The Dispatch Podcast - Private School Che Guevara

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

Does the praise of Luigi Mangione—the alleged assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson—say anything profound about Americans? Sarah Isgur, Jonah Goldberg, Steve Hayes, and Megan McArdle discuss. The Agenda: —Against 'But …' —The acquittal of Daniel Penny —Did Mangione get what he wanted? —The lamest duck —Age limits? —The Great De-Wokening —Syria and Iran —NWYT: How journalism works —Flagship debate redux The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and weekly livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Conditions apply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isgir with Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes, sure, but Megan McArdle. Hi, Sarah. We are recording this on December 12th, it's 2020. All right, let's dive right in here. I want to talk first about the murder of the United Healthcare CEO. Someone has now been caught, arrested, charged with second-degree murder in New York City.

And what this says about our cultural moment of populism, of anti-elitism, about our politics. Yeah. So, I mean, I think there are a lot of different ways you can go at this. And I try to go out of a few of them in my newsletter yesterday. But I think that this has more potential to have copycats than a lot of the things we've seen in the past. Look, I mean, mass shooters have copycats. We've known that for a long time. Assassins have copycats.

But one of the things that makes them, that creates copycats is just the repetition of their name. It's not necessarily everyone is celebrating and extolling and talking about how friggin hot a school shooter is. We're watching, we're watching this guy, or we're watching this guy, Luigi Mangiani, turned into a folk hero before our eyes with all these. social media, you know, Liberty Jibbitts talking about how, you know, how he is. You had Jimmy Kimmel talking about how his producers wanted to become jailhouse brides and others wanting to be

on his jury. People paying for his legal defense, sending in money to his defense attorney. And I find this, I mean, like, I find this really repugnant. In part because the guy's just a cold-blooded murderer, which we're supposed to like condemn. Last time

I checked my notes. But also because just the, it's, it's, it's the glee with which people are doing it and the degree to which even the people who are condemning it are using as an excuse to trot out really old and really bad talking points about health care and health care reform and you know i i looked it up i don't know how many you guys remember who d b cooper was but d b cooper was um they made a movie with treat williams about them and made them into this whole folk hero and there were a half dozen at least copycats and what D. B. Cooper did was he hijacked a plane, extorted money, and then parachuted out of the

plane. And there were so many copyc-cad, and they'd ever found them. There were so many copycats because of this story that basically our entire aviation fleet had to be retrofitted with something called a Cooper Vane to prevent the back stairs from being lowered in flight so that you could parachute out. When you have people of dubious intelligence or seriousness, but nonetheless, lots of celebrity talking about how they're joyful like Taylor Lorenz did, this sends a really bad signal. And I think that this is one of these things. Normally I'm the guy who wags his finger at the catastrophizers, but I think this is really, really bad. And I think the arguments are in favor of even the murder is wrong, but you have to listen to their anger stuff, are pretty repugnant

as well. Megan? Yeah, it's utterly repugnant. It's silly. on so many levels, I barely even know where to start. But, okay, but it's clearly tapped into something. I disagree. I disagree. I think we need to, first of all, apply the Texas high school football stadium test, my favorite social media test, because I made it up, which is that in the state of Texas,

there are 87 high school football stadiums that seat more than 10,000 people. And if you would not say to yourself, Sarah's gotten drunk in the parking lots of 20 of them. The Katie Tigers fan base is up in arms about this. We have tapped into the underbelly of America. You should be very cautious about taking small trends on social media and assuming that they represent something larger than people with a terminal case of Twitter brain.

And I really think that this is the case. So as it happens, I literally just filed barely five moments before this podcast started. A column in which I actually look into this. I'm like, yes, you ask Americans what they think of our health care industry, only 31% of them say anything nice about it. But if you ask Americans about their own health insurance,

81% of them say it is either good or excellent. And if you look at international comparisons, people in the United States actually rank pretty high on thinking that they get good care. And they're not wrong, by the way. We are, for example, we get better cancer care than Europe because we're more likely to get access to cutting-edge treatment. If you look at single-payer systems like the UK or Canada, we experience lower wait times for

specialists or surgery, and that's generally true. It's extreme when you look at the single-payer systems, but it's generally true everywhere that we are less likely to wait two months or longer to get surgery or see a specialist than people in most countries. And if you look at what people say was the most important issue facing the country in 2024, it pulled below the economy, inflation, immigration. And I don't think that if anyone, if some lunatic, and I expect just because this tends to be a pattern with shootings like this, I expect we're going to find out that he had some

sort of a mental health crisis, either somehow to do with his surgery, he had back surgery three months ago, and there are medications and things like cerebral spinal fluid leaks that can cause this, they can cause kind of psychosis, or that he simply had an underlying mental health issue that sort of came into flower after his back. surgery for whatever reason. If someone like that had shot the head of the Fed, the Treasury Secretary, the head of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, I don't think anyone who was saying he has tapped into the rage of America would be saying that about someone who did that.

We'd be like, this is a lunatic who has clearly developed some sort of weird fixation and has come to think completely irrationally that somehow if he shoots this person, the problems he's angry about will be solved. Okay. How about this? I will grant you that it is not that I think if we took a poll of the country, this guy would be polling particularly well for president

or something like that. So I will grant you that this is, we're talking about a relatively small percentage to the American public who thinks this was a good idea. Nevertheless, it is also the case that people feel that it is socially acceptable, some number of people, however small, that it's socially acceptable to go out and cheer this in a way that we have not seen in the past, as you've mentioned, when there have been mass shootings, for instance, or people killed. this feels to me like a natural outgrowth of the political populist moment that we're in right now and a time related to that political populism where media, for instance, movies, television shows, books that are popular, often have an eat the rich plotline that is also pretty specific to our current age.

I don't mean there haven't been eat the rich ages in the past. But, you know, at the Oscars, what was it last year or the year before, like three of the seven movies were Eat the Rich movies, it may be a minority of people who are genuinely cheering or who want to be jailhouse brides. As Jonah pointed out, nevertheless, the fact that a network late night host thinks he can say that, that does seem like a moment in time that we should recognize as being unique as much as you want to tell these people that they're wrong or that there's not a lot of them. they do seem to have a cultural vibrancy that they did not have previously. Yeah, okay, so let me, let me qualify that then. I think it is fashionable among a certain, extremely small and extremely stupid slice of the elite

to do fake radical chic. And I actually think that part of this, I was reflecting on this today, is if you think about like 19th century novels or even early 20th century novels, people written by people, novels written by people who grew up in that period. So many of those novels have the scene where the little kid comes face to face with death for the first time.

