The Dispatch Podcast - National Security Used To Be a Thing | Roundtable

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

The Agenda: —The Atlantic: The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans —The Goldbergs —War plans vs. attack plans vs. whatever —How to handle classified information as a reporter —Hillary was bad, too —Kurt Schlichter: Troll —NWYT: Snow White? Show Notes: —The Dispatch's reporting on Signal —TMD on the Houthi group chat The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and regular livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Details and tickets at festivalofauthors.ca. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Izgar, and it's the core for Jonah Goldberg, Steve Hayes, and David French. We're going to start exactly where you know we have to start the most, probably the biggest story. of 2025 so far in this administration. Jonah, are you Jeff Goldberg? For the purposes of this podcast, no. What an interesting answer. Are you Jeff Goldblum?

Well, no, I reserve the right in certain circumstances to be Jeff Goldberg if it is to my advantage. But this is not one of them. I've gotten so many emails and texts or whatever that the best thing happening on the internet right now is you just sitting on Twitter saying, I am not Jeffrey Goldberg, yeah. Over and over and over.

How many times do you think you've done it now? Oh, I think I've done it maybe 15, 20 times, but like if that, you know, but like the number of opportunities where I could have is 10x of that. I mean, I just pick the ones that I think are the funest ones to respond to. All right.

If you somehow listen to this podcast, but also live under a news rock, let me back up and explain what has, happened. Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor of the Atlantic magazine that covers politics, culture, current events. It's generally considered a left-leaning magazine. Certainly, think New Yorker or something like that. He publishes a story that says he was added to a signal chat. Signal is an app that is encrypted end-to-end with users. You can download it on your phone, and that he was added to a signal chat for a principals committee meeting.

Principals committee is something that arranges cabinet-level officials, and they can designate someone as their proxy potentially, to coordinate on some high-level decision for the U.S. government. Nobody had ever heard of a principles committee over any sort of app. These usually happen either in person or there's something called a paper PC where it's just what it sounds like, right? So he's added to this chat that's called Huthy, PC small group, which has become its own meme now. And on that, he starts seeing people with names like J.D. Vance and Pete Hegseth. And he, of course, at first thinks it's a joke or someone trying

to trick him. The conversations, though, continue to be pretty unjokey and very serious. And then he says there's a moment where they basically say in two hours, we're going to attack the Houthis. Over the course of the week, in the first story, he declines to put in some of the texts says that he thinks they are too sensitive to national security. The White House then says there's nothing sensitive on this. There were no war plans discussed. He then later releases more of the screenshots from that conversation. Now, let's like go through all of the things here.

One, how he got added to this, Mike Waltz, the national security advisor, says that he has has no idea how Jeffrey Goldberg got added. One of the screenshots, however, does say Mike Waltz added Jeffrey Goldberg, added you in the screenshot, whether, in fact, this conversation was war plans, attack plans, was it sensitive, was it classified, whether Jeffrey Goldberg did anything wrong, whether this compares in any way to what Hillary did, what Biden did, what Trump did with classified documents in the Jack Smith case. So, before we launch into all of that, David and Steve, all of us have handled classified material. Sorry, Jonah. David, do you want to discuss just a little bit how y'all handle it out

in the field? Yeah. So one of the first things you're taught in the military is this concept called operational security OPSEC. And basically what this means is, for lack of any better description, you just keep your plans secret. You don't talk about your plans in unsecure channels and unsecure places. And by unsecure, we typically mean classified systems. So in the military, you have an unclassified system. When I was in what was called NipperNet, and you have classified systems when I was in the military. The secret system was called Sipernet.

And the two things are totally separate. So, for example, you can't have a phone that talks to both the Nipper Network and the Sipper Network that doesn't exist. You can't have a computer that talks to both the Nipper Network and the Sipper Network. It doesn't exist. They're totally separate systems. And then when issues are particularly sensitive, even out in the field, we had particular areas of the base that were for top secret information. And so if you were going to even walk into that part of the base, you had to have a top secret security clearance. And just to give you some perspective on how sensitive this information was, we were so careful about operational security that, for example, soldiers would get in trouble for sending an email to a spouse or a girlfriend that showed damage to their Humvee.

So, if they had been out in the field and they had rolled over a mine or they had had an IED or a small arms attack, sometimes they would take pictures of the damage and send it back and say, hey, you know, hey, babe, look what happened to me today. Not very reassuring to people back home, by the way. But we had to clamp down on that because the very demonstration of battle damage would help the enemy determine what would. what would, you know, determine how effective their weapons were. So just to give you a sense, I reached out to some of my folks that are not just experienced when I was in Iraq, but in current experience with current protocols and procedures, and asked about this information. Let me give you a sense of how classified this would normally be, okay?

even the existence of a principles committee on that particular subject would typically be treated as secret. The title of the signal chain, because it is descriptive of intent, would probably be classified. All of those internal deliberations, the part that people are talking about, well, you know, J.D. Vance is railing on Europe, et cetera. That would definitely be classified. And the strike information, of course, absolutely of course, would be classified. The idea that the strike information would not be classified is absolutely stunning. And I would just say this. I, and part of my job as a JAG officer was to investigate classified information spillages that occurred overseas, back when I was back home, some of the things that would occur back home. I've never even heard of anything like

this. Never heard of anything like this. The spillages that we dealt with by contrast, which, by the way, instantly ended military careers in some occasions, were far less egregious. And I just want to say, just one thing very quickly, anyone who tells you that that information in the signal chain is no big deal, you should immediately discredit as either dishonest or totally ignorant. They have no idea what they are talking about. about. And so just for example, if you have information that in two hours, a strike is coming and you're the hoodies, what can you do with that information? Well, one thing you do is fire your missiles before the strike. Another thing you can do is move high value targets. You can move missiles into

more hardened shelters or facilities. You can notify partners and allies to coordinate a response. I mean, there's all kinds of things you can do, even if you don't have very specific information, and like they're going to strike this single person at this single place at this single time. If you know F-18s are coming in two hours and drones, et cetera. And also, by the way, Hooties have air defenses. They do have surface-to-air missiles.

