The Dispatch Podcast - Not at Dartmouth Anymore

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

A new study shows the stark lack of ideological diversity in elite universities. Lawmakers call to rethink relations with the Saudis after OPEC’s decision to cut oil production. John Fetterman’s NBC interview raises difficult questions. Sarah, David, Jonah, and Declan wrestle with these topics before providing an urgent manatee update. Out of context: “If you stare at 2 + 2 = a duck and you say ‘oh I get it,’ that’s a problem for you.” -American elite students study -Fetterman’s NBC interview -Manatees update Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgher, joined by David French, Jonah Goldberg, and Morning Dispatch editor, Declan Garvey. We will be talking about an interesting study on college students, ideological diversity, demographic diversity, and what it might mean about the future of our politics, rethinking the relations with the Saudis as OPEC decides to cut two million barrels a day in the face of Joe Biden and his administration. And lastly, got to check in on the midterms and the interview that John Fetterman, the Democratic Pennsylvania candidate, did with NBC News. Let's jump right in. David, you were actually the first one to sort of see this study and

and say that it was worth our time, if you will. Do you want to introduce why you immediately glommed on? Yeah, there's a study we'll put in the show notes called Diverse and Divided a political demography of American elite students that really is, I think, illuminating. That what it did is it took a look at information and survey data from the foundation for individual rights and expression fire. I want to always say foundation for individual rights and education, but it's, It's expanded.

It's growing. And it took a look at the demography of American elite students. In other words, these students who go to the top-ranked cohort of universities. And what it found was this is not, shouldn't be a surprise really to anybody, but to actually get real numbers here is that there is a massive disparity between conservative and liberal students. There is a massive disparity between Republicans and Democrats. And that while there is real diversity on a lot of different ranks from race to ethnicity,

there is a overwhelming sort of disproportionate diversity on sexuality that liberal arts colleges, for example, are the least politically diverse, but they have high sexual diversity with nearly 40 percent of students, LGBT. And it's just a very interesting snapshot into the feeder schools into a lot of Americans, elite professions. And I have thoughts, Sarah, on why this is and what kind of effect that this has and doesn't have. But it was also noting that Christians, that conservatives tend to cluster in red state flagship universities, which are the most politically balanced in the country and have very similar shares of liberal and conservative students. So, for example, the University of

Arkansas was the most viewpoint diverse university with 35% conservative, 37% liberal students, 36 Republican, 36% Republican, and 41% Democratic. The least diverse is, drum roll, please, Smith College, which should surprise exactly nobody, 81% liberal, 1% conservative, 1% conservative. So I thought this would be fascinating to hear what everyone on the panel thought about this, both the why and what effect. Jonah, I wrote about this for the sweep. And I think, you know, so religion, right, virtually non-existent on a lot of these campuses

compared to the general population, race on a lot of the elite campuses correlates much more closely to political ideology than it does in the world. real world, about five times more likely to be liberal than conservative versus the general voting population. And the gender gap compared to ideology is also much, much higher on these campuses. But, I mean, that alone isn't a problem, right? Kids go to college for four years. All sorts of things about college are not representative of how real life works, mostly that there's a dorm cafeteria. So why should we care that colleges are bubbles of a variety of sorts?

Well, first of all, let me see. I'm skeptical about some of the numbers on here. I think they're probably all directionally right. I haven't done a deep dive on the methodology or anything like that. But I think there's probably a lot of social desirability bias in these things. I honestly don't believe that you have the numbers of LGBTQ kids that. say they're LGBTQ. I think some of them are lying either to themselves or that they think it's square to just to pick one lane or whatever. But that too is interesting that the social

desirability bias kicks in on something like that. I'm so I just I just gave a talk about some of this stuff earlier this week, not about this study, but about I I think the colleges are doing an incredible disservice to the United States of America in terms of the kind of character formation that they're involved in. And it has very little to do, in fact, well, I shouldn't say as little to do. It is not entirely to do with the ideological diversity stuff. We teach kids on college campuses at elite college campuses that, first of all, their feelings are superior to factual discourse. We basically now, it's an unwritten part of the educational experience to be a protester, to complain, to organize, to mob, to cause, signed petitions.

We've seen a great example of where this can go a week and a half ago at NYU where kids signed a petition and successfully got an organic chemistry teacher fired, professor fired, because he was too hard a grader. And I'm just one of these crazy people who thinks that people who are going, and the reason they needed the fire room is because he was. He was standing in the way of their kids, according to the New York Times, dream of going to medical school.

I dream of a world where people who go to medical school can pass organic chemistry. So we have a conflict of dreams here. But then there's also the way that campuses teach kids that being liberal or being progressive is rebellious when in fact it is the most conformist thing as these data show you can do when you go to college. We have on this panel, the former head of the college Republicans at Harvard University,

maybe he has some thoughts on that. So I'll skip that part of it. And then there's just simply this idea. I wrote this piece for NR 10, 12 years ago, about how American utopianism increasingly takes the form of thinking the entire country should be like one vast college campus. And we tell kids today, particularly elite kids at these schools, I know some kids work really hard to get through school and they take out debt and all the rest, but we're talking about the typical, prototypical, um, norm setting kid at one of these schools.

They have their food paid for. They have their housing paid for. They have their security paid for. People literally clean up after them. And they think they're independent, right? They think they're self-sufficient. And then they go out into the real world. And some of them are like, first of all, who is this FICA?

