing them. And the commission came back and said, all three of our services, the Air Force, the Navy and the land, ground forces are not capable of sustaining any serious military operation anywhere. And what I would advise is that you get rid of two of them and just focus on making one of them good.

Steve, is that good parenting advice? Get rid of two of your children. Focus on one. Focus on the one. Look, I do think that if we wished to take Greenland or parts of Canada by force, we could. But why would we? This is crazy. And no one in his coalition would seriously want to do this.

Unlike mass deportations, which, well, I think that they might regret that, there's definitely a strong desire to do that. And so I think, you know, he likes to pop off. He likes to project the sense that, like, yeah, we're tough. If we want to take Greenland, we're going to take Greenland. No one's going to stop us, and I think that's factually true. No one really could. I mean, I guess, like, maybe the Soviets could stop us, but they're not going to.

They would love us to ratify the policy of randomly grabbing bits of territory. You feel like ought to be part of your country. So I think, yes, you should, I mean, look, you report it because you said it, but it's just so obviously dumb and so obviously off the cuff, And so obviously there is no constituency for seizing Greenland by force. I don't know, Megan. I'm Greenland curious. I think buying Greenland, if the Greenlanders want to be part of the greater United States.

Once we go in, they will rise up and join with us. They will greet us with songs and flowers, yes. Democracy promotion. Better ice melting mats. in every home. But I think, like, you have to focus on the stuff that he actually seems like he wants to do, which is the mass deportations, and that's what matters, right? That's actually going to be a big policy issue, and it is going to have massive implications

for kind of everyday life in America. So I'm on team, like, glancing mention, ha, ha, and then just move on. All right, speaking of moving on, I want to talk now about what, at least I've heard referred to as based Mark Zuckerberg. So after years of attempting to have fact-checking on Facebook in various meta-platforms, Mark Zuckerberg put out a video saying that was a failed experiment. What started, you know, with honorable goals to get rid of the crap and actually let people know what was true and what wasn't, eventually turned into censorship. And if we're going to have to err in one direction or the other,

I would rather err in the direction of free speech. So that's what we're doing moving forward at Facebook. Hey, everyone. I want to talk about something important today because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political. But there's also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there.

drugs, terrorism, child exploitation, these are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly. So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content. But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that's millions of people. And we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.

More specifically, here's what we're going to do. First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X, starting in the U.S. Lots has been thought about this. Is it him trying to curry favor with Trump? Is it just a reflection of the overall mood of the country that we saw in the 2024 election? Is it truly what Mark Zuckerberg thinks as he looked sort of very un-tech bro in a lot of ways and far more, I don't know, there was like a gold chain situation and the hair? Hard to say. So, Steve, what do you make of Mark Zuckerberg's announcement on fact-checking and the balance between the desire for truth versus that desire kind of always leading to censorship in the end? Yeah. So first, we should disclose that we were a partner in that project. The dispatch, I know if it was maybe six, eight months in to our life five years ago, joined with then Facebook's fact-checking efforts. We were happy to do so. I think we made valuable contributions. I'm proud of the work that we did. We should also explain to people a little bit about how this works. We had a commenter on, I put out something on the website. We'll link to it.

sort of explaining our views, or my views, on fact-checking in the end of this program. And we had some comments from people, and I thought it was worth just spending a minute to clarify. We did not, as a partner in this program, ever seed any editorial control at all to meta. We wouldn't have joined the program if we did. They didn't tell us what to fact-check and what not to fact-check. There was a tool that surfaced things that seemed to them to be potentially problematic. and we were free to choose from that tool or not choose from that tool. And we did a lot of fact checking outside of the meta program as well.

They had some pretty tight restrictions on fact checking elected officials and politicians. They did not want those people fact check. We thought it was important to do those kinds of fact checks. So we did a lot of our fact checking outside of the program. So my basic view is fact checking can be a good thing. It's often a good thing. But I think there's sort of inherent bias in the process. I think there's bias, certainly in the fact-checking community, like journalism more broadly.

I think the community leans to the left. Steve, at one point, you asked us all for our favorite fact checks gone wrong. Yeah. And I just want to tell mine. Please do. I think this is actually instructive, and this is where I was going. When you sent it to me, well, you tell the story and then I'll tell you my reaction. So back when I was running Carly Fiorina's presidential campaign, you know, you have a stump speech and you give it in every home and town hall in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