And they have shot down American drones before. So they're not toothless here. They have struck ships with missiles. Thankfully, not an American ship, although one came very, very close back after October 7th. And so this is, absolutely comprehensively information that is classified this kind of conversation is supposed to take place on a secret system, not an encrypted civilian app on civilian phones.

Okay, but David, just to question real quick, the initial news story that they published in the Atlantic was entitled, the Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans. My understanding is that war plans actually is a term of art, and these would not qualify as war plans. Is that correct? Yes and no. Okay. So they are absolutely war plans in the way that any normal person would describe war plans. So that is a way in the vernacular to say this is describing the plans for an act of war, which an attack and airstrike is. No question. So in the vernacular, in the way normal human beings talk, that would be not a war plan. Okay. Now, the military has highly specific lingo.

And you might occasionally, I have never seen anything in my life entitled war plan, like on the top. It might say opport, okay, operational order, which would be sort of the order of the day or the instruction for a military operation. A war plan might be something like that is kept in a drawer in the Pentagon for a response to an attack on Taiwan, etc. but I never saw anything labeled war plan. But this is absolutely by any reasonable definition in common language, a war plan. The military has all kinds of unique language, but if you'd said op-ord, well, they would have said it's not an op-ord because it doesn't say up-ort. But it would still be a relatively fair way to describe what you saw,

which would be attack sequencing, attack composition, attack timing, So, yeah, okay, it's not a war plan in the highly specific way that the Pentagon talks about different documents. It's absolutely a war plan in the way that normal human beings address plans for acts of war. All right, Steve. I think people will be surprised potentially to learn that reporters get classified briefings. Yeah, sometimes classified, but more often just briefings about sensitive information

that's not classified. I have been briefed as a reporter. I've never had a government clearance of any kind. Never had a secret clearance, never top secret clearance, nothing. Most of the information that I've reported on and dealt with over the years has been called FOUO, which is for official use only, which is one of the lower forms of classification. But I have been taken into a skiff,

this sensitive compartmented information facility, to get briefings, both on Capitol Hill and at the White House. And again, this is not because these people who are working for the government or sharing with me classified information. It was because they were talking to me about things that they deemed sensitive. But when you go, first of all, the skiffs themselves are built with specific designs

to make them impenetrable to foreign intelligence operations. So the designers, the architects, even some of the construction form, and they all have to have top secret US government clearances in order to work on building these facilities where people go and get this information. And when you show up at a skiff, For a briefing or in my case, a conversation about unclassified information, you're not even

allowed to carry your phone into the room. Typically, you have to turn it off and you leave it in something that looks a little bit like a safe deposit box, sort of like a wall with a bunch of small. Or like, you know, think of your, think of the old school mailboxes. Like if you went and got a PO box, you leave it in there. You get a number. See, I think they look like cigar boxes. There's a big collection of them, right? And you get your number. like at a deli and you pick it up when you're done. The phones are never allowed in the room, even for members of Congress with the highest possible clearances. And if you mistakenly take your phone into one of these skiffs, you have to report it. You have to disclose the fact that

you had had this in there. And then there are a whole series of procedures that are, that kick in after that. The same set of procedures happens when you go to the situation in room at the White House. I was once invited by the Obama White House, surprisingly enough, in for a briefing on what Obama Ma's team was doing with respect to Iran. Very interesting conversation, two plus hours with some of the top officials in the U.S. government. Contentious. I disagreed with them on virtually everything that they were telling me about what was happening Iran. They disclosed no classified information whatsoever, but I had to go through all of those same steps just to have that conversation on an unclassified basis. There are, in addition to the things that David said,

I mean, the Pentagon has an entire section for teaching both civilians, and uniform military, how to safeguard classified or sensitive materials, the Center for Development of Security Excellence. They do this. This is what the whole point is. And when you have principles, especially at the level of the folks who are on this chat, when they travel, they have entire teams that go and set up mobile skiffs. So often it'll be a tent with, you know, made of specific materials that will block outside interference. They have all sorts of highly technical things that I can't describe that block access from foreign actors to do this.

Sometimes these teams are a dozen plus people. They have advanced teams that they send out in advance to help set this all up so that they can have exactly the kind of conversations that these people were having on signal, on a commercial app, in some cases, on their phones. It also should be said that the foreign adversaries who are trying to obtain this information have entire teams, have entire programs designed to penetrate the equipment of exactly these people, especially with their personal phones. They spend untold millions and millions of dollars to get their hands on this

kind of information so that they can understand better what we're doing, that they could use it potentially to black bail somebody, what have you. There are huge operations that are enemies used to get their hands on this kind of information. Those are among the reasons I think this is so unusual and such a big deal because they have thrown all of that to the side in order to have this kind of conversation, the manner that they did. So one of my biggest takeaways from that, by the way, is that whether this information was technically classified, which that, you know, classified as a name, someone gives the information at some point later, frankly. Basically, it doesn't matter, though, whether it would be classified, because even if it were

just sensitive, and it's really hard to argue that at a minimum, this wasn't sensitive national security information, that it would still be discussed in a secure setting. And obviously at the Department of Justice. We have all sorts of, we have skis, we have secure rooms. We don't have the fancy number box thing where they give you the coat check number because it's only a few of us in the room at any given time. So we use the cigar box. But there's a David, I mean, this is the Department of Justice in 2019, right? There's an unsecure fax machine and a secure fax machine. But I think the overall point of that is just the words aren't as important as what everybody knows, whoever deals with America's national security.