Um, and why is he taking all my money? And, um, and I think that, you know, part of what higher education is supposed to do is character formation. It is supposed to change who you are and what you value. And I think these schools are doing that in a way that is partly ideological and partly sort of more fundamental. And I think it's really pernicious. And I just wrote the Gval yesterday about how, you know, this L.A. Times, of this L.A. Times story about the L.A. City Council where these people are saying terrible things in the city council members, Hispanic City Council members are saying terrible things in private. And, and raised

and bigoted against, including other Latin Americans. And I think that the people who go through this pipeline think that the way they talk, the way you talk in the New York Times Slack Channel is the way real Americans talk. And it's ill preparing them for dealing with America as it is or even as it should be. So I think, you know, the whole system needs to be torn down and rebuilt. All right, Declan, I saved you for last for a reason. are the closest to college on this podcast. And as Jonah mentioned, you were the president of college Republicans at Harvard University, certainly one of the schools where Republicans are not

in the majority. What of this, actually, let's start the other way. What of this study did you sort of think, I don't know if that's actually representative of the experience at these elite schools? Well, I think what Jonah was saying about social desirability bias is definitely true. I think, you know, the crimson school newspaper every year would conduct a survey like this of the incoming freshman class of Harvard. And you'd get similar numbers. And they'd ask about politics. I think my year it was 15% conservative, 80% progressive or liberal, and 5% moderate or whatever, what have you. Those numbers have continued to kind of grow in more disparate directions since I graduated five and a half years ago.

And funny enough, this year... You're a fetus. Say that again? He called you a fetus. He called you a fetus. This year, funnily enough, they're not doing that survey. I think people have speculated because it might have something to do with the upcoming Supreme Court case on affirmative action, admissions policy, and diversity on campus. But I think there is some social desirability bias in that, you know, people know there is supposed to be a correct answer on that survey.

There is a, you know, what will just make your college experience as easy as possible, what will ensure that you're not getting harsher grades or, you know, worse treatment from professors. There's just kind of a go along to get along, and there's a lot of people who I know in private conversations are or were conservative right of center who would, you know, talk to me about it because I was like, the conservative avatar on campus, be like, you know, hey, I agree with you on some of these things. I'm never going to say it, and I'll kill you if you tell anybody. But, you know, that exists. But it is, I mean, it is a huge problem. And Sarah, I think the point that you made in the sweep on this study was really interesting that, you know, the impact that this is having on campaigns and, you know, that everybody who's staffing these campaigns is coming from these campaigns.

is coming from these colleges, you know, both on the Democratic side and the Republican side. And that means that, you know, Democrats have existed in this world and they've never really had their views challenged Republican operatives, meanwhile, have had to, how did you put it? They're fluent in the language of the left while also learning to speak conservative through their own extracurricular studies. I think that's 100% accurate. I graduated being, having to learn how to exist in this, in this world. world. And I think that's been an incredibly valuable skill, both learning about, you know,

40% of the country and, and what they believe. And being able to kind of just appreciate where people are coming from, understand motives better. And it's, it's, I would talk to my friends about this all the time on campus that they are missing out on an enormous opportunity to have their, their views challenge for four years and force themselves to think more, uh, critically about why they believe what they believe and kind of hone what it is that, you know, they actually think and why it is, you know, it's much easier if you're never challenged on anything, if you're never faced with someone who disagrees with you, to just kind of go along and then you get this, you are surprised when you find out that, you know,

43% of the country votes for Donald Trump and you're like, well, I've never met a single person. So how is that, how is that possible? And I think it's just that, you know, was it John McCain who used to talk about wanting to implement a year of public service after high school have students take a gap year and, you know, either military or working at the National Park, something that get people from across the country to interact with people from a different part of the country, with different backgrounds, with different perspectives. In theory, you know, when he would talk about it, he'd be like, this is primarily for kids who don't go to college because that experience is supposed to stand in for a lot of this stuff. It's not really. Like, you're going and you're spending time with people who think like you. And we're increasingly seeing, I mean, you guys on advisory opinions have talked about Judge Ho and his everything with Yale law school. He's a circuit court's judge who's pledged to not hire clergy.

from Yale because of the way the law school operates, the lack of diversity of thought, you know, that's going to just kind of further this divide where conservatives don't even want to go to these elite institutions anymore. And that's going to make the problem worse, not better. David, one of the things that I thought was interesting was, in Declan touched on it, but yeah, this idea that on any campaign, Republican or Democrat, the staffers are to the left of their median voter. On a Republican campaign, the staffers are to the left of their media Republican voter, which makes them moderate, even if they were the president of college Republicans at Harvard, for instance.

Wait. On the Democratic campaigns, though, they're to the left of their median liberal voter. But the differences, I think, that the Republican operatives know that because it was very obvious to them that the college campus wasn't representative because there were so few of them. They knew they were ostracized. And they also can, you know, look at elections and see what's going on. They're reading all this stuff extracurricularly that they're. not actually learning in class. Therefore, they sort of know throughout their time that they are

the odd ones out and that that's unrepresentative. But the progressive students increasingly, I think, spend their four years not even thinking about the fact that it might be an unrepresentative bubble. And so when they get on these campaigns and they are to the left, this is where, for instance, the race correlation with ideology becomes really important on these campuses, that if everyone you meet for your four years who isn't white is liberal, then you go out into the world, not even realizing that you have that subconscious bias that is not, and stereotype, frankly, that is not actually true when it's about, you know, 30, 35 percent of the non-white people that you meet in the United States who are conservative. And you can see how that would work on a

