The Dispatch Podcast - How Trump Made $2.2 Billion Since Taking Office

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

Morning Dispatch Reporter Surya Gowda joins Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and Kevin Williamson to explain how Donald Trump made $2.2 billion in 2025 and discuss whether or not his financial gains are ill-gotten. Then, Kevin and Jonah discuss Graham Platner dropping out of the Maine Senate race and the end of the ceasefire with Iran. The Agenda: —Trump’s presidential payday —Binance founder pardon —Public perception of corruption —Allegations against Graham Platner —Platner's working class cosplay —Is the Iran war back on? —How Iran keeps winning—NWYT: A Kevin Williamson solo Remnant? Show notes: —Trump: "I found out that nobody cared." —False allegations against a University of Virginia official The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a nonpartisan perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including audio versions of all our articles and newsletters—⁠click here⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Greetings. No, that's not right. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Jonah Goldberg. Now, I'm not in fact hosting most of today's podcast, just some of today's podcast, because Steve Hayes, as is his want, had a technology failure of biblical proportions. And so he started it, then he couldn't finish it. And so I jumped in with Kevin Williamson, recorded the second half because we lost the first half. There were plagues. There were locusts.

Small children were hiding behind their mother's skirts terrified to see the spectacle that it had become. And so we start out with Steve moderating and Syria Gowda, a reporter for the dispatch, joined me and Steve and Kevin to talk about Donald Trump's $2.2 billion financial gains since taking office. then Syria left voluntarily. Steve was ejected by the technology gods. And so Kevin and I just had a conversation about the latest developments with Graham Platner, some of the Iran stuff.

And I think it all will come together just fine, but I figured as long as you guys know about it, you won't be freaked out about it. So there you have it, and let's get on with the show. Welcome, everybody, and a special welcome to you, Syria. We're very happy to have you with us on the Dispatch podcast. You worked on Monday's morning dispatch item, big item, that was headlined Trump's presidential payday, and it followed some reports about Donald Trump's 927-page financial disclosure forms last week

that detailed the money that the president has made thus far in his first term. I wonder if you could just give us sort of a big picture view of what we learned from those financial disclosures and the angle that you chose to focus on for the TMD item on Monday? Yeah, so I guess just to give some kind of background context, so Trump did make money while in office his first term. So I believe in 2019, he reported $440 million in revenue, and it was mostly from real estate. But the most recent disclosure from 2025,

he reported $2.2.2 billion. And this is in comparison to last year before he was, 2024, so before he was president again in his second term, he reported only $6.22 million. So that's a pretty big jump. And maybe to give some other context, Biden in 2021, he only reported $610,000. So these are kind of the levels

of income or revenue we're talking about here. And so one of the big kind of differences that we noticed from the first term Trump to the second term Trump, like why did he make so much more money this time around was because of his crypto investments, which basically he didn't have crypto investments the first term. He was calling crypto a scam, like even as late as 2021. And so now he has these like different investments in terms of meme coins with the Trump meme coin, the Melania meme coin, and also his own crypto company, which is called World Liberty Financial. So those are the two main sort of crypto investments that cause this big shift that I wanted to focus a bit on. And for people who aren't familiar with crypto or who like me have raised.

read dozens and dozens of articles about crypto over the years and have read beyond just the morning dispatch on Monday to understand this windfall to President Trump and his family. We'll get into his family a little bit later. What is World Liberty Financial and how does one make money on crypto and meme coins? Yeah. So World Liberty Financial is his crypto company that he started in 2024. And so there's kind of two types of investments here. So the company itself, like that, its key product is called USD1, which is pegged to the US dollar. And so it's called a stable coin when it's

pegged to a real asset. So that's somewhat more of a tangible thing that we can kind of think about. So the meme coins is kind of a separate issue. So that's actually just pegged to nothing. So its value really comes from being able to tell a story about or just a narrative about the product. And so it's not really tied to, you know, some kind of objective analysis that we might have of a company of like, what's, what's this product? Like, why is it valuable? So those are the two things that we're looking at here. And the people who invest in something like the Trump meme coin, Kevin. Are these primarily Trump supporters, Trump fans? Do you have any sense of why Donald Trump sort of abandoned his skepticism? As Syria points out, he was very, very skeptical and calling it a

scam before he set up his own crypto company. Has he given any explanation as to why he changed his mind on that? And how do people invest in a Trump mean coin? Who are those people? I'd like to do my impersonation of Donald Trump's evolving thoughts. on crypto. It's scam. Yeah, it's a scam. It's a scam. Advantage to YouTube viewers of the podcast to see Kevin's facial expressions. After twice trying to get me to talk about soccer, now we're going to talk about crypto.

So Steve Hayes is clearly a statistic, SOB. People who invest in meme coins are fools. And setting aside serious tenetion. just claim about U.S. dollar-based coins being based on a real asset because U.S. dollars maybe. But crypto performs a useful function in some cases. It does what money is supposed to do. It's a store of value and a means of exchange. There are people who use Bitcoin for useful things, I suppose, although what the great advantages of it are still not, I think, really evident to me. Meme coins are just like meme stocks and things like that. They're basically a joke that people put money into.

and then they become a kind of pyramid scheme where more people get into the joke and then inflates the value of the non-asset that starts to look like an asset, which I guess it kind of sort of becomes, in some economic sense, an asset because you can sell it, and some of them there is, you know,

some persistent value that stays around for a long time. People who buy it are Trump fans and fools to the extent that that's not repeating myself. But, yeah, it's a whole different set of things that I don't think there's much of a case for, And I think that if you look at the actual performance of the Trump coin and the Melania coin, which there also is one and the rest of this stuff, you will conclude that it's probably not been a very good investment for most people. Jonah, these are eye-popping numbers, obviously. I mean, if you look at just the context that Syria laid out, Trump 1 versus Trump 2, Trump 2 versus Biden, if you're going to make a defense of the Trump administration, you'd say there's no suggestion that stuff is illegal.

The president, President Trump is far wealthier than Joe Biden, so it stands to reason that he would make more money on sort of leveraging his own assets, making investments as he would. Why is there a problem with this? Just in the strict sort of legal sense, why should people care? Well, I mean, it's, we'll take it as a proposition for argument's sake that he's done nothing illegal. I'm open to that. I'm also open to the idea that we just haven't found out yet, but let's put that aside.

It is obviously by any historic standard of the presidency unethical. I mean, like some of these things he's done are just gross. But the meme coin thing, not to mention, you know, all the other Chachkes with his name, the watches and all that other stuff that Syria got into, he is directly profiting off of the presidency in a way that, you know, I mean, I heard somebody make the case. Google George Washington and land warrants or something like this

these really desperate short of attempts to put this as a historic norm but if you just look at like the charts of stock trades from previous presidents you know all increases

from zero are infinite so you can't even do it really as a bar chart in the sense that it's zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero tens of thousands of them by Donald Trump

and I understand you know, we don't have the AO crowd here about presidential immunity. The presidents are not bound by the ethics rules that his cabinet members and other staffers are. But if a cabinet member had done some of the things they were doing, it would be illegal. So, you know, one of the buzz phrases that people love to throw around during impeachment controversies is, the president isn't above the law, but he isn't below the law either. He literally is now above the law in the sense that he can do something, that other government officials cannot do.

