The Dispatch Podcast - Oh No | Roundtable

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

Osama Bin Laden’s manifesto justifying 9/11 went viral on social media and on today’s Dispod, Sarah, Jonah, and Mike discuss how we got here before turning to: -Xi Jinping’s trip to San Francisco -China’s social media pysop -The pandas on loan -Reports from the IDF hospital siege in Gaza -Power tools, yay or nay? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isker, and I've got Mike Warren and Jonah Goldberg here. We're going to talk about the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit that was held in San Francisco this week, why Congress has suddenly turned into the most pathetic fight club in America and whatever else we happen to meander into in the meantime. Let's dive right in.

In August of 2022, Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. Seems like an okay thing for an American speaker of the House to do. But China got real mad. And they cut off military-to-military communications, stopped helping with the fentanyl crisis, though, I mean, how much help were they really giving? So this week, President Biden and Xi sat down for several meetings in San Francisco as part of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit. Many of those things got back on track, the military-to-military communication, and China's very ephemeral promise to do more to stem the flow of fentanyl precursors and analogs into Mexico that then pour over the southern border into the United States.

And at the end of it all, President Biden appears to have accidentally, though perhaps intentionally, called she a dictator again. Jonah, it feels to me like on the one hand, we should make an effort to avoid another Cold War. And on the other hand, this doesn't feel like it's going to end any other way when our American leaders aren't allowed to visit Taiwan without China. taking steps that, again, like, it's very clear that they don't mind poisoning 100,000 Americans a year. So anytime we do something

that they don't like, they're just going to once again say, oh, great, well, we're cutting off the military to military communications. What does an actual win here look like for any administration? It's a good question. Thank you for having me. I think I'm going to do that every time now

like Harold Ford on Special Report is like, first of all, thank you very much for having me. It's an honor to be here. So, like, I'm very down on China. I've been running a lot about how China is an apartheid state. It's a dictatorial state. Gee is a very bad dude. At the same time, I'm kind of with you.

All things being equal, it would be better not to have a Cold War with China. It would be better not to have a hot war. with China. I've been saying, I don't know, for 10 years now that the ones, there are very few places where there's going to be a real bipartisan consensus in America, but one of them is hawkishness towards China. And so the real debate is between dumb hawkishness and smart hawkishness. And it seems to me that smart hawkishness requires sort of a dual track of on the one hand preparedness on our part to be able to deal with China in the ugly ways that we may need to

that implies pulling back supply chains, that talks about military preparedness, talks about building up our allies in the region. And on the other hand, making sure that China doesn't lose so much face and all of that, that they feel like they have no option but just to sort of go forward on Taiwan

or as we'll talk about in the next segment, as one senator put it, throw hands. And that's going to take a delicate balance. And to be honest, I think the Biden administration has been okay. on this, at times better than okay, at times a little worse than okay? I think that the other point, just to get a little egg-hitty on this, is

there's a whole school of foreign policy, quote-unquote, realism, and I always put the scare quotes around it, because I think it's one of the most bogus schools of foreign policy thought, that says that states only act in their basic interests and that the sort of individual leaders don't really matter because they are constrained by the long-term interests of the rational interests of the state, yada, yada, yada. I think one good example of why that's not true is Xi.

Xi's a bad, weird dude who has a very specific philosophy that is very different from Deng Xiaoping, is very different from his predecessors. He doesn't like the market economy. He doesn't like, and why I say he doesn't like an economy, he doesn't even like the Chinese version of the market economy. If you get our version, he's in favor of more suffering for the people. He thinks it builds character. He has really crushed a lot of the attributes of Chinese society that give it its strength

in terms of the sort of the independent marriageocratic bureaucracy and all of that. And it is not obvious to me that the course that China is on right now survives Xi. And that's something to keep in mind. Like it's one thing when you think that the inherent regime of the communists of the Bolsheviks is going to be unchanging for a long time, then you have to set up a long-term philosophy. If you think this stuff isn't going to survive this 60-something-year-old dude

who's increasingly unpopular, then maybe you want to keep as many options open going forward. That's an excellent point. I want to read from the Morning Dispatch, Mike, just a smattering, a sampler platter of the last 10 months in U.S.-China relations. This is setting aside, of course, the Chinese spy balloon that we shot down

and that they took our pandas. Although I think you've heard my album side on the pandas that like we should never have been paying rent for these pandas helping breed these pandas to keep them out of extinction all the while China is driving tigers into extinction, rhinos, elephants, and not giving a crap. And in the meantime, we're paying them for the privilege.

No, no, no. Yeah, also never lease to own. I mean, like, you don't rent furniture, you don't rent pandas, right? You buy them or don't? But they were so cute. They were so cute. Don't care. Evolutionary dead end.