campaign on the Democratic side, if you don't know what you don't know, and you think that that bubble, you know, sure, you know there's more conservatives out in the country than at your college campus. But it's never occurred to you, for instance, that it was unrepresentative in other more subtle ways, you know, that women on your campus were three times as likely to identify as liberal than they are out in the real, you know, world. So that you just sort of, again, have this, like, intuitive sense that women are all liberal, men are more likely to be conservative, Sure, there is a gender gap, of course, in the United States. But it's just not, it's, you know, again, three to five times as big on these college campuses. And I think that will have a profound impact, David, on some of these institutions moving forward, including religious ones. If religious, if college campuses no longer have students at them who identify with certain religions, those religions also get their leadership from college graduates. What does that look like moving forward? were 10, 15 years. Yeah, that's a really great point. On the political point, I think that

one of the most insightful studies that's been done in recent years about an electorate was Nate Silver's study, or Nate Cohn's study of the Democratic electorate offline and online in late 2019, where it found that one-third of Democrats were very online and two-thirds of Democrats were offline. The one-third very online sounds a lot like the demographics of this study. It was disproportionately white, disproportionately progressive. The offline Democrats were disproportionately diverse and moderate. And so what did you see in the Democratic primary? A bunch of the top-tier candidates ran for the one-third, and only one of the top-tier candidates ran for the two-thirds. And guess who won? And so I think this is a lesson that smarter Democrats

are learning. We've had a lot of really interesting commentary from Rui to share a Jonah, you had him on The Remnant, right? Yeah. Your new colleague at AEI. Who, by the way, if you're wondering why you haven't heard of this person before, it's probably because you read, and it's spelled R-U-Y, like, T-E-X, I don't know. I always in my head say Roy Texiera. Yeah.

Visually it's a hate crime, I agree. I agree. I didn't know how to pronounce his name till the remnant. So the other thing you're having is because of these disparities, are so dramatic, it's becoming self-reinforcing. I put it like this in a piece I wrote in response to sort of a similar survey a year or two ago where I said, if you live in Tennessee, where I live,

and your kid gets a 1550 on the SAT, your first thought is not I'm going to Harvard or he's going to Harvard or she's going to Harvard. That is not the thought. It is, my kid is going to Alabama for free. That's the thought. And so a lot of this is self-reinforcing. And in fact, you know, Alabama and Oklahoma have this program where if you're a national

merit scholar, you go for free, period. And so in any given year, Alabama has more national merit scholars than Oklahoma, I mean, than Harvard debts in any given year because of this program. And so it's creating these self-reinforcing bubbles. And then you have admissions offices that are, you know, we're now seeing have these relationship with particular feeder schools and there are certain prep schools that thrive on sending, say, dozens of students to the Ivy League every year. And you get this sort of self-reinforcing closed loop that is a real problem because it does the same thing in the academy

that a lot of times what you see on Twitter, which is the most progressive of the big social media platforms, as you were saying, Sarah, it misleads progressives into believing that the world is more progressive than it is. And it also misleads conservatives into believing that the world is more progressive than it is. And so it creates this sort of sense of supremacy, on the one hand, history is on our side. And then on the other hand, it creates this real sense of, you know, I'm besieged, I'm embattled. And really all you have to go is, you know, do is go to University of Tennessee and Neeland Stadium on any given Saturday in the fall. And you're going to hear the F. Joe Biden champ reverberate across the stadium coming from the student section. And you realize,

I'm not at Dartmouth anymore. And I do think that it's just a symptom of our bifurcation by class. It's a symptom of our bifurcation by ideology. And I do think religious students, interestingly enough, have it a little bit better than they used to, believe it or not. The clustering of religious students in the big state universities has meant that the big state universities are often full of just. giant Christian student groups.

And this is not something that was the case when I was in school. Auburn University, for example, at least as of a couple of years ago, when my kids were considering going there, was as known throughout the southeast for huge Christian student presence, evangelical presence. Tennessee, huge evangelical presence. There's just a lot, when you talk about clustering by politics in this country, you're also going to get a lot of clustering by religion. And that leads to the last point, that clustering by religion means that guess what? Elite students don't run into a lot of

religious folks. They just don't. And so what ends up happening? The same, when Dean Bacay said, we don't get religion, he wasn't just talking about a New York Times problem. He was talking about a problem that's in these elite institutions where there is a dramatic underrepresentation of Christians. But you move out of the elite institutions. And things look a lot better for Christian students. Jonah, last word to you. I found something in your not last G-file, G-file before last, penultimate G-file, where you talked about the purpose of the state and the sort of Berkian notion that the state exists

to create a space for individuals to flourish versus the purpose of the state is to head towards a unified goal. And then in some ways you can think about the left-right divide, maybe not currently in the Republican and Democratic parties, but the overall conservative versus liberal divide in the West as the tension between those two philosophies on the purpose of state. And I just find it so frustrating, I guess, to think about college education right now, as you said, it's sort of a disservice beyond the ideological problem. problem? Because there is so much to read and teach college students that can touch on all of these debates that aren't happening because of a lack of intellectual curiosity more than almost ideology happening on these college campuses that is betrayed by these numbers. When you have 80% of people sort of agreeing that they're all on the far left, then there's not a conversation

about Burke because it doesn't even make sense. Yeah, so I mean, I agree. There's the, you know, one of my favorite stories, Hayek talks about this and there's Nobel Prize acceptance speech about the difference between the English garden and the French garden. And the English garden, the whole idea in Burke is to, the state should basically be a watchman who protects the garden, but lets everything in the garden and the English garden,

be the best version of itself. And the French version of the garden, which comes out of the sort of hyper-enlightenment French Revolution stuff, is all these curly cues and squares and rectangles, and it's all this imposed vision about what the shape of nature should be, and we need to make nature rational.