And so it is profoundly unseemly. I also think if you were to describe it to somebody in the before times up until about a decade ago on just the objective outlines of what he's done, people would say, well, obviously that would be impeachable and he would be impeached for it, right? Forget the Amman. You mean stuff, Air Force One and the Qatari plane.

As Syria got into, you know, a foreign power backstopped these digital currencies, currencies with air quotes, in a way that inflated their value. And if the standard, which historically had been a real standard of the appearance of corruption is held constant or the appearance of impropriety, the fact that not only did he have this windfall profit from it, not only did he soak investors, there's a quo to the quid pro in the sense that, you know, we agreed, was it to UAE, the sale of, you know, the sale of, you know, of these very high-end, very in-demand,

very national security-sensitive computer chips. And so, I mean, it would be worse if it was flagrantly and obviously illegal, but that's not a defense of it. That is simply a, it is something that TV lawyers can cite as a way to say there's nothing to be seen here. But, you know, I'm an obsessive about the point that there are an enormous number of people who think an explanation is an excuse.

I can explain exactly why Hannibal Lecter likes to eat other humans' livers. That is not an excuse for murdering people and eating their flesh, right? A lot of the pro-Trump punditry on this explains, well, technically he's not bound by these ethics rules, and technically it's not illegal, and he's being transparent, and, you know, and he was a rich guy, but fine, I can stipulate or I can concede all of those things for argument's sake. none of us is an excuse. None of it is justification for it. You know, it's funny. Just one last point on this because I've seen nobody make this point. J.D. Vance just came out with a book that he wrote while vice president. He's not giving the royalties to charity. He's not, at least he's not said he is.

I've searched in vain for any evidence of this. He is literally profiting off of his job by writing a book that's a campaign book for a future race on government time with government resources. Now, Vice Presidents don't necessarily do a lot and all that, but, you know, the precedents are very few and far between. Barack Obama wrote a kid's book

that he mostly wrote before he took office. It was one of these gitchie goo little things, whatever. The previous precedent, I think, is Al Gore's like manual on reinventing government. That was basically a government report. There were times where a vice president president writing a book for profit, using his office to sell the book around the world and

plug it all over the place on government time, would be considered fairly scandalous. Now, compared to what Trump is doing with this stuff, you have to be one of these fastidious Popinjay, former White House ethics czars to even find it troubling. Just the deviancy has been so redefined here that that kind of thing is just background noise. There was a time when you could be speaker of the house and get into trouble for... For sure, right, Jim Wright.

That's the thing. And then be the guy who deposed him and get in trouble from the same thing. So I think it's all gross. I'll defend crypto a little bit more than Kevin. I basically agree with him. Just insofar as I think it's an important point to point out. The meme coin stuff is

just stupid, right? It is basically investing in cabbage patch dolls or some other fad. and if you want to do it as a part of history and you know that it's not a good investment vehicle, fine, go ahead and do it. That's fine. But crypto, in countries with runaway inflation,

corrupt governments, tyrannical governments, having a storehouse of currency that is highly, highly portable that you can leave Nigeria or Egypt in a moment's notice and not have to sew diamonds into your wife's dress or something has real value, which is why the people who use it most are in places where they don't trust the government

not to confiscate their wealth. That's fine. The irony is that given some of these policies, maybe we'll be that kind of, we'll have the same use case here. What I get from this is this is how Jonah buys his Cuban cigars, by the way. Siria, if you imagine this as one of those charts

with the yarn and the stick pins on a bulletin board, it's hard to make sense of this because it goes in so many different directions. And it's not just President Trump. It's his sons. And we'll get to that in a moment. But one of the companies that's sort of at the heart of this is Binance. And you talk about Binance in this morning dispatch item and the fact that President

Trump pardoned its founder, Shangpen Zhao, back in October. Can you give us just a big picture overview of who he is and what role Binance plays in all of this? Yeah, so Binance is the largest crypto exchange in the world, and it holds, I believe, 87% of the World Liberty Financial's main product, which is the USDA one that we were mentioned. It holds basically the vast majority of that product's circulating supply. And so Trump pardoned the founder of finance after he had like a four-month-searched. for this anti-money laundering violation. And so prosecutors had also said that finance was allowing transactions that were benefiting Hamas and al-Qaeda. So this is also some very sketchy stuff. And something I also wanted to mention going back to the meme coin point was it does sound really

ridiculous. But at the same time, like investing in this meme coin kind of bought you access to Trump in that he held this dinner for the top investors in the Trump meme coin. And one of these people was also pretty sketchy named Justin's son, who was this other crypto entrepreneur who later the charges were dropped against him. So again, like, it sounds really ridiculous. But I think that the buying access point in the meme coin story is also another sketchy point same thing as the finance founder with his pardon. Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is, you know,

people who will defend Trump on these numbers and on these business practices who will point to things like, you know, Trump stakes and the actual Trump labeled businesses and say, look, he's doing all this out in the open. There's no suggestion that this is yet illegal. Why is this a problem? And yet, you know, the dinner that he held at Mar-a-Lago certainly raised a number of eyebrows.

If you look at what he has said in his own defense on these issues, I find it fascinating. He's given answers that sort of echo the answers that his sons have given. He was asked in this extensive New York Times interview at the beginning of 2026, why he reversed a first-term policy of not having his family do business overseas. And this is what President Trump said. Well, because I got no credit in the first term. I don't have to agree to that in the first term. we did nothing. We did. We were just, and my kids were asked to do business all over the place.