And we would have a little stand up, maybe four foot, six foot tall standing up things. And it would go Carly from secretary to CEO. And the Washington Post fact checked that because Carly's stump speech was about, you know, only in America could you go from being in the secretary. pool to being the CEO of a Fortune 11 company in the United States, the first female CEO of a Fortune 100 or 50 company. See, it's been so long now. I've actually forgotten the stat. And the Washington Post fact checked it gave her four Pinocchio's and said that it was not true that she had gone from secretary to CEO. And I was like stunned. I was like, wait, did they find something that she was never secretary? Because I think we all know she was in fact CEO of HP. Nope. She was a secretary,

but they said in between being a secretary and the CEO, she had held other. jobs. That was the fact check. That got four Pinocchio's. Four Pinocchio's, which is the worst that you can get by the Washington Post? It was the worst lie that you can tell. And they got so much pushback. They actually did retract the Pinocchio's, left the story up and just said, we'll let you decide how misleading this was. Steve, this is all to say, yeah, the fact checking both, I think, had a bias at times. It was also weaponized at times towards political ends. And at some points, it was silly. Like, I don't know that that ever warranted a fact check.

Maybe that was an interesting piece. Hey, look, Carly had all these jobs in between. And so it can feel misleading. If you're a total moron who thinks she literally, they went, the HP board, went down to the secretarial pool and was like, well, nothing we've tried so far as worked. Let's hire a secretary as the CEO of this company. That would have been, that would have been more impressive, frankly. It would have been, for sure.

I would have been more impressed by that story. I mean, look, having worked as a secretary, they're all sure that they're all sure that they do a better job than the CEO. And probably many of them came. Yeah, exactly. I wouldn't bet against them. Says the CEO. Undoubtedly true.

Probably our fact checkers would do a much better job than I have. Mostly true. Look, I think you're getting some of the problems here. Like that there's no world in which that should have been a fact check. And it really isn't fact checkable. What we're talking about there is, you know, I think their suggestion, having gone back now and read this thing, actually, When Sarah, when Sarah posted this, I was asking people sort of, hey, give me some examples of

fact checks that stick in your mind. And Sarah mentioned this one and sort of short-handed it and said, Carly Fierino was fact-checked on her claim that she went from being secretary to CEO. I thought that Sarah was guilty of shorthy. Like, well, that's obviously not what they fact-checked. And I would click through. That's exactly what they fact-checked. I mean, it was really was amazing. And they provided, I think their claim later was, we were just trying to provide contacts and let people know that it wasn't that, you know, sort of shoots and ladders path to the CEO suite. But it's never should have been fact checked. I was subject to a number of fact checks by Politifact over the years. They used to do something called Pondit Watch. And most of them

were of that variety. And, you know, just didn't, there's nothing, there's no reason to fact check something like that. One of them, they came after me when I wrote a piece about, or I was talking, I guess it was on ABCs this week, about one of the five Guantanamo detainees that was exchange for Bo Bergdahl. And I was giving people a sense of who this guy was and what he had done. He was a bin Laden associate. He was regarded in all military and intelligence assessments as a serious threat. He'd been involved in planning terrorist activities, what have you.

And I made that point. And the fact check was something like the, And I said, that's why the Obama administration had been reluctant to release this guy before. And then they decided to release him despite all of those concerns. And the fact check was something like they didn't regard him as a threat because they didn't argue in one specific court case that they went to on a technicality that he should remain at Guantanamo for reasons not having to do with the fact that he was a threat, but on some technical grounds. So the whole reason we're even having this conversation is because the guy's a threat and he was a close associate of Osama bin Laden. Of course he's a threat. Anyway, there are lots of examples like that.

And, you know, I think too often when you look at those examples, they run in the same direction. There was another one that I looked at again yesterday that I think was really a telling one, and you might remember this, it was more recent. When Joe Biden was reading some remarks off of a teleprompter after Dobbs, and he quoted the, a, a dissent and then said, end of quote, repeat the line. That's what he said. And the White House transcript that was put out, and people jumped all over and said, oh my gosh, he's reading his teleprompter cues in the body of the speech. And the White House put out a transcript. That was false. It added, let me repeat the line. It added the words let me in the transcript. He didn't say them on the video. This is not disputable. You can watch the video. He

didn't say them. So the White House, White House puts out a false transcript, adding these words that Biden didn't say, and factcheck.org put out a fact check, not of Biden in the White House for lying about what the president had said, but of people on social media who wondered whether he was reading his cues, as it certainly sounded. And they fact-checked those people without any basis and came to the conclusion that those accusations about Biden reading his teleprompter cues were false. There's no reason for them to have done this. And the only authority they relied on was a comment from a White House spokesperson, presumably somebody who may have been involved in editing, falsely editing the transcript in the first place, who said, no, no, that was