And this is really the difference historically between, in many ways, between sort of, left and right in broad brushstrokes is in the Anglo-American tradition. Edmund Burke wanted to create zones of space for freedom to exist to protect people, to protect the rule of law, allow for human flourishing, and the left, whether you want to say it's Thomas Payne or August Compt or whatever, wants everybody be marching in the same direction towards a final goal. And the weird thing is in America today, and this is a point Charlie Cook likes to make

that, uh, English Charlie Good, Florida man Charlie Gove. Um, the two most illiberal institutions in America today are arguably elite newspapers and elite universities. And those are the two institutions that should be the most liberal in the classical sense. The most open to new ideas, the most skeptical about popular passions, the most committed to, um, exploring truth on its own terms. Um, and I think that this is what I'm getting to about the problem with character formation is that the point of higher education is to teach people not what to know but how to think and the way we're teaching kids how to think today is not open it's not liberal it's not it's not generous and you know i keep thinking about i know i'm so obsessed with the latin x stuff but like

we have leaders in america who think that the professional representative, professional representatives of certain ethnic groups are actually representative of those ethnic groups. And so like Elizabeth Warren is surrounded by people who use Latin X seriously and unironically. And she thinks, oh, well, these people are my stakeholders from the Hispanic community. And so she thinks she's being inclusive when she's speaking in essentially the equivalent of the court language in medieval Europe, like medieval European and German principalities, they spoke French in the court and the German people hated them for it because they're like, wow, we don't speak this stupid freaking language.

And if there's one thing I could get through to college administrators is they're hurting their political side. They're hurting the Democratic Party. They are hurting the left more broadly because what they are doing is they're releasing cadres upon cadres of people out into the world. who don't speak the lingual franca, who don't represent where actually left-of-center Americans are, and they're alienated those Americans

and making them into proto-Republicans. And at the same time, they're serving as essentially Medusa's heads to freak that freak out the right. The only people who actually believe Elizabeth Warren speaks for the normal Democrats are people who love Elizabeth Warren and rank-and-file Republicans.

And nobody else believes it. Yeah. Yeah, I, you know, it's to take that to another, like, non-Latin X thing, for instance, all of these headlines about abortion being this number one issue using these polls that don't really say that. And you actually go dig into the poll and it's like, ooh, actually, this was the last issue of all the things you talked about. Except for climate change. Right. Which is another one they say is like, you know. That's true.

But, you know, the headline coming out of it. will say, more than half of Americans say this is a major issue for their vote. And they don't mention that they asked about six different issues and that it came in last. And again, you can argue that that's, oh, misreading the poll, they're trying to gaslight people, all of those things. But the effect is that Democratic candidates are running the majority of their ads on abortion. And if they're misreading these polls, they're doing a disservice to their own candidates, to their own, quote, unquote side, when they sort of insist on the world as they think it should be, rather than having the curiosity to wonder if the world might be different. And yeah, I think you hit on it for me,

Jonah, which is you're not teaching these kids the questions to ask, how to issue spot, how to be curious. Instead, you're teaching them how to accept orthodoxy and speak a language that, as you said, is the court language and not the lingua franca of voters in particular, but just of Americans, my God. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters.

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Application times may vary. Rates may vary. Okay, Declan, we are moving to OPEC. The Biden administration courts the Saudis, goes over the summer. This is the famous fist bump, right? despite all of the complaints about Saudi Arabia's human rights abuse. I mean, you don't just have to pick the human rights stuff. You can pick 9-11 if you want or any number of things in between.

I mean, Joe Biden runs his campaign saying that the Saudis will pay a high cost for this, that he's, you know, this was a major talking point for him. Okay, fast forward to the summer, you get the fist bump. And their administration is begging the Saudis not to cut oil production, not to raise gas prices on Americans heading into the midterms. And this is interesting for a few ways. So first of all, the Saudis absolutely decide to cut oil production a month before the United States midterm elections, which they are very aware of.

Now, their argument is that they thought, you know, their status quo is a little different. They thought the Biden administration was asking them not to cut oil production to help them politically. Fair enough. But I think another way to read this, and what I hear from the left, is that that they believe the Saudis did cut oil production to hurt the Biden administration and to help Republicans, that they are, you know, Trump Republican supporters. They want to do what they can in the midterm elections as well. And this is just another form of, you know, interference,

if you will, different than Russian disinformation, but only a little because it's disinformation in terms of what oil prices will be in three months, six months, et cetera. And Declan, just from a reporting standpoint. You've written about this quite a bit for the morning dispatch. It gets a little nuanced in terms of whether this is, in fact, the Biden administration's fault. Certainly, they have not, they've leased a record little amount of federal lands for oil production. But would those leases have actually turned into enough oil production by this point in administration, et cetera, et cetera, our refining capabilities? All of this is 18 months, two years into an administration. How much of this is Joe Biden's fault? Well, if you just listen to White

House press briefings, you'll know, Sarah, that when gas prices go down, it's Biden's doing. But if prices go up, it's somebody else's fault. That's reductive as well. But in talking about this OPEC decision last week. Basically, everybody on the political side and the punditry side made it into this Democrat versus Republican issue. There was this, I forget, I think it was a Washington Post columnist who started pushing the line that Trump was back channeling with MBS, the Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia to conspire with Saudi Arabia to hurt Democrats in front of the midterms.