They run it now. I have a great company, one of the greatest companies. And I think it's one of the in terms of beautiful assets, great assets, great property, etc, etc. I didn't let my kids do anything because to me, the presidency is the highest calling, but I got criticized. Nobody gave me credit. So move down that the Times reporters sort of push back and say, Mr. President, we reported that you've given back your salary. we reported on this. And then Tyler Pageer, New York Times White House reporter, who does a very good job covering the Trump administration, said, and so why now, why the change? Why now are you doing the deals? And President Trump responded, because I found out that nobody cared. And I think that turns out to be pretty true, given the magnitude of the deals that we're discussing, and there are a number of others that time won't allow us to get into. There's a critical mineral.

deal that the Trump sons are involved in with the government of Kazakhstan that was signed in the Oval Office, got government back, U.S. government backing for some loans attached to the deal. There's a resort that Donald Trump's daughter has undertaken off the coast of Albania. There are a number of these things, and when you scrutinize them, I wonder, Kevin, if part of the challenge is this stuff is really complicated. I mean, crypto itself is complicated. But then you look at sort of the contours of all of these deals. And it's just really hard to keep track of, much less hard to explain to people who are busy living their lives. Is that part of the reason that this hasn't been more sort of eyebrow raising? Well, I think the complication is part of it. I also think that

that that is fortified by the fact that Americans don't take financial corruption very seriously, for the most part. So the example that I've used off and on is that, you know, in the 1990s, if you tried to explain Hillary Clinton's cattle future stuff to people and tried to explain to people what futures trading was, you would just get this blank look, nobody cared. It was actually pretty sketchy stuff, and there's evidence there of some pretty serious wrongdoing. You tell him that Bill Clinton's got his pants down with the intern in the Oval Office and everybody

gets it. Trump can do all this stuff that's, as John, points out wildly unethical and inappropriate, and people will say, well, but it's not illegal, so that's all right. Now, if Trump had said, ha, she's 18, it's not illegal, everyone would understand why that's a problem still, right? If there was, if it was a sex thing and not a financial thing. So it's just, you know, what we, what we tend to focus on, what we tend to process as Americans and how we think about this stuff. And, yeah, you throw Kazakhstan in there, and I think that, well, we're very anti-Kazakhstan in the Williamson household for, for reasons that some of you

know about, I think. But people don't know where it is, what it is. It ends in Stan. It sounds sketchy. They just assume that it's like some borat kind of thing that's necessarily going to be corrupt to start with. I also kind of think that a lot of people just sort of assume that everyone at Trump's level of wealth

got there through corruption. Americans do have this populist streak where they think about that sort of thing that way. I remember when I was a youngster first kind of learning a little bit about finance and Wall Street and what these guys do. And it all seemed like a species of magic. And like there were these super smart people

who had this very specialized knowledge. And then once you kind of drill into it and you start to understand what the jargon is and all that, you're like, oh, it's just like, you know, it's banking and loaning money and investing pretty straightforward stuff. It's not really magical at all.

But if you're on the, completely on the outside of it, you don't know the lingo, you don't know what this, that, and the other thing means, which, inutainingly, Trump doesn't. Like, he clearly doesn't know the difference between, like, what a hedge fund is

and what private equity does and those sorts of things. He just kind of lumps it all together because it all looks like voodoo to him too. But it also looks like a scam that he wants in on. and now he's he's in on it. One of the things I grudgingly admire about Trump, I suppose,

is that there's just literary conceit that the devil always tells people the truth and that even though he tells them the truth, they go ahead and do what he wants him to anyway because he says it in such a way that they want to hear it. Trump, even though he tries to lie about everything, at critical moments, he just can't help but telling the truth. And as you were pointing out, no one cares about this stuff, so I may as well go and do it.

Like, he didn't try to even make any defense about, that's not really dirty. it's not, it's not, you know, sketchy, it's not embarrassing. It's not a violation of our norms or ethical rules or anything like that. Just, yeah, nobody cares. So why not? And he's not wrong. So I agree with all that, Kevin.

But I do think that there's one explanation that we haven't mentioned, and then there's one issue that we haven't mentioned. The explanation is, and this is a point Doug High, some other people have made when I've been on TV with them, is that people have already priced in. their opinion that Donald Trump is corrupt. Yeah. They, or at least sketchy, right? And so he is playing to type.

And when you play to type, people are like, well, we kind of knew this about him, and he's just sort of getting away with it. And we have this thing in our politics where it has to be shocking to sort of get people to lock onto it. And it's just, I mean, the scope of it is shocking with Trump. But the fact that he's self-dealing and doing this sort of thing is just not shocking for people. And so you're not going to convince a big chunk of people that it's terrible. The other point, which is not so much as an explanation, but I just think it's worth pointing out,

I'll see if I can find it. And if I can, I'll put it in the show notes. There was a montage, I think, on CNN of all of the times Donald Trump attacked Joe Biden for profiting off of the presidency. And he campaigned on this about it being outrageous, that these guys are enriching themselves and all that. And, like, I think Biden was much more corrupt than people thought and that the press wanted to cover. And a lot of it had to do with Hunter

and also with Joe Biden's brother. And I think a lot of that was a legitimate thing to look into. But even if you take the most extreme narrative from Comer or whoever or any Fox News host about Biden's corruption or the Biden crime family,

you have to add, I don't know, one, two, three zeros before the decimal place to talk about the kind of money that Trump is making. And it's just not obtaining. And I think it's kind of remarkable, you know, I mean, Syria is a wee lass. But the three of us have been talking about liberal media bias and how the mainstream media runs cover and protects Democrats in ways of a dozen about Republicans. and I believed all of that, and I still believe it to a certain extent.

You know, we have to talk about a case-by-case basis kind of thing. But the ability of Republicans to get narratives out into the bloodstream is just as effective, if not more effective, than Democrats at this point. Because the amount of time and energy spent covering Biden corruption, particularly at Fox, just dwarfs anything we've seen about Trump. And part of that is the function is that Democrats don't. control the House. Republicans control the House so they get to have hearings, which were, by definition, news events. And so I think some of this stuff will become much more of an issue if Democrats take

back the House and or the Senate. I don't know if we're going to get to impeachment. I don't know if we should, blah, blah, blah, that's a whole other conversation. But in terms of the oversight and going after corruption and subpoenaing people and saying, how do you justify making this money and going after Lutnik and Whitkoff and those guys, if Democrats win in November, we're going to see a lot of more of it, and that will give ample opportunity to the press to cover it a lot more. Do you ever kind of wonder what he wants the money for? Yeah. I mean, seriously, he likes McDonald's and Floor Shime shoes.

You know, like even Jonah Goldberg, who Donald Trump famously said couldn't afford to buy a pair of pants. Can buy McDonald's. He said, I didn't know how. Didn't know. I thought he couldn't afford to buy a pair of pants. No, I think he doesn't even know how to buy pants, I think, is that. I have a team of the staff who've worked on this. issue. But I'm pretty sure that's what it was. But even even even Jonah Goldberg can afford probably all the

McDonald's he wants and all the floor shime shoes he could wear. Fact check true. Fact check true. I wonder what he wants the money for? I think that's a reasonable point. I think some of it is for his sons. I mean, his big argument is they're in charge of the company. They should be able to do this business. They sat it out in the first term. They should be able to make money. Now, this is what Eric Trump, that was his direct argument when he was asked about this during the 2024 campaign. There's one other thing I want to touch upon before we move on from this issue, though, because I think it goes far beyond, you know, the president enriching himself, which I think is problematic for the reasons that we've discussed. But if you go back and you think of the Clinton Foundation scandal, and I think it was

a scandal, I think there were real questions being raised about whether foreign countries were giving to the foundation as a way to influence Hillary Clinton's campaign. They're thinking to get in good with former President Bill Clinton to be able to exert influence. on U.S. policymaking and thinking in a way that we wouldn't want. And even that, if you go back and reread some of those stories, it was always sort of a double or triple bank shot to get to that point, and it looked like it was hidden. What we're seeing here in many cases is just straight out in the open.

