The Dispatch Podcast - Is This What Retribution Looks Like? | Roundtable

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

Sarah Isgur is joined by Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes to react to Donald Trump’s first few days in office and Joe Biden’s final act of lawlessness. The Agenda: —President Trump’s pardons ��Is it time to fix the pardon power? —Whose pardons are worse? —Birthright citizenship —Revoking security details —"The Right Is Winning the Battle for Hearts and Minds" —Is conservatism cool now? Show Notes: —Indictment of Genesis Lee Whitted, Jr. —Advisory Opinions on Birthright Citizenship —The Volokh Conspiracy 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

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isgir, and I've got Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes here. Plenty of news to discuss. Look, I want to go, Pardon's? Which one was worse? Biden or Trump's? Then I want to talk birthright citizens. Not the legal side. You can go to the flagship podcast for that, but just the policy of birthright citizenship and whether it actually is a good idea or not for a country like America. And then finally, all of the other stuff that Donald Trump has been doing in his first few hours in office. And a little not worth your time. Jonah, I love this piece you sent on the cultural ascendancy of conservatives and why that may be occurring. I chuckled at various points. So let's talk about that at the end.

Okay, let's start with pardons. On the one hand, in President Biden's last few hours in office, he pardoned hundreds and hundreds of quote-unquote, nonviolent drug offenders. Those did not run through the pardon office, the Department of Justice, the normal people who might have informed President Biden that just because someone was convicted of a nonviolent offense

does not mean that if you go through the indictment, they actually were a nonviolent drug offender. Using one example coming out of North Carolina, it was the head of a drug gang who in fact would show up to rival drug dealers, houses and apartments, and pour boiling water on their girlfriends until the drug dealers would tell them

where various drugs were or other information that he needed to know. Yes, he was convicted making and distributing cocaine. I mean, he had a tattoo of a Pyrex, like it's like you know dish to make cocaine in so like that they had very good evidence on that it wasn't going to take a lot of resources to convict him of that but to call that guy nonviolent so now he's back on the streets in Fayetteville north carolina i'm sure he'll go get a nice job at you know home depot or wendies or something and definitely not go back to his

violent drug gang but don't worry because then at the very very end of the Biden administration he his family, the January 6th committee members and staff. And I was like, wow, that is a fitting end to what I believe is absolutely the most lawless president of my lifetime, who has done more to undermine the rule of law, in part because he said that he wasn't. And it was that juxtaposition that I thought made it incredibly poisonous to the rule of law.

But here comes Donald Trump at 1201. And also, a slew of pardons. The January 6th, anyone who was indicted for their involvement in January 6th was pardoned minus 14 whose sentences were commuted. Those included the leaders of the proud boys who actually planned and executed really the January 6th violence. And that, I mean, they had a plan. That was it. He also pardoned the founder of the Silk Road, a huge website. for drugs, really all just all the bad things you can think of that one would want to get on the

internet that you can't get on eBay or Amazon or whatever. Also, it hired a hitman, actually multiple to kill people. So yeah, that guy, he's back out too. Steve, I'll start with you. I guess, does this do actual lasting damage or is it just really, really aggravating right now? I think it does real lasting damage. And I think that's one of the hard things. about a week like this and about a second Trump administration is trying to make distinctions between, you know, what's noise, what's media obsession of the moment, what's sort of a silly debate, and what are the things that are actually going to do, likely to do sort of longer-term damage. I think, so Joe Biden issued the pardons for his, for his brother, for his family

members for his brother, I believe, 21 minutes before his time in office was up. And they included pardons for James Biden. And the justification you heard from Joe Biden and his advisors was that these were people who were likely to be targeted by the Trump administration. That was just a lie. It's just untrue. James Biden was under scrutiny from Joe Biden's own Justice Department in two different cases for fraud. So if Joe Biden, was protecting his brother from a politicized justice system. He was protecting it from his own justice department, his own system. I think that the problems with the Biden pardons, sort of all of them share something in common with the problems with many of the Trump pardons.

And that is there's very little indication that either man took the time to scrutinize the crimes to look at what actually either happened or was alleged to have happened and did these things almost purely for political reasons. And, you know, I think that when you think about the rule of law and damage the rule of law, when you have the two men who take an oath to the Constitution to defend and uphold the Constitution, for shrugging it off and doing so in an ostentatious and, I'd say, aggressive way, you can't help but have that matter for the people who work directly for them, the other people who are charged with carrying out the laws,

and the rest of the country who's watching all this happen. Jonah, is it time to fix the pardon power? Yes, but first I want to say that I hope you know, that you may be getting a stern letter from the people in the PR department at Pyrex. Pyrex is a brand name and sort of like Band-Aid or Xerox. And to talk about the murderous Coke dealer's Pyrex tattoo, I'm sure they want to tell you that it was a generic. But anyway.

You know what? I will read to you from the DOJ indictment. Because he was so adept at manufacturing cocaine base, witted the defendant or a convicted felon in this case, obtained tattoos on his chest of a Pyrex measuring cup and a box of baking soda, key implements in the cocaine-based manufacturing process. So at least according to them, it was Pyrex.

It was the brand name Pyrex that he got tattooed. Fair enough. I stand corrected and that's... Pyrax. That's their problem then. Yeah, so look, I am very close to done with the pardon power. And I think I am done. I think I'm done.

I mean, you know me, like I, Chesterton's fence, especially, oh my gosh, for the Constitution, there is no higher, taller, more beautifully painted fence than the U.S. Constitution. But I'm done. Yeah. So I have a couple reforms that would be willing to talk to people about if they, less than a complete pulling it out. One is, one is talking about a lot of people, which is not have the power of part. pardon between election day and inauguration day so that you can't do stuff on the way out that would help, right? It wouldn't stop anything that Trump has done, right? Because he did it after he got

inaugurated. Well, the problem is, right, like the reason that we would look at that time is because it's this lame duck period where there's absolutely zero political accountability. But the problem is once you're also a lame duck, so like you've won a second term, whether consecutively or not, kind of the same thing applies. And we're not going to get rid of the pardon power. Like, you only get pardons in the first term when you have political stakes in the game. Like, that's not going to work. So I agree with that. And so I actually think, and I haven't seen anybody propose this except for me right now.

So it's probably wrong. But when the Constitution was originally written, there were only three federal crimes, right? It's like... I've been accused of one of them. Yeah, fair enough. But, like, piracy, treason, and, like, counterfeiting. I think those are the three, right? Let's just say that the president still has the power to pardon those crimes and none other.

Ooh. Right? That's a really originalist reform. And it just says this is what the Constitution intended. That's what the framers intended. And all these other crimes, mattress tag ripping campaign finance things, whatever. Sorry, you can be pardoned for those things. I could live with that.

David French had an idea which I like, which is turn the pardon power into something more like a confirmation. So an advised consent role for the Senate. Actually, the two of us came to it together. He had a board or whatever. That was dumb. I added in the Senate part. But the point is you would have a check on it, a small check, but a check nevertheless. And I think if you look at both Biden's pardons and Trump's pardons, if the Senate had had to confirm those, none of them would have been confirmed.

And I think that would get bipartisan support in Congress. Remember, you need two thirds of Congress, and then you need three quarters of the states to amend the Constitution. First of all, I think three quarters of the states is going to be no problem. And I think Congress could actually get this done if there were the political pressure to do it. So someone out there, make this. And they do that is your proposal that they do that on a pardon by pardon basis? Yeah, correct. Which you could, I mean, on the one hand, I listen to you and I think, boy, you have a lot more faith in Congress.