And then talking to anybody who either is doing work in the Middle East or has, you know, real knowledge about how this works are just like, it's so much simpler than this. It's just, you know, the Saudis are acting in their own self-interest the same way that we would, the same way that any other country would. And that is that they see a recession on the horizon if it's not already here, and they don't want to be left holding the bag. And by bag, that means excess oil capacity that they're using and not being able to sell or have to sell at a much lower price. When that comes, I mean, China has recommitted to its zero COVID policy over and over again. I think just this week, we saw that that's going to continue for months to come. that's a huge market that is going to be dampened. The Federal Reserve and several other central banks around the world have made it very clear that they're willing and possibly, you know, intending to tip their respective economies into recession.

That's going to have a real, you know, medium to long term effect on oil prices or oil demand. And so, you know, the Saudis are hoping to get ahead of that a little bit here. And there is some gamesmanship, obviously. They announced a 2 million barrel per day cut in actuality. It's going to be closer to 800,000 to 1 million barrels a day because that cut is based on August projections that many OPEC members weren't already meeting. But it is going to have an effect on gas prices before the midterms. And what I found most interesting about this in the recent days is kind of the willingness

of top congressional Democrats who even a year ago were, you know, willing to kind of tow the United States line on this relationship with Saudi Arabia, which is, you know, yeah, they're not great. There's some real human rights violations going on here, but they're better than Iran. And we, you know, we need to work with them for stability in the region and XYZ. Robert Menendez, the top Democrat from New Jersey on the Foreign Relations Committee, pushed that line last year when, you know, a lot of the, these debates were happening. And then this week switched on a dime. It's like, nope, it's time to cut them off from arm sales. It's time to rethink our relationship. There's, there's a, there's legislation. I'd be interested

hearing the lawyer's perspective on this. The acronym is no peck. And it basically would allow the Justice Department to sue these countries for antitrust violations and market manipulation. That enforcement, I think, would get a little dicey there. But it's been, something bandied around in Congress that probably would end up more as a messaging bill than anything else. So, you know, we're seeing a real shift here. And, you know, we were willing to put up with all these excesses and things that we disagree with you about if you do these two things, which is, you know, help us against Iran and keep Das cheap. And they're starting to see if, you know, if one or two of those prongs is no longer part of the bargain, then why are we putting up with this?

And so it'll have rippling effects, I think. You know, we'll see if they still care about this after the midterms next month. But it's a really interesting debate, but it's also incredibly short-sighted to think that it's entirely about democratic political prospects. David, what are we supposed to do? What are we supposed to do foreign policy-wise about the Saudis? You know, yeah, David. I've got it all fixed, Sarah.

I figured. Everyone just pull up a chair and, no, this, look, this is a decades-long problem. And it's a decades-long problem and part of it, in part because of another decades-old problem called the Iranian Revolution. So for decades now, you've had, when Republicans are in power, they have tied themselves more closely to the Saudis. And Democrats will say, look at you, you're tying yourself closely to the Saudi. then Democrats get into power and they fist bump the Saudis and Republicans say, look at you, you're tying yourself closely to the Saudis. And one of the reasons is because when you actually get in the chair and you see the strategic

situation in the Middle East, your options feel like they really narrow because it starts to feel like a zero-sum game in the Middle East. You're either going to have a Saudi-led Middle Eastern order or you're going to have an Iranian-led Middle Eastern order. And between those two options, it seems to be in America's better interest that it be a Saudi-led order than an Iranian-led order, although the reality is that the Saudi-led order has really hurt us a lot many times over the years. So, for example, who, moving into the era of al-Qaeda was funding many of these madrasas, mosques overseas and schools overseas that were fomenting. this enormous wave or this wave that existed of radical Islamic theology

that led to radical Islamic terrorism. At the same time, there are foremost ally. Also, we are pouring arms into Saudi Arabia while they are engaged, and sometimes even engaging in aerial refueling of Saudi aircraft that are engaged in a horrific bombing campaign in Yemen, just a brutal bombing campaign in Yemen. And so time and time again, we've thrown in with the Saudis,

and then the Saudis do things that are contrary to our interests and always have the Trump card, which is, what you're going to do? What are you going to do? And I think what we're seeing as we're reaching a point where the stakes are very, very high because we can't just look at this as a matter of inflation in the United States, which is very important. But we're also talking about the energy, we're also talking about the availability of energy reserves more broadly in the world

at a time when Russia's kind of last remaining real significant card to play that isn't nuclear is energy. And how much are energy producers going to make up for slack in some of the uh in sanctions induced uh lack of supply these are questions that matter far beyond american inflation but we're decades into this we're decades into the same game and the same nonsense which is why a solution to the iranian problem and and why every american And every American presidency, presidential administration should be absolutely investing in a solution to this Iranian problem because it also in many ways will help solve the Saudi problem. But that's where we are and that's where we've been for 30, 40 years.

