The Dispatch Podcast - Protest Poop

Episode Date: April 29, 2020

Sarah, Steve, Jonah, and David discuss Justin Amash's move towards a third-party presidential run, the sexual misconduct allegation against Joe Biden, and round two of the paycheck protection program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgir, joined, as always, by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French. This podcast is brought to you by The Dispatch. Visit the dispatch.com to see our full slate of newsletters and podcasts. And make sure to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. Today's podcast is sponsored by ExpressVPN. More about them later in the show. Today we'll talk about Justin and Mosh's entrance into third-party presidential waters. the assault allegations against Joe Biden, and the latest controversy over the Paycheck Protection Program's second wave of funding that was released earlier this week.

And perhaps a little meandering discussion around our furrier companions at the end? Let's talk. dive right in. I'm going to start with something we rarely start with. On this podcast, I'm going to read some tweets. From Justin Amash last night, let's do this, amosh for America.com. Today, I launched an exploratory committee to seek the Libertarian Party's nomination for president of the United States. Americans are ready for practical approaches based in humility and trust of the people. We're ready for a presidency that will restore respect for our constitutional. and bring people together.

I'm excited and honored to be taking these first steps towards serving Americans of every background as president. Jonah, coming to you. Really? Does this matter? I think it probably, well, I think it definitely could matter. I think there are probably a lot of people out there who are looking to not vote for Iowa.

of these guys and if you just go by the math of 2016 if you had you had one percent of voters in five counties voting for someone other than those guys than Clinton or Trump it could have thrown the election the other way so I mean I think it matters or I think it could matter for someone like me who doesn't much care about his vote and lives in a place where my vote really has no impact one way or the other I'll think

very long and hard about voting for Amash. I mean, I, why wouldn't I? Interesting. You know, I'm certainly not voting for Trump and I'm not throwing for Biden, so my plan is a writing candidate no matter what. But beyond that, I don't, you know,

It's kind of too early to tell. And you've got to always remember that the Libertarian Party itself is basically a roving Star Trek convention. And they're good about getting on the ballots, which is really important. But beyond that, they don't really have a great record of reaching beyond a very tiny sliver of voters. Steve, I want to crunch some numbers with you. So from the last NBC poll, it showed voters who have a negative opinion of both Trump and Biden overwhelmingly prefer Biden. 60% to 10% for Trump. And in the USA Today Suffolk University poll from last week, the former vice president is leading Trump by six percentage points. No surprise there. But if you take out all the third

party contenders, Biden's margin jumped to 10 points, 50% to 40 points. So, and then I think you have to factor in that Justin Amash, who has pretty low name ID nationally. In fact, let me change that to very low name ID nationally is from Michigan, a state that will matter in 2020. So given all of that, who do you think this helps? Who does it hurt? And if you're the Biden or Trump campaign, how are you responding today? Well, I think it does matter. I think Jonah's right. I think it could really matter. We've seen, you know, if you go back to 2000, you look at the elections between 2000 and 2016. A couple of them have been decided by, very small number of votes. So I think it's sort of crazy for people who say this doesn't matter,

and you've already seen sort of the conventional wisdom set in Washington and on Twitter, scoffing that this matters at all. Isn't this all silly? Well, of course it could matter. If people vote for the guy, he could change the outcome of the race and the way that we govern ourselves for the next four years. Do I expect him to have a Ross Perot-like showing 19% as a third-party candidate, I don't. I think the challenges you have laid out are real the name ID challenge, particularly in an environment where he's not likely to be able to go out and really do a lot of campaigning and generate local press. He's going to be heavily relying on national press, makes the name ID issue potentially a considerable hurdle. On the other hand, I think you will

have national reporters looking for ways to make this race more interesting. keep this race sort of at the front of mind and could give him a lot of earned media, free media that he might not otherwise get in another environment. I think your point about the voters who don't like either Biden or Trump, preferring Biden by such a heavy margin is a very important poll result. If you look back, and I don't have the numbers in front of me, just came to me as you mentioned that, you look back at the exit polls from 2016, that voters who really didn't like Donald Trump and really didn't like Hillary Clinton went for Donald Trump, interestingly.

So I think that really could be. Yeah, and it was much closer as well. It was closer, but it was, I mean, it was more than I think most people would have expected. I was going to throw in a point here, because this is something that David and I have been talking about for a long time about how Donald Trump won because he wasn't Hillary. In this year's primaries, Bernie's performance in states that he ran away with last time was abysmal. And it turns out that a lot of Bernie voters just were anti-Hillary voters and not pro-Burney voters. And so in Michigan and Wisconsin and those places, and those voters matter too. And it does seem like Hillary was the key ingredient for Trump's victory in 2016 more than anything else.

And very helpfully, she just endorsed Joe Biden yesterday. today. So. Well, so, David, you know, if I, if I'm the Trump campaign and I believe that Justin Amash's entry into this race is going to net take voters away from Joe Biden. Again, if you dislike both candidates, Joe Biden's winning. So those voters are prime picking for Amash. And then, of course, just with the third party entry poll that I mentioned, Biden's margin jumps four points. those four points are, you know, being taken from Biden, in theory, as of right now. So if I'm the Trump campaign, the best thing that I can do is raise Justin Amash's national name ID.