And having been in the room when both my parents died and having previously seen someone bleed out on the street, and having seen what it looks like at the moment when a human being becomes a corpse, I could not be excited about that happening to anyone, and by anyone, I include like Osama bin Laden. I might recognize the necessity of it, but I would not be thrilled at the thought of watching a human being turn into me. The part of this is that these are young, I think mostly young people, not all.

You saw Elizabeth Warren do the engage. She was part of the yes-buttegrade. Yes, violence is bad butt. You know, people like Tim Wu at Columbia. You did see, you saw Sunny Hosten on the View kind of excusing this, medical contributor at CBS. You did see some of it among people who are really just old enough to know better.

But I think a lot of it is that we are in a lot of ways uniquely sheltered. And so we think that having a health care claim denied is the worst thing that can happen to you. We don't think about street violence as being something that is of a different order of magnitude. I'm not going to get into, does the United Healthcare deny too many claims? Is that bad?

I mean, all systems do it. Are they doing it enough too much? Those are fascinating questions. for the eight-hour podcast, I'm sure you have planned at some point. But street violence is a whole different level of terror. And I think that this is reflected in our criminal justice system where people often ask, why did Bernie Madoff, you know, get punished more lightly than someone who murders someone when he destroyed all of these lives?

And in fact, A, he didn't get punished and died in prison and got a very long sentence. But B, actually being afraid of losing your life savings is terrible. It is not as terrible as being afraid of being murdered. and the precautions that you have to take if you were routinely afraid of being murdered. And in fact, a lot of the discourse, I think this is also true around the discourse around Daniel Penny, who put a homeless man who was acting deranged and sort of saying things that sounded threatening into a chokehold and he died. He was just acquitted of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide. Anyway, he was acquitted of criminally negligent homicide. The jury deadlocked on, weirdly,

greater charge. But one of the things that was clear to me from watching that was the sheer number of people who had never been in a fist fight. And again, I'm not, I have never been in a fist fight since third grade. And so I am not going to argue about whether he should have used a chokehold he shouldn't have. It was whether he should have held it for as long because I am not an expert on those things. But what was just obvious was that neither was anyone else who was confidently opining and just asking, well, why didn't he do this other thing I saw in a movie somewhere? And if you've ever seen a row of this fight, which I have, I've worked on a construction side. The funny thing is, it looks a lot more like toddlers slapping each other

than the choreographed violence that we see in the movies. And so you see that movie violence and you think, well, you could have done this neat trick that I saw some, and you at some level, you're intelligent person, you know it's not real, but it still does influence your subconscious if you've never seen what real adult men were kind of trying to hurt each other really badly and how disorganized it is and how hard it is to pull those smooth moves that when the fight coordinator

has not told the guy to stand in the position that will allow you to execute them easily. And so I think part of it is just that our elites are so sheltered and they feel so aggrieved for reasons that are often not entirely clear to me that they treat words as violence, they treat claims adjustment as violence,

they treat everything except violence as violence. Words are violence and violence is words. Yeah, basically. Hey, isn't that Steve Hayes over there? Oh, is it? Oh, hey, Steve. Oh, my gosh. Hey, so here's my question to you, Steve.

What happens to our politics or our culture if the elites of society, however you want to define that, feel increasingly like they could be the subject of violence. because of their job or status more and more. And I'm thinking here, obviously, the assassination attempts, plural, on Donald Trump, the very close call at Justice Kavanaugh's house, at Nancy Pelosi's house, now the murder of a CEO because he's the CEO of a company. I don't know.

It makes me nervous what happens to a society that has that as just a thing that can happen. It should make you nervous. And I think the incidents you've mentioned are certainly the highest profile incidents. But I think this is happening, either the threats themselves, sometimes the incidents, are happening with much greater frequency than we understand. I think some of what we've seen in the debates on Capitol Hill over these nominations and the possibility that Republicans will vote against some.

some of Donald Trump's nominees, there is an undercurrent there of the threat of violence from people who would defy MAGA on some of these votes. You know, you have threats coming from sort of MAGA world to primary people like Joni Ernst, who initially said that she had some questions about the nomination of Pete Hagseth to be Secretary of Defense. I think those are totally within bounds, perfectly appropriate part of our political back and forth, political fighting, people who don't like her position, don't like the fact that she's questioned this, have every right to run primaries. There have also been people who have singled out members of her staff, suggested they're the problem by name, not necessarily

in public threatening violence, but I think there are, that certainly people have taken that, that, you know, those tweets have been circulated on Capitol Hill as evidence that this is going a little bit further, or family members who have been identified by sort of Maga World, family members of senators who have been identified by Maga World as potentially problematic in this nominations process. And they're physically afraid for, to do what they might otherwise do. You saw this in the David Ignatius column about why Mike Gallagher, friend of the dispatch left Congress. He said, I signed up for this. I signed up for this public profile, but my wife and kids didn't. And he's out. And we lost, I think, a very, very good

lawmaker because of it. There are many, many other such examples, some of them public, most of them not public at this point. Member of Congress, I know, who was physically thrown up against a car because of a vote that he took on a Donald Trump priority. I do think this. I do think This is a huge problem. Let me jump on sort of a second point. I agree with what Megan and Joan have said largely on this question of the discussion about Luigi Mangione. There's a second part of this that really bothers me and it has to do with the media. And Megan, you sort of started and then said, I'm not going to go there.

We're not going to have this debate because we don't have eight hours to have the discussion. I wouldn't want to have the debate anyway. I think it's hugely problematic that what this murder has done is trigger exactly the kind of debate that this murderer wanted to trigger. And so we're now having a national discussion about whether United Health Care denies too many claims and the policies and practices of our health insurance industries. This is undoubtedly part of why he did what he did. And I think by now engaging in this debate, we're making it worse. I had a call with Deccan Garvey, our executive editor yesterday, about exactly this. We talked about, hey, we should cover this, we should write about it, we should talk about it on our podcasts.

But one of the things I'd like us to avoid as an institution, I mean, we give our, you know, our writers, our newsletter writers, our columnists and others wide latitude, they can write about whatever they want. But in terms of commissioning pieces, going out and trying to get pieces that we would publish, Declan and I talked about it. We made a decision we don't want to do that. We don't want to go get people to write stories, either defending or explaining sort of the health insurance industry, and how it makes these decisions or criticizing because it's exactly what this guy would have wanted us to do. And I think that's a huge problem. And you don't see many people exercising much restraint in that regard.

