The Dispatch Podcast - Ironic Crayons

Episode Date: November 18, 2020

Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg were in the hot seat again on Tuesday, answering questions from Senate Judiciary Committee members about the policing of misinformation and controversial speech on their platforms. The biggest takeaway from the hearing? Both political parties want to regulate Big Tech, but for very different reasons. As David argues, it’s not just that liberals want more censorship and conservatives want less of it. “It’s that liberals want Big Tech censorship in exactly the areas where conservatives want less censorship,” especially as it pertains to hate speech and disinformation. Is there any room for compromise in the war against big tech? Our podcast hosts break it down in layman’s terms. Also on today’s episode: an update on COVID-19’s third wave, Biden’s Cabinet picks, and Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the election. Show Notes: -Reuters poll on Republicans’ perception of election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to a very pre- Thanksgiving episode of the Dispatch podcast. We will be off next week, so you better get your fill today. Plenty to be thankful for, but also plenty to talk about. I've got Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French here, and we will be walking through the tech hearings from yesterday with Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. COVID, it is coming back with a vengeance. We're in the third wave right now. what that means for our politics, what it means for our day-to-day lives, what's going on with

Biden's cabinet picks, what that means. And, of course, the Trump election, lawsuits, shenanigans, rhetoric, et cetera, will end on that less fun topic. Plus, a little national bird conversation at the end, because you guys know I love my birds. This podcast is brought to you by the dispatch.com. Please come check out our newsletters and podcasts. We think if you're listening to this podcast, you might just like them. Let's dive right in. First up, we had a big hearing on the Hill yesterday. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey were in the hot seat.

And perhaps the biggest takeaway was that We'll be doing this again shortly. In fact, several of the senators mentioned that they would like to do this again in the spring with Google and Amazon CEOs. We shall see, David, I want to start with you. What has always struck me as odd about this conversation is that both sides

desperately want to regulate big tech. It's just that what they want is exactly opposite of the other. Conservatives want to regulate big tech. to censor less, and liberals seem to want to regulate big tech to censor more. Is there a world in which there's a piece of legislation that both sides get what they want, or is this a zero-sum game? I think this is zero-sum precisely because it's not just that conservatives want big tech

to censor less and liberals want it to censor more. It's that the liberals want big tech to censor more in exactly. the areas where conservatives want less censorship. So conservatives do not want to see posts labeled as misinformation. Conservatives do not want to see the warnings attached to allegations about vote fraud. Conservatives do not want to see these political posts taken down. And that's exactly what the left wants. They want Facebook to be more responsible for policing misinformation. They want Facebook to be more aggressive in policing, which you might call hate speech. The possible area of overlap and compromise isn't really on the content of speech at all,

but perhaps on the extent, the amount of information that big media collects from people and sort of the privacy concerns that aren't specifically rated to the related to the content that comes out. But this is something that those of us who've been warning against government interference in big tech. This is something that those of us who've been warning have been beating the drum about all along to conservatives who are wanting to revoke Section 230 and increase the number of the amount of government interference, is that once you open that door, you're one Democratic government away from regulation that will double, triple, quadruple the level of interference in conservative political speech or what passes for

for conservative political speech now, which often is a whole avalanche of misinformation, to be honest. But that's the conundrum. It's not just they want more or less censorship. It's in specifically the same area. So, Jonah, who has the better argument at this point? On the one hand, as far as I see it, Twitter is a private company.

They can make their platform, whatever they want it to be. On the other hand, I found it somewhat persuasive when Senator Mike Lee was asking the Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, about an account that they suspended. It happened to be the Customs and Border Patrol Commissioner Mark Morgan's account. So it was a blue checkmark government account because he tweeted Wall's work. And they said that violated their policies. Now, Dorsey at the hearing apologized and said, quote, that was a mistake. we reverted it, but the fact that it got taken down in the first place, to me, is pretty good evidence that, you know, this is pretty one-sided. Like one side does get taken down more than the

other. But isn't that just sort of Twitter can say they, yeah, that's our policy. We take down conservative stuff and we don't take down liberal stuff. Yeah, I mean, the essence of conservative philosophy when applied to nuts and bolts policymaking is to always ask the question compared to what, right? To govern is to choose. If we choose to spend X amount of money on this thing, that means we can't spend X amount of money on that thing. And it seems to me that as problematic as the liberal bias in social media companies, which is obvious, right? I mean, O'Sullivan's law says that any institution that is not expressly conservative will become liberal over time, and I think that's true. I do think we need a corollary that says that any conservative institution that is not expressly anti-Trump or Trump skeptical will become Trumpy over time, but that's another conversation.

I think that the problem is, what is the alternative? If the alternative is to say that in effect, bureaucrats with the power to find people, put people in jail, use state power are somehow better than a bunch of dudes in bike pants in Silicon Valley. I just don't get it. And I thought the whole Republican argument on the eve of what at the time looked like it could be a blowout election, and it's still Trump lost, the idea of like, let's as quickly as possible, hand all this power to the FCC right before Joe Biden gets to appoint the FCC commissioner seemed like a really dumb kind of play to me, and I've never had it explained to me

in other than performative reasons. The one thing I'd add, though, is you left out in this framing of what Democrats want this, Republicans want that. We left out that Zuckerberg wants regulation. And he's been saying this for a very long time, and he's basically, he might as well be wearing a sandwich board, reading a bell, saying, regulate me, regulate me. And this, I mean, I rarely get the opportunity on this podcast to invoke Marxist historians, but I think Gabriel Coco was exactly right about this kind of thing. Big business tends to love inviting regulation because it creates, it makes them essentially clients of the state. They have barriers to entry for smaller competitors. It protects monopolies rather than ends monopolies. And what

Facebook is basically saying is, as he said yes, regulation is inevitable. And what he wants, is, and he's been very clear about this for a very long time, he doesn't want to make a lot of these decisions. That's right. He's just like, take this off my plate government. You do this for me and we'll just make the money, right? You took the risk for the social cost of my product and I will collect the rents. And I say to hell with all of them as far as I'm concerned.

I think that Facebook point's really interesting because my impression is that Zuckerberg is sick of getting blamed. He's sick of getting dragged to Congress to answer for, you know, on two, Tuesday at 4.30, I saw this thing that I didn't like. What did you think about it? And he's like, I'm the CEO of Facebook. I have no clue what you're talking about. I've had seven people murdered in Taiwan while you were looking at Twitter. I have bigger things to do. I'm a James Bond villain. Don't you understand? But yeah, of course, he'd love regulation for all the reasons that you said on the one hand, it's good for business. It's a great barrier to. to entry. And on the other hand, then there's no more blaming Facebook. You just have to go blame Congress, which also would be great for Facebook. Steve, where does this end? What's your, the Republicans have kept the Senate. The Democrats will have the White House and the House.