You know, I'm just but a simple country lawyer. And I just am of the view the best thing you can do is raise your own vote total. And see, the problem I have with all of this war gaming out about just, Justin Amash and who's it going to help? Who is it going to help? Who's it going to hurt? I just don't think we really know. And let me just sort of throw one other wild card into this thing. So Justin Amash, unlike many Libertarian Party nominees, is very much pro-life. That's not the norm for a Libertary Party nominee. Justin Amash, unlike the typical Libertarian Party nominee, would be the least gaffe machine of all of the candidates.

on 50 state ballots. So if you're going to watch an interview of Trump, an interview of Biden and an interview of Amash, who's going to come across as, for those of us who are getting really sort of sick and tired of word salad from the bully pulpit, who's going to come across with a sensible point of view, who's going to come across with a logical constitutional explanation for his views? And then also, if you look at sort of his... But if they hear it, David, that's the problem. Well, but, you know, that, yeah, of course. I mean, Having one time stared in the face the possibility of a third-party run, you know, I at one point had to really confront the reality that more people would probably hear from me

if I kept writing at National Review than if I ran for president. And I think that's actually true. But Amash has much more of a war chest. He has more name ID nationally by orders of magnitude than somebody like me. he, so he has a chance to get on the air. And the other thing I would say is so he's pro-life and he's a legit, one of the sort of the last of the fiscal conservatives that exists on the planet. So his niche, to the extent that he has a real niche, is not a disaffected Democrats niche. It is a disaffected Republicans. That's his core. Now, I get that there would be people who

what could be disaffected Democrats who might vote for him, these things are not super, super predictable. I've heard all y'all's lecture about lanes. So I don't, we don't need to go through that again. But I do think that he's just better positioned. He's not going to make the Aleppo gaffe. He's, you know, when there was a moment when I thought Gary Johnson had a, not to break, breakout, but to be a more significant factor.

And he wasn't ready for prime time. I think Amash is ready for prime time. The only question is, can he beat? What's his main competitor? Is it John McAfee, who's down in, like, Honduras murdering people for the Libertarian Party nomination? I mean, you know. Let's just throw in an allegedly there. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I don't know. He's in doing something nefarious or on the run from something nefarious, but can he get that nominee? But there are a couple people who have been in there. I would say you can boil down Amasha's strengths to both. his principles and this particular political moment. But I also think you can boil down his negatives to his principles and this particular political moment. Because right now, if you look at it, look at the big picture. I mean, yeah, I think that the disgust, we know that the disgust for both

major political parties is at a high or a near all-time high. You have, on the one hand, Donald Trump, who has enthusiastic support of the Republican base, but has shown himself unwilling and unable to really go much beyond that. He can't get above his numbers and generate any kind of enthusiastic support beyond that base. With Joe Biden, he lost presidential campaigns twice. He's a bad, bad candidate. There's a reason that he lost twice and that he was basically non-competitive through the first several contests here, until the Democratic Party collectively understood that they couldn't nominate a full-blown, unapologetic socialist who was not only not running away from his radical past, but reembracing his radical past. So they turned to this guy,

Joe Biden, who, it may be the case that the Trump administration is exaggerating his cognitive difficulties, but he's having cognitive difficulties. I mean, it's hard to watch an interview with Joe Biden where he doesn't have that sort of moment where he's at the end of the verbal cul-de-sac kind of looking around and wondering, what am I doing here? And I've had that, you know, I've been there, we've all been there. But it's a real thing. So I think on the one hand, you've got Amash entering this picture at a time when the enthusiasm for these candidates is likely not to be high. The major parties are in disrepute. And there's this potential opening. And he is, whatever you want to say about Justin Amash agree or disagree with him, and I agree with him on some things very strongly, I disagree with him on other things very strongly.

He has principles. The guy makes his arguments based on principles. And at a time when I think we're seeing increasingly people not make arguments based on principles across the political spectrum, I would think that might have some appeal. But the negative side of that is that those principles often lead him to, I think, take deeply unpopular positions, not just in a way that has him kind of thumbing his nose at Washington and the Washington establishment. Steve, wait, wait, wait, more or less popular than injecting disinfectant? Well, if that's your bar, that's a fair point. If that's your bar, he might be more popular than that. But, I mean, look, Donald Trump's positions on a number of issues have been popular.

I mean, as a sort of populist candidate, some of them have happened. And Amash, I think, doesn't have that. And the other problem, the other particular problem is in the context of coronavirus in this moment where even somebody like strong libertarians across the country are pushing for immediate cash payments to citizens across the country, including Amash, which shows that he's a little bit flexible. This is a moment when people are increasingly turning to the government for help, and he'll be running as a guy who says there's way too much government. That could be a change. Well, as you note, though, he really was very clear and very direct on getting a maximum amount

of cash infusion directly to people rather than through the bureaucratic processes that have been set up. And, you know, the, yeah, I think the thing about him is, again, with the caveat that Sarah said about will people see him, you know, what kind of eyeballs will ever actually get to see him, the contrast between the two leading candidates and him will for once work in the Libertarian Party nominee's favor if he's the nominee. And, you know, if by a miracle he gets a polling bump and appears on the debate stage, I think the contrast would be pretty dramatic. Now, I know that's all pie in the sky stuff. Jonah.

Yeah. So I think there's, you're also getting at, um, a real messaging problem for the Trump campaign. Um, you know, right before, um, the shutdown of everything, you know, right before the shutdown of everything, you know, right before the shutdown of everything, uh, Trump was really ready to have this campaign. be all about uh capitalism versus socialism uh that's one of the reasons they wanted bernie is they thought that would make it a starker choice of capitalism versus socialism trump is still tweeting about socialism and the the the a lot of the sort of surrogates and quasi surrogates out there are making the case that Biden really is no different than burning when it comes to socialism and so trump's got

two problems there. One, well, three, one, Biden is not a socialist. I mean, he's not my kind of politician, but he's not a socialist. Two, we are right in the middle of this pandemic, which is screwing up all of the priors and preconceptions about the benefits of capitalism for a lot of people, right? We are talking about people wanting command and control stuff, that we're worried about, you know, the president is ordering factories open. You know, there are all sorts of things that muddy this clean argument that he wanted to make, that he's the capitalist and the other guy is the socialist. And then you have Amash who can actually make a pretty principled case that they're both socialists,

at least by his standards, right? You know, the difference, there's not a dime's way of the difference between Trump's nationalism and the Democrat socialism. And that could have, I mean, again, it depends on who hears it and all the rest. But, you know, Trump is not a nimble ideological messenger. And the whole plan, it seems like they're just going to sort of square peg the round hole of the next 12 months or eight months or whatever it is as best they came and just assert that the other side is socialist and all the rest. And so sort of getting to Sarah's point about building up Amash's name ID, you know, giving a voice to a guy who's pointing out that Trump isn't really. a capitalist either may not be ideal for him either. I mean, it's just, it's hard to game out because we really haven't been here before. But it's, I think it's relevant at this point to stop

and also look at the historical role that third party candidates have played. They have filled a gap where the other two parties aren't fighting. And the purpose of the third party run is to basically force one or both of the other parties to chase you and try to take your voters by adopting some of your policies or whatever the purpose is for your running. Justin Amosch is not going to be president of United States. So what is the purpose of this candidacy, David? Well, so a couple of things. One, I think a person who goes into this does actually have a flickering flame in the back of their head that says, there's a way.

