The Dispatch Podcast - No True Conviction on Abortion | Roundtable

Episode Date: April 12, 2024

Sarah, Steve, and Jonah react to Donald Trump’s milquetoast yet controversial statement on abortion and how it's confusing Republican abortion policy at large. The Agenda: —What do people really think about abortion? —Conviction vs. convenience on the abortion issue —Israel’s pullout from southern Gaza —Is Israel making the same mistakes as America? —Craziness on college campuses —Trump’s “Sister Souljah” moment —Does Hamas have “enough” living hostages? —How NPR lost America’s trust —What have we gotten wrong? Show Notes: —Trump’s “rogue cops” comment —2022 midterm exit polls —David French’s writing on a “pro-life culture” —The Dispatch editorial on the lesser of two evils —Trump: “Take the guns first, go through due process second.” —The Dispatch Podcast with Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isgir with Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes, the really the distillation of the crew. And we are going to talk about such light topics as abortion, the war in Israel, and the fall of Western media. Jonah, the abortion debate has taken on many forms this year. So on the one hand, you have the Supreme Court having two interesting abortion cases this term, one on Miffa Prestone, an abortion-inducing drug, one on basically whether emergency rooms in Idaho will need to perform abortions, if it's for the health or safety of the mother, for instance. You also had the Alabama Supreme Court hold that IVF in vitro fertilization was banned under existing Alabama law that has since been changed by the state legislature.

And all of this sort of churn led Donald Trump to then put up a video statement on truth social. And it has lent itself to any number of interpretations somehow managing to anger the pro-life movement with some pro-life leaders, saying that it was the most disappointing statement from any Republican presidential candidate in history. You also, though, had the Biden campaign putting up a clip of it and basically taking a victory lap and thinking that this was going to be a huge political boon for them. And I guess I'll just describe what I heard and tell me if either of you think I'm missing some key part of this. It's about four and a half minutes. So A, he says that Roe v. Wade was overturned. It's factually accurate. Next, he says that this means that abortion will now be left up to the states, that they will determine the law of the land, the law of the states.

My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint to state. will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both and whatever they decide must be the law of the land in this case the law of the state by the way he appeared to be speaking off a teleprompter so that line seemed particularly strange because someone actually wrote it that way but okay again that is just descriptively accurate and then he said uh it's really important for you to vote in your states about this issue true

he says you should vote your conscience or your religious beliefs what you think is best for your children your families your country okay but he never actually says how he thinks you should vote and then

that's sort of it he never says for instance what he would do if a Republican Congress passed legislation to ban abortion at the federal level, for instance, or create a weak limit or whatever else. He never addresses that at all. As I said, he doesn't say what he thinks the correct limit should be at the states or which measures he supports or opposes. I guess, Jonah, I'm just a little confused about what this was other than literally a descriptive statement

of where the law is. And what was interesting is what he didn't say, which is anything about what he believes on the issue. Right, but I think there's a follow-up where he was asked about this Arizona court ruling that restores this 1874 law banning abortion. 64. Don't know why those 10 years matter to me, but they seem to. 64 is an interesting year, but anyway. It is, right? Like, weren't you busy with some other stuff?

Like, this is what you were doing? Yeah, and anyway, we can talk about that more. That'll be, we'll take that to the skiff and do a special thing on Arizona in 1864. No, look, I think, and then he said, well, that's bad. I wouldn't do that. And I think there's a, this is an unusual place for me to be in, where I basically think Trump is right on a major policy. But I come to that place from conviction, and he gets to it through cowardice.

And he thought, he was clearly convinced by somebody, this is my theory of the case. he thinks abortion is screwing him as a political issue. And so he goes to his advisor and says, give me something to say that gets me out of this. Because I want to say I'm for 15 weeks. He was hinting at that for a while, about a national 15 week cutoff for abortion. And then that seemed to go away

because they got a lot of blowback on it. And so it's, you know what it reminds me of? Remember where Trump kept posting on truth social of the stuff about how rogue, even rogue cops need immunity. And I have a lawyer friend who says, clearly here's what happened. A bunch of lawyers sat him down and tried to explain qualified immunity to him. And it was sort of like the far side dog where it was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, rogue cop. And that's stuck in his head. And so he starts making this argument about qualified immunity and rogue cops, whatever, for the president.

United States for completely unrelated things. I think that similarly, someone tried to explain to him the federalist compromise idea behind sending this issue back to the states, and he doesn't know how to explain it. He doesn't know how to defend it. And he doesn't know how to say, yeah, things I disagree with will happen in a lot of states. And this gets him crosswise with a lot of pro-lifers. Not as many you might think or would have predicted 10 years ago, but it gets some crosswise with a lot of pro-lifers. And I don't think it wins him a single pro-choice

voter. I mean, if you are voting on abortion as a pro-choice person, this is a word salad that means nothing to you. All you hear is, I repealed Roe v. Wade, and that's it. And so I think he's got himself into a mess.

Will it matter in November? I don't know, because I'm more of the law Nothing Matters camp on a lot things but that's where I always see it. Oh, we're going to come back to that because obviously I think that campaigns, people vote on vibes, not on policy issues. But Steve, before we even get to sort of what happens now with this, I guess for me also, there's something interesting about the fact that, look, I do not think that abortion is a deciding issue in this election, right? As I said, I think people vote on vibes. The issues maybe feed the vibes, but they don't look at everyone's

10-point plan and decide which one they think will best fight inflation. But doesn't it drive turnout? Doesn't your theory need to acknowledge that like, okay? Wait for it. Yes, ma'am. Yes, Mrs. Edgar. So, I don't think that the issue, people have sorted themselves. I don't think it's a big driver anyway because it's so far down on people's priority list most of the time compared to the economy, immigration, crime, etc. Crime is actually not that high up where you'd think it would be either. However, there's no question that overall people are more with the pro-choice side than the pro-life side. When you look at these ballot measures,

for instance, in red states, Kentucky, Kansas, places like that, the pro-choice, and again, those words are sort of meaningless, but let's just use them for now. The pro-choice ballot measures pass, but then pro-life candidates still win, which to me says, yep, when people, are asked point blank what they want on an issue. They'll give you one answer, but it's not really affecting their vote for candidates, except on this very marginal way where it could have the ballot measure could have people turn out where they wouldn't otherwise turn out and maybe, you know, create a little bit of enthusiasm. There's a problem with that, which is sure, in midterms, there's a lot of people who don't vote. But in presidential elections,

we've pretty much tapped all the voters. Turnouts actually very, very high in presidential elections and especially in the last few. So the turnout argument, while it's true in theory, may not mean much in practice. Nevertheless, Steve, there's no question that this issue does not affirmatively help Republicans. On the whole, it would, if it matters at all, help Democrats.

