The Dispatch Podcast - Kummerspeck

Episode Date: April 15, 2020

Sarah, Steve, Jonah, and David discuss the debate to reopen the economy amid the coronavirus pandemic, federalism and overreach by governors, and the president's decision to halt funding for the World Health Organization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgert, joined as always by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French. This podcast is brought to you by The Dispatch. Visit the dispatch.com to see our full slate of newsletters and podcast, and make sure to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. Today, we're going to talk about the debate to reopen the country, the economy, and governor overreach, federalism up close for a lot of Americans. And, finally end on China, the WHO, and how this plays politically and on the world stage. Let's dive right in. I want to start with the debate we're all having in our homes across the country and from the White House podium. That's the open-up debate, let's call it. Yesterday, the president said that he, quote, I will then be authorizing each individual governor of each individual state to implement a reopening, very powerful reopening plan of their state in a time, in a manner, which is most appropriate.

But we have lots of polls out as well on this that say that even if the president says that the economy should reopen, and even if states remove some of their restrictions, the American public may not be ready. 81% in a morning consult poll said Americans should continue to social distance for as long as is needed to curb the spread of coronavirus, even if it means continued damage to the economy.

Only 10% said that we should stop social distancing to stimulate the economy, even if it means increasing the spread of coronavirus. And when asked how quickly they would return to their normal activities once the government lifts restrictions and businesses and schools start to reopen and this is a Gallup poll the vast majority of Americans

say they would wait and see what happens 71% would wait and see. 10% would wait indefinitely. Only 20% said they would return to their normal activities immediately. And even if you pull demographic age, all sorts of

other things, it doesn't really change those numbers. The only statistically significant differences that 20% that said they would return to their normal activities rises about 10 points among Republicans, and it rises two to three points among those who live in rural communities, which I want to get to eventually in this conversation, and, of course, men.

David, you've written about this sum. Jonah, you have two. Let's start with David. Yeah, I mean, I'm really glad you started with that poll because I've been getting a sense for a while, that a lot of the really angry foment to reopen, reopen, reopen is mainly a Twitter phenomenon. It's mainly a lot of very angry activists on Twitter and not reflecting something that's a huge groundswell in the rest of the United States, at least not while coronavirus is the number one

leading cause of death in the whole United States right now. I mean, this is something that happened last week and on a an average daily basis has continued to happen. And that is every time you see that daily number of deaths from coronavirus, which is almost certainly an undercount, hitting above 1,700 or so is when you're seeing coronavirus become the number one leading cause of death in the U.S. way, way above car accidents, way, way above seasonal flu or complications from seasonal flu, above heart disease, above cancer.

and yes, there have been some models that, for example, undercounted the projected demand for hospital beds right now. That's absolutely the case. But at the moment, you have coronavirus is the leading cause of death in the U.S. And so, therefore, as people, as this reality sinks in, and that's 26,000 deaths, and that 26,000 number, well more than 25,000 of that has been in the last four weeks. And as that numbers sinks in, and especially the plight of New York City sinks in, you could say go tomorrow and unless people feel safe, they're not going to go. Now, some percentage may, and it may be larger in the rural areas, but the rural areas do not drive the American economy. The American economy, as I talked

about in a pretty long piece last week. The American economy is driven by cities. And the city that drives the American economy more than any other city in the U.S. by far is New York City. And New York City is just on its knees with this thing, about 10,000 deaths according to the last projections, which they revised upward to sort of bring the counting system in line with the way they count deaths from flu. And so there is a human behavior aspect of this. that governments are not in absolute control of. They're not an absolute, there are not an absolute control of the shutdown,

and they're not in absolute control of when it reopens. Jonah, New York has seen a flattening of its curve, and if anything yesterday, what Governor Cuomo was saying, was that perhaps it is seeing a downward trend in its curve, and maybe a little early to say that. And there are other parts of the country that are saying, and we're not New York. Yeah, no, look, I mean, this debate reminds me a little bit for those of us who have teenage kids,

you've had the experience of your kid being sick and wanting to go to some event, play in a, you know, a basketball tournament or go to a party, whatever it is, and you have to say to them, well, let's see. how you feel when we get there and they say but you don't understand I have to go and you say well let's hope you get better and they say but you don't understand I have to go and you have to go back and forth about this and the reality is is that the that there's something as David alluded to there's just something otherworldly about this I have no problem with other I mean other states reacting to these things in

different ways and all the rest but at the end of the day if you don't have this thing under control, if you don't have some regime for testing, which is the only way as I understand it, you can truly get it under control, you risk having more hotspots. And New York could still turn into a hotspot. It's not like the vast majority of New Yorkers have been exposed to the coronavirus. You know, most of them haven't. And if they all started getting back on the subway without having some means of controlling this