Congress than I do. But at the same time, if they have to take up each one of these, you would think that there would at least be some institutional pressure on the president not to do so many of them. Right, right, because it would slow down the Senate at a time when the president might really want them. We're not, for instance, commuting the death penalty for people who tortured and murdered a mother and her child. The child's body, of course, has never been found. I mean, that's just not getting through the Senate. Like, nope. Okay, but Stephen Jonah, I need you to answer. Well, okay, Jonah. Yeah, I just want to make one point about why these pardons, I mean, I can make many, but we've heard a lot of the arguments. There's the moral hazard. It's like some of these guys were violent. It's irresponsible, blah, blah, blah, blah. All that stuff is true.

Both a big chunk of Biden's pardons and Trump's pardons fit what Madison said in the constitutional ratifying conference, you know, convention in Virginia would be impeachable offenses. offenses, suborning people to commit crimes on your behalf and then giving them a pardon for it. Like, Madison is explicitly, it's not a crime, but it is impeachable. But I think the thing that bothers me about these pardons beyond all of those things that people aren't talking about is they're illiberal. And what I mean by that is the pardoned power, I get Lincoln pardoned Confederate soldiers and that was to bring peace. And like, so there are exceptions to this. But as a rule, Johnson.

Oh, Johnson. Okay. And it was wildly unpopular at the time. For sure, right. But I mean, I get the arguments for that. Or like Carter with the draft Dodgers, right? I mean, so I get it. There are some arguments.

Technically, by the way, that was an amnesty through executive order. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So my point is. He could have done it through the pardon power. Right. So my point is, is that pardon power generally should not be applied.

Justice, both punishment and clemency, should not be applied to groups of, to categories of people, right? When you have your day in court, you are, get to confront your accuser. You get to bring the facts relevant to your case. It is an individual thing. You know, and this is one of the reasons why Ernst Vandenhog used to have this big problem with the argument about the death penalty being a justification, being justified because it deters other people from committing crimes. It's like, look, either the person you're executing deserves this justice or they don't. And you can't use the death penalty as a demonstration effect for other people. Similarly, we all understand a collective justice or collective punishment is wrong. Well, so is

collective reprieve. The Trump administration said, well, it would just be too cumbersome to go through each one of these cases individually. So they decided to do it as a category. The people who were accused of bad things in defense of Donald Trump, all get a pardon, except for six people who get commutation or whatever. And that is illiberal. That is seeing, and similarly, when Biden just says, oh, look, there are people who were convicted because of this fairly artificial designation called nonviolent drug offender, which doesn't, as you point out, doesn't take in fact that a lot of these things are plea bargained, because that's a political category that the left has turned into something that it isn't,

he gives pardons out to a category of people that by definition is going to be a very superficial category that isn't going to get at the issues of actual justice committed by the individual. And the individual is the fundamental unit of liberalism and both of these guys violated the sort of spirit, the philosophical spirit of the Constitution end of this country. And they were gross for a lot of other reasons,

but it's the thing that's been bothering me. Okay, there's been a lot of what aboutism about these pardons, like anyone who complains about the Biden pardons, you immediately get like, well, what about Trump's pardons? And if you complain about Trump's January 6th pardons, you get, what about what Biden did? So I want to take the what aboutism head on right now. Which set of pardons was worse in your mind, Steve? Yeah, so I appreciate the question. I appreciate the logic that leads you to ask the question, and I reject answering the question. Good, actually.

It's what I wanted. It's what I expected. It doesn't matter. They're worse for different reasons. I mean, look, one of the reasons that I think what Joe Biden did is as offensive as it is to me is because he set himself up as the guardian of these norms and the guardian of these things and campaigned on it and talked about it. And we also know that in very specific terms, he rejected the pardoning of family members and preemptive pardons in 2020, when he was asked about this directly, he said, this would be wrong. And then he went ahead and did it.

And I think to me, this encapsulates who Joe Biden is, who he's been for his entire life, and what kind of a president he was. It's hard, however, to think about Trump's pardons of the January 6thers. and both the results and the process that led to those results and not just be really worried about what this means on a number of different levels, in terms of precedent, in terms of moral hazard, in terms of all the things that we've already discussed. But it will also assuredly have the effect of emboldening these people who committed these crimes.

Stuart Rhodes was a proud boy, helped coordinate the attacks, was convicted of seditious conspiracy, pardoned, was at the U.S. Capitol yesterday and taking what certainly felt like a victory lap. You know, this was the capital, which the courts had decided, the jury had decided. He played a major role in helping attack.

on January 6th, and he was there giving press conferences, lying openly about what happened. At one point, he said something, I'm paraphrasing something to the effect of, those people who went inside the Capitol were just there to help out. They were just there to help the police. We were there to protect Trump supporters from Antifa. We were there to protect and secure two committed events on Capitol grounds where members of Congress were going to speak. I'm so worried by the revisionism of January 6th.

broadly, we've talked about this before, we don't need to dwell on it again here. But the story is so counter to the reality of what we saw that day. This is what happened on January 6th, 2021 is one of the most, probably one of the most videoed events in recent U.S. history. We saw literally in real time and then have, what, tens of thousands of hours a video of what transpired, much of which led to the convictions that Trump has now issued pardons on. And there is this growing sense, this argument that seemed crazy at the time and seemed even crazy until relatively recently, until Trump started making it, of course,

that the people participated in January 6th were just innocent protesters or, you know, maybe even heroes, or as Trump calls them hostages, and you take this sort of new fictional account of what happened, and you overlay that with Trump's explicit blessing rhetorically again and again and again of what these people did. And then the pardoning of them on a legal basis, you're insane if you think we don't get more of that. It's crazy to think we don't get more of it. Jonah, which one's worse? I'm with Steve, and I'm grateful to him for Kobayashi maruing the question in the first place. Because it is, it's sort of to me, like, I'm really interested for totally nerdy reasons in the argument, who is worse, Stalin or Hitler. But at a very

fundamental level, it's a really dumb debate, right? Because it's like, one is like at 100 on the evil chart, and the other one is at 99.5. They both meet the necessary requirements for being really, really bad. And so the whole debate of whose pardons were worse is another one of these examples of how we end up taking what we're supposed to be maximums and turn them into minimums. Like if I say Trump's not Hitler, how can you defend Trump like that? pretty sure, like, you can still be bad and come up short of being Hitler, right? It doesn't matter whose pardons were worse. They're both terrible, some for overlapping reasons, some for completely different reasons.

I think Bidens are definitely more hypocritical for the reasons you guys laid out, right? Because he just, like, literally, I mean, at some point, hypocrisy stops being hypocrisy, he just becomes this thing called lying, right? I mean, he said he wasn't going to do something and then he did it. But he was sanctimonious. Yeah. Right. But it's the sanctimony about saying he's not going to do it when you knew he was going to do it,

right? That is infuriating. Can I just jump in real quick and read his exact words? When he was asked about this in 2020, he said, it concerns me in terms of what kind of precedent it sets and how the rest of the world looks at us as a nation of laws and justice. In terms of the pardons, you're not going to see an. administration, that kind of approach to pardons. He explicitly and directly rejected what he

then went on and did using the same arguments that people are criticizing him for today. Okay. But his pushback to that is that this is all Trump's fault. So Trump's pardons are Trump's fault and Biden's partons are Trump's fault because Biden was worried about Trump breaking norms. So he had to break norms to save his family from Trump's broken noise. In the specifics, that is wrong. Look at the case of his brother, which I mentioned earlier. It's not about Trump. I mean, he wants to dress it up as being about Trump.