There is a way. And I don't think that... Let me just tell you, there's not. I know. I was going to say we actually have somebody's run a major national campaign on the line here to give her view on it. And I wanted to hear, I want to hear your view. You just gave Justin Amash bulletin board material. He will not be president in the United States, Sarah Isker. You know, look, there was, again, having had this unbelievably.

strange experience of making this kind of decision in May of 2016, which I still can't believe those words come out of your mouth. Yeah, you know that this isn't going to happen, but one of the things that people were telling me time and time again was you need to do this to make the argument, to preserve the, to give, there was one group of people saying, you need to run, to give me a place to park my vote, where I can register a protest. You need to run to give to give me a place where we can show the strength, the actual empirical numbers of the strength of the opposition. You can sort of create a version of a party in exile, so to speak, that there are millions of us who have said, we're pro-life, but we're not going to compromise

with this guy. So in other words, what you do is you're sort of creating a movement or a party in exile. You're registering a protest that's actually measurable in a way that you're you're you can go to the party the next time around and say, look, unless you bring this constituency in, and here are the conditions for bringing this constituency in, you can't win. So there's a lot of reasons why you do it. But I do think there is also this flicker that people have in the back of their mind

that says if A, B, and C happen, I can get a polling bump. If I get a polling bump, I'm on the debate stage. If I'm on the debate stage, anything can happen. And Amash himself, we should point out, You know, he gave an interview to our colleague, Declan Garby, for a terrific piece that Declan wrote back in January, a big profile of Amash and sort of walked through Amash's thinking, likelihood that he would run. And Amash himself said, I won't run unless I think I can win, which I think many people reading that at the time that was published thought, okay, then he's not going to run, because surely he's not going to conclude that he's going to run and win. I mean, look, I mean, I don't think Justin Amash is going to be the next president of the United States. I will just say people made the same kind of categorical statements about Donald Trump,

myself included, and that was an odd occurrence. Again, I don't think Justin Amash is going to be the one to break this, but stranger things have happened. But let me commendere the hosting responsibilities briefly here to ask Sarah, since you have, you were deputy campaign manager for Carly Fiorina, you were a senior official on Ted Cruz's campaign. If I come to you right now and say, you are now in charge of Justin Amash's campaign, what do you do? What are your priorities? How do you build this out? How does he run?

I mean, I've hinted at some of them, right, that I would not think with the money that we had available or would have available that I could do enough to raise a national profile through advertising, door knocking, the sort of traditional. avenues. So I would look for different avenues, sort of the bank shots that David was making fun of a little. I would try to goad the Trump team into doing some of this for me and get them to raise my name ID through like, you know, guerrilla attacks on them, try to get them to engage. The Biden team will not engage. I do think that they know that this has the ability to hurt them more than the Trump team potentially. And if I can somehow convince the Trump team that it's in their interest,

they can do a lot of this heavy lifting for me. And then it's about fundraising and it's about some of the more basic parts of campaigns. I probably also, for the sake of what I would think the purpose was, which is some of what David talked about, a marker showing strength in the movement, the protest vote type thing. Pick your place and run up the numbers there.

Don't try to win the national popular vote, but show that in, you know, these three states that we campaigned in and actually spent our money that we got above the sort of normal 4 to 6%. And that delta is the number of people who are unhappy with the two parties, the purpose then being to get one of the two parties to try to come get your.

voters the next time around, which, you know, you go back to 1860 when we had four parties running and there was a lot of uniqueness going around there. But eventually you do end up in this equilibrium and the equilibrium is struck when sort of all of the necessary voters are corralled into the two places. So if you can show that they need your voters, that helps you with whatever your ideological movement is. But the first thing, the only thing that matters right now is money, name ID. Is it your assumption that the two-party system that we've seen survives this moment of extraordinary volatility? And by moment, I don't mean this year, I mean the past 15 years. Yes, because it's so hard to break out of the equilibrium. As soon as one party becomes a minority

party, they start looking for those other voters and they go and raid third party candidates to try to steal some of those voters. Okay, you can have this back. Well, so there's another topic that I want us to get to, which is still political. We're still not doing coronavirus. I'm so excited this week. We'll get to it. Don't worry, guys. Biden held a town hall dedicated to issues around the coronavirus that specifically or disproportionately affect women. And I think there was a lot of assumptions over what that town hall was going to, what the purpose of that town hall was. I think a lot of people thought this was going to be his chance to address obliquely or

otherwise these allegations that had been bubbling up in the press about terror read from the 1990s. Instead, Hillary Clinton endorsed him and there was no mention. of the Me Too movement or otherwise. And look, Chris Zeliza wrote this very interesting piece in CNN where he said this was a huge missed opportunity and that the Biden campaign can't, they have Kate Bettingfield, the deputy campaign manager,

has issued a statement very early on denying the allegations. But otherwise Biden has not been asked about it and the campaign has otherwise ignored it. And his points were, one, people are going to, start moving away from the constant coronavirus news cycle and look for something else, and this will still be there. The Me Too movement isn't going away, and that there had been this believe women movement, and this contradicts that, and that Biden's campaign has really been one about character,

and it's hard for him not to then address this. so with all of those thoughts Jonah the terror read allegations and the Biden campaign you know just for the record when you ding someone to go first in the first round

that you give them a bye for the second round she just thinks you're so much wiser than David and I that she has to go there so you can bring it up We have to bounce off the superior intellect. I mean, like, we literally know whether I am, in fact, wiser and smarter than you guys, that's up for debate. That Sarah thinks I am, we know that's not the case.