Right, if you learn that shooting the CEO of industry you don't like will spark nationwide debate to reform industry you don't like. Boy, your incentives. That's exactly what's happening here. It is exactly what's happening here. The crowd that always says, look, I just wanted to start a conversation. I want to start a national conversation. They make it sound like all national conversations are worth having when most national conversations are hot garbage. Put that aside, saying that somehow it justifies murdering someone because you launched a national conversation is really just sort of, it's appeasement. And it's gross.

Murder is bad, but national conversation. The idea of a conversational starting pistol, literally, is truly disturbing. Although I really should say that my strong suspicion based on the fact that this guy had surgery, disappeared, caught off contact with his family. then reappears to do this, is behaving in odd ways, like handing police a fake ID that he must have known was compromised,

and then shouting at the courthouse, reading his apparent very short manifesto in which he suggests that he is the first person to face the dilemma of the U.S. healthcare system with the brutal honest it requires. I think he is probably mentally unstable, and I'm not sure how deterrable he is. I think that people like that,

are kind of they're responsive to media because they copycat. But not because it's not the policy stuff. It's literally talking about it at all. And I'm not even sure that refraining from mentioning

their names is enough. I have at times toyed with just the idea of never reporting that these incidents happen at all because it's pretty clear actually the kind of current era of mass shootings

started with Columbine and cable news, which was able to broadcast this 24-7 and that the media attention itself is there's a lot of other things, gun policy, et cetera, but that the media attention itself was a major force, both in starting the spike. For example, these shootings dropped during a like kind of high attention, free mass assassination kind of shootings, which I think of as one category. They dropped during 9-11 because the media's attention was elsewhere.

And so I've toyed with the idea that we should just pretend they didn't happen. For various reasons, I don't think that will ever happen. And I'm part of the problem. As I say, I just filed a column on this, but it really is a problem. But I don't think it's that like, because it's a problem because we're having a debate about the thing he wanted. Because what he wanted is, I think, probably going to turn out to be so disordered. But more of the fact that we are having a debate. I don't know what to do about that.

Well, we will now ignore it by moving on to a new topic. 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. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months.

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without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Jonah, is this the lamest duck president in American history? And I want to give a few fun facts. You know, initially, we didn't inaugurate presidents till March. and in fact it felt like

that lame duck period was too long itself which is why we moved the inauguration to January so we've definitely always had the lame duck problem and then for historical examples I don't know

I kind of wanted you to talk about Jimmy Carter and the transition from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan which to me has at least some similarities you've got hostages being held in Iran at the end of Jimmy Carter's term

in his lame duck period and you have what feels like not just an election of a one-term president where Americans change horses but something like a bigger wave of what that election meant in terms of a bigger

cultural change in American politics wanting not just a new horse but a new direction, et cetera. But yeah, I mean, I wasn't alive during the lame duck period of Jimmy Carter. Is Joe Biden Jimmy Carter or is it Worse? What do you think? Well, I mean, I was nine during the lame duck period.

So you remember it well. You were reading the Wall Street Journal Daily. Actually, you know, it was the Hendrik Hertzberg days of the New Republic and, you know, and they were kind of like torn because half of them were like Atari Democrats and half of them weren't. But no, I think there's, I mean, the reason why Jimmy Carter comes up is because he's the last really lame, lame duck president we had. I don't think you can say that about George H.W. Bush. George H.W. Bush was a really hands-on good manager of international affairs, and he wrapped up a lot of the stuff that happened at the end of the Cold War well and worked well with the Clinton people in a way. And I think some people felt kind of bad for firing Poppy. But I don't think, I don't think, I mean, I think the better comparison is probably, and this sounds mean, but I'll live with it, post-stroke Woodrow Wilson, where basically, I mean, Biden, doing better than the near comatose Woodrow Wilson was, you know, not a lot better. One of the things I think that is particularly sad about this moment, I don't want to trigger Steve,

but is the way in which they're looking at things like Syria and all this and saying, see, all of our foreign policy plans are coming together, right? They're making it sound like, like they meant to do this. And it's unbelievable. I think it's legitimately problematic. I mean, you're not going to, I mean, the Boland Amendment stuff was always hot garbage, right? But, and you're certainly not going to do it about an incoming president, but we basically have a weird quasi-dual presidency right now where every government around the world is thinking about what parting gift to give to Joe Biden and thinking about how to curry favor or deal with Donald Trump. And I don't think that's super helpful, but I also don't think it's avoidable. You know, I mean,

I recently wrote that President Biden should be impeached. I don't think that's going to happen. So we're just going to have to, you know, ride it out. It is a good reminder of why he needed to step down, why he shouldn't have run again in the first place. Jonah said things in that little moment that were both hilariously false and sort of profoundly true. The hilariously false thing was, I don't want to trigger Steve. That's total nonsense. It wants to trigger me every time he possibly can. The profoundly true thing is, I mean, this, the revisionist history over the past few days from Biden world on what's happening now. Remember, I think it was within the past two years.

Jake Sullivan was waxing poetic at a, you know, one of these think tank national security conversations about how the Middle East has never been this calm and peaceful. and, you know, everything we've seen since, it was as if they wanted to just to seed the changes that we've now seen, which is sort of preposterous on its face. We talked, Joan and I talked about this a little bit on the, we did a dispatch premium town hall the other night and we got into this a little bit. I mean, I think it's in some ways the most fitting end of the Biden presidency you can possibly imagine because it's basically been a sleepwalking presidency, particularly over the past. a couple of years that I think has done tremendous damage to the country, both in terms of actual policies pursued, but also in terms of the norms that he was elected in some respects to restore. You look at the fact that, you know, the country basically decided, I mean, actually decided, I believe the polls, this long before that June 27th debate, but certainly

after the June 27th debate, the country, the Democratic Party, decided that he wasn't fit to run for president again. And I don't think they made that decision because they were thinking about 2027 and the concern that Joe Biden wouldn't be a good president in 2027, they made that decision based on what they saw on the June 27th debate. If this guy's not up to the job, he shouldn't be president. And there was basically no real discussion about the fact that He had six months left in his term, this guy who was having difficulty articulating his thoughts, completing a sentence. That, I think, has done real damage to our norms.

And we need to get that norms thing from Cheers. Plus, by the way, it just really does feel like Kamil Harris is just recuperating at the spa and having a long wine, boozy lunch. Because, like, where is she? Like, you'd think that the president is not up to it. The vice president's supposed to sort of be around a bit. As I'm sure y'all are very aware, there is a thing called campaign flu that basically your body is working on so much adrenaline and it sort of knows it can't get sick that the second a campaign is over, the entire staff and especially the candidate, truly, not psychosomatically, but become very, very sick, often like the sickest they've been for years. So my guess is she's sick.

