The Dispatch Podcast - Hunter’s Trial, Alito’s Tribulations | Roundtable

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

Sarah is joined by Jonah and Steve to discuss the Hunter Biden conviction and debate how much Biden’s age matters. The Agenda: —“This is what Joe Biden wanted.” —Hunter’s tax charges —Rep. Nancy Mace’s political evolution —Have Republicans set expectations too low for Biden? —IVF and political malpractice —The secret recording of Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts Show Notes: —Dukakis' death penalty question —Yuval Levin’s new book: American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation―and Could Again —Yuval Levin on The Remnant —Ryan Anderson’s piece about IVF —NYT: Alito’s ‘Godliness’ Comment Echoes a Broader Christian Movement 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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It's in the fake news media want to constantly talk about oh President Trump is a convicted felon well you want to know something the man that I worship is also a convicted felon welcome welcome

Oh, and that's Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg. And we're doing a little bit of, I don't know, news popery today. So let's just dive on in. Hunter Biden was convicted of three gun-related charges. Jonah, does anyone care? Yes, I think a lot of people care. I think no one who cares is going to change their mind about anything, right? So, like, the people who think it's unfair to a hunter care.

and they're going to still think it's unfair to Hunter or the people who think it's unfair to Joe Biden or the people who think there's a double standard or whatever but like no one is no one is like oh now I have to take the position that I thought was wrong before and so I don't think it really changes very much I will say I'm kind of curious what you guys think about this

I find the extreme versions of the claim that this was all orchestrated to protect Joe Biden and distract from the deeper, greater crimes of the Biden crime family. And this plan is working exactly as

they wanted. This is what Joe Biden wanted to have happen to be absolutely preposterous. I'm not saying that there couldn't be a theory where this was the best of a lot of bad situations. Like there's something in there

that we could play with and say is right. But to listen to sort of Ted Cruz and that and Charlie Kirk in that crowd, they make it sound like when the guilty verdict came in from the jury, everyone on the Biden campaign and the Biden White House and the Biden high-fived. Like, yes, we got exactly what we wanted. And there's just nothing. I cannot figure out the logic behind that. And so tell me if I'm wrong. I feel like that conspiracy theory would have a lot more going for it, but for the tax trial that's coming in September. So remember, Hunter Biden is facing other criminal charges that he will be tried for in September related to, oopsie, not paying $1.4 million in taxes.

To be clear, not not paying taxes on $1.4 million of income, not paying $1.4 million in taxes. And that trial has, I think, the potential to be a lot more damaging. A, they're just the timing, right? Right now, it's June, it's the summer, people aren't really in the swing of campaign world to begin with. So this is September. That's like the worst timing. But second, the topic itself is a problem. Gun charges in cocaine are bad.

They're seedy. There was embarrassing stuff, you know, pictures, text messages, et cetera. But none of that's about Joe Biden, unless you think, you know, his parenting is somehow relevant to your world. But if you think that all presidents need to be good parents, like, let's take a walk down memory lane here. But the September tax trial is going to be about where Hunter Biden got that money. And the answer is a whole bunch of foreign entities and really malign actors against America's interest and that he was doing it while trading on his father's name. Like, this is exactly what Republicans have said that they wanted

I know they want the smoking gun tying Joe Biden to it, but they haven't found it. So in terms of like the next best thing, surely it's having, you know, earned media free advertising for the quote-unquote Biden crime family in September before the election. So yeah, the conspiracy theory about like these gun charges are a distraction makes no sense in that way, Steve. Yeah, it also, if you're being tried for not having paid $1.4 million, and taxes, it also complicates Joe Biden's ability to say that he's going to make the rich pay their fair share. I mean, if he's going to make the rich pay their fair share, he maybe ought to have started with his son.

I think that this result this past week actually is maybe a bigger deal than you do, Jonah. I do think it undermines the claim central to everything that Donald Trump has been running on for, you know, really the past year plus, that. There's this two-tiered system of justice that, you know, Democrats are manipulating the levers of justice. Just go after Republicans. If you're a Democrat, you can walk Scott Free. If you're a Republican, you're going to be held accountable. This does, not for the hardcore people. I mean, I think it was funny in the hours after the verdict came in to see the sort of beginnings of this conspiracy theory. It was like they hadn't really thought through what the proper response ought to be.