Because she is wise and smart. That is objectively false. I actually know you've been thinking about this. That's why. I have been thinking about it. Deep thoughts with Jonah Goldberg. So I think it's a hot mess. And I think that...

The technical term. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, in a perfect world, the Democrats wouldn't have this nominee. They wouldn't be, from their position, running against the guy that they honestly think is an existential threat to all they hold dear. And so, therefore, they're willing to overlook all sorts of things that they otherwise wouldn't. And as someone who has a pretty consistent track record on saying that sexually assaulting somebody, if proven, and that kind of behavior should disqualify you from public office, I have no problem saying that Biden on the merits, if this gets proven, you know, that a party could be within its rights to say, look, we're going to have to find somebody else. That said, the mechanics of that are just extremely difficult, particularly when you can't even have anything but a virtual convention anyway. The idea that a dump Biden movement leads to a new nominee that's picked in the text messages and DMs of Twitter by the sort of blue checkmark Democrats, that is not ideal for a populist moment, right?

of Populist Party. And the thing that sort of just drives me crazy about all of this is I just want to know what the standard is, right? Is the standard, you know, so many of the people, it's very interesting. Now, the Trump campaign and it's and its surrogates, they are not going after Biden's actual behavior. They're going at the double standards of the media, which are obvious. They are manifest.

I take David's point about we shouldn't just use the blanket term media. So the New York Times, the New Yorker, MSNBC, those kinds of outlets. Their double standard here is egregious and grotesque. Well, wait, let me push you on that a little. Are you talking about vis-à-vis Kavanaugh? Or are you talking about, wait, are you talking about vis-a-vina v. Trump? Oh, no, I think that's a perfectly valid thing. So my point is that for the right, the Kavanaugh thing in particular,

and all the Me Too stuff in general as well is this enormous compass that has been put next to their... I'm sorry, this enormous magnet that has been put next to their compass and it is thrown off any discussion of what actual True North is. I think that's fair, though, when it comes to Kavanaugh, but, you know, Trump has been accused by more than a dozen women of inappropriate sexual behavior, and I would dare you to name one of them.

Oh, actually, I just, on a draft, I have a list of them in front. front of me, so I won't cheat. But, look, I agree. The mainstream media has largely ignored that, but they didn't a year, two years ago, three years ago. There was a lot of stuff about it back then. And then they got no traction because you only have one president at a time. And it wasn't like he was going to get impeached for past behavior.

And so they just, they moved on to the Russia probe and all of that kind of stuff. But my only point is, is that the, if you, if you take the Kavanaugh part of, imagine the Kavanaugh thing never happened. Would conservatives actually be mad that it took the New York Times 19 days to report on the Tara Reid story once she changed her allegation to sexual assault, you know, and would they find that their claim that they needed that time to report it fairly? Would that be really outrageous? Or is it that they want the media to be as asinine and unprincipled and unhinged as they were during Kavanaugh? Do they want them to be consistent? wrong or inconsistently right? And is the issue here, the media's hypocrisy, or is it the

sexual assault? Because if you actually care about credible allegations of sexual assault and you're a Trump supporter, you have to explain why you think Biden, the allegations against Biden from far longer ago than more recent ones against Trump matters, and these don't. I mean, when you get furious about hypocrisy, what you end up doing is you end up taking the other sides principles and standards, internalizing them and then weaponizing them against your enemies. And are conservators now, me-tours? I mean, is that the position of the conservatives? I mean, I just want to know what the standard is. And I can't discern it from Donald Trump Jr's tweets, you know, and I use that in the most Catholic sense to include hundreds of various

right-wing journalists. David, you dedicated your newsletter to a lot of this yesterday. It was well done, of course, as always. But I guess what also struck me was that a lot of what we know now is because of reporters digging through a lot of these claims, including the Larry King video, where Tara Reid has said that that is her mother calling in. The neighbors, there's now been Huffington Post and the Atlantic, I believe, have both put out calls that he should release his papers that are currently at the University of Delaware, I believe, that could include the... She says that she filed a complaint with the Senate about it at the time.

So you're the one who makes the point that not all media is media, you know, under the same umbrella. Walk us through your thinking and some of your newsletter, I suppose. Yeah. So I quoted a tweet from Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times who just said, what a nightmare. What a nightmare. It's like peeling. It's like peeling an onion. of awful. So let's look at the one bright side on this. The one bright side on this is I think

that the media is actually handling the allegations against him. By the media, I mean the New York Times, the Atlantic, these outlets that you discussed correctly. It's doing a very thorough, deliberate job of investigating a serious charge with not easy availability of evidence. So I think that there is a, they're doing a serious, good job overall right now. Of course, the conservative complaint is, where was this version of investigation? Not so much when Christine Blasey Ford came forward. That was a different situation. But with the, you know, Julie, Wild Julie Swetnik rape claiming, Fox actually ran a piece that said, the movie 16 candles helped bolster Swetnik's claims. I mean, you know, there was this real feeding frenzy. But the issue here, I think,

is that everyone made a bed that they're now being forced to sleep in, or that all of the chickens are coming home to roost, as I titled my newsletter. Here you have a Biden himself wasn't just a guy who had the gotcha soundbites on the Kavanaugh case. That's easy. He also, was a guy who cheerleaded Obama administration efforts to really strip due process protections from students who've been accused of sexual assault in college. I mean, and this is something that has had catastrophic effects from coast to coast. And this was right in the Obama administration's lap to make it easier to make and prove claims of sexual assault. Then we don't even have to go into all the problems that the Republicans have. I mean, you ask for a name,