Jonah, on the gas price side of this, isn't this a little weird on the left? On the one hand, they're bemoaning the cost of gas. and on the other hand, they're trying to say that we need gas prices to go up so that green energies can compete with those. If you want to move the country to electric cars, they need to be at least comparable in price to combustion engine cars. Isn't that a main goal of the environmental policies of the same administration, which is why they're cutting federal leases for oil production, why they're not investing in refinery capacity, and why therefore oil companies, I think, are hesitant to make long-term, you know, 30, 50-year investments in some of this

infrastructure, when they think long-term, politically, it's only going to get harder. I don't quite understand how this works. That's because it's an intellectual mess. So it speaks well of you that you don't understand it. If you stare at 2 plus 2 equals a duck and you say, oh, I get it. that's a problem for you um the problem like the the the i've been right i write this column i don't know every 18 months that feels like uh the democrats want to get us off of fossil fuels and then the second gas prices go up and threaten a midterm or a general election they're like let's open up

the the the tap right to the strategic petroleum reserve whatever and i think to tie this into the previous conversation rather than do the sort of the the sort of same analysis that I've you know that we do every time we get into one of these situations to tie back to the previous conversation this is the mindset I am talking about that comes out of college campuses where you have people who think as a sort of on almost a literary symbolic spiritual level it's bad that the university is invested in fossil fuels and so I go we have to divest from fossil fuels and so I go we have to divest from fossil fuels and they don't really care about what the economics are they don't care whether you know what what the reality of fossil fuel stuff is it's it's symbology as public policy and um

and another example of this is is look Saudi Arabia is bad country and they do bad things there it has gotten better not worse um but because mbd did something truly evil and ordered the barbaric assassination. Not Michael Brendan Doherty for I'm sorry, MBS, sorry, I apologize. Sorry, Michael. Who's being naive now, but no,

because the Saudi Crown Prince ordered the murder of a journalist. And again, I'm against murdering journalists. I think what he did was terrible. You've got this sort of campus journalistic class talking about this as if this is the single worst crime a leader of a government, you know, a government could ever have committed.

And again, it's really bad. But if you compare it to the things that the Iranian regime does every day, or you compare it to the kind of stuff that the Saudi regime did routinely to people who weren't famous five or ten years ago, it's just part of the equation. But symbolically, it bothers people so much that we think that there's so much worse than the Iranians and all the rest. And I think that at the end of the day,

I don't like realism and foreign policy, but I'm perfectly fine with realism about means and idealism about ends. And I kind of like this moment. I don't want Americans to suffer and pay high prices and all that kind of stuff. But for 20 years now, every time, and I wrote a piece about opening up Anwar 22 years ago.

And the response from the left and from Democrats was the time it would take to get this stuff online, we'd be through this particular crisis right now. And they say it every time. It takes too long, opening new wells, new exploration doesn't make sense, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then

10 years later, everyone is like, you know what would have been great if we had done this 10 years ago? And so I think the fact that Europe is, you know, Germany is starting to talk about fracking. Europe is talking about moving back towards oil, keeping their nuclear power plants open. The political pressure

that this creates on the United States to not rely on Saudi Arabia and international oil is a good thing in much of the same way that the answer to the cure for inflation, the cure for high prices is high prices. And the cure for dependence upon crappy countries that do crappy things is to develop your own capacity to not rely on them. And so this long term is probably good news, I think. Because now we can talk to Venezuela and and get them to, the two plus two equals duck thing. I mean, we don't want to drill more here because that's bad for the environment, but we want Venezuela to drill more there because that's okay for the environment.

And we don't all share the same environment. We're not on the same plan. Herschel Walker would disagree with you. But yeah, I mean, looking at it from the Saudi perspective of, you know, all these Western countries have been ministerial. manipulating the oil market for a year, releasing tens of millions of barrels of oil from their strategic reserves. They're talking about a price cap on Russian oil experts, which would essentially be like a monopsony of buyers targeting exports from one specific country and

damaging their ability to make money off of it. Saudi Arabia looks at that and says, like, oh, we don't want that to turn against us one day. We're going to show you what real market manipulation looks like. And so it's very easy to get caught up in the United States perspective of this is like, why are they doing this to me? But it's just so much more complicated than that. And, you know, there are real reasons why Saudi would want to do this. And, you know, bad country, not defending them, don't think that, you know, it's good that they're doing this. But there are very real reasons that don't have to do with a secret back channel between Trump. Or MBD.

Poor Michael Brendan Doherty Just defamed all over the place on this pod For murder no less Like a barbaric murder With Amex platinum Access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets Can score you a spot trackside So being a fan for life

Turns into the trip of a lifetime That's the powerful backing of Amex Pre-sale tickets for future events Subject to Availability and Vary by race Terms and conditions apply Learn more at mx.ca.com slash Yanex The midterm elections, obviously, still looming, were less than a month out now. There was an interesting interview with John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee in Pennsylvania.

He did it with NBC News. This was his first sit-down interview since becoming the nominee and since, of course, having a stroke, which he said left him with auditory processing issues. Let's start with how we're set up here. This is very different than the last time we were here in your home and talking. Walk me through why we need the closed captioning, how it works. It's really just how things happen because I sometimes will hear things in a way that's not perfectly clear. So I use captioning.

So you can make sure that you know exactly what I'm asking you. Yeah, exactly. I know what you're being said to make sure that I'm able to give the perfect answer. I will just take a little courtesy moment here as the host, but as a former campaign operative to explain why what they did was stupid and why everyone's saying what they did was stupid is wrong. So, yes, what they did was stupid. Wait, all time. Yep. But everyone is saying what they did was stupid because he didn't do well in the interview. Nope, that's not why it was stupid. You can't change what your candidate is and simply pretending that there's nothing

wrong is actually, I think, one of their biggest problems. They are on defense on this entire issue. He needs to use closed captioning in order to process what's being said to him. It would be no different if a candidate were deaf, for instance. And instead, they've waited until mid-October to really allow people to see what his auditory processing is like. And then in doing so, they immediately lash out at the interviewer, say she's ablest for commenting on it. And only agreed to one debate on October 25th, which is going to guarantee incredibly high ratings. No, they should have, again, this is like maybe two in the weeds for some of you, but if I were running the Federman campaign or advising the Federman campaign,