And yet, when we walk through this stuff, the two Supreme Court cases, the Alabama thing, the Arizona thing, Donald Trump's statement, all of that is being driven by Republicans who are keeping it in the news. The people who brought the Miffa Prestone case, you never quite know like the exact timing for a Supreme Court case, but I can get you pretty darn close. And it was very clear that the Miffa Prestone case was going to come to the Supreme Court and be decided in June before the general election. if you're pro-life and you're seeing what happened in the 2022 midterms, that is political malpractice. So, Steve, am I missing something? Why do Republicans keep bringing up abortion

when the issue itself doesn't help them? Well, I think there are two different groups that we're talking about here when we talk about Republicans and abortion. There are the sort of the conviction Republicans who believe this and believe sort of abortion is killing a baby. They want to do whatever they can do to slow it or to stop that. And I think make decisions based with that and in mind, often without regard to the political consequences of their actions. Then I think we're seeing sort of in stark, even starker contrast than usual, the second group of Republicans who have often used pro-life language, campaigned as pro-lifers,

but who didn't really mean it or didn't mean it in the way. that the conviction pro-lifers meant it. And, you know, of course, Donald Trump, I would say, would be sort of at the head of that group. If you look at the exit polling from the 2022 midterms, I don't agree with you. I mean, Sarah, we'll revive our long-running dispute over vibes versus policy, right? Because I think you're guilty of sort of the Jonah's much-derided monocausal fallacy. like it's not just vibes it's policy too it's both i think policy matters i think policy matters in a general sense i think policy matters uh on abortion and i think the numbers would suggest that you look at the exit polls from the 2022 midterms you had six and ten voters um saying that abortion

should be legal in all or most cases um you had abortion as the second highest ranked issue in terms of importance to voters. Seventy-six percent of voters who said abortion was their top issue voted for Democrats. So I do think there is the case to be made that in that instance, policy affected the outcome. But I think you can't separate that from Trump. And I think there's a good case that the fate that befell Republicans in 2022 midterms had as much or more to do with Trump and his presence and the election denial stuff and everything as it did with abortion. The real problem, to me, is the combination of Trump and abortion, right? Abortion is, I think, is a conviction issue. You know, we had seen David French had written about

this a number of times for us, this sort of slow, this gradual trend toward a more pro-life culture based on medical progress, based on our understanding of fetal viability, you know, on and on and on. And I think people, when they were sort of faced with that, made moral calculations about what was acceptable and what wasn't, and it ended up changing some views on abortion. Trump doesn't look at this through a moral lens. He doesn't look at anything through a moral lens. And when Jonah says, you know, you came to this through conviction, Trump came to this position through cowardice, I don't even think you can articulate Trump's position. Like, what's his position. He doesn't have a position. He called himself very pro-life. His position is, I don't want to

talk about it. Right, but that's not your position. I mean, I think if you're talking about the policy position, I don't think you can, I don't think you can articulate a policy position. Like, what Trump is doing now is pure political expediency. And people will see that. And I think it will repel people because he just called himself the most pro-life president in the history of the country. He's taking credit for killing Roe v. Wade. And yet, it's obvious that he doesn't believe in the same things that conviction pro-lifers believe in. And I think that'll be obvious to people. And it comes off as sort of cynical beyond cynicism. And I think that'll be hard for Republicans. Okay. But here's where the negative polarization

comes in, this idea that you're not voting for your candidate. You're voting against the other candidate because there were some people of true conviction on this abortion issue who, have come out strongly against what Donald Trump said with no qualifiers. Lila Rose comes to mind as someone who fits into that category. But then there's people who are running, you know, different anti-abortion groups who basically said, well, we don't like this statement, but Donald Trump is still better than Joe Biden if your priority is, you know, ending abortions in the United States. So we're still rooting for Donald Trump. We're still going to help him defeat Joe Biden. I mean, I guess first of all, isn't that kind of true? I think it's, look, I think

it's kind of true. This is not, this is not Jenna Goldberg coming out endorsing Donald Trump here, but it's a good illustration. You know, we did this editorial that we got a lot of grief for about how the lesser of two evils gets you into trouble. Pro-life movement is stuck with a conundrum that they kind of deserve to be stuck in like so many other elements of the right where you hit your wagon and Donald Trump saying he's wise, he's solomonic, he's infallible, he's glorious, he's the leader we need, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then Donald Trump throws your principles under the bus out for political expediency. It's really difficult to all of a sudden turn on a dime to a pragmatic argument about the lesser of two evils.

in part because you've helped convert your own followers to the cult. I mean, this is the problem. And I know some really, really, really passionate pro-gun people. And there's a concern that, you know, Trump, that's basically the last constituency of the old pre-Trump right that hasn't been really betrayed significantly by Trump. but they know he's capable of it. Remember there was that scene in the White House where I can't remember which mass shooting it was, but Trump starts going on to this thing

about how, you know, like Pence says, you need to follow the law and you get a warrant or whatever to take people's guns away. And Trump says, look, sometimes maybe what we need to do is take the guns first and then get the law stuff second. And everyone winses knowing that, uh-oh, that's not a good thing to say.