Does anything happen or do we just keep having these hearings every so many months where we can all vent our frustrations at these tech CEOs who like are somewhat. it bewildered that they keep having to do this. Yeah, I mean, I would say in the short term, that that is probably what we do. I mean, if you believe that Congress is much more a performative body than the legislative one at this point, everybody gets, everybody gets what they want in some ways. You know, I mean, you know, you continue to have these hearings where Ted Cruz can fulminate about tech censor or tech bias.

Democrats can please their various constituencies by grandstanding about the things that are bothering them. And sort of everybody wins, I guess unless you're Mark Zuckerberg and you really do want to be regulated, you know, you leave these things and you're frustrated that there haven't been any steps taken toward big regulation. I mean, I think that's the sort of short and medium term outcome. In the long run, it's hard for me to see a place where you don't. have government more involved in speech on these issues and you know it's so ironic that that

republicans argued for years against the fairness doctrine in the context of uh talk radio and um you know rejected wholesale the idea that you'd have a government bureaucrat making determinations about what was and was not fair and you know you don't have anybody necessarily making a direct call for bringing back the fairness doctrine. But it's not hard to read that into some of the complaints that you get from some of these conservatives going the other way, of course, which I think is, I think you're getting into sort of dangerous territory there. That's interesting because obviously Twitter, if you look at the demographics, does lean left in terms of its user base, as well as the folks back in HQ, presumably marking and monitoring posts. But that's not

true for Facebook. Facebook at this point, as we all know, the user base leans conservative and the shared posts and all of that don't lean conservative. It's like fallen over conservative, but you still have the folks back at HQ who lean liberal. So Facebook has always been a more interesting question to me because business-wise, they actually are in a better spot if conservatives feel welcome on their site. Twitter, has less to lose, and we've seen that already, like, so conservatives move to parlor and, like, shrug. That would be a big problem for Facebook if conservatives start leaving Facebook, and that's why I think you see Mark Zuckerberg with a very different posture than Jack Dorsey at these hearings.

It'll be interesting to see whether Zuckerberg's able to make any headway on either side of the aisle on that front. But, David, last question on this to you, legally, it's one thing to stand up there and say, like, we're going to regulate Facebook's ability to regulate speech, and they're going to be mandated in the First Amendment or whatever. Like, obviously, the First Amendment doesn't apply. What are the legal boundaries of what conservative senators could actually propose? Well, yeah, I mean, conservative senators are acting as if the First Amendment doesn't exist here, as if they have some kind of carte blanche to tell a private company how they can use the algorithms

and the platforms that they have created to shape and mold private citizens' political speech. There are dramatic First Amendment limits on the power of the government here. And, you know, this is something that Section 230, they look at Section 230 and the fact that a statute exists protecting the autonomy of the moderation decisions

of these companies, as if that means that it's all, because the statute exists, that means that they have all the power here. But the statute essentially within some, you know, within a margin of error, codifies, in my view, and the view of an awful lot of scholars who looked at this essentially codifies the kind of First Amendment protection that the companies would have anyway. And so what you have is a senator's acting as if they have power that under most basic doctrine, most basic First Amendment doctrines, they don't have.

And there's another aspect of this here that I keep sort of having a, a deja vu feeling about. And that is the argument over speech online is very much like the arguments over speech codes on campuses in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When campus was really explicitly

trying to regulate the kind of speech that students and faculty engaged in on campus and you're seeing all the same difficulties that people have in crafting rules that leave up the speech that they like and take down the speech that they don't like without also taking down speech that they like or giving power to people that they don't like.

This is always the problem when you get into real efforts at censorship. Always, it's a complete rerun. And I've told people involved in the tech industry this, I said, you know, look, some of the smartest people in the United States have already tried to create a free speech utopia. They tried.

They tried for years, and it can't happen because you're dealing with human beings on both ends of this. Both the censors are human beings and the people who are trying to censor your users are human beings. And there's always going to be bad speech, always. And then when you try to censor the bad speech, you're always going to have bad censorship. This is just the way it works when you're dealing with human beings. And in the United States of America, we have said, the cure to bad speech isn't going to be censorship. They procured a bad speech is going to be more speech. And, you know, this is the, you know, this is the starting a parlay or any other kinds of competing social media companies.

These things happen. The marketplace will work its magic, hopefully. And the, but the reality is that the idea that these senators can become the speech code, can create the new speech code, then get it right this time. this time the government will get it right I think it's just pure fiction a quick total digression in the late 90s Michael Kinsley wrote this calling it famous is a bit of an exaggeration but much discussed for about 20 minutes column where he said you know in like 19 with technology it was like in 1990 people were like are at 1995 people were like what's you know do you have a fax machine and by 1990

they were like, what's your fax number? Because it was just assumed people would have a fax machine. And then a little later, it was like, what's your, you know, do you have email? And then it's what's your email? Just out of curiosity, have any of you heard anybody say, did you see so-and-so's post on parlay? Have you heard anybody say anything like that? Or do you ever heard anything say, what's your parlay account? I mean, to me, it is, it's a tree falling in the woods.

but all these Republican politicians keep talking about moving to Parley as if it's like this major blow for the culture war and it seems like a perfect example with the self-gettoization of conservatism. I'm just wondering if you guys, have you guys seen any impact of it?

No, I mean, Parlay won't do anything much because there's no libs to own on Parlay. So half the appeal of Twitter is you get to own the libs in real time, the real libs, and there's no libs to own in Parlay. So what's the fun in that? I think what you described, Jonah, happened to me for the first time this week in reference to a post that Maria Bardo put up at Parlay, sort of giving life to one of the crazier conspiracy theories on the voting systems.

This was her lizard people stole the election post? Yeah, more or less. Yeah. And that, I think that is, it's interesting. I hadn't thought about it as the first time somebody had said, have you seen? seen this on Parley. But that happened this week for the first time. Well, we will keep an eye on the Tech Wars as they continue, which they will for as long and as far as the eye can see. Let's take a quick break and hear from our sponsor today, Acton Line podcast. Acton Line is the flagship podcast of the Acton Institute for the study of religion and liberty, dedicated to the promotion of a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty. and sustained by religious principles.

