The Dispatch Podcast - January 6: One Year Later

Episode Date: January 6, 2022

On the eve of the anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, the podcast is dedicated entirely to the events at the Capitol. The gang recounts their memories from that bleak day in Washington and what it has meant for the country over the past year. A lively discussion about what role Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the left played in the lead-up and aftermath ensues. Finally, what will be different about how we talk about January 6 in 20 years?   Show Notes: -First-ever editorial from The Dispatch calling for Trump impeachment -The Dispatch Podcast from January 7, 2021 -Inside the Capitol Riot: An Exclusive Video Investigation | New York Times -Rep. Mike Gallagher on January 6 -Sen. Lindsey Graham on the Senate floor on January 6 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgert, joined by David French, Steve Hayes, and Jonah Goldberg. Today we're going to do something a little different. We are going to talk about January 6th a year later. We're going to talk about what it was like that day. We're going to talk about what's happened in the year. And we're going to talk about how we think January 6 affects what's happening to our country going forward. So it's going to be more of a freewheeling conversation and we hope you'll come along with us. Let's dive right in, Jonah, you live in the district. What were you doing on January 6th? Were you expecting this?

Were you sort of following that there was going to be this rally? So, as you may recall, this time last. year, I was making you feel incredibly envious because I was in Hawaii and sending pictures of my place, the family place in Hawaii. And I came, I was scheduled to fly home on January 6. And because of the top four hour time difference, I watched the stop to steal rally or most of it. And a lot of the stuff percolating up on my iPad, basically. I remember just sort of like lying in bed watching this stuff and I had like a two o'clock flight and or noon flight to L.A. And I remember thinking, gosh, I'm going to have to go radio silent on

the flight because there's no, you know, Wi-Fi over that part of the Pacific. And when I land, for all I know, the capital will be burnt down or there will be scores of people dead because that seemed like a reasonable expectation of how that day was going to go. And there was something very otherworldly about watching it, you know, watching something happening in your hometown that's at the heart of your, you know, profession, you know, happening from a couple thousand miles away. And I remember working with Steve and David because I had a long layover at LAX to deal with our first editorial, which was on all of that stuff. and that itself was a little surreal sitting in a waiting area trying to work on an editorial

when we'd never done one before and trying to figure out what to say. And I'm glad I'm glad I did not take lead on the writing of it because that wouldn't know work. And I don't know, that's, and I was alone. It was a very, you know, I got home and I was alone. My family was still in Hawaii. And it just felt like I'd come back in some ways to a different country. Steve, you had people in the Capitol, members, staff, etc. Were you texting with people?

I was, yeah. I was also out of town as it happens. And we had several reporters from the dispatch who had gone up to the Capitol. Audrey Falberg and Andrew Egger wrote a terrific piece about the folks they interviewed that day and what they abused. observed. So we were in touch with them. And, you know, thinking back, I mean, I think that morning, we were well aware of the possibility that something might go crazy. But I don't think that was my primary thought. You know, I mean, we had conversations about sending reporters up there and said, in effect, if you don't feel safe, you should feel no obligation to go on our behalf. half. If you want to go, we'd love to have you. We would like to have people cover it. We'd like to

have people interview the folks there. So we definitely would like to have people go, but we didn't want to push people into something. So we were aware that there was, you know, the possibility of violence. It had been discussed. I had spoken to a couple members of Congress in advance of January 6th and, you know, the two, three, four days beforehand who had been briefed by the FBI. and they both said that the FBI had, in effect, said, eh, we're not planning for this like this is a huge deal. They had checked occupancy rates at hotels throughout the region. They didn't see anything that would suggest a massive uprising

or the kind of violence that we eventually saw. Then as the day we're on, I was watching it. I was, you know, emailing, texting with members of Congress and senators and some staff throughout the day about what they were seeing and hearing. And, you know, there was that moment when things started to look like they were turning a little dark. I mean, the President Trump spoke at the rally. He said he wanted people to march peacefully toward the Capitol, but also repeatedly declared

that he wanted his supporters to fight. And certainly some of the rhetoric before the actual day, before January 6th, suggests that, you know, there was at least the possibility of violence. I was on a call doing some work for the business side of the dispatch that afternoon, a scheduled call as things really started to turn and was, you know, focused on the call, but, you know, out of the corner of my eye could see things getting a little bit ugly and getting increasingly alarmed. And that was sort of the early part of the day. The later part of the day, we can come, come back to it was, was even more eventful in some respects. David, what point did you turn on your TV? I turned on, you know, at the

beginning, I was not as interested in, and didn't follow the rally itself, you know, the Trump speaking part of it and all of that. I was much more interested in watching the electoral count act shenanigans unfold. And so I was glued to the TV watching all of that. And so, For me, it's sort of, as you're watching it, you realize that there's a lot that's happened outside before anyone inside realizes it's happened. And that was what was so surreal to me was this slowly unfolding sense that, wait a minute, not only are they maybe going to breach the Capitol, they already did it, and they already did it some time ago. And everyone in the Capitol is only just now realizing it. And then that's when you began to see

the camera's pulling back out of the Capitol and you saw some of those, you know, the really memorable images that still sort of dominate your mind in the day of the sea of people surrounding this very thin blue line that people were just surging against and surging against. And it looked like some sort of medieval battle. And, you know, I can remember seeing that and just being furious. I mean, I was just furious. And I was furious for 19 different reasons. You know, one of them was, a lot of us had been warning this might happen.