Let China fix the problem. Okay. So here's the smattering. April. Federal prosecutors pressed charges against two men accused of running a Chinese police outpost in New York aimed at intimidating Chinese dissidents living in the United States. May. The world learned of the existence of a Chinese listening station in Cuba, which almost

scuttled Secretary of State Blinken's rescheduled trip to Beijing. Then the summer, U.S. government discovered a widespread Beijing directed hack of unclassified State Department computer systems and those of key figures managing U.S. China relationship in the Biden administration, including Commerce Secretary Gina Romando, whose department is behind export controls on various Chinese goods. Also, August, we indicted two U.S. sailors stationed on naval bases in California for sharing sensitive military information, including the specs of ships and plans for U.S. military exercises in the Indo-Pacific. with their Chinese handlers in exchange for cash bribes. And only days later, a flotilla of 11 Russian and Chinese ships came shockingly close to U.S. sovereign waters off the coast of Alaska's Aleutian Islands. And that's to say nothing of the other, you know, things they've been doing in the South China Sea, aggressive measures towards Taiwan. And to say really nothing, nothing of the fact that while they've, you know,

banned Facebook and Twitter, et cetera, in China. TikTok is alive and well in the United States. I understand the people who are trying to argue that TikTok is simply an algorithm and is giving American young people just what they want, what's popular, which in this case seems to be rooting for Osama bin Laden these days. But that's the whole point, right? We don't see the algorithm. It's not necessarily just upvoting things.

that are popular. It's choosing what's potentially popular. And who is choosing? A company that is overseen, or at least at the mercy of the Chinese government. So, Mike, I take Jonah's point that maybe we've got 20 years left of Xi. Maybe things change dramatically, but 20 years feels like a real long time right now. And a long time with, as Jonah points out, kind of a weird, a weird guy at the hell. I mean, this is what in this address in San Francisco, you know, he said the earth is big enough to accommodate both countries, referring to China and the United States. I mean, he has these sort of growing ambitions for a kind of Cold War.

I mean, there's clearly what he's sort of laying out there. And that is that is what concerns me. I mean, it's sort of what happens when you corner, you know, a rabid dog. Like, you know, he may be sort of on the ropes internally, domestically, she is, but that could be where he and his ambitions are the most dangerous. So, I mean, I do tend to agree that on balance, the Biden administration has handled things pretty well. But it just, it seems to me that, that the, there is, there is no sort of organizing principle or, or really kind of idea behind the American response or the American strategy that I can see to sort of containing Xi in these. last 10, 15, 20 years of his, of his life and his reign in China.

So, and by the way, the, it's not just the propaganda and the messaging from TikTok and like, we could like rant Sarah, you and I could rant all day about TikTok and the kids. It is the. F-M kids. It is the data collection as well. And just all of the questions. And when I see all of these American, CEOs at this at this meeting in San Francisco by the way just some of the CEOs that

were there Tim Cook of Apple Larry Fink of Blackrock Jerry Brown the former governor of California executives from Boeing Pfizer Nike FedEx Elon must pop by their incentives are so different because the United States each of these individual guys wants to make money wants to build their company and China is an enormous and growing market and we have elections. We have a freedom of press, a First Amendment, that they are exploiting. And they have none of those things to contend with on their side. If at any point a CEO gets out of line in China does something that Xi does not feel like is within his plan, that's the end of that. And that's always been seen as our strength. And it is our strength. But China is able to view how

it can be used as a weakness. Yeah, I mean, I agree. It sort of gets my, it gets my sort of patriotic Irish up, you know, when I see these, these CEOs sort of, you know, or just, I mean, it strikes me that like free trade is, I'm a free trader all the way. But it, I see, I see where the impulse that gave kind of Trump his power when he talked about this when it comes to China just because it's it's it's not it's not fair it's not it is not it is not I was thinking about this with regard to Hollywood which Hollywood is sort of moved off of China in a lot of ways but but about 10 years ago you know the way in which these Hollywood studios would just, you know, spout kind of liberal platitudes here at home and then basically

say whatever they had to do, whatever they had to say to appease China. That, that to me was a perfect illustration of the kind of cowtowing that you have to do. And it just, it doesn't seem right and I don't like it and I don't have any other principle other than it's, it's wrong, man. So Mike, I got a question for you. Yeah. Are you using. coutowing to be culturally insensitive or sensitive? Because I can kind of see it either way. I'm pleading ignorant. I know that count.

I know it's like it is it's both insensitive and sensitive at the same time. Yeah. Cover all my bases. I mean, it's been a while, but like my understanding of where cout comes from is an incident, a guy had to come and an ambassador from another country had to come or a delegate or whatever and had to bow seven times.

to the emperor to show his inferiority. And it's, it's, it's a obsequiousness, a humiliating, requiring a humiliating obsequiousness. Something that we, you know, we practice quite a lot here. Look, look, I agree with all that. And look, there are days you will find me much more hawkish about the China stuff. My only point is, is that, you know, what does it James Burnham say? Problems without solutions aren't problems. I am 110% in favor of regime change in China, if it would cost us nothing.