I would have had background briefings with reporters bringing in five, six reporters at a time in a small, you know, private space so that they could get accustomed to what my candidate was like, what he was good at, that in fact, he totally understands you. He just needs to read it instead of hear it. Yeah, he stumbles over a few words, but his answers are coherent. And over time, I think they would all get really used to that. I would start with local reporters. I would move it to print journalists. Then I would probably have done any TV reporters who wanted to come as many of those background briefings as it took. And then I would start doing on-camera interviews like this. Not one in mid-October. I would have flooded the zone this week with on-camera interviews. Lots and lots of them.

go on offense here. And I think they think they're on offense, but they are not. If they really watch these interviews, they will see he is incredibly defensive about his speech tripping and his auditory processing. Even his body language is someone who's being defensive about it. He's sort of hunched over, you know, scowling a little absolutely the wrong way to go into this. And they should have agreed to six debates because it would have guaranteed. guaranteed nobody watched them. Having one debate means everybody will tune in, and it will be only potentially the second time they will have seen Federman take questions. Huge mistake, but David, do you care? Well, but Sarah, you forgot something that invalidates your entire analysis,

and that is, you can make all those mistakes, but if you call enough people ableist on Twitter, then you can totally reverse the dynamic, and voters will. not pay attention at all to Federman's physical condition. So, yeah. It's very strange. You know, they did this thing with NBC and the reporter who conducted the interview. First of all, they agreed to a 30-minute sit-down where NBC could edit it. That's already a strange decision for a campaign to make. Normally, I would, I mean, I teach a college class in this, and I tell my future comms directors never agree to edited interviews. Like, there's very little reason to ever do that. But she begins the package by introducing it and saying, in order to do this interview,

we had to agree to use closed captioning so that he could read my questions in real time. When we spoke before the closed captioning started, it was not clear he understood what we were talking about. That was a damning thing to have opened the interview. But again, if they had done six of the interviews, it would not have opened each of the other interviews. Yeah. One of the questions I have is, how long has he been able to process closed captioning? So, you know, there's so much we don't know about this health situation. And it could very well be the case, given that we've seen some real confusion, or has seen what looks like confusion from him before,

that he's just not as far along in the recovery as they've kind of led people to believe. And that maybe this was his not quite ready for prime time debut. I mean, there's just a lot that we don't know. And the problem that you have is we have this sort of political class and, you know, partisanship is just something that just choose away at people's brains that is saying, well, look, here's what we're going to do. We're going to have this candidate who's had this really terrible health crisis and God bless him. I hope he fully recovers. And we're just not going to be very forthcoming about it. And then when people raise legitimate questions, we're going to dog pile on top of them.

and we're going to tell them those are not legitimate questions. When a reporter conducts, does her job, we're going to pile on top of the reporter. And I'm sorry. And then this is compoundings, you know, this is a problem with Twitter brain. You think you can accomplish something on Twitter and get people to not talk about it everywhere else.

And that's completely false. And so, you know, look, I mean, this is a terrible thing that happened to him. I wish him well, and it is absolutely in voters' interests to know fully what is the mental capacity of a person that they're going to vote for for Senate. And you know who agrees with me one billion percent? Democrats in Georgia, because we have a Republican candidate in Georgia who really seems to be dealing with, and God bless him.

I hope he, you know, I hope he can, you know, manage this. but he seems to be dealing with the effects of a life in football and says a lot of things that just come out of nowhere, and that's totally relevant. And that's totally relevant. But it's ablest for some people to ask legitimate questions about somebody who had a stroke in recent months. And this is what drives people nuts about partisanship.

Just nuts. It's, wait, can't we just agree that for all candidates, the status of their health, matters and we can ask hard questions about it. Is that a principle we can agree on? Please. But no, but we cannot, apparently, Sarah. But I do wonder, I do wonder if one of the dynamics, and we might not know this until months or years later, but I do wonder if one of the dynamics is the reason why they're doing this now is it's the earliest they could have possibly done it and had any kind of decent outcome.

Interesting point. Jonah, speaking of Walker, he sent out a fundraising email. I can't get off these lists. Try as I might. The subject line, Warnock is using my mental health issues against me. For nearly 15 years and throughout the Senate campaign, I've been forthcoming about the mental health challenges that I struggled with in the past. I've overcome a lot in my life, self-confidence issues, a stutter, and thanks to the help of mental professionals, dissociative personality disorder. And then he says, I even wrote a book about it in 2008. Fascinating because the abortion conversation going on about Herschel Walker, A, he denies doing it. So it's not that he has sought redemption for this, as David has pointed out many times. He still says he didn't do it. But two, he says that he wrote that book in 2008 about finding his faith and overcoming all those mental health obstacles. But the abortion in question happened in 2009. And in September of 2009, the book came out in 2008, presumably was written before then. So, you know, a year and a half, two-year gap there.

Yeah, I mean, is David may be right about what voters should get to care about, but in a sort of binary choice environment, do voters care about the health, mental health, or physical health of their candidates anymore? Yeah, first of all, I think you should be ashamed for bringing your Western heteronormative, ratio-centric, logical, you know, biases to a question of the space-time continuum and when his book was written versus hit with the mistakes that he made. He lives on a Mobius strip, and you cannot judge it by your linear thinking. So, yeah, no, I'm very much with this. David, I was going to chime in and interrupt him, but then he beat me to it on the comparison

to Herschel Walker. It's last night, there's a lot, this is going to come to as a shock to a lot of listeners, a lot of people on this panel. There were a lot of bad opinions on Twitter last night, and I got sucked into paying attention to some of them. Oh, no. Same, Jonah. Same.

