The Dispatch Podcast - January 6 Committee Makes Its Case

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol held its first hearing Thursday night. Sarah, Steve, Jonah, and David discuss its fact-based and substantive approach to investigating what happened at the Capitol riots, and whether the Republican Party will hold former President Donald Trump accountable. Then our panel turns to the question of political violence in America: Is our political rhetoric out of control? Our hosts then cover how the California primaries are off to an interesting start with progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s recall on Tuesday.   Show Notes: -The Dispatch: “Primetime Hearing Focuses on the Plan Behind January 6” -TMD: “January 6 Revisited” -Uphill: “January 6 Through the Images and Words of Those Who Lived It” -The Dispatch: “What Chesa Boudin’s Recall Says About Criminal Justice Reform” -The Atlantic: “How San Francisco Became a Failed City” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by David French, Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg. We are going to start with the January 6th hearings that have kicked off this week. We'll also talk about political violence, the threat of it, the rhetoric around it, as a person was arrested outside Justice Kavanaugh's home and charged with attempted murder. And last, we'll talk about the primaries that happened this week. A lot to say from California. least. And then, of course, we'll end with not worth your time. But I'll leave you in suspense on that one. Let's dive right in. Steve, you were basically live tweeting the hearing last night. Why don't you give us a recap of what we missed? It was, I thought it was pretty sleepy to start. I thought Benny Thompson made what can probably most charitably be described as a plotting case about what the committee was going to be doing over the next few weeks, then turned the microphone over to Liz Cheney, when things, I think, got a lot more interesting.

She led people in a combination of sort of very dispassionate and passive narrative interspersed with video from depositions, from interviews, sometimes from news outlets, making the case that this was not just an isolated one-day spasm of violence, but in fact part of a moment. longer plan, and she laid it out as a plan from Donald Trump, starting with Donald Trump, with Donald Trump at the center of the plan to keep him in office illegally. I thought it was very effective. What's really interesting, if you look back and, you know, obviously Republicans in the House, Republicans on Capitol Hill, generally professional Republicans, the conservative Angertainment environment.

They don't want to talk about the substance of this. So they've been busy coming up with reasons that nobody else should talk about the substance of this. This is all old news. This is you know, they've, that there was the former president of ABC News had a hand

in producing this. So then it was going to be all Hollywood and flash. And all of their prebuttles basically fell flat. It wasn't terribly flashy. It was pretty straightforward, pretty substantive, pretty fact-based. And there was a lot of new stuff there, whether it was Liz Cheney revealing that while Donald Trump was watching the crowd

chant hang Mike Pence, he said that Pence deserves this to apparently to audible gasps from people in the room to the revelation that members of the House Freedom Caucus sought pardons, preemptive pardons from Donald Trump for their role in this. There was a lot of new information, half a dozen plus new things that I would think on any given day would be big, top of the fold stories, all in this one presentation. Jonah, I realize that we don't want to go straight to the politics of like, whose mind is this going to change? But I do think it's worth asking who the audience for this hearing is. We're now, you know, a year and a half later, it's the summer. They're doing this in a different fashion than you would do, for instance,

a normal congressional hearing, a Supreme Court confirmation hearing, for instance, where it's an all-day, like 12-hour fest. They're doing this in little bite-sized portions. Last night in prime time, you know, as one friend said to me, By helping the Dems focus on this circus instead of issues that most Americans care about, Cheney is helping the GOP. I find this whole thing tacky and a little bit tone deaf, to be honest. Are Democrats helping Republicans by focusing by looking backwards? I mean, I think David Brooks' column, his point is well taken a little bit,

that having something a little more forward-looking thematically would have been still sort of bad for Trump, but also like proactive and positive. That said, I think the question of who is the audience for this is a complicated one because I don't think the committee has figured it out. I think Liz Cheney has one audience in mind. You know, we've seen these leaks where, you know, where we've seen these statements where Jamie Mn Roskin says, oh, it's going to blow the roof off.

And then AIDS say, actually, we want to lower. expectations and everything in between. And I think that this is part of the problem is that there are members of the committee who think sort of the panel on Nicole Wallace's show on MSNBC is the audience for this. And I think there are people on the committee who think, oh, this is a historic, as much as anything, a historical document kind of thing. I think there is even in Liz Cheney a certain partisan motivation, not to necessarily help the GOP in the midterms, which I don't think is her goal, but to her basic view, which is on record, and I've heard her say it, is that the GOP needs to purge itself of this personality cult and this

Trumpism stuff for the long-term health of not just the party, but the country. And so for her, there's a certain amount of exorcism, you know, going on in this. But I don't think there's, I mean, I think the best audience, the smartest audience is essentially the tune-out center right. You know, the people who, let me put it this way. I think there's a lot of punditry about this is wrong. I don't think there's this vast numbers of people who think January 6 was no big deal that it was that Trump was right, you know, that aren't embarrassed by these things, all that kind of stuff. I think it's more like, not the trafficking stereotypes about the Irish, but it's like you've got this really problematic uncle.

Everyone knows he did terrible things, but you don't want to talk about it. It just makes you uncomfortable. And so the trick isn't to convince large numbers of Americans in my mind that this was bad. the trick is to convince them that we should still care about it and do something about it and hold Trump accountable for it. And I'm bought in on that. But I think a lot of people aren't, particularly in a time when we've got, it's going to cost you $100 to fill your gas tank. David, it's interesting to think back on those days after January 6th and the impeachment that comes from it. And this is, by the way, to pick up on Jonah's point, right? You already impeached him.