newsletter. I went through some of the details on summer Zervos's claim against Donald Trump, and it's very serious. And it's in litigation right now. A lot of people don't even realize that. And to your point, I think what ended up happening with Trump in the campaign was that the sheer multiplicity of claims against him in an odd way worked in his favor. Well, that's how the news cycle has worked in his favor on any number of topics. Yes, exactly. So it just became a haze. Who am I thinking about now? What did they do? When if you break down some of these individual cases, the facts are really damning. And so I don't have a way through this other than to say that, you know, you had the

left that said, hey, let's make it, we should believe by default. And this was Biden's statement. We should presume that the essence of what they're saying is true. That's what Biden said during all the Kavanaugh stuff. So you have this and then you have a Republican Party that can't make any argument on the substance of the claims. And then you have all of the Kavanaugh-related issues we just talked about that Jonah just talked about. It's peeling an onion of awful. And the only thing, hey, let's go back full circle. There's a guy in a corner going hard reboot here, don't have any of these problems, the name Justin Amash. Steve, how does the Biden campaign handle this?

At some point, he's going to have to answer these allegations. I think their approach thus far has been to wish it away. And it seems increasingly clear that it will not be wished away. Now, having said that, I don't expect that he'll ever face the kind of scrutiny that Brett Kavanaugh did on either the more serious claims with some apparent corroboration to the frivolous claims that were pretty plainly made up from the outset. I agree with everything that David and Jonah just said, both about the Democrats, about Republicans, about hypocrisy, and about the media. And yet, I think it is worth dwelling for a moment on the double standard in the media. Because it is so gross, and it is so obvious.

I mean, the kinds of charges that were thrown at Brett Kavanaugh that, again, seemed to be, I mean, in some cases, in the articles, there were disclaimers that they couldn't be corroborated, and they ran with the claims anyway. They ran with the allegations anyway. In this instance, you had a claim. Now, her claim is problematic in several respects. I mean, she has made different claims over the years. When she was talking about it as recently as last year, she mentioned an entirely different, she gave an entirely different description of the kind of harassment. that had taken place. She had said that he, you know, ran her fingers along, his fingers along her neck and touched her unwontedly, but didn't get into the aggressive assault that she would later describe. And I think it's fair to say there are discrepancies in, in her account. But the media did not research or investigate or treat those allegations with the seriousness that they, or the eagerness that they did with the

Kavanaugh allegations. And just no possible way. But isn't it the problem with this argument? Isn't the problem with this argument that by okay, so let's, I'll take everything you say is true. They handled one set of allegations one way and they've handled another set of allegations why way. By making it that this was unfair,

aren't we just pushing the media, quote unquote, to handle every allegation X way, which we're saying was the wrong way? So to perhaps a little bit of what David was saying, shouldn't the push be, ah, this is great. This is how you handle allegations like this. You investigate them. You take your time.

You reach out to people. Instead of saying, no, no, you have to handle every allegation the way you handle the first one, which we all think was not the best form of journalism. Totally. legitimate point. It's not the one I'm making, but it's a legitimate point. I am not at all encouraging the media to be more irresponsible. I think it's far better to take, particularly with

issues like this, to take your time to vet these allegations as seriously as you possibly can, and I think don't print them unless you have real corroboration that meets a certain threshold that makes, and I don't know what the right media standard is for reporting these things, but you can't just take claims. I mean, the slogan during the Kavanaugh hearing was believe all women, and I can understand the appeal of that. I know women who have been sexually assaulted, and certainly you want to believe all women, but it's not fair to have that as sort of the modus operandi as a journalistic outlet

as you go about these things. My point is a slightly different one, and it's a broader sort of media point. You know, we don't like to get too bogged down in media criticism here. But if you want to understand why Donald Trump has been able to cast the media as his opponents, or as he likes to call them his enemies, this is why. This is exactly why. This has happened again and again and again. There are dozens of examples they don't have to do with these kind of sexual harassment,

assault allegations where there's just a clear and obvious double standard. And at a certain point, you have conservatives look and say, I'm not going to believe what you say anymore. I'm not going to take this stuff seriously. I think the media left, ended the Kavanaugh nomination fight with gobs of egg on its face, on its collective face, and further diminished the overall credibility of the establishment or legacy media, particularly when it comes to conservatives. I think that's a really negative outcome. And I think it's worth remarking upon even if I don't have the obvious solution. So I have a question for Jonah. So my question is, so Jonah, you've been an advocate of the smoke-filled room for a long time. And if there's a few more shoes that drop, and one shoe that

I could immediately think of dropping is, Tara Reid claims that she complained in real time, at least against background sexual harassment and that there was an actual sexual harassment complaint that exists. And if that's found, that could really upend a lot of this. Would you be as happy with an angst-filled slack channel

as a smoke-filled room for selecting the Democratic nominee? I think that, you know, so part of the problem is you can be sure as sure as the first thing, that Marxists do when they take over a country is grab the radio stations, you can be sure that Bernie Sanders and his crew is going to claim that this means he's the guy, right? And in fact, there's reason to believe that some of these allegations, certainly a year ago, I mean,

I mean, reason to believe it's the truth, that some of these allegations first surfaced by pro-Bernie people. This was a Bernie move to TAR Biden over a year ago. And And the thing is that, and I'm been concerned, I'm less invested in the rules of the Democratic Party, but I remember getting into a debate with Bill Bennett about Trump and during the primaries. And my position then was if he is one vote, one delegate shy of having the required minimum to secure the nomination, then there should be a knockdown, drag out floor fight to deny him it. And if Sanders gets to whatever the convention is, whatever chat room is designated the convention, without the required number of delegates, I have no moral problem, no political problem, no legal problem with the party saying, you know, did pretty well on all of this stuff, even though actually he didn't, but, you know, whatever people think he did, Andrew Cuomo, you know, or whoever. And that's what parties used to do.