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All right, Jonah. We're up to you. We have 11 million plus in. Infections in the United States, closing in on 250,000 deaths today or tomorrow, we have new lockdowns. The American Association of Pediatrics has said that one million children in the U.S. have been diagnosed with COVID-19 as well. What's happening? Well, I mean, going back to the old idea of me putting the question to you people. No, I've just been thinking about this because we haven't talked about it for a while.

And it seems to me the politics have gotten in some ways better, but also just weir on the pandemic because we have these vaccines coming down the pipe. So people see a glimmer of hope at the end. But also, I think lockdown fatigue is very, very, very real. I also, no offense to our friends at Zoom, I think Zoom fatigue is palpable out there. But I'm just kind of curious where you guys think the politics of this going forward are if Trump continues to refuse to cooperate with the transition.

And so therefore, Biden can't get up and running with his plan to tackle the pandemic and all of that. Does that mean that he basically, in political terms, has a free pass? Is he inoculated from any screw-ups for the next year on pandemic response? Because he can just say, hey, look, we had a plan. We had this operation, but we got no help from the government. And this was a crucial moment when we were seeing these truly scary explosions in cases and hospitalizations and deaths, which are happening right now

and are going to continue presumably through like Christmas. does that let Biden off the hook in terms of political accountability, since this was like one of the only things he actually campaigned on? I'll throw it to you, Sarah. What do you think? I think Biden's messaging on this has been really interesting because he has not done what I think anyone would have expected someone to do in this case, which is to sort of, you know, throw a daily temper tantrum listing the things that they have asked for that they're not getting. And instead, what they have said, which I actually think is pretty smart, is, you know, Would we like their help? Sure. But we don't need their help. We're going to be able to do this. And on January 20th, we'll be in office. We'll be fully prepared. We're the adults. Don't worry. We've got this. And they let the media do the sort of hyperventilating. They're not helping with the transition work for them. I think it's a perfect place to be. Now you need the media to participate because you don't want folks to not realize that the Trump team isn't helping you. You very much want them to know that.

But for them to say, you know, they'll do what they do. It's fine. We've got this. I think is smart on them. I don't think that Biden will get a free pass because I think that's like pretty inside baseball politics. And most people are just going to ask at the end of the day on, you know, March 15th, are the vaccines out there? Are the infections going down? Yes or no.

And whose fault it is will be a less interesting sixth question on that list. I was just going to say, Steve, I mean, by January 20, we were going to be through the worst part of the, of this third wave. And so Biden can't get blamed if he's not president yet, right? So January 20, Trump is watching the inauguration from Mar-a-Lago. Biden inherits a mixed bag of excellent vaccine on the way, but also a lot of deaths and a lot of cases. I mean, how does it all play out? Yeah, I mean, I guess I have a different view than Sarah. I think this, just speaking to the politics of this, which feels a little crass in the middle of this new explosion, but it's a reality.

I think this is almost all to the benefit of Joe Biden for the reasons that Sarah says, I think it's fair to assume that the media will willingly play the role that you've assigned it. The media will happily point out that Donald Trump is not cooperating, that he's not making his, uh, his, his, coronavirus task force studies and people available. And I think it's good for Biden not to whine about it. Honestly, I think it's smart. But if you just look at the calendar and how it's likely to play out for the next six months, you know, you have these emergency youth authorizations, I think likely happening or likely being approved in the beginning of December, beginning middle of December.

So you're going to start to have the first 10 to 20 million people. getting the vaccines. There's been great news of both the Moderna and the Pfizer vaccines, more good news about the Pfizer vaccine this morning. They seem to be effective. And as, Jonah, as you suggest, you know, I don't know if it'll be January 20th,

but, you know, these things have come in waves. The more precautions people have taken, the more they've worked, the more isolated people have become, the less the virus has spread. So I think it's fair to reason that in January, this will dissipate to a certain extent anyway. And then you layer the vaccine on top of all that.

And people start getting it. I don't think people will take, I think Sarah's right. You know, it's a sixth, the sixth order of question about whether they stop and say, Joe Biden deserves credit for these five things. But I think they'll just give Biden credit. Biden's credit will be assumed, honestly. And that's not entirely fair to President Trump, who I think does deserve some credit for Operation Warp speed and for pushing that. I think Biden will just be the beneficiary of a virus that even, you know, the most skeptical or some of the most skeptical or, you know, the people who warned most about the long-term consequences of the virus are now celebrating what's likely to.

to come. I think Biden just benefits from that because he's in office. If he's in office when the thing goes away or when the problem starts to be solved, he's going to get a lot of the credit. David, when does, with Trump out of the picture, do we see mask culture increasing or decreasing, particularly since the outbreak is toughest and it looks like it's really blowing up in red states to be crass about it? Oh, I think it would increase. You know, a lot depends on where we're going to be, say, two, three weeks after Thanksgiving. I mean, you know, what we have right now is basically to the extent that the right-wing

world is talking about coronavirus, they're saying celebrate Operation Warp Speed, which is entirely fair, as Steve said, Operation Warp Speed has been a great success. And also, stop worrying about coronavirus and do your Thanksgiving thing because of, you know, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter protests or, you know, whatever, as if, you know, the Lib's inconsistency on coronavirus somehow is going to own the coronavirus. And, you know, I really worry that you're going to see, and we've got, we're not cresting on this third wave, that we're actually going to see it magnify and get worse following Thanksgiving and following the holidays, and if one of Biden's signature, and so that would cut against sort of the

argument that the mask culture war is going to exacerbate if, in fact, we're going back to April, May levels of death, but this time concentrated in different places in the country, but I'll tell you, I mean, excuse me, it's everywhere. Coronavirus is out in Tennessee. It is everywhere. And I was driving through McMinville, a small town in Tennessee over the weekend. And I had a mask when I went into this small general store. And you're glared at. It's weird, glared at in some places by some people if you're wearing a mask. It's just bizarre. And so I think if one of Biden's signature issues is there needs to be a mask mandate, this is going to be your sort of first big response to the new administration will be this sort of, you know,