And Pence, I think, clean it up a little bit and then they issued a statement. They know that Trump has no convictions about this stuff. But when you hit your movement to this sort of cult of personality stuff, it's riding the tiger or what is it, the face-eating leopard party, shock to find out candidate leopard eats faces or whatever. I mean, it's that kind of thing. And they're going to be very ill-equipped because they're going to have some segment of their movement, 20%, 30%, 50%, I honestly don't know, who are just like, yeah, no, this is a bridge too far. I don't, we, we, I've grown up as a pro lifer. I've been a pro lifer for 50 years. And, and now you're telling me, oh, I have to be

pragmatic when the president says he's again, you know, he thinks what John DeSantis did is terrible and all that kind of stuff. It's going to show so dissension. And I just think it's going to, on the vibe front, it's going to unify opponents. It's a wedge issue for his own coalition, is I guess what, what he's doing here. And I just don't know what, solves for him. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security

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from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ETHOS.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. Can we just take a little like dispatch cul-de-sac, Steve? I haven't gotten to talk to David French about this specific issue. But it has to be a little vindicating for David French after being attacked for years, you know, because he wouldn't support Donald Trump, this pro-life president, who, you know, the most pro-life president ever and he says he's pro-life but yada yada and now like all of these people are having to explain how like well actually even though donald trump's wazzi stated slash implied position would be defined as pro-choice by the vast majority of the pro-life movement it's still better than joe biden so that's who we're getting behind i mean that's the exact

compromising that they attacked david for sorry i just have to like it's crazy No, you're right. I mean, look, this is, this is a, this is a recurring feature of, of the Trump administration is when you've been skeptical of Trump or you've criticized them for something and then, and then that criticism is born out to have been, you know, prophetic or somehow right. It's the least satisfying being right can ever be is when you're right and then Trump has screwed all sorts of stuff up. I mean, I think this points to, what Jonah was talking about, points to this, you know, much bigger. outcome of this alliance between movement, thoughtful, ideological, principled, well, sometimes principled conservatives, and Trump is he often makes issues that he adopts for transactional or expediency, political expediency purposes, more difficult to make for the people who really believe them. So, you know, I'm very strongly in face. of cutting taxes. But I listen to Donald Trump talk about cutting taxes, and it makes me not want him on my side. Like, don't be on my side. You're making my argument more difficult. I want to

one next Greenland, and he ruined that for me. I wanted him to, I've long wanted to seriously call the administrative state. I believe in the bloat that conservative, that conservative have talked about for decades leading to less effective and less efficient government. But the way Trump talks about it is we got to get all these bureaucrat assholes out so that I can put in all of my own worshippers. And it's just, it's hard to make principled arguments alongside somebody like Donald Trump. And he ruins good arguments. One final sort of point, we were talking about this in our Slack channel last night about Trump just not understanding some of these issues. There's a big debate in Congress right now about FISA reform. And people have noted on

social media and on our Slack channels that Trump in January of 2018 seems to have supported basically something very similar to the kind of Pfizer reform that he came out against two days ago and which has sort of thrown some, thrown the future of this 702 provision in particular of Pfizer reform in general in some jeopardy. In 2018, there was this huge effort among national security hawks, people who believe in the importance of the 702 program, which allows the U.S. government to conduct surveillance. Talk to intel people, they will tell you it's prevented multiple attacks. I basically buy the argument. But there was like a months-long project working on Trump to get him to the point where he would agree to this reauthorization. He'd be in

favor of it. And then the morning that this was coming up for a vote, he was watching Fox and friends, heard Fox and friends talking about it and asking the question, isn't this what the Obama administration used to go after Trump, to a legal, you know, remember Trump said FBI wiretapped Trump? So Trump tweets out on the morning of this vote that he doesn't. like this thing because it was used to go after him. And it blows up the entire like carefully planned effort that was coordinated between Mike Pompeo at the CIA and John Kelly, Trump's chief of staff, the Hawks in Congress had all sort of delicately gotten him to this point where he was in favor. Then he sends this tweet where it blows it all up. And for two or three hours that

morning at the White House and on Capitol Hill, there was this mad scramble to get Trump to put out another tweet to say in effect, hey, look, I'm for reauthorizing this. I was just raising questions. And he did. That's what happened. A couple hours later, he put out another tweet of quote unquote clarifying the issue saying, you know, that said, even though this was allegedly used against me, I favor reauthorization. Anyway, the point is he had no idea what this program did. He didn't have any idea what he was talking about. All he knew is that people had told him that it was used against him and if it was bad for him

he was opposed to it and I think that's you know to at the risk of oversimplification that's what we're looking at here the guy doesn't have convictions about it you can't say you're very pro-choice and then claim that you're the most

pro-life president in the history of the country doesn't work by the way Jonah's face has never looked more sincere than on that Greenland point wounded Congressman Mike Gallagher and I have been passionate advocates for the peaceful annexation of Greenland

for a very long time and Trump ruined it for me and I will never forgive him for that but when you say Trump doesn't have any real convictions I mean I agree with you about certain public public policy issues generally but he does have some convictions about some things and one of them

is that the 2020 election was stolen and and Noah Rothman over at NR makes a good point which is like this is in part a setup for the inevitable if Trump loses for the inevitable throwing of the pro-lifers under the bus because there is at least as much evidence that the stolen election BS cost Republicans seats in the House and Senate and then abortion has but Trump would never

countenance the idea that he would have to take one. for the team on his core narrative about how he didn't actually lose. He'd perfectly happy blaming pro-lifers for everything, because that's negotiable. His self-serving narrative about the election being stolen, which they're now campaigning on, they're now doing robocalls on, that's non-negotiable because that's actually what defines a Republican in Trump eyes is how much you are committed to that narrative. And he did that. He did that exact thing in 2022. He tweeted, right? It wasn't my fault. The Republicans didn't live up to expectations in the midterms. It was the abortion issue poorly handled by many Republicans. It's literally exactly what he did.