You have this opportunity to bring all of this up, you know, and I think I disagree slightly with Joan on who the audience is or who it should be. I don't know who the audience is. I am bewildered by some of their choices here. But who the audience should be in my mind is actually who the audience is weirdly, which is reporters, basically, who are going to be writing the first draft and the second draft and the third draft of this history. Get them this information. So there's no, nothing lost when anyone's writing about. January 6th and the years surrounding 2021. But David, there's a few schools of thought on, like, the alternate history. If they had pushed for impeachment more quickly, maybe they could have done it. And then there's like a version around this hearing, which is if they had gotten all of their

facts straight and impeached him after he had left office. But with all of this, maybe it could have happened. Do you see any world in which history turns out differently with what you learned at the beginning of this hearing? The only world where I can possibly conceive it turns out differently is one where impeachment happened so fast, unrealistically, fantastically fast, because the backpedal on the part of Republican officeholders or sufficient Republican office holders to stop a supermajority in the Senate, started to happen relatively quickly, almost as soon as they started to hear from the base. And, you know, the base was already rebelling against a Trump-focused narrative of January 6th. On January 6th, you could see it happen in real time. And then when you saw how Republicans turned against Pence and McConnell pretty darn quickly,

with Pence and McConnell's approval with Republicans plummeting at the same time that Trump stayed relatively high, tells you a lot about where the base was at this time. Because remember, this all happened after weeks and weeks and weeks of lies and lie after lie after lie that penetrated to some degree throughout much of the Republican world. And also at a time when if you remember watching it play out live, the worst images were not on your screen. So it was only days later that the worst images really began to filter into the public. But, you know, I'm going to push back a little bit on the Jonah point. They didn't necessarily filter into the Republican public in the same way that they filtered into the rest of the public, of the public. I think the

Republican public had this view. Yeah, that was bad. okay i know it's bad stop telling me is bad i know that was bad stop telling me and they never it never sunk in a how bad and then in the years now since or a year and a half now since um it hasn't sunk in how comprehensively bad it was so you know when i talked to like a normal rank and file republican they don't really know about the eastman memos. They really don't know about this stuff. They don't know about shadow slates of electors. They don't know about any of this. And so that's one reason why I think, for example, the Fox decision to not air this and to sort of air counter programming like you saw Tucker

yesterday. This is about the Democrats wanting to imprison people who disagree with them is so pernicious. A lot of Republicans have characterized in their mind, January 6th was bad. January 6th was the fault of the rioters. And there is no penetration of that larger story. I would bet if you pulled 100 Republicans off the street and asked them to say, what were the Eastman memos or what tell us what you know about shadow electors, you would be stunned and amazed at the level of ignorance there,

which is why I got kind of frustrated when I saw. even some people I really like on Twitter saying, oh, this is stuff everyone already knows. Everybody already knows this. And I'm thinking, you know, I'm around a lot of people who are college-educated Republicans,

and I guarantee you they don't know it. Everybody, those people on Twitter talk to already know this. I mean, this is sort of, I think, a classic case of the Beltway talking to itself, right? Of course, Liz Cheney's presentation and Bill Barr's denunciation of of Trump's BS and what we heard from

the Trump campaign lawyers and what we even heard from Ivanka is not going to convince people who are professional Republicans. If you're on Twitter and you are a performative, conservative on Twitter, you're not going to, you will know most of the stuff that was presented. Not all of it. As I said, there were a bunch of new things. But what was presented it won't affect you. But Ben Sass likes to talk about the 86% of the American public who don't pay attention to politics on a day-to-day basis. A lot of those people vote. And I think David's exactly right that many of them will not have heard about the details of this. And look, Fox News is powerful. Obviously, Tucker Carlson gets three, four million viewers on a given night. He probably got a few more

last night because people who wanted to tune in but didn't want to watch the hearings may have turned to Tucker. But what he fed them was sort of insultingly stupid, this BS Patriot Purge-esque alternative history that basically is not true. He's asking lots of questions. Tucker's asking lots of questions. That's going to work for the most politically active, maybe for the base of the Republican party. But I do think that as we get further away from this and we learn more about what actually happened and the fact that Donald Trump, the whole point of this was that Donald Trump wanted to stay in office after he lost an election, you don't do that. And I do think that that will register in some way with the huge chunk of voters, independents, Republicans, certainly Democrats,

who think that's crazy. We don't do that in the United States. Yeah, so two quick points. One, I don't think that my point and David's point are really all that much at odds in the sense that if you've got the embarrassing uncle on the family, you also don't want a lot of the details. It's true, you know, and, you know, and when your brother says, do you realize exactly what Tom actually did? And you're like, I don't want to hear it, you know, whatever. Like, that's the Eastman memos. You know, that's a lot of those things. But the thing that I think Butchers is your point about, particularly Tucker Carlson last night, isn't what Tucker Carlson was saying. It is the amazing.

I mean, like, I wrote this thing about how I thought Fox's decision not to run the hearings was, defensible. And one of the theories among many that I floated was that Tucker show, the primetime shows just generate too much revenue and they didn't want to forego advertising. But then Tucker does it without commercial breaks, right? Because clearly the fear is, oh, it's a commercial, let me flip on over even to Fox business and see what they're saying. And the flop sweat panic, that that implies that they cannot risk their core audience leaving for the time it takes to sell my pillow is just shocking to me. And it's such a tell about where their heads are at that they're just scared of their

audience and scared of losing it. Okay, so I want to think about the metric of success at the end of this hearing, how do we judge whether it was a successful enterprise? And there's a few things here. One, and I talked earlier about how I think they've done a lot of things wrong. Let me explain why I think that. Because there's a reason that millions of Americans tuned in for the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial. And that was a trial. This wasn't, you know, there weren't fireworks going off. It was a real American trial. Think OJ. Why did people tune in for that? Because there was an unknown drama. that could happen at any moment. You didn't know what was going to happen next. And I think a huge mistake that they've made with this is keeping Jim Jordan, for instance, off the committee.

I understand that they wanted to have a serious committee that where everyone was on the same page on what happened on January 6th. For investigative purposes, great, I agree. But for hearing purposes, it actually sucks out all of that drama. And so I think you only have people tuning in whose job it is, frankly, to tune in. And a version of that, by the way,

is Steve talking about Benny Thompson, the chair, giving his opening remarks, what in the world? Why would you open with that? Something that's so not dramatic. Open with the video. Open with, you know, here are the three things we're going to tell you tonight. I don't know.