But you got the sense that the people who are making that kind of argument were going to make that. I mean, whatever the result was, it was going to be the result that Joe Biden wanted, you know, if you're in the Charlie Kirk conspiracy world. The bigger, I think the bigger takeaway, though, for people who are not, you know, obsessed with politics and not following this every day, people who might be swing voters or decisive voters in battleground states in November is that all of the. the stuff that Trump has been saying isn't true or at least isn't true in the way that Trump thought it was true. Joe Biden's son convicted. It's going to be harder to convince people that the justice system generally is going after Trump and Republicans in this case. You know, I think that there was a little bit of holding of breath for at least people who want the rule of law to be admired, that if he was acquitted,

right. This was in Delaware, the Biden home state. They're, you know, huge celebrities in Delaware. So in the reverse, the fact that he was convicted in what has to be the friendliest location of all, I think is a good sign. And actually goes to this point that we've been trying to make about juries all along. Juries tend to be really straightforward and take their jobs very seriously. This idea that like juries are in the bag for one side or the other, they come with preconceived notions of, you know, acceptable cultural behavior, things like that. But it's usually not like, oh, you know, hometown crowd type stuff. That's not really how juries tend to work. So that obviously was proven out in the Hunter Biden case, which I think is a good thing.

Is this going to come up at the debate on June 27th, Jonah? Yeah. And just for the right, I take Steve's point. I think in terms of preventing. worse problems for Biden, there's more significance there. I just, in terms of like, people are locked into their positions in a lot of ways, but in an election where two voters can decide this whole thing or something, persuading small numbers can matter. So I agree with that. I think yes, because Trump can't help himself, but he will bring it up, he'll try to bring

it up in a way to make it about the Biden crime family. And Biden will try to make whatever Trump says about Hunter a cheap shot at a guy whose kid is struggling with addiction. And so there's going to be a lot of attempts at emotional manipulation that will be incredibly ugly. Yeah, I mean, is this going to be a sort of Dukakis replay referring to the debate where Michael Dukakis has asked, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you then support the death penalty? and he gives this very sort of policy answer about his opposition to the death penalty. I assume that the Biden team is preparing for something like this and to have a more, whether authentic or inauthentic, emotional response to anything about Hunter Biden as sort of a how dare you.

I guess my question is, who's going to bring up whose conviction first? Is Biden going to go for Trump's jugular on calling him a convicted felon? or is Trump going to go after Hunter Biden first? I just think the country is going through an opioid crisis. It's going, lots of people are touched by addiction. Lots of people are also touched by older people who have senility issues. So that's another related thing. And so I think the comebacks for Biden are actually pretty easy on a lot of this stuff.

My son is not running for president. You know, how dare you, sir, all that kind of stuff. And I think he has some, because the detail, people don't want to get into the details. They just hear, oh, he's going after him because it was a drug addict son. That gives a certain force field around Biden in a debate. And I suspect Trump people know that. And whether or not they can convince Trump to do something clever, I have no idea. Steve.

I would think the moderators will bring it up, right? I mean, if I were preparing questions for this debate, I would want to have a line of question into both of these trials, not because they're the same thing or not because they're equivalent, but it's a rare and unique thing to have the son of a president entangled in these legal difficulties and even more rare to have the former president entangled in legal difficulties. So if I were the moderators, I would be working out a line of questioning that It helps people understand exactly what has happened here and what each of the candidates says in response. All right.

Let's broaden this conversation to some politics more generally. Nancy Mace won her primary last night. She is a South Carolina member who has had a bit of an evolution, but I don't know to where. So she started out being considered one of the more mavericky, moderate members of the Republican caucus. and now is, I don't know. Jonah, do you have a definition for what Nancy Mace is these days? She's a leaf on the wind.

I think she's mercenary. I think what we've come out, learn from her, is that she likes to be on TV. I mean, I guess what started this was, started the quote-unquote evolution is she would continuously come out and say publicly she was or wasn't going to vote for something. And then when the vote came around,

she would do the opposite of what she just said she was going to do. That's not really a political evolution in terms of policy. It's more of a cable news evolution in terms of, yep, now she gets booked a lot more. So she was facing this primary. She easily beat off the primary challenge. And, you know, just Republican Party writ large, I think there are interesting beneath the surface currents in terms of where Trump and support for Trump is helpful or not making much of a difference.

candidates who try to act like Trump and that doesn't work sometimes. But overall, perhaps it's not necessary to talk about whether the party is moving into a Trump direction policy-wise or just a Trump loyalty direction even. But I do think it's moving into a publicity era, if that makes sense. You're just not sending people to Congress who are interested in legislating, running on their legislative accomplishments, or would-be accomplishments. Instead, we're not sending our best people. We're sending people to Congress who thrive in a sort of cable news, toxic environment. That's undoubtedly true. Nancy Mace, I think, is arguably the greatest example of the turn. I mean, you know, particularly when you look at what people

were saying and doing about Trump in the post-January 6th world, you obviously had a lot of Republicans who criticized him, who held him responsible for this, ranging from, you know, Mitch McConnell who'd been skeptical of Trump publicly, to Lindsey Graham, who was a Trump sycophant for much of the first term and turned on him in the days after January 6th. But very few like Nancy Mace. I got access to some texts that Nancy May sent her, some of her colleagues in the days before the impeachment vote on Trump, as she was trying to figure out whether she was going to vote to impeach Trump or not. One of them, a colleague had asked about Lee Zeldon, who was a Republican congressman who had become very pro-Trump. And you'll excuse the language here, but the question was posed, when did Lee Zeldon become so balls deep on Trump?