It's not about Trump. We talked about this. I believe it was last week or a couple weeks ago. I'm opposed to all of these pardons, all of these preemptive pardons. I think they're bad policy. I think they're norm breaking, and I think they rode the rule of law. I can understand the logic that would lead one to the kind of conclusions that Joe Biden apparently reached on, for instance, the January 6th committee and its staff

because Donald Trump has talked about targeting these people. There is now a second investigation, the House of Representatives seeking to, I think, essentially invent a new narrative or add to the invented narrative, which accuses them of committing crimes themselves. It's total nonsense. So I can understand the logic there. It's still wrong. Also, can I just note that If you're a member of Congress who was on a committee, you can't be indicted for Jack Squat. You are protected by the Constitution and the speech and debate clause. So it was also a totally unnecessary preemptive pardon for the members of the January 6th committee, which I found bizarre. Okay, but Jonah.

So that, but that, yeah, so you're, you're pointing out of Biden's pushback. I actually think can be flipped around and again, I'm with the consensus here that, worse is the wrong way to think about it. But you can make the case that Biden's are worse in this regard. Biden's the guy for the reason, you know, that he stated that Steve read and other statements who thinks that Trump is a threat to democracy. Biden's whole friggin, quote unquote, mandate was to prevent, and legacy was to prevent Trump from being in the White House, right? And to certainly prevent him from doing the kind of lawless things that he thinks are so terrible and all that, right? His pardons give Trump permission structure to be more lawless. Preemptive pardons are

horrendous. Joe Biden gave a pardon yesterday to a lot of criminals. These are criminals that he gave a pardon to. And you should be asking that question, why did he give a pardon to all of these people that committed crimes? Why did he give a pardon to the J6 unselect committee when they burned and destroyed all documents, why did they give a pardon to all of his relatives, his brother who made millions of dollars to all these different people, he gave pardons? That's the question you should be answering. And we know that Trump is going to be grateful for this idea because now he can say to Paul and Grascia or whatever coprophagic phylum that he wants, that, hey, look,

you're definitely not going to get in any trouble for this. I'll even give you a preemptive pardon, you know, at the end of my administration, no matter what, go, you know, go take care of this for me. And by Biden doing this, he makes it easier for Trump to do that. I also, and I made this point at the time, I think it would be better for America,

worse, arguably possibly for Liz Cheney and those guys, but better for America if Trump overreached and prosecuted those people, right? And because sometimes you have to show, not tell, right? Examples of the school of mankind, and you'll learn it no other. And so by taking that option off the table, it lets Trump bitch and whine about how justice was thwarted without actually having to put his money where his mouth was.

And I think there would be a huge backlash if we started having political trials for these people. It would, again, be bad for those people. I would contribute to a legal defense fund. it would be better for their reputations. I mean, Liz Cheney would be better sued politically as a martyr. I think she'd stand up to it and do full Thomas More routine,

film version, not a real-life version. And it would be better for the country to force Trump to actually either renege on his promises to his base and not follow through with that nonsense or follow through with the nonsense and let the system react to it. But instead, Biden short-circuited everything for grotesque reasons and gave everybody the talking points they wanted without actually having

them to have to risk political capital to back them up. Okay. I am going to answer my own question that the two of you, uh, well, Steve totally dodged it. Jonah half dodged it. The answer is Biden's partons. I think terrible as Trump's pardons are. And it's a real race to the bottom here. Let's be clear. The person who I talked about who was being released in Fayetteville, North Carolina, his name is Genesis Lee Witted Jr. He was sentenced to 35 years. That's 420 months in prison. He was the leader of the Bloods Gang called Addicted to Money or ATM.

His gang, he and his gang members were linked to home invasion robberies, carjacking, shootings, financial fraud, obviously drug trafficking. One of the victims, one of the female victims, and to remind you, girlfriends of drug dealers were also frequently harmed during these invasions. On two occasions, Witted and his accomplices poured boiling water on these female victims until they disclosed the locations of drugs and or currency. During one of these invasions, a taser was deployed on a woman's genital area. This man's being released this week back into his community. Imagine being the female victim who had the guts to testify against these guys this whole gang and the whole gang went away and now this guy's going to be back out on the street imagine what her life is like this week because of joe biden's decision to not

actually look into whether these were nonviolent drug offenders like this guy smoked a joint and ended up getting 35 years in jail no look at what actually happened and she's fearing for her this week um for good reason and god help us if anything happens to her so i agree i agree I agree with everything that you just said they're accepting, except your lead in, except your conclusion. I look at some of the, think about the January Sixers. You know, they didn't directly kill anybody, but you've got a defendant like Matthew Kroll, who stole a police baton from a cop and then beat numerous other cops with the

baton. You have the guy who used the shield. I can't believe we're going to get into a debate about, like, who's violence is worse. This is why the worst thing is worse. But Steve, that is a single incident. This guy dedicated his life to terrorizing a community over years, not a single event. And he's going to go kill people, the witnesses who testified against him. I guess I'm just not worried about the January 6th defendants. They may commit other crimes. I will grant you. But I don't think they're going to January 6th again and go back to a life of January 6th thing the way that these guys are

going to. That's our fundamental disagreement. That's our fundamental disagreement. I think what Trump is saying here, I mean, look, this is somebody who from the podium on numerous occasions has advocated violence, right? He is now blessed what they've done, as I've said. He's repeatedly called them hostages. He was asked about this directly in his Oval Office session that night, about the proud boys specifically and basically said they're patriotic Americans who love their country. They deserve pardons. I mean, if that's how you've operated, and look, you don't have to read, you know, all 800 or plus pages of the January 6th Committee report to understand why they did what they did in attempt to steal an election. They are going to do this again.

They're going to do it again and again and again. And it's not going to be, it's not going to be about stealing an election. It's going to be about anything they want to do. I just don't think there's a lot of witnesses sitting home wondering when someone's going to come kill them this week based on the Trump partons like there are hundreds. What about the young man? What about the young man who turned in his father? What about the DC cops who went this week and got restraining orders against some of these January 6 attackers? They certainly are afraid.

Well, I'll tell you, restraining orders, sure not going to help this woman. Okay, we're moving on. and it's going to be actually kind of a similar vibe. So Trump has an EO ending birthright citizenship in the United States. Of course, this is based on the 14th Amendment, Section 1, Clause 1, all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States. Advisory opinions went over the legal side of this in great length.

This debate is all going to turn around and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, and it's going to turn around whether a president would have the authority to do this regardless compared to Congress. Like, do you need an amendment to the 14th Amendment? Do you need a congressional law to do this? Or can a president simply reinterpret the 14th Amendment on his own? There are Supreme Court cases on point. The 1898 United States versus Juan Kim Arc is one folks can go read or Plyler v. Doe in 1982 has some dicta about this as well. but I don't want to talk about the legal side of this, which I feel like is where everyone's head is.