Like, understand why people tune in to something. And especially we just had this absurd trial that everyone was watching, talking about, interested in, that was generating so much social content, I felt like nothing was taken away from that. And the lack of drama that's going to happen in this hearing, I think actually will detract from any metric of success. David, I want your reaction to that. And also, you know, if Republicans take over the house and they hold a hearing on how baby formula was out of stock through most of the country and how the president was told about that and the White House knew about it and they didn't do

anything about it and they said it was a lesser crisis. Will television networks cover that one in prime time? Yeah, I think the answer to that is no. They probably wouldn't probably hold it in prime time. They just probably hold it in the regular course of business. But the if you're talking about sort of injecting Jim Jordan drama,

I don't know that I necessarily agree with that. Or having the other side, having someone who doesn't already agree with your narrative there to challenge it. I think it would be a better committee if there was somebody more adversarial because you'd actually get

better. you'd have better findings of fact if you had a little adversarial I mean I think because I guess the question is okay to have a response okay to have a responsible

skeptical Republican okay yeah still doesn't make Fox cover it still doesn't I don't know you think Jim Jordan's on that committee and Fox doesn't cover it I don't know that I don't think so

I don't think so I don't think so I don't No, I don't think Tucker, they forsake Tucker. No, I don't think so. I think this is such a, this is not an exercise and own the libs. This is, they would, they would broadcast the clips of Jim Jordan, allegedly owning the libs. They would absolutely do that. That would be what they would put up there. This would be the focus of Fox coverage of the committee would be the Jim Jordan berating of witness X, Y, or Z. But they would still do the same, because this is not an exercise and own the libs, because you can't own the libs here. This is an exercise in deflection and evasion and denial. That's the fundamental exercise in play here. And it's just very rare, it's very rare for hearings to truly captivate, congressional hearings to truly captivate the country. It's kind of like catching lightning in a bottle.

And nothing surprises me that Johnny Depp and Amber Heard and our celebrity observes, culture would get more attention than a congressional hearing. Like, if you were going to tell me that a congressional hearing could rival Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, I would fall out of my chair in shock. I would think, what happened to the America that I know? It cares about celebrities. But, no, I think that, I think, you know, look, having a more skeptical Republican who's going to sort of rigorously examine the assertions of the committee, I don't have a problem with that. A Jim Jordan type, I would have a problem with that. And so, you know, I think that's where the difference is. And I also think we might be measuring success in a little bit the wrong

way here. I like the first sort of that draft of history point. But I like what was just tweeted a guy I followed him, Greg Nunziata, said, a well-formed citizen has the capacity. to oppose policies that contribute to inflation and high gas prices, while also defending the Constitution rule of law and peaceful transfer of power. It's not either or... Big if true. It's a both and. And one of the things here is not about... The January 6th Committee does not fail if Republicans take the Congress. You know, Republicans are going to take the Congress or not based on the voters' moods about the state of the country in November. No, but David, just to push back on this, that there is a lot of energy time and resources,

not to mention prime time, television time, going to this committee. And there is no equivalent Democratic Select Committee on figuring out inflation and how to stop it. That's what I think you have some voters saying, this is ridiculous. I understand. I think January 6 was really bad. But gas costs $100 and they can't get baby formula. Where's the prime time hearing about that? aren't we putting those resources in Congress into trying to think through what might solve this

problem that we're currently in, that is existential to the country in the sense that we could have a recession. You know, it opens up avenues for China, as we've already seen in different parts of the world when America isn't strong. I mean, there's real arguments here that aren't just stupid January 6 didn't happen in arguments. Wait, okay. So I guess I'm a little confused by that. And these are arguments that, you know, yes, absolutely put more emphasis on inflation, but that's irrelevant to whether or not we have this committee. Because this committee is, what, eight people out of, how many are in Congress? Seriously, 435, David, plus 100 in the Senate.

Yeah, I know that. I was just, you know, making sure there's 435 members of Congress. I'm confused about your confusion because obviously David knows this. I just, you know, for a minute, I was going to confidently declare 435 and then had this thought of, what if I confidently declare it? I know. I do have those moments sometimes. Were you thinking of the poor non-voting delegates from Samoa or anything? Thank you, Jonah.

Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. You know, 435 members of Congress. Nancy Pelosi is not on that committee, obviously. No, but that's exactly the point, David. There is no committee on inflation. Yeah. I agree that you don't know those.

There's a accounting committee. There's, I mean, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, all. these committees this is what they're supposed to do all yeah i'd be much more sympathetic to your point sarah if i thought that members of congress were doing that stuff anyway like what's keeping them from this from doing this so you have nine committee is not keeping them for this now they're they're out recording podcasts they're out on box and msnbc it's not like they're this is keeping them from doing anything oh i totally i'm on teams i'm on team sarah about this to this extent uh it's a messaging thing, the amount of bandwidth that is breaking through to a lot of Americans, it may be, look,

for all I know, the banking committee has been working around the clock on tackling inflation with, you know, Jean Sperling coming in with, you know, extra black coffee, and they're just trying to hammer it out. Of course they haven't been. But no one's hearing about that. There have been, just to be, for factual purposes, I don't know if it was a banking, but there have been hearings about inflation. I'm sure there are.

Again, my point is not at all about substance. My point is about the amount of politics that people consume at the street level being dominated by this thing, which I'm entirely in favor of this thing. I'm entirely in favor of the January 6th committee. But as a matter of messaging and politics, I don't know that it's crazy that the rep—I find it's craven and cynical what a lot of the Republicans are saying in response to this. you know, why isn't there a hearing on, you know, my Sheropatist or whatever. But like, um, the, I don't know that it won't work either, is my point. Yeah. Okay.

Just real quickly. The, first of all, all, we can have these conversations at the same time. There's, that's, that's not a problem. It's a non-issue. It's a red herring. It's a straw man. Pick, pick your, pick your descriptor. Secondly, this.