And Nancy Mace responded, balls deep on Trump is so indefensible after Wednesday. I really don't get it. And then she sent another note to the group, makes me sick to my stomach. I cried to sleep last night, disgusted by these people leading our party, these un-American nut jobs who put us all in danger. That's the person she's now eagerly and enthusiastically supporting for president who came in and endorsed her and may well have saved her seat. So you see these pretty dramatic contrast, but none so dramatic as Nancy Mace, I think, in this case.

I agree with you entirely. She doesn't, I think half the time she doesn't know what she wants to say. She certainly doesn't give much indication that she knows what she believes, but she definitely knows that she wants to be on TV. And that seems to be the goal. So just because he's a friend, friend of the dispatch, all the rest, you've all of in has this terrific new book out. American Compact about the Constitution. And he sings quite a few bars from the crossover remnant AO universes about this. You know, I mean, I've been arguing for years that Congress has become a parliament of pundits.

One of the reasons for this is that leadership basically writes all the legislation. And there's very little incentive to do committee work because committee work is hard and committees aren't given any power. And one of his proposed reforms is to do what a lot of state legislatures do and have that if a bill is passed by committee with at least one vote from the minority party, it's guaranteed floor time. And that way you can actually have an incentive to get legislation onto the floor. But regardless, my point is that we have set up a Congress with an incentive structure where Nancy Mace, I mean, I have a lot of, I have a lot of problems with Nancy May, so I'll be very delicate about it.

But she is responding rationally in some ways to the incentive structure that has been created in Congress. The way you make money, the way you get reelected, the way the party leader, who is Donald Trump, endorses you, is by being on TV, sucking up to Donald Trump, and saying crazy bombastic things that gets you small donors. There is no other track for success in Congress right now that, I should say it doesn't exist.

It is much harder, and the returns on investment on your time are much smaller to actually be a good legislator. And so that's why you get Matt Gates's. That's why you get Marjor Taylor Greens. We have a Congress that doesn't actually want to have the rank and file do their jobs. And so the job gets redefined as hanging out in a green room and going on CNN or five. or MSNBC or whatever. Yeah, I mean, as I like to say, what's the difference to voters

between someone who worked really hard on a piece of legislation that has no hope of making it through Congress because they're not in leadership versus someone who sat on cable news and, you know, said the other side was crazy, had weird conspiracy theories that got them a lot of media attention. Own the libs. That's all you had to, you know.

And the answer is the voters have heard of the second person. The second person has a lot more money to run because of small dollar donations that come in nationally, not from their district. And that first person fades into oblivion and eventually loses their seat or retires

or, you know, just decides that they'd rather have root canals every day for the rest of their lives. And so you're, it's this, you know, in sort of evolutionary biology,

the landscape has changed and you're simply, you know, rewarding one type of creature over another and we're the ones rewarding them, right? Voters, I mean, they're acting well within their incentives. It's really hard for me to now blame Nancy Mace and Matt Gates and Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boberts because they're right in a sense. That's what voters are rewarding. That's what small dollar

donors are rewarding in our new campaign finance structure. Why would you be doing the things like legislating, like reaching out to, you know, large dollar donor, CEOs, community leaders, why would you do any of that these days? It doesn't make any sense. And so we're what, mad at them for not doing those things that make no sense?

It's a structural problem. It's actually not them. It's a structural problem, but it's also them. I mean, they suck to be very delicate about it. Like, they really suck. They're awful. But if it weren't them, it would be someone else.