Yeah, I'm not going to go through all 19. First. But I was furious. I mean, a lot of us have been warning that this would happen. And then, you know, frankly, I was pretty furious at my own tribe of, you know, evangelical conservatives. Because I could see the religious. fanaticism surrounding Trump rising. And, you know, you had this Jericho march in the days before January 6th. And the rhetoric there, the rhetoric was the rhetoric of religious war. And you could see

immediately that religion was all over that crowd. And that was just infuriating for me to see that. And so, yeah, it was a slowly dawning realization that something worse than what we even had been warning about had occurred and then followed by just rage, quite frankly. So I have sort of, this will surprise, no one listening who's been listening, three buckets of memories, three types of memories. One, like you, David, I was watching what was going on on the floor because you and I had done a lot of deep dives into the Electoral Count Act and the various sort of interpretive gaps that were in three USC 15 at that point, that we were looking for.

answers to. The vice president had put out his sort of statement on what was going to happen, but nobody really knew what was going to happen. And we had sort of had theories. So definitely watching that unfold. And then you can just feel something's going wrong on the floor. You know, all of a sudden the vice president's disappearing. There were just like nobody quite knew what was happening. And I remember thinking that it was an interesting failure for maybe the first time in like modern television history that the television cameras weren't really where you wanted them to be. We didn't really watch this unfold on TV. There were cameras in the well when it first was starting and then there were cameras very outside, but then there was

sort of nothing in between. You started to get some recordings on Twitter, but compared to a lot of other events that I've watched unfold in my lifetime. I mean, the Challenger explosion happened when I was quite young, but that's, you know, was being shown in classrooms across the country. You know, from that moment forward, I think we thought we would always see every single detail of everything play out on TV, the OJ car chase, you know, we'd have a helicopter in the sky. And it felt like that didn't happen on January 6 as much. And I was struck by that at the time. I had a friend, a good friend who worked for the vice president. was a senior staff member for him.

And I didn't know whether he'd be with the vice president that day. And so as we were getting news reports of, you know, hang Mike Pence and they were spiriting the vice president off, I was trying to get in touch with my friend to find out, you know, is he safe? Is he there? Is he, did he stay in the office today? What, what's going on? He was with him.

They were quite cloistered in that basement bunker that they were taken to. And they didn't really know, it seemed like, quite what was going on, you know, looking back through our texts, I will say that none of us were saying very apoplectic things to one another. You know, it was all relatively calm and, you know, finding some humor in the situation as best we could. Now, obviously, some of that's because you're worried for your friend and so you don't want to say scary things. But that was, it was hard to have friends there. another friend had just recently become the chief of staff for a senator. And so it was his third

day on the job along with his staff and they're barricading their doors. The staff is crying. These are, you know, young staffers. And I was very angry when I would see people on Twitter, you know, mocking staff for crying. You know, you're sitting on Twitter like behind your, you know, your keyboard somewhere, safe at home. And it's this person's third day on the job and they don't and where the bathroom is. It took me a full two weeks at the Department of Justice to find the bathroom.

So I'm assuming none of them knew because everyone's like me. So that also, you know, was hard. You know, you're just sitting there on your phone trying to text people and give them sort of reports of what you're seeing on Twitter and the news. And then the third part is,

I really was just sitting very 9-11-ish in my kitchen, just watching the television all day long. I just didn't turn away from it. At one point, I took a picture of Nate in front of the TV because I wanted, it felt so historic at that moment that I wanted to remember how old he was, things like that. And that was sort of as the evening wore on. And we've really just, it felt like this could go either direction really quickly.

And I remember Scott was working. and came out of his office at one point. You know, we're all working from home still pandemic-wise. And I said they've just breached the Capitol. And he was like, what? And that, you know, again, like just very reminiscent of 9-11 in a lot of ways. So the day ends the way that it ends. And Republicans are reacting to it in a pretty similar fashion to Democrats at the beginning, Steve.

did you think that we were at a turning point in the next few next few days? Yeah. I mean, I think what was somewhat apparent that day and has certainly become far more apparent and clear in the year since is that there was this divide among Republicans. Immediately you had members of the House of Representatives, Mike Gallagher, I remember Republican from Wisconsin, who's a friend of the dispatch frequently on the public. podcasts, recorded a video from his office saying this is not what America is about. Donald Trump call these people off. You had people imploring President Trump to say something from members of

Congress and the strongest, Trumpiest members of Congress to we've since learned Fox News anchors and hosts and personalities. Sort of everybody normal records. recognized that something was really, really wrong and that this was unacceptable. You had in that same day in the days following people like Kevin McCarthy, blame Donald Trump, Lindsey Graham, say he tried his best to work with Donald Trump, but he was done. He was out. Lindsay Graham giving those speeches. But at the same time, and we saw, I'd say, glimpses of this, but it wasn't evident in really. real time, the way it is now, just how much planning had gone into the other side of this,

the people who were intent on actually stopping the certification and attempting to keep Donald Trump in power. And I had gotten a tip that night. The night of September 6th that Rudy Giuliani was still making phone calls on behalf of Donald Trump to these senators to get them to slow things down. It wasn't clear exactly what they would do if things were slowed down, but they were determined not to let this actually happen. And Giuliani, I suppose sort of befitting of the clown that he had become, left the message with one senator, but intended to leave it for newly elected Senator Tommy Tuberville. And the message in effect said, we really need you.

We need you to slow this down. We've got work to do. We can't let this happen. I'm calling on behalf of the president and slow this down. This was after all of the violence that we saw at the Capitol that day. This was at a time when, again, most sane Republicans, or at least temporarily, say, in Republicans, understood what was happening and understood that it was totally and completely unacceptable.