I get it. But this thing's going to the Supreme Court. Nine people are going to decide this question, and I don't think Trump's going to win this. I want to just talk about actually the policy of birthright citizenship, because we're one of the only countries in the world to have birthright citizenship, the idea that if you are born here,

you are a citizen of this country. I don't hear a lot of debates over whether birthright citizenship is a good idea or a bad idea. Like, if you had a magic wand, Jonah, would you have birthright citizenship in the United States or not? Probably not. I'll be honest. I don't think, this is not one of my holy of holies. I don't think it is, I think there was a perfectly legitimate argument for it when this was

a underpopulated vast continental nation. At the same time, I'm not passionately against it either. I think the people who turn it into, oh, we're being played for sucker. and all that kind of stuff, it's so symbolic to people on both sides of the issue that I think they get carried away. And I care about that symbolism, right? I mean, getting rid of it does send a signal to the world, and I don't like that signal, right? And because it doesn't, I don't think it actually matters that much in terms of numbers or any of that kind of stuff, or in terms of the kind of people that become Americans, I've seen no evidence to say that, oh, you know, these anchor babies

turned into MS-13 or something like that, right? I think there's a lot of just hysteria about all of this. But if one could change the policy without feeding the larger culture war debates about it, I'd be okay with it. I do want to say, I think you're right to focus on the policy question. And it's also worth point out just the politics of it for a second. I think most of the people around Trump know the Supreme Court's going to call BS on this. And they don't care.

And the fact that they know, this, at minimum, this lets Trump tell his base, I tried. And then that no good Rino Supreme Court screwed me. Once again, by the way, something that Biden did, something that Obama did, something that Trump has done, this idea that, like, do something that you know is unconstitutional. make the Supreme Court say so the headlines read Supreme Court strikes down X Y or Z and the Supreme Court gets blamed and you get all the credit with your base for trying to do it in the first place instead of having to explain to your base I would love like this is great and we support this so we should advocate for it in Congress or try to get a constitutional amendment to do this thing and instead you're like oh I'm sorry I tried but I couldn't It's constitutionally, it's very much like throwing a puppy into a wood chipper. And then the headlines are, woodchipper destroys puppy, right? No. A little much for the time that we're recording this.

But yes, okay. That's a lot, Jonah. And so it's incredibly cynical. And there's so many other real life examples he could have chosen. And he goes to that. Because the bad thing, wow, making the point. You don't want to live in my mind. Anyway, I mean, it's like, it's like the, it's like the, when the New York Times

puts, slaps a headline on a Palestinian ramming Israelis in a car, and they say, you know, car strikes pedestrians or something. That's maybe not quite as colorful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like all these people out, you know, like where Biden left to say all these people being killed by illegal guns. Like they're just like these cartoon guns riding around by themselves

without fingers attached to them, killing people. Anyway, my point is they know it's not going to pass muster at the Supreme Court. They don't care. And it's part of an effort at minimum just to say, I tried, right, as like Obama and Biden did. But I think part of it is also

you know, like an effort to further talk about how the swamp and the deep state or in the establishment are arrayed against him and he's the only tribune of the people. And I'm not saying he's going to go full Andrew Jackson or anything like that and say, let them, you know, try to enforce it, you know. But it gets you closer to that kind of thing, by the way.

Yeah. No, I, you didn't get any pushback from me about Biden being a lawless president, you know. So I think, so I think that's, you just made an important point. And but there's a, there's a reason behind what he's doing. And look, I don't, I don't know whether this is Trump. or whether this is his team. Certainly, this is something that people like Michael Anton have been arguing for a long time. I was reading the Volok conspiracy, some sort of archival arguments there, sort of on the back

and forth, on the legal side of things. And they were pointing to a back and forth between James Ho, who Sarah interviewed at our summit, and Michael Anton, I think it was in 2018. John Eastman, before John Eastman was John Eastman for the reasons John Eastman is now known as John Eastman as the... Okay, but just a footnote to all this. Isn't this fascinating how much ink or digital ink is spilled on the legality of a president changing birthright citizenship instead of the policy? Shouldn't we start with whether we want birthright citizenship in the country? And then if we do want birthright citizenship, great, continue as is. If you don't think birthright citizenship, citizenship is a good policy, then here's the ways to change it. Stop debating just the legality of this one type of change. No, I think that's exactly backwards.

And this is the reason why. And this is, I think, part of what Trump's team, I wouldn't attribute this thinking strategy to Trump is why what they're doing. What else did Trump do on that first day where he, in effect, claimed powers to I would say violate the Constitution in a way that I think would normally cause great uproar if it weren't done in this context, this sort of news hurricane that we've been living through over the past week. He just said he wasn't going to 75 days.

He's not going to enforce TikTok. Again, we won the young vote. I think I wanted through TikTok. So I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok, okay? Right? This law is law of the Congress passed overwhelmingly Supreme Court weighed in. Trump's just said, I'm not doing it. Worth noting that Joe Biden, who actually signed the law, also said he wasn't going to do it,

which is insane because you signed the law because you thought America's national security was at risk, but then didn't enforce it. Why? Anyway, go ahead. Well, and look, I mean, on the practical, on practical terms, Biden didn't need to say anything. He just didn't need to do anything. Like, that was his attitude, which I don't think it should be his attitude. I think he's wrong.

But, like, he didn't have much time left in his term. He wasn't going to get anything done, just on a practical level. It was unnecessary for him to say what he said, but, you know, he's petty and small. But in this instance, Trump is announcing that he's sort of above the law. I think he's doing the same thing with birthright citizenship. And look, this has been something I think that was consistent throughout some of Trump's first term where he just doesn't believe that he's subject to the laws that govern others. And when he takes the oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, he doesn't mean it.

He'll do what he wants to do. I think this is sort of laying a precedent for Trump to do this again and again and again in other contexts and to sort of whip his supporters and, and, to probably to earn the public buy-in of elected Republicans in Washington to say that they're with them. It becomes a loyalty test. They're with him. Yeah, Trump wants to violate the law. Trump wants to ignore the Constitution. We're with him. We're, this, you know, this is such an important issue, or this is such a, we're in an emergency moment, a crisis moment. Trump has to do these things. I think I think we'll see more of this last word to you Jonah what should we be focused on in the birthright citizenship debate

I'm torn between the two of you because I think I think Steve makes a good point about the this is part of a larger pattern for Trump of wanting to be sort of an extra constitutional leader and and this fits into that at the same time there's a lot of talk about that, right? People are talking about Trump's contempt for the Constitution. They're on the lookout for it. I still stand by my prediction that I made the day of the inauguration that every single one of his executive orders will be challenged in court, even if many of them were thrown out pretty quickly for standing or whatever. There are lawyers just flooding this. I'm not sure we have seen challenges to the renaming of the Gulf of America.

And I think that one would withstand any challenges. Can I ask you a question, sort of not worth your time adjacent question about that? Will you start calling it the Gulf of America? Are you going to continue to call it the Gulf of Mexico? Huh. Well, that's interesting. I mean, are you going to sort of like miracle of 34th Street? The post office says he's Santa, so he's Santa.

Just because Donald Trump declares that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America, are you just going to, like, betray the spirit of the American Revolution and bow down to King Donald? do what he says? Well, this actually maybe goes to the greater point of which is, is it, do you ask about the policy first or do you ask about the legality first? Because as a policy matter, I think it's fine to have the name be the Gulf of America. I grew up going to Galveston every year. That's on the Gulf of now America, for those who are curious. I'm a big fan of the Gulf of America. I don't know. I'm trying to get used to it just saying it. It's a little hard. But of course, The way these things actually work, as you know, Jonah, is it's not whether I adopt the name.