written his teleprompter cues. Anyway, you can see the problems here. There are two, it was too often the case. In fact check in general, I'm not specifically talking about the meta program, where fact checkers were either fact checking opinions, fact checking things that shouldn't have been fact checked, you know, picking nits. mostly with Republicans or conservatives on things that they have said, and it developed a reputation of leaning to the left. I think that was one of the reasons that the fact checkers and the fact checking community had a big PR problem. And certainly what Mark Zuckerberg is trying to do is ingratiate himself with Trump World. And sort of remarkably, he said that in effect

in his video, this five into video and said, look, this is a cultural tipping point. We're changing. We're changing how we approach this. So, Mike, let me list you some of the donors to the President-elect's inauguration fund. Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, Amazon, meta, Google, all have given $1 million. Does this feel like a tipping point? Not just, you know, Donald Trump won this election, but that Republicans now represent a different type of vibe, ethos, whatever you want to call it, you know, back during my whole lifetime, Democrats were the cool party, the iconoclastic party, and Republicans were the stick in the mud with their ties.

You know, that was the, why am I blanking on the character's name from family ties? Alex P. Keaton. Alex P. Keaton. Yeah. Michael Keaton being the actor. Alex P. Keaton being the, you know, the Republican and the house full of hippies. Like that was the stereotypical Democrat, and that was. the stereotypical Republican. Democrats were like, cool and go with whatever, man. And Republicans

were uptight and sort of hectoring. And that feels like that's what the cultural tipping point in some ways has become. And are all of the sort of Silicon Valley move fast and break stuff guys now donating to Trump's inaugural fund proof that that tipping point has passed? We are now on the other side of it. And Democrats are seen as the hectoring uptight language police ones. And Republicans are the ones that are cool? Is your contention, Sarah, that Silicon Valley executives are cool? Because I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to debate that premise alone. I mean, I know Mark Zucker.

Yeah, exactly. Mark Zuckerberg has a chain. He's got like kind of crazy cool bro hair. I just, he still looks like a Harvard nerd to me. That's just, that's just my view. this country has lost far beyond what I thought no look I'm you're the problem says Vivek Ramoswamy because you think nerds aren't cool I'm like this my head is like spinning over like what is supposed to be cool or not cool depending on which tech bro says you know deem something cool or not

by the way Zach Morris everyone knows it spelled ZACK Vivek spelled it ZACA proof that he didn't watch the show. It's Zach Attack, not Zatch Attach. So, four people have gotten this, are following us anymore. I have no idea what you're talking about, but you can tell, I'm cool.

Because you watched Saved by the Bell. Yes. Yeah. Different ideas of what's cool. So, look, I view the, I'm actually writing about this now, the sort of tech bro cozying up, throwing a million dollars into the inaugural fund,

which is now. not that much relative to what a lot of these guys and companies have. It's in line with what companies, big businesses have done for inaugural committees in both parties in the past. I mean, the only real sort of deviation here is that all these tech companies and other big companies didn't donate to the 2016 inaugural committee for Trump. They were all sort of holding their, you know, keeping their powder dry. I think that's the big change now is that everybody sort of understands that Donald Trump is not only going to be president, again, that going back to our original discussion, like that some of the stuff that he says he could do, like he understands a little bit more of how Washington works, how the administration works, and they want to see it at the table. This is just like political rent sinking is all it is.

or, you know, I was talking to a lobbyist or someone yesterday who described it as, you know, they're paying for their indulgences. That's what this is. And I don't know that I agree with that. Because I don't know. I really think that there is something very different in our culture from January 2017 to January 2025. You know, by all sort of normal metrics, you're right. They didn't give to the 2017 inauguration.

It's not like good things have happened since then, and they were all like, well, we were wrong about Donald Trump. No, I mean, family separation. They all said how outraged they were about that. January 6th, they all said how outraged they were about all of that. So it's not like they just came around on Donald Trump. There has to be something else to explain this, Megan, culturally, in this moment in America, that has all these guys. I mean, I guess Mike's explains it. It's just pure rent-seeking indulgences.

I mean, sorry, I'll let Megan answer that. I just, I do think that's what it is. Like, I do think they have come around on Trump because he's going to be president for the next four years. This is all about trying to figure out how Mark Zuckerberg can make life better for Mark Zuckerberg. Like, let's not, like, overcomplicate this here. And it's also not, like, something to clutch our pearls about. It's just what, like, rich guys in America have been doing forever, and he's just the rich guy now. I don't know.

I can't see myself getting outraged or excited. Like, you see all these folks on the right getting so excited that finally the great Facebook fact-checking, you know, Nazis are going to, are finally going to be defeated. Like, I don't know. Give me a break. We will keep doing at the dispatch what we've been doing on fact-checking and truth. other news outlets will rise and fall in the eyes of people based on their work. And like, Facebook shouldn't be in this business in the first place. So, like, I don't know.