It's a will of the wist. If you look at the, If you look at the path that Republicans took on this issue, they were angry on January 6th, many of them contemplated impeachment. I think it's clear, especially after reading the Jonathan Martin Alex Burns book, that there were enough Republicans in the House who would have voted to impeach, enough Republicans in the Senate who would have voted to convict that they could have impeached and convicted removed Donald Trump from office. I think that's reasonably clear at this point. For the Republicans who didn't want to vote to impede, didn't want to vote to convict, their argument for many of them, for many of them who weren't sort of on the, the, you know, pro-coo side of the Republican Party, their argument was, we're for a commission. We definitely have to get to bottom of this. We need to look for it.

Now, we've talked here on this podcast a lot about Nancy Pelosi and her politicizing this. I stand by those criticisms. They're right. She played a role in getting us to the point where there's not a real bipartisan committee in the way that we would have understood it before. But now, you know, a year and a half later, we've gone from looking at January 6th as this one-day convulsion of violence fueled by Donald Trump's rhetoric and his claims to a stolen election to, I think, more properly seeing it as the last point in a detailed plan to stay in

power. So the fact set has gotten considerably worse in the last 18 months. And Republicans have gone from caring and wanting to get to the bottom of it to saying this is all a distraction. And we shouldn't really be spending any time because people need baby formula. Like that is a crappy, crappy argument. And they can say that they feel that way because, you know, Nancy Pelosi didn't let Jim Jordan on the on the committee that's not why they feel that way. They feel that way because this flood of evidence and new facts and details about planning and John Eastman's memos and alternate electors and pressuring poll workers in Georgia turns out to have been part of Donald Trump's plan all along and they don't want to contend with that fact.

They should have to contend with that fact. And the reason that we're spending time on this is because we're talking about basic functioning of American Democratic Republic. I hope to God we get infant formula. I think the supply chain stuff, clearly the Biden administration screwed up a number of these things. The FDA is to blame. I think they were terrible on inflation.

We were shouting on this podcast that inflation is not going to be transitory. They should pay more careful attention to it. it's irresponsible to spend more, all of those things are true. But we're not even going to be talking about those things if we don't deal with the fact that this guy tried to steal an election and Republicans now want to sort of wish it away. I agree with that 1,000 percent. I agree with all of it. The only thing I would also say that is also true is that if you pay some close attention

in the last five, six, seven years, crappy arguments often work. Yeah, they do. And this is my, like, special little corner of purgatory. C.E.G. President Trump. Yeah. And so, like, again, I'm not, I'm not defending the crappy argument. I'm not denying that it's a crappy argument. I'm saying as a matter of messaging, you know, I mean,

Elise Stefonic, her press releases read to me, like sources of profound shame and embarrassment, but they seem to be working for her. And that's, you know, more of the pity, more of the, shame on all sorts of people, but I don't, the idea that simply because it's a crappy argument that it won't be effective for Republicans, I'm not sure is right. That's all I'm saying. 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

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Protect your family with life insurance from ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ethos.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. Let's talk about other types of political rhetoric. Actually, kind of this type of political rhetoric again. So this week, a man was arrested outside Justice Kavanaugh's home, well-armed. He called 911 to say, or at least we believe that he was the one who called 911 to say that he wanted to kill the justice because of the leaked Alito draft opinion on abortion and the shootings in Uvaldi. He knew that the Supreme Court was looking at a Second Amendment case as well.

It raises larger issues, though. And we can talk about the specifics around Kavanaugh, but I think it's worth talking a little bit about some of the atmospherics as well. A man showed up at a federal judge's house a few years ago, shot her son when he answered the door, shot and wounded her husband, and he wanted to kill Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

At the congressional baseball shooting, the perpetrator of that belonged to Facebook groups, terminate the Republican Party. The road to hell is paved with Republicans. Donald Trump is not my president. And he wrote a change.org petition. Trump is a traitor. Trump has destroyed our democracy.

It's time to destroy Trump and company. In some ways, when I read that list, they sound like really normal, modern names for things. We hear that all the time. Trump has destroyed the country. Trump is a traitor. you know, terminate the Republican Party. Donald Trump is not my president?

That, yeah, we hear that all the time. I think the difference and of what happened this week is how close this person got. A cab dropped him off in front of the justices home. He was just, you know, a few yards away when he was arrested. I mean, thank God. He, again, we believe it was the perpetrator himself who called 911. To imagine, just for a moment, regardless of what you think of Brett Kavanaugh and agree or disagree with him, imagine having two daughters in your home when those sirens go off, when all of those police cars come. I have a friend who's a neighbor, one house, you know, two over, and, you know, it was terrifying for them as neighbors.

neighbors. So is our rhetoric out of control, David? A hundred percent, yes. Or is it just crazy people responsible for this? And it has nothing to do with change.org petitions and Facebook groups and, you know, some very heated rhetoric coming out of the Senate. That's not what causes someone to show up to Justice Kavanaugh's house with a Glock. It's not a joke.

Because otherwise there'd be a lot of people showing up with a Glock. It's one new. It's not a direct line. You can't draw, there are many steps between reading America will be over or the election is stolen or so-and-so is a traitor and somebody picking up a gun. There are many, many steps. So you can't just simply say, well, Chuck Schumer saying, what was it? You're going to reap the whirlwind.

Yeah. It doesn't mean that Chuck Schumer is responsible for what occurred. But it's time for us to apply what we know about the formation. of extremism to our own freaking country, okay? So for years, we have been able to diagnose why, for example, Islamic extremism has arisen in parts of the Muslim world and how it ultimately culminates in ISIS. There's lots of books that you can read about this. There's lots of study about this.

And it is not the case that the people of the Middle East are somehow completely different human beings from the people of the United States of America. They're human beings just like us. And the fact of the matter is the more overheated rhetoric becomes, I look at it like this. Imagine you, it's like a funnel. And each next step of engagement narrows and intensifies. So you go from Joe Biden or, you know, Donald Trump is not my president. He's a Russian traitor to, well, what are you going to do about that? Well, I'm going to, I'm going to donate. Okay, well, that's good, but that's not enough.