It's whether my kids adopt the name because they will have known nothing else. And it's whether the next president changes it back to Gulf of Mexico. And then the president after that changes it to Gulf of America again. And we have these fights over what we call things that will be so emblematic of the tearing apart of the United States that, frankly, I just hope that doesn't happen. And I don't care what we call it. Let's just pick one. Because the irony that in the same breath, basically Trump renames the Gulf of America, while taking back the renaming that Obama did of Mount McKinley, like, with no irony.

Like, Obama renamed something and I don't like the renaming, so we're going to unrename it back to Mount McKinley. But now I'm going to rename something. Really? It's a good thing the country isn't facing any serious issues, which gives us time to talk about these things and for Donald Trump to think about the Gulf of America. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of

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And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Okay, well, we're shifting into our next topic, which is all the other things Donald Trump has done in his first 72 hours of his presidency, Steve. one big thing is the question that we all had going into this Trump presidency would, what would retribution actually look like? And the first thing that we've seen is the revocation of a lot of folks' security clearances. So for instance, the 50 national security folks who signed a letter about Hunter Biden's laptop had their security clearances revoked. I sort of shrugged at that one. I'll acknowledge that. I'm just, you don't have a right to a security clearance after you leave the government.

I'm not sure exactly why we do all of that. However, then he revoked John Bolton, who had been his national security advisor, had gone toe to toe with the Iranian regime and has been, is on Iran's assassination list. They make that very clear. They mention his name frequently. There was an attempt, right? There was an attempt that was prosecuted in 2022. He's the only non-president, really, to get that sort of name-check treatment from the Iranian regime in America, I believe.

Two others. Mike Pompeo and Brian Hook also, following the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, have had real, persistent, serious threats on their lives, plots being uncovered, some of which is public, much of which is not. Well, Donald Trump revoked the security detail for John Bolton. And Steve, you and I had a little bit of a conversation about this where I said, again, this is like the, what do you look at first? As a matter of policy, I don't know what to do about the fact that a lot of people who work in government end up getting death threats. We can't give them all security details. At the same time, I don't want to discourage people from going into government because they might get death threats. That's a very complicated question. But something you and I 100% agree on is, however, we should determine.

determine who gets security details not based on their support for the current administration. Because if we're revoking security details for retributive reasons, A, I just don't see how good people are going to go into government. And I mean good in both senses, meaning competent, they're good at their jobs, and good, meaning morally good. But even if they do, if they're then faced with the decision of, you know, well, should we assassinate this foreign super, bad guy, they're going to have to think about their families and their lives after that and say like, and if the next president doesn't have my back, my family's going to get killed and all for political reasons, not just like, well, we don't have the resources to give everyone

a security detail reasons. So that seemed pretty bad to me, Steve. Yeah, I agree with you. Let me just start with some context. I mean, you know, so much of what we've seen in in these first few days of the second Trump administration is reminiscent of the debates and the quandaries and the challenges of the first Trump administration covering the first Trump administration. Because I will admit that in some of the news coverage that I've read about decisions that Trump has made in these early days, there is sometimes this sort of overwrought hand-wringing, this hysteria about things which are not that uncommon. I mean, Trump might take them further.

He might do them in a different way. But, you know, these are, to a certain extent, these are things in many cases that happen with a change of administration again and again, and again, Republican and Democrat, Democrat to Republican. If Donald Trump wants to go through the bureaucracies and say, I aim to remove the people who I believe will fight against my policymaking on agriculture, my policymaking at the State Department, what have you. He has every right to do that. He's the president. He was elected. If you didn't want him, if you didn't want his policies, you quit your job and campaigned harder against them. So I'm pretty sympathetic to the argument.

that sort of the Trump world makes, that there's a double standard here and that the media covers breathless media coverage of, you know, firing National Security Council staffers or suspending their work so that you can conduct a review to know whether they're likely to, you know, do good work in a Trump administration. Those things are more or less fine with some qualifications.

But to your point, Sarah, what we're seeing here, I think, is different. And it's different because of why Trump has taken some of these measures. The retribution aspect of this, particularly with respect to John Bolton, I think is appalling and dangerous. And when Trump was asked about this, the first. first thing he said was John Bolton is a dumb person and he disagreed with me on all these things. And I used him effectively, but he disagreed with me. And you just stop and think about that. These are not theoretical threats. There was an attempt made back in 2022. As I said earlier, there are real and persistent threats to those three men. And I believe, and I believe,

believe actually a number of others as well who have not been as much publicized. The idea that Donald Trump would, in effect, risk their lives by taking away that additional security is appalling and not terribly surprising. Jonah, in the first 72 hours, what have you been most focused on for good or bad? Well, I mean, I had to say I'd be the most focused on, but I do think it's worth pointing out. I agreed with a lot of his executive orders and or at least I had no fundamental objection to a lot of them, right? I mean, if I don't know if I'm going to get better water pressure in my shower, but if an executive order does that, that's great, you know? and I'm not particularly upset about the DEI stuff.

In fact, you know, on net, I'm glad he did it. Part of my problem with the conversation about all that is you get this flattening where you say, well, you know, this, you know, it's so great that he did this thing about, about water supply and low flush toilets. And also it's bad that he, you know, pardon this guy who held a taser to the skull of a cop, right? And you make it sound like it's like they're just all single units and you can put pebbles in a jar. And if you have more good pebbles in the good jar than bad ones or whatever, then somehow it was on net fine. And it's like not all executive orders are equal, right?

Like you can have an executive order that is utterly meaningless and you can have an executive order that is fantastic. and you can have an executive order that is truly base and grotesque. And I think there are a lot of people on the right, a lot of friends of mine on the right, who haven't figured out how to score this stuff because they generally want to be enthusiastic about Trump being back in and Harris losing. And they really do love the delicious tears of the left these days, which are copious and flowing. Talk about water pressure. And that's all fine, but like at the same time, that clip of Donald Trump being asked about the Bolton thing and him not even bothering to put it in a plausible, a plausible policy and just basically saying, you know, I mean, not in so many words, but saying, I don't like the guy, you know, and that's why if the Iranians want to kill him, I'm not going to get in their way.

that is just so friggin reprehensible. And again, it just so, what I wrote after the election that I was not, I did not have the emotional state that I thought I was going to have because I was actually, if Harris had won, I would have spent four years hearing people tell me, you did this, you wanted this, this is because of you. And as much as I think that's nonsense, that gets really tedious. And instead, I'm going to get to spend the next four. a year saying, I told you so. I informed you thusly that Donald Trump's not changing,

right? And he's emboldened now. And so some of the things I've paid attention to are just, I mentioned briefly that Paul and Gracia guy, I don't know if you guys follow who he is. He's a horrible. I mean, I think he has hooves. He's just a horrible person. And he is now the White House liaison at the Department of Justice. A big fan of Andrew Tate, who's rationalized all sorts of Andrew Tate things, regular contributor to Gateway Pundit. Yeah, I mean, he's just a cranky loon. And that's the thing that-

He's already violated the Hatch Act several times since being at the Department of Justice. Yeah. And so, like, that's the thing that bothers me, I think about more, is it's even if these guys don't turn into the friggin' SS or anything, right? And even if we don't get this dystopia that some of our friends on the anti-Trump right, are fretting about, right? Even if it's bad but not the end of America and all that kind of thing,

we're going to see on the right in Republican circles and conservative circles a whole generation of really shabby people credentialized who are going to go into the machinery of the Republican Party, who are going to go into, we're going to be accepted in conservative of punditry circles and intellectual circles because they're going to have this great

credential, you know, after their name about where they served in government. And they're, and that's the kind of thing. I just been noticing, like, on TV, just I see these, these people who I only know as really deranged Twitter trolls or, you know, stupid podcast bros with like important titles after their names now. And that's very depressing to me. I'm not saying it's the thing everyone should focus on, but this is the world I live in. And I despair at it from time to time.