You still had the president's team working to stop this. And, you know, certainly now that we know what was sort of underway and what they'd been working on, whether you're talking about Peter Navarro, whether you're talking about the war room set up at the Willard Hotel next to the White House with Steve Bannon and others, there was a real plan, whether John Eastman and his, his, his memos, there was a real plan to keep Donald Trump in office. And it turns out, I think, that at least in that respect, all of the things that maybe sounded somewhat alarmist in the months after the 2020 election turned out to have been true. They were really trying to keep Donald Trump in office. David, I don't want to jump forward, but I think it still is part of this

sort of the week or so after. Have you been surprised at how serious the efforts were knowing what we know now about what was going on in those days ahead of time and the days after in terms of their reading of the Electoral Count Act, the Constitution, you know, all those conversations we were having ahead of time, you know, none of them involved anyone actually being able to make a good legal argument on this. I at least was very surprised reading some of these memos we've seen since then. You know, I was surprised on two counts.

And in hindsight, I only should have been surprised on one. The one count I was surprised on was one of the one that I was surprised about and is genuinely surprising in some ways is the extent to which this effort was organized politically organized in the streets, and organized as specious as those Eastman memos are, organized legally, all directed towards a single point of pressure. And that's the vice president of the United States. And what was sobering to me when I think about that is I just have, I'm obsessed with this question, what if Mike Pence had said yes? What if with the pretexts provided by the memo, what if with the enormous pressure being put on him by the president of the United States, by the angry base, what if he had said yes? And so I was surprised that all of these points of

contact were coming at Pence. And I had kind of in my mind pictured it as, well, there's talk radio angry at Pence. And then the president is saying wild things about Pence, but the president says wild things all the time. But this effort, this Green Bay sweep, this. the Eastman memos, the Jenna Ellis memos, all of this telling Mike Pence, don't forget the acting head of the Citadel Division in the Department of Justice threatening the DAG and others, the acting attorney general at that point. It was, these were real people. Senate confirmed humans. Yes, all telling him you have a path to a second term for Donald Trump and it's on your shoulders.

So that is the thing, those revelations have surprised to me. What also surprised me, but shouldn't have surprised me, is how quickly, immediately, the base rallied to Trump on January 6th itself. I could see it happen in real time where I was. And I think once again, it proved that Trump was more in tune with the Republican base than Republican politicians. You read Republican politicians reacting in real time, having been at the receiving end of this mob, and you could see some of that real anger and that raw anger in in real time. But when people around here in Tennessee began expressing anger at the mob, the blowback they were personally experiencing instantly was unbelievable. And so you began to see some of this Republican divide that you see now, which isn't so much Trump and anti-Trump,

but it's Trump and can we move on from Trump. And so, but can we move on from Trump? And so, but can we move from Trump people, they don't want to talk about January 6th. They don't want to dwell on it. They just want to put it in the rearview mirror. And then the anti-Trump, I mean, the Trump people, of course, to the extent they're dwelling on it, they're dwelling on it as how they've been treated unfairly, how the January 6th rioters are political prisoners. They're dwelling on it all right in all of the worst ways. And then that core of that very small number of people, there's a third group of people and unfortunately it's the smallest that are saying we need to figure out what happened we need this is the Liz Cheney you know this is the

the faction of the very very very very small faction the party that's saying we need to put you know the microscope on this this needs to never happen again we got to figure out how this happened and the saddest thing to me of of the republican factions that appears to be the smallest well and we'll come back to to where we are now a little bit later but Jonah did Do you think the president would get impeached? Yes. And I think it should have been, you know, impeached much quicker and the proceedings should have gone much quicker.

I think, you know, part of the problem, this is the problem you get with so much of the Trump stuff. I mean, it's the January 6th thing was a, I don't want to say it was a microcosm because it was such a macro event, but it was sort of the, all of the themes of four years of Trumpism were in some ways played out because of January and within and because of January 6th, in the sense that Trump learned, you know, that shoot him on Fifth Avenue thing, which, you know, first was sort of this sort of dumb throwaway line, over time became sort of this real dynamic where he could do unthinkable thing, unthinkable or indefensible things. And then immediately,

like an antibody response, the right wing base, the infotainment structure, in certain parts of sort of Fox and talk radio world and that kind of thing, went to work to what aboutist, you know, to what about it to say, well, actually, and figure out a way to say, no, no, no, this indefensible thing is not only defensible, we should own it and be proud of it. And the rapidity of that happening on January 6th, I think is one of the most dismaying and the most shocking things about it. It was like the process started, as David was saying, almost immediately. The thing is, but one last point is that if you, if you just take a step back for a second,

like I keep thinking about like John McCain, you know, he was involved in the Keating Five thing and it plagued him for the rest of his life because he could never sort of, he was like, you know, the stain on his reputation was such that he could never speak. about his honor and integrity without first admitting how he screwed up something. You know, there are these mistakes you make in life that for the rest of your life, you always have to say, well, except for this one time where I did X, you know, that kind of thing. For the rest of American history, whether this republic lasts another century or five centuries or five thousand centuries, we can no longer brag about the peaceful transfer of power anymore, the way we did prior to 2020.

that is a huge deal and it happened on purpose and these people who did this either deliberately in some cases or with other disregard if this was a possibility set and play a bunch of things in an attempt to steal an election that would have ruined if successful our ability to lecture other countries around the world about democracy and the peaceful transfer of power, about being able to tell our kids about this is one of the great things about this country. And the fact that so many people instantaneously treated the event as if the thing that's outrageous about January 6th is the big deal its critics are making out of it. Right.