Yeah, I mean, maybe. I think that's, you can make the argument that because of the structural problems, we sort of get what we deserve, if that's an accurate paraphrase of the case you're making. And I wouldn't disagree with that. But you still, I think, have to fault the legislators who come and respond to those incentives in a way that is bad for the country, bad for, I would say bad for their constituents, bad for their, I don't souls, if we believe that they have them, they do have to shoulder some of the blame. I mean, the kinds of things that we're seeing from Matt Gates and Lauren Bobert and Nancy

Mace, the Nancy Mace flip in particular, I think, is instructive here because Bobert Gates came in and they sort of were who they were, right? Nancy Mace ran as an entirely different kind of person the first time. I mean, she, in effect, told, I mean, she was in a competitive race. She told voters that she would be responsible. She opposed Trump publicly in some of his craziest things early in her career, which signals that at some level she understands what the right thing is to do. I think these texts that I just read, you know, I believe that when she sent them,

she probably really meant the things she was saying. That's how most Americans were feeling at the time. And when you just set that aside so that you can do your next Fox and Friends hit or you can get a Hannity interview, I mean, for sure, there are structural problems. But that's on you. And she should have to live with that. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change

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I also want to touch upon one of our colleagues. We're going to bring this full circle. So Nick wrote his piece on our last conversation on this podcast. We were talking about the expectations game

for Joe Biden. That as Republicans kept making the case that Joe Biden, you know, was already in a nursing home, eating jello through a straw, et cetera, with this debate coming up, that it was an odd way to set the expectations so low that Joe Biden was going to be able to exceed them. And Nick makes the point that I am just wrong about this, that that's very 2015 political thinking. And then in 2024,

yeah, you say the worst, craziest stuff about your opponent. And it doesn't matter what actually happens because the, I don't know, the well's been poisoned so much that it just doesn't matter anymore. Reality doesn't matter anymore. They will see the debate through the lens of Joe Biden being that senile, or most of them won't see the debate at all, or if Joe Biden has sort of one slip up that makes it through social media, that that will be enough. Jonah, I wanted to give you the opportunity to respond to Nick. Yeah, so I'm actually, I think it's a persuasive point. I'm not sure I go all in on it, but it is actually true. We have seen, particularly Trump's remarkable success at simply willing a new reality into public consciousness.

He refused to bend on January 6th was bad, and all the people who said it was bad, bent to him. people forget that fake news was originally this thing that described like server farm weird things in Slovenia that were pumping out literally made up stories as click farms and you know a lot of them were geared to support Trump and Trump has successfully made fake news simply the term for the mainstream media for most conservatives now um He completely owned the term America First, which was radioactive in American politics for a very long time. You can go out on a long list. He has simply by dint of willpower and repetition the ability to introduce all sorts of crazy lies, distortions, and manipulations into the public consciousness. And I have to think when you start thinking about it, the left has the ability to do this kind of stuff too. They just don't, it's not attached to a personality. I mean, it's like, don't say gay bill.

Well, it actually doesn't say don't say gay in it. And the bill's not called don't say gay, right? I mean, the New York Times, which we're going to talk about in a little bit, you know, has this headline about Samuel Alito's godliness comment. And he never said the word godliness. You know, I mean, you can, there is this tendency to intercept these things into consciousness. And so the debates don't become about debates. They become the debates about the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave.

And so I think there is some truth for sure to that. At the same time, getting back to Steve's earlier point, the people you need to persuade are this, because the people who are, who, who, for whom these Jedi mind trucks work, they've already worked. And to get back to Steve's earlier point about the people are going to decide the election,

you know, the persuadables and all that kind of stuff, they're not paying attention. They're going to turn on the TV. They're going to watch Joe Biden. If Joe Biden has a fairly normal performance of barely adequate competency, then I think the expectations thing is going to hurt. Our point is going to stand. But if, you know, he gets up there and starts saying, you know,

you can take that to the bank because vests have no sleeves, then we're going to be wrong. So I just think there's this nuance involved. right? Like, Nick has a point, but we're right. Okay. So... Yeah, that's how I feel about it. Here's where Nick is 100% right. None of this would have, I think, worked to the extent it has and driven this really, you know, large polling group at least that says they are concerned about Joe Biden's fitness for office, but for Republicans moving to the extreme on that issue and constantly putting out clips of Joe Biden, you know, looking very

stiff or like he doesn't know whether a chair is there or not. Absolutely, that's the kind of stuff you have to do to raise an issue in the public's consciousness. But then if you're, you know, running a campaign and you're heading up to a debate, you then take your foot off the gas pedal right before the debate and start raising expectations again. And then as soon as the debate's over, you're going to hit that gas pedal again. So it's a little bit of, you know, gas and clutch type issue here. And my point is, it's weird right before the debate to hit the gas pedal that you want to sort of lay off a little bit in the run up to it, which they didn't do for State of the Union, and I didn't think worked particularly well for them. Again, you want to set it up so that it's bad

enough so that if anything, if even there's a moment of something weird happening, you can make hay out of it. But also, if he has a good performance, you're like, look, we never said, you know, that he wasn't an excellent debater that he wasn't going to give a strong State of the Union when he's reading off a teleprompter. I mean, for State of the Union in particular, I found it strange that they weren't ahead of time saying he's getting to read a speech, people, off a screen. It's right in front of his face. Yeah, we think he can probably do that to, to again, like, a bit reset those expectations right before these moments as a hedge. So Nick's right that it obviously works to their advantage to make it an issue overall, but that's different than expectations setting right before an event.