That's what parties are for. This idea that they are just simply the sort of oracle or the concentrator of the raw animal passion of the masses is not healthy. But I think you're making a big assumption that if David, everything David says is true, that that's disqualifying somehow. Yeah, look, I'm now doing what I criticize. I am borrowing the principles that the left has established as their rules, which is believe all women, zero tolerance, yada, yada, yada. But what you actually saw in the last, you know, going to get the slightly, certainly in the last three years, there was a huge amount of backlash to Franken being

pushed out on the left. Yeah. Look, I mean, I also think this would not be nearly as toxic for Biden if he were a better candidate. You know, they're an enormous number, I suspect there are an enormous number of people who are ambivalent or they're just like tie goes to the runner. You know, you don't, we're never really going to settle this. What really happened. It was a long time ago. Her story change, yada, yada, yada, yada. But Biden's not the best candidate. And it also reinforces some of what we've seen from him in public, frankly. I mean, we've seen him grab the shoulders of a woman at a prominent. I mean, at a prominent White House event, and she physically shrinks back from him.

Yeah, no, it's like he's a blind man in everybody's braille. You know, to your point, Jonah, about if he was a different candidate, let me just imagine an alternative universe that couldn't possibly exist. Like, imagine. I love that universe. Imagine if he was a young, talented politician, male politician from Arkansas. Yeah. With, you know, a pretty well-established track record, I'm sure.

you know, the Democrats would react just as strongly. Well, although I think that's interesting because it goes to the media point where the media, there's this feeding frenzy aspect that happens on specific issues occasionally within the media, and then in the calm waters that come to follow, we decide that wasn't appropriate. And I think you can look at Monica Lewinsky's treatment.

I think you can look at Richard Jules' treatment. There's many examples that are sort of even outside the context in which we're talking about where everyone's like, oh, we got a little caught up in that. And I think to maybe what I was saying to Steve and to others, what we're seeing now, what conservatives are so upset about being a double standard is perhaps more accurately put in the context of, oh, that was not a good way to handle that. it became a feeding frenzy and what we actually just don't want to repeat that in any format again. Before we move on, let's talk about our sponsor. Being stuck at home these days, you probably don't think much about your internet privacy on your own home network. Fire up incognito mode on your browser and no one can see what you're doing, right? Wrong. Even an incognito mode, your online activity can still be traced.

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by CNET, Wired, The Verge, and countless more. So protect your online activity with ExpressVPN. Visit ExpressVPN.com slash Freedom, and you can get an extra three months free on a one-year package. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-V-N-V-N dot com slash freedom. ExpressVPN.com slash freedom to learn more. I do want to make sure we get in a little bit of coronavirus talk, well, at least adjacent coronavirus talk, which is the second round of small business funding. So if you remember, the first round was $349 billion. It ran out quite quickly. from the Small Business Administration.

The second round is $310 billion, and that was opened up at 10.30 a.m. on Monday. There has been sort of some individual companies that have gotten some backlash. Most recently, the Los Angeles Lakers, who are estimated to be worth $4.4 billion, have repaid a $4.6 million dollar coronavirus loan. also some interesting statistics coming out of which states and which types of businesses are more likely to get funding. One recent analysis said that of the 10 states it had the largest shares of approved loans as a portion of eligible payroll in the aid program, eight of them had backed Donald Trump in the last election. Nebraska, for instance, got 81% of the state's eligible payrolls covered compared to New York that got around 40%, California, 38%. Now, this isn't because of partisan reasons. This is because of small lenders, having relationships

with their clients often, and sort of how the queue works, if you will, to get to the money. But that's all to say this is turned into a real political football, not necessarily partisan football, but political football. And so, Steve, I wanted to ask you how the funding's working, and these companies that now need to say that, quote, in good faith, this loan is necessary for their business after taking into account their liquidity and operations. Are we going to see more places having to pay back the loans? I would imagine we will, and I think we'll see a lot of additional scrutiny of exactly how this disbursement unfolded as these things see the light of day.

And, you know, this is something that we talked about. on this podcast a month ago. This is going to be a difficult process. Part of the, part of the challenge of the federal government was to get this money in the hands of businesses, of taxpayers as quickly as possible. And there were considerable shortcuts taken in order to do that. Things that deserved a lot more deliberation and discussion than they got were sort of waived quickly into law and became part of this process because of the urgency. that I think many people correctly felt at the time. But we are seeing that this was an imperfect process.

This is going to look like a really bad process. I think we're going to look back to the 2009 stimulus process, which had its own very well-documented problems, and see that as a relative model compared to what we're seeing now. There is no cue. You're that optimistic? Yeah. Sarah, you made mention of the queue. I think part of the problem is there is no cue. It is all done on an ad hoc basis. And while there are broad guidelines provided to lenders, lenders had tremendous leeway in making the decisions about how they were going to process the loan, what their internal individual cues looked like inside of those institutions. There are repeated stories of smaller businesses, without quite the heft, finding themselves unable to jump the line, to get to the front of the line,

even in some cases if they were among the earliest people who had made an application for these loans, you saw bigger businesses running to the head of the line, I think precisely because of the associated fees that the banks could collect on these larger loans. And look, I mean, anything that happens like this at this kind of a scale, I think it's reasonable to assume that there will have been out of the public eye, arm twisting, and favor granting, and these kinds of things, we're only just beginning to see the beginning of these. And I think the reporting process will be interesting to follow, because what you're seeing right now is a lot of investigative reporting that's unearthing what we would describe as unorthodox practices by the federal government. in a normal situation and, you know, the kinds of things that cry out for deeper investigation. I just think on the scale of something like this, it will take years to unravel exactly what happened. And usually in a situation, I mean, there's not really been a situation quite like this.