Is something that I don't think the damage that's done to the culture by all of this. and to the psyche of American politics and the American right has come close to being appreciated. But do you think, let me just push you on that, do you think it really was instantaneously? I mean, I think there was this split. We saw sort of hints of it in those early days. But I mean, Kevin McCarthy a week later gave a speech condemning Donald Trump on the floor of the House of Representatives. You had all of these people who had been, you know, I would say Trump water carriers who, for, I mean, you know, we can quibble over what an extended period of time is, but longer than a blink of an eye who sort of recognized what any sane person would have recognized, which was that, holy cow, this is awful. This is really, really terrible. And then gradually, I mean, maybe this doesn't matter because eventually they got there. But to me, it's more damning of them in a certain sense because they recognize not just in the

moment that it was wrong, but for a while that it was wrong. Now, they didn't vote to to impeach him, everybody but 10 of those Republicans, all but a handful of senators didn't vote to convict him. But there was this, you know, at least for a week, there was this sense that, wow, something unprecedented has happened here and it was really, really wrong. And it was only later in January that Kevin McCarthy took a secret trip down to Mar-a-Lago. I agree with all of that. But my point, you know, and that was the point we all bunch of us made about the Laura and Hannity texts to Mark Meadows is that they revealed themselves of actually being in the closet decent people who understood the gravity of what was going on. But they just- These are the Laura Ingram, Sean Hannity texts to Mark Meadows that the January 6th committee has uncovered. Yeah. Right. They recognize that Donald Trump was responsible for this stuff and that he had the power to stop it.

they just really were reluctant to say so on air even that night and that's what i'm sort of talking about i agree it was my point my point wasn't that they didn't recognize how bad it was and it wasn't that they they all instantly started backpedaling it's that that process started almost instantaneously and it applied to and you know it's like some character like Deadpool or somebody in a movie who has a fast healing ability like a terrible wound it takes a little while for the wounded like suddenly self-heal, but like that, that process of the right, um, grabbing their mops and buckets and hammers and nails to fix this problem started so unbelievably quickly. And the, and I agree with you entirely. What is damning about the initial

response from virtually everybody, um, either publicly or privately or both is that it reveals these people could be snapped out of the cult of person. personality worship stuff. They could see the event for what it was, but they could not hold on to their decency and their realism for very long in the face of the need to return to the narrative of Donald Trump being in the right and the real villains were the other people. And now that process is largely complete. I mean, it's more than complete. And it's very Olenskyite. You know, They take something that is a problem for our side, quote unquote, our side, and try to turn it into a positive. And that's what Tucker is doing by saying, no, no, no, no, the heroes, whatever.

Like, American greatness just had this absolute garbage piece saying, so long as the left is saying this is like a Reichstag fire, we need to say this is like our Bastille Day and defend all of us. And when does the right ever embrace the French Revolution, the American right? 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 financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in

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various parts of those hours and days after. But now for the second half where, um, There's maybe three parts I want to break this into. The first is to challenge what you're saying a little bit, Jonah, because, well, Jonah and Steve, both of you are putting this fully in only the context of the right. And David, I want to bring you into this, but we're also forgetting the left. So there's a reason that it takes so long for Donald Trump to be, for the articles of impeachment to be drafted and brought forward. Nancy Pelosi didn't do it. day later or two days later what it took two weeks david like right before he was going out of office

uh why is that because the timing would then be that much harder for republicans to deal with she didn't involve republicans in the drafting of it it was about incitement not about dereliction of duty the article went back to october as in pre-election so that any republicans who signed on do it would have to be signing on to the idea that Donald Trump's impeachable incitement action happened during the campaign where they were supporting Donald Trump, which was it just like intellectually untenable, even also politically untenable. So immediately, you're talking about how the right got their mop and buckets out, but on the left, they wanted this to be tribalism also. And so I think only talking about this in terms of, you know, right wing talk radio and

and Hannity or Fox News misses a whole other side of what was going on here. If everyone thinks this is a political moment, then how can you possibly be surprised that it became tribal on the right when it was already tribal on the left? David, please respond. I mean, okay. Nancy Pelosi did some procedural things in response to an attempted coup on the United States government.

But is it, David, no, you're like, exactly. There was a attack on the capital. I know. I know, and Nancy Pelosi did not handle it perfectly correct. Not just not perfectly. She refused to involve Republicans. Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, the night, the night of January 6th, 147 Republicans voted, 147 Republicans voted to scrap some of the election results.

Eight senators, 139 representatives. So what we're dealing with is- 80 who were able to work with Nancy Pelosi to draft an article of impeachment? It would have been plenty. I stipulate it. I stipulate it. She didn't do a good job.

It's not that she didn't do a good job. It's that she wanted, there was as much political tribalism on the left in the hours and days later. Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope. So the thing is what we had was the head of the Republican Party in assistance assisted by a majority of the Republican House tried to overthrow our government, okay?