I can't remember, was it Ross Dotha who coined the term folk libertarianism, sort of this folk libertarian, a media-fueled anti-mask response because if this is Biden's first big initiative. However, the wildcard is if we're dealing with what we could be dealing with over the winter, which is a current coronavirus Chernobyl, then, maybe that will be tempered a bit. I was just talking to a doctor friend of mine, a ICU doctor friend of mine, and he was talking about how in their rural hospital, the overwhelmingly high percentage of the beds were taken over by coronavirus patients. They're having to expand the ICU because of the expected additional influx. And they didn't know where the staffing was going to

come from to fill out the ranks of health care providers to meet the needs of the expanded ICU. And remember, the hospitalizations are a trailing edge indicator of this explosive growth and positive diagnoses that we've already had. So we could be in a situation in December and January where big chunks of the nation are where New York was in the end of March, beginning of April. And that could scramble the politics in unpredictable ways, but to the extent is predictable and Biden wants a mask mandate, we can predict that the mask war will inflame. One last point on the scrambled politics thing. I just thought it was really funny to watch Republicans and all sorts of true cons insisting vis-a-vis warp speed that this is totally a government-led public-private

partnership and that is the real model that we should praise and all the liberals saying no no no this was purely the beauty and genius of the private sector working under the profit motives and it's like wait what you know like why did when did everyone switch jerseys it's a very weird thing you know one final point on this it is the case and it's worth remarking upon that the hypocrisy from many elected officials on the left continues apace and maybe even growing. Gavin Newsom, governor of California, got in trouble because he went to a dinner at the very fancy restaurant in Napa Valley French laundry where I think that, you know, the starting tasting menu is like $400 or something. Yeah. I think the paper napkins are 50 bucks. Yeah. And then and then came out

and apologized, sort of apologized about it, said, I made a mistake. But this was mostly an outdoor event. A local news station there uncovered some pictures of the table, which was most definitely not outdoors. And it turns out he was dining with a lobbyist, so he didn't really fully disclose the nature of the dinner and getting in trouble. But I would just say, we've seen this now pretty consistently from politicians, particularly on the left, saying, here's what you have to do. this is really serious. Everybody take this serious. The president and his supporters are awful people because they're not taking this seriously. Now leave me alone while I go dine at this awesome restaurant with my friends and break all the rules that I've set out for

everybody else. And, you know, while it's true that you've had hypocrisy from public health folks and you've, you know, saying don't, don't gather in groups, but if you go to these protests, that's okay. You've had, I think, bad behavior from, you know, the people that David has rightly criticized the sort of tough guy anti-mask culture. To the extent that our elected officials are just blatantly violating their own rules and continue to get caught, that has a long-term effect of eroding trust in these folks. I mean, not that there's probably a ton of trust. there, but when you're making big asks of people, when you're saying to people, you know, in effect, we need you to hold up in your house now for another month, you best not be out

doing the opposite. And especially if you're, if your requests or demands or rules involve getting people not to do the very things that you're doing. And it's, I think that is almost under attributed for why Democrats did not do as well in this election as they, you know, looked like they were going to, should have given all of, you know, the indicators that we had. I think that it's not talked about a lot because people just know it and hate it. This idea that these nags are so willing to wag their finger on television and then privately don't follow it. It is part of now the narrative of the left that they're going to have a hard time shaking and it is a big, big problem. Now, the narrative on the right is that they keep

saying coronavirus is no big deal and then getting coronavirus, which is a different problem. Right. But there's not the hypocrisy element to it. And I think on the left, it, it's a little hard to explain maybe, but it feeds into the canceled culture thing. It's all of it. It's that it's performative. They don't really mean it. They're doing it to score points with each other on the other side, but that they're not really outraged about whatever they say they're outraged about. They're picking things to be outraged about because they like the feeling of being outraged. And they're going to the French laundry because, of course, they are. And they're going with lobbyists. Oh, color be shocked. And I think that there's that sense among just normal people throughout the

country, right, left, center, and everything else. That doesn't mean they won't vote for Democrats. Of course, they will, but they don't like it. And I think that I don't understand why we've seen so, so many of them fall into this trap at such a high level. You had the Virginia governor. You have the California governor. To some extent, the Michigan governor, plenty of folks in Congress. Diane Feinstein yesterday walking around the halls of Congress not wearing a mask. And, you know, it's one thing to not wear a mask because plenty of Republicans aren't wearing a mask.

The problem for the left is that they're sitting there attacking Republicans for not wearing masks. That's what doesn't work. And I think people very much know this, even if they don't talk about it a lot. I was just going to, I think you're 100% correct on that, Sarah. I think that people are furious when they're being told to radically restrict their own behavior and radically restrict their social circles. And they watch some of the same people are saying that and radically restrict their church service. and some of the same people saying that are walking arm and arm in mass numbers of people

down the street to protest or they're caught at these nice restaurants, et cetera, et cetera. I think that is a super fair, exactly right critique. Here's what's happening, though. People are saying, look at those hypocrites. Come on, family, into the house. Of course they are, David. But of course they are. I know.

Don't you watch something? Like, I have this exact impression myself. Like, it is so frustrating to me that, you know, of course I have to wear a mask when I go to the grocery store or do anything leaving my house. You know, my baby doesn't get held by people. He doesn't know that aren't one of like three people, basically. And like, I'm sick of it. And so, yeah, to see them go to French laundry, yeah, it does make me want to invite more

people over. And I understand that that's not how science works. But you're damn right. That's what I want to do. I know. But so here's a thing. thing. Here's what a responsible voice says. Hypocrite, you're a hypocrite. That's dangerous. And then does not then say, well, you know, how dare you tell us what to do with my extended

family, which is all coming over on Thursday? Because the virus doesn't care. Like, that's the thing. Human lives are at stake. And the virus doesn't care about all of this hypocrisy. And yeah, call it out. You have to call it out because we do know on a human level what that hypocrisy does is it exacerbated. exacerbates people's coronavirus fatigue. But the virus just flat out doesn't care. And we're at a point where, you know, we have record number of hospitalizations. It appears as if the federal government

has essentially said its goal is to try to get, to find a way to get Donald Trump four more years in spite of losing an election. That's the goal of the administration right now and is basically saying to everyone else, you're on your own in this pandemic that's worse than anything we've seen in this century. And the message of a lot of conservative media is relentless, relentless with a population, by the way, that is disproportionately older, with a viewing population is disproportionately older, providing rationalizations and justifications for dangerous behavior. Constantly, constantly. And people are dying.

But, David, it undermines how dangerous it actually is. That's the problem. No, I agree with you. But the responsible reaction to that is not to. focus entirely on the Democrats' misbehavior and then say, how dare you tell us what to do, thereby giving this sort of tacit, you know, the responsible thing is, look, these people are being irresponsible.

But you're then still assuming, I hear you, but you're then assuming that they've been telling the truth, though, about how dangerous it is. And the problem is this also undermines, those are the same people telling us how dangerous it is.