But Jonah, imagine, and I hate using this example, and I want to be clear, I'm not using the example to equate the two situations, but except in this one very limited regard. imagine that our biggest trading partner in the 1930s is Germany and all of these CEOs are having, you know, elaborate, fancy Michelin-star dinners with Hitler in the 1930s. Yeah, I hear you that it's not a problem with the solution. I know you're about to say, like, don't imagine it. It happens. Yeah, that's exactly what happened.

Right. Exactly. And the point is, I understand we can't do much to change. China. But why aren't we doing more to change here in the United States, how we view this situation? I mean, Xi, for instance, invited a whole bunch of folks from Iowa to have dinner with him one of the nights of the summit, because in 1985 he visited Des Moines and just really enjoyed these, you know, real Americans from the Midwest and feels a certain tie to Iowa. It was an incredible photo op. News outlets ate it up. In the meantime, there's concentration camps in China. What?

Why is it socially acceptable to show up to this dinner, whether you're Tim Cook or you're Betsy from Des Moines? I agree. I've been writing every 18 months for 20 years. My don't tell me never again, column, because there have been genocidal, horrible eliminationist regimes going all the time, and Americans don't actually care. Now, what's interesting is they actually don't care when it happens to Jews either. So, you know, there's that. No, that's a little unfair. Most Americans are on Israel side and all this.

But I agree. It rankles me a great deal that all these people who talk about the evilness of, you know, nativism and apartheid states and all this kind of stuff. And you, or, you know, eliminationist policies, whatever, you pick your evil for a state. China's doing it to one extent or another. And you tell them that, and you say, well, that's the way it just, glazes off of them, right? I mean, like...

I mean, one of the main criticisms of Israel that I've heard from the left is this idea of having an ethno-religious state is, in and of itself, morally wrong. And that's exactly what China is. Exactly what China. China practices Han supremacy. If you were...

I mean, not all non-Han Chinese are as discriminated against to say the Uyghurs or the Tibetans, but, like, Uyghurs and Tibetans can't check into a lot of hotels in China. because they're considered second-class citizens. Right now, it's sort of worth pointing out

just because the media in the states have just a zero on it. Chinese state media is full of the craziest anti-Semitic stuff right now. Like 24-7 round the clock, they're spilling it out onto TikTok. They're spilling it out on all the places. And it's always worth pointing out that if you criticize the Chinese regime, if you say something inconvenient about Chinese history, you are censored Chinese people never hear. And I like pointing out,

if you're wondering who controls TikTok, try posting something about the Uyghurs. Post something about the Jews, then post something about the Uyghurs, see which one goes further. Right. So it's state policy. I mean, it kind of reminds me a little bit. I was talking to somebody on the run in about this recently.

Orwell is great on this about how, like, if there's a Gandhi... in or a knee molar and in the Soviet Union, we don't know who he is because he was dragged off in the middle of night and killed, right? And there is this incredible double standard that we have for China. I think, you know, we're recording this on Thursday morning.

Elon Musk had some crazy anti-Semitic stuff on X recently. And I don't know if he's actually an anti-Semite. I don't know if he's an idiot about this stuff. And I also don't rule out the fact that this is the kind of thing that China likes to see because he's got relationships with China. I don't know. But like the influence operation from China is real. I think that alone justifies getting rid of TikTok.

At the same time, we are not in a position to make China be not China right now. Yep. So you have to deal with China the way it is. We have to deal with ourselves dealing with China. We have to deal with ourselves. Yeah. So physician heal I itself, I think, needs to be part of it. And that would start with banning TikTok and all sorts of things.

But in terms of China, having a little carrot along the stick is not idiotic to me because we are going to need to, they can make life really, really, really difficult for the United States and for our allies if they want to. So the things that, if there are smart things that don't fundamentally compromise our interests or principles to encourage them to go that way, we should probably do. because the Cold War was a long struggle. We worked with the Soviets and all sorts of things

from time to time in the Cold War precisely because they weren't going away. And that's my only point. The second biggest kid on the block, they got an enormous number of problems on their own. Like, that's the one thing that kind of gets left out. We used to say 20 years ago, they're going to get old before they get rich.

We were right. And they're about to head into a bad deflationary spiral, it looks like. So, like, straight lines. projections about China's, you know, hegemonic role in its region or in the world should be taken with a grain of salt, but we should act like they're possible and, and just be grown-ups about, you know, a policy of hawkishness, but not just sort of boob-bait hawkishness, because that doesn't help anything, and it makes the necessary stuff harder to do.