Nancy Pelosi comes in and I will stipulate that the way she responded to impeachment was too slow and too partisan. That's normal bad, okay? That's normal bad. It doesn't even belong in the conversation. But what about the Democrats who had objected to, I mean, why are you saying that they tried to overthrow the government when there have been representatives who have voted against certifying electoral slates before? They weren't trying to overthrow the government. Well, again, what we're talking about is, so that's beyond normal bad, trying to not certify, say, George W. Bush's election. That's beyond normal bad. It was such a small effort. It was fortunately irrelevant.

this one resulted in the capture of the violent seizure of the Capitol and was supported by the President of the United States, where only the Vice President rejecting the President and senior leaders of the President's administration saved us from the possible collapse of the United States of America. I obviously accept all of that, but then treating it, to me it's a little like the filibuster, right? Both sides can claim that the other side got rid of the filibuster. because it's been incremental.

We've been frogs in a pot of boiling water when it comes to the filibuster. We have for the undermining of our election norms as well. But this was such a giant leap forward. I don't think it was a giant leap forward. I think it was a leap forward for sure. I think it was Harry Reid saying

we weren't going to have the filibuster for... January 6th. I think incremental getting rid of the filibuster for Gorset. And the days after Donald Trump was inaugurated, was it his inauguration or his election, when Antifa terrorists went through D.C. and burned K Street down and broke all the windows, you don't think that was maybe a first step towards this? Oh, that was terrible. That was horrible.

How is that not similar to this? Again, this was a leap, but I don't think it's like that wildly, like, oh my God. Like, this is step by step by step each time, each side. is willing to go to new lights. There's a giant difference between Antifa or the proud boys and the proud boys and the Oathkeepers and the three percenters

and the First Amendment Pretorian supported by the sitting president of the United States of America in the effort to overturn an election result. That's an order of magnitude difference, Sarah. It's a giant order of magnitude difference than a street gang rioting, street

gang supported by the president of the United States with a majority of his elected representatives in the House continuing to support the effort to overturn the election after the Capitol was violently attacked. And I'm going to stipulate to everything

you critique about Nancy Pelosi it's just not it's not not just not in the same ballpark. It's not in the same county of the same ballpark. Look, I and Steve Jonah about to bring you in. I agree that it is a huge difference. I do not want to minimize it. I hope I've made that clear. My point is that saying that this is a right wing only problem

is going to be proven factually incorrect in a perhaps terrifying way, Jonah, if we don't see this as a larger American problem and continue to say, nope, it's the right wing, it's the conservative media, it's just Republicans. No. Just specifically, who is saying that? I mean, nobody in this podcast is saying that. Is it your claim that that others are saying this is only a right-wing problem? I think that that y'all have not been giving enough broader picture to the fact that this can happen on both sides and that this has been Republicans' fault.

January 6th. I am much more in your camp than I think you realize in the sense that, you know, I've been writing about this. I mentioned this on Meet the Press on Sunday. Like, I think January 6 exposed a cross-the-board elite failure. The way Nancy Pelosi handled impeachment was bad. It was a sign that she doesn't see herself as representing an institution. She sees herself as representing the partisan faction that, for the time being, controls the institution. I also think it was a sign that she didn't think January 6th was very serious.

I think that, I don't think that's right. I think that what it's not was, was a sign that was like they thought, ah, this is such an unbelievable, a wonderful political weapon, let's use it to our advantage. But it didn't mean they weren't legitimately horrified by it. And I think the problem that you're running into here is that, first of all, there are differences of degree that become differences in kind, an assault on the seat of government where people are literally chanting hang the vice president if he doesn't willingly go along with a premeditated plan to steal an election.

Yes, yes, all stipulated. It's bad. But as Kevin Williamson says, a riot that is part of a coup d'etat is a lot different than a riot that is part of a coup de target. And I think that the part of the problem with your analogy here is that whereas I agree that the antifist stuff was terrible, the forgiveness for the violence from the left was terrible and all these kinds of things. This was a premeditated plan by the president of the United States and his minions.

My point is it's a step along the way. Yes, this was a bad step. Maybe it was even a difference in kind of a step. But we're acting like it's the end. It's not. But the thing is, we're not acting like it's the end. When you're, and I agree that it is part of a process of the erosion of, leadership within this country on a whole bunch of fronts, but it is orders of magnitude just

simply a different kind of crime than the collective action problems we've seen in the past because it was deliberate. And I have no problem with people making your argument. But one of the reasons why the right is such the hot mess and deserves the crap that David, Steve and I are giving it is that they only give the part of the argument that you're giving about how Nancy Pelosi is bad. I mean, Kevin McCarthy's position right now is he gave a statement on Sunday where he said the central question of January 6th, the central question, ladies and gentlemen, is why did Nancy Pelosi leave the house unprepared for this event? Yeah, that's silliness. And this is like ordering, it's like swatting someone's house where I call

a, I fortunately call a police report, say, you got to go to David French's house, he's holding hostages, he's got guns. And then saying the real scandals that David was not prepared for the swat attack. And so I have no problem with you. I make a lot of these points that you're making all the times are about how the left has dropped the ball on a lot of this as well. And they should have made Liz Cheney a impeachment manager. They should have worked with Republicans to write the orders on impeachment. I've said that on 30 different podcasts now. But unless someone is willing to say, and which you are, you have to first be willing to stipulate

that what Donald Trump did was a disqualifying, outrageous, arguably treasonous, evil crime where he instigated a mob as part of a larger plan to steal an election and that it should bar him from public office for the rest of his life, unless you're willing to say those things and then say, and by the way, Nancy Pelosi didn't do a really good job either. My point is that January 6th didn't come out of nowhere. It didn't just a spring from the foam and that we are heading toward the same thing in 2024,

and it could be from either side. And so the more we simply focus as a culture, as a punditry on only the right, we've got a problem. Steve, when it comes- The more the right refuses to condemn it, the easier it is going to be for the left to say, well, you didn't condemn it when your side did it. It's all the more reason it's the responsibility of the right to condemn it. Yes. I would like to condemn all of it is the issue. Steve, we haven't talked a lot about the January 6th committee, and I want to make sure we do. what do you view as the purpose of the committee? Yeah, let me, I will answer your question.