It's also the case that there's information that's presumed classified, right? I mean, these people know, Pete Higgseth knows that if he's talking about the specifics of particular weapons systems or which of our jets are going to be dropping the munitions that they're dropping. It's presumed classified. So I will have conversations with government officials in the past where I have asked the series of questions that take them into classified areas. I want to know the classified stuff, right? So I will ask them a series of questions that takes them into classified areas and they will say, I can't talk about that. It's classified. So it's not like we would have a conversation and then they take it to somebody and say like, hey, can you review

this and tell me if what we did was just classified at all, which is, which is a huge problem for the defense that the Trump team is offering that this wasn't classified. And anything they're discussing was classified. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. They want to argue about whether it would have been classified, whether it would have been presumed classified. My point is it doesn't matter, actually, and that the more you talk about the linguistic side of this, whether it was a war plan or an attack plan, whether it was classified or just sensitive national security information is totally beside the point when you,

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I mean, she has a point that Republicans are being hypocritical. the Democrats are being hypocritical about condemning the Republicans for doing the same thing that the Democrats did. Basically, the only intellectually defensible positions are, well, the only intellectually defensible position is to say what Hillary did was bad, what these guys did was bad. I am so nostalgic for the days of Sandy Burger shoving things in his pants at the National Archives. I wish we could go back to that simpler time. I want to pick up on your point, Sarah, because I'm going to, I'll make two points. One, on the classified stuff, the easiest sort of heuristic or counterfactual to sort of illuminate this is imagine if Jeff Goldberg had released this information two hours before the attack. Pete Heggseth would be out there screaming, you released our war plans.

He would use war plan, right? He would be outrage. And all of the people, like, I asked Sarah about this yesterday. You know, there's this sort of cliche when we talk about like prior restraint and what. the press can do, the shorthand for it is you can't report on active troop movements. Everyone would be saying you've violated that. This is what, you know, everyone agrees in journalism you're not supposed to do. And they would all call it classified.

They would all call it top secret. They would all call it war plans. And we know this. And it's just gaslighting and infuriating to hear them sort of deny that. But the broader point is, is I don't want to pick up on what Sarah said. I think, look, I agree with everything that has been. said here. It's outrageous. It's irresponsible. It's so profoundly hypocritical. But I think the lasting effects of this are not this stuff. And this is this, this reminds me a lot of

impeachment fights. You get everybody, including you lawyers, who say it's a, this is a political trial, not a legal trial. It's not a criminal trial. And then they go right back to arguing as if it's a criminal trial. We can't tell it. They go right back. And at least you guys have an excuse because you're lawyers, but like the politicians do it too.

They go right back to these technical, it's not quite perjury if this happened on a Thursday kind of nonsense, right? And meanwhile, that's not what the founders had in mind about impeachments. And meanwhile, like, there's a reason why you have, why you have,

I mean, Sarah and I've been on this hobby horse forever about how like C-SPAN's been bad for Congress and transparency is bad. There's a reason why you have meetings in secret, regardless of the legal classification of it, because you want to have honest expressions of your opinions, right? You want to be able to talk forthrightly, been bluntly about things. You keep those things secret, not because they're putting troops in danger,

but because they're putting American state craft in danger if people know them. And what we had in this chat is it has now been, like there was a time where you could maintain a plausible theory that a lot of what Trump and Vance and these guys are saying about our alliances in Europe are in fact in order to make NATO stronger, right? That's one of the most annoying arguments that you get is that they don't, they're not anti-NATO.

They're giving NATO tough love to make the alliance stronger, which is, again, what social scientists call a complete freaking lie. But the thing is, like, you can at least hold on to that. If you were a European statesman, you could say, hey, look, we can wait out the Trump administration because America itself and the Republican Party is full of closet normies.

They just can't challenge Trump. And once he's gone, you know, Republican Party will come back to normal. All sorts of things like that. We now find out that, no, they really do hate Europe. They hate our alliances. Even Hegzeth, who was right on the policy stuff in this, had to suck up to Vance and say,

I agree with you entirely that Europe is pathetic and we hate them, right? Steve Miller wanted to present the Europeans with a bill for services rendered by clearing up the sea lanes, right? Now, just imagine if you're a European politician, a Starmer, a Macron, any of these people, and you're trying to tell angry voters who are freaked out about Trump and America, like, now like 75% of French people in polls say America is not a friend of France or of Europe anymore. You at least had this plausible deniability. you just had this argument you could make. All doubt has now been removed. We've made anybody who advocates for friendship with America,

made their jobs harder, and anybody who advocates for making America an enemy, their job easier. You cannot go to a French rally now and say, hey, look, I know Donald Trump says some crazy things, but there are a lot of grownups in the administration who don't believe this stuff and they're going to restrain him. We now know that's just a lot.

that all these guys are bought in on this garbage. And that is going to create problems for us on the world stage for years and years to come in ways that these compromised classified information things aren't. And it's not to say that that stuff isn't important. And I am sort of fascinated by the selective prosecution problem that this adds to about like how do you go after the airman who's sloppy but taking a picture in front of a plane or a sub or whatever, and you'd throw that guy in jail, but not the secretary of freaking defense.

All that stuff is real. But like I think historians will look back on this moment as the moment that all doubt about the sort of neo-isolationist or whatever label we're supposed to use tone of this country is real. And that even if you think Trump is a one-termer, right, and that he's not going to be replaced by Vance, every ally in the world now has to, for planning purposes, assume that America is one election away

from completely abandoning them and screwing them. And that has huge geopolitical consequences. So I agree with Jonah that that has huge geopolitical consequences and I think it's significant and one of the more significant things to come out of this. I don't agree that it's less important than the intel sharing stuff. More important.

Yeah, that is more important than that. Look, I mean, the damage on this, I think, comes a number of different ways, but I'll just point to two things that I'm most concerned about. We have already heard in, I think, credible reporting in credible outlets that our liaison intelligence services, our allies, were increasingly afraid to share intelligence with the United States with Donald Trump as president and with Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence.

When you demonstrate that you can't keep your own secrets like this, that will make them far more reluctant to share. We've already, you know, the United States is in, some of these, some of these are direct sort of bilateral, liaison relationships with other intelligence services. Some of them are group intelligence sharing like the five eyes. Whatever the setup is, when you show people that you can't protect your own intelligence, they're going to be more reluctant to share theirs with you.