Well, and one of them is going to have a title more important than White House liaison to the Justice Department. He could well have the title, FBI director. I mean, Cash Patel was a regular contributor to Gateway Pundit. I'll tell you, my thing right now,

Again, it's sort of like the renaming of Mount McKinley and then renaming the Gulf of Mexico without realizing the irony that you just undid another president's renaming. Trump has bragged about undoing all of Biden's executive orders and hirings and, you know, sort of legacy agenda items in the first few days of his presidency. And what does he do to shore up his own legacy agenda hirings? exactly the same process that Joe Biden used, which was exactly the same process that Joe Biden used to undo all of Trump's legacy and hirings and decisions. I just, when are these guys going to learn to stop, you know, hanging a mission accomplished banner when you're only using executive orders.

Courts are going to strike down large chunks of it and anything they don't, the next president will simply undo with the stroke of a pen in the first few hours. Having a four-year win, I just isn't a win to me. It's not even interesting to me. And yet that's exactly what Trump has done and his side is cheering and the other side is gnashing teeth. And we're just going to do this every four years and no one's going to notice that nothing actually moves the ball forward. Nothing changes.

We just swing the pendulum back and forth to see who can do the bigger thing that will only last four years. Can I ask you a law question about that? Yeah. I've read a few things making the case on the birthright citizenship thing that it's a more open question. about whether or not it has, it is constitutionally sacrosaning in the face of actual legislation defining the jurisdiction stuff that, I agree. Not saying that like Congress obviously has the power to get rid of birthright because of citizenship, but it's not, but it's a debatable proposition and there are good arguments in both sides.

Where do you come down on that? Or is that true and where do you come down on? So I said this at the beginning, right? The question is not only does the 14th Amendment enthrined birthright citizenship, but the question that the Supreme Court, may not even need to answer that question because they may be able to say, we need not reach the question of whether the 14th Amendment ensures birthright citizenship. What we can say is that a president cannot change the definition and the requirements for citizenship through executive order. Go back, try again, and we'll let you know if you come up with an actual law to do this. In fact, I think it is the most likely outcome at this point because remember, what the Supreme

Court loves to decide more than anything else is who gets to make that decision. And so often the answer is just not the president or the answer is not the courts. You know, that's up to the school board. So, yeah, I don't know the answer to it. I think it's a tough call based on the history and the debates that we have around the 14th Amendment, which pretty clearly only accepted Native Americans and diplomats. I just don't think illegal aliens are like that. But this gets to a larger problem. You know, the Episcopalian pastor who gave that homily that President Trump hated

about how he needed to show how she hoped he would show mercy to illegal aliens in the country. I mean, this gets to my frustration with the left. Then advocate to change the law. But it is not reasonable to say, we have a law that says these people can't be here, cannot cross our border, shouldn't be in the country. But then you must, it's a question of mercy. once they're here. The problem is they won't advocate to change the laws and make it legal to just come into the country whenever you want, however you want, whoever you want, because that

would be unpopular. So instead, they just have chosen basically not to enforce those laws, but to say that it's good not to enforce them and like a moral thing not to enforce them. Yeah, I think that's also been really, really bad, not least of which, bad for the people who then come here illegally, live as second class citizens are far more likely to be the victims of crime because they can't really report those crimes, far more likely to be trafficked by the gangs that are paid to take them across the border, child labor, all of those things are because we either won't change our law or won't enforce our law. And the same people, like, think they're the good guys on the other side of that. Halloween is on Disney Plus, so you can feel a little fear.

What's this? Or a little more fear. I see dead people. Or a lot of fear. Mom. Or you can get completely terrified. Who sent that? Choose wisely.

With Halloween on Disney Plus. Okay. Not worth your time. Jonah, you sent this piece. And I just... was tickled by it. This is in the New York Times. The Right is winning the battle for hearts and minds by Thomas B. Edsel.

The full-scale assault by the conservative movement on liberal domination of the nation's culture has begun to deliver key victories. The right has gnashed its teeth for decades over the leftward tilt of academia, the literary world, the press, television, and streaming video. And then it goes on to talk about all the ways in which the right has started to, to make real inroads on the culture and some of the reasons for that. Jonah, they'll just, before I even talk about my own thoughts on this, what were your takeaways? Why did you suggest this?

I thought it was, I've been, I've been following the vibe shift conversation of late. And I, and, you know, as we did, actually, we just discussed a couple weeks ago or a week ago, the mood change in the country, politically, culturally, is so much greater than, reflected in the election returns. Kamala Harris lost by 1.5 points. Trump's victory in the electoral college ranks 44th out of 60 was not a landslide, right? It was decisive. And one of the reasons why it feels so decisive is because all the swing states went one direction, right? Plus, if you start looking at that county data, huge numbers of shifts in blue states and blue counties towards Republicans. And so it feels like there's a momentum thing going, but I don't

think that captures it either. I think we're in a moment where the sort of metaphysics of politics have changed in a way that Republicans used to work within the constructs of the left. And so they were terrified of being called racist. They self-edited to avoid being called racist to avoid being called mean or heartless or any of these kinds of things or exclusionary or sexist or whatever and something flipped where Republicans no longer seek the approval of liberals they no longer seek um the uh to prove that no we're really nice people too kind of thing right and instead there's this sort of like if they call you a racist that's a badge of honor kind of vibe. And the fact that that's working or perceived to be working, I think is freaking out

the left in ways that they have never been freaked out before. And frankly, I'm enjoying some of it. At the same time, I think one of the things in that Tom Edsel piece that I put in the Slack was that, and I read it fast because it was right before we started recording. I think one of the things that a lot of people leave out is it's not that conservatives are winning. It's that the liberals are losing, right? That they went too far. They overextended. They, you know, the transgender prison surgery thing was such a perfect, almost parodic example of it. And it happened at the same time the technology has fallen apart in front of the, in front of liberals, right? The mainstream networks have no cultural clout anymore.

Cable is losing whatever culture, or the exception of Fox is losing its cultural clout. People are retreating to podcasts and YouTube videos. And conservatives have always had an advantage in alternative media like that, right? Every time there's a new mass communication medium, the two earliest adopters are pornographers and right-wingers, right? From direct mail to VHS, all that kind of stuff, because they were blocked by the gatekeepers of the mainstream media and the elite media. and, you know, from Hollywood to NBC, NBC and all the rest, all that stuff is gone. And so, like, a lot of right-wingers actually get to have the cultural fair that they want on podcasts and whatnot. And it's not, I don't think, a sign that the conservators are winning a lot of hearts and minds necessarily.