I'm just, I'm not outraged. I'm outraged about how not outage. Old man, Mike. Yeah. You seem pretty outraged over the non-outrage. Cool. Sorry, Megan. Is it that simple?

I think there's a bunch of stuff that has happened. Right? Let's embrace the healing power of and. I mean, number one. Look, businesses have always formed alliances with political parties, and that varies by what business you're in. Media has long had an alliance with the Democratic Party, oil and gas, pretty much a Republican stronghold, right? And I was actually really interested in how tech decided in the last decade, right, early in the last decade, that it was going to be allied with Democrats, because that always seemed like a weird fit to me. I was like, they're not going to be nice to you.

You're really rich. They're going to try to take all your money. That's what they do. They're Democrats. And but I think there was a real cultural thing. Because Silicon Valley in the late 90s and early 2000s was quite often libertarian. It was quite libertarian and often Republican allied. And that really shifted for a bunch of reasons.

I don't like, we don't really have time to go into. But I think that that alliance proved unsatisfactory for a bunch of, of reasons, right? One was that they thought they had a deal around about 2000, right? You're in an industry doesn't need a ton of regulation because you're making software. No one cares. Right. Yeah, the antitrust people are going to come after you, but they're going to be incompetent as they mostly were with the other. And so you're just going to make this deal. You're going to generate a lot of money, right? And because you have, you don't have a lot of labor costs, you don't have a lot of union employees. You don't have a lot of the stuff that, like, has traditionally turned businesses against

Democrats. So look, you're minting money. You were sitting on these like monopoly gold mines. And so you're going to give Democrats 35 to 40 percent of that money and you get to keep the rest. And that's our deal, right? You guys are going to basically leave us alone. You're not going to try to overregulate us. And we're just going to give you a bunch of money and everyone's happy. And that deal fell apart for a bunch of reasons. One was that internally, progressives got more and more power and started doing more and more progressive activism that was really quite disruptive to internal company operations, not just the walkouts, not just the like, you have to fire this rando engineer who wrote something to an internal company message board suggesting

that maybe dudes are on average more interested in spending all day staring at lines of code than women, and that might have something to do with why there are more male coders than women coders. I thought you meant they were more interested in staring at lines of code than they were at staring at women. And I was like, that doesn't sound right. Well, I mean, in the case of many coders, actually possibly accurate. And we're going to get a ton of emails from coders now.

Thanks, Megan. That was disrupt. I'm just saying they are so dedicated to their job. They're so obsessed, right? I was in IT in the 90s. Not that I'm saying they're less. than manly and, you know, dating machines. But anyway.

Keep digging that hole, Megan. Keep digging that hole. So that was one part was the internal problem. And this actually started to impact contracts. So, for example, Google faced internal activism over what they were doing, both on AI and on government contracts in a way that was, you know, they didn't, they were fine if you wanted to, like, make them protest, you know, don't say gay laws or whatever. What they didn't want was for you to make them sacrifice, like, profitable cloud computing contracts. And as

that started to bleed over, and then you get, you know, Biden comes in and appoints Lena Khan, this really, really activist antitrust person, who then starts making noises about what if we broke up Amazon? What if we broke up Google? Right. And that was not part of the deal, right? And so they They started, you know, the famous line in the real Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, where he says, you know, I'm altering the deal, pray that I do not alter it any further. They started getting that feeling that this contract they thought they had was being unilaterally rewritten. And there was also a bunch of stuff where like the progressive, I mean, I think we've all lived

through this. I don't think I need to prove it. But there was massive progressive overreach on this stuff. It went from, you know, in 2014 being like, what if we didn't let people? people use anti-gay slurs on social media, to by the end, no, you cannot in any way suggest that transwomen are not literally exactly identical to women. And if you do that, you are transphobic and you should be fired. And your account should be banned and you should never be allowed to speak again, right? And like, as that overreach crept, as the DEI excesses got

more and more excessive, I think there was also a cultural backlash to that, not just in Silicon Valley, but I mean, one of the things that we saw in this election, right, was Democrats have always thought that young people were their natural constituency, and they seem to be moving against the whole woke excesses of the last decade or so. And so, yeah, it's less cool because what's cool, what's cool is what young people are doing, whatever that is. If they are painting themselves blue and, like, sticking straws up their nose, that's cool. And so there is a vibe shift. And so I think that there was a, a collective sense that, like, look, the progressives are the future, and we're just being a little,

we're just getting a little on the future a little early. And that's no longer what it looks like. And I think that that is where the election comes in, not just in, yes, it's like they're sucking up to the president because that's what companies do. They always try to stay nice with the administration for very obvious self-interest reasons. But I think that what the Trump election also signaled, And the reason that this has been so demoralizing for Democrats is that it signaled that, like, the, you know, the emerging Democratic majority just might never emerge, that there is a vibe shift that, like,