Also, when you downplay it, which we've now seen after the, the fact. You have, I mean, the official line of, at least most of the Trump administration is, hey, no big deal, everybody. And while I think we all understand that it's a bullshit argument and that most of them don't even believe it, the fact that they're making this argument in public has to cause our intelligence partners around the world to say, like, they're telling us that they don't care about this level of information. If they don't care about this level of information. How are we going to pass along something that we learned from a human intelligence source that gives us broader context on what's happening on the ground with the Taliban,

for instance? I think that's a huge consequence that actually could get people killed, that could leave us more vulnerable to attacks, period. Second, the message that descends down the chain of command, when you have these top officials who have, who have, teams and extensive efforts and millions of dollars spent to make their consumption and sharing classified information easier who thumb their nose at the rules. What do you think it says to everybody below them about how important it is to protect information? You can't continue to pretend that it's serious.

I mean, as David said, I've had conversations, many conversations over the past 48 hours with people, you know, some of whom worked. in skiffs as their job. They showed up at work and they went to a skiff and they worked in skiff all day every day because it was so important for them to protect this information. What do you say to those people when you have our top officials, the principals committee by definition, these are our top national security and foreign policy officials discussing imminent attack plans and weapons systems and targeting?

I think the long-term damage there is incalculable, but will. will be a major, major problem. Steve, just one quick thing on top of that. Look, you can't look at this in isolation because we just had the firing of some generals for no apparent reason other than they appear to have potentially some political disagreements, which should be totally irrelevant to the evaluation

of a general officer, totally irrelevant. General officers, all officers, when our military is functioning well, are evaluated on the basis of professionalism. Are they competent? Do they have high character? Are they good at their jobs? Do they win on the battlefield? That's what a professional military focuses on. Trump is focused on political alignment and political loyalty. That's what the Russian military does. The job one for the Russian military, I'm not saying that they don't have lethality, that there aren't capabilities there. Obviously, there are. But it's all subordinate to alignment with Putin. So alignment with Putin is job one, and then all the other jobs flow out of that. And so what we're doing is we're creating a military

environment where the highest level people do not have to comply with the minimum standards of conduct so long as they're loyal to Donald Trump. That is countercultural to the military in an extreme way. And I think military culture is strong enough to resist it for a time. But over year after year, if the rule is your career is safe, no matter what you do if you're a maga loyalist and you're in danger, your career is in danger, no matter how good you are if you're not, that will eat a military up from the inside out. So normally on this podcast, I try to play the role of the person who is skeptical of you guys and who

pushes back. Steel man's the other side. So you try to be yourself. Yeah. It's not like you don't do that to us when we're not recording. You know that when we're talking about food. Parenting. Painting.

What a beautiful day outside. No, it's not. No, it's not. By what definition do you mean beautiful? Words matter. But I think it's worth noting that I have no steel manning for the other side of this conversation on any front. I don't have steel manning on the hypocrisy front. I think it is so clear that either I'll take, I'll push back on Jonah in the slightest of ways. Jonah said there's only one position that all of this is bad.

Look, I will actually tolerate someone who says, you know, Hillary using a private server for stuff that was. you know, not that important for the purpose of getting around FOIA was bad, but not, you know, actually risking our national security. It was overblown. How about that? I'll tolerate that position. That Biden telling his speechwriter over the phone, hey, I just found the classified documents in the basement. I'll go get those for you. He's out of office and he kept classified documents in his basement and he's handing them over to his ghostwriter who has no business with them.

It's bad, but, yeah, okay, like, probably shouldn't have been prosecuted for it as he wasn't. Trump taking classified documents with him and keeping them in a box in his bathroom under some chandelier. Bad, but, you know, was it worth the DOJ's, like, full commitment of all the resources to special counsel, Jack Smith to prosecute that when he was running for office? Okay, fine, maybe not. I'm stretching, but there is no world. in which you can say that this one somehow is not that bad because they just made a mistake by adding a reporter.

That's not the problem here. And I think that's a really odd defense from Trump supporters that like, well, we don't know how this reporter got on. And the National Security Advisor, by the way, says he didn't add him. So maybe this reporter infiltrated the chat and maybe he's the one who should be in trouble. Okay, let me just tell you that makes things worse, not better for me.

So either you were sloppy and accidentally added a reporter to your principal's committee meeting that shouldn't have been happening over an app on your personal phones. Or, let me get this right, a reporter with zero tech background whatsoever was able to break into your principal's committee meeting

that you were holding on your personal phone on an unsecured app. And you think that's the defense? Dear God, you just cannot say Hillary Clinton should be in jail and chant lock her up. And also, I don't see anything wrong here. This seems like an honest mistake.

They won't do it again. You can't have it both ways on this. I also, by the way, really reject the, well, but this was the Democrats version. This was so much worse. You know, you guys made a mountain out of a molehill on Hillary Clinton's emails or Joe Biden giving classified information.

And this is actually the thing we should focus on and not those things. Also, no. Either you are careful with our nation. secrets and you take classified information seriously and sensitive information seriously or you don't and I am just so done with the what actually I mean I get accused of both sidesism no no no both sidesism is when you use the other side's misdeeds to minimize your own or when you try to play the like well that one was worse when it was the other side this isn't both sidesism both of them are bad everyone should be

fired. Everyone should be held to the same standard. It's also tribal. I mean, you know, as you said, Sarah, Hillary Clinton herself is out there tweeting and taking shots at Trump over this. I mean, honestly, with all due respect, shut the hell up. Like, don't open your mouth on this stuff. Like what she did, what she did was very, very serious. It did involve classified information. It did involve setting up an alternative server. it did involve lying repeatedly about what she had done. And the reason was the same, Steve. That's what's sort of incredible about it.