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I do want to spend a second on the TikTok bin Laden episode. So thousands of Americans on TikTok are posting videos of themselves, having just read bin Laden's letter to America and saying how it's changed their entire, you know, worldview, their thoughts about the country that they live in, etc. And I'm, I'm, I am I'm shocked. I am on a couple fronts. One, there's just the obvious, are you kidding me? Most of these people, of course, either weren't alive for 9-11 or so young they couldn't possibly remember 9-11. So it's a bit of like, spare me that you just discovered who Osama bin Laden is. But there's something, I guess, more concerning that we have a generation of Americans.

I'm worried that have been educated through caricature, either moral relativism, where there's no such thing as good and evil, just, you know, there's only shades of gray. But more than that, I think my concern is that we so caricatured Hitler, for instance, as evil, I think that this generation, things like Hitler walked around with an I am evil t-shirt or like the bad guys where we are the baddies, you know, on a little badge on their arms or something, instead of teaching them that, in fact, you have to have the moral judgment to discern who is good and who is evil because the bad guys will always have a reason. They don't think they're the bad guys. No terrorist walks around saying,

I'm a really evil, bad person. I just want to kill a bunch of people for funsies because that's all I do. No, they all say they have reasons. Hitler had reasons. And I guess our education system, I think, has failed because we don't teach what Hitler's reasons were and then teach why that was still evil, even if you have reasons. Because now they suddenly find out that Osama bin Laden had a philosophy of his own had reasons for why 9-11 happened. Of course he did. This wasn't just like he had nothing to do on a Saturday but plan a terrorist attack

against the United States. And so in some ways, I guess I'm mad at us. We've been teaching this wrong. We simply taught that Hitler was evil. Osama bin Laden's evil and evil people just do evil things and they know they're evil and we all know they're evil that was never

ever true and now those chickens are sort of coming home to roost I guess Yeah that that I think that is a big part of the problem we also have a kind of I mean the ability to discern

the you know what is real and true and what is propaganda, what is, I mean, the, you know, useful idiot, right, is the, is the, is the phrase it comes to mind when you watch these TikTok videos. The thing that worries me more about this is the, is the way that these ideas permeate, the way that the useful idiots are in the thousands, rather than, you know, writing a column in the New York Times, which, of course, everybody reads.

but it's the way that it seems organic. I mean, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. But when you watch these in succession, these videos on TikTok of young people saying, you know, I just discovered for the first time, I never knew that bin Laden had wrote this letter. It almost all kind of follows a script. I would love to know where this got into the bloodstream.

what got into the bloodstream. I've got a guess. What's your guess, Sarah? China, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, but like in terms of the actual mechanics, I'm a little obsessed with the mechanics of how virality on the internet and particularly, you know,

because like a good old millennial, I watch all my TikTok videos on Instagram, which is like three or four weeks later. from when the trends are happening. I'm right there with you. I got to tell you. Exactly. I knew you would be. I knew you would be, Sarah.

And as a consumer of the internet for most of my life, actually, I can tell when something is, something organic is not organic, right? When something has sort of, you know, somebody has paid some money to get an idea into the internet bloodstream. feel it on this one. It's not even subtle. And I don't think they care that it's not subtle. No, no. But it's, to me, that is, it's the, it's the, uh, illiteracy of young people that, you know, for whom this is, they've just, they've lived in this. And that's all they know that, like, they don't know they're being had. They don't know that what they're seeing as propaganda.

They don't know that bin Laden's letter to America was designed to do exactly what it's doing. and that is what concerns me if it wasn't bin Laden's letter it would be something else it would be you know and we went through this right nobody remembers Luce Change but I feel like Lose Change this internet video that went around

like five six years after 9-11 that was like purported to be like proof that the towers fell because of some bomb it was like this whole way crazy kids like yeah we went through all that and then like we all grew up and realized what that was like crazy bullshit and and that's i i worry that's not happening with the kids these days so two quick well three

quick points one uh just because we always want to stay on top of the news here and i think we missed something apparently jy said last night that uh the processes are in place for us to get more oh no no you don't understand i'm more mad about that i'm livid about that i'm livid about that. Are we still renting the pandas? Can they still claw back the pandas at any point? We just spent how much money having FedEx trucks drive through downtown Washington, D.C.

on a weekday to return the damn pandas. Do not take more pandas. They are a trick. They are taking candy from a stranger in a van. No more panda. So I'm the one, last week on Chris Wallace's show on CNN, said that at the summit, they should

serve panda. You want Panda diplomacy? This is some tough panda diplomacy right here. Real fatty meat though. There's not a lot of moving going around. Talk about something that's so obvious. I mean, G now saying like, oh, we didn't even know you guys liked

the pandas. Oh, we'll send you more pandas. After he just took the pandas back, it's an, like, that's what abusive husbands do. No. Yeah, no. It's like, try your first joint for free. It'll make you cool. It'll make you popular. Secondly, just on this

broader conversation, you know, One of my abiding complaints about the way we teach things in our, not just in our schools, but in our culture, is the constant confusion between an explanation and an excuse. And, you know, so yeah, bin Laden had an explanation. Hitler had an explanation. Stalin had an explanation. And some of those explanations, maybe not Hitler, right? But, like, there are facts in them.