It's that the left completely blew it. They ruin the reputation of universities. You have all of these, like, normie bourgeois families wanting to send their kids. to southern schools because they think they'll get a normal college education and college experience down there. And so it's sort of a perfect storm kind of thing. And the inability of a lot of people on the left to understand that it was more that they failed than the rights succeeded is something I find really fascinating. Okay, so Steve, here's what I was giggling at, which is, as you read through this very long piece, it came

talking about how the right, you know, dominates podcasts and the right, you know, fixed all these, you know, new technologies, Elon Musk bought Twitter and there's Gab and true social. And at the same time, fewer people are watching CNN and MSNBC. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, chicken and egg, man. The people aren't watching CNN MSNBC because of the message, not because you're not winning because they're not watching it anymore. Or that, like, all we needed was just more social media and the people had no choice but to show up at gab and parlor and true social. No, they went there because it was offering something different and they just aren't grappling with that. And then towards the very bottom of the piece, it has this very long quote

from Yasha Monk in an email to the author here. He wrote, each time Democrats lose, they blame the nature of modern communication. Since Trump was reelected last November, they have lamented that left of center donors haven't invested into creating progressive podcast that could rival the influence of Joe Rogan, ignoring the fact that, of course, Rogan's podcast never had such donors. These arguments miss the forest for the trees. The truth is that Democrats are now in the midst of an epistemological crisis. They look at the country through simplistic categories, for example, by assuming that it can be split into two rival blocks of whites and people of color. They talk about it in linguistic register that most Americans find deeply alienating. Most of all, they continue to express themselves,

with extreme care, lest they inadvertently end up saying the quote-unquote wrong thing. Now we go back to Edsel's description, and he says, among the most damaging developments for the left include the failure of elite universities, bastions of liberalism, to deal with anti-Semitic protests during Israel's attack on Gaza. The discrediting of academia's commitment to free speech as a result of the disclosure of their cancellation of controversial speakers, the relative absence of conservative professors in most fields, the requirement.

that faculty members file annual mandatory diversity statements. The current exodus of reporters, editors, and subscribers at the Washington Post? Like, again, no, that's not what caused it. Where Edsel used to work for years, right? This is the symptom. The reason that they're leaving is that liberals dominated the culture, that Americans got to see what the culture looked like under liberalism, and they didn't like it.

So they looked for a new culture and the thing that's on offer is this right-wing culture that's, you know, available, such as it is. But this gets to Jonah's point about the pardons, for instance. Like, you actually do want people to see what the world is like under X, and then they can, you know, choose it or reject it. The right is winning right now because Americans got to see the domination of the left on culture. And they didn't like it. I think the same thing could, of course, easily have.

happened to the right. But it's whatever it's, you know, he goes on to also quote Nate Silver, talking about the Democratic Party resulting in the indigo blob, the merger between formerly nonpartisan institutions like the media, academic, academia and public health on the one hand, institutions that draw almost exclusively from the ranks of college graduates and expressly partisan and political instruments of the Democratic Party and progressive advocacy groups. On the other hand, it underwent a double failure. Its institutions serve the public increasingly poorly, but it's also increasingly losing politically. If Trump's victory against Harris campaign that literally ran out of ideas wasn't proof enough of that, people are also voting

with their feet, fleeing blue states and cities. Corporations that embraced wholeness have now done 180-degree turn. And I clicked on the link to what he meant by Harris literally running out of ideas. And it cracked me up because 14 days before the election, he was talking about Donald Trump's message. He went to the website. And the first thing you get is, they're not after me. They're after you. I'm just standing in the way. And it's a picture of Donald Trump looking fierce, you know? And then he went to Kamala Harris's website. And it says, 14 days left. That's the closing message. So yeah, I feel like, you know, is it worth our time to try to explain to liberals that they still have no idea what, forget the politics, which is now a slight majority of the country.

But I mean the overwhelming majority of the country that doesn't know what they're talking about, doesn't want to know what they're talking about and thinks everything they touch is a disaster and a failure. they still think now it's like, well, we need Joe Rogan of the left and we need true social. No, you had truth social of the right of the left. This is the federalist society problem. The right creates the federalist society to stand a thwart, the overwhelming institutions on the left. I mean, the federalist society of the left is called law school.

Yes, exactly. And they can't understand why a federalist society of the left has still not taken off, despite having all the donors and all the stuff. the things that the federal society never had. It was some students at three different universities who met up. That's it. Not only is this worth our time. I mean, I think we could do an entire podcast discussion based just on this.

Having said that, I have not read the Edsel piece because Jonah dropped it in at what, 9-11 for our 9-15. 9-15 start. You obviously conspired to make me look like an idiot so that I couldn't talk about the thing that we're going to. That requires no conspiracy. I'm eager to read this piece that you guys find so fascinating and that we're talking about. We'll put in the show notes for you, Steve.

Yeah, I appreciate that. A couple of big thoughts. I would love to get back to this because I mean, there's, I have so much to say I can go on for hours and I won't. The, you know, on these, on the rise of these alternative. sources of information, the alternative media. I mean, this has been going on literally for decades. There's a really terrific book by Paul Matzgo at the Cato Institute called The Radio Right. And it was about the rise of sort of Christian talk radio two, three decades before Rush Limbaugh was known to anybody and became a national figure.

And he looks both at sort of the environment that gave birth to, those alternative radio broadcasts and the extraordinary efforts. I mean, you have to actually, like, read the memos, the DOJ memos and the White House transcripts of what the Kennedy administration did to put these folks out of business. I mean, you want to talk about something to make you paranoid about the power of government? Read that, and it's absolutely terrifying. But we've seen this again and again. You know, one parallel to the Federalist Society would be the rise of think tanks.

the Heritage Foundation was created in 1973 because really smart conservatives didn't have any place to go because they were so unwelcome at universities. So they created these think tanks where conservatives could go and do the kinds of thinking and research that college professors did on the regular if they were on the left. You know, you've seen this again and again and again and again. And I think obviously technology has sort of a flattening, a democratizing effect on all of these things. And it sounds like what Edsel is doing is just grousing about what that means for him and for people who think like him. On the broader question of this cultural shift, I'm not cool

enough to call it a vibe shift. And Jonah's been studying the vibes. I'm not really, I'm too old to even understand what vibes are these days. I think vibe is already cringe. So I think you actually already missed it, Steve. Yeah, I thought Jonah's argument was suss. But the, Skibbittie. Skimity is definitely already cringe, I think. But there was another article this week in the Wall Street Journal looking at sort of the rise of college Republicans and why college Republicans are sort of cool again and contrasting it to what happened in 2017, 2016, 2017, where if you wore a MAGA hat, you were sort of, it took a lot of courage to wear a MAGA hat. you are announcing yourself as sort of an outcast, you are inviting scorn and ridicule from your friends on campus. And, you know, this Wall Street Journal piece describes a very different

set of circumstances now where it's almost sort of cool to be a conservative, to be a college Republican, to be affiliated with Talking Points USA to wear the MAGA hat. And, you know, if you look at why that is, I mean, they're, you know, I think we are, we repeatedly refer to. to the fallacy. What is it the monocausal fallacy and the invalidity of explaining things with a singular explanation? But I mean, when you look at who's driving this, obviously it's young white men. If you look at who drove Donald Trump's popularity, it's young white men. If you look at some of the congressional elections, the victories of Republican MAGA-style candidates in competitive Republican primaries. The reason the MAGA candidates won in places like

Wisconsin-8 was sort of a rallying effect of these young white men. And I remember, this goes to the DEI conversation. This goes to what Trump is doing right now. This goes to the blind spots of the left. I remember back in 1996, when I flew out to California in the fall of that year to spend the final two months of that election season working on California's Proposition 209, which used the language, Martin Luther King's language, language in 1964 Civil Rights Act, to argue against racial quotas and preferences in contracting state government work, college admissions, what have you. And one of the arguments that we made at the time was this is going to have a compounding effect. It will create resentment. And the numbers, you know, the numbers in the

California system, you looked at numbers from UC Berkeley or UCLA. And it was literally just the case that, quote, unquote, preferred minorities were given, you know, 120 points on the SAT test. If you're white, you didn't get the points. If you were, you know, a certain minority, you got. Jew 120, 120. Yeah, Asian, Asian kids did not get, get the points. And Asians are the new Jews. It was so obvious, blindingly obvious at the time that when you have the government acting in such an aggressively discriminatory fashion that the people who are discriminated against were going to be angry about it. That was.