I always answer your question. But before that. But before that, just my two cents, I agree with you. I agree with a lot of what you said. In fact, I think if you listen to these podcasts of 51 weeks ago, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, I was doing some real-time reporting on Nancy Pelosi's decision not to include Republicans and condemned that in the strongest possible way. I was talking to probably a couple dozen members of Congress at the time, Republicans who were willing to work with Democrats on the impeachment language. She did the same thing on the January 6th commission made it entirely partisan.

announced her plans for it without consulting Republicans, including Liz Cheney, who was then in Republican leadership. It's just hard to imagine post-9-11 saying we don't need to include Democrats in our resolution containing 9-11 and then saying, but we take 9-11 seriously. No, obviously you don't take it seriously if you think, if you are seeing this through a partisan only lens. I mean, look, so many of the people in Washington, the people who are elected member of Congress. It would have been different if the towers were attacked by the head of the, the attack was directed by the head of the Republican Party. That would have been a less bipartisan response. I think if you look at her partisanship, I don't think it necessarily means she didn't think that this was a serious attack.

I think she probably did think it was a serious attack. I would argue that because she thought it was a serious attack, that makes it even more outrageous that she was willing to politicize it. She shouldn't have. And she did. and she deserves condemnation for that. But I just think it isn't just a matter of difference of degree. It's a difference in kind. I mean, we're not talking about an apples to apples comparison here

or even an apples to stakes comparison here. We're talking about apples to sheet metal. These are not the same things at all. They have nothing to do with one another. And so I just think the... Well, they do for me in the sense that each side is creating the churn that makes the other side more tribal. The actions by the Republicans

to not certify the election made the Democrats more tribal. The actions by Nancy Pelosi to treat this as a partisan event made the Republicans more tribal. And so it's a tit for tat all the way down the line and it leads to something really bad.

And the more we simply focus on the rights actions on January 6th, we're missing where this is headed. No, I agree. Look, I share your concern about where it's headed. I guess I would just say that if we're looking at what happened and you're looking at in the context of January 6th, you know, as David says, you have Nancy Pelosi committing some procedural fouls, mistakes,

misjudgments, and Donald Trump trying to forcibly remain in office. Like, these just are not in the same universe at all. I guess I disagree that they were procedural mistakes. I think Donald Trump could have been impeached and potentially convicted in the Senate if Nancy Pelosi had not been the speech. of the house. No, I agree with that. I agree with that. So that it's not a procedural mistake. No, I don't agree with that at all. I think he could have been impeached. I think there was a moment, I mean, I know there was a moment where Mitch McConnell was very open to convicting Donald Trump.

She wanted him convicted. She needed to have the article of impeachment done the next day and she knew it. Yeah, and they could have had more Republicans in the House, which would have built momentum. Yeah. And I think could have had him impeached in Roof. I really believe that's true. And I think that's, and I think that's, but that is a procedural mistake. That is a procedural mistake. I'm not I'm not saying it doesn't have big consequences, but even if I stipulate to the seriousness of the procedural mistake, the argument that you're making, it is not stopping the peaceful transfer of power and trying to remain in office based on lies about an election. Yeah, I'm not trying to compare the two in that sense. What I'm saying is it's this

continual churn that each side eggs the other on. And again, the more we focus on just one side on one day and that huge leap, difference in kind and sheet metal that it was, you miss the bigger picture. And I think historians will look back and think we were insane to only care about January 6th and not see the water temperature rising around us. If you look at, I mean, my gosh, ever since, but both before and after January 6th, the amount of people who are weighing in on the possibility of civil war in the United States is... But they think it's going to be driven by the right. But look, hey, look, I just want to be clear.

Like, when you say you can't focus on just the right, we are not doing that. Like, I know that's not what you're suggesting, but I want to be clear for listeners. We are not doing that. And as I say, I believe in the podcast that we did immediately after January 6th, we talked about what Nancy Pelosi was doing. So I think we have looked at both sides of this, even if, in my view, there's no comparison between the two. Okay.

So now to your actual question. to the January 6th committee. So best case scenario, unfortunately, I think, you know, to your previous point, Nancy Pelosi made what could have been a more productive, more bipartisan effort, less bipartisan by, I mean, she sent out a letter announcing what the committee was going to look like without consulting Republicans. And as I say, Liz Janie was at the time the number three Republican in the House of Representatives. She was making these arguments behind the scenes. I believe she had a reasonable expectation that some, you know, a minority, but a sizable

minority of Republicans were sympathetic to the arguments she was making and would have gone along. Nancy Pelosi screwed that all up. She screwed it all up on impeachment. She screwed it all up on the committee. So I think the, you know, the best case scenario would have been a committee that produces a report, something like the 9-11 commission report, which I was deeply, deeply flawed in in many, many ways.