So I don't think that Trump is doing what I'm about to describe with a lot of forethought. I think it comes to him naturally, like instinctually. But there is something very smart about the way he approaches all of this stuff. Within the Republican Party, there's a bunch of different factions who have different and competing issue priorities. evangelicals, the pro-life movement, the national security folks, whatever it is, like walk down the line. What Trump has been able to do so successfully, whatever that person's thing is, their most important thing, he first gets them to compromise

on that most important thing. And then once he's broken them off of that, every other compromise is much, much easier to get them to make. And I think that that has what has made him so successful at remaking the Republican Party in his image. And this is just a really paradigmatic example for me where, yeah, the Lila Roses didn't go along. They're not going to. But think about how many other of the pro-life community have now been willing to compromise on their core identity issue.

So, of course, they're going to be willing to compromise on everything else. I think that, you know, some of the national security hawk stuff, we saw Mike Pompeo come out and endorse Donald Trump, right as he's saying that he's against, you know, Pfizer reauthorization, you know, and you can go down the line with whatever issue you want or any person that you want. A lot of these people that he's gotten to bend the knee had to first, you know, sort of compromise on whatever their like core identity thing was to get on board with Donald Trump. Once they did that, everything was pretty easy from there to keep them on the Trump train. So that's why I think the abortion issue is interesting. It's why you see not just Trump remaking the Republican Party, which he has in spades, he's remade the evangelical movement and religion. Now, I think David French would probably say some of that, you know, Donald Trump is as much a symptom of the remaking, maybe. but certainly he has contributed, I think, massively to changes within evangelical communities.

All right, Steve, will you update us on where things stand in Israel, the troop pull out from the South, the plans still to invade Rafah? What is the strategy at this point that anyone can discern? You know, I'm no military tactician, but generally speaking, if you've defeated an enemy somewhere and there's still somewhere else, you don't pull out of the place that you just beat them to move into the somewhere else so that they can just move into the place that you already wash them out of. Like, are we literally going in circles? I mean, sometimes you do in their defense. Sometimes it's necessary if there's a bigger conflagration in the place you're headed than there was in the place you pacified. There may be sort of a kinetic necessity to do that.

But David, French, we keep talking about David. I thought he should be banned from this podcast and banned certainly from any praise. I have not said his name. I've praised him. And I praised him on the abortion question I'm about to praise him again. He had a very good piece in the small community newspaper that he writes for about exactly this. And suggesting that what the Israeli military is doing is in some ways making the same mistakes that the U.S. military did. in Iraq, both in terms of efforts, in terms of having to retake territory that they've

already taken, but also in terms of failing to adequately tend to the needs of the population to mollify them or, to the extent possible, pacify them to continue the kinetic operations. Look, I think this is a really challenging moment. Benjamin Netanyahu is as unpopular as he's been. He has people in Israel and, you know, prominent hawks in the United States, challenging his conduct of the war, challenging his decision-making in diplomatic and domestic terms. terms, Brett Stevens at the New York Times, strong hawk, very supportive of Israel in this war, wrote a column two days ago saying Netanyahu must go. Not entirely new argument for Stevens, but he made it pretty forcefully. So I think there are real challenges there. Beyond that,

there are additional challenges, and I think some challenges that the Biden administration is making worse. this pattern of constant hectoring, constant public scolding from top Biden administration officials, including often the president himself, second guessing seemingly every Israeli decision, challenging humanitarian questions, changing positions on the necessity of a ceasefire, refusing or failing to make demands of Hamas, that it's making of the Israeli government on and on and on. This is not how an ally behaves when a long-time, strong allies and an existential war. That doesn't mean that the U.S. government has to just accept everything Israel is doing. I think it's entirely appropriate to have very direct and blunt private talks, And I think it's appropriate for the occasional public rebuke. But that's not what this is. This is a constant stream of badgering and scolding from the Biden administration that I think is undermining Israel's position. For domestic policy purposes. Sorry, for domestic political purposes. Yeah, very clearly for domestic political purposes. It's not actually about thinking you're going to influence Israel. It's that you don't care whether it weakens Israel. You're doing it because you need to at home.

I mean, I think there's a policy component, too. I mean, if you look at, so Israel took out, or we presume that Israel took out several Iran Revolutionary Guard Court generals in a house that was near a diplomatic facility in Damascus on April 1st. And in doing that, there has been the argument in the region that Israel really dramatically escalated, that this is unacceptable. You're going after diplomatic. resources. It's, I think it's a nonsense argument. These are IRGC Kud's Force Generals. One of them, Muhammad Riza Zahidi was basically the liaison between the, uh, between Iran and Hezbollah. Um, these guys are terrorists and they were taking refuge in diplomatic facilities or near diplomatic facilities, which is a common tactic from the Iranians. But the Biden administration didn't sort of stay silent. They didn't offer support for, for the attack, which I would have done if had I been president. Instead, they put out word that the Biden administration reached out directly to Iran,

to let Iran know that the U.S. government didn't have any heads up on this, that we weren't supportive, that we didn't play any role. And then that leaked. I mean, think about what that does to Israel's position, but also the message that it sends to America's enemies. I mean, we're so afraid of escalation that we're willing to try to make nice with Iran. And that's where I think the policy component comes in. There is this longstanding policy approach from the Obama administration and the Biden administration on Iran that I think is still, still treats Iran as if it's a would-be member of sort of civilized nation states when it's not, when it's a terrorist state. Jonah, at home, we're certainly seeing an increase of that pressure, I think, on Biden and his administration, in part because, as Steve mentioned, it's working, right? Biden and his team keep feeling like they need to go out and make these comments criticizing Israel a little, then a little more, then a little more. And so if I were them, I'd be like, yes, okay, it's working if we just keep it up, make it stronger, make it louder. We'll get what we want.