There is no, there's no real precedent for something like this. But if you look back to the stimulus, you had some oversight and some check on that by, what Congress did to look at that, particularly after Republicans took Congress in 2010. I think you're unlikely to see much of that right now, in part because most of Congress from the outset have been eagerly enthusiastic about doing this and just getting it going. And they're not going to be that interested in looking back and trying to understand where they might have contributed to the problem. I do think with Democrats in charge of the House, they might, I mean, they've already begun to try to,

administer some oversight on the way to make this look like a Trump administration disbursement problem. But I think this is going to be messy, messy, messy for years to come. And to your point, and perhaps David, you and I will talk about this on advisory opinions, but there have been a number of class action lawsuits brought by small businesses alleging discrimination against these banks. Wells Fargo, J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Frost Bank, all are facing large lawsuits. So, yes, we will definitely be learning more over years as this litigation and discovery process unfolds, David. I mean, who could have possibly foreseen that the snap creation of a bureaucratic process would come with serious complications?

Look, from the beginning, I think that the smartest play was pushing, cash into people's hands at scale as simply as possible. That was, in my view, the way this should have been handled from day one. Instead, what we did is we pushed a modest amount of cash into some people's hands on the basis of old financial information, which makes no sense. And then we created this bureaucracy, and this bureaucracy is controversial. I mean, it's better than nothing. It's better than nothing. But it's, you know, I'm not sure whose priors are going to be ultimately end up being

most completely reinforced here. But there were simpler ways, and I think more efficient ways to do this. We chose not to take that path. And we're reaping the consequences. and the consequences, as Steve Mark accurately said, are going to be controversy for years. For years, we're going to be untangling. Who deserved what? Who should have been first in line versus one millionth in line?

This is something that's going to be talked about for a very long time. It'll probably be an issue in the November election as well. It was avoidable. It was avoidable, and we chose not to avoid it. I'm going to push back a little bit on this one. I agree it was avoidable in the sense that if there were better ways to do everything. I agree, you know, fine. But, you know, the simplest way to get money out there would have been to launch a massive armada of helicopters and throw money out the side, right?

and sort of the old helicopter bend thing. And that would have disparate impact, too. The people with better vehicles, access to better vehicles, the people with the ability to craft giant butterfly nets, the cash money flying through the air, whatever, you're going to have disparate impacts no matter what. This is the point I make all the time on my own podcast about, you know, how complexity is a subsidy.

The more complex you make any program, the more you were rewarding people with the cognitive capital, the social capital, the financial capital, the political capital, to be able to game the system, or not game makes it sound dishonest, just maneuver through the system better than people who don't have those things. And so, you know, this is, you know, there were people like, you know, Jim Pethakoukis,

who's normally a pretty, you know, green-eyed-shade guy about spending and all these kinds of things. He was like, just get the money out the door. Speed is more important than accuracy here. Fire hose, fire hose, fire hose. You know, don't want to be surgical. You want to get it out the door. And I agree that they could have gotten the door out the door in a better way.

But any way they picked when they're under that kind of time constraint and that kind of political constraint and with that badly managed a federal bureaucracy, you were going to have the ability of lawyers and pundits and whatever to say they should have gone this other way. And I just think it's the nature of the beast in an emergency that there are going to be these kinds of screw-ups. And there is something uniquely kind of funny American about this. There's a great scene in Paul Johnson's Modern Times, which is a fantastic book, where they're talking about the Manhattan Project and how they're rushing to get the thing dealt with. Or built, you know, the bomb built. And this guy, this general who's running the program, calls the Treasury, I think.

I mean, it's been 15 years since I read it. but calls the Treasury, and he says, look, we're going to need 10,000 tons of gold by next week or something crazy like that, right? And the bureaucrat at the Treasury says, I'm sorry, sir, we do not measure gold by the ton. We measure it by the Troy ounce. And the general's like, screw you. We're doing this, and we're going to do it this way. And there's something a merit.

Everyone says, oh, we're so good at mobilizing for World War II. That's BS. People say we're so good at mobilizing for the Great Depression. Total BS. It takes us a while to get up to speed, and then we're really good at it. And in the beginning, we tend to screw this kind of stuff up. And I think this is a pretty good example of that. I think that's a great pace to end our substantive discussion.

But Jonah, per coming to you first on all things. I'm coming to you with our fun question first, because it's going to be about our companions, our fur babies. No, no, no, no. That's not the term. It's weirdly gendered. I just don't know a lot of men who are going to refer to their animals as fur babies. But if anyone would, you would, Jonah. I'm sympathetic to women who do it, but I do not, in fact, call them my fur babies.

So my question to each of you, who all have animals in your house, is what new habits have they picked up? Are they enjoying this? Are they not enjoying it? And how do you think they'll react when you do start leaving the house again? Jonah, you in particular have, there's a lot of personality going on in your house. Yeah. So as people may know by now, we decamped for Florida because I have a friend who has an empty house down here by the beach. And I'd rather quarantine here. Actually, my women folk would rather quarantine down by here. And so we drove down here in a day. It was interesting. We actually hit a COVID checkpoint at the Florida border, which was, you know, it wasn't quite. dystopian, but it was kind of like internal checkpoint where they, you know, they're asking you where you're coming from. And I was like, if only there was some podcast that talked about legal issues that could figure out whether or not this was a, you know, a legal thing. But anyway,

it is. It is. I know it is. But because I listen to, you know, great podcast. But yeah, so the dog's sense of entitlement, there's never been any upper boundary to the dog's sense of entitlement to begin with. It is, it's sort of like, you know, a gas will expand to fit the size of the room that it is in. Their demands for attention are truly limitless. And so I just spend an enormous, this is one of the reasons why I end up riding in my car, you know, smoking a cigar away from home, is because otherwise the Spaniel in particular

will just simply bring me a tennis ball. every 15 to 45 seconds, as if I've never thrown it for her before. The cats are kind of digging it, too. You know, Gracie gets a lot more home attention when all the human beings there, particularly my daughter. But no new habits. I mean, you know, both my wife and I functionally have worked from home for a long time. So we've already built up the muscle memory about how to deal with demanding animals.