You know, the deal that the Trump family struck back in April of 2025, that would allow them working with a Saudi company, also working with the Qatari company owned by the Qatari government, which had been criticized for years as a state sponsor of terror, of radical Islamic terror. This deal creates this beachside resort, an 18-hole golf course, and it happens at a time when the Trump administration is then accepting a plane, a new Air Force One, which the president flew on to a NATO summit this week, did not fly back on that same plane for potentially pretty interesting reasons.

But we get this gift in exchange. Then President Trump offers in public remarks basically a security guarantee to the government of Qatar, where there's now this going to be this new Trump family resort. It's all so out in the open. And I guess, you know, the crypto schemes and some of the sort of complicated financial deals that the Trump administration, the president and his sons have sought and struck, sealed, I can understand why those are hard to comprehend. I guess something like this at least raises questions that I think are easier for the average American to get their head around. and yet it's still not really breaking through in the manner that we might expect it to. Well, Syria, thank you very much for joining us and helping us understand at least one aspect of this.

We appreciate it, and we look forward to having you back. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This is so fun. You bet. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. We're back.

You're listening to the Dispatch Podcast. Let's jump in. All right, everybody, we had a technological failure of biblical proportions where Steve's Wi-Fi just not only quit, like the software that we used, straight up rejected the idea of letting Steve even try to get back in. So adding to that, Kevin and I recorded what I think future historians will recognize the extent they can verify it, probably the smartest, wisest, funniest, most entertaining conversation in all of human history. And it is lost because it never got uploaded. And we are loath to try to put lightning

back in the bottle and do that exactly as it was. But we are going to talk about Graham Blatterner. But now we know how they felt when the Library of Alexandria burned. For sure. This is sort of like what happened with, a little like what happened with episode 11 of The Remnant, which we don't talk about. But I'm not saying we're on the same level with Aristotle, but he got close. Yes, I mean, what was it, like, half of the work of Aristophanes was lost in Alexandria and like three of, well, there were like three major works of Aristotle that were lost, right? Something like that. I think so, yeah.

I can't remember what is, yeah. His underrated second book. Why don't we start where, since there's been news since we recorded, Graham Platner had not dropped out when we recorded. He has now dropped out the presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine accused of sexual assault by a credible but unproven accuser in a Politico story? Kevin, what do you make about it? Well, you know, the first thing that comes to mind is, I suppose, not Grant Platner. You know, I'm not exactly shocked by this. It seemed like, gosh, if you were writing this as a script or something, this would be the moment you were building up to and obviously telegraphing and coming to.

So Plattenor is obviously a person of low character in lots of ways. You know, there's the Nazi tattoo thing which, okay, you know, lots of people have regrettable tattoos and lots of people drink too much and make some bad decisions when they're young. And I don't want to psychologize him from afar, but, you know, there's talk of, you know, him having some mental health problems related to his military service, which would be entirely understandable. That kind of stuff you can probably get past, I think, in a lot of ways. but his inability just to tell the truth about it, to be sort of straight up about it,

his need to continue lying about this stuff, that really is something that speaks to his lack of suitability for a position like this. There is a part of me that always wants to take a step back a little bit when someone is accused of a crime outside of the context of being charged and tried on those charges and convicted, because even though I don't think there's any reason to doubt this woman or her story,

the way you get justice for someone who was accused of, let's be clear here what's a violent sexual felony crime, is to charge that person in a court of law and conduct a trial in accordance with the excellent standards of evidence and criminal procedure that we have in the United States. That's how we go about doing this stuff. And this thing that we've developed over the last couple of decades foregoing that, particularly in cases of sexual crimes, and saying instead, well, what we're going

to do to achieve, quote-unquote, accountability is to wait for some crucial crossroads in this person's public or professional life and then launch these allegations in a way that can't be proved, can't really be evaluated. Your attitude toward these charges will probably reflect what you already thought about Grand Platner going into it, which is natural and that's not necessarily a criticism of how people come to these conclusions, but there isn't going to be a trial. There isn't going to be testimony. There isn't going to be evidence. There isn't going to be criminal procedure. And again, even though I don't think there's any particular reason to doubt the story in this case, it does create a set of incentives, I think, that are very destructive.

I do think that in the case of Kavanaugh, in his hearings, that those were fictitious claims. I do not believe them. I think they were made up for political reasons by a attention-seeking person with some mental health problems, very likely. And I just said, I don't want to Psychologize people from afar, but I just did, but okay, sue me. Don't actually sue me? And I don't want to create more incentives to weaponize that sort of thing, both because it's unfair to the accused in cases like Kavanaugh when he is obviously, I think, not guilty of the thing of which he was accused, but also because it creates incentives for poorly serving the people who actually are victims of these crimes, which should be addressed through police and the courts. That's what you do with crimes, particularly very, very serious crimes like this. rather than saying, well, we're not going to treat it as a crime, but we're going to treat it as a testament of what this person's character is like, which it is. It is that.

But it's also a crime. And crime victims deserve justice, and justice comes into court of law. Yeah, so we talked about this a little bit yesterday, and I've been thinking about it a bit. And my basic take is you're absolutely right in theory. That's how it should work. When I say the theory, I'm not trying to be dismissive. That is the ideal way it should work, is that, and that's the only thing that Platner said in his statement,

did you watch any of his video resume? Okay. Because I want to talk about that in a second. It's the only thing where I have actual agreement with him in that he says, accusations are supposed to be the beginning of a process. Accusations are supposed to be the beginning of an investigation. And I think that's right, right? It's like the accusation isn't the conviction of the accusation.

It is the introduction of a question. And that said, I think part of the problem is with your formulation is there's kind of like no good moment to declare that the rule. Because we were so far down the road on this stuff. And so if you actually look at, let's assume that the accuser is telling the truth. I find her credible. and I find the fact pattern of why she came forward and the evolution of why she came forward certainly plausible and credible.

And I don't want to get deep in the weeds on the rape accusation, but simply to say that we have a media industrial complex, which is part of your complaint, that does this, right? Does this with Me Too. It's been doing this for basically since Bob Packwood, if not earlier.

And that kind of reporting, which can be of service. I mean, I think we both thought the Caesar Chavez reporting was very useful after he died. As you pointed out, New York Times is very good at doing history. It's the journalism they struggle with. But that's a good line. Thank you for reminding me of it. Yeah.

But the point I'm trying to get at is living on the ground in the real world when this woman sees what the New York Times did and ignited with making the issue more about the credibility of a previous accuser of physical. you then create a moral dilemma for the person, right? So not for the journalists, but for the person of, do I come forward? If I have the truth in my heart, and I know what actually happened, and I have the facts, and I didn't want to do this for all sorts of understandable reasons about not wanting the stigma, not wanting to go to court, all that kind of stuff. But I feel morally compelled to come forward now. That person is going to find an outlet that is going to take their story. And then once it's published, it's news. And so you're left with these, you know, Princess in the P.