But it feels like it's not working in terms of the Democratic Party as a whole, meaning a lot of Americans, I think, are looking at this anti-Semitism on university campuses, you know, the dean of Berkeley Law School invited students over to his house for dinner, and one of them stood up on his furniture to berate him. They had circulated a pretty anti-Semitic cartoon of him. He has, obviously, nothing to do with America's foreign policy towards Israel. He cannot in any way, you know, force Israel into a ceasefire. He has no connections to Israel, but he is Jewish. And then the speaker has claimed that it's her First Amendment right to berate someone in their own home, which is offensive on several levels. But most of all, to me, and she's a law student saying that. Wow. So I guess I'm curious what you think of the political moment around Israel. I still think this is a fascinating episode because I just can't think of another time where a foreign attack like this has affected domestic politics so much. And to be honest, I can't quite figure out why this did in a way

that nothing else that has happened around the world in my lifetime has. Yeah. So I have two points. One, I'll make the political point first. I'm a little confused about the Biden approach to this in so on the on the politics side you know the old joke about yasserer it wasn't a joke it was an observation is that yasser arifat would talk about peace in english and eradicating the jews in arabic and like the new york times would always quote his english stuff and never pay attention to his arabic stuff right and it's become sort of a metaphor for speaking to different audiences saying different things lots of politicians do that the weird thing to me about the way of the Biden approaches is, is like, he's talking to the, basically the, either pro-Hamas or

anti-anti-Hamas constituencies in English. And he's talking to the pro-Israel people in English. And they, they kind of seem to have this theory that the pro-Israel people will only hear the pro-Israel stuff and not the other stuff, and vice versa. And I just don't think that's how it works in our media climate where you hear the bad things that they're doing and saying too. And this goes for both sides, right? And so... It's the 47% comment.

If Romney had said that at a closed door fundraiser in 1996, it would have been totally fine. It's what politicians did all the time. They said one thing to their donors and another thing at campaign rallies and another thing in interviews to the press. And what happened in 2012 was the realization that you couldn't do that anymore because of iPhones.

So it's like, you're behind. Like, this has been a thing for 12 years already. We know you can't have different messages for different groups anymore. Yeah, and so I think that, I mean, you can have one-on-one phone conversations with leaders, you know, but yeah, you can't, but you just, and so John Federman is way committed to being pro-Israel, right? And it doesn't appear to be hurting them all that much in Pennsylvania. But the Biden people have decided to go a different way, and I'm just, to me, it's a little. bit like Trump's stuff on abortion. He thinks he found this neat trick to avoid making enemies anywhere and instead he makes enemies everywhere on the issue. But the second point I was going

to make, which it just occurred to me when we're talking about this, is like, I think that there's a sociological issue. It's sort of a perfect storm thing. One is just sort of the rise of identity politics stuff generally as a defining ideological commitment on the left. it's been institutionalized through things like DEI through a whole generation of rhetorical and policy commitments and all the rest but there's also this role that that happened on the organized, the seriously organized left in the Bush years where care and a bunch of sophisticated pro, you know, I don't say I don't know what they're pro. Anti-Israel, political activist, Muslim Americans became much more entrenched within the organs of the Democratic Party and elite liberalism. Universities launched all sorts of outreach

to, you know, funded in times by Saudi Arabia or Qatar or whoever, this internalization of Islamophobia being the greatest threat America faces, even. even though anti-Semitic hate crimes have always dwarfed anti-Muslim hate crimes. And there just became this sort of whole strange zeitgeist and institutional thing that has transpired in the last 15 years. And the result is a whole bunch of elite institutions that simply don't know how to tell, I just put it, be blunt about it, Muslim activist kids, left-wing Muslim kids that their antics just won't fly.

And that it is not, and we saw this with the college president's thing, right? It's like they had spent so long developing one theory of the case about how to do outreach to the Muslim world, how to do, you know, bring in foreign exchange students, hype, settler, colonial BS. And then after 10-7, they're repeat. what they're sewing, because it turns out you have a lot of very activist, ideologically committed anti-Israel people and no muscle memory about how to fight this specific issue. If these were clansmen, if these were, you know, if these were anti-Asian bigots, they would know exactly

what to do. DEI administrators would come down their bat poles and run out into their batmobiles and come around and throw these kids into re-education camps or expel them. But they've internalized this entire argument about how any criticism of Islamic radicalism, any criticism of Israel is somehow bigoted and wrong. And they have, it's, it's like they've never had to fight Southpaw before. And all of a sudden, they're being hit from the left on all sorts of these kinds of intersectionality, anti-Israel stuff, and they suck at how to respond to it. And I think that this is a huge problem for the Democratic Party because there are a huge number of these people working

in the White House, working, or from the same social milieu, from working in journalism, and Biden listens to these people. He's always had this problem of like listening to his grandkids and listening to young people and thinking that they are the voice of wisdom. And he doesn't realize that the emissaries from these activist left-wing identity politics groups are as representative of normal Americans as the people who use phrases like Latinx and breeding person, and that they are not actually where the median voter is in the Democratic Party, never mind in the country writ large. You know, Steve, I really enjoyed Nick's newsletter where he talked about Trump's abortion statement as a sister soldier moment, I don't agree that that's what Trump was intentionally doing,

even if it was maybe the idea of some of his operatives, to push back on the most radical parts of your side in order to show sort of that centrist part of your own voters, like, look, I'm beholden to no one, you know, I'll tell them where to go. What I found really interesting about it were Nick's theories about why Biden hasn't done that, because he's had a lot more interesting sister-soldia opportunities. Trump has already tamed to the Republican Party. He doesn't need to sister-soldia as much because everyone thinks it's Trump's party anyway.