a lot of the stuff's going in the opposite direction. And that that makes it seem less imperative to stay on their nice side. Steve, there's also a piece of this. The Atlantic wrote an interesting article, the anti-social century Americans now spend, more time alone than ever. It's changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality, written by Derek Thompson. Is that a piece of this as well? Yeah, I mean,

that's a big question. It certainly could be. And I recommend that piece. I still haven't actually finished it. It's a long piece. But it's very sort of thought-provoking look at these changes, not only that have come as a result of attack, but in sort of in ourselves. I mean, it opens with a story of just picking up food to go rather than staying at the restaurant, for instance. It's not just about social media. It's about an entire culture now sitting alone, bowling alone, but like you're not even bowling anymore. You're paying wee bowling in your own house. Yeah, no, that's true. I mean, and I think that's illustrative. The numbers he shares about the amount of time that people are spending alone, choosing to spend alone, physically alone, are pretty staggering, honestly.

When you just look, this is not, this didn't happen over a long time either. I mean, we're not talking about decades or centuries. We're talking about years. And it's, and it's fascinating. I will say, you know, I think as with a lot of these things, and he, again, I haven't finished the piece, so he may get to some of this. These are complicated. He writes about this stuff in a complicated topics in a sophisticated way.

And he always tries to, my experience always tries to account for those complications. But just to point to your example, Sarah. As it happens, I was watching a clip from Jimmy Fallon, who was interviewing, and I'm going to totally screw this up. My kids will be frustrated that I don't know this. A very big influencer, young person, the kind that Megan thinks might paint herself blue and stick straws up her nose. Cool young kid. That is what's cool, Steve. I'm really in touch with the youngs.

DeMello, is that her name? But Jimmy Fallon was interviewing her. And I think he was, as I could tell, he was, as far as I could tell, he was sort of asking her to explain some of the things that the youngs are up to these days. And one of the things that she described for him was a get-together and there was an acronym and I'm screwing up the acronym. I'm sorry, this is a really bad story. I'm screw it up. But there's a point to it. What she says her friends do is they get together and they all order from different places and put

the stuff on the kitchen island. And so it'll be wings and it'll be pasta and it'll be a pizza and it'll be all of these other things. But they're using it as an excuse to get together to do all these individual things. So it's complicated, right? I mean, it's not necessarily the case that all of these things drive us toward, you know, additional alone time or or loneliness. But certainly that appears to be the trend. And I don't know, I mean, I don't know necessarily how that fits in exactly with Zuckerberg's political shift. And I agree that there is one. I found, I think Megan's brief tour of that part of this story is absolutely fascinating. We should just isolate that and post it somewhere. But I do think, you know, we can also make this too complicated.

Donald Trump is in power. Last summer, he threatened to jail Mark Zuckerberg for his lifetime if Facebook was involved in elite, what Trump described as illegal election activity. Zuckerberg is basically cowtowing, I think, to those threats. And when Trump was asked about them at his press conference, said, do you think what Mark Zuckerberg is saying in doing now is as a result of your threats, Trump answered with one word? Probably. I mean, I think that's part of it, right?

And look, I don't have any problem. Mark Zuckerberg can do what he does, and I think there are reasons to have ended the fact-checking program the way that it was being operated by meta at the time. The way that they, you know, we submitted these fact checks, they were the ones who decided to downrague stories, things like that. Mark Zuckerberg can do what he want, and I'm not necessarily offended by that. What I do find hard to take is this pretense that this is all about. free expression now. And you heard this from Zuckerberg in the video that you mentioned, Sarah,

you heard it from Joel Kaplan, who's now the new global policy head. Noted Republican, Joel Kaplan, by the way. Noted Republican, right, which is not accidental, I think. And their thing is, look, Donald Trump has given us this opportunity to return to our roots. And our roots are free speech and free expression. And we're taking that opportunity because of Trump. And they're literally talking about working with the Trump administration on these issues of free speech and free expression. Joel Kaplan talked about that in an interview that he gave to Eric Erickson on Eric's radio show. And like, at a certain point, if you think that Donald Trump is the avatar of free speech and free expression, you just haven't been paying attention. And I do find

that a little offensive. Really, the guy who threatened to jail you six months ago, if you, you know, if you engage in speech he doesn't like, is now the avatar of free speech. The guy who's suing the Des Moines Register because there's a poll he disagreed with that turned out to be wrong is the is the avatar of the free press he wants to open up the libel laws yeah who wants to yank licenses from broadcast networks because he doesn't like what they say about him this is the guy who's going to lead us into the the um you know fantasy land or the the utopia of a free speech and free expression come on like that just insults our intelligence but this is the tension i think between the maga movement all the things you just said on the one hand are part of the

fight fire with fire, part of the MAGA movement. And then there's the other part that's like, no censorship, free speech, stop with the DEI nonsense. So, and this is the problem within just the microcosm of the legal conservative movement. Is it going to be about process or is it going to be about outcome? Yeah. And I find that tension really interesting within the Republican Party right now.