and doing contact tracing, you could be essentially right back to where we were before, at least in terms of the numbers of infections in serious cases. Maybe they're better mobilized to deal with it now, so the curve could actually be higher in terms of hospital capacity and all of the rest. And so it's just, I mean, it's sort of a bizarre conversation. You know, we've had this thing where Trump wants to sometimes claim now that he has total authority to do this and to reopen the economy. Sometimes he says, well, it's up to the governors. I'm with David. It's not up to any of them. There's a collective action issue here

in terms of what is the actual state of the pandemic on the ground. And it's entirely possible to open up parts of the economy that don't matter as much to the GNP or the GDP as other parts of the economy. But you just sort of have to wait and see and play it by ear. And while I agree with David that I do think that Twitter distorts this. If you read Twitter, you would have no idea that the polling is so lopsided in favor of quarantines, in favor of lockdowns, and split on Donald Trump's performance. You know, it's, it's, Twitter is a distortion effect. But the people who are contributing to that distortion effect are playing an outsized role elsewhere. We had my old friend Bill Bennett, who I'm sort of brokenhearted having to criticize

him again, but going around saying this is just the flu, that this is a, essentially, he's not saying it's a hoax, he's saying that it's an exaggeration and hype and all of that. It's just not the flu, right? It's just not the flu. You don't normally during flu season talk about flu hotspots around the country. and what is weird about so I think one of the things that drives some of these people is that the pandemic has completely thrown into the garbage heap of history the narrative that they wanted about the roaring economy about how Trump was high in the saddle and they want to sort of talk our way back into that narrative regardless of the facts on the ground and one of the main places where that's being done is on Twitter but Twitter. is not real life. Yeah, let me, let me just pick up on that real quick. I think there are a couple different, I mean, oversimplifying a little bit here, I think there are a couple different groups

that are making this case, that it's time to open up. Certainly one of them is, as Jonah suggests, kind of the, a lot of people in the Trumpy center-right parts of Twitter. And I think they're making this argument for a couple of reasons. One, they want to support Donald Trump. They're frustrated that this economy could threaten his reelection, which looked pretty good to them, I think, two, three months ago. And two, many of these people are the same people who were saying from the outset that this was not really that big a deal, echoing the kinds of comments that we heard Donald Trump making. So for them to kind of turn now and say, well, yeah, you know what, it was a really big deal, and I got it wrong, feels, I guess they're less.

inclines to do that than they are to try to insist that this thing that's causing thousands of deaths every day is not that big a deal. Then there's a second group and I'm much more sympathetic to the second group. I think the second group are people, and I've spoken to some of these people, are folks who, you know, live in, you know, rural parts of the country who look around and they're not close to anybody. They don't interact with people on a, on a, lots of people on a daily base. and they look around at their life as it was two months ago and say, boy, I can live my life much the same way that I could have a couple months ago.

And what's with all these crazy restrictions because people in New York City are getting sick? Why should there be restrictions in central Wisconsin or rural South Carolina? And I don't think those are unreasonable questions to ask, particularly when you look at some of the overreach that we've seen from local governors, whether it's Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, banning garden sections of big box stores or, you know, cops running people down on the beach in a famous video that circulated on social media this week. There's definitely some overreaction. I think people, you know, out in certainly my home state and elsewhere, look at some of that and say, this is crazy. Why are we doing all this?

This is largely a New York problem. There are other hotspots. Deal with the hotspots where you have to. But otherwise, leave me alone. I'm not unsympathetic to that argument, but I think it misunderstands the transmissibility of this particular virus and what we've seen in some places. You remember there was the funeral in Columbia County, Georgia, that led to a mini outbreak in that area, including some deaths. You have South Dakota, which had among the least restrictive rules in place for a while that is now really heating up, despite its lack of population density.

So the fact is this can spread pretty readily, I think much more quickly than people imagine. And that's the reason that what Jonah and David have said, I think, is right. It's not just a matter of flipping the proverbial switch, as everybody says, or the president saying go. You'll have some people in rural areas that are ready to get back to their lives that they knew three months ago. But that's not going to have a dramatic effect on the economy

and certainly not when you have huge majorities of the population saying, I'm not ready to do this. So on the rural point, what's interesting to me is that it seems that what the data tells us is, if you live in a rural part of the country, you are less likely to be exposed to the virus. However, if you are exposed to it, you are far more, likely to have very negative consequences from it because rural residents tend to be older, less affluent, less healthy than the national average, fewer have health insurance, longer

distance to hospitals and labs that can have catastrophic results because this can turn very quickly as we've seen in some of these urban areas. And that rural grocery stores, pharmacies, hospitals are actually last in line for some of the supplies that the chains and big box stores in more urban areas sort of get first in line for. And so it's it's an odd predicament. If you don't know anyone around you who has this, that's a good thing. But to your point, as soon as there's one, it can actually spread very quickly because as others have pointed out, this idea that rural folks, I grew up in a pretty rural part of Texas, yeah, your your social distancing may be a lot more because of population density. But when you do get together,

it's the whole town and it's you know it's a Friday night football game it's the school play it's whatever else and that being said we've also seen now some indications people saying that we'll have to continue this through 2022 certainly through the fall colleges are planning to do online learning for the fall it's one thing to say this in April of 2020 but David What happens in November, December, what happens in April of 2021? Yeah, I mean, you raised a really good point. You know, a couple of things, I think, are going to have to happen to us. You know, one is, you know, we've pointed to some of these really vibrant democracies in and vibrant economies in Southeast Asia that have done a lot better than virtually anybody else, even though they have an enormous amount of trade with China.