Well, I'm going to get in the streets. Okay, well, that's good. But if he's really a traitor, is it enough to peacefully protest? Well, I'm going to set a cop car on fire. Well, that's, you know, and it just, this is the way extremism works. As each next step of engagement, each next step of engagement is smaller number of people, but a more intense level. And the wider that funnel of hate, the more wide. the rhetoric of hatred and more widespread the rhetoric of catastrophe and apocalyptic

um of an apocalyptic politics the greater the probability that somebody at the end of that funnel is going to be violent and this is something that you know look to people on the left recognize this in 2020 they said you're playing with fire republicans with all of this stolen election talk and there were Republicans who scoffed and scoffed and scoffed even through the jericho March right until January 6th happens. And then Republicans turn around and say to Democrats, you're playing with fire by saying we're destroying the country or where you're, you know, Donald Trump is a traitor or you name it, that Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist.

You're playing with fire. But here's the world we live in. The world we live in says, their anger breeds violence. My anger is justified. violence is completely disconnected from my movement and how dare you suggest otherwise? It doesn't work like that. Jonah, how should I think about people protesting

at public officials' homes? And I want to set aside the legal question. A lot of folks online noting that there is a law on the books that would make it illegal to protest outside of justice's home. David and I have talked about this and actually whether we think that law would stand up to scrutiny, I happen to think that it probably wouldn't

the way that it's written. But just set that aside it's notable to me this wasn't a protester who was arrested the protesters have all been peaceful outside the home at the same time

the protesters are the ones who put the justices home address all over the internet is this a doxing problem is this a not respecting people's personal private space and we should have a norm

of only protesting at public buildings, for instance? Or is this all unavoidable now? I fear, to some extent, it's unavoidable. But even if there is not a law that will pass scrutiny right now, it should be a law that you shouldn't be able to, particularly judges. I mean, senators and congressmen, I'm not in favor of protesting in front of people's homes generally. But the whole point of being a judge or a juror, is like you're not supposed to be intimidated and let your fears or your passions override the facts and the black letter of the law. But moreover, like, I'd be more sympathetic to protesters in front of people's homes if part of the requirements to being on the Supreme Court was that you had to be single with no kids. And I mean that kind of seriously.

Like, you know, like when the Kavanaugh news first broke, you know, my wife's first reaction was that poor woman. And I was like, what, what woman, you know, at first? And then I was like, and she was like, his wife. I mean, she didn't sign up for this, you know, and, and she's got kids in the house. And there's just something particularly sort of cruel and, and sort of inhumane about thinking, well, they should have thought about this when they became Supreme Court justices to begin with, right? Like, does that mean like the neighbors should have thought about moving in next door to a Supreme Court justice? I mean, at some point, I just think it's, it's just bad form and it's rife for problems like this to happen. I also just, I mean, I agree hardly with David about the rhetoric problem.

I got no problem. I mean, I can't tell you many times I've had these arguments on the right in the last 10 years where I just keep thinking about, like, I had a long exchange with Dennis Prager, you know, like eight years ago where he kept insisting. No, we really are in a civil war. And I was like, maybe we're metaphorically, like Cold War, culture war, that kind of. He's like, no, no, it's a real war. And, like, Hannity used to begin his radio show, you know, prior to the 2016 election. And it was like, every day it was like, we're only, now we're only 38 days from possibly seeing the end of America. The Flight 93 election stuff, when you start telling people that you're serious, you're not being figurative, you're not being.

You're not employing poetic license, but you are literally and truly arguing that the other team poses an existential crisis, an existential threat to everything that you hold dear. Anything short of violence for some irreducibly's, but yet greater than zero number of people will just seem like half measures. Yep. And that's the fundamental problem with all of this stuff. And so coming up with just to get back to the question, coming up with procedures and practices that make it less likely that those kinds of people can actually succeed in doing violent things seems utterly reasonable to me. And like having rules about not protesting in people in front of people's homes. seems like an utterly reasonable rule to me. Jonah, you'll appreciate this.

There is one shot in all of this news coverage of U.S. Marshals and security in front of Justice Kavanaugh's house and right behind the armed guard at the door as a, I'm going to be generous here, a 16 pound white fluffy dog who looks so serious about the job that he or she has been given, I mean, guarding that door. And so I just shout out to the dog, doing his best. The thin, fluffy line that protects the rule of law. That's right. Steve, what are your thoughts on all this?

Look, I think it's fine. I'm with Jonah on the procedures and practices, do what we can, protect the justices. You know, there's legislation to provide more protections to Supreme Court justices that pass the Senate easily. And the House has held it up. It's still not happening. I think it's outrageous. The House has held it up. John Corny.

By the way, I at least read that Democrats want to provide protection to the law clerks. That's a real misunderstanding of law clerks. And just imagine for a moment. Because they're totally expendable? A trained U.S. Marshall who can go chase down fugitives, the amount of just money and time we put into training these people doing door to door for a 27-year-old from Yale law school. Like, it's boggling my mind. Yeah, well, you wonder if that comes as a result of the speculation that a law clerk

as the person who leaked this decision. It's, I think, outrageous that Democrats have not passed this. I mean, do all the little things that you can. The problem to me is much, much bigger. And David and I talked about this a little bit on Dispatch Live earlier this week. In March of 2020, there was a rally at the Supreme Court. Chuck Schumer spoke, then Senate Minority Leader, says, at the rally, there's a quote, I want to tell you Gorsuch, I want to tell you Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you

will pay the price. You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions. The leak suggests that they are going forward with these awful decisions, awful in Schumer's language. So they are now, as night follows day, reaping the whirlwind. They won't. know what hit them. You know, Schumer was, he sort of backed away from that and said he didn't, I mean, he didn't really back away from it. He just tried to clarify and said, I didn't mean that as a threat and pointed to politics. But justices aren't, they're not going to lose the next election. They're not subject to political repercussions. I don't know what he meant. I don't know if Schumer meant that as an actual threat. I would certainly hope not. But to pretend that,

Republicans and critics were distorting his language at the time when he said those exact words, I think is totally outrageous. I don't know. I haven't seen anything this morning, but this all happened 1 o'clock in the morning on Wednesday. As far as I know, as we're taping Friday morning, we're a little bit after 10 o'clock right now, I have not seen a White House denunciation of this or an attempt by Joe Biden to say, holy cow, we came whisper close to potentially losing

a Supreme Court justice to assassination. Everybody's got to cool it, right? Yeah. They haven't seen that. I haven't heard anything from the podium did say that the White House condemned it in the strongest terms, et cetera, et cetera. But you are right that President Biden said anything.