It's been a month. Has she, how long does this flu last? Years. I think that this is a good argument for two constitutional amendments, one to shorten the lame duck period yet again, since very few of our candidates now have to travel by horseback from their home in the mountain west. And number two, one, to set a maximum age at which you can run for president or indeed any higher office. Because I think that, well, part of this, we've had a lame duck basically

since you stepped down. But I also think we have really kind of had a lame duck since before that because the president was clearly not in charge. And while this can happen to someone at any age, you know, a dear friend of mine's husband dropped dead at the age of 53, and it could have been a disabling stroke. Those things happen. They are much more likely when you were in your 70s and 80s. Even when you are not doing literally the hardest job in the world, there is a terrifying graph from a paper that was released, I don't know, I want to say like 10, 15 years ago. But they just asked a question of if the lottery pot is $2 million

and five people hold winning numbers, how much does each person get? And you're like, thinking there's a trick here. There's no trick. But like only 50% of people at age 50 can do the mental arithmetic. And by the time you're in your 80s, it's fallen to 10%. And it's just the reality of cognitive decline. I know that none of you have had it,

but I definitely now, like, forget names and, you know, I'm like, why am I holding the coffee pot, et cetera? And it just gets worse as you age. And we should try to have, you know, fewer people in the White House who are like, why am I holding the staff meeting in the middle of the meeting? You know, we can. If they're awake. We can, and, you know, and I also think that the counterargument,

to that before the Biden presidency was there are mechanisms in place. We've got the 25th Amendment. We've got, and what this has definitively shown us is that those mechanisms have failed. And, I mean, in the first place, the 25th Amendment's really not set up to handle a president who is still, like, still cognitively there enough to understand what's happened. If he is a total psychotic break and is, you know, in a locked ward on ketamine or, you know, or on Thorazine or whatever they give you in those circumstances, that's fine.

And if he's in a coma, that's fine. It's not fine, but you understand what I mean. Like the amendment can work as intended. But if the president is just suffering from, say, a manic episode or is kind of cognitively impaired but not totally disabled, the president can within four days just contest it, go to Congress. even if the president loses the vote in Congress, then they can just go back and recontest it the next day.

And you can just keep doing that forever. And that is a situation. That's a recipe for a constitutional crisis. It is an invitation to our strategic rivals to get busy abroad. It's just a bad situation. And it is most likely to occur when we can least afford it, which is when some sort of crisis is happening that just requires the vice president to step in and say, we are invoking the 25th Amendment.

So the other problem is that we can now see the extent to which the president's advisors will go to hide the disability, the extent, even from like the cabinet, the extent to which people in Congress will, accept upon threat of immediately losing an election, pretend that it's not happening, that donors will pretend that it's not happening,

that everyone will kind of close their eyes and say, well, I guess this is better than the alternative which is that our rivals might get some political advantage here. And so we actually just need to step in and say, nope, you cannot do this. And we've had this issue with senators. We've had this issue with a number of people who should not be in office, whose deficits have been hidden.

We cannot afford that in the 21st century, and we should fix the problem. Steve, have you been surprised that we haven't seen more Democrats distanced themselves from Biden before leaving office so that they can have the record of distancing themselves from a very, very unpopular president. For instance, I'm thinking, in the wake of his pardon of Hunter Biden,

there were two senators who came out and said, don't like it, bad idea. I assumed, just from, forget the truth of the matter asserted, if you will, just from your own political expediency, I thought everyone would come out and do that on the left because it was in their interest. Now that he is a lame duck,

he's heading out of office, he has no political future, he did something that obviously is patently unpopular and that has no sort of larger bearing on liberalism as a cause or progressivism. Why wouldn't you come out and say no? It's sort of like how 20 years later everyone feels very comfortable saying Bill Clinton was a predator,

but they wouldn't say it at the time. Like now they can say it now in the moment and then point back to it and say, see, I'm a truth teller and I call out my own party when I need to or whatever. And yet that didn't really, that wave didn't come, despite there being individual Democrats that absolutely did do that and should get credit for it. Yeah, it's a really interesting point you raise. I would say, number one, there's not the incentive to be the truth teller and call out your own party as much as there once was for all of the reasons of polarization and things that we've talked about here. But I would suspect, and I have done zero reporting on this, I haven't talked to anybody in a position to know this, but just based on sort of observing what's happening.

It seems to me that Democrats, especially elected Democrats, are in this date of complete defeat and exhaustion, both from having, you know, watched the disaster, the slowly unfolding disaster that was the last year in both Democratic electoral politics and, I would say, in governance. you know, they're sitting here looking up at Donald Trump and a Donald Trump who's claiming that he has a huge mandate that, you know, a Donald Trump who has Republicans sort of enthusiastically behind him. I think Democrats just don't, they're not saying anything about that because they're not saying much about anything else either. And by the way, just to, since I mentioned that they should get credit, Representative Greg Lansman, but as someone who wants people to believe in public service again, a setback. Colorado Senator Michael Bennett says Biden put personal interest ahead of duty and

further erodes America's faith that the justice is fair and equal for all. Democratic Greg Stanton of Arizona said that while he respects the president, I think he got this one wrong. That's it. That's all I could find. John Fetterman says that Hunter Biden and Donald Trump both deserve pardons after politically motivated trials. I'll count that in its own way of at least like not feeling like you need to tow the party line on this one. Jonah. thoughts on partisanship in this moment? I mean, I guess it felt like you had this election where the results were pretty dominating for Trump

in a way that actually felt like it wasn't that the Trump campaign had run some amazingly clever race, but that the country itself was moving in a different direction away from Joe Biden. And again, you would think that the left would take every opportunity to capture political advantage when they have the chance, right? both parties all they really care about. There's no first principles to political parties.

There's only getting to 51%. Here we are, and it's mid-December, and after some initial hand-wringing from the left about like, okay, you know, these like dumb-dum groups on the far left cost us a lot. I don't see anyone doing anything about those far-left groups. I don't see anyone really pushing themselves away from Biden or Harris, for that matter.

And it appears that a lot of the soul-searching conversations that you thought we were on the brink of having just didn't materialize and everyone went home for Christmas or something. Yeah, I mean, I'm not, I'm not sure how to put that in the prism of partisanship, as you put it, because I kind of, I'm kind of with Steve on this. I think a lot of Democrats, they look at the,

we've all seen those county maps like the New York Times did where they show the partisan direction of each district in the country. And it's just, it's like 400, 98 red arrows pointing rightward and three blue arrows pointing leftward. And some of the biggest shifts happened in places where neither party campaigned. A lot of them like happened in places like New York where, you know, which is essentially, you know, the use of phrase from the movie Avatar is like liberalism's home tree. And so I think for Democrats in particular, what this feels like is a rejection of them more than an embrace of Trump.