She set up the private server so she could get around records retention requirements so that people couldn't see the conversation later to help her own political future. That's exactly why they set this up on Signal and they set the messages to delete. I forget whether it was one week or two weeks, but that's something Signals, you know, known for. They did it so that they wouldn't have to then turn this over. into the Presidential Records Act requirements or FOIA requirements, et cetera. So we haven't even talked about that. Illegality is not a word.

But the whole point was to get around the law. And that's exactly what Hillary Clinton did. Didn't Republicans run because Hillary Clinton was bad? Yes. Like that we were supposed to be beating Hillary Clinton because that was bad. They weren't running and saying she set the new standard. I mean, what are we doing here? but the i mean it's all it's all so tribal you know i i i overheard a clip of my old colleague jonathan

last at the bulwark mocking the but her emails thing well actually you know what her emails did matter they mattered back then when we all worked at the weekly standard they matter today it still matters what she did was stupid and bad you shouldn't shrug it off because you don't like what don't like what don't trump is doing and at the same time watching the clips of my old colleagues at fox news channel who are minimizing this I mean, Fox News broadcast almost nothing but Hillary Clinton's email story for months and months and months. And I was part of that. And I was happy to criticize her.

I think I was right to criticize her. They were all right to criticize her at the time. But now because it's Donald Trump, they can just mock this or shrug it off or in many cases actually just not cover it. I mean, really, really pathetic. I was watching a special report last night and they were talking about this thing. And I turned to my wife and I said, if you just added up the amount of coverage I provided on this show on this subject, it would be more than this. I mean, it was just unbelievable me. But you know what it reminds me up when the Democrats start chiming in and like I get a lot of like go Jonah on this kind of stuff?

Remember that seen incentive a woman where Al Pacino just rips the board anew on it, you know, the tribunal, you know, how dare you do this to this young man and blah, blah, it's this stirring thing. and the students all cheer and the bad students in the audience who were like, were part of the thing that got this kid in trouble. They think this guy's our hero. And then Al Pacino turns to him and just says, oh, and Harry, Trent and Jimmy, F you too.

Like, I don't need Hillary Clinton coming in on this. Like, get off the rope and go sulk. Like, you know, like congratulations. The Republicans are as bad as you were. Like, again, it's just... infuriating, that partisan tribal brain rot is so bad. So bad. Did you lock the front door? Check. Close the garage door? Yep.

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Conditions apply. Fly Air Transat Seven time players champions out of game. Fly the seven time world's best leisure airline champions, Air Transat. Wait, can I just have a moment of like personal

I don't, I'm not on social media a ton anymore, but I was frustrated with the story and so I tweeted out something like where are the people who can think that this is bad and that is bad? And someone from the bulwark quote tweeted me and said, they're at the bulwark as like a sick burn or something.

I was like, wait, what? And then I started tweeting like the bulwark calling Rob Her special counsel who looked into Joe Biden's classified, mishandling classified material, a liar and a bad American. and the, like, making fun of what about her emails? Like, no, no, no.

That's exactly the perfect example of not thinking that this is bad and that is bad. But here's where I am going to steal man an argument against you guys. Kurt Schlichter had this to say. He wasn't referencing Signalgate specifically, but... He's a, he's with Town Hall, and he's a sometime fill in for Hugh Hewitt's... radio show or was at some point.

He's a public personality. And a lawyer. That's always used big defense of him. He's a great litigator. And a veteran. And a troll. But anyway, going. This applies to SignalGate, but it applies to so much else from the last 60 days.

Stop policing our own side. I know that gets a lot of you off and you feel great because you think it demonstrates integrity. All it demonstrates is weakness. Never ever help the enemy who wants you dead or enslaved. To do otherwise betrays a fundamental misunderstanding. of the struggle we are in. It's not 2003. Get that through your heads. So, here's this point. Yeah, yeah. Both things are bad. Like, good on you that you, like, sleep well thinking that you're some morally unhypocrical person. We are in a political fight against another side that wants to hurt America.

And by the way, notice I'm not naming which side is which here, whether you're on the Hillary Clinton side or the Trump side. when you're in a fight against an existential threat to your way of life hypocrisy is not just warranted it is your patriotic duty in some ways you don't have to go out and defend these guys as basically no Republicans are doing by the way on Signalgate but you don't need to pile on either

you don't need to be the ones like us out there saying this was bad and that was bad you can just say Hillary Clinton was bad and ignore Signalgate. So, David, why not? Why isn't there something to this? It's a political fight. Dumbest tweet.

Dumbest tweet. Morally bankrupt, intellectually bankrupt, stupid on 9,000 different levels. They want you dead or enslaved. No. That might describe the hootis. That might describe the hootie. That certainly describes the hooties.

The people that we almost. gave attack information to they want us dead or enslaved but i am so tired of this rhetoric that turns people into political raving political monsters by characterizing their enemies as their political opponents as essentially people who want to do to you what the nazis did it's utterly absurd it's breaking people's brains, what are we even doing here? And it's breaking people's brains in a very specific way. The research tells us right now that Americans, highly partisan Americans, are very wrong about their political opponents. And how are they wrong? They're wrong in a very specific way. They think their political opponents are more extreme than they really are. And that is

exactly what empowers an enormous amount of what you might call counter extremism. So the person who reads this tweet and goes, Kurt nailed it, is exactly the person who has been twisted bipartisan media into believing their opponents are far more extreme than they really are. And this is not just a right-wing thing. Left-wing activists think right-wingers are more extreme than they really are. And so right from the get-go, right from the get-go, this guy lays out a scenario that is utterly at odds with reality, utterly at odds with reality, and then tries to dictate your morality on the basis of his fantastical scenario. And this is par for the course in Twitter discourse amongst hardcore partisans,

catastrophize your opponents, and then rationalize anything after that. So yeah, it's one of the dumbest, ridiculous tweet, most ridiculous tweets you see. and I'm even including in that like the whole universe of tweets that say LeBron isn't the goat. So by the way, my favorite study on partisan brain is that it actually makes you worse at math. So basically they gave everyone a math test

and scored them. Then they would give those same people and then a partisanship basically test. Then they gave those people a test where the math would turn out to disprove whatever your partisan side believe. So it would be about abortion or guns, or DEI stuff.