President Biden has not said anything as of. He had time for, he had time for, of late-night talk shows, right? But didn't apparently have time right after this, but hasn't had time to say anything about this? And if we're going to point to the rhetoric from the White House Press Secretary at the podium, we should also make clear to mention that Jen Saki, before this happened, when there were these protests at the House, gave sort of a rhetorical shrug of the shoulders and said, yeah, they've been peaceful so far, we hope they will be. didn't say don't, don't get in the front yard of Supreme Court justices, sort of shrugged

your shoulders and rationalized it. It's so deeply irresponsible from the Democrats. And these are the same Democrats who spent the hearings last night, lots of time talking about how outrageous it is that the Trump administration and Trump officials in the Republican Party have so distorted our norms. I agree with most of those criticisms. But this is very, very similar, and it's outrageous that they haven't been more forceful in speaking out against this. I'll just read you what she said. Sorry, it was a board Air Force one, not at the podium. The president condemns the actions of this individual in strong terms and is grateful to law enforcement for quickly taking him into custody. As the president has consistently made clear,

public officials, including judges, must be able to do their jobs without concern for their personal safety or that of their families. And any threats of violence or attempts to intimidate judges have no place in our society. Steve, to your point, that feels like a pretty pat statement. Pretty standard. And let me also provide the pushback to those on the left who say that Schumer's comments are being taken out of context because I want to agree with you quite strongly and want to give their argument so that I can show why I disagree with it.

So everything you read is correct. Here's what he said right after you won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions. The bottom line is very simple. We will stand with the American people. We will stand with American women. We will tell President Trump and Senate Republicans who have stacked the court with right-wing ideologues that you're going to be gone in November and you will never be able to do what you're trying to do now ever, ever again. You hear that over there on the far right? You're gone in November. Their argument is in the full context, he was talking about political ramifications. But Steve, he said, I want to tell you Borsuch.

Yes. I want to tell you Kavanaugh, but you can't get them out of office. And also, if someone can take your comments, not really out of context, take the full paragraph of what you said and just not include your whole speech. And it sounds like a call to political violence. Sorry, I don't think you were a very good speech writer then. If you have to read the whole speech to know that you weren't calling for political violence against Supreme Court justices. He literally directed the comments to those two just, literally. There is no context you can provide that takes away the plain meaning of his exact words. Yeah, so, look, I'm with you on this. The thing, like, I still have scars from the fight over the Arizona shooting where

Sarah Palin was supposedly responsible because she talked about targeting districts, and this was considered by a lot of New York Times columnist types as eliminationist rhetoric. And, you know, my, my problem. with I agree with you that like if first of all if you're the kind of person who is inclined to shoot somebody because of one paragraph that you hear from a senator the idea that you'll say oh never mind when you hear the second paragraph is sort of ridiculous right the point is the first paragraph is the problem but what drives me crazy in all of this is that you know I've been writing about this for a long time

It's the weaponizing of norms. It's not like the norms apply. My team needs to accept these norms, but I'm going to hold the other team entirely accountable to these exact same norms. And so, as David was saying, the Democrats are convinced that everything Republicans say leads to violence, endorses violence, causes violence, whether it's, you know, Paul Gosar doing a tweeted dumb anime video, or whatever, but they have a free hand to say whatever the hell they want. And vice versa.

The Republicans have the exact same position. And I find unbelievably exhausting and whiplash-inducing is watching various sides. It's sort of like a John Stewart routine, you know, clown nose on, clown nose off, where they are all of a sudden deeply disturbed by the irresponsible reddish, of the other side. And then the next day, they're talking about great replacement theory. Right. And, you know, it's like, if you're not going to be bound by your own criticisms of the other side, shut the hell up. Yeah. Because this is, it just exhausting. I just want to say, wait, just real quick, to, there's a whole lot of women, but it affects men,

too, and I don't want this to be too gendered, who suffer from various forms of imposter syndrome through their lives. You know, often in your 20s, when you're starting out, you feel like everyone knows that you're you're not really supposed to be in the room. You shouldn't be there. And I've had my moments of imposter syndrome in my career. And hearing Jonah Goldberg say, I've been right about this for a long time. It brings me so much joy. And it is one of the reasons I wish that everyone got to spend as much time with Jonah Goldberg as I do because it is truly, I actually, I can't tell you how sincerely I mean this. It is moments like that that. store in my heart, and it creates this little warm place. Thank you, Jonah.

Sure. Happy to be right for your benefit. And so, David, protesters gathered outside Amy Coney Barrett's home last night, where, of course, she lives with her seven children. Speaking of people, you know, who didn't sign up for this. Yeah. So, yeah. So, you know, look, the bottom line is, in my view, regardless of the constitutionality, as a matter of morality, unless we're talking about a governor's mansion that is removed from the street or the White House that is removed from the street and heavily guarded, don't go to people's homes. That should be a bright line. And look, I get the argument that you can't pick out a Chuck Schumer quote here or a so-and-so quote there and then

radiated all down to the violent person in the street. What we're talking about is a level of pervasiveness of rhetoric. And if you doubt the rhetoric is pervasive, just try to go on Twitter and say, hey, people shouldn't protest at people's homes and watch how furious many, many people become. And why do I emphasize pervasiveness? Well, some of us, I think maybe all of us at different times have faced our own threats. And I don't know about you guys, but when that happens to me is when there's a degree of pervasiveness of anger, when something you do trends on Twitter or some big controversy flares up and a lot of people get very angry, I can almost set my watch, you know, set my clock by it, that when those events occur, it filters in.

into some degree of harassment that's offline, some degree of threat that is, you know, that you, that's way beyond anything you'd see on Twitter. It's that pervasiveness. And that's the thing that is so dangerous. It's the pervasiveness of this fury. Your funnel point's exactly right. The idea is there's 0.001% of people

who will turn violent when activated. So if you activate 10 people, the chances are none of them will turn violent. And if you activate a million people against someone, if you activate 100 million people against someone, those chances go up in the funnel. Yep. 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. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Turns and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca. Let's move to the primaries. There were primaries across the country, but frankly, the attention is focused on California. The district attorney in San Francisco was recalled overwhelmingly, not close. A Republican, Loni Chen, came up top of the heap in a statewide office in California.