I went through it carefully at the time. I won't bother to go through all the details of the mistakes right now. But it was a flawed package, but what it gave us was based on real-time documentation, interviews with participants, you know, sort of in the immediate aftermath of the event. It gave us a reasonable, approximation of what happened, of that history, even if there were some details that I think

they didn't get quite right. The best case scenario would have been for that to happen from this. And I don't think we're, we're not going to have a report out of this committee that Kevin McCarthy says, ah, well, you know, they make some interesting points. They found some interesting things. We should consider this and, you know, talk together about how to move forward. Republicans have decided that it's a partisan committee, the Republican commentariat, including many people who strongly condemned Donald Trump and expressed serious concerns about January 6th, have swung entirely against the committee for reasons that aren't really clear other than that they are back on the team and they're wearing red jerseys. Where I do think it can be

useful is to the extent that it's able to get its hands on these documents that give us insights as to what was happening, both on that afternoon, documents and or transcribed interviews, what have you, that give us a better sense of exactly what happened that afternoon. I mean, we now know, for instance, much more than we did a year ago about what Donald Trump was doing. It was clear that he was watching television, that he was enthusiastic about what was happening. We had those reports in the media in the immediate aftermath of January 6, but we now know with much greater detail and from eyewitnesses what he was doing and what he wasn't doing. We have contemporaneous texts from senior White House officials to a wide

variety of people, including our former colleagues at Fox News. I mean, there have been, as Jonah mentioned earlier, there have been revelations about what people like Tucker Carl and Laura Ingram were saying in public that in some ways it was consistent with what they were saying in private. They were showing alarm. In other ways, they were totally changing the story and doing Donald Trump's bidding, which, you know, that fact isn't surprising. To see it in their own words is somewhat surprising. There's a new text from Sean Hannity yesterday, revealed yesterday by the committee that showed Hannity saying he was worried this is on January 5th he was worried about what was going to happen over the next 48 hours and that same day Hannity goes on

air and says you know big day lots of people come and you know sort of celebrating what was going to happen that doesn't have tremendous bearing on actual you know planning for January 6th what have you. But it does give us more information about who is doing and who was saying what. And while Hannity, you could sort of write him off as just a media personality, very clear that he was intimately involved in the PR response and all of this from the beginning. So I think giving us that kind of real-time understanding of what was happening will be helpful. David, what is the, well, we haven't heard from Jonah, perhaps. Jonah. thinking about the committee's work, what is the role of the Republicans, Liz Cheney and

Adam Kinzinger on the committee? And how should we think about, you know, this being really still partisan, even with them on it? You know, some of the, I think, objection that Republicans are making to this committee's work is that it is meant to be basically a campaign prop for the D-Trip heading into the midterms, and whose role is it to, quote, punish Republicans? Is it this committee? Or is it the voters in their districts? Or the courts, right? I mean, like, there's also, like, the Congress is not a criminal investigative body, and all it can do is refer stuff to the DOJ. And it seems to be acting a little bit like a grand jury and a little bit like a partisan thing. I think, you know, Kevin McCarthy's decision

to... refuse to appoint anybody to the committee is feeling more and more like the Soviet's decision to walk out of the UN in advance of the vote to go to war in Korea in the sense that it seemed like this, oh, let's let's let's let's show these guys active defiance. And it turned out to be incredibly dumb because you could have people far more. I mean, this is this is, you know, best gas station sushi and Alabama kind of standard. But you can have people more responsible than Jim Jordan on that committee who would still bring up legitimate concerns about, you know, the partisan nature of this or the precedent of that that could slow this thing

down. And but Kevin McCarthy thought he was making a smart play by keeping any loyal, you know, team player quasi-pro Trump Republicans off the committee. And so the committee has just basically totally freehand. do whatever it wants, which I think was a politically boneheaded move. But I honestly, I don't care at this point because at the end of the day, getting these facts into the historical record, even if they don't turn out to be the partisan weapon that they want them to be, it feels like the Democrats are trying to make January 6th a political cause for the midterms

that in the same way that Terry McCullough tried to make Donald Trump, the central part of his Virginia gubernatorial bid, and it's just, it feels like bad politics, even if I'm sympathetic to the outrage. And so I, but I, I want this stuff on record. I want, I want this to be known. I want this to be locked in in the history books. And if this is the way you do that, I don't really don't care about the political consequences of it. I think that the getting to the truth of this whole thing is vastly more important. And I will say just because I think it is one of the funniest things to watch is people like Peter Navarro patiently, calmly going on TV and confessing to a crime is just so joyful to watch and helpful.

But I'd like to see more of that. I'd like to see more people just sort of going out there and not, and having spent so long in the bunker bragging about their role of being part of an effort to steal an election, don't realize that you're not supposed to say that out loud in mixed company. And I'd like to see a lot more of that. And I'd like to, look, I want to see some at least historical accountability for Sean Hannity and Tucker and all these people. I think it's useful to get this stuff out there, even if it's not the political silver

bullet that the Democrats think it's going to be. David, we're heading into 2022, 2024, nothing has changed. None of the basics have changed. what should we be doing differently? Boy, that is a really, that's a really good question. You know, look, I think one of the things, and I was just talking to somebody the other day who was asking me, what does a post-Trump future on the right look like? And I said, if you're waiting for people to sort of suddenly say, you know what I're bad

for supporting Trump, you're going to be waiting a really, really, really long time. The future, I think, looks like people moving on if it's going to be a positive future. More like the Glenn Youngkin race, where he sort of holds down the right, finesses the questions around the election, and then forges forward, presenting a particular vision that really has nothing to do with much to do with Trumpism at all. A kind of a turn the page. And part of the ways that like Ronald Reagan, for example, turn the page from. the Nixon era. So I think there's a vision of a better Republican party that is not going to be what, that can be a lot better and can be a positive, and can be a positive presence in the