There are, you can say, oh, I can see where, why they're saying that. That doesn't excuse anything. It's very similar to the Hamas stuff. It's like, you can tell me all the explanations you want, but you're not going to get me to the point to say, oh, so that's, that's why it's okay to cut off the head of a baby. Because there's a difference between an explanation and an excuse. But in the age of authenticity, Jonah, that's just. not true. I mean, no, I get it. But it's also, it's a journalistic problem. There's a lot of

journalistic outlets that add as this sort of false imposed objectivity and have to have, you know, both sides say where they come down. I listen really closely all the time when NPR does their such and such happened on Capitol Hill yesterday. Democrats want to do X. Republicans say why. And nine, seven out of ten times, the Republican thing and the Democratic thing, could both be true because they're not actually at each other in any kind of way. And it's just this false framing kind of thing. And I just think it's the kind of thing that today's kids, because of the culture that they grow up in,

and the celebration of victimhood and transgressiveness is so profound that it's better to have a wrong hot take than a boring good take. And I don't mean that just in the journalist's, sense. I mean that across the culture. And that's the kind of thing we should be fixing at home and not worrying about it. China's exploiting it. They're not creating it. Okay. Let's move a little more domestically, and by domestically, for the three of us, at least, down the street. Some weird stuff happening on Capitol Hill of Lated, maybe not that weird actually anymore. Because if there's nothing to do when you show up to school all day, you just sit in detention. And by the way,

I don't know if anyone else had this detention. I thought detention was supposed to be where you have to sit at school instead of hanging out with your friends and you have to like do your homework and like get stuff done. That's the punishment. But that wasn't detention at my school.

At my school detention was you weren't allowed to do anything. You weren't allowed to read. You weren't allowed to do homework. You were there for 45 minutes to stare at a wall. You couldn't fall asleep. They would wake you up. You just had to stare, which actually was sort of brilliant

because, of course, it was not a punishment for me to just read a book after school. And this was all coming about. I had detention, I think, every day in seventh grade because there was a rule that you had to wear a belt with your pants, regardless of if your pants were loose-fitting. And I did not like that rule. And so I refused to wear a belt every day.

And so we went on. They and I through this game where every day I didn't wear a belt and every day I got detention for not wearing a belt. And every day that rule was still stupid. And I learned a lot about authority, authoritarianism, as I stared at that wall. Did you actually learn a lot about authoritarianism? I didn't learn anything. And then I discovered I ran and it all made sense.

Okay. So here's my point, which is there is no reward, like I've said, in elections, primary elections, or general elections, it would seem, to actually. be a legislator to tout your legislative accomplishments because to do so would have to acknowledge compromise that you made along the way. And as a result, you have a bunch of members of Congress who don't really know what they're doing there because there's no actual goal. And so they're getting frustrated and they're getting feisty and they're getting bored. And what do people who love attention and have huge egos do at some point when they've been bored this long?

they start to fight each other and that's what somehow we saw this week Mike could you walk us through a little bit of the most pathetic fight club in America this was no Preston Brooks caning Charles Sumner on the Senate floor let's just say that

I don't know where to start should we start with the most pathetic of them I don't know which one you think is most pathetic frankly well okay the least violent of them, right? Was the sort of hissy fit that James Comer, the chair of the House Oversight Committee made when I guess

Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat, was raising some issues with a loan that Comer gave to his brother that seemed, at least on the surface, similar to the loan that Joe Biden gave his brother that Comer has been probing in the ongoing impeachment investigation that Comer is leaving. So this was very annoying to James Comer to have this

seeming hypocrisy or at least sort of interesting similarity pointed out to him and he called Jared Moskowitz an idiot and a smurf which I'm not quite sure what that insult is supposed I guess it was because Moskowitz

had a blue jacket on or something. I don't know. Smurf seems like pretty late. And also a really specific generation's like, you know, thing. Like, Smurfs are for us. Like, Jonah doesn't know what they about Smurfs? Smurfs started when I was in grade school. That's right. Well, what the French,

the French or the Belgian comic book, I think. Fine, Jonah. You know nothing about Care Bears. Nothing. Very little. Just like we know nothing about Telatubbies or like Barney. That was after us. Nope. So, okay, so that's one. All right, that's just kind of lame, right?