They have close proximity to China. But they had something that we didn't have, which is that, you know, real, as we say in the South, come to Jesus moment with SARS. And so they had, and so they, they, when they began to realize that there was a potential pandemic brewing in China, there was this both governmental and very critically cultural response. And I thought that in Jonah's podcast with Lyman, which we'll refer to as as the Rachel Kleinfeld episode of In Quality of the Jonah Remnant podcast because our Vote by Mail podcast was even better than Jonah's pandemic information podcast,

but we don't want to have interd dispatch rivalry. There isn't one, trust me. Ouch. And then, so anyway, as Lyman was talking about when he was talking about, about Hong Kong, there was a cultural response there due to information where people were masking, people were distancing. They were doing this on their own. And what I begin, what I'm wondering is as this goes on, if we're going to start to learn these kinds of social habits that have kicked in countries like in Taiwan or in a place like Hong Kong or a place like South Korea,

where there is a cultural response to the information about the virus that through things like universal masking, much more natural distancing, et cetera, allows us to move out of our homes on a more safe basis. The problem that I have and the question that I have is there are industries in this country that are really ill-suited to the social distancing world. The obvious professional sports, college sports that's obvious. Another thing is, you know, restaurants. I mean, these are high, low margin businesses. They need all their tables. And when how are we going to have restaurants thrive if people are keeping their distance from each other? But I think it's going to end up with a lot of masking that is not something Americans are used to, especially in the

big cities. It's going to be a lot of distancing that Americans have never been used to. But I think that we're going to end up and perhaps with a culture in response to illness that looks more in the way Southeast Asia has reacted. You know, I did this Remnant podcast with James Pethakoukis, my colleague at AEI, and we were talking about this. That's actually great to know how to pronounce his last name, because I've been reading him for a while, and I just go pee, and then I trail off. You also just call it at AIA, we basically just just.

call him Jimmy P or Hey, You. But, you know, we were talking about this, you know, the committee to save the economy or to open the economy guy, team. And it's, and it inspired me to write this somewhat long, weird piece that's on the website today about how we could stumble into a new, new deal, if this goes badly. you know, regardless of whether or not Donald Trump has the authority or the ability, which are two different things, to reopen the economy, if he goes out and claims that he has, you know, which, and he has this tendency to do sort of headline on a press release as substitute for policy stuff, you know, where he just announces that he's done something and that's a substitute for actually doing it. If he announces that he's reopened the economy, a lot of people will follow his lead. And if enough people do it and he's right and we've got this thing under control, it'll be great for him, right?

I mean, he got America moving again. He'll take credit for it. And in politics, that's a fair game. If he's wrong, if millions of people leave their homes and start getting together and going to NASCAR and Trump rallies and you get some super spreaders out. there and we are in a worse shape in terms of the pandemic than we were before, he will get blamed for it and for the economic crash that will come with that in ways that you can't blame him for for this stuff right now. And you know, you can't blame. You can say he didn't do everything he could have and he hasn't been as good as he claims to be and all that kind of stuff. But he's not responsible for this pandemic.

If he sends everybody back out there, like if he blows the whistle and everyone charges out of, the trenches into the machine gun nest of COVID and you have really bad consequences for it, then he owns it. And that's one of the reasons why I think the committee thing is so weird is he's got no, like normally what you would want to do is have as many stakeholders as possible on that commission so that both parties have buy-in that you can speak. bred the blame, you'll still get more than your fair share of credit. He's put his daughter and son-in-law and, you know, what's his face? Wilbur Ross and Steve Mnuchin on there.

It's basically the Trump's ID commission. And so if he gets this decision wrong, we're screwed. And he's screwed. And if that happens, you can see Biden winning, or whoever the Democrat ends up being, because who knows, winning in a massive landslide that gives the Democratic Party all of the power they need to do what they've been trying to do for a century, which is have another new deal. And I think the stakes of this politically and economically of Trump getting something like this decision right, I'm not even sure it's dawned on the White House, the stakes involved.

And just to have some, that was initial reporting on who would be on. that council, that has changed somewhat and the president announced different people who would be on the council yesterday during his Rose Garden Daily Presser. Gene Piro? The names that he mentioned Jamie Diamond, Stephen Schwartzman, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg. Was that the point of that long list of names? There were several long lists of names, Jonah. I started, I really, I started to tune that thing out because I just, you know, I missed what, it just sounded like a, it just sounded like a, reading his phone log or something. I would say as of the taping of this podcast, we do not yet know who is on this council.