And in a lot of ways, I think that hurts more because it is, I think you can find a lot of data that says a lot of Americans still don't really love Donald Trump. And, you know, there's a bit of a honeymoon period right now where they're sort of hoping for the best, you know, and all that. But there's still a lot of swing voters who don't love the full Trump effect and the full Trump show. But what the data is pretty clear is a lot of voters really just don't like what they associate with the Democratic Party. So if you are a true, true resistance type, who truly believes that Donald Trump is a dictator and a horrible person and all of these kinds of things, to find out that they dislike you more

really hurts. And I think, you know, they're, I think as we speak, they're trying to pick a new head of the DNC, that'll tell us something. Like, I think they're in a bit of a denial. And not to go back to the Mangione thing, but I think the Mangione thing is kind of a sign of where the really online, very progressive people want to be is taking this radical chic private school Che Guevara as the thing to talk about to indict, you know, neoliberal health care systems and not talk about the fact that people don't like them and that their culture war project and their bet on identity politics has done so much damage to their brand that actually the guy they hate more than any politician in their lives was seen

as the clear lesser of two evils to their core voters. And so like, I mean, maybe, maybe Kamala Harris has campaign flu. But I think a lot of people are just hitting the sauce, you know, figuratively speaking, about what's happened to the Democratic Party and, you know, I kind of don't blame them. You know, you and I, Jetta, grew up on the Upper West Side at around the same time. And there is a type from the Upper West side that I remember very well, and I'm curious if you do as well. And it was the person who had come of age sometime between about 1966 and 1973, and they had been part of a rising left-wing movement that just felt like it was going to keep rolling on to greater and greater victories. They were going to remake society. And then by,

It happened in the late 70s, early 80s, but I think that the kind of the crowning moment of this is in the movie Heather's, when the hippie teacher is saying, you know, is talking about how they need to do a healing circle and all this, and the principal just looks at her and says, call me when the shuttle land.

And right, like at that point, they're not even like the opposition that people are like fighting against. They're just a joke. And the people who had gone through that, it was weirdly damaging for them. There was just a kind of bewilderment about them that they did not understand what had happened. Where had the magic gone? And they had all sorts of creative explanations for where it had gone.

I recall one really elaborate conspiracy theory about Cargill, which seemed an odd joint Cargill secretly running the country. But they never really got over. it, right? Because what they had, they'd had this incredible, heady sense of power at the moment when you have no reference point to understand that that's not normal. And then it just evaporated really quickly. And I think I see that now. And there was also a lot of rage, right? They would just go into these like spittle-flecked rants about stuff at dinner parties and stuff in a way that seemed a little overwrought, even to me at the age of 14 when nothing seems to overwrought. Like, I think that the current progressive left with the great

de wokening is going through something similar now where like they experienced from around 2014 to around 2022 this incredible accelerating power. They're getting people, they're getting the opinion editor fired from the New York Times. They're doing this. Corporations are catering to them. Everyone's catering to them. And now everyone just turned around and we're like, well, that was a mistake. Stop. They certainly are not, they recognize what has happened, but they, I don't think they have grappled

with what has happened, and they are certainly not grappling with why it has happened. And so, and I think that you can actually bring the United Healthcare CEO thing into that, where there is this rage, you feel like, and here's a target, here's something I can enjoy feeling powerful again. And there is no one so enraged by a lack of power as someone who used to have it. Yeah. There really needs to remember the movie falling down, which was a huge, not a huge box office of sex, but a huge cultural moment for a certain crowd, because it was the movie that crystallized the idea that white middle-aged men were the problem with America, particularly ones who were part of like the defense industrial complex and all this kind of stuff. And the

famous line from it is where Michael Douglas says to Robert Duvall, you mean I'm going to the bad guy? And it tapped into this sense of existential panic in the culture for a certain kind of slice of white men. We desperately need a movie where the DEI director at Brynmar College is cornered on the roof after killing the CEO of some company. And the cops say to her, it's time to go. And she's like, you mean, I'm the bad guy? Because like these people, like, they don't get that they're basically fundamentally been rejected. at a really, that doesn't mean that progressivism entirely has been rejected or that welfare, you know, like social democracy ideas are gone. In fact, a lot of them are being incorporated

by the freaking Republican Party. The thing is, is that the cultural approach, the shibbolists that they want to use to punish people and separate out the unclean from the clean and the Brahmins from the masses, America just is enough with that crap. And the problem is, is they still control a lot of commanding heights of the culture. argue to you that it is the way you know a movement has actually succeeded is when it reaches this sort of peak and then its excesses get rejected because everything else has already been so enmeshed into the culture, into corporations, into higher education, when they finally gotten rejected, it's actually because they've won.

I think the trans thing is the perfect example of that, where they thought this was going to be, okay we had the success with feminism and then we had the success with title nine and then we had the big success with gay marriage and equal rights for homosexuals and this is going to be just like that and it isn't you can say it should be or you can say it shouldn't be we can have that we've had that argument everyone i think knows where we all come down on that and it doesn't you don't have to be black and white and all that and all the rest but it is not the same thing and the american people don't think it's the same thing and that ad that they they them ad for Kamala Harris, I don't think was all about trans stuff,

but it was a signal about how these people have their own crazy agenda and they don't care about like normal stuff and look how and look how crazy their agenda is. And that has to drive some people just absolutely bonkered. And it's why for the first time in my lifetime, and I think even parents' lifetime, but for the first time, the Republican Party is the cool party. because it's the out group, if that makes sense, right? The Democrats are the ones that have all the power. They're the man. They're the ones trying to enforce their shibbolists

and their way of thinking and their speech. And therefore, the group that is iconoclastic and chic and cool, actually, for the first time, they're right. It's the Republicans. See what they do with that. But for now, it involves NFL dancing. Steve, Basharraf. Al-Assad has fled Syria.

The rebels are now in control. We talked about what was going on there last week. Is this about Iran at this point? Like when it comes to being an American, you know, and why I should care about this, Iran now meeting with Israel to like divvy up Syria, basically. Europe wanting to prevent another refugee crisis. Who are the winners and losers here, aside from Syrians, of course, who still lack a stable, safe place to live?