Kind of like, how do we get out of this cycle kind of thing that I don't, like, if she had come to us at the dispatch, I don't know what we would have done with it. But I'd have published it. Yeah. We're so far down the road on this thing that, you know, they're, I mean, obviously we shouldn't have gotten into World War I. But here we are, right? Let me just add something just real quick. So I was saying with Platner, you know, your attitude toward the accusations will probably be dependent on your attitude toward the subject. And I think that's true in all cases.

And as we got into a little bit yesterday, I actually did some years ago teach journalism seminar on the Rolling Stone UVA rape case. And this is a case of a woman coming forward with this, you know, story of this, you know, horrible sexual assault that she suffered. and it bolstered the writer's attitude toward a certain class of people, these entitled frat boys at the University of Virginia and the lacrosse team, I guess they were. And the story was not only did they do this, but this is the sort of thing that people like this do. And that's a really easy thing for people to fall into, particularly when it comes to one's political enemies. Now, that story turned out to be made up. It was entirely false. It should have been obvious to the editors and writers of the story that it was before it went out,

but it was published. And, you know, Rolling Stone is, I'm not sure I would still call it a great journalistic institution, but it's an institution with some history and some resources and things like that. And it can get things spectacularly wrong in a way that was going to wreck the lives

of these young men who had not done the thing of which they were accused of doing. So I think we have to be really, really careful with allegations of crime outside of the process that we have for evaluating such allegations. Now, again, I agree with you entirely in this particular situation. There are all sorts of reasons for her to come forward at this time. I don't blame her for doing that.

But I think that when we're thinking about it as journalists and political people and as citizens, we should be a little bit more circumspect, I think, than we often are in these things, rather than just saying, well, this comports with my priors, and it serves me politically. right now, so I'm going to run with it and assume that it's entirely true because we've seen, you know, situations where not only was it entirely made up, situations in which we have pretty good reason to think things were either made up or exaggerated, and then there's some, you know, gray area in some of the other cases. So it should be an occasion for some intellectual and epistemic humility. That's all fair. I don't want to keep this as a journalism and philosophy

seminar as much as I am in favor of epistemic humility. But so here's the thing that I got very angry about when I actually saw the video of Graham Platner's withdrawal announcement. He, look, if he was blackout drunk in this alleged rape situation, he may not actually remember what he did, but he does remember that he was blackout drunk, right? And if he was blackout drunk, and he may remember more than that, right? So if he did it, his statement was so fundamentally more. and ethically grotesque that I find it sort of borderline scandalous.

He is basically saying, like, if you listen to it, maybe it's because I've been doing this deep dive I was telling you about going through the various caucuses and the Democratic Socialists of America and all these Maoists and Marxists and whatnot. He is making a classically Marxist argument about what happened. He says in his statement that he's not guilty. He says in his statement that this isn't just. about getting them off the ballot. This is about we should be outraged about how the structures of the system are being removed from us, that we did this the way they told us to, and basically the capitalist

ruling classes are combining, you know, with corporate media and the power structure and all the rest to deny you a voice in our politics and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, I think that's all BS on the merits, on the facts, but I would find it forgivable, more forgivable, more forgivable, if he is in fact not guilty, right? Because then when you're wrongly accused of stuff, you start coming up without all the system's out to get me and he's inclined to go that way. If he is guilty or if he thinks it's even possible that he is guilty and he is doing this, it is un-American, it's unpatriotic, it's incredibly so. It is, I mean, the stakes are much lower, but psychologically, it's no different than Donald Trump knowingly saying the election was stolen when it wasn't. And it's

that sort of mindset that I just found pretty appalling in what he was saying. Yeah. You know, it's seen in one of my favorite movies in Beckett, where there are these two kind of, you know, corrupt, contented Italian cardinals talking about political strategy. And one of them that says to the other, well, you know, sincerity is just another strategy like any other. I've been known to use it myself.

And there's the old, you know, joke that, you know, authenticity. If you can fake that, you can do anything. And Platner is, again, to revisit our lost conversation, yesterday, you know, you, you mentioned the thing about Donald Trump being a poor person's idea of what a millionaire is like. And Platner is a couple of, you know, very cosseted, insulated political consultants' idea of what a working class guy is like. Right. And so they see this guy and they're like, well, he doesn't have a great job and he's got unkempt facial hair and this, you know, kind of Walrus mustache thing going on. He must be,

you know, a personification of blue collar America and the working class. And Turns out he's not that at all. And, you know, Platner talking about the ruling class overlords being out to get us and all that. If there's an example of that, it's him because he's a creation of that very political machine. You know, he is a prodout. He's not some guy who rose up organically through the ranks because he was, you know, the vice president of his local union chapter who decided to run for city council and then ended up going to, you know, a Senate campaign. he's this guy who did some social media stuff

that some political consultants looked like and said, we can use this. You know, we can put some soap in that soap box and sell that laundry detergent because the box is what we're selling, not the detergent. And my father worked for Procter & Gamble, I guess Tyde just comes to mind in all marketing,

in all marketing conversations. So, you know, Plattner really is an example of the thing that he was pretending to decry, which, of course, is perfect, Because when you are someone like Donald Trump or some other well-heeled populist, you're always out there telling the rubs to be afraid of and to resent the thing you are. You know, if there's an example of insider dealing kind of comfortable, cozy relationships between private business, corporate interests, and, you know, politicians, I mean, is there a better example of that than Donald Trump? certainly after he's become president, but before, too, you know, his building career in New York was built on, you know, political favoritism and access purchasing and all that by his own, you know,

account. And, you know, Platner is kind of the flip side of that same model, I think. Yeah, so, like, I've been writing versions of this column for a very long time about what I call sort of the Johnny Bravo form of politics, which is, I first started writing about it with, what's his name? Johnny Bravo. No, the former commander of NATO. West Clark. Yeah.

Right. In 2004, the Democrats brought him out because they thought they needed a guy in a uniform to beat George W. Bush in an Iraq war. And they didn't actually care what he had to say or what he thought. He just fit the costume. And I'm not calling them a uniform a costume. He was a noble public servant who served his country and all that kind of stuff. But that's how people like, yeah, that's basically the argument for why John Kerry got it.