I find it unresolved. I think it will stay unresolved for several more years, probably until we see who takes the man. of the Republican Party after Donald Trump to see which side of that debate really wins. Because there's also individuals who will say different versions of that at any given moment. You know, well, that's what Democrats did. We have to do it back to them because that's the only way they'll stop. Or open it all up and show them what it would be like without the censorship and we win elections,

which both have evidence for them. And some people in that MAGA movement are saying both things at the same time, right? I mean, Elon Musk, who's being hailed as this, you know, the new sort of leader on free speech and free expression, has been, I think, credibly accused of using Twitter and blocking voices that he doesn't like on Twitter, which is supposed to be this new free speech platform. You know, if he doesn't like it, he's not going to be for it. I think there is some built-in tension there, but I guess the idea that this is that this is going to usher in a new era of free speech and free expression is difficult for me to believe, difficult for me to believe. Two quick points here.

One on the tension between process and outcomes, I think we can just all assume that the Silicon Valley side of things, it's all about outcomes. like let's like they don't care about a principle about these things they they they they want things better for their bottom line and for and and I don't I don't blame them for that that they're not in the business of anything other than their business so and then I will say I don't disagree in fact I entirely agree with Megan's assessment of the cultural shift I just think Silicon Valley the Mark Zuckerberg's the world they're lagging indicators on this like

they're their followers they're not they're not leaders in this way and that's that's what I, I guess that's my, my ultimate point on this is, is they just, they see where the wind is blowing, and that's where they want to be. And that, that is, that is not tell me anything more than, than what it is. I want to talk about the wildfires in Los Angeles. At the time that I collected this, we still had two dead, tens of thousands evacuated, 27,000 acres burned mostly in Pacific Palisades. The mayor of Los Angeles has been, in Africa. And a lot has been criticized that this is an example of California as a failed state, that she should be criticized for not being back in Los Angeles the same way that, for instance,

Ted Cruz was criticized for going to Cancun during the freezing weather in Texas or those who left their places during COVID to go have dinner with friends out of the country, et cetera. And I guess my question is, how much in a time of natural disasters, Katrina, Texas freezing, California wildfires, who should have the blame for these things? Where should the politics be? Is there a better way to talk, not just about the disaster, because of course we're going to talk about that, but there is politics involved. There are choices made up preparedness, disaster relief.

That is politics. So, Megan, what's the correct way to talk about the politics of natural disasters and the incorrect way, maybe? I mean, look, I think if there are policy failures here, we should figure what they are and fix them. An outlandish suggestion. I know this is crazy. But I think that right now is probably not the right time to identify what those policy failures were. So, for example, there's been a lot made of there's not water in the fire hydrants. Well, you know, there's not infinite water in fire hydrants. And I don't know whether this is a policy failure or not.

when you have big fires that are raging out of control, the water pressure can drop, making it harder to fight the fires. I don't know if that's what's happened here or not. I don't think anyone else knows either. I think, you know, the fact that the mayor had gone to Ghana, it's not like she knew the wildfire was going to happen and was like, I would like to duck out of town to somewhere far away. Mayors go on these trips. When my dad was working for Mayor Koch in the 1970s, he went to Japan because Tokyo was our sister city. you know and that was just a thing that's just a thing that politicians do they go and have photo ops and other you know they trade kimonos and and like new york city hot dogs or whatever it was

i don't know what we brought to that my dad did bring back some very nice kimonos that he had gotten from the people the Tokyo city government and so i think that in the immediate aftermath what you want to do is allocate blame to your political opponents and there i mean there was also right I think it was Sam Stein of the bulwark, tweeted that, like, you know, what's really disturbing is to think that, like, Trump wants to cut wildfire funding. And so I was pointing out that there is this kind of tendency on the left to do, to look for the Republican in closest proximity to a disaster. And when you don't have an RCIP, you kind of need, you need an H-R-CIP, which is a hypothetical