Yeah, I mean, I think in some broad geopolitical sense, it is about Iran. I can't remember a time since I've been following the region and Iran, in particular, that Iran has been as weak as it is right now. Absolutely extraordinary, especially when you contrast it with where Iran was in the days before October 7th and where Iran thought it was in the days immediately after. the extent to which the Sunni Gulf states have also been emboldened to sort of stop taking Iran's grief to make private gestures once again to Israel about peace, about stability, about some level of diplomacy. Again, I expect we've seen those obviously emerge in public during the first Trump administration. I expect that we'll see more of that right now as people further their resolve on Iran. It does have other implications, certainly implications for the Syrian people and the images that we're seeing of the prisoners,

the prisoners who have been killed, I think methodically slaughtered by Bashar al-Assad's regime. We've known this. He's responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of Syrians over the years, but to once again see these pictures and see the video of prisoners who haven't seen the light of day for months, suddenly being freed, I think, you know, refocuses the mind on a country and a tragedy that had been too long ignored. But I also think it has implications for our policy. I mean,

I don't know if you caught this week that J.D. Vance went after Washington Post columnist Josh Rogan, when Rogan made a pretty simple and I think an objectionable observation that This is a good moment for the Syrian people to have Bashar al-Assad gone. And there's a lot of complications and a lot of the people who did the freeing are not good people. We should be worried about them. But Vance's response to that was sort of we should learn the lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq and sort of not be further entangled in this part of the world. And, you know, that's certainly one way to look at it.

I would say the opposite argument is we should remember the lessons of Afghanistan to a lesser extent Iraq and remain involved in trying to shape outcomes in that part of the world when you look at what happened in Afghanistan became obviously a breeding ground for terrorists, the growth of al-Qaeda, Taliban took control, and eventually caused us a lot of trouble because we ignored Afghanistan

and these sort of non-states or failed states that become havens for people who want to do us harm. And Steve, what about our involvement? Like, are we going into Syria? How will this affect my life? No, I can't imagine that we're going to go in, go in, quote unquote, go into Syria. I mean, we're in Syria right now, just to be clear. Right.

Any further than we already are. What happens if we pull out of Syria? I mean, you've got folks coming into the government that have mentioned that specifically that they want to bring Americans home from Syria. Yeah, I mean, I think that the J.D. Vance comment that I mentioned and, you know, Donald Trump's sort of broad view of this suggests that we put. probably won't do a lot to try to shape outcomes there or have a strong voice there. I think that carries tremendous risk, and I think it makes it more likely that in three years

or five or eight, we could be looking at the rise of jihadist groups that have their sights on places far beyond the region, and it's dangerous. Just one point on this. Look, J.D. Vance is a classic example of some of sort of the cliché of jihadist. general's fighting the last war. And you can, there are legitimate arguments against nation building or the democracy agenda and all that kind of stuff. And there are also legitimate responses to accusations that we were involved in nation building and, and all these things. It all gets complicated, but he's the one who's mired in the past in the way he sees this stuff. And the idea

that you can't root for one of the most, the most heinous probably mass murderer other than maybe Vladimir Putin of the 21st century. I mean, the things we're finding out from this prison are horrendous. And the idea that you cannot take some satisfaction that this happened, that you can't at least say, I mean, this is not some snotnose punk

murdering a healthcare CEO, right? This is a horrible regime being overturned, and you can say, yes, we don't want to get involved in, you know, nation building, but this is a good news. And what I think Vance misses is that he wants to say any involvement, that all involvement is involvement. But like there was always an argument, the John Bolton School, my friend Annie McCarthy, lots of people during the Iraq period where of the rubble doesn't make trouble school, which is different than nation building, right, which is different than standing up

democratic regimes. But it's still involvement. It's still hawkishness. Israel right now is bombing the crap of basically out of all of Syria's military assets in Syria because they don't want that stuff falling into bad guys' hands.

And it is a staggering degradation of Syria's military capacity and by extension Iran's military capacity. That's involved. That is like violating these just stay behind your borders kind of idea, but they're doing it for their national security.

There are things along those lines we could be doing for our national security that don't involve getting, you know, the kind of phantasmagorical American empire building that J.D. Vance wants to argue with that never really existed in the first place, but really wouldn't exist going forward. And I just like there's such a straw man

to so much of J.D. Vance's stuff and that crowds... Nobody's making those arguments. Nobody's making those arguments. I'm against Forever Wars, unlike you guys. And it's like, show of hands, who here's for Forever Wars? I mean, it's like it is the cheapest form of argumentation. It's the same as the boots on the ground argument against supporting Ukraine. I mean, there's this huge logical leap that if you send Ukraine supplies and money to help

it defend itself from an aggressive attack by Vladimir Putin, that, you know, therefore, in six months or two years, everybody's in the, United States is going to be serving in that war. I mean, it just doesn't make any sense. Or that if you really have an opinion about it, that somehow you are leading to. All right, we'll take that as a transition into some not worth your time. Speaking of our armed forces and the Secretary of Defense, Steve, I wanted to have you weigh in on a story and Megan about how journalism works. So, ProPublica got a tip that, I guess, Pete Hegseth, who has talked about, how he applied and was accepted at West Point, but decided not to attend, in fact, did not.

They called West Point. West Point, according to them, twice said that they had no record of Pete Heggseth ever applying, which would make Pete Heggseth a pretty big liar since he said he was accepted and turned down West Point. They went to Pete Heggseth for comment. He provided them with, in fact, his letter of acceptance from West Point. And so, ProPublica dropped the story. and their argument is that that's how journalism works.

There wasn't a story here, so he didn't write it. The end. The pushback from the right has been, well, wait, the story is that West Point lied to you twice. Who was your initial source that he hadn't been accepted at West Point? Maybe that was the story. And Steve, I'm a little torn because on the one hand, I get the point that when you have partisan or activist media and they start out with a negative narrative, and that it doesn't come to fruition

and then they just don't print anything at all. They should actually print like, hey, we thought this bad thing, but it turned out not to be true, that that would sort of be very honest with their readers. On the other hand, set aside the fact that West Point lied, quote unquote. Like, let's just say they were mistaken.

It wasn't anyone's fault. You know, their records were in a flood and they don't have it. What is the story? Like, what? They were really going to publish an article that was like, hey, we chased after this thing and then it turned out not to be true.

Like, if you're Pete Heggseth, do you even want that printed at that point? Because you could imagine an accusation where the person would like not to be known for this accusation that turned out not to be true because even repeating the accusation could be pretty negative. So, Steve, how does journalism work? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a fascinating case study. And I think basically everybody has most of it wrong, all the people involved in all the people who are making these arguments. there was a sort of an initial response from team Hegseth and the Trump transition folks that obviously West Point was lying. Obviously they only set out to do a hit piece.