Steve? Yeah, I think Nick's right. I think if you look at the argument that you made Sarah, which was none of this would have ever happened if it weren't for the bright-moving noise machine, you know, highlighting Joe Biden's mental lapses, I just don't buy the premise. I think definitely people were paying attention to Joe Biden's mental lapses and would have regardless of whether Republicans made it a big deal or have been making it a big deal. You know, if you go back and look at the early polling on this, some of the people who were

most concerned were Democrats. I don't think that's because they were watching Fox News about Joe Biden's mental acuity. I think it's because of the people have concerns about Joe Biden's mental acuity because there are reasons to be concerned about Joe Biden's mental acuity. No doubt the fact that Republicans have made it a thing has heightened that awareness, shall we say. But I don't think that that's the cause of our understanding of Joe Biden's problems in that regard. I take your point on the tactical question, but I don't think it matters. And I would actually argue that the state of the union is a good example of why it doesn't matter, right? Because Biden didn't have a bad night.

He probably overperformed expectations. you had the people who had been saying, you know, he was likely to drool through the speech saying afterwards, wow, he must have been on drugs. Definitely Joe Biden was on drugs. That's why he could have that kind of a performance and left to sort of make excuses for why what they had predicted didn't come to pass. But has it changed the perceptions of Joe Biden? I don't think it has. And in that sense, sort of the constant both the constancy of the right-wing outrage machine whipping this up and continuing to remind people of these problems has been effective. But Joe Biden has continued to make these mistakes that give them things to talk about. I mean, Joe Biden, you know, we've mentioned this before, but a month ago, he read pause in the middle of a speech when the teleprompter was instructing him to pause.

he read quote-unquote last name when he was supposed to fill in the last name on an extemporaneous basis when he was giving another speech. He keeps having these moments. And as long as he keeps having these moments, I think it'll, I think it'll, that will be one of the defining questions of the election and one of the ways that people see him. And even if he has a good night, it won't matter. All right. Next topic, the Southern Baptist Convention has come out against IVF at the same time that Ted Cruz and Katie Britt have tried to sponsor a bill in the Senate to protect IVF. And you see, for instance, letters to the editor published in the Wall Street Journal from Ryan Anderson, a well-known conservative Christian who has said that sort of both, right?

IVF is morally wrong and should be banned, but also it's incredibly popular nationally and Therefore, we shouldn't have legislation protecting it because it's unnecessary. I find this to be a fascinating political moment for the Southern Baptist Convention to take a position either way. And in some sense, this to me is a huge win for the pro-life community, win with sort of a lowercase W, if you will. Because after that Alabama ruling that found, IVF to be unlawful in the state

of Alabama. Everyone thought that was an insane thing and yet it's actually moved it to the forefront of this conversation on the right that has allowed pro-life people who have been against IVF for a long time to sort of have their moment to make their case while at the

same time politically IVF has never been more known more popular, etc. And again, full disclosure, both of my babies are IVF babies. Yeah, I am also we should point out, I mean I just saw it this morning 49, as in all of the Republican senators, signed a letter coming out in support of IVF. So there is clearly a flop-swit panic among the political people about this issue.

I get your point about a lowercase W for the pro-life crowd, for the people who have long had problems with IVF. I think this is probably more of a problem for the pro-life crowd in the long term. Well, it's sort of fascinating. It's like Dobbs, right? Like they reversed Roe v. Wade. That was a huge win, in some sense, for the pro-life community. I mean, it's what they've always wanted.

And yet politically, of course, abortion, they have lost more ground on abortion than they have gained since reversing Roe v. Wade. Right. My point is just simply that this is wildly politically unpopular. And for, I think, correct reasons for the most part. And if the long-term goal, which is my understanding from virtually every thoughtful pro-lifer I know, and I've spent my entire career around a lot of very thoughtful pro-lifers,

is the goal is ultimately to create a culture of life where you convince people of things and convince them to be pro-life. Now, whether or not, and personally, as you just say, I don't think IVF is not is inherently in opposition to the pro-life position. What you do about not used embryos and all of these kinds of, there are legitimate questions that pro-lifers raise that I think have a lot of merit to them, but I know a lot of pro-lifers who've used IVF and just this idea that like IVF is incompatible with the pro-life position, I think is wrong.