Biden can look a lot like the tail-wagging the dog when it comes to this issue, immigration, crime. I mean, you name it. There's been sister-soldia opportunities again and again that I think would have helped Biden politically way more than any sister-sul-a-moment from Donald Trump. and yet we haven't seen it and we've seen the opposite

over and over again and I guess to my point on turnout and the turnout that we've seen in the last two presidential elections normally we've said these are base elections you're just trying to turn out your voters I don't think that's true

this time around you're trying to win those marginal voters from the other guy as the two parties realigned there's weirdly more people up for grabs in some sense than there have been in the past as they sort of are willing to reevaluate their own identities. Why isn't Biden doing this very clear thing to me? Yeah. So I agree with you. There's a long history of this, actually. I mean, if you go back

and you read the book by Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, this two shall pass. We had them on the podcast talked about this to a certain extent. One of the things Joe Biden did when it was very clear after he won South Carolina, and it was clear he was going to be the presumptive Democratic nominee, well, he reached out aggressively to the progressive left, to sort of the elected officials, to the outside activists who make up the progressive left to send a signal in effect that he was with them on a lot of this stuff. Now, you could argue that that was just smart politics. You know, Biden, he hadn't really run as a centrist. I don't think it's accurate to say that. I think if you look at what Biden ran on issue by issue, he ran to the left of Hillary Clinton in 2016.

But because the contrast was Bernie Sanders, Biden sort of by default looked like he was a centrist and moderate on relative terms. But he reached out to Elizabeth Warren. They had a warm relationship. He sort of built that relationship, cultivated her support. He reached out to Premier Jayapal, a leading progressive in the House. and they developed a warm relationship. And I think Biden spends as much time listening to the progressives, both elected and unelected, as he does to anybody else.

It seems like, I would argue to bring this back to Israel, I would argue that that's in part been why they've been so tone deaf on Israel generally, the rhetoric on Israel, is they don't get the kind of, blowback that one might have expected when they are critical of Israel. They get it from Republicans, but they don't get it much from longtime Democratic pro-Israel politicians or interest groups or what have you. They seem to, there was a moment here just in the last couple days where they seem to have realized that maybe this has gone too far. And you had Secretary of State Anthony Blinken have this series of statements where he kind of

kind of tries to recontextualize what's happening and says, hey, sometimes it seems like everybody's forgetting that Hamas started this. Hamas is a terrorist group. Hamas killed 1,400 people on October 7th and sort of kind of reorienting the debate around Hamas. My response when I heard him do that was, well, yeah, there's a reason people aren't focused on Hamas as much. It's because you're not focused on Hamas as much. If the president of the United States was focused on Hamas and was talking about Hamas and holding Hamas responsible and pushing Hamas to release hostages more than he has been in a public and aggressive way, I can guarantee you that more people would be talking about Hamas. But they sort of come to this realization lately and then they're trying

to course correct, but they seem overwhelmingly concerned with the progressive left. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style. It's quick, intuitive, and requires zero coding experience. You can also tap into built-in analytics and see who's engaging

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Hey, Sarah, can I ask you, just this reminds me just as a comms thing. There's a really depressing, not-surprising headline in the Wall Street Journal today that Moss is indicating that there may not be enough women and children and old, so non-combatant age male hostages, right? that all the women and children that they've taken, they're mostly dead. And because they can't scrounge together 40 living hostages to trade. Now, when you think about what that actually means, the implications of it,

whether they're lying or not, because I think there's a good chance that they lie because then they can say 10 years from now, oh, you know, oh, look, look what turned up in the couch cushions. Remember that adorable toddler that we stole from her parents? Well, she is alive. I mean, they do that. They're evil people. It seems to me that this is the kind of thing that Biden could come out and say, you know, with his incredibly grating stage whisper, think about that, right? Is there a way to message this to get, because right now it, I don't know where the moral high horse, you know, like the only time they gets on the high horse now is to talk about how Israel isn't providing enough aid to civilians that the people, it's fighting. writing don't care about, right? Hamas isn't providing any support or cover or protection for its own people. It says those are up to Israel to protect. And indeed blocking. Right. So is there

a way to message this that you think could rally American people to the sort of idea of staying the course and letting Israel actually try to win this thing? Yeah. It would just involve a time machine. and instead of being on the defensive, you know, I see John Kirby on the Sunday shows every weekend, and I'm sitting on those panels, and the conversations are sort of baffling. Like, I'm the only person mentioning the hostages.

John Kirby didn't mention the hostages. So, yeah, I mean, I think if the administration had set this from the beginning as they're holding six Americans, and by God, Civis Romanus, you touch a hair on an American's head, this isn't about Israel or Palestinians like, well, you know, it's whatever it is. Like, that's their beef. They have six Americans.

And until we get them back, I don't give a crap what happens. You know, turn the place into glass. And then you can back off from that position, you know, privately, as I said. But it's your point, Joan, about what you're saying publicly versus privately. They started off from a like, oh, golly, gee, that seems like quite a shame. But I hope that nothing like humanitarian bad happens. no no that's what war is and and which side started the war oh the people the people who took the hostages um and you know these kids they're not kids they're adults putting up quotes or going on social media and praising um some of the prisoners that israel holds and they're like this guy is in jail for being a critic of israel oh nope it turns out he's in jail for kidnapping torturing in graphic detail that i will not share on this podcast, and then murdering a young Jewish man, that's why he's in jail

for something that would be a war crime that you, like, I don't understand. But if you don't start from that position, then yeah, it's pretty hard six months later to be like, but wait, they're holding six Americans. Right. Because that message didn't bake in from the beginning. I mean, I'm, I'm so offended that there are Americans being held and that we don't talk about them every day that we don't know their names, you know, etched in every single, you know, tree and yellow ribbon around every community in America, because that's what should be going on. Terrorists took six Americans. So, yeah, that's what my communication strategy would have been. Okay. Last topic. Steve, a senior producer at NPR wrote a long piece about what he has

seen as a change at NPR. And basically he says, look, yeah, NPR always was left-leaning both in terms of employees and in terms of audience. But that didn't really control what the content was. NPR was really about curiosity and nothing was off limits and going and talking about weird stuff, interesting stuff, challenging stuff, whatever that might be. And he said that basically that has changed in the last, you know, five, six years, some related to Trump, some related to George Floyd. Maybe those two themselves are connected in terms of how it's changed the culture.