Okay. So, fair enough. It's probably the most accurate way to phrase that. That's good. That's good. Steve, I do want to make sure we leave enough time to talk about some of the governor overreach that you mentioned a second ago, because they fall into some different categories as well.

So on the one hand, let's dive into Michigan for a second, according to the governor, who put out a new order several days ago, can't travel to an in-state vacation residence, can't use a motorboat, and then businesses can't have to close off areas, can't sell, areas dedicated to carpeting, flooring, furniture, garden centers, plant nurseries, or paint, which has caused actually an enormous amount of confusion in that state where one Walmart accidentally cordoned off infant car seats, which is a big deal if you're pregnant during coronavirus and you've got enough problems on your hands. And now you don't have to get your baby. I'm not. I look like I am, but I'm not. And this comes with a criminal penalty. You can get

charged with a misdemeanor, though unclear how much there's enforcement. So let's call that one type of overreach. But then there's sort of the political overreach, let's call it, in Kentucky and Mississippi about these drive-up church services where you stay in your car for church. A judge in Kentucky overturned that right before Easter. In Mississippi, the Department of Justice is getting involved as well. And then, so let's call that the maybe left side. And then on the right side, we have the abortion debates for a variety of reasons that I will not bore listeners with.

The Supreme Court did not have to rule on the Texas abortion case. and Governor Abbott reissued his order, which will now be in effect for three more weeks. But this is true in states around the country where some could argue, to borrow a phrase, that governors are using this for some pet projects as well. So how do we, I don't know, match small government conservatism and federalism with overreach? Well, I think to a certain extent there are two different questions. One, I mean, I think, you know, as both David and Jonah have written and we have a very good piece from Tim Sandifer from the Goldwater Institute on the website today, the governors have this power. I mean, they are the ones whose power accrues to them at this time much more than the federal government for reasons I leave to David and to the, to the,

people that have already explained this at some length. I think that you could see from the perspective of a governor that they would want to issue very tight restrictions with the understanding that people are going to violate these restrictions. And even if you have some people violate the very tight restrictions, the tighter the restrictions are, the more likely it is that they'll still have a pretty significant effect on social distancing.

The problem is, if you have absurd, restrictions, which I think a lot of the rules that you just laid out are, you can have the opposite effect. Then people just stop paying attention to the restrictions that you're announcing because they're silly. They don't make any sense. They don't sort of pass the common sense test. And I think that's what's potentially the risk here. It reminds me, I mean, as I was reading these stories about Gretchen Whitmer and sort of the arbitrary closure of these things. And, you know, it's fine that they vary from state to state, but when you take a step back and you look at the big picture and you think Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, has declared that professional

wrestling is essential and you have... Rightfully so. I guess you could make a federalist argument there. And Gretchen Whitmer, you know, cordoning off garden supply centers, you look and you think, boy, that just doesn't make any sense at all, particularly given that there are outbreaks in both of those places. But there is, I mean, the arbitrary nature of this, I think, is sort of a good warning about the growth of government in general. Obviously, we're in this crisis moment, and these are, you're talking about some extraordinary measures at this point. But I remember doing interviews with Dick Cheney for a book I wrote about him 10-plus years ago. And Cheney was basically the note-taker or the typist, President Nixon's Wage and Price Controls. And he would talk about being in the room with Don Rumsfeld and some of these others as they were trying to come up with these rules to basically run the U.S. economy.

And, you know, they were, you know, sort of throwing darts at a dartboard to figure out what the price of ground beef would be and how you would restrict corn. Would sweet corn be restricted, but popcorn wouldn't be restricted? And there is sort of an arbitrariness to all of this that I think really risks eroding the sort of purpose of the rules in the first place, which is to get people to follow them and to flatten this curve. David, there was a protest in Raleigh, in which the police tweeted that protesting was not an essential activity. I think we're about to have a lot of conversations over the definition of police power. A Pennsylvania Supreme Court opinion yesterday said that the use of the police power cannot be a government taking, which just plug for advisory opinions. It is not a topic we will dive into here. but that is the exact kind of topic we will dive into on advisory opinions my podcast with David French but overall legally how safe a ground are these guys on well as a general rule when

you're talking about something that is going to be able to be rationally tied to stopping the known causes of the spread of a viral you know a viral disease especially at this point where, as we talked about at the very beginning of the podcast, coronavirus, is the number one cause of death in the entire United States on a daily basis at this moment. Your governors are going to be sort of at the apex of their power. But as we saw in the Kentucky case, apex of their power does not mean unlimited power. And so when a Louisville mayor said you can't have a drive-up church where no one gets out of their car, the cars are parked to part from each other, but you can have. a Lowe's parking lot open where people do get, stay in their cars and get out of their cars,