And if you did the math problem correctly, it would undermine your previously held partisan belief. And they just wouldn't get it right. They would literally mark the wrong answer. It made them worse at math, whereas the less partisan you were, the more likely you were to get the math problem correct because you could just sort of tune out

what the problem was about. Okay, but Steve, here's my pushback. Given how the left treated George W. Bush, he was a racist, he was a fascist, he was stupid. They treated Romney that way. mean, let's be real, they treated me that way when I was hired by CNN. I had never written anything. Nobody ever mentioned my law degree, by the way, or anything I'd written, including for you, Steve, by the way, at the weekly standard. But when Jen Saki left the administration,

mid-administration, she got her own show and everyone just sort of clapped quietly and moved on with their life. There was no backlash. So if the mainstream media only polices the right, and we police the right and the left isn't that then in an environment unfair counterproductive unbalanced whatever word you want to use i mean trump has done a lot of vile things but biden already did a lot of them and the mainstream media only started caring when trump did them isn't that a problem sure yeah i mean it's it's a problem i know i've mentioned this before but i gave my first speech the first time i weighed in on media bias was in 1988 at the Wisconsin State Forensics Championship.

I've cared about media bias for a long, long time. And I think you're right to point it out. We should make those arguments, good arguments to make. I guess where I have a problem is, I mean, I have a problem with what Curtis Lictor said for all the reasons that David does. But I guess it's increasingly less clear what I'm. a side means anymore either. I mean, I'm not, I'm not, you know, I'm a conservative.

I'm a sort of libertarian-ish conservative who has strong views on national security believes that we should try to shape world outcomes. But where does that put me? I mean, you know, I still think I'm a conservative. I call myself a conservative. But I'm not going to go out and make arguments I don't believe because people on my, quote, unquote, side think it'll benefit them or I think it'll benefit

a particular political party. I guess it's just not maybe people like Kirschlichter and others are, they come to this with sort of a political or a partisan mindset and they see this

as this kind of zero something. That's not what I'm doing here. That's not why I got into this business at all. It doesn't mean that I've never done it. I mean, I will say when I think back on, you know, my time at Fox News,

my time on Special Report. There were undoubtedly times when I would look at something that a Republican had done and thought, man, that is so stupid and maybe wouldn't be as harsh on air as I really believed. I don't think I did that very often. Maybe if I went back and reviewed, I'd be more frustrated with myself than the story I tell myself today. But that's just not why I got into this business. I mean, you know, we've quoted our old friend Charles Crouthammer on this before. And Charles said, you're betraying your whole life if you don't say what you think and you don't say it honestly and bluntly. That's sort of the game here. So I'm not trying to thumb the skills for a particular team. And I'm not willing to say that what Hillary Clinton did with respect to classified

information isn't important anymore because I am frustrated with what Donald Trump did. I just think that leads to, I mean, basically this is part of the problem that we're dealing with right now as a country. It feels very much like what I'm trying to teach my four and a half year old, which is also something that I try to teach adults, you know, my girlfriend sometimes as well. You can only control your own actions. I can't control what everyone at the mainstream media does. I can't control what people say about me when I get a job. I can only control what I say. And so I then am not going to add sand on one side to an argument or the other. I'm just, as you said, Steve, like, if I can only control what I say,

I better just say what I think and not be a hypocrite about the whole thing. Sarah's got her tattoo, which let the record show I was the first to buy for her. About Supreme Court justice's quote. Oh, do you want me to read it to you? Sure. Other cases, presenting different allegations and different records may lead to different conclusions. So if it wasn't going to be like so unbelievably pretentious, like I was trying to pick up girls in a cafe kind of tattoo, the quote I've been going back to over and over again is from Alexander Soljitin, speaking of integrity, where he says, you can resolve to live your life with integrity, let your credo be this, let the lie come into the world, let it. even triumph, but not through me.

And that's sort of the grandiose version of what you're trying to teach your kid, right? Is that you can only, you know, I'm not, I'm not Timmy's mom. I'm your mom. And, you know, and you're not Timmy, you're you're you, and you're only responsible for what you're, what you can control. I agree with that. I will say, like, I agree with David and Steve and all this. We don't need to have another diatribe from me about what, how just fundamentally corrupted,

I think people like Schlichter have become. And I don't want to do media bias either. But just as a matter of sort of sociology and history, it's worth pointing out that the fact that the right was willing to actually police itself is one of the reasons why the Democratic Party is now the minority party. It is one of the reasons why Republicans have been so successful in the last 20 years. It's one of the reasons why you get Dobbs, right? It's one of the reasons why you get the most robust pro-gun rights regime in American history.

And it's because the right, broadly speaking, was willing to have arguments among itself about first principles and about the tradeoffs between competing first principles. You had fights between libertarians and social conservatives. You had between free marketers and less than free marketers between neocons and paleocons and traditional cons and these cons and that cons and all the kind of stuff. people walked around with their dorky ties with what level philosopher they were. You know, I'm a ninth level Hayeky and elf kind of thing. We were dorks, right? We had fights about this stuff. That's how, and so like when people say, you know, when they talk about media bias,

I'm with Steve. I've been doing media bias for a really long time and I'm perfectly happy to do so. My dad used to talk about how he worked his entire career, quote, behind enemy lines, right? So like, I get the arguments about media bias. But the media, liberal media bias was so much more powerful 30, 40 years ago than it is today because they controlled all of the commanding heights of the media. We only had a few broadcast networks. They were all run by center left people.

You had a few newspapers and magazines all out of like one square mile of Midtown Manhattan, Time, Newsweek, right? New York Times, all that kind of stuff, plus the Washington Post and maybe the LA Times. That was it. That was the liberal media. That was the mainstream media. They controlled everything. They had Hollywood.