Like, Democrats didn't like him. They thought Republicans would like him, right? And the Johnny Bravo reference is there was an episode. If you were raised thinking about commercial detergent projects, I was raised watching the Brady Bunch. And there was an episode of the Brady bunch where Greg Brady gets recruited by some slick Madison Avenue music producer types who, and promoters who want them to break off from the family band and launch a solo career as Johnny Bravo. And Greg thinks they.

love his authentic voice and skill and talent and music and all this kind of stuff. And it turns out, no, he just fit the costume. And that's why they wanted him. And you see this with, you know, the candidates that, you know, like James Talarico is just the latest version of this, where he's a, well, he's a pastor. Those people like pastors. So we don't know anything about the differences between kinds of pastors and all that. And we'll just get those people to vote for him. well, he doesn't actually have to, like, be conservative in any way, right? And I think that this is sort of Graham Platner thing. He's an oysterman Johnny Bravo.

Greg Brady, of course, had the self-respect not to be the Millie Vanilli of the middle 1970s and to not go forward with it. That's right. That's right. Tolerico, less so, I think. Just on the raw, punitary side of this, is this good news or bad news for Susan Collins? Well, it's bad news for Collins in that Platner would be a very easy person. I think to beat and almost anyone that the Democrats are able to recruit to stand in for him

on the ballot is going to be as stronger or more plausible candidate than him. And I think that that would be true even without a lot of the personal scandal stuff. He's just kind of a crackpot. And main voters historically are not super, super crackpot friendly. The outrage of a certain kind of progressive toward Collins to me is illustrative in some ways. you know, if you're a kind of normal middle-of-the-road Democrat, you know, someone who probably voted for Obama twice, but doesn't necessarily think that you want to drive a tank into Prague. Collins is one of the least offensive Republicans, probably in politics. She actually is fairly moderate. She actually is bipartisan by, you know, contemporary standards, although like every person in the Senate, she largely votes on party lines most of the time, but she's, you know, more likely to cross that than most other.

Republicans are, or most of the Democrats are, for that matter. And of course, the irony here is that, you know, part of the case against her was that she voted to confirm Kavanaugh after these allegations were made about him. You know, we mentioned Tala RICO earlier. I could see swinging for the fences a little bit with staying on board with a crackpotish candidate if you're trying to take out Ken Paxton, try to keep him out of the Senate, because if you are a sort of Normie Democrat, he's the sort of person who's going to really annoy you. I mean, I'm a normie, and he annoys me. So it's got to be that much worse for somebody. But the, you know, trying to get the world outraged and ginned up about Susan Collins is just going to be hard to do, I think, in some ways. And so even if they, you know, replace Platner with, well, there are two ways they could go, right? They could do with a sort of more moderate kind of normie Democratic candidate. And then you've got the problem of, well, between two normies, why not the norma we already know and familiar with and who has some seniority and that we kind of trust? Or you can try to find another Platonor-esque candidate

and run as a candidate of outrage against, you know, the system and capitalism and all that kind of stuff. But you still got to put Susan Collins out as the face of that thing you're running against. And I don't know. There's nothing about Susan Collins that just makes me want to go to the barricades. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was basically my position yesterday

when we recorded this before Grand Platner dropped out. I know, but you asked me, so I stole it. No, that's fine. That wasn't my point. is that it's still my position largely, I think it's just like the opophile that they had on Grand Platner. He was already kind of losing Normie support. You know, they, I think they had a plan. It was a good plan, whether it would have succeeded. We'll never know. But like, I would have bet on Collins against Platner. And now, at minimum, they have uncertainty. So we'll see. But I was

listening briefly to the beginning. I listened to the beginning of the commentary podcast. yesterday about this, so the Wednesday one. And our friend Eliana Johnson was saying how this is really bad news for Collins. I'm not persuaded, but it did shake my confidence a little bit. But part of her point, which I think is probably right, is that this is going to elicit a major sort of intra-democratic civil war in Maine. Because the DSA crowd had their guy, they loved their guy, they had written off all these faults as, you know, running dog capitalist, bourgeois propaganda. And now if they put in,

like, a Normie Schumer-approved establishment person, they're going to scream bloody murder. I don't know if that's true, but it sounded pretty plausible. I would have, I still think, I try very hard never to use the formulation X amount of time is a lifetime in politics, because it's just such a frigging cliche. But November is a long way away. Platner is a is his trajectory towards being the answer to a trivia question has started. And the anti-Trump spirits of the Democrats are going to be very, very strong. And this is the place where I do push back on you a little bit on this. That demonizing Susan Collins is ridiculous and very hard to do.

The problem is we live in a political system now where the idea of, all politics being local really doesn't apply. And if you tell people, like, people think we live in a parliamentary democracy and they vote like we are in a parliamentary democracy. And that's why people are going to vote, a lot of people who don't like Ken Paxton are going to vote for Ken Paxton. And it's why a lot of people who don't like whoever the main candidate is going to be are going to vote for the main candidate because the point is to take power away from Republicans and mount resistance to Trump. And I think that is going to drive a lot of turnout. And Collins will not have a persuasive story to the people who feel that way that she's quote unquote stood up to Trump.

And so I think it's going to be a hard race. It's something I bet on her, but it's, I wouldn't bet a lot of money on the outcome of this thing. The thing, last point, Graham Platner, could have made a ton of money because it was 95 to 5 on like polymarket or whatever that he was going to drop out. He could have just said, nope, and, you know, deal with it. Man, that's, I should write something about that one of these days, but that does create all sorts of bad incentives as well. I thought you're going to say just to hold out for some kind of, you know, payoff to get out of the way. Not to go off on a tangent here, but. And he might have gotten one for all we know. I'm not, we have no evidence of that. But like, if he was going to get one,

we wouldn't have gotten out of the sport either, you know. I know that Kamala Harris doesn't ever get up in the morning saying I really should have taken the advice from that Kevin Williamson column a few years ago. But she could be the president of the University of California system on her way to being governor of California if she wanted to be. But she wanted to get her tail kicked politically by Donald Trump and go down in history as a laughing stock instead. And that just seems like a bad decision.

Yeah. And Plattener probably could have got something. He probably could have got, you know, I'm going to be. I want to be the, you know, president of some lefty think tank, and it better suddenly get a $10 million endowment so you can afford to pay me $100,000 a month for the rest of my life, or at least until you forget who I am and you win the Senate race. The Oysterman Institute.

The Oysterman Institute. That would be actually a pretty good name. Yeah, it sounds like a little bit like a Ludlam novel. The Goldberg paradox. Well, we already have the Goldberg variations. That's right. You have, by the way, manfully resisted ever publishing a collection of your works and calling it that. which you've got to do one of these days.