Now, obviously that still has to, you know, go to the top two finishers in November. And same with the Los Angeles mayor's race where a guy who was a Republican until, I don't know, a few minutes ago, ran as a Democrat also came in at the top, edging out Karen Bass to get into the top two for the Los Angeles mayor's race. Is conservatism sweeping California, Steve? No. I don't think we can say that it is. But I do think that we're seeing backlash to the kinds of of progressivism that we've seen hurt the Democrats nationally, frankly. The defund, the police Democrats, the hardcore progressives like Chesey Boudan, I don't know if that's how we're pronouncing his last name, pushed.

I mean, in a way, this is sort of how this should work. He came in with an idea and with a set of policy. policies, he more or less implemented them, and they didn't work. They've been ineffective. And I think what happened in San Francisco is people looked at the policies, looked at what he said he was going to do, evaluated what he had done, and decided that even as liberal as San Francisco residents are overwhelmingly, they didn't want it. It was humorous to hear him and others on his behalf, try to make this sound like this was a Republican conservative hijacking of the San Francisco election process. It most assuredly was not that. The seven conservatives in San Francisco

do not have that kind of power. This was fellow Democrats and progressives. And I think people who think of themselves as do-goaters deciding that this wasn't an effective way to run criminal justice in the city. Jonah, so interesting because we just, this was on the heels of the recall election for two school board members in San Francisco. And by the way, the arguments end up looking exactly the same. This was some sort of Republican conspiracy

to recall the school board members and not, for instance, actually very Democratic, more than Democrats, left, leftist parents livid that the schools had been closed during COVID and that the school board had continued to meet about renaming schools instead of after Abraham Lincoln

instead of trying to figure out how to reopen the schools setting new standards for getting into charter school because too many Asian kids were getting into the school. So you saw a lot of these parents just fed up with that. And I thought there was such a great piece in the Atlantic that I'll post there

written by someone who is so far to the left of the three of us, born and raised in San Francisco, clearly loves that city the way I love Texas. The three of us? Who's? Who did you leave out? Either one of us isn't here

or one of us is just as leftist. No, no, I know she didn't mean me. She wasn't referring to me because she was aiming the question at me. So she included me and the us. I feel David or Steve are the left person. You strip me of my humanity.

I clearly don't get to make fun of David for not knowing how many people are in the U.S. Congress when I can't like count the four boxes. Okay, so, Jonah, the point of this piece was that to be liberal and to be compassionate for the other and to want to lift everyone in society is to also want those things to be effective. And part of the problem that is happening in California is that liberal policies are now in place. There's no one else to blame for what's standing in the way of effectuating. these liberal policies that are supposed to be compassionate and that in fact there is something

deeply dehumanizing, not compassionate about stepping over people as they are near death because of how much fentanyl they've had and saying like, well, that's their choice to die. We're just going to have open air drug markets because that's the compassionate thing to do, that in fact this is in some ways not a repudiation of liberalism and the motives and goals of liberalism, but a repudiation of the means of liberalism that folks have been pushing and that have failed to have good results in a place like San Francisco. Yeah, I mean, I want to push back, I agree that entirely, but I want to push back a little bit on something Steve said before about how Jessa Boudin was recalled because his proposed

policies weren't working. I think his proposed policies were working exactly as designed. He, I mean, it's difficult to, I mean, like, if you had written a character like Budin for a movie, you would be considered some sort of right wing caricature guy because like literally his parents were were bank robbers with the weather underground who when they went to prison, he instead got then raised by two other domestic terrorists. He was like a translator for Hugo Javas or something. I mean, it's just like, it's just bananas. And his policies were to not arrest anybody and not put anybody in jail and not charge anybody with serious crimes. And that's what he did. And he did it effectively.

And like the problem was that, that, you know, I heard somebody on the economist podcast say the problem with San Francisco is they have a rich tradition of solving other people's problems. And the thing is like, San Francisco did not have high incarceration rates. It did not have high arrest rates already, but Boudin thought like somehow he was solving problems in Oklahoma by letting more criminals go in San Francisco. And I think that the, I don't know if anybody's ever coined this phrase before, but you know, there are narco-capitalists, some of them are close friends of mine. I think that there's a thing going on on the left, which you could call a narco-progressivism, which is, you know, like the, the, remember the, what was it, the, what was it, the, the, the Capitol Hill area of Free Zone in Seattle that they had. Chad. Chad, that's right.

Oh, Chaz, yeah. I think they kept changing the names, so I think you're both. Sorry, I was looking at Jonah and just thought, Chad. But the, the, the, the, there is this idea of just simply not enforcing laws, right? Of not enforcing shoplifting laws, not enforcing criminal justice laws, not enforcing, forcing like vagrancy laws and let a thousand flowers bloom kind of attitude and that's not liberal right that's something else and the i was talking with roy to share about this on my podcast the other day it is bizarre to me that it should ever have to fall to me knuckle dragging right

wing troglodyte that i am unlike steve who's the outsider among the three of us um uh that there's a very strong liberal case to be made for fighting crime right crime is a regressive tax on poor people crime affects poor neighborhoods poor people are victims of crime more than you know people on the upper tax brackets the food deserts that we have in poor neighborhoods

are directly the result of crime because big supermarkets won't go into those neighborhoods and the idea that somehow enforcing criminal justice justice laws, or criminal law, is somehow anti-poor people, betrays a hundred years of polling about what poor people want. And it is such a rich, affluent problem with progressivism that they are, and there are, so many of these people like Boudin are terrified or are committed to the idea that somehow they should not have to impose simple rules of life. on criminals and quality of life things that make life better for everybody because somehow that's judgmental or something. And I think there is a real pushback against that in California.