So clearly, they don't think it's that dangerous, so maybe it's not as dangerous as they say. And so, yeah, maybe I should have my family over. It validates. I think that's right. I think Sarah is exactly right. It validates that skepticism coming from the center, right? And then they don't feel the need to behave that way. And you get these mixed signals and we've gotten them from the beginning, frankly. I mean, you know, you had at a time when, you know, it was certainly the case that Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and many elected officials on the right early in the pandemic were still poo-pooing how seriously.

it was. It is the case that you had prominent liberals doing the same thing. Bill de Blasio, Nancy Pelosi. You know, they were going out, downplaying the seriousness of this as well. And every time you, whether it's an elected official, whether it's these public health officials who made, you know, sort of protest exceptions for the virus. Like, you can't do that. People will stop believing you if you do that. It was a huge problem when they did it. And I think get pretty dramatically undercut. I mean, I wouldn't, I don't think you can attribute these subsequent waves to any particular thing, but I, I have little doubt that that played a significant role that people had been

hearing from mid-March through the beginning of summer that, that, you know, you had to potentially, you'd just stay away from everybody, you'd be wise to take extra precautions and wipe down your stuff and do this and do that. And then, you know, when it was a politically favored cause, they all just sort of suspended. their rules. You can't do that. And it pretty dramatically undermined, pretty dramatically undermined, I think, the argument that they were making that, that lefty politicians were making. And I do think it's played a rule. But you don't answer one irresponsible argument with another irresponsible argument. Undoubtedly. That's my point. I think you're right. I think you're

right for smart people. But then you don't believe it. We've had these Republicans, we've had all of these, you know, Republican senators, lots of people in the White House get coronavirus. They're back at work. That undermines this idea that the, you know, the people who have been telling us, like, if you get this, you die. Well, that's clearly not true either. Look, I'm not saying I want coronavirus. I'm mostly expressing my frustration at these folks who have not made a reasoned argument for why we need to have lockdowns and instead have made a very screechy argument about it that they know isn't true, which is why they're willing to violate their own rules that they're putting out there. Gavin Newsom isn't going to French laundry because he, you know, does believe that this

virus is as dangerous as he's said and he just doesn't care and is happy to get it. He's going to French laundry because he doesn't think he'll get it. And that if he gets it, he thinks he'll be just fine. He should say that. Well, yeah, okay, fine. Yeah, he should say that. He's irresponsible. 250,000 people are dead. 250,000. And the thing that is so frustrating here is that this, virus is almost like it's engineered in Satan's laboratory. I'm not saying it's engineered in Satan's laboratory, but it's almost as if it's engineered in Satan's laboratory to rip us to shreds. Because for most people, you're going to be okay. And for super, you know, my son had it. He had four or five really rough days. He would not have wished on

anybody when he was, he's at, at the University of Tennessee. But he's fine. Thank God. He's fine and we pretty much knew he was going to be fine when he caught it but here's the problem there is a significant number of human beings so significant that this is one of the largest mass casualty events in the entire history of this country that there are significant enough people about who are vulnerable and it's not always super predictable who's going to be vulnerable there are people my age i'm 51 who have died of this who've been otherwise pretty healthy. Yeah, so most people are going to be fine, but a significant number of people are not, and this is a part of who do we care for? How do we care for people? How do we take care of

people in a community? And we're running around talking about who's being hypocritical and who's not being hypocritical. And if the argument is at this point that this virus isn't dangerous 250,000 lives later, I don't know what to do for those folks. I don't know what to say to those folks. This is a point where you're really talking about people are so steeped in the hoax media and the pandemic stuff and the right-wing media stuff that they're beyond in five, ten conversations. But again, we've got a crisis here if spread with hospitals in certain locations being overwhelmed. And the message should not be, look at those hypocritical Democrats.

So. Fair enough. Yes, Jonah? All I was going to say is you use the first. phrase color me shocked earlier and I went off chasing butterflies in my brain thinking about that and I think we need to have a new line of crayons with have like color like shocked and not impressed and all the other things that we say color me by. Yes. I think that would be cool. Ironic crayons. That's all I've got. Adult crayons that with ironic slogans and snarkiness. I like it. I think it would

sell, Jonah. David, we come to you on the Biden cabinet. There's rumors just swirling of who's going to get various cabinet posts. The latest one in my inbox is Jay Johnson for Attorney General. But I also have these contradictory headlines in my inbox. So I have bad news for Wall Street. Elizabeth Warren's fingerprints are all over Biden's transition team. And then I also have a tweet that says no indications that Biden or Warren

will be offered any cabinet positions. What's going on, David? How's the cabinet shaping up and does it matter? Well, that's what I was going to ask y'all. What's going on, Sarah? How's the cabinet shaping up? Because I'm looking at other headlines. Here's my favorite.

This is from Jack. Do you pronounce it Jacobin magazine? Is that how you pronounce it? Jacobin. Okay. Because I heard somebody call it Jacobin the other day. And I thought, that doesn't seem right. That would be like saying dispatch.

Which is correct. dispatch. So anyway, here's Joe Biden. Here's the headline. Joe Biden is freezing Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren out of his cabinet. And then Joe Biden is signaling he has no intention of offering cabinet slots to Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren despite spin to the contrary. It's the latest sign that the Biden team is planning to govern.

And I love this phrase from the extreme center. The extreme center. I saw that and I kind of loved that. Because I'm, look, I'm obviously not on the Jacobin side of things. They are at this point, you know, an ideological outlet. But you know what? There has always been this assumption that, like, the center is just the compromise between the two extremes on either side.

And that's not true either. And so, you know what? I kind of like them making their case. I'm for it. The extreme center. Make your case, Jacobin. Well, so we've, in the green room, Sarah, we discovered much to our shock and surprise that you do not know the incoming White House counsel of the Biden administration.