And just the mere fact that they were asking these questions demonstrates their bad faith. Well, I don't think that's true. I think it would have been very interesting if Pete Hegseth had in fact said that he'd been accepted to West Point and hadn't been accepted to West Point. perfectly legitimate story. It seems to me that what the ProPublica editor said that he had his team do, which was reach out to West Point, get a comment, understand the process. It is journalism. And if the story were to end there, I think that he would have a pretty good defense. I think that the mistake that the editor made and explained it, he did about an 11 tweet thread, or it was, I think,

a four-tweet thread and then he felt the need after taking more criticism to add more context was to sort of justify just dropping the story. Like, therefore there wasn't a story, so we dropped it. But I'm with you, or at least what I'm reading between the lines of your question, Sarah. I think it's pretty significant that West Point gave pro-public a bad information about its records. I think their explanation, if I'm remember, it correctly was that, you know, they, they checked and they didn't see it, and then they later saw it, and they, you know, they looked at the acceptance letter and they accept the head set version of events and have now confirmed it. But I, as an editor, and certainly if I were

the reporter, I would want to know why the initial claim was wrong. The initial claim was mistaken. And maybe you really reported out and you press people and you find out, eh, this was just an actual mistake. And we sent an intern to look at it. up and the intern didn't know where to look and the database and the database was wrong. And by the way, we've had problems with that database over the years. And if you can show that, I think you get to a point where to your question, Sarah, you say, this isn't a story and we're not going to run anything about it. I do think, however, I would be very interested in reading the story about why one of the

country's premier military training outpost, the university, was providing either false information or bad information to a journalistic outlet about the incoming or potentially incoming Secretary of Defense. That seems to me in itself a story. Now, I have sort of further background that makes me even more curious about this. I did a story a long time ago about what happened with the documents that were captured in Osama bin Laden's compound in Abadabad after the U.S. government took possession of them. And there was this unbelievable years long back and forth, primarily between the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA. And at one point, the Obama administration's National Security Council got involved and selectively leaked

25 of those documents to the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, who then did an analysis of those selectively leaked 25 documents. And the analysis happened to tell the country exactly what the Obama administration was trying to say about al-Qaeda and about the threat for jihadist terror, which was there wasn't really much of a threat anymore. Well, it turns out that those documents had been handpicked. They weren't at all representative. And so I wanted to to ask questions about why were these documents chosen? Who made these decisions? Why were we given a misleading understanding of what the threat was

and a selective and, I think, awful sense of what the broader collection of documents was? Anyway, I talked to everybody I could possibly talk to, including the people at West Point, who, it turns out, in an interview with me, lied about what had happened, just told me things that weren't true because they were protecting, I think, the institution, they were protecting the Obama National Security Council.

And I certainly don't want to suggest that people who work at West Point, why? I mean, I don't think this is true. I don't think this is representative. But I would be interested in the Hague Seth story and the backstory there regardless. I'm especially interested in light of this. And a final point on just that aspect of it. I have, you know, I still stay in touch with a lot of people who follow military intelligence and these matters. And a number, I've heard from a number of them or read things that they've observed on social media and elsewhere.

And I've been fascinated to learn that these people who you wouldn't necessarily describe as, you know, Trump defenders or in the tank, whatever, smart national security analysts, former members of U.S. intelligence. also want to know more about why West Point provided bad information to ProPublica here. They think that there's a story here. So I would love to see what the more detailed explanation is. I'm sure we'll see more about what's happened here. But I think there was a story initially, potentially. I think that ProPublica was right, that it did the things that journalists do to find the story. And I think that they're wrong. And I agree with the Trump administration people who say that just because the original claims didn't prove true doesn't mean there's not a story there.

Megan, thoughts. How does journalism work? I think the most parsimonious explanation for what happened. Look, as a former IT person, although now a long time ago, I would be shocked if West Point has not migrated its admissions records at least once during the past 20 years. This was, in fact, their explanation that it was in an archived database and that they didn't know to check the archived database. But, you know, if you read also the statements from, remember, they checked twice.

They called him the first time the person said, we have no record of him ever having applied. And they said, to be clear, that means he didn't apply, but also couldn't have been accepted. And they wrote back that time and said, 100%. So, like, they also weren't checking into whether there was an archive database, which, of course, do any of us when you're asking about something from the 90s would be kind of an obvious, hey, do I actually have records from the 90s on this thing

that I'm searching? Yeah, so my second guess would be that the person, this was a youngster, to whom everything that happened before about 2010 might as well have occurred, you know, sometime before the Battle of Hastings, and they just don't think of it, right? I do think that there is, like, I think the odds that someone in the communications office of West Point was like, time to get Pete Hegsa. I mean, for no other, if for no other reason, then like, the odds that you are wrong will be as exposed as wrong. And then this guy will be your boss seem unacceptably high. So I think that it's probably not malicious.

It's probably dumb. And I think, why do I feel like if I called any school right now and asked if so insisting, was accepted for admissions, they would tell me they couldn't tell me because that's private. They don't release that information. It seems weird to me that they answered the question at all. And so they were so sure of themselves,

that raises eyebrows for me. I think service academies may have public record stuff that most schools don't. Yeah, they have to go through FOIA for. Like once again, you don't just get a call. That just may be their policy in a way that it wouldn't repent because it's public, like, you know, it involves like

congressmen and there's a whole bunch of stuff that just doesn't apply to even public universities. It's weird. So the answer is I really don't know. So did ProPublica do the right thing? And what should we think about when you're chasing opo on someone and you find out it's not true? Do you have a responsibility to say you got this opo? You can't say from where. But someone told you this appo and we tracked it down and it's not true. Or do you do the right thing by saying like, oh, it's not true. So we just don't print anything? I would not write it because there is this

where there's smoke, there's fire problem which is that if you say someone said that we got a tip that Pete Headset was not admitted to West Point but we checked it out and it was wrong people on the internet are going to snip off the second half of that sentence

and turn it into the scandal like people will just vaguely remember this happened they won't remember what the resolution was this is why newspapers I mean I literally when I'm doing like a big like a piece that is important and has a lot of fact elements. I will literally have trouble sleeping. I will literally like wake up at three in the morning and re-google facts just to make sure

that I didn't lose something, I didn't miss something. Because you don't ever want to be in the position of printing something that people will remember and not remember that it was a lie. And so I think not printing it is in fact 100% the correct thing. I think what conservatives are mad about, I don't know, justifiably is a strong word. is that ProPublica would not have been interested in the story if it were a Democrat, and they would not have been interested in the story of if West Point had lied to them. That's not what they do. It's not about them not publishing it. It's about them chasing down rumors about Pete Hegset, but not about Tim Walz. That they, yes, exactly. That that's not what they do, and that irritates people. But like, come on, there's a ton of outlets on the right that are the same way. That, you know, Fox News is a lot more interested in running this story about a Democratic Secretary of Defense than a Republican one. That is a the reality of media in 2024, and I have spent a lot of