It would not surprise me if Caruso wins in Los Angeles. David, last word to you on this. Something I find really interesting is part of the pushback from the left on the Chesa Boudin recall was that, in fact, if you look at the crime statistics, they're not that different than the national rise in crime. To which my thought is, yeah, I think you're proving a different point than you think you're proving, which is that people nationally, including those on the left, do not want to tolerate an overall rise in violent crime. And so if they're not willing to tolerate in San Francisco, they're not going to be willing

to tolerate it in other states that are having elections this fall. Yeah. Well, and a little bit, some of that is deceptive. So, one, it is true that San Francisco is not out of line and the violent crime with the larger rate of increase, which everything you just said Sarah is true is, yeah, exactly, and that's the problem, okay? But San Francisco also was having this problem with disorder that was an order of magnitude different from almost any other major city in the U.S.

And you were having large numbers of people sweeping through stores and just taking stuff with impunity. You were having situations where people were, you know, literally putting signs in their cars. My door is unlocked. My door is unlocked because they were just sick of their windows being broken out constantly, just constantly. And to Jonah's point, it was interesting as I was watching their returns come in. The one consistent thing I kept seeing was it's in the wealthiest, widest areas of San Francisco that Boudin, was doing the best. And there's this concept that I think a lot of folks who are sort of on the liberal left, as opposed to the far left, are coining, which I think makes a lot of sense,

called luxury beliefs. And luxury beliefs are those beliefs that you get to hold without experiencing the consequences of them. And so if you can live in a gated community, if you can definitely lock away your car at night, if you have security systems, if you have all of the things can deter crime, well, you get to kind of watch the rest of the city with, you know, one step removed from the consequences of your actions. And so I thought that was very interesting. And another thing that's interesting to me is I think we're watching a little bit of a replay on the left, from the center left to the left, of what led to the rise of the sort of the Clinton Democrats, which was, wait a minute.

We have to deal with crime. We have to be fiscally responsible. There's some reality intruding here. If we keep going down that road, the Democratic Party started to go down during the McGovern era and following, we're just lost. We're lost. And a lot of people forget that in the high crime of the late in 1980s and early 1990s, Democrats worked with the Congressional Black Caucus to get tough on crime. it was not the case that there was this sharp divide between white and black Democrats with black Democrats resisting tough on crime measures. In many cases, it was black Democrats who were

saying, we need to be tough on crime. Now, some of this went too far, the big, huge disparities in crack and powder cocaine sentencing, for example. There are elements of that that were bad and excessive, but the idea that it is somehow not in the Democratic Party's DNA, much less in the DNA of minority Democrats to want crime to deal with crime is just fundamentally false. And with that, our last segment, not worth your time. This week, there was drama at a workplace that spilled over into the public arena. The Washington Post had several employees, many, many employees, that decided instead of talking about their workplace on a Slack channel, they do it on Twitter, America's Slack channel.

Well, really the world Slack channel. Lots of people have tried to take big picture things away from this about wokeism, about management, about news media. And I think, I don't know, Steve, I don't know if I speak for all of us, but I think I speak for me when I say, you know, sometimes a workplace can just be dysfunctional because of the people in it. And you don't need to try to make larger hay out of it or, you know, a narrative.

It's just sort of sad to watch and you don't have to talk about it. I mean, since this is not worth our time, I won't say much. But I will say that what's happened at the Washington Post is not unique to the Washington Post. Similar things playing out at other mainstream outlets. And not outlets, right? Like other just companies, things. Yeah, this is not news media. specific. And so with that,

can I just say, can we add, though, if we're airing our dirty laundry, if news outlets are airing our dirty laundry, you have some? Andrew Egger. Yeah. Andrew Eager took rogue ginger defamed the original Top Gun movie in our Slack. Oh my God, you're actually letting our Slack channel spill over into the public. David, shame on you. I can't. I can't. cannot stand by. Since I was not asked about whether this was worth my time, I want to say, look, there's a lot of TV I watch that I know is not worth my time, and yet I love watching it. I loved watching this thing. I'm just going to say it. I thought it was, I couldn't look away. It was, it was so spectacularly stupid. And I'll just say, you know, like my friend Charlie Cook

likes to point out that we live in a liberal society. And yet many of the institutions, that are supposed to be the most liberal in the proper sense of the word are the opposite of that, right? Universities and major newspapers are full of like East German bitties

snooping in your garbage and ratting you out to the Stasi and I think it is fascinating and depressing. Are bitties? Is that a misogynistic claim? It's gendered. Can they be both? They can't be both? I just found the original joke

that caused this whole kerfuffle. The original joke was something to the effect of all women are by. You just have to figure out whether it's polar or sexual. Like, it was like an Al Bundy 1992. I was like, what? How is that even?

Like, eh? It's, it's, yeah. But it also was a retweet, which he immediately unretweeted. And apologize. And for that, he should be staked to the desert floor, covered in honey, and have red ants poured all over going on five minutes not worth your time i didn't say it wasn't worth our time i love this story i want to do a whole podcast on this story we're going to do it we're going to do a good 20 minutes

on it on the remnant in a minute we're going to get to the point where we do where we do not worth your time that's longer than the actual lead item we're going to talk more about the washington post drama than january 6th we aren't even close andrew egger also i will say oh my god he's He's going in for tweeted out his disagreements regarding Top Gun and so I will

I would just say he started it he started it and I intend to finish it Okay three of us are having a conversation and then one of us is having a different conversation

in this segment so really Steve it's like unfair we have to discount 25% of time on this section Maybe this is why you counted just three of us earlier. Oh yeah that's it.

Maybe. All right. Thank you so much for listening. If you have comments thoughts on this podcast, become a member. And you can hop into the comments section. I will see you there defending the honor of Jonah Goldberg. And I don't know, I'll let Andrew defend himself. I wonder how long it'll take him to figure out that he was mentioned on this podcast. It's a good test of how often he listens. Thank you so much. And we will talk to you again next week.

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