And then I think earlier in that day, this all happened like in one day. You had Mark Wayne Mullen, the senator from Oklahoma, former MMA fighter, in the middle of a hearing in which one of the witnesses invited by the Democrats was a teamsters leader named, I believe Sean O'Brien, which like, this is like all states. stereotypes, like, are all meeting here at this one moment because apparently Mr. O'Brien had tweeted something a while ago, making fun of Senator Mullen for being fake or weak and made some kind of, I'll take you anytime, anywhere, to which Mullen in, like, basically in like wrestling, a total wrestling move, like, just.

basically said, okay, here we are. We're here. This is a place. Let's go. And started to get up and like even maybe take his wedding ring off and try to start fighting with this witness in the middle of a Senate hearing. It took Bernie Sanders sort of saying, sit down. You're a United States senator. I mean, it was it was kind of crazy. But all of this was just like all paled in comparison to a kidney shot by Kevin McCarthy hitting Tim Burchett, one of the recalcitrant House Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy. They were in this hallway.

I know which hallway it is in Capitol in the Capitol. It's narrow, but it's not that narrow. And apparently Burchett said that McCarthy elbowed him in the kidney. And then McCarthy said, no, I didn't. and then raised it even more, raised the stakes even more by saying if I had, he'd be on the ground. I mean, it was basically middle school

all throughout the Capitol this week and like a really good metaphor for the state of Congress these days. I mean, that's the summary. What else do we need to know, Sarah? Okay. So Jonah, with that, let's make this an extended worth your time.

Why should anyone care? About the jackassery on the hill? Yeah. About the specific jackassery, let's put it this way. If this was going on while they were actually crafting legislation and holding hearings and having regular order, then it'd be kind of funny and fine, whatever.

But like, it's a symptom of the fact, as you said, that they're not getting anything significant done. Your friend Chip Roy, I had this great little floor speech where he was just like, can somebody tell me, just come on down, explain to me what the hell we can talk about

on the campaign trail to get reelected that we've done so far this year. It was a good question, I thought. I thought it was an apt and poignant question. I thought there are people who will tilt their heads at who the questioner was given his role in some of the,

the controversies of the last six months, but it was a good question. So look, I am of the mind and that Congress really, really, really, really matters because it is the sponge that absorbs political toxins in this country. It is where politics is supposed to happen. And one of the reasons why we spent all this time talking about the craptacularness of TikTok and all these, and college campuses and all these kinds of things, is that when Congress, It's sort of like, you know, those wetland grasslands that are supposed to absorb all sorts of, like, tidal things

and whatnot. And when they don't work, you have soil erosion and all that. Congress is supposed to absorb a lot of political energy in this country. And when it doesn't, that stuff just disappear. It seeps into all sorts of other institutions. And so it matters. It also matters that, you know, there are a lot of really important things that need to be done and they're not getting done.

I am with you on the culture of losing thing, right? I think that this is one of the abiding problems of both parties right now is that the loudest and most influential voices have a better incentive structure to go down fighting on dumb ideas than to actually make compromises on halfway decent ideas. And so the toxic masculinity on display as a symptom of these larger problems, I think is, first of all, it's worth mocking. And it should point to the fact that one of the most important institutions, the first branch of government, the most important branch of government, is broken. And one of the things that bothers me about the way we talk about this is we talk about how, well, look at it. GOP caucus is broken and it's got these divisions. McCarthy was a weak speaker this or Johnson is not up to the job, that and all that kind of stuff. It all sort of implies or begs the question in the proper sense of the term that Nancy Pelosi was good at it and therefore a good speaker.

But the system that she was good at was one of the problems. this delivering legislation like clay tablets from the mount to the yammering Hebrews and saying take it or leave it is one of the reasons why our politics is broken. Congress is supposed to be a process of discovery where they have adversarial hearings that seek out facts and address things in ways that involve horse trading and compromise and debate and changing people's minds. And instead, starting with Gingrich, but then Paul Ryan, the Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner,

they're all guilty to one extent or another. We've adopted this system where the leadership basically goes in a closed room, comes up with legislation, and then demands an up or down vote at the last minute from a bunch of people on sweeping areas of public policy and public life. And it's always funny how every two years you get, if the Democrats are in power, you get people saying, get Republicans saying,

John Smith voted with Nancy, Pelosi 100% of the time. And the reason why is because every Democrat basically voted with Nancy Pelosi 100% of the time because they were not allowed to vote. They were not given any other option than vote yes or no on something. And if they voted no, the government would shut down or something. Similarly, they did the same thing with like Tom DeLay and Denny Hasterd, who shall not be named further.

And that's dysfunctional. And that dysfunction creates an incentive structure for performative jackasses to come to Washington and do clown show stuff because that's the only way you get attention because you're not rewarded for actually doing any real legislating. That's the work, right? I mean, Mark Wayne Mullen, almost starting a fist fight in a Senate hearing, he's doing his job as he sees it because what happened after that? He gets a lot of attention. He's going on podcasts. He's going on TV. Oh, he happens to be raising money off of the incident. I mean, that's what they are there to do.