And yet conservatives somehow managed to like claw their way through all of that. And how did they do it? By hewing to a higher standard. By actually being willing to have the arguments to duke it out and disagree. And the pathetic thing about this argument, which you get from people other than Schlichter, is we should abandon all of that and behave. exactly the way the left did, which we condemned for a century.

It is so a historical, anti-intellectual, just lusting for power for its own sake, nonsense. And it is like a mind virus out there. And so now a lot of the most interesting stuff you get is on the center left because they're willing to have those arguments now, and that's how they're going to get out of the wilderness. And I just, I lament that, you know, like Heritage Foundation used to be part of arguments. It is not. It is now a messaging shop. And that is the problem with a huge, and Fox still has some good people at it. It's a messaging shop overall. And MSNBC has been a messaging shop for years. And it seems like maybe it's dawning on somebody over there that maybe this was a bad

idea. We'll have to wait and see. But the kind of water-carrying, propagandizing stuff is a sign of intellectual rot and weakness, not of strength. I think you should get the Sojanitin thing as a tramp stamp. He looks so great. And I can't believe you're only a level nine high I can. I get like level 60. Come on. Well, when I get my sort of free markets, everything changes. Anyway, I want to do a little, a little bit of not worth your time on the new Snow White movie, which I want to be very clear, none of us have seen. So this is not about the value or quality of that movie that, again, we haven't seen. But I want to talk a little bit about the left eating its own, I guess.

I don't know, like talk about 60th level Hayekian. On the other side, right, it's 60th level cultural appropriation, D-E-I, you must do all of the things. So they make this movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. That's literally the name of the story. It's the name of the movie that Disney made the first time. To say that movie's beloved is maybe going a little too far, but lots of little girls dress up as Snow White for Halloween. So yeah, sure, beloved. So they're going to remake the movie. And they're like, right off the bat, someone in that room must have seen the problem, right? So they're like, let's drop it from the title. Now it's just Snow White. Problem solved, except you still need to have seven dwarves

in the movie Peter Dinklage who is probably the most famous actor of all time to have dwarfism he was in Game of Thrones like you've seen him in tons of stuff he comes out at some point when the movie gets announced

and says like basically you gotta be kidding me like why are you making that movie when like the whole point is to show seven weirdo dwarves living in the woods like being creepy and so they respond and they're like oh don't worry

we're reimagining the whole thing. And then after, I guess, reimagining it and figuring out there was no good way to do this, they create these CGI things that are, they're not dwarves, they're not people with dwarfism. They're people with heads that are like one third of their body sizes and they're very strange looking. It's like uncanny valley stuff for those who have seen the 30 Rock episode, a polar Express, et cetera. Anyway, so then you have a bunch of people with dwarfism who come out and are like, so wait a second. To mollify the PC police, you got rid of seven roles for people with dwarfism who have a really hard time in Hollywood because drum roll, they have dwarfism. And that was your

solution to do these creepy CGI things and take roles away from real actors who have this condition. They're just getting it from all sides. This feels like a metaphor for the left right now. As we, there was a congressional hearing with the head of NPR and one of the congressmen was reading her tweets about like I just took the day off to read this book about reparations and

he was like, did you read that book? And she's like, no. And then he's like, did you read this book about white privilege? And she's like, no, I've never read that book. And he's like, that's weird. You tweeted about reading this book too. And she's like, I've never read that book.

I mean, as my friend Mary Catherine Ham tweeted like, this is the most white lady thing ever to like say publicly that you read the books to get credit for it on Twitter and then have like have no memory and they definitely never read the books. So is it worth our time to still talk about these things when the left is so clearly eating its own and having this like struggle session amongst itself? Can we can we leave them to do this on their own? Are they good now?

You know, it is really interesting, Sarah. it feels as if this worldview where people were, I mean, we can go back, it's not that long ago, people were hunting for folks who had an okay symbol, right? Like the whole title of the movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, you didn't even touch the Snow White part of this, and that was the fairest of them all, right?

And so you have this era where they were remaking this movie and they made the decision to greenlight it and sort of peak 2010s, into the early 2020s in the testimony from what Catherine Maher, is that her name? Her testimony sort of gave the game away that there was an awful lot of people who were kind of going along with all of this because they were scared not to. And then now that it has been sort of like demonstrated to be annoying, demonstrated to be bankrupt in many ways, demonstrated to be hypocritical in many ways, demonstrated to be intolerant,

And most importantly of all, demonstrated to be a political loser. Now, you know, it's kind of hard to find anybody who will confess to being like all into that stuff in the 20 teens. Everyone was like, oh, that was annoying to me. But I think the reality was, is that from the beginning, from the get-go, there was a ton less buy-in to the whole thing than you would think, from sort of the online world. But the problem was that so many people on the center left capitulated so completely to this stuff, just so completely that it's very kind of hard to trust

where they're headed now. Right. I mean, look, I'll tell you, I get pretty mad about this because what happens is that those people who were part of the mob now get to be like, oh, yeah, I got real caught up in that. My bad.

And they get to move on with their life. and the people who were the subject of those mobs never get their reputations back, never get their jobs back. And again, I'll speak from some personal experience here. When the mob came after me for getting a job at CNN, like they never found anything else I did wrong, but get offered a job. You know, there's like this whole frenzy. And then when Jen Saki gets her job, they actually are like, oh, yeah, that was a mistake.

We shouldn't have said that about Sarah. It is okay for someone to come out of an administration and get a job. How convenient. that we're wrong now, it's that we were wrong then. It's the same thing we've seen with the Bill Clinton feminism stuff, right? Like, oh, yeah, we shouldn't have defended Bill Clinton then, but now we're right about this. No, like when you constantly get to change your position, but the people that you targeted and the people who you said, like, weren't real feminist when they said Bill Clinton was a,

had done something wrong, just, just something wrong. Or me, I lost my job. I mean, I ended up here. So, like, whatever, things turned out pretty badly. That was fantastic. But, yeah, like, she gets to say, like, oh, yeah, I never read those books. I never cared about that. Columbia University gets to, like, stop doing all their DEI stuff, whatever.