or you can't have drive-through liquor sales. Well, it was very hard, and you made a very good point, Sarah, in the podcast, that we never got to hear Louisville's side of the story because this was, the motion was granted on an ex parte basis, but it's going to be really hard to make the case that this is going to be rationally related or the least restrictive means under the strict scrutiny test. That should be precise. The least restrictive means under a strict scrutiny test to support the compelling governmental interest. Similarly with if there's not the same kind of constitutional interest in the purchase of seeds, for example, but it is it is very hard to argue that taking police tape

and roping off part of Walmart, but not the other parts of Walmart, makes a giant ton of sense. And so there's an element here where the common sense test comes in for sort of public exposure, which can lead to public shaming of government officials and change in policy. And then other elements, especially when fundamental constitutional rights are involved, where simply put, you won't meet the strict scrutiny test as in the Louisville case. But I think that, you know, let's go all the way back to the start of the podcast. So long as these assertions of power, and again, I keep qualifying by this by saying at this time, are obviously rationally related to containing the spread of a highly contagious virus that's spread by person to person

contact, close person to person contact. As long as you're you're tying these things together, there's going to be a wide degree of public acceptance of them. And that does not mean that that public patience is unlimited, and it doesn't mean that the power is unlimited. But it does mean that at this moment, governors have far more power than they've ever had in their entire political careers. Some of them will abuse that. One, it's just obvious that that will happen, but so far it's the exception. I'm going to actually defend the gardening ban, not from a, um, the point, if I told you that 80% of the people going to Walmart, right now are trying to spend their time redoing their backyards and getting all of their

perennials in, etc. And that was what was causing so much foot traffic in the store. And that if you told people they couldn't do gardening right now, they needed to wait. And so then you lower the number of people in Walmart to 20% who are the ones who need essential things, baby formula and toilet paper. I think that that is reasonable. But do you think that's happening? I mean, do we think that there's a crush at Walmart because people can't get their hose? Well, I look, on the gardening side... Sorry, Jonah, I know that triggered. Jonah wasn't even paying attention, and then he heard hose and sat up.

The 14-year-old boy part of the podcast has begun. No, I'm a bros before hose guy, so I don't know what you're talking about. You can't have bros now either. I mean... The, I don't know, in my neighborhood, people are using this time to garden. I mean, I guess the part that undermines my argument is the carpeting and flooring. Maybe there's some run of people wanting to put in hardwood right now. That seemed a little less seasonal.

So can I add a possible additional defense, even though, let me just say up front, I do think it's kind of ludicrous. If you want people to feel less like they're in prison, give them the ability to do things like garden right but that said it may also be we now seeing that and since I didn't know about this updated committee to save the planet maybe I'm missing some fact here too but it may also be a manpower issue right if we now know that a bunch of these big stores they're having their own employees suffering from contracting the virus and if you close off certain parts of the store you need fewer employees to operate the store. I don't know that that's the case,

but I could see that being a reasonable argument to make. You're very close to the argument that the governor has cited in Michigan, which is that it is for the protection of employees because they can now have fewer employees in the store. It keeps employees safer when you actually do have a number of grocery store, and big box store employees getting sick because of the, foot traffic people asymptomatic coming into the store. See, I have a gift for channeling the logic of authoritarian governors of Gretchen Whitmer. Look, but there are other ways around that too. I mean,

we don't need to belabor the point. But there are other ways around that. I mean, you can restrict the entrance to 20 people at a time if you want to make sure that people are socially distance and expose store employees to fewer people. I mean, there are just ways around that, that I, around, I think, silly restrictions like this that have the same effect on public health or have the potential have the same effect on public health, but allow people to take seriously what they're hearing from their governors. I do think that when you have these kinds of restrictions or that, you know, I mean, the absurd case is the guy running by himself on the beach, this video that's circulated on social media all week, and this cop trying to run down this

lone runner on the beach and thankfully getting totally dusted by the runner. But people look at that and they say, you know, kind of to hell with it. If this is what the governor, governors are requiring, if this is what's against the law, then I'm not going to even follow the restrictions that I think are unnecessary to protect my own health. And I do think then you have people starting to make decisions that probably aren't in the broader interest of public health. okay let's switch topics in a in a larger way the president also yesterday said that uh he was halting all funding to the world health organization while his administration conducts a review of the organization's response to the coronavirus what that means in reality is that the money

that has not yet gone out the door for the 2020 funding for the w hO will not go until the review is conducted. That's at least 50% of the funding, according to one administration official. And the United States as a whole accounts for about 15% of the WHO's budget. This has been, you know, boy, do people have opinions. So the United Nations Secretary General saying, now is not the time. China, not surprisingly, expressed, quote, deep concern. But perhaps to more surprising. So Bill Gates says halting W.H.O.'s funding is as dangerous as it sounds.

Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19. And if that work is stopped, no other organization can replace them. The world needs the WHO now more than ever. Congressional Democrats are disputing the president's authority to do this, of course. Like if they've authorized the money to go to the W.H.O.