And that is why this silly stuff is important. It's, um, it is, it is the work. It is why they are there. It is why Matt Gates is in Congress because, not because he's there to legislate. It's because he's there to host his own podcast. Uh, Ted Cruz is a United States senator. And the most I see him is when he's posting podcast, uh, serves on his Twitter feed.

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You can offer services, book appointments, and receive payments directly through your site. It's a single hub for managing your work and reaching your audience without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. aisle. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Well, to end on a high note, I guess, let's talk about Israel and Gaza. So after Israel had offered incubators and fuel to the hospital in Gaza, which Hamas turned down, Israel has gone in and taken in the hospital, in which they have reported to find, obviously,

various indicia of military equipment, go-bags, you know, uniforms, etc. This, the reason that's relevant is because, of course, Hamas using a civilian hospital as military headquarters, et cetera, first of all, violates international law. Second of all, it puts Israel once again in that impossible situation. If you put your military headquarters in a civilian hospital and then everyone says you're not allowed to attack a hospital, so Israel then cannot defend itself against a military enemy, military target.

Jonah, you know, we can go over this over and over again. But the hypocrisy of those who criticize Israel, but don't criticize China for their human rights violations and don't even know about, you know, the various horrible things happening in other countries. I mean, I'm looking at Ethiopia, Tigray. It's Syria. Syria.

Assad has killed more Palestinians than the Israelis have, you know, last few years. But, yeah, I agree. The hypocrisy is driving crazy on just a sort of, a cold-hearted factual thing. I had a bit of a flop-swit panic. Again, we're recording Thursday morning last night when the initial videos that came out of Al-Sheva Hospital were underwhelming in terms of this, you know,

Hamas command center thing. And I had that brief moment of feeling of like, of 2003, where are the WMDs, right? And I texted with, with a few of my friends who are either in Israel or know a lot about Israel, and they're all like, yeah, don't worry about it. We've known about Shifa being a Hamas place for

for 10 years. Even various UN officials have said it. It's, you know, they've only found the small, we've only explored a small component of it. So, but still, it would be for the PR, the PR risk rewards for Israel, if they don't find the tunnel, if they don't find, you know, the connections, it would be really bad.

And so that, so anyway, just that aside. Yeah, look, I mean, the thing I wrestle with is this argument that Hamas, which is not a signatory to any of the conventions on like rules of war, human rights, or any of that kind of stuff, right? It is literally an extra legal. They're very honest about who they are and what they do. terrorist organization, right? And so this came up a lot during,

the war on terror in the early 2000s is this strange argument that you get a lot where it says terrorists have no obligation obviously that's why we call them terrorists to observe the laws of war or just law in general but they deserve all of the benefits of these things right and the problem with that in part is that and look I again it. On domestic soil, on Americans, a terrorist, he has rights. That's a different thing, right? But we're talking about state actors and non-state actors abroad. One of the reasons why you sign the Geneva Convention or these various other conventions and treaties and understandings is because there are incentives for it. It's that you'll know your people have captured or treated properly. It's that your

civilians will be treated properly, right? That's the whole idea is to come up with a framework where you have benefits that make the constraints worthwhile. And that goes out the window for a lot of these sort of, including like human rights groups. So they're just sort of flatly saying, it's regrettable that these terrorists don't observe any of these rules and tisk tis. But they should have all the benefits for them.

I mean, Israel is the only question on Earth where the international community expects people to just passively accept having rockets, fired at them regularly. Yeah. You can't do anything about it because otherwise you'd be violating their rights under international law,

which isn't even true because they've put military, like they're violating international law. All of this is Hamas. Sorry. I'm, okay. I'm done. Yeah, no, I'm with you.

I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it seems like, it seems like, is just to make you think that, like, you're the weird one for thing that saying there should be a sort of a consistent standard. I mean, I just wrote about this yesterday in the G-Feld. The people I am most fascinated by aren't like the hardcore anti-Semitic pro-Hamas, you know, a race Israelty people.

There's a consistency there that I can rock. It is these cookie pusher state department types. By, you know, my favorite category of human being right now are the people who virtue signal by signing anonymous letters. It is the weirdest sort of like, I want to be, I want credit for being. courageous, but later, not now because I don't want to lose my job. Anyway, these people, the sort of banal basic sort of center-left types, who completely understand these arguments when it comes to Russia and Ukraine, completely.

Russia can't be allowed to get away with this. The moral hazard of allowing Russia to the flout, all of these conventions, all of these rules, and cross-border aggression like this would be disastrous. And at the same time, say, yeah, it's a lot of it. Israel just needs to stop fighting right now and suck it up and Hamas needs to be able to get away with this as if like these are, there are different issues and equities at stake. And it's just, it's very hard not to fall into the trap and just saying, okay, so you just don't like Jews and Jewish countries.