time kind of railing against that. I lost that fight within my industry, and that is just those are the rules of the game, and it's not, I think conservatives still have this kind of lingering sense of grievance, this belief that there's this huge, powerful establishment media

into which they vaguely lump ProPublica because ProPublica does get, if they write something and it hits, it's going to end up in the New York Times, it's going to end up in a way that if the free beacon writes something and it hits, and it's probably not less likely to end up in the New York Times or on CBS or what have you. It's not that it never breaks through,

but it has to be a bigger story and a bigger get in order to break. So I think conservatives have the sense that there's this vast, really powerful apparatus that's a raid against them, and then this teeny tiny little beleaguered conservative media. And like, it is not 2005, guys. So first of all, you know, our influence is sadly declining. and linear TV is now, which is cable and broadcast,

that's now also in decline. And in the meantime, all of these podcasts and so forth have grown massively in influence. So the idea that there's this huge imbalance is, I think, incorrect. And in fact, I would argue, I wrote this column in, I should say, a mainstream newspaper, guys, there is absolutely liberal media bias. It is real.

And the people I know who argue that that's not true, I just, what color is the sky in your planet? But I now think it mostly hurts Democrats. It doesn't, it used to, I think in like 2005, it was a little boost for Democrats of the polls. We can argue about how big it was, but they had an advantage for the fact that it was harder to get negative stories published against them and easier to get positive stories published about them than it was for Republicans.

But these days, precisely because readers have sorted in much the same way that voters have, we're mostly only talking to people who agree with us. And so the upshot of that is that actually, and I think the Biden story is a huge example of this, right? I do think that the media covered for him. I think it is more complicated sociologically than the kind of conspiracy that conservatives imagined. But there was a combination of like, I really want this guy to win.

He's a nice guy. I know his people. I trust his people. They're people like me. have dinner at their houses, et cetera, like on and on and on, and that the upshot of that was not that that helped Joe Biden, because voters could see what was happening. The upshot of printing all of those ludicrous takes about how the videos of Joe Biden being clearly debilitated were actually cheap fakes was that Democrats fooled each other into keeping

him in office until the point at which it was too late to find a viable replacement who might have had a better chance of defeating Donald Trump, or even to give Kamala Harris longer to stand up a campaign. And so I think conservatives, like, the two quake is not entirely wrong. I don't think ProPublica would have gone after this story if it was a Democrat. I think they would have been more interested in why they got a false story if it was a Democrat. But that said, I think that this is, this should be a really, really minor resentment for conservatives at this point because they are on much more even footing ground, even competitive ground than in 2024 than they were in 2005.

And that Republicans should just stop thinking about liberal media bias as a big problem they face. It is not. It is a big problem in Democrats' face. They should be glad for it. They should be like, no, don't be fair to us. Tell your people, everything's fine. Un-kew the polls, guys.

I'm not sure you're unskewing hard enough. Try harder. maybe Biden's up by 10 in Texas, right? So I get it, but I think that the resentment is really misplaced or the amount of attention going to it is really misplaced. Even though I am completely with Steve, I would be fascinated to know how this mistake was made and to have a TikTok on it because I like journalism stories.

I like knowing, but I think that conservatives, their anger about this is misplaced. And before we leave, hey, Jonah, just so you know, my call out to see if there was any one, let's say a professor at a military university. And lo and behold, a professor who's teaching this semester cadets at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy had this to say. In the most recent remnant, Jonah further grounded his case about the flagship podcast in an analogy to British Adidas. Admiral Horatio Nelson. But I submit that given Jonah's appeal to his overall position at the dispatch, he is more properly thought of as the British First Sea Lord or First Lord of the Admiralty. So he has ultimate control over naval strategy and forces. The First Sea Lord can issue orders to a

fleet commander. But when it comes down to direct command of vessels, I submit that you are more properly considered the fleet's flag officer as you directly command two vessels to Jonas one. In short, I think the fact that you have direct command of control of more vessels than Jonah lends weight to the argument that you could properly be considered in command of a fleet, as the commander is something close to 50% of the flagship's entire Navy. So whatever vessel you are commanding at any given moment is the flagship. Another member, the admiral is an active member of the military, not an owner or civilian commander.

I think Steve and Jonah fall into the owner-civian commander role, leaving the admiral role to one of the dispatch employees. Dot, dot, dot, dot. And finally, on Star Trek the next generation, the Starship Enterprise is referred to as the flagship of the Federation, despite not having an admiral as regularly stationed on the ship. And with that one, Jonah, a Star Trek fan, I will note. I drop the mic.

Star Trek is on my side. Look, you're going to have to pick a lane, Sarah. Are we going to talk about this metaphorically? Are we going to talk about this literally? I will just note that, like, those are much better for the most part than the ones you read on your own podcast recently. Flagship podcast. And there's, you know, there's this old rule in the law that says if you have the facts on your side, argue the facts, if the law on your side, argue the law. And if you have neither pound the table, there was a lot of table pounding on your podcast.

A lot of accusations of plagiarism on my part and violent, vicious attacks, I think you protested a bit too much. This is a little more measured, which at least suggests that you saved the dispassionate smart stuff for the flagship podcast. But be that as it may. Look, I'm the one who introduced this whole thing. You did not. You claim this that the whole idea of you being the flagship podcast was your idea. this is a lie. I've been talking about,

I'm using the phrase niche podcast for competing podcasts since I launched the Remnant at National Review and then I started calling my podcast, the flagship podcast. You jealously wanted to take this. That's fine. Let the baby have her bottle. All I'm saying is that if you want to claim

that your podcast is the best, which is what half the people defending you want to claim flagship means, it's just the best top of the line, premiere, whatever, make that argument. If you want to make the argument from historical text history and tradition, make that argument. You cannot denounce me for invoking text history and tradition and denounce me for not using the colloquial thing. That's what you did on the advisory opinions podcast, is you just grabbed any weapon to hand and attacked me like a whirling, dervish sprinkler system of fecal accusations. And I think it was a sign of your own insecurity on this issue.

And so if you want to come up with a definition of how we describe what a flagship podcast would be, we can then work from that definition and we will hammer this out in the skiff. And because I will be on the skiff, that will make it the flagship podcast of the dispatch. Jonah out. I'll see you there, friend. I'll see you at Al. I'm going to be able to be.