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was a handball. Cheers rising like a roar around the room. Because match days are about the shared moments. How did Jameson to your match day lineup? Jameson, it's what you bring. Please enjoy our products responsibly. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. We should switch briefly to Iran. Okay. Iran's so far away. Soft flock of seagulls. Donald Trump yesterday, we're recording on Thursday. This happened. Might have happened late Tuesday because the time's on differences and time is a flat circle. This week, Donald Trump announced that the ceasefire is over, that the Iranian regime is scum, and he just doesn't want to deal with them anymore. Shooting is recommenced in both directions, in the Strait of War moves and in the surrounding neighborhood. Zero to 10, zero being

not shocked at all, 10 being gobsmacked, as the British say. How much blow, below zero are you? It's like roughly like negative pie square. That wouldn't work. Negative square would give me a positive number, so that would actually take me entirely in the wrong direction. So I should stick to my English major math here and say, yeah, about, I don't know, what's the temperature New Year's Day

where your wife's from in Alaska, about 13 below typically? Something like that. Yeah, throw it around there. You know, it wasn't that long ago when Trump was saying, hey, these are the most reasonable guys we've dealt with so far. You know, we basically got regime change by whacking the old guys, and now there's this new gang in there that wants to do business with us, and we can work with these guys. And Trump, of course, what he said an hour ago is completely forgotten by his colleagues and friends and admirers and sick fans, much less what he said a week ago or two weeks ago. Iran is winning this thing, and they understand that they're winning.

And we have a problem in that the United States may be in general, but also the Trump is. administration in particular, doesn't understand that the Iranians define victory in a way that's different from how we do. So every day they last against the great Satan, the United States, and stick a thumb in our eye and show that they can control the Strait of Hormuz and collect rents and do the rest of it is a day full of sunshine for these guys. And yeah, their people are suffering economically and some people are going to get killed by American military power. They can live with that. I mean, they killed 20,000 people to make a political point, not too long ago. They might have killed a lot more than that. Who knows? So if you are the Iranian rulers, whoever that may

actually be, it's not really entirely clear to me. He's in charge over there. Why would you want this to stop? Because if it stops, then you've got to go back to trying to run Iran, which is a terrible job because it's a poor backward country with a non-functioning government and a decimated, actually decimated is not nearly strong enough a word, a crippled economy, and not much in the way of prospects. And it's run by people who are at least intelligent enough to understand that the things that they would need to do to radically improve their country's position economically and get it more globally integrated into the world markets and such would require the kinds of reforms that are the opposite of what they actually want to do. They don't want to be a normal country. You know, the comparison case for Iran is Saudi Arabia in a lot of ways, which also run by sort of backward-looking Islamic fanatics, but Saudi Arabia wants to be a rich and modern and sort of more

normal country. And so it's taken various steps to get itself that way. It's still not Nebraska, you know, it's not Connecticut. It's not even Singapore. But it's been moving, you know, in the direction of reform and openness and, you know, better kinds of government and decency and institutional reform and all the rest of these things. And Iran doesn't want to move that way. Iran's got different ideas about what its role is. It really is this genuinely millinery and apocalyptic outlook that defines how Iran goes about its business. I don't think you disagree with me, but we should clarify, we're talking about the Iranian regime because I think this is exactly the fault line, right? Yeah, the crowd's protesting, want to be a normal country.

Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah. And the government doesn't want to it. You know, Iran, again, I'm far from an Iranologist, but my understanding is that the revolution regime's political base is really basically in strongest and undeveloped rural areas among people who are poor, not very well educated, and who don't have a lot of hopes of gaining anything from Iran being more closely integrated into the rest of the world. So people get mad when I point this out, but their coalition looks a lot like Trump's coalition in a lot of ways. It's rural, religiously fanatical, downscale, poorly educated, backward-looking, and afraid of globalization. So the question is, and it's never been clear to me, and I've done some reading on this,

but it's just how much support the regime has. You know, it's probably not majority support, but it's also not 2%. And so if they can really count on the support of, you know, 20% of the people, that's one thing. If they can really count on the support of 35% of the people, that's a different thing. There are obviously not enough of a paper tiger that we can just knock them over the way that we apparently thought we could, Venezuela style and just go in with some, you know, 15 minutes of extreme violence and then put in some new people who are going to be more plastic and more amenable to doing our bidding. So Trump administration, surprise, surprise, didn't do his homework, got it wrong,

and now it finds itself in a mess that it can't win because it's not willing to do the things that would be necessary. And there's no way out of. Yeah, I had an interesting conversation with Aaron McLean who hosts the School Award podcast. I listened to that just this morning. And, you know, the basic problem is people have learned that the way you win is not lose. That's really it, right? It's just stick it out, become a pain in the ass, make a superpower spend a lot in, or at least I make America spend a lot in very expensive munitions and muck around with

international commodity markets and threaten the rise of the stock market. and America, I mean, there's a point I think Aaron is right about, I should be careful. Donald Trump will lose patience. And I think the American people will lose patience if they haven't been convinced the war is in their interest. You know, Andy McCarthy makes, our old friend, makes this point from time and time that if you convince Americans that something is really in our interest and that our honor is fundamentally at stake, and that American lives are in danger. Americans will tolerate a lot of sacrifice. It's just not infinite, right?

So even people got tired of the war on terror, right? I think in part because they realized we got the low-hanging fruit, we got Osama bin Laden, we did the things that we're supposed to do, and then they're like, okay, enough of this already. And I get that for sure. but when you do it the way Trump did it, which is don't have a debate in Congress, don't have a debate in the press,

don't telegraph that you're going to do it, don't ask for permission to do it, don't talk to your allies about it, claim that you're doing it all unilaterally, declare unalloyed total victory prematurely, you know, demand unconditional surrender and essentially regime change, and then fail to get all that.

Surprise, surprise, it's the most unpopular war since in the history of polling from the outset, just because no one was asked to have buy-in for it. And I honestly, like, there's a cause for optimism here insofar as I think it's good for some optimism. I think it's good that Donald Trump called off the ceasefire. I think it's good that he called their BS on attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz and said, this is not what the deal was.

You're breaking the deal. screw you. And again, I think it was a mistake to get into this war, given how it's played out so far. But better to call the Iranians bluff and say, hey, look, you can't turn the Strait of Hormuz into a toll road. And if you're doing that, you know, people forget, the Iranians in this, within the four corners of this incident started it because there's another channel off the coast of Oman that is not the one that the Iranians control. They don't want people. people using that because they're trying to lay the foundation to say, once the 60 days is up, we're setting up tollboos.

And America doesn't want that. A lot of our allies don't want that. And so we called their bluff on it. But I just don't know how it ends because the Iranians are very triumphant. I was just listening to an economist podcast about it where they really feel, they're feeling their oats. They really milked that funeral, too. Yes. And, you know, at the event in Iraq, not Iran, in Iraq, it was a sea of Iranian flags, right?

So they feel like they're projecting power. And the IRGC is unconstrained by the Mullahs, which people who are afraid of Islamic fundamentalism think is a good thing. It might be in the long term, but in the short term, it's not a good thing. And so I just, I have no idea how this thing ends. The only argument I will utterly reject is anybody claiming that anything is going according to a plan. Yes. Well, I have it on the good word of J.D. Vance that, you know, you, neocon, Warhawks just want to kill every Iranian anyway. That's right.