But the people who were the focus of this mob attention and the threats, many far, far worse than anything I experienced, they never get apologies. They never get their reputations back and get those. years of their lives back. So I don't know. I'm pretty torn about it. But also, Steve, I want to read you that I guess the right is now super into this stuff and are going to use it also. This is from Ben Dominic, who founded the Federalist and is now at The Spectator. I'm not sure there is a more disgusting white privileged argument than looking at a picture of a sea of cartel members, rapists and drug dealers, and taking the position that, oh, but what if even one of them didn't get a lawyer.

Okay, set aside the whole, like, you know, due process goes back. 800 years that we've been finding that that is the best form of government, really. I won't even get into that. Really? We're now saying that something you don't like is white privileged from the right. So that's all we were doing here. We were fighting so that the right could now use this language as a weapon against people they don't like.

I mean, because it came from Ben Dominant, the first. Question you have to ask yourself is, is it his original thought or did he plagiarize it? Because he's a serial plagiarist who was fired from the Washington Post for plagiarizing. Also took money he claims not to have known from authoritarian governments to publish stuff on their behalf. Yeah, look, I mean, this is where we are, right? This is the conversation. I mean, these are the people who are driving our conversation in some ways. And it's one of the reasons that the conversation, the national conversation about these things

is as shit as it is. I mean, I'm going to go way out on a limb here. Due process should matter to people. We should care about it. It's not just white privilege. This is like when the left said stuff like being on time is white privilege. What? That's how we can run airlines, basically.

Or math, right? Math is white privilege. Like due process is white privilege is the dumbest. But it insults intelligence. But again, it's using this language from the left that they were so mad was used against them. And now they're like, no, what we were really mad is that we couldn't use it against them. Now, I take your point. And, you know, since this is not worth your time, you know, I think the places that you have ably guided this conversation, Sarah, have me caring a little bit more than I thought.

But I don't really care. I don't think this is worth our time. I don't care about Snow White. I don't care about all of that stuff. I don't, not something I spend a lot of time. I try to have fewer opinions these days than more. We're grateful for that, Steve. Having fewer opinions is, is a good idea.

I think, like, that could be a whole movement. Yeah, can I correct myself? I don't try to have fewer opinions. I just find myself having way, way fewer opinions about things because I can't. But then, you know, on the big things, I tend to have very strong views, but I just find myself caring a lot less about stuff that I used to care about. I thought it was interesting in the original framing. David kind of pushed back a little bit in his very polite way.

I don't think that the Snow White thing fell apart just because of the dwarves, right? Snow White had a terrible debut for a whole bunch of reasons, which gets to your larger point about left eating itself with nonsense, right? because part of the problem was Gal Godot as the witch or as the queen, I'm sorry is actually fair is the fairest of them all and shouldn't be

pissed off about this Zegler girl being the Snow White and it turns out that the girls playing Snow White is pretty pro like is it like is on one side, let's put it this way is on one side of the Israel-Palestine issue and

Gal Godot is on the other side. and the fact that the studios had to work assiduously to, first of all, keep them from talking anymore and we're appearing together. Like, there was just all of these signals that I think are kind of fascinating that audiences only seeing a trailer and maybe getting snippets from entertainment tonight

can figure out way in advance, oh, man, this movie's going to suck. And there's some, I think it's kind of fascinating. It's like the wisdom of crowds in a certain way. And I think it is good that this movie bombed because Hollywood constantly needs to be reminded that when you indulge your ideological priorities over like just making stuff that people want to see,

good stuff that people want to see, you're hurting yourself. And I think this is, you know, this is part of that process that Disney's been going through for a while of realizing that they are not the DEI Education Department of the United States of America.

So I think that's all good. I am shocked, though, truly shocked that Sarah of all people, I don't expect this from Steve to talk about Peter Dinklage's greatest roles and not mention that he played Stuart LaGrange

in 30 Rock and he was a commissioner on the UN High Commission on Water Temperature and Food Taint which was one of his greatest roles and he was also the children's book author in

Yes, an elf and that was a brilliant, brilliant friggin' role. He was so good an elf actually but like 30 Rock I mean every single moment of 30 Rock is pure quotable gold first season is maybe the best thing ever. And then first three seasons, super quotable.

And then they're starting to mail it in. But yeah, it was just, he was great. He is great. He's one of the greatest actors of our time. But he needs to get all. Look, I get it. I'm not going to lecture him. I don't like to, you know, like he feels very passionately about the treatment of people

with dwarfism. Are we supposed to say little people? I can never remember they keep trying to find the word for it. But I'm sorry. come on like like the dwarves in you know like in Tolkien in myth and all of these things this is a sort of part of not just you know it's not just the Disney product it's like Western civilization has had these notions of these these humanoid creatures right like I get why he has some issues with it but like he I think he needs to get over it because first of all if you're if you're if you're if you're going to say it's wrong to cast people with dwarfism and roles like this, it means you're basically saying people like with Peter Dinklage's condition cannot be actors. But that's exactly the point, though, Jonah, the opposite.

All the great roles we just listed about Peter Dinklage could have been played by anyone. He wasn't playing dwarfs. He was playing great jobs that they gave to Peter Dinklage because he's freaking awesome. Game of Thrones is the only one, I think, where the dwarf is. is actually part of the character, not in 30 Rock, not an elf. I kind of disagree with that. Just because they're not saying it

doesn't mean it's not part of the genius of the character. Anyway, I just think it's one of these things where you, if you hold yourself hostage to whoever it most loudly takes offense, you're never going to get anything done. You've got to take the arguments as they come. And with that, thanks for joining us. We'll be back next week.

You know what I'm going to be. Thank you.