Especially when you brag about discriminating against them. No, it was in your face. And, you know, you couldn't even, it was the case that if you made. that case, if you made the argument, like, hey, this seems unfair. You were branded a racist for saying that. If you're arguing for colorblind application of laws, you were described as a racist for making that argument. Do you remember the affirmative action bake sales on college campuses in the 90s? Yeah. Where college Republicans or some even like subsidiary group of college Republicans so college Republicans wouldn't get kicked off campus would

host a bake sale and you would pay depending on your race. Right. So it would be a dollar for a cookie for a white person, but it would be 50 cents if you were black. It would be 75 cents if you were Hispanic, et cetera, et cetera. It was sort of the, and it was meant to provoke this conversation about why would this be fair? And here we have it. Now 30 years later, the end of the affirmative action bake sales. But Steve, okay, here's my question to the two of you to end this, because you're right. We could talk about this all day. Is a little piece of you, jealous or some word that the Germans, no doubt, have, that if you were in college right now and conservatism was cool, you would have been getting all the chicks?

Jonah got all the chicks anyway. So he's not really worried about that. But like, isn't it weird, like, when I was in college, it was so uncool to be a conservative. I mean, I've told this joke before, but I mean, it's a joke, but it was also serious. Like, someone put on my dorm room door, I hate poor people. And it was like, it was like, like meant to be funny, but also very much like she's a Republican, so she hates poor people. And now it's like, no, you're the establishment. You're the man. And like conservatives are the cool ones. I don't know. Again, like, I don't know that I would be part of conservatism or republicanism now. I'm obviously still a conservative, but I don't know that they would, they call

conservative that anymore. But yeah, like, it'd be cool to be part of the cool club. Man. Well, we're sorry Sarah for your trauma in college. It was possible to be both conservative and cool, I think. Let's just talk about it in a theoretical way. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, if you look like George Clooney, maybe. The, I don't know, I liked being a conservative. What about me and Jonah? I liked being a conservative on campus. And I, I, we've had this discussion before. You know, I think I grew a lot having my views challenged in, you know, beers with friends, in the classroom, in my discussions with administrators. I mean, the reason I came to Washington, D.C., was because I went to the president of DePaul

University and said, I really think we ought to have Jack Kemp as our commencement speaker. And Jack Kemp, I mean, that was a revolutionary thing to do. I had people who said to me before I went to the president trying to bring Jack Kemp as our commencement speaker at DePaw, are you sure you want to do that? Are you sure you, you know, like it was taking some huge risk? And the president responded. I mean, he was very sort of direct and I appreciated his candor. He said, the faculty have a veto on commencement speakers.

They will never approve that. But we have Bill Bennett coming. And you can, you know, pick Bill Bennett up from the airport. And I did. And he got me a job at the Heritage Foundation. And sort of I came to Washington ever since I loved being a conservative on campus for that reasons. I worry about conservatism today as it's understood by young men on campus, young men and women, but young men in particular. Because I think there are, in many cases,

having grown up, having come a political age during the past 10 years where they've known nothing other than Donald Trump-style republicanism, so many of them are less invested in conservatism because of the ideas, which is what drew me to conservatism from the beginning. And more because it's sort of a permission to be an asshole. Like you can just be really rude all the time and be like, well, that's what the president does. And look at these guys and look at how this guy conducts himself on cable TV. We can do the same thing. And, you know, you look at the people in the alternative media that we were talking about. And the, the way that they conduct themselves, not all of them, but some of them on this sort of new

MAGA right. And that's the behavior. That's what they do. No, no, the problem is I want to be iconoclastic and cool, but by definition, if you're cool, you're not iconoclastic. And that kind of sucks. Yeah. I mean, I mean, again, my college experience is so sui generis that it's difficult to, I mean, I'm the Rosa Parks of gender integration, remember? And, um, and, um, So I would have been controversial, even if conservative was cool, it would not have trumped feminism as law in my college, right? And I mean like Andrea Dworkin kind of feminism, not like, you know, Christina Hoffsummer's feminism. Anyway. Those institutions are still the same right now, at least.

Conservatives still aren't getting hired at these universities. Now, maybe that's going to shift. But right now, you would still have kind of the same experience where your professors have, you know, life tenure, basically, are far to the left and aren't going to like you. Yeah. And so this is a point, I actually edited a book about young conservatives, but 20 years ago. And the point I made in there about, and I've made elsewhere, that for all the disadvantages conservatives have in higher education, one of the great advantages that they have is the best learning is done secretically. And when you constantly are questioning the premises of what

you're hearing and engaging with it critically, you learn it better. And, you know, fish, live fish swim upstream, dead fish float downstream. You can be the smartest lefty in the world at Brown University. And you're not going to hear anything really except maybe, you know, some stuff about whether or not Israel should be liquidated. You're not going to hear anything from your professors that you don't already agree with. And so you don't get that kind of critical engagement and friction that you get when you're constantly having to look up the better arguments to explain why your professors are wrong. And this is why conservatives generally, I've been saying this for years, all other things being equal, if you can stay conservative after going to a good

school for four years, you're going to be just a bit sharper than most of, and I don't mean on sort of innate cognitive ability. I mean, you're going to have been engaged in arguments for four years in ways that the lefty kids haven't been. And this is why conservatives, generally speaking, past ideological touring tests so much better than liberals do. Like, conservatives are much, much better at understanding what the liberal argument for something is than liberals are at understanding what the conservative argument is. When you ask a liberal in one of these tests, you know, what would a conservative's issue be with this thing? And they say, well, because they're racist, they would say X.

And then that's not actually the... Guns is an amazing one to ask. Why are conservatives against gun control? Is a really interesting thing to ask liberals. Yeah. And they can't get their head around it for all sorts. They know it. Like no one's actually for dead kids, but they can't think of another reason.

Right. Right. You know, and you ask one about abortion and invariably, it's a handmade's tale thing about keeping women, you know, as chattel or something like that. The challenge, and I think Steve's right about this, the challenge going forward is a lot of these turning point USA kids don't want to make the best conservative arguments. They want to be assholes.

They, this liberal tears are delicious ethos has suffused so much of sort of right-wing maga politics that the impulse is to pick the most offensive argument, not the most persuasive argument. Right. And that worries me. in all sorts of ways. All right. Well, I guess it was worth our time

given the time we spent on it. Thank you, listeners. And we'll see you next week. Thank you.