Republican in closest proximity to a disaster, which is. And it's also true on the right, right? You look for the Democrat in closest proximity, and then you just try to pin it on them. And I think that's really unhelpful. Wildfires, look, L.A. has always been plagued by wildfires. They had bad wildfires in the 1960s, and it wasn't because of global warming, and it also wasn't because of, you know, whatever policy thing you think is happening was not what caused that. The fact is they just live in an area where it's dry and windy, and when a fire gets going, it can really get going, which

just not to say, look, if there's stuff we can do, I think people have been putting out some helpful stuff. Don't have vegetation near your house. Try to make neighborhoods fire safe because when you fireproof your house, that has spillover benefits to your neighbors. You know, those sorts of things are helpful to talk about now. There probably is a little role of global warming, but not as much as people are making out. Fuel probably matters more. And I just think, like, trying to pin this on your political preconceptions is counterproductive. Not only does it failed to solve the problem. But it also actually, even undercuts your own cause, right? People feel like when I say, this is because of global warming, I'm going to get more attention

on global warming. Well, the problem is when you do this every single time, you know, global warming or whatever your cause is just comes to seem like ginseng, right? It's a broad spectrum snake oil that cures any problem that anyone has. And so I think it is much better to report on what's happening, to look at like practical, non-partisan. things that we could be doing to try to fix this. And then later, when we have more perspective on the event, that's a good time for the postmortems and to figure out whether there was, whether there were policy failures here. And if so, you know, who should be held accountable for them. I've seen a lot of gender discussion similar to what we saw after the assassination

attempt of Donald Trump. You know, after that July assassination attempt, there was a lot of focus on the female Secret Service agents and a lot of focus on the head of the Secret Service, who was a woman. Here, I've seen a lot of conversation about DEI efforts in the Los Angeles Fire Department and looking at whether that has caused a failure of the fire department to be able to contain this fire. There are female firefighters. They're the head of the Los Angeles Fire Department, I guess, is female. It's interesting, Mike, as Megan said, like, there's actually all sorts of policies. I wish we would approach them and say, what are the policies that can affect this?

Mandatory clearing of your property, I think, is already in effect, but it could certainly be enforced better, perhaps. Water, riparian rights, stuff like that. Firefighters are part of this question, certainly. But instead, it feels like, to Megan's point, we go to our politics and see where we can apply that. So it's like, well, I hate DEI. Fires don't really do DEI.

So where could we find DEI stuff? Aha! The fire department! But, you know, I don't think there's really a good argument that this fire has spread the way it has because of a lack of firefighters doing their jobs either. That's just because you're not using your imagination well enough, Sarah. Yeah. Look, I agree. I also think it's, I mean, it's so, it's so tacky to me when literally the main fire, like this, as we are recording this, there's still no containment of it. I mean, things are still, you know, blazing, and we're talking about, like, the cause of these fires or the ways to be better at preventing them. It's an important conversation, but I think there is something to be said for being critical or at least being scrutinizing, say, the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, asking her questions because part of her job is to help her, is to lead her city through responding to a on-endezing. ongoing natural disaster.

And, you know, is she doing a good job of it? Is she being responsible enough? Is she telling the press and therefore the public enough about what they're doing? I mean, these are all, that's all fair game. And at this moment right now, as the fires are blazing. So I think that's fair game. The question of what could have been done, it's just, there's too many people online with, you know, who are armchair, fire experts or climate change experts or think they know or or don't even care if they

know anything. It's just about sniping and making a point and making a point when the liberal journalist they don't like says something, you know, maybe ill-advised on Twitter or whatever. It's all silly. The Southern California will, we'll figure out something after this fire. I mean, it is the worst fire that Los Angeles has ever had. After the North Ridge earthquake, and what was that, 1993, I think, there was a big push to retrofit houses to be better for earthquakes, and it has saved a lot of property in subsequent earthquakes since 1993. It was a lot of work, a lot of money went into that.

I imagine something like that will happen to sort of more uniformly help homes in these areas avoid. this next time, that's a discussion that can be had and will be had. I'm not that worried about it. Everybody else can just, like, shut up and pound sand until, like, the fires are put out as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, I think if there's practical stuff that you can do now, that would be good stuff, right? Like, I don't know, take a fire break around your house. Is there something that you can do right now to fix the problem that hasn't been done? Great. Pull down vegetation, whatever it is. But short of that, like, why are we trying to to litigate this now. Steve, it seems like at this point, everyone's agreeing that it's not worth

your time to talk politics around fires in Los Angeles. Any points of disagreement? No, I mean, like, I think the very first thing that Megan said is the most important thing to say, which was, I wrote it down, I don't know if this is a policy failure or not. I mean, how refreshing to have somebody who just admits that, right? Like, we don't know. We'll find out. I suspect if Megan's going to write about this, she'll call a bunch of people who have been involved in these fights, learn a lot about it and then talk about how we should think about this and whether there's a specific policy failure we can point to or a lack of funding, what have you. The problem is, and I think Mike gets at some of this, you have in this hyperpolarized moment where it's all