And one of the amazing ones was, was I watched some of the dog piling against, I guess, Andrea Mitchell had said something about Federman, and people were going to. nuts and it was amazing to me to see how many people said to one version or another of this is outrageous MSNBC needs to do better have you seen how much Fox backs Republican candidates and it's like well wait a second I thought the fact that Fox backed Republican candidates was bad and but MSNBC is bad for not doing what Fox is doing and it's the sort of the same thing with the with the walker and and fetterman thing um all the all the defenders of walker that i've seen on the right that i've talked to on the right they're all like look i don't care i want

the seat right it's a totally parliamentary thinking like our party needs the majority he's essential to the majority i don't care about the man i don't care about his positions i don't care about his past or i don't care about his mental health and it's pretty much the same thing with Federman. I mean, I think there's more organic positivity on the left towards Federman than there is towards Walker. It's less purely instrumental towards Federman because he was a much more popular figure, I think, among sort of rank-and-file, you know, Democrat types.

But the analogy just works fine. And I have no problem in the abstract with that sort of thinking if, A, you're honest about it, right? and you just say, hey, look, let me just be clear. This is a pure instrumentals, cynical thing I'm doing here because I want the seat. But I used to have such incredible contempt for people who said there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between the two parties. And I think that is true on some, on a, I think that is non, I still don't think it's true on a bunch of policy positions. There's a big delta between extreme pro life and extreme pro choice, right?

That is true in a bunch of things. But in terms of the tribal jackassery and situational ethics and, you know, principles for me but not for the kind of or principles for thee but not for me kind of thinking, the two parties mirror themselves in really profound ways. And you can you can get to the point of self-harm if you try to take it too seriously and try to and take people as good faith combatants in some of this stuff. Declan, I don't know if you've been following the Utah Senate race, but Mike Lee, the Republican senator from the state, is up against independent Evan McMullen. You may remember him for running for president in 2016 instead of David French. And he's been endorsed by the Democratic Party in Utah, but is not running as a Democrat in the technical and official sense. The race, at least in terms of polling, and I think Utah is a difficult state to poll for a variety

reasons that aren't worth getting into right now. But polling such as it is, shows the race neck and neck. And clearly, Mike Lee believes that it is tighter than he wants it to be because he is, went on TV last night asking Mitt Romney to endorse his campaign. And this is, of course, interesting to everyone who has followed. Mike Lee's career, Mike Lee refused to endorse Orrin Hatch in 2012, his fellow Utah senator at the time. And he refused to endorse. Wait for it, Mitt Romney in 2018, now saying that, you know, Mitt Romney needs to get on board, quote, unquote. Declan, what am I supposed to think about this?

Yeah, Declan. Just laugh, laugh, laugh, and laugh. I've talked to several people in Romney world, either campaign or Senate in recent days who are doing similar things. I mean, it's the same, it's the other side of the coin. that Jonah was talking about. This is Mike Lee when he went on Tucker, which, one, I don't think that a pleading message on Tucker Carlson is the way to reach Mitt Romney.

I think that, you know, there's probably in... Can you show your math on that? He might have been better coming to the morning dispatch to make that plea. Yeah. You know, I, Mike Lee, my phone is open. But no, it, I mean, it's... just the same the same kind of thinking where Mike Lee went on Tucker and was basically like Mitt, look how bad the Democrats have been, look how much spending they're doing, all these

things that you say you care about, help us keep the majority, help Republicans keep the majority. And it's just a parliamentary, get a Republican in the seat appeal. Mitt Romney has said he's not going to endorse in the race because he's friends with both Lee and McMullen. And McMullen is endorsed by the Democrats and, you know, has definitely trended in the progressive direction since mounting a independent conservative third-party bid in 2016, but I don't think he's necessarily going to be a Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, senator if elected. So, yeah, I mean, it's a, everybody is just kind of getting into that, we're less than a month out from the midterms now.

everybody's getting into their tribal red seat, blue seat, give me more camps. And there's not really much else to it than that. And, you know, we see that with Mike Lee. We see that with Federman and Dr. Oz talk about a Saudi Iran, no good options split. And we see that with Walker and Warnock in Georgia. Well, it would be a real thing if Republicans lose the Mike Lee Senate seat in Utah, pick up the Patty Murray seat in Washington, thereby still taking the U.S. Senate. But we'll talk about that more next week. We've kind of run out of time for a not worth your time. So instead, I'm going to briefly tell you something that is definitely worth your time. The Cincinnati Zoo is great at not just social media, just all media. They have very talented

people who work there. And if you weren't sure about that, I will give you their latest manatee update. They have three male manatees that they are moving to release into the wild in Florida and the first step was to get those manatees to SeaWorld Orlando so they can acclimate and then they're going to be released into the wild. The important thing here is that the photo that they released is like a boy band of manatees. The three of them are all together in the photo looking really dashing. But the one on the far left has just a look on his face that, again, we'll put it in show notes. You really need to see this.

The important thing is, though, that the Cincinnati Zoo at some point named this manatee, wait for it, swim shady. And I love him. That's solid. And he's everything I've ever needed. Not Manatee McManity face? Thank you, Cincinnati Zoo. Thanks for your rehab work for these manatees. and your release program, but thank you for naming that surly-looking bellow swim shady.

And with that, we'll talk to you again next week. Rate us. We have a new website. We're getting all the bugs out. We're doing our best. But if you have any issues, let us know and become a member. Now's a great time. New website. This is the platform that's 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.

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