But the point is that you get rid of Dobbs and in a half minute later, telling people, oh, we're going to get rid, you're signaling that the next goal is to get rid of IVF, that's going to cause more people to harden and turn away from this long-term goal of changing hearts and minds about a culture of life. And it is going to get Republicans to panic and become more nuanced, to be more Nancy Maceish on these issues, precisely because they're running scared. And so you kind of have to like, sometimes in fishing, you know, you got to give a little line before you reel it in. This is one of these moments. We're figuring out where to give some line before you start pulling the issue back towards you would be well

advised. And I just, I think this is really bad politically PR-wise for the pro-life movement in the near term. And because it's in bad form in the near term, it's probably bad for them in the long term. See, I don't think they see it that way. I think that you and I think, and some people in the pro-life community, absolutely, see it what I think is the correct way, which is the goal of the pro-life community should be to reduce the number of abortions or, you know, the number of lives lost, et cetera. Like, it should be, as you say, Jonah, promoting the culture of life. But I think that for a lot of the pro-life activist group, they've mistaken the tactics for the goals. And so the tactics are to ban abortion. Well, that's not quite the same thing as lowering

the number of abortions in the country. And in fact, we've seen the opposite that abortion bans don't necessarily lead to fewer abortions. And so the same thing, right? I think they see it as enough as like the tactic of getting people to come out against IVF, maybe even potentially banning IVF, and they're not looking at the goal as winning hearts and minds over in the culture of life, which, as you say, like banning IVF will be incredibly unpopular, but coming out against IVF is going to scare so many people. It's not like you're ever going to get there, and that's the weird thing of what I thought about Ryan Anderson's letter to the editor. He's saying on the one hand that he would like to ban IVF if it were up to him, but that also

we don't need any legislation protecting IVF from people. like him who want to ban IVF because his position's so unpopular, so we definitely, definitely shouldn't protect IVF. Wait a second, Ryan. I don't understand. Why do you care? If it's so impossible for you to ever ban IVF, then what's the problem about protecting IVF in the law?

And of course, we know the answer to that, right? He'd like to leave this door just a little bit of jar. Steve? I haven't read Ryan's answer, but I agree with your... description earlier that he's a very thoughtful person on these issues. If he's arguing what you're saying he's arguing, I guess I don't understand the case. I agree with Jonah that this is politically problematic for Republicans. Democrats right now are devoting huge time and resources and will certainly between now and November to portraying Republicans as extremists

on abortion. And among the arguments they're making beyond this IVF argument, is, you know, Republicans want to ban all contraception, Republicans, you know, sort of on and on and on. And some of the claims are not true and sort of wildly untrue. I don't think it's the case that all Republicans want to ban a contraception. I don't think it's the case that most Republicans want to ban contraception. A lot of Republicans don't want contraception paid for by the government, distributed to minors, what have you. But there's not a coming way in America of contraception bans,

which is, if you listen to some Democrats, what you would think. This, I think this helps Democrats make that case

that Republicans are the ones who are on the extremes of these issues generally. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

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integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. All right, let's move on, as you mentioned, Justice Alito, at an event for the Supreme Court Historical Society, which is open to anyone. You do have to buy a ticket. And it has many, sort of it has a lecture part. And then there's a reception where at least one or two Supreme Court justices are usually present. In this case, it was the Chief Justice, Justice Alito, and Justice Jackson, who were at the reception. A, woman who posed as a Christian conservative secretly recorded conversations with the chief justice and Alito for the purpose of trying to get them to say on a crazy Christian right-wing things. In her conversation with the chief justice, he sort of didn't do the polite conversational thing and pushed back. She said, you know, well, this is a Christian nation. He said, I don't think that at all. I have plenty of Jewish and Muslim friends who I think would disagree with you. And regardless, it's not the court's job. Whether it's a Christian nation or not, our job is to simply apply the law to the facts. When she talked to Justice Alito in sort of a similar fashion with these sort of long, rambling, sort of awkward conversation questions, she says at one point when saying, I know you're a Catholic and I'm a Catholic and I just,

just think this country, you know, needs to return to godliness. He says, I agree, I agree. At other points, she says, I don't think there's any compromising on some of these, you know, moral issues in the country, not really referring to the law at any point or the court's work or anything about his job as a justice. And he says something to the fact of one side's going to win or the other. She also has conversations. with Martha Ann Alito, his wife, in which here she's clearly trying to get Martha Anolito to curse,

because the neighbor in the Martha Anolito flag episode has gone on TV to claim that Martha Anolito used the F word toward her before she used the C word toward Martha Ann Alito. So this secret recording has the person asking the question, just using the F word over and over and over again, to try to see if she can get Mrs. Alito to use it in return. She doesn't. Instead, she just keeps talking about flags and how much, you know, she wants to fly a flag about