But it seems to me he's kind of getting, he's kind of getting the Obama gang back together again to an extent. To the extent that we know anything, it looks like he's getting the Obama gang back together again. And the Republicans aren't going to give him credit for that for any sort of centrism with an Obama team reunion. And he's going to have a problem with his left flank because the left has, it's long been pretty clear that the left has a lot of beef with Obama that it didn't really articulate that loudly

while Obama was in office. As a political matter, Sarah, what do you make of it? That this is like the fun that political reporters have during transition and that what will really matter is the relationship

that those cabinet members have or do not have with Joe Biden and a senior staff at the White House, House and who they are on an island doesn't really matter very much. Well, and Steve, I, so a lot of these folks are names, you know, you kind of vaguely know them from, I kind of vaguely know them from a distance from the Obama years. As you look at it, I mean, are you thinking, okay, Biden's administration does kind of look

like Obama 2.0? Or, I mean, are you seeing or hearing anything different? Yeah. I mean, that's certainly how it feels. to me. I would imagine that at some point, in some position somewhere, Biden will sort of make a nod to the progressive left. He'll have somebody who's sort of identifiably lefty in his administration so that they can say, ah, there's our guy or there's our woman. You know, maybe as Secretary of Labor, there were early rumors about Bernie Sanders.

there, Bernie Sanders indicated that he'd probably take that job if Biden were interested in offering it to him. So I imagine just for political expediency, he'll do something that allows the left to have some buy-in. I guess what I'm most interested in is the outcomes here, and I don't think it likely matters much. I mean, he is going to be president at a time when we have tremendous divisions in Congress, what he's able to get accomplished, I think he'll largely get accomplished, as was the case with his two predecessors, by executive order. And those things are not necessarily long-lasting. We will see that very soon as he reverses a number of President Trump's executive orders. And he will have to fight to get anything through Congress,

a very, very divided Congress. You know, a probably single-digit gap in the House of Representatives, almost certainly, and in the Senate, probably a narrow majority for Republicans or best-case scenario for the Democrats, a tie with Kamala Harris breaking the tie. That is not a, you know, that's not like a parliamentary system where you can then move your entire campaign package through the legislature. It's just not going to happen. So I think he's going to just be boxed in by reality on a lot of this stuff. What quick question for you on the foreign policy side? So there has been some, we've already seen announcements of drawdowns in Iraq and

Afghanistan. Do you think Biden will reverse that at all? Or do you think he'll just be, he'll just try to remove Iraq and Afghanistan from front of mind. Well, to the extent it's been front of mind, do you think he'll just roll forward at the troop levels he has in place? Probably. I think what we're likely to hear from Biden on all fronts, but those as well, is sort of a doubling down, a reemphasis on diplomacy and soft power. And, you know, this has been Joe Biden's thing for decades, right? This is, this is where he makes his arguments. It's been very interesting to watch the discussion over the past week about President Trump's reduction of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. There was a sense when we had a firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper, an elevating of a new interim defense secretary and then sort of the cashiering of several other senior defense officials that Trump was going to go in and demand.

an immediate withdrawal of everybody. It was over. It was done, especially because this is something that Mark Esper had suggested to the president with respect to Afghanistan just wasn't possible, and President Trump was frustrated by it. The true productions in those places

are not that significant. They're not nothing, but there is a presence there, and it sounds like there will be a presence there on January 20th. I don't expect that we'll see Joe Biden dramatically, our presence in in those places, perhaps having learned the lesson of what happens when

you do try to, try to withdraw too quickly. I mean, looking back at Iraq as an object lesson and certainly having been warned about Afghanistan. So I would expect that he'll emphasize diplomacy, but that's, you know, that's not a small thing. There have been talk about closing the U.S. embassy, actually at both places. And there are some pretty significant intelligence programs that the United States runs out of the embassies in those places that had people in the national security world very worried. I think that was as much of the worry as anything with the talks about just getting out, just bugging out. And I don't think Joe Biden will do that. So, Jonah, do you think Mitch McConnell is going to take his pound of

and the cabinet nominations, or is Biden going more or less get his team, part A, part B, are Sanders and Warren done in more by the fact that they're progressive for cabinet nominations or by the fact that they have Republican governors? And then Mitch would have a larger majority if one of them is appointed for a cabinet position. Yeah, I mean, I think Biden is helped enormously by the fact that he doesn't have to answer that question. And he can just say, hey, look, I would love to have Liz Warren in my cabinet. He doesn't have to say that on TV, but he can say that in conversations with progressives. But my hands are tied, right? And so we'll just never find out if a Treasury secretary can

unilaterally seize the means of production. And similarly, you know, well, you know, the other thing to think about is the house. I mean, the house is shaping up. to be 218 to 2.14. That means that, and look, I'm one of these guys who thinks that the media, both right wing and left wing, have beclown themselves with how much attention they paid to the squad and to AOC and all that. I mean, she is basically a much more attractive version of Ted Cruz on the left in terms of just trolling everybody.

But four votes is now a veto on anything Nancy Pelosi. wants to do. And so you could see the progress, I mean, it doesn't take much for the progressive wing to throw the entire agenda of the more moderate agenda under the bus. And so the interesting thing is, does that then put pressure on Pelosi to try to get Republican votes? Who are those Republican votes? And what do you have to pay to get them to come to the dance? So, I mean, it's a very, I think this is actually a good thing for America in the sense that, and I just gave a talk about this here in Dallas last night. But I think it's a good thing for America because the real competition right now is between which party can seem more like a grown-up for the next

year. And there's real incentives for doing that. And the center has been empowered. I mean, Joe Manchin just did something that, you know, blew up any hopes of the Green New Deal and socialized medicine and all that kind of stuff. But there's also a really non-trivial chance that we have the mother of all government shutdowns on everything for the rest of our lives. And we're eaten canned goods and squirrels pretty soon because you could have no budget passed. I mean, you could have just total, total, not just stalemate, but like true gridlock on some important things. And I honestly think that's kind of a good scenario for Biden because it just lets him

tell everybody concerned, hey, look, we can't swing for the fences on anything except for maybe some appointments and whatnot because the numbers are too tight. And it, and the one last point I would make about Biden, which I think you guys haven't mentioned, is he is personally much more like Bill Clinton than he is like Barack Obama. And like Hillary used to talk about how, like when she would talk to Biden in the Senate, it felt like she was talking to Bill. And that they think in very similar ways. Biden's in some ways more of like a Clinton retread. And the problem is I just don't think there are a lot of Clintonistas that are now appointable to anything good because either they're making too much money or they're too corrupt or they're just too old. But I think there's a real chance that Biden tries for a Clinton-esque triangulation.

He's certainly the way he talks, and Sarah was referring to this earlier, about how he's responded to the pandemic stuff and all that. In the 1990s, one of the key rhetorical tropes of Senate Democrats and Clinton White House people was to say how they were saddened and disappointed by what the Republicans were doing. And that's the card he is playing. It's not to say, it's not to pick a fight. It's to sort of appeal, particularly the soccer moms. Look at how these silly, dumb boys are behaving. It's very sad and disappointing.

And I think we're going to get away. When a dad is always a good position to be in. Yeah. And I think that's where, never mind disappointed grandpa. And I think that's where we're going. Well, you know, and speaking of Joe Manchin, his tweet, defund the police, defund my butt. Rhetorical gold. Yeah.