David, we don't often talk about your animals. Introduce us to your dogs and then tell us how they've taken this. So we have three dogs. You travel a lot. Yeah, I travel a ton. Not anymore. We have three dogs, two Labradoodles, young Labradoodles, who are just a mess. They're awesome dogs.

And one aging small dog that's a breed called a Lauchin. And to Jonah's point, the title of his autobiography is, all I wanted was everything and how I got it. and and you know my my grandmother had a saying that when people get older they don't change they just get more so in other words just whatever personality they had just amplifies it's true when a dog gets older and that dog has been an annoying i want everything dog his entire life and now it's utterly out of control but we love him like he's he's our he's our opportunity to love something unlovable. I thought that was me.

No, he's, you know, it's sad to be with a dog as it's really invisible decline. So I don't know how much longer we have with him. So we're trying to lavish him with attention. The two young Labradoodles are just all over the place. And we have six people in the house. Normally, because I have three kids, two in college, one of the college kids is married. So normally we only have three in the house, Nancy and Naomi and me. Well, then now we have the college crew plus a son-in-law.

So there's six of us in the house. And it's very busy, and the dogs are getting a massive amount of attention. Because it's not like the college kids are running around going out with their friends. They're staying here. And so, yeah, the dogs, especially the Labradoodles who love to play, they're loving this time. The older dog, he just stays on his bed and he sleeps until he starts barking incessantly for wanting something else that we then have to figure out. Steve, we don't hear a lot about your animal situation.

Yeah, I appreciate David for giving me a little air cover to express frustrations about our animals. We have one dog, a golden doodle named Harley. um she's gotten extraordinarily fat during coronavirus time um may or may not mirror the uh expansion of her owners she's um endlessly needy so when she's in that when she goes she goes outside by herself and then turns literally turns around sits at the back door and whines until somebody lets her in which we do and then she goes outside again and winds until we're we let her back in, which I find annoying. She also, she knows better not to come to me for a ton of love.

I like the dog. Don't we all know that? Let me just say, I like the dog. I like Harley. She's very good with the kids. But she follows my wife around wherever she goes all hours of the day and, you know, takes her little snout and hits my wife, my wife's hand until my wife, you know, gives her a little pet or little rub, which I just find too much. I will say about the dog. That used to be you.

Well, I mean, I was going to say, I've thought about trying to do the same thing, but I'm not nearly as cute. The dog is exceptionally good with the kids, including the three-year-old, who shows that dog a ton of what we might call awkward love, sort of jumping on her, her over huge hugs that might not be that comfortable. So I'm grateful that she's as patient with the kids and particularly the littlest as she is. We do have other, I mean, nobody would call them fur babies because they don't have fur, but my son, who's 13, prefers reptiles, in amphibians, actually. So he's got some turtles, a bearded dragon, some frogs. So does that mean you have A whole cricket collection, too?

We've got crickets all the time. And yes, every once in a while, they break out of their container. You can't blame them, though. I mean, you were feeding them to dragons live. That is true. I mean, leave it to Jonah to turn this around and show empathy for the cricket. No, no, no, the crickets have a coming. It's Darwin, man.

But, like, if I were the cricket, I would try to get out, too. Yeah, that's true. Well, that's not totally fair. Like, crickets in the wild have some chance to escape. these crickets, not so much. So wait, Steve, are you growing? Are you breeding your crickets? Or are you getting, is the cricket supply chain keeping up during the coronavirus? We're not breeding crickets, although we've tried. My son is determined to do it. We typically go out to the pet store and get our crickets, which, by the way, as with everything related to pets,

extraordinarily expensive for what they are. I mean, they're crickets. What about mealworms? I used to raise mealworms. Yeah, he does mealworms too. Lots of kale, the bearded dragon loves kale so well in our house speaking just speaking just one last thing on this speaking of lizards though

I was telling Sarah this earlier um we've been warned around where we are we're sort of near Jacksonville there are an enormous number of ponds lagoons swamps

waterways lakes around here and we've been told explicitly do not let your dogs in any fresh water because there are going to be, the odds of there being an alligator in there are very, very high. And Pippa in particular, who's Miss Splashy, Splashy, chase a tennis ball, wiggle in the water, I'm now having stress-related dreams of picturing Pippa being swallowed whole by an alligator and carried off.

And I know you guys are, I mean, with the exception of Sarah, don't really care about my dogs, but it would be bad for the entire dispatch. If I fed PIPA to an alligator, we would have subscription cancellations. We would have protests. There are a lot of people up there who care more about Pippa than they care about any of us. I was going to just actually ask that before we go to Sarah to wrap this up. How many people do you imagine are still listening to this? Because in my head, I think, eight.

I just talked about my son's kale feeding his bearded dragon. There are people who love this stuff. We'll hear from both. guess is you'll hear from more people saying they listened all the way through. As Tobias Funke said, there are dozens of us, dozens. Well, let's turn that eight into fewer. So my cats initially, my cats initially had a difficult time adjusting to us being home all the time. They were a little confused. It was a little upsetting. But now they think it's amazing. Yesterday,

we left the house for three hours, both of us. us. So they had the house to themselves and came back and in my recliner, which is very important for an eight-month pregnant lady, if there's those out there who appreciate the importance of recliners, in my recliner was a large protest poop about the three hours out of the house. Nice. Yeah. And now we're to zero. I'm not even listening now. You don't even have to wrap this up in the cool professional host sort of way that you usually do. We can just cut it off

right here. Thank you so much for listening to that one listener who's now like, what's a protest poop? Please subscribe. If you propose talking about fur babies on a future episode, Steve is going to leave a protest poop on your chair.

Caleb, we can just edit that out. What is a protest poop? The title of this podcast. Subscribe to this podcast at Apple Podcasts or wherever you're getting a podcast. Are you even going to make a pitch to subscribe at this? Please join us at the dispatch.com. We're so sorry. We're so sorry.

Goodbye. I make no apologies.