Jesus because she has to look at a pride flag during the month of June and that whenever he leaves this job, she dreams of all the different flags. She's going to fly, maybe a different one each day, she says. Okay. We're going to talk about this. lot more on advisory opinions, but here's my just top-level take on this. One, the chief justice gives the answer that politicians give, right? Because they always think they might be being secretly recorded, and it makes them not really human. It's very robotic. It's, it will feel weird if you're having a conversation with someone and they don't do the general thing where you sort of try to find common ground in your conversational moment, because he's going to at all times be the chief

justice. Justice Alito, to me, saying, I agree, I agree, when not being asked about his job and being asked about his Catholicism and whether the country should be more godly, there is nothing that Alito said during any of this, you know, secret recording that he hasn't said publicly a lot. He's a conservative Catholic, y'all. News flash. And I think the reason that it made so much news was that people wanted it to confirm their prior so badly. And the fact that it was a secret recording made them believe that they were hearing something new and something salacious, whereas if he had just said that exact same thing in a speech at Notre Dame, I don't think it would have made headlines at all. And then as far as Martha Anilito, what I think is amazing is this actually confirms everything they have said. Right?

There's all these people that are like, he obviously, you know, is throwing his wife under the bus. He knows what's going on with the flags. No, she's super into flags. That's what this secret recording shows. So for me, I think it sort of did the opposite of what the goal was, which was, again, to undermine the institution of the court, to show that this is some sort of right-wing conspiracy Supreme Court. But I also think it will have this very negative effect of every justice being more like the chief justice in this regard. They'll go to fewer public events where they're not going to know the people there. And when they do go to those events, they're going to be very politiciany and sort of stick to these lines

where they don't really engage with people in normal human conversation. And so I don't know what's been accomplished here except to make the institution of the Supreme Court less accessible and sort of more cloistered in a way that will only hurt our understanding of the court and frankly the justice's ability to communicate themselves as real people.

And Steve, I'll turn to you on this because the New York Times then wrote a piece called Alito's, quote, godliness comment echoes a broader Christian movement. Just as Samuel Alito's secretly recorded remarks come as many conservatives have openly embraced the view that American democracy must be grounded in a Christian worldview. And you and I had a bit of a chuckle about this, since that clearly is supposed to sound deeply sinister, and yet please look at anything any of the founders of the country wrote. First on, just as a sort of stage setter, since I don't think I've talked about this here before, I still think going back to the original story about the Alito House and the upside

down flag, I'm not, I don't like the explanation from the Alito's on that. I think it's weird that it flew in the first place. I think it's weird that it stayed up. So I'm pretty skeptical of the arguments that we've heard. Not necessarily something super, super sinister, but it was inappropriate, I think, to fly the flag of distress, fly the American flag upside down that way. Having said that, clearly what we're seeing, Sarah, to your point, is an effort to frame Alito in particular, but the court generally as a bunch of crazy right-wingers. And this latest attempt, I think, misses for all the reasons you suggested that it misses now you know mrs alito said some things she had something about her german heritage you know the people who are coming after them will

get retribution because she's a german and she knows how to do payback and she had the comment about flying an anti-pride flag or a christian flag that i think certainly not something i would have said but in terms of justice alito and this new york times piece as jose Jonah pointed out, Alito didn't in fact make the godliness comment. He was hast about returning the country to a place of godliness, and he agreed. So the headline, I think, is tremendously misleading. It's not Alito's comment. The tone of the piece is unbelievable to me. What the Times writers apparently were trying to do is frame this as sort of out of step with American history, current American thinking, how voters think about Christianity. And they're just wrong about that.

My friend Alberto Martinez, who was Marco Rubio's old chief of staff, I sent some tweets out about this. And Alberto responded, recent peer research found that just 11% of Americans ascribe negative attitudes to the phrase Christian nation. And the way that this sort breathless way that this Times piece is written, you would think that it was crazy for Justice Alito to agree with someone who had said, I would like the country to return to a place of godliness. In fact, of course, anybody who studied the founding and studied our history knows that the founders, most of them, were tremendously faith-filled people and explicit Christians. And even in the arguments that they made about religious freedom,

there was an assumption, a presumption of Christian virtues in the cases that they made. So the piece suggests that they're unfamiliar with this history and unfamiliar with the way that most Americans think about religion. You know, back in 2016, Dean Beckay, who was the executive editor of the New York Times at the time, made some comments that got him in trouble with people in his newsroom. He was addressing, this was in December of 2016 and addressing sort of the Times failures, why they failed to see Donald Trump coming, why they were sort of out of step with much of the rest of the country.