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express VPN protection for free. That's EXPR-E-S-V-S-V-P-N.com slash freedom to learn more. All right, David, let's put a pin in the cabinet. We will definitely be talking about this in future weeks. But we do need to talk about Steve's topic, which is that, you know, sort of kind of, Steve, I guess this election sort of is ongoing, kind of, maybe, fizzling, fizzling. Yeah. Tell us. So I'm interested. The president continues. I mean, just within the time that we started recording this podcast, the president tweeted, this was a rigged election, no Republican poll. watchers allowed voting machine glitches all over the place, meaning they got caught cheating,

voting after the election ended, and so much more. And you've seen efforts by Trump supporters both in the conservative media and elsewhere to cast doubt on the results of the election. It appears through some polling, including a fresh poll from Reuters, again, with the caveat that we should be wary of all polling, this is having, this is starting to have an effect. You've seven out of ten Republicans who say that they believe that the election was not free and fair. And yet we still have seen or heard very little from elected Republicans pushing back on this. Mostly they tip their hat to the process. The process has to continue. The process has to continue. And I think do so in a way that,

allows people who want to believe that the election was stolen to believe that the election was stolen. My question is very simple and direct. Is this a short-term problem that we'll all forget about when Joe Biden is inaugurated on January 20th and we'll look back and say, boy, I wish that hadn't happened? Or will we be looking at persistent beliefs that the election was illegitimate and effects of those beliefs mattering in our ability to govern ourselves, Jonah? I think they're going to have a pretty long half-life, all things considered. I think, you know, part of the problem is that when Trump leaves office, and he will leave office, when he leaves office, he can freeze the entire GOP.

sort of presidential ambitious ambition process in Amber for a while. Because if he doesn't denounce that he's running in 2024, he says he's thinking about running in 2024, we have the same, a modern, a new version of the belly and the cat problem we had in 2016. In 2016, you know, it's in every mouse's interest to bell the cat. It's in every mouse's interest that the cat be belled. It's in no mouse's interest to be the one to put the bell on it. And we saw in the primaries, everyone being afraid to be the one to take on Trump until it was too late. The first person who announces their exploratory committee, while Trump is holding that card over them, is going to be attacked by all the usual people as unloyal, disloyal, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so it's going to freeze all that in place for a long time.

And that vacuum, I think, is going to be filled, sort of like, you know, the way birtherism filled a certain segment of the right for very long time with this nonsense about how the election was stolen. And so, but I don't know how, I don't know what kind of longevity it has. A lot of it has to do with whether or not he starts this new media venture, whether or not we see a great migration of Trumpers out of Fox. There's just a lot of unknown unknowns quite yet and a lot of known unknowns. But for a certain, I think at the minimum, there's at least an 18 month period where Trump is basically Sarah Palin on steroids, where remember after they lost the, election in 2008. Palin played this role. She was most coveted endorsement. She got all this

attention. Everyone wanted to interview her. What does Sarah Palin think? What does Sarah Palin think? And I think that's, and the base is the same base for both of them. So I think we're going to see at minimum a lot of that stuff for about 18 months. And then there are going to be some diehards who are going to believe this, you know, like the Kennedy conspiracy. They're just going to believe it forever. David, Trump campaign has indicated that they're not. now going to file for a recount in Wisconsin, which will cost them $8 million, but we'll also allow them to raise a lot more money because they can go to their donors and say, we need $8 million for this recount. Do you think this lasts, or does it just sort of fade away? Oh, it lasts.

Well, it lasts in a subset of the GOP base, because there are a couple of things are going to happen, And I think, one is you're going to see an illegitimate election economy begin at launch, which you're going to have the books, you're going to have the documentaries, you're going to have sort of these, you know, these folks who are going to be coming out of the woodwork for the next several months saying, I've discovered why it was illegitimate, here's my book here. And, you know, we saw a little bit of this in 2004. Remember, there was some, again, my pronunciation, was it, Diebold? It's D-Bold, right?

Debold, D-Bold, okay. You know, the D-Bold speculation. But take that and put that on steroids with Hammer and Scorecard with Dominion, with what was it, Benford's law, Sarah. So you're going to see, you're going to see a legitimate election economy spring up. And then you're also, it's just going to become part of the grievance.

It's going to become, it's going to be part of that sort of enduring narrative. of base Republican grievance. It's going to be just part of the list. Well, they were horrible to Kavanaugh. They mistreated Covington Catholic. And then they went and they stole the election and the suppression polls and the, I mean, the Russia hoax, it's just going to be part

of this entire long narrative of building grievance and building anger that has the profoundly negative consequence of completely undermining sort of faith in the American system of government itself for the sake of really a political organizing tool that's going to be utilized. So I think that it's going to be, it's going to persist in a subset of the GOP base. It's going to be part of the grievance. It's going to make some people some money. And we can just kind of all, you know, we can map it out all from sitting right where

we're sitting right now. Sarah, you've worked with elected Republicans more than any of the rest of us you stole elections before some of some of this stuff is is totally insane i mean the prevailing theory now with respect to to dominion is that this was something that the u.s. government used to help you know to help flip votes against hugo Chavez and it has all of these foreign central South American roots. And they're going into these machines and flipping votes by hundreds of thousands. Sydney Powell, who was Mike Flynn's attorney, has been making the rounds on Fox business and elsewhere, making these claims in effect that not only did Donald Trump win this election, but it was a landslide for Trump. This stuff is crazy.

there's no evidence to support any of it. She keeps saying, well, I've got this affidavit. I've got this anonymous person. Patriots from all over the country are sending me information. And yet we've seen no real evidence for any of the claims that she's making. Why is this so hard for those Republican elected officials? Shouldn't they at least be saying, you know what? That stuff is nuts.

And not only are they not doing that, I watched Newsmax television yesterday morning for about an hour and a half. And you had a parade of Republican officials, current and former, in some cases, actually giving credence to that. And in other cases, just giving oxygen to it by refusing to say, yeah, you know what? That's totally not true. What's the problem here? Steve, you need to revisit some of your life choices if you are watching Newsmax for an hour and a half. Hey, I do it so you don't have to. These are the sacrifices I make for you. A few things. One, I don't think any of them think it's particularly in their individual interest to stick their neck out. They think this will all go away. And they think it will go away as soon as the votes are certified by each of these states. And like, okay, so to touch on some things that other people have said so far, one, I'll, I'll wait and see on that Wisconsin recount. You know, they have to put up the money up front, right? Eight million dollars? I don't think so. I mean, we'll see, but nah. So there's that.