about engagement, it's all about performance, everybody runs to social media or Twitter or whatever, cuts a video or does a TikTok, what have you, just making assertions. They don't have any freaking idea. I've been looking at the Twitter feed of Charlie Kirk. Does anybody think Charlie Kirk has any freaking idea about the policy implications of decisions that were made before this? You know, you have people who have been making some wild accusations about Karen Bass, about the funding for firefighters. Was it cut? Was it not cut? Some people say it was. Some people say it was just howled out of the budget until they could reach a different agreement. But those people, who are making these claims, these political claims or seeking to assign blame, not all of them,

most of them don't have any idea what they're talking about. They don't care. They're not in this to try to ascertain the truth. They're not in this to inform people. They're in this to score political points to get better engagement for their own BS. That's the game. That's the game. And it's, I just think it's refreshing to hear somebody like Megan say, like, look, I don't know. And that's my, That's my own view. I mean, I've been following this. I've been reading what I can about it. I've been trying to learn about it.

I see some people who I think are smart making claims about the failures of California Democrats to push for better brush clearing. That seems plausible to me. Wow, did they do that? That seems like that could give us future hazards. That would be a problem for me. I would be concerned about that. Do I know that that's real?

Then I see someone like Rob Stutzman, who's a really sharp political consultant out in California, who's a Republican, saying, hey, this is all way premature of the people who are doing this right now really don't know what they're talking about. And I see Rob and I think, I trust Rob. He's a smart guy. I think he's probably right about this. But it's a bigger problem, honestly, than just this fire. I think you've asked the right question the right way, but it's a bigger problem than this

fire. It's about our information environment. and it's getting more cluttered and harder to find out what's true and what's not because of all of these incentives. So my takeaway is in moments like this, the best thing to do is start collecting all of the policy questions, not the answers. How did the fire start? Was it a homeless encampment? Question. Put that one away for now. We're not going to know for a while. Did failure to clear brush contribute to the fire spreading? Good question. Put that one away. did the fire department do an adequate job trying to contain the fire as early and as effectively

as any fire department in the country? Good question. Put that one away for a while. And that basically as you see these things on social media or in the news or anywhere else, find the question, don't take the answer, if you will. You know, is there anything that Mayor Bass could have done if she had been in Los Angeles instead of in Africa? Interesting question. Put that one away for a while. Wait till the fires out. Wait till we actually have experts who can go and dig into some of these questions. And hopefully we have competing experts and competing narratives and we can really sift through some of this when the fire has been contained, when we don't have people's lives at risk. And Sarah, can I say that the lack of the lack of accountability

of policymakers and politicians can be traced to the noise that we help, and not we at the dispatch, but that is created by all this. I think that's where people who should be held accountable somewhere down the road, they hide behind that because they can say,

well, those are just trolls, those are just people. And it creates an environment where when the time for accountability is there, a lot of people can escape that account. And I would add, too, just keep in mind, cost-benefit analysis. Right. If you clear every inch of brush, that also comes, like,

you can't do everything all the time to the fullest extent. Everything's a trade-off. Yeah. So one thing we know that would really help with wildfires, and we've seen this before, is power lines, right, is if you buried all the power lines, that would be really good for preventing wildfires in California. The problem is burying all the power lines is insanely expensive. And maybe California should do that. But you got to keep the numbers in mind and how much are people willing to pay for electricity in order to have fewer wildfires, that's just a hard policy tradeoff. And just remember those exist. There's no, you know, you can say, well, if Democrats had just done that, like, yes, if Democrats had just done that,

but maybe if Democrats had just done that, you know, it would cost like a million dollars to operate your toaster. I, again, I don't know what those numbers are, but you should have some grasp on them and have some grasp on the political realities before you just sort of say, well, Democrats failed by not doing this. Can I make a suggestion? Why don't we? I mean, I don't know where the fires will be in a week. Hopefully they'll be all extinguished.

But why don't we just commit to revisiting this topic in a week? We can do the things that we're saying we should do. I mean, I think it'll be really interesting and there will be, you know, serious policy implications for who, who is, is there someone to blame? could there have been things that would have been done? Were those cost-benefit analyses done in advance of this? And there was a decision made. I just don't know this.

Undoubtedly, there are lots of people who do know this. People who have been involved in these arguments or discussions for years are no doubt frustrated at the moment because they're thinking to themselves, we've been discussing this forever. We know that the solutions. We should talk to those people and, you know, come up with a better assessment of this. are, I think, I saw in our Slack channel, we have unleashed our fact checkers on some of the claims that are out there right now. So bringing the conversation full circle, we will have them look at things that are being said, whether they're true or not. And if we can't determine whether they're true or not, we'll just tell you that we don't have that much information.

Crazy novel. And with that. Homework from Mr. Hayes. Thanks a lot. That's right. We'll talk to you next week. You know what I'm going to be. Thank you.