And he said back at the time, we don't get religion. We don't get the role of religion in people's lives. And I think we can do much, much better. I think if you look at this piece and judge the times by this piece alone, the fact that it was even published, suggests that they're, they still don't. get religion, and they're not doing much, much better. I'm more on Sarah's side of this debate than, than Steve's, and I still think that both of you have low-balled this. It is, I mean, I agree with you, Steve, about the New York Times

doesn't get religion and all that kind of stuff. I think that is true. I mean, the New York Times got itself into hot water in, what, 1994 with its whole evangelical Christians are uneducated, easily led, you know, kind of crap. But the amazing, So I coin, I'm pretty sure I'm the one who coined it, this phrase about 20 years ago, 15 years ago, called conservatives in the mist. And it was an extended comparison about how particularly places like the New York Times, they would send reporters to college campuses, to church groups, whatever, to interview and look at conservatives. And they would talk about them when they were trying to be complimentary. I'm not talking about when they were trying to be hostile. When they were trying to like show that they understand people outside of, their universe, they would describe conservatives in sort of the same language that Diane Fossey would use to describe silverback gorillas. And it would be, oh, look at them. They're so like us. They use tools to eat. And they date. You know, they're like, oh, just describe it as if, like, there were visitors from Mars and they'd never seen a conservative before. And they don't

know how to speak it, right? And this woman, the activist, who at least to her, to, you know, admit she's just an activist. It feels like someone said, okay, we need someone to go undercover, you know, Hamas or MS-13. And they need to like, they need to blend in perfectly. And the spy we send in speaks Spanish just slightly better than Donde estesda es Dibliteca, right? She doesn't know how to talk to a conservative. And she's clearly nervous about talking to a conservative and talking to a Christian conservative. So she fills all the air and then just says, do you agree? Because she doesn't, like, she doesn't know how to get him to answer a question that might be damning. And then when she, so she says the damning stuff. And when he says,

I agree, for whatever reason, I mean, like, all three of us have been to many, many events in places where people who seem to be very nice say things that we don't entirely agree. with or don't agree with at all, but we also really don't want to use up our entire evening arguing with them. So we just... Right, and this, to be clear, her question goes on for six minutes. Can you imagine getting six minutes with a Supreme Court justice who you want to take down and this is all you get because you fill the time yourself with talking instead of using

that six minutes to like actually ask questions? And she sounds so, as you said, uncomfortable and I think it's very easy. both to feel, if you were in a conversation with this person, to feel sorry for her and to want to get out of this conversation. Yeah. I mean, that's the vibe I get from it. And so the whole thing, I mean, what I agree with Sarah the most on this is that if this woman knew what she was doing as a journalist, and put aside the fact, all of the people who crapped from a great height on James O'Kee for the last 10 years now celebrating what this woman is doing, you know, they need to check themselves a little bit. But like, where I agree with Sarah the most is if this woman actually understood

the lay of the land of this debate and this argument, and she was just interested in making the biggest real news, not fake news, not bogus news, not confirmed Pryor's news, what she would do is she would have brought this to National Review. And she was, says, look what I got. I got Mrs. Alito to confirm Justice Alito's story in all of this. Because that's the only news in this thing. It's not, oh, this just in, Catholic guy nods politely to Catholic things, right?

It is the fact that this woman actually, look, I want to tell, Sarah gives a lot of dating advice on advisory opinions. I want to tell everybody out there, find someone who loves you half as much as Mrs. Alito loves flags. she loves flags as much as the the assassin in the jerk hated cans and she basically speaks vexologically in flag talk right and so like and and you can almost hear alito sighing and being like ah flags I have to deal with this flag stuff and so I just think the whole I agree with Steve entirely and I know Sarah agrees with this too hanging the flag upside down was inappropriate and shouldn't

have been done. I don't now believe that this had much, if anything, to do with January 6th. The extent it did was probably inadvertent or in a fit of peak. I don't think anyone can have laid a glove on Alito that he had anything to do with this. In fact, his wife affirms that his story is the most plausible and accurate one that we have. And she even says he told me not to do it. In the secret recording, she says, he told me not to. And now I'm deferring to him on this for now. For now.

Right. I mean, the galaxy brain left wing reaction to this should have been, logically, my God, the Federalist Society got this woman to do, to go, to pretend to be a left winger, to get this. And it was all, I bet you Mrs. Alito was reading from a script written, written, by John Eastman to, like, get her off the hook. I mean, that's, on the substance, this is a huge right-wing scoop. But the left just sees a Rorschach test and says,

oh, see, this proves that, you know, Alito is a Christian and aren't they strange? All right. With that, we'll talk to you next week. God knows there's going to be plenty of news to do this again. Bye. You know,