His authority to stop sending the money is in question, although I've certainly seen some rate that after the review, he would probably be on okay ground because of the authorization for this funding. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers are planning their own investigation to examine the early response by the WHO and its ties to the Chinese government. A couple things here. I mean, generally, WHO funding, Steve, but also, is this what is going to be the next great political

divide in the United States, sort of the China not China discussion with WHO serving as sort of our first volley over the net? Yes, I think it is. And I think that explains part of what the Trump administration is doing here. They've obviously got an interest in blaming China for what we are seeing right now. And frankly, I think they're correct to do so. I mean, if you look at the way that China behaved, there was a new Associated Press out today that China withheld information that it had about the transmissibility of the disease and just what a big threat it posed to not only China but the world at a time when the disease was spreading rapidly in China. I mean, it is totally appropriate to point fingers at China

here. I also think it's appropriate to point fingers at the WHO. When you go back and you look at the kinds of things that the WHO was saying, the kinds of things that the WHO was doing, the that offered support and praise for China at a time when it was being widely discussed in international media what China had done to distort its reporting. And the WHO is still getting China's back, still praising China, still going out of its way to avoid criticizing China. The WHO has a lot to answer for right now. So just because this, I think plays to the president's advantage doesn't mean that journalists and Democrats and Trump skeptical Republicans shouldn't, should avoid criticizing the, or should be criticizing

the president for it. I think the president is right on substance. I think the big question on this is a matter of timing. Is it appropriate to take this action now to suspend these payments now? had the CDC director, Dr. Redfield, come out and say the CDC works hand in hand on a day-to-day basis with the WHO, and we need to continue to do this. You have public health specialists at Johns Hopkins at Harvard and elsewhere pulling out their hair at the prospect of losing the data, the important data that they say that the WHO still provides, even if Dr. Tedros is out there, the WHO head is out there shilling for China. In some respects, their argument is we're still getting good information on a country-by-country basis,

and the sharing, the WHO serving as a clearing house for the sharing of that information is absolutely crucial to the defeating of this pandemic. So I guess my inclination would be to do this, to have this kind of review, start it now, but continue the cooperation to the extent that you can while you're conducting the review. And I wouldn't probably withhold funding at this point. Jonah? Yeah, I mean, I basically agree with Steve that on the timing part of it, if you've got someone, you know, not that I've, you know, to use this sort of movie, Hollywood war movie, you know, sort of metaphor, someone in the platoon can screw up,

but when you're engaging with the enemy, that's not the time you do the court martial. Is you like, get a gun and get on the, you know, get on the wall because we are all hands on deck right now. And I'm sure there are a lot of mixed metaphors in there. And so I think the fact that right now who WHO is helping more than it's hurting is a really important part of the equation. And if we're really talking about doing everything we can to fight this, better to say, by all means, the Congress study doesn't have very much to do right now. they can start their investigation stuff, but I think cutting off the funding right now is not really a great idea. And also, I worry a little bit. I agree with Steve. I agree with a lot of the things the president has said and what a lot of the critics of World Health Organization

and of China have to say. But I don't think that, I think the way that Trump has talked about this is it feels more like he is looking for some globalist analog of the deep state that he can blame for everything. And, you know, when he talks about how WHO could have gone in earlier and figured this out and stopped this and all the rest, no, it couldn't. WHO does not have like the ability to parachute in against the orders of domestic government and assert itself. It cannot claim police powers during a pandemic. And even though I think WHO has a lot to answer for, it feels more to me like this is, you know, being done for the express purposes of finding a convenient scapegoat when he's under a lot of pressure. And that is not necessarily

the best way to be conducting the conversation either. David, I'm sure you have thoughts. So few things get my inner cantankerous conservative cold warrior self more like animated than the very old phenomenon of funding international organizations that kowtow to communists. I'm having all these flashbacks to like 1987 and my glorious 18th year of life. But the look, I mean, I think there's very. little question at this point that WHO was part of the problem early on. I also think from there's an overwhelming amount of evidence that there are, that it's doing good and helpful things right now. And when I first heard Trump saying, I'm going to cut off funding now, I admit my first response, my initial first blush was good, good. They get what they deserve.

But as I thought about it overnight, in true dispatch non-hot-take fashion, by the way. Excellent. Very good. I had a little bit different thought. And what really helped crystallize my different thought was reading a good piece in the Atlanta by Graham Wood, who noted that who would be most likely to immediately sort of step up and replace our funding. Well, if they're shrewd, guess who it's going to be? the People's Republic of China. Because we're not talking about a whole huge pile of money here. It's a kind of check that an authoritarian regime can stroke instantaneously and actually

perversely enough enhance its influence and authority. So this is a lot more complicated than simply saying the WHO did something bad and now the WHO needs to be punished in the moment. I'm with Joan and Steve. We need to accurately state what the WHO did, good, bad, and ugly. When this is all over, take a comprehensive look at the way that they behaved as part of a 9-11 style commission, look at this whole thing from start to finish, and then act accordingly. And if that means saying to the WHO, you're not getting as much from us unless you implement reforms, A, B, C, D, and E. we should absolutely do that. But yeah, I mean, I think there's an element here that's the same song, different verse, of funding international organizations that pay excessive deference to authoritarian regimes. But in the middle of the firefight, to use Jonas Platoon analogy, is this the right time? I'm not so sure.