Two, in Georgia, this is why the Georgia recount was always a problem for them, because it's a hand recount, meaning Georgia uses Dominion machines. They're not using the machines for the recount. So now you're going to see whether there's a difference between the machine count and the hand recount. And what you've seen so far is, I think actually very heartening. So they found two memory cards that hadn't actually, their data hadn't been uploaded. They account for, I think, total around 3 to 4,000 votes.

The margin will shift towards Trump about 800, under 1,000 votes. But by the way, this is why you have automatic recounts in states when it's very close because things like this not just can happen, they do happen every single time. If you've ever done a recount in any state, you are going to see movement in votes because of this stuff, stupid stuff, lazy, poor. bureaucratic things get dropped when you're doing stuff quickly like an election. So it undermines, though, this conspiracy idea about the machines in Georgia. And it also undermines the idea that recounts really change things.

Now, of course, the Trump line on that is that, yeah, but they're not doing signature matching. There was some consent decree. I wrote about this in the sweep that's just not accurate. there is a consent decree in Georgia about how they do signature matching, but that you must have signature matching. And as the Secretary of State has pointed out, they have actually thrown out more ballots for failures of signature matching, not fewer since the consent decree. You know, I think we do have to separate these, quote, you know, what I call very online conversations from the vast, vast majority of people who are not paying attention to this. They don't know

who Sidney Powell is, and they certainly don't know what Sidney Powell is saying. I don't know most of what you just said that Sidney Powell has said. And I pay a lot of attention to this stuff. And to David's point, yes, of course, this will persist in the long list of things with that very online crowd. That's not the majority of voters. It's not how you win elections. And so that's why I think these Republican electeds aren't saying anything because most people aren't paying attention to it. And it's going to be gone. in a week or two in their minds. And I think for the most part, they're right.

Again, it's not that David's wrong with a certain segment on Twitter and the own the libs crowd or newsmax or something like that. It's that that's just an increasingly small number of folks compared to everyone else who, like, yes, they think there's some voter fraud. There's some shady stuff they've heard about that they can't really explain. But they don't think Donald Trump won the election. They don't think it shifted millions of votes. Joe Biden is the president-elect as far as they are concerned, and they're moving on.

And by the way, they're voting for the Republicans in the special election. So it's also not undermining their faith in Republicans that these other Republicans haven't spoken out about it. They're just, there's other stuff going on. And I think that it's turned these like, you know, Giuliani showing up in court yesterday, which David and I will no doubt cover in depth on advisory opinions. But, you know, you even see it with the report. is talking about it, it is at best a entertainment value of how flailing silliness this is

turned into. I'm willing to take the under. I think this will all be a unfortunate, stupid, forgotten thing come January 20th. Yeah. See, I mean, you know, it's interesting. I guess my instincts are pretty well aligned with yours on that. And my experience tells me, that you're wrong, you know? Yeah, fair. Look, I mean, it's often been the case. I mean, look, this was true in the, this was true to a certain extent in the lead-up to Donald Trump's election.

You had stuff that felt very online and felt very underground, you know, Breitbart touting Trump's certain victory in Republican primaries that, you know, had professional Republicans scoffing and, you know, the conservative media at the time kind of shrugging it off, dismissing it. And then you don't sort of take it on or challenge it or ask questions or probe. It grows to become almost self-fulfilling. And my concern is that's what we're seeing here. And it's why every time I hear a politician talk about the importance of the process, when you know that what the process is now designed to explore is total nonsense, then there's an attendant obligation to say, let the process play out, the president has every right to do this,

you know, all of the lines that we've heard from elected Republicans, but also say clearly and without qualification, the election wasn't stolen. It's ridiculous for the president to claim that the election was stolen. There's zero evidence to conclude that the election was stolen. And it's irresponsible to pretend that the election was stolen. And I guess I'm troubled by the absence of that. It's just not happening. Particularly when these guys won in the election, right?

I mean, like... I know. I'm incredibly angry about it, but I'm angry for a... I think a version of what you're saying. I'm angry because once again, the president is using the processes against us, right? We all want to follow the process. We all think process is important.

And he uses that as our weakness to then undermine the very system that we have in place. I'm so angry about it. I don't sound angry, if that makes sense. You know, like it hurts me in such a place that I cannot open up that place to you for fear of exploding.

But, But I guess perhaps it is wishful thinking, I just hope that on January 20th, that part of it that I find so egregious, that I, you know, undermining the faith in the very system that allows us everything else that we have, I hope that that is just folks, you know, sort of enjoying the entertainment value and that that will go away. Okay. Thanksgiving is Thursday. bird could have been the turkey instead of the bald eagle. David, make your case. Which bird should it have been? You can also pick a different bird. I have never understood the case for the turkey.

They're delicious. Somebody explain that to me. What is the case for the turkey again, except it's like plentiful and tasty? Yeah, I mean, it's a quintessential American bird. and, you know, it has sustained us through hard times. Well, okay. Like a cow is a quintessential American animal, and it sustains us in hard times.

Does that mean what, like, the national mammal should be the cow? He's not picking the turkey. Steve, what are you picking? It's the eagle. We're strong and mighty. The eagle represents that. well. End of discussion. Thank you very much. To be clear, the bald eagles are scavengers that will eat anything there. And

the sound, like the sound that, like on the cold bear report that they use for the bald eagle is actually a red-tailed hawk. The bald eagle sound is much less manly sounding. There's nothing more elegant when it soars and it conveys strength whether it's a scavenger or not. So I think a turkey holding a quiver of arrows and e pluribus unum in its talons. Do turkeys have talons in his feet? Would look pretty cool like on the back of the quarter. But got to go with an eagle. Although harpy eagles, Google them. Coolest looking eagles there are out there. They look like they should be in a Tolkien novel. There's an entire Dora the Explorer episode about Harpy Eagles, which you will no doubt see that he watched after Newsmax.

Yeah, you flip back and forth between Newsmax and that. So at this point, I will now read from Benjamin Franklin, who said that the bald eagle was a bird of bad moral character that does not get his living honestly. He steals food from the fishing hawk and is too lazy to fish for himself in contrast. Franklin called the turkey, quote, a much more respectful. bird, a true original native of America. While the eagle is a ranked coward, the turkey is a

bird of courage who would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards who would presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on. What say you, David? A, all props to Franklin

for his virtues, but not my favorite founding father for many reasons, including the turkey argument. Perfect. And with that, David, Jonah, Steve, I wish you and all your families and all of our listeners and their families a wonderful, very happy, very fulfilling in spirit and stomach Thanksgiving. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime.

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