Obviously, this is going to please you. You know, you think about it like, I mean, to use maybe a tortured metaphor here, if there was a guy who came by your house and shot a rifle through your window every night at the same time, roughly, like you wouldn't love it, but you could learn. to adapt to it, like you wouldn't be in that room. It's still be scary, still be dangerous. You still want to have your kids somewhere else. But if you were 99% sure the guy was never going to kick down the door, but you knew he was a lot better armed than you, you wouldn't want to go out into the street and fight him. And we're essentially the guy shooting through the window.

You know, the things that are necessary to do to really dig these guys out of the ground and have regime change in Iran or short of that just to get the things accomplished that we want to accomplish, like, you know, seizing the nuclear materials or these other things. the administration has said, just requires a kind of commitment to this fight that we, by we, I mean the U.S. government, which I hate to even use the personal pronoun with that, but it is our government. We are not going to do those things. Donald Trump does not want to have another thing that looks like the Iraq War, another occupation troops on the ground, people having to go door to door and do X, Y, and Z, or deal with, you know, IEDs and booby traps and that kind of stuff.

you know, they want to do this kind of antiseptic warfare from ships and from airplanes and maybe occasional special forces operation here or there. But that's not going to get done what we apparently want to get done in Iran. So I would expect what we're going to end up with is just, you know, essentially a quagmire in which Trump will declare victory every six weeks and then say, well, you know, those datchedly guys, they're not trustworthy. And as though that's their problem and not his problem. Yeah.

for continuing to make deals with these people who obviously aren't going to keep them and have interests of their own and a different way of going about politics and military engagements. And just going to go on and on because the guy is 80 years old and he doesn't know the difference between Putin and Zelensky and Iran and Japan. And his number two guy is a guy who has a very different view, I think, of foreign policy than he does, who's just watching the president spin around like a pinata. I'm wondering where this to torture another metaphor game of mutiny. musical chairs is going to stop, and whether it's going to be something that is more or less hospitable to the long-term aspirations of one J.D. Vance. I will not poke you about J.D. Vance because poke away. No, no, no, just because I'll set you off and then you'll set me off, and then we'll be here for another 45 minutes, and we've already gone on too long. But I did promise

you yesterday that we needed to have you back on the remnant. You may, you guilt. You shamed me. I guilted you, yes. Yeah. Because I'd said, I'll have you back on soon about a year ago. And so we will... And then you tried to rope me into doing the solo. And you begged off, which I was a little surprised by. Let's take a vote in the comments section. Who wants to hear Kevin Williamson get up in the morning

and talk for 45 minutes to an hour about whatever comes into my head? And I was talking to my wife about this, and she said she would have enjoyed it, but I'm going to do my best Jonah Goldberg impersonation and get up and say, it's an overwhelming schedule right now, and I haven't been feeling great,

and I'm not sleeping well, I'm in this little apartment, and I got dog issues. Yeah. And my lumbago is acting up. You know what it would sound like? It would sound like those radio intercepts from Kurtz in the beginning of Apocalypse now, where it's just me at 4 o'clock in the morning when I go up,

saying we have to go from village to village, early after army. The horror. The cow pig out of baby. And, yeah, that wouldn't be good for anybody. All right. So rather than redo the not worth your time thing, that we talked about yesterday since we've gone along here,

I will just throw it to the comments, is it worth our time to have Kevin try to do the solo remnant? I bet you votes are, because look, here's the thing. The people who love you and want to hear what you have to say, want to love you and want to hear what you have to say. Those people who live with me, Jonah. Yeah, okay, well, the people who like you, right? The people who hate you want to see you screw up.

up. So, like, I don't know that you're going to get a lot of people say, oh, no, don't do this, right? So for listeners who don't know, I do a solo podcast on Fridays, usually on Fridays. And I wish it was 45 minutes to an hour now, but it has been creeping northward for a while. And I'm going to be away next week. And I asked Kevin if you want to sub for me. And he took a pass. So I think we're going to, now we're going to do it as a Q&A kind of thing, me and Victoria, some evergreen kind of thing. Because I want to honor my. commitments on this front. But I'd be happy to have you come do it another time and you should think about it. Give it some thought. It's weird, but I think it's good. It's actually good practice in some ways.

I mean, I think I've gotten better at it. But, you know, I used to sub on radio sometimes, like on serious XM on their, on their, whatever their right-wing channel is, Patriot. And like three hours of talking on a Friday night when it's just like you and the two truckers who are listening. Because they're not a lot of calls coming in or anything. Yeah. And that was really hard. In fact, first time I did it, I sent a note to Rush Limbaugh afterward, just, you know, complimenting them on making it look easy when it's not, not that easy.

Yeah. I will say, because I did a little guest radio hosting. Like, I took over Bill Bennett show a couple times. Oh, yeah. And I just didn't like it, in part because it seems like you're talking a lot. But in reality, with all the commercial breaks, there was just like too many little set pieces. that you had to actually be disciplined for? I mean, that's the problem with the solo is, like,

there's no artificial external constraints that say, okay, now it's time to wrap up on this topic, and you end up having a loggeria, or I end up having a loggeria quite often, but there we are, so. I can talk to you for an hour, I can talk to you and Charlie Cook for an hour. I can do that sort of stuff,

but just like, into the camera. I think I might lose it. Well, we don't use the camera for the solo because it's Paywall and doesn't go up on YouTube, so, which I would like to fix at some point. I mean, not because I think the world needs my mug, but I don't know. I think the real worry that I get is like, you forget that you're talking. Right.

And so like, and then like you're like, what did I just say? So people will send me email about stuff I said on the solo. I do not remember saying, like, because it's just, just go when I finally get up and going. And that's, that scares the crap out of me. What did I say about invading Poland? You know, that kind of stuff. Yeah, I have, I have fewer of those conversations that I don't remember the next day than I used to. Fair. Yeah. Different reasons, more platinum-adjacent reasons. Yeah. All right,

Kevin Williamson, thank you for doing this. Everybody, it's really important to mock Steve Hayes, as we were saying yesterday, of all the technological issues that we have had with the dispatch podcast over the last seven years in terms of connectivity, Wi-Fi, Steve, who fancies himself, the CTO of the dispatch, makes up about 70% of it. There's just something about the guy. He's like pig pen or whatever. He brings this cloud of like EMP energy around that disrupts normal EMF frequencies. I don't know what it is, but maybe we should get him to wrap parts of his body in tinfoil before he does this podcast because that will disrupt this cycle.

We could drop him on North Korea. That would be cool. Steve as an EMP weapon. I like it. Just a massive cheese curd splat in the middle of Pyongyang or whatever. Smells like Schlitz in here. Thanks to everybody for listening. Apologies to everybody for me and Kevin going so long.

It's all my fault. And subscribe to The Dispatch. See ya. If you like what we're doing here, you can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. As always, if you got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections,

you can email us at Roundtable at the dispatch.com. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. and thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.