You know, and just to add real quickly onto that, I mean, I think it's important. to separate the WHO as an institution from the WHO leadership, current leadership. I mean, there's no question, I think, that Dr. Tedros, the Director General of the WHO, has been overly generous in his assessments of China and China's transparency, its helpfulness, and the effects of what China has done. He had been out in public crediting China for transparency, for providing good information, for taking a hit for the world, long after it was recognized that China was playing games with the numbers, not only games with the numbers, with the data that it was providing directly to the WHO, but with the data that it was releasing publicly.

So you have, in the person of Dr. Tedros, somebody who's out there shilling for China. I think that's a fair, it's a harsh assessment, but I think it's a fair assessment if you go back And you look at the comments that he made, particularly, you know, through late January and well in to February. It's unclear to me that he speaks for the broader bureaucracy. And I think this is the point that some of the prominent epidemiologists here in the United States are making. They have good working relationships with people at sort of the second or third tier level. And by the United States withholding funding or somehow severing those partnerships, we can, could be information poorer as a result. So it may be more appropriate to focus the investigation

and the review on Dr. Tedros and his public statements more than the WHO as a broader body. Jonah, politically heading into November, is this what the Trump campaign and the Republican Party can rally maybe Trump skeptical or Trump not enthusiastic voting? around, which is sort of this common enemy of China as embodied by the WHO's leadership, as we'll borrow Steve's point. Yeah, I don't know. I do think, and I've written this a couple times now, I think that on the intellectual right, China is going to be one of these galvanizing issues, sort of a geopolitical version of Brett

Kavanaugh, that people can disagree on all sorts of things, but basically agree that China is a malign actor and that we need to rethink our relationship with them to one extent or another. And there'll be huge policy disputes about what that means, but I think pretty much everyone will agree with the basic assumption. I also think that most Republican voters, whether, however they feel about Trump, will probably agree with it. The only reason I'm skeptical is about the way you phrase the question is that, look, if we take a 25, 15% hit to GDP, if we see economic, you know, stagnation decline, the likes of which we have not seen since the Great Depression compressed into a three or four month period, if we see a second

re-ignition of the pandemic in scary terms, I think the China stuff will still be resident and important and it will have a long tale after the election. But my God, I think that stuff just dwarfs anything else in terms of political considerations. People who are on breadlines are not going to be like, well, I'm still going to vote for the incumbent because, man, do I hate that pencil pusher at the head of the World Health Organization. David, I think that's right. David, on the flip side of that, though, you've got to have some message as a campaign. Yeah, I mean, I think that at the very least, taking on China and WHO,

culpability here is particularly when it comes to China. I think when it's all said and done, WHO's relative culpability compared to the PRC is a rounding error. But when it comes to initial culpability, I mean, taking on China has as grounded in truth. But the problem is as if you look and you track the public statements that Trump made from when the pandemic first arose in China to the point where, you know, he gave his now infamous address where he restated three different policies while reading from a teleprompter. If you take the look at the statements in between that time, and let's say you compare them with Joe Biden, Biden was actually coming across for a lot, at many moments, more skeptical of China than Trump was. Now, Trump did make the decision to do the partial shutdown, but the record is replete between that time and mid-March with really credulous takes about China. And so even that record, absolutely China did terrible things. But it is far from clear to me that Trump's record from late January to the middle of March is going to be better than Joe Biden's.

And I think Biden has got an opportunity here to say, no, you don't get to do this. You don't get to act like the China Hawk when I have 15 public. statements from you about G that I would never make. And multiple public statements for me about skepticism from China that you did not state. So I think that the Democrats would make a real mistake if they just take the attack on China and react in the predictable way that sort of the resistance reacts, which is tend to then go the opposite direction from Trump. I think their better political move is to call out Trump on the BS from the end of January to the middle of March and to say that this is a new political pose. It is not what you were saying when it mattered the most.

I think that is as good a place to wrap our substantive discussion as any. But earlier this week, Nancy Pelosi was on James Corden's late night show, obviously from her house. It was actually from her kitchen, and they had a nice discussion in which Nancy Pelosi showed us her freezer drawer. Nancy Pelosi's freezer drawer is entirely made up of ice cream, the vast majority of which is chocolate ice cream. She says that this is what she is doing during the quarantine. And, you know, she seemed genuinely joyful when talking about chocolate ice cream in a way that all of us should be so joyful in talking about anything. It made me think because there have been these great

stories that are being done about shortages around the country and my own grocery store ice cream is definitely a high demand item this week we got the last vanilla ice cream. It was very exciting. We hoarded the chocolate ice cream weeks ago because that we can't

do without. A half gallon of ice cream has climbed price-wise nationally over 5%. And I guess I was just curious for you guys What is your quarantine ice cream go-to routine, Steve? So I'm a party pooper in that I'm not really eating much ice cream these days. Oh, you disgust me.