And that now there's this sense that you basically just do the same stories over and over again on race, identity, politics. And that it's led to sort of what I think he highlights, not as a. the three most catastrophic errors in their coverage, but is three that we would all recognize. One, being the Mueller investigation, I feel it in my bones, Yuri, thank you. Two, being the Hunter Biden laptop story, and three, being the origin of COVID. And just the lack of curiosity, even when they had reason to see and know that there was an emerging narrative coming out of the other side, they didn't say like, oh, we missed it. We're coming back to it now. Here's how our process went wrong. Instead, it was more, let's move on. And they never talked about it again. And I, I, boy,

again, just going back to the Mueller investigation, I think it's been really corrosive for our country because voters who watch MSNBC or listen to NPR, and as he noted, I think Adam Schiff was on NPR, 37 times hinting that he knew of evidence that would come out to show that Donald Donald Trump had worked with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election. And then the Mueller investigation found none of that, and they just moved on, and they never mentioned it, and they never stopped having Adam Schiff on or said, he's no longer a credible source. He not only lied to us privately, he lied to our viewers repeatedly.

And instead, voters were left with the impression that that all was proven, and yet nevertheless, less Donald Trump wasn't charged with a crime because DOJ. And so trust in our institutions has fallen, you know, in part. I don't, again, it's not monocausal. I know that. But certainly it contributed to it. So with that, Steve, I want to come to you with a somewhat difficult question before we jump into what we think of that over the whole of the media ecosystem.

What's a story that you think we've gotten wrong and how we've handled it after the fact that would be like a counter example to that potentially? And then we're going to ask you, what is your greatest masculine insecurity? So for example, Steve, one that comes to mind to me is, at least for me, the Hunterbine laptop story was also a failure on my part because the origin story of the laptop was so insane. I had just come from the Department of Justice where I had sort of seen that tradecraft before in great detail, you know, in some of our indictments. And so it's not that I came out and said that it was Russian disinformation. Obviously, I didn't have the evidence for that.

But yeah, I didn't think we should cover it as much because the story itself didn't make sense yet. And we didn't have the information to make me feel comfortable that it was going to make sense. Yeah. I mean, it's a good big picture question. And I'd probably have to spend some more time thinking about things I wish we could have done. I mean, there are big areas, and we talk about this internally, that I would like us to cover more. I would like us to do more on DEI stuff, do more reporting, firsthand original reporting on some of the excesses of DEI, which I think are very real, and ESG at the same time. On the Hunter Biden thing, I take your point. I mean, I think that the

it was very, very important at the beginning of that when the story first broke to be cautious. And I mean cautious in both ways. You know, the New York Post had this reporting. The Rudy Giuliani story itself, what Rudy Giuliani was telling people was internally contradictory. And even if you were inclined to believe that this laptop showed up at this, you know, that the mostly blind Mac repairman in Wilmington, Delaware, and that Hunter Biden didn't remember dropping it off because he may have been drunk.

And Rudy Giuliani's, like, the fact that Rudy Giuliani couldn't get his story straight and had these internal contradictions, I think had to give responsible journalists pause. So we did report on it. We, to walk people through why we were handling it the way that we handled it, we talked about sort of the problems. I think we also avoided going, leading too far in the other direction, which was to say, you know, the kind of statement that the Intel, 60 Intel professionals put out that, you know, was, I think, in a literal reading, careful not to say,

this is absolutely Russian disinformation. But the point of the letter was to say, effect, hey, this is likely Russian disinformation. I mean, as you said, sir, it bore the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, and there were reasons for us to be on sort of alert about that. But I think, you know, we tried to get the laptop itself. There was a time at which Giuliani's lawyer was sharing copies of the hard drive with people. We pushed to get that. They did not provide it to us. We pushed to get it through other means so that we had it ourselves and could make these determinations and do additional reporting on our own and not be reliant on what a New York Post reporter says or what an Intel official says. We didn't have enough success. I would say we didn't,

we didn't do a lot of sort of immediate follow-up reporting on that. And I'm a little torn on that. On the one hand, you know, anybody reads our stuff knows that that kind of story isn't really our bread and butter, I would say. We don't spend a lot of time doing that. kind of reporting anyway on Hunter Biden's, you know, illicit or explicit pictures and, you know, or him smoking crack. It's not, we don't spend a lot of time on that sort of either way, on either side. Well, not at work. But there's so many things I could say, Jonah.

The, but I do think we could have probably done some additional reporting on the sort of the story about the story. don't love to do a ton of media criticism, but there were legitimate media stories in places where, for instance, the NPR, I mean, the NPR, I don't have it in front of me. There was an NPR ombudsman who basically sort of said, this, I'm going to get this wrong, so I want to actually find it. But the statement that was put out was, it was this, chief managing editor for news, explain the thinking, we don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions. That's suggested to the point you raised at the outset from this NPR editor, that they just weren't interested in at all, and that they had made a determination based on very, very little information that it wasn't worth their listeners' time. We did not make that determination. We did the reporting, lot of the reporting that, you know, doesn't, you don't see necessarily. We made the phone

calls. We did the checking. We followed up with, you know, an explainer about sort of what happened with the laptop, what's happened with the Hunter Biden controversies based on the laptop since then. So we haven't sort of left it. But I agree. I'll take, I'll take your point that we could have done more on it at the time. I think that's a fair criticism. Jonah, last word to you on this, is the pendulum just going to swing the other way? Because I think what he's describing in the NPR newsroom just isn't sustainable. you're going to cover less and less stuff, your listenership's going to become more and more niche, you know, college town professor types. It's not going to be very interesting for your