And I don't want to do that all the time because I don't think internally a lot of these people actually think that's the case, but it's very difficult to find a heuristic that explains their arguments that doesn't include some of that. By the way, the anonymous letters being signed to Virtue Signal reminds me of the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where Larry and Ted Danson both donate a wing to the new art museum, but Ted Danson donates it anonymously and then goes around telling everyone that he's anonymous. I mean, look, I don't know.

I don't have anything else to add. It's just, it is the double standard that we've, that we and everybody on, you know, who's been covering this at the dispatch, you know, talks about whatever, whatever the truth is and what Israel finds in this hospital will get out because Israel is a free society and they have, you know, they have a free press who will ask questions and they want the freedom to ask those questions, and we will find out what happens. The fact that we put what the IDF and what Israel's government says in news articles side by side with Hamas statements that say, it's all a lie, that is what is, you know, I don't want to hear anything from

mainstream media folks about both sidesism when they're, on this, issue. There's never been a more egregious example of both sides'ism. What Hamas says on this, they have no credibility, and whatever the truth is on the Israeli side will be found out.

That's just the fact that it's just a fact. All right, we're going to end with a not worth your time. I've noticed a trend, gentlemen. Here's the trend. A, maybe it's just because it's fall, but man, the leaf blowers are everywhere. But more than that, all of a sudden, all of my male friends, like when you're sitting around in the backyard, drinking a beer, grilling some stuff, are bragging about their power washers.

Since when did power washers become the new thing, they're so loud, they're so annoying, and what all do you all need to power wash? This is a false equivalency between gas-powered leaf blowers, which are an abomination, and power washers, which are a beautiful technological triumph of humanity. So they're so loud and awful. But they're so much fun. The dirt just goes away. It's like painting, cleaning, you know? you're painting cleanness on your

on your on your on your on your on your on your on your on your on your on your power washer no but my neighbor does and I borrow it from time to time I can do you do you like what's the ballpark price of this I don't even know uh I don't know I could I could effort that but it it's if if you've got a neighbor with one I mean it's that's that's the way to do it because my cousin just got one yeah you're not using one every day but you're going to want it when when you do want it It's like a front of the truck. Exactly.

So, like, if you've never used a power washer on, like, on teak outdoor furniture, it's like you got a whole new furniture set afterwards. It is really cool. It goes from, like, being that weird gray, you know, kind of rotting wood look to bright fall brown. It's very exciting. It's very satisfying. And it reminds me a little bit of those commercials. You may not have had them when you guys were in school.

where it's like these things for fixing your silver where you just dip the old varnished spoon in and you pull it out and it's silver again kind of thing. It's like that puts the outside. It's very exciting and very satisfying. Where I will agree with you is that the problem with power washing and leafblower is less the technology issues at all.

It's the time that when people do it. And in my number, There are dudes who, like, it's Saturday morning. This is true day. Out of bed. 7 a.m. Let's start power watching. And that stuff drives me crazy.

And it drives my wife to borderline arson. And so I'm with you on that. I would have thought y'all are the problem. Yeah, but we don't like, you don't want to hear that stuff at 7 in the morning. You know, you want to read the paper and have a cup of coffee. But here's the problem. I work from home sometimes, but my wife works from home every single day. And now that the work from home economy is sort of in bloom, like there's no good time

for doing this sort of thing because people are having phone calls and podcasting and all those sort of things during the weekday too. So where is where is the benighted leaf blower and power washer. When is he supposed to do it? That's my question. We need to make space for them to do what they need to do. All I'm learning is that I was not really made to have neighbors. I actually love our neighbors on either side of us are both older couples and I love them. It turns out I do really well in quasi-retirement communities. But our neighbors in the back are young like we are and the power washing and the leaf flowing and the puttering and the little construction projects. I just cannot deal with.

It's suburbia, baby. I love it. I need to move to the country. Wait until you do a major home renovation and you get one of the giant dumpsters outside your house. And then you find all the neighbors who all of a sudden need to get rid of like their 10 year old couch and like dump it in your dumpster. And he's like, you know what you call it? It doesn't mean thousands of dollars for them to pull this thing away. And you're using up a third of it with your frigging like old toy sets for your kids. Like I didn't. You know, it's amazing how people will come out of the woodwork. So this has really been a not worth your time, Neighbors episode.

Noise pollution. Noise pollution. No, neighbors. Neighbors, good fences make good neighbors, especially if you're not power washing your fence, I guess. And with that, thank you, Mike. Thank you, Jonah. Thank you, Jonah. Just so much for being here with us and taking the time out of your schedule.

It's a pleasure. Thank you for invited me. No, it's such a treat to get to talk to you. Yeah. So much you might. But Jonah. Thank you. Thank you. Wow. Just can't say enough. What an honor. It really is. In my experience, you can say it. All right. We'll talk to you all next week. I'm going to be able to be.