I don't. I mean, well, obviously, if you look at me, it's not because I'm in such great shape. But there are, that's an aspiration at this point. But the best, the best ice cream to have at this time or really any time is not, in fact, ice cream. It's frozen custard. and the best place to get frozen custard is Wisconsin, obviously. And the best flavor of frozen custard, if you can get your hands on it, is Grasshopper,

frozen custard, mint ice cream with fudge and Oreo cookies, which is, I mean, it's just hard to describe how good that is. We grew up eating Grasshopper and basically any and every other flavor from Gillies, which is a very famous Milwaukee, old school Milwaukee, Butterburger and Frozen Custard stands. So obviously David hasn't had frozen custard or he wouldn't have harrumped when I mentioned it. But I will make it a point when this is all over to bring frozen custard to the office for everybody. We'll have it shipped out in dry ice so that you can all have it and then change your mind. please not grasshopper flavor that sounded like grasshopper flavor sounds grotesque it's not actual grasshoppers

no that's that grasshopper sounds like it would be better i despise mint ice cream mint except in a mint julep and mint chewing gum i hate mint with a blinding passion well there's black raspberry there's chocolate malt with whoppers there's rhesies peanut butter cop i mean there we can come up with any and everything but uh grasshopper is my favorite jona what's your ice cream, du jour? Well, I annoy my wife and daughter quite a bit because

they are fans of a broad spectrum of ice creams, and I am a pretty passionate coffee ice cream guy, which is why I basically try to keep it out of the house. And we haven't been doing that much ice cream either

because both my wife and daughter like to bake. They like to bake independently. They like to bake together. And so there's been a steady slew of pies and banana breads and whatnots coming out. And sometimes we'll have a little vanilla ice cream with those because vanilla ice cream is the right

ice cream to have with baked goods. But I do want to warn, you know, sometimes I will wax prolix with esoteric sescopedillianism in the G-file and come up with strange and exotic words for people. And I do think that a word that, again, the Germans come up with words that we are not ingenious enough to come up with.

And there is the word cummerschpec, which literally translates as grief bacon. And it refers to, to the excess weight game from emotional odor overeating. So ice cream can be, can lead to a state of kumerschbeck. So you've got to be a little careful in these trying times. That is certainly going to be the name of the podcast, David. But it just has to be grief bacon.

Yeah. Grief bacon flavored ice cream actually would be fantastic. If Hagenas came out with like kumershebeck ice cream, that'd be awesome. So first I have to fact. check Steve real time. I have had frozen custard, or as I like to refer to it, creamy frozen butter with sugar sprinkled in. And it's not great. But so my eyes, I actually don't have good frozen custard then. We've got to. Colvers, I love Colvers. It's my favorite fast food place and they're all about the custard. So I'm okay with those. Well, I, the last one I had was in the Milwaukee airport.

So maybe it wasn't Milwaukee Airport frozen custard wasn't great. bad actually it's not bad okay okay um the ice cream of choice briefly is mint chocolate chip but like the other guys i have not been having uh i very much ice cream at all um this ninja like physique does not maintain itself at my age uh but i do have a uh chocolate chip cookie dough hack which is pilsbury break and bake it's got to be the break and bake where you break off the little square and not the tube of the cookie dough because you'll just eat the tube. And you end the day with a just one or maybe if you're, you've run a lot, two of the break and bake squares, break them off, have a couple of fingers of a good bourbon. And, you know, we restarted Ozark from

episode one. And that's, that's a good way to end a quarantine day, I think. So I don't know whether it's a gender divide or a pregnant, not pregnant divide on this podcast, although after y'all have said that none of you are particularly in ice cream. Those might be related if I could just say. After the, yeah, after the senior hour at the grocery store, we need a pregnant lady hour that is just restricted to the ice cream aisle so that I can get in there for my ice cream before everyone else. my ice cream actually aligns perfectly with Nancy Pelosi's when I am truly indulging, which is her freezer was full of Jenny's darkest chocolate ice cream, which she said you can get delivered, which I did not know, so you can learn things even from late night TV.

But it's available at Whole Foods. It's just obscenely priced. So I only get it once in a blue moon, but it is the best chocolate ice cream out there. And then I get a carton of fresh raspberries and dump. the whole thing into the ice cream until the raspberries get just a little bit frozen on the outside, so they're just a little bit crunchy in the ice cream. My husband thinks it looks disgusting because it's like a melty mush of raspberries and chocolate ice cream, and it is the best thing ever.

Well, and since pregnant ladies are immune from Goumerschbeck, I say hats off to you. My doctor disagrees, funny enough. I was like, oh, I had like a cake yesterday. She was like, you had a whole cake. I was like, no, I didn't mean that. She's like, don't. Just don't do that. With that, thank you listeners for joining.

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