employees or your listeners if you just keep doing the same thing, even if your listeners like it at the beginning. Sort of like, we just got back from Texas, where my son got to be indulged by his grandparents for a week, and he had ice cream three times in one day. He really liked that. But over time, he actually, as it turns out, wants real food. And we tested this because he just got all the treats he wanted, clearly, from the grandparents. And eventually he did want something else. He actually turned down ice cream at one point. So, you know, yes, in the beginning, your listeners really like being told how right they are,

but at some point that's boring. And so I just, I can't help but wonder whether we're just at the peak or even slightly past the peak of this on university campuses in liberal media structures. and we're going to start to see a lot of places move to where the blue water is. CBS seems to be moving to where the blue water is. Tons of universities seem to be moving into like, no, we're the place for pluralism and free expression and wanting to build that up. Like, that's how this works.

If everyone's crowded into a tiny space with fewer and fewer people in it, I don't know, it's capitalism, right? Yeah, so there are a bunch of things I would have to say about it. One is, I think you're right, with a with the, Nate ice cream hegemony analogy breaks down is that he's an individual person

we're talking about a big audience and so in the laws of large numbers I think one of the things you're going to get is the people who get sick of the ice cream stop listening and the people who only want ice cream intensify their demands for more ice cream and so you get

that's what happened at Fox with respecting the audience that's what happens at a lot of these places I mean I listen watching, look, I'm still friends with Brett Baer, at least I think I am, but watching Brett and Howie Kurtz, mourn sorrow than in anger, talk about an NPR producer calling BS on the audience capture of NPR without any hint of the fact that Fox has the exact same friggin problem was a bit much for me to take. And this is a problem across the media. one of the things I have discovered as I've become a robust both-sideser

is that you please nobody. And that's one of the reasons I'm leaning into it. I get hate mail every time I do a both-sides piece. And I have to read like a couple paragraphs in to find out if they're pissed off at me for criticizing Biden or for Trump. And I think that's a dynamic that is worth talking about. I also think you're absolutely right that I don't know if we've hit peak woke. you know, I think these things roll out

unevenly across cultural landscapes and all sorts of ways and you're always one news event for certain things to come back or certain things to go another way, you know, events dominate things. But it does feel like some people are learning something that we were saying when we were raising money for the dispatch, which is that there is a lot of market gaps out there

for not being ideological water carriers or partisan water carriers for either side. And, and I say this with some trepidation, I largely agreed with a big chunk of the Berliner piece. And I am, I've been something of a house goy at NPR for the last, you know, 10 years. And, but I just think NPR is a left-wing, left-of-center institution that is fueled and staffed by people from a certain kind of elite schools.

And so it would be inevitable that they would, fall to a lot of the same things that happen across the media landscape and across the cultural landscape generally. You raise one point, and I know I'm violating one of Sarah's most hardcore rules on this podcast. She set a flat out rule of no Hagel, Chuck, but with, not Chuck Hagel, although I have no Chuck Hagel rule. This gets it as, so this gets it a sort of a fundamental thing that I wish more responsible leaders of institutions on both the left and the right thought for a minute about, right? You don't have to go back to like Victorian England where they thought about these kinds of things all the time to the detriment of democracy and all sorts of things. But having

leaders of institutions who think about what your side's quote unquote victory will elicit from the defeated. You know, there's a dialectic, right? It's a catalytic process. I remember in 2008, talking to a bunch of people, I'll leave them out, where we were making the case that we thought Barack Obama would not be a very good president. Not because he's black, not because it is, not because he's two left wing, he doesn't have a lot of experience, he's more cerebral and egg-hedy. We were going through a whole list of things. And I remember feeling, and someone saying to me, so great, what is it going to do to this country if the first black president is a failed president, right?

That's something to consider when leaders of institutions actually have the ability to act on their responsibilities. Now, I'm not saying he was a failed president. He did get re-elected. There were pluses and minuses to his administration.

It wasn't as, but there's a lot of disappointment on the left that it turned out that he wasn't the messianic, you know, guy who made the ocean start receding that they thought he was. similarly, the reaction that we've gotten from the left from Donald Trump has been bad for America. If the goal of the conservative movement, the goal of concern movement is not to make the Republican Party as right wing as possible. The goal of the conservative movement, at least back in the old days, was to move the center of gravity rightward in our politics.

And instead, we have this pendulum kind of process where we move the conservative, movement moves the institutions that has control of way, way, way far from the center to the right, leaving the center open, allowing Democrats to take the center, which moves the, which has the net result of moving the center of gravity, American politics leftward. There's a real argument for the conservative movement to behave more like the NRA in the 1990s and give money to both Democrats and Republicans, move the Democratic Party to the right, move the Republican part, which would move the center of gravity of American politics more. I only bring this up because I think NPR, lots of media institutions after George Floyd during COVID, because of Trump,

behave badly. Some of the reasons they behave badly is because of the way right-wingers give them the opportunity to behave badly. They make it easy for them. They create a permission structure. They create an environment where, you know, when Lauren Bobert is talking about how if only Jesus Christ had an AK-47 or an M-16 rifle, things would have worked out so much better for him, what do you expect New York liberals to respond? How are they going to respond to that other than to think, look at these friggin idiots. And one of the great things about William F. Buckley is that he was a media figure. He had a long-running show on PBS.

He defied the expectations of his enemies by being better than them at the things they value. He was more erudite than John Kenneth Galbraith. He was more sophisticated and ideologically composed than, I don't know, Noam Chomsky. and he didn't sound like George Wallace. And we have a whole bunch of people on the right who want to make it easy to have to have the right be dismissed

by acting like caricatures. And so I just, I think there's blame here to go all around, but again, I agree largely with the Berliner, you know, thesis. All right, and with that, thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next week.

Thank you.