American life that is not going to, that is still not going to be what a lot of people want, which is sort of this come to Jesus moment that says, we shouldn't have gone down the Trump road. We shouldn't have done that. We shouldn't have defended him. So I do think there is a future that is a better vision, but it's a vision of moving on, not of repudiation, if that makes sense. But right now, Sarah, goodness, I wrote a whole book about how there isn't a single, truly important social, cultural, political, or religious dynamic that is pulling these United States together more than it's pushing us apart. And to me, this really the central challenge we have going forward is not only is that still true, it's more true than it was before January 6th.

that the forces pushing us apart from each other are stronger. And that is, I think, the central challenge of which politics, quite frankly, is just one part of it, and not even necessarily the most important part. It's downstream from a lot of these cultural indicators of the big sort and increasing cultural differences, a decreasing appreciation for tolerance and grace, a decrease. number of close friendships. I've written about this as a factor as something that's really harming our culture, where we're replacing the connection of civic association and friendships with something more hollow and artificial and political associations and political causes.

So I think that's our central challenge. It isn't what's going to happen to the Republican Party. The Republican Party will be, what happens to Republican Party will be downstream of that. We still have the challenge that there is not a single, truly important cultural religious social force that is pulling us together more than it's pushing us apart. Yeah. And I mean, as I've said before, I think that if you have a Biden versus Trump rematch in 2024, both sides believe that the other side is trying to take the election. Democrats absolutely believe that Republicans at the state level are trying to change the

rule so that they can steal the election. Republicans believe that that's what Democrats did with COVID changes to the election in 2020. and it's a recipe for, I think, a much bigger disaster than we saw on January 6th. All right. Last quick thoughts, Steve, in 20 years, what will we be saying differently about January 6th than we're saying this week? Yeah, that's a great question. I hope and expect that through this discovery process that the,

that the January 6th committee is doing, we will get a lot more of this kind of real-time understanding of what was happening. The committee has cooperation of many, many Trump White House officials, including cabinet-level officials and people who were in the building involved in these discussions who were at the time and remain appalled by everything that they are seeing, many of those people are cooperating. So while I would love to see somebody like Mark Meadows, who seems to be at the center of all this, you know, suddenly decide that he owes it to history and to the capital T truth to talk about what was happening and to share his recollections, I don't expect that we'll do that. But I do think that given the cooperation of so many

other people around, it will be a rather definitive report. And I think we'll understand me, to me, the biggest takeaway, if you go back to the day of January 6th, 2021, what we saw happening looked like it could have been, you know, a protest or a riot spun out of control with, you know, the most fervent Trump supporters storming the Capitol in kind of a spontaneous. show a frustration about what happened. And I think that that description applies to many, if not most of the people who are there. I don't think that most of the people who stormed the Capitol were part of a Steve Bannon-driven conspiracy or Donald Trump-driven conspiracy to keep Trump in office. However, it is now clear beyond any dispute that there was a Steve Bannon conspiracy, a Donald Trump conspiracy to keep Trump in power. That's what. what this was about. It was about pressuring Mike Pence behind the scenes initially and then

pressuring him publicly to do the wrong thing, to unilaterally declare that Donald Trump could remain president, kick this to state legislatures. This was a plan. It was an obvious plan. And it's appalling. And I guess the great, the thing that worries me most, if we're even having these conversations in 20 years, is that the people who saw this, even with imperfect information in January 6th, understood that what was happening was profoundly wrong and un-American, now with the benefit of all of this additional information and information that makes clear that Donald Trump tried to stay in office and steal an election, have returned to Trump's side. Amazing to me. Jonah, let's see if you can do a better job quickly.

Short answer. What will historians say in 20 years about January 6th that we're not saying now? I think over time, the truth of it will, the discussion of it will get closer to the truth of it, which means that the significance of the actual mobsters will decrease. Because the thing, the primary thing to know about most of those people who, were committing violence, breaking windows, defecating in the hallways, all that kind of stuff. For the most part, it's not that they were fascists or white supremacists, though. I'm sure there were some of both in the mix.

The salient point is that they were idiots. They were profoundly stupid, gullible people who were misled by the President of the United States and his sort of infotainment enablers. And so I think in some ways, as much as I love heaping scorn on Peter Navarro, I think his narrative is going to get closer, is going to be closer to how we're going to talk about in the future, which is that they had a plan to steal the election that didn't involve violence. But because they were so stupid and so bad at figuring out how to do this, they did not anticipate the foreseeable violence that would come from the rhetoric and the actions. that they took. And it seems to me that at the end of the day, egging on a crowd that went violent as negligent and as evil as that really was, the greater crime was trying to steal an election and doing it with premeditation and considerable planning beforehand. And I think in history,

that is where the emphasis will be put, is on the effort to steal the election and look at, and then the downstream problems that trying to implement. that plan caused, including the violence of January 6th? David, I don't know if anyone knows what short answer means. Let's see if you do. I will say with this qualifier, if present trends continue, I think in a generation or so, people will look back on January 6th as one of the most significant markers of deep and profound and what should have been quite obvious to us in the moment.

cultural instability and political instability in the United States that we were in the process of failure as a nation and that the unwillingness of a critical mass of Americans to wake up to that as a salient reality above and beyond the daily realities of our lives may well be looked back by future generations as a fatal mistake for our country. I think those were all good answers. All right. Thank you guys for tuning in to this a little bit unusual New Year's podcast that we're doing. And we'll get back to our regular schedule, if you will, next week. Bye, guys. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside.

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