The Dispatch Podcast - Purge Artists

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

It's Jonah in the driver's seat this week as he bring along Declan and Kevin to talk about the debt ceiling mess, the over-classification of documents, and whether Ron DeSantis' all-in-on-the-culture-war approach is simply what right wing politics is going to be from now on. Show Notes: -The Dispatch: Debt Ceiling Coverage -Nick Cattagio: VP MTG?  -CBS News: Why A&W put pants on its cartoon bear after M&M's spokescandies gaffe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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But we got Declan Garvey and Kevin Williamson, and this is the Dispatch podcast. We're going to talk a little bit about the debt ceiling hullabaloo, the classified documents, hullabaloo. And whether or not the GOP is just simply a culture war party, these days with little else to talk about, and we'll see what else may be worth your time. So as Sarah might say, if she were a WWE announcer, let's dive right in. Okay, so thank you guys for joining me this morning. I spent a while since I've actually had to professionally moderate something, and today won't be the day where I start. Kevin, our friend and former National Review colleague, Ramesh Pannu, had a good column in his new Washington Post column, where he makes the case that the only reason to be really scared about how the debt ceiling thing is playing out is that nobody seems to be really serious.

scared. Where do you come down on all that? That's a very remission, uh, Ponoruvian way of looking at things. Isn't it? Yeah, I mean, these sorts of, um, standoffs are always a little bit of a loaded gun, you know, um, I think that we exaggerate the likelihood or danger of an actual default, uh, because the money that we have to spend on debt service is well under what we collect in tax revenue, so there is money to pay for that stuff. The chaos comes from the likelihood or possibility of having to shut down lots and lots of other stuff, and we're eventually pushing finances to the point where they have to stop writing checks that people really care about, like Social Security and that sort of thing, although that seems pretty unlikely.

I'm up to two minds about these debt ceiling fights. I mean, it's a dumb way to, I think, organized finances, but at some point new debt does have to be authorized by somebody, and that's Congress's job. So there's, I don't think there's a really good way around having something like this. I don't think you really want it on permanent autopilot given the, you know, character of the people and institutions we're talking about here. Using the debt ceiling fight as a way to at least bring up the issue of fiscal reform and, you know, fiscal probity and eventually getting to a more sustainable, if not balanced budget is, I think, not the worst, you know, kind of political opportunism. I think it's relevant to the question at hand. It's a very fair observation that

these Republicans don't really have much of a moral like to stand on in terms of, in terms of unifiscal responsibility. But, you know, if that were really our standard, we wouldn't have had any major policy innovations since Abraham Lincoln was probably the last person in office in the United States who really had some moral authority, maybe Dwight Eisenhower or something like that. So I don't worry about this, this fight too much. It's not how. I would like to see our policy conducted. I prefer that things happen in a much more predictable, orderly kind of way, but that's not how democracies work, which is why I'm, you know, a two-chairs at best for democracy kind of guy.

That being said, I don't expect to see any real reform come out of this process. It's going to be a while before that happens. I probably should have started with you to do the table setting here, but do we even know exactly what the Republicans are demanding? No. Because I take Kevin's points. They're all well taken, but like, if you're going to extract concessions to get spending in line, you should have an idea of what those concessions are, right?

A list would be nice. We don't know what they are and Republicans don't know what they are. I mean, I'm going to pull from some quotes from this NBC news article from Sahel Kapoor that went up this morning. I haven't really formulated an exact list. That's Marjorie Taylor Green when asked. about what should be cut. We've got Bob Good,

declined to elaborate on what specifically he would like to be cut. Anna Paulina Luna, where there's a will, there's a way saying that she would not add any tax increases or social security or Medicare cuts. These are not serious people

presenting not serious plans to actually make a dent in any of this things. We've published something from Brian Reedle last week at the Manhattan Institute that gets into this really well. that if you're not willing to touch defense spending, tax revenues, Medicare, or Social Security, you basically need to reduce all other domestic federal spending by like 90% almost to balance the budget. And Kevin was like, go on.

Well, actually, what I was thinking is I don't think that math is quite right. I think that if you eliminated all non-defense discretionary spending, you still wouldn't get rid of the deficit entirely. That would be like over a decade, something like that. That's just not a, you know, not a politically feasible plan. It's even if it might be marginally a mathematically feasible plan. And so, I mean, a lot of this is theatrics. But that said, historically, a lot of actual fiscal reforms have come tethered to this debt ceiling.

Granted, those were times when Congress was slightly more functional than it is now. The biggest question remaining is whether we have a two-day freak out in June where we do, it does seem like we're headed over the cliff and then Kevin McCarthy loses his speakership. Somebody else comes in and they just pass a clean debt ceiling rise or we avoid that two days before that happens. They're going to raise it eventually. It's just a matter of whether there's a little bit more theatrics involved for them. But it does seem like Joe Manchin met with Kevin McCarthy earlier this week after meeting with the White House talks are happening. Patrick McKenry, who's a top House Republican and has allies on all parts of the conference, is urging

his colleagues to be a little bit more responsible about this in their rhetoric than they have been. We've got four months, five months to figure it out, and we shall see what comes out of it. You know, we tell where people's hearts are, you know, Marjorie Taylor Green saying, I haven't really formulated a specific list. You know, in 10 years when they're asking Republicans, like, who they want to send to the re-education camps down in Orlando or wherever they build them, the answer is not going to be I haven't formulated a specific list. They've been working on that list for years, and they're going to be ready to go with that one. One thing, I mean, to speak to that point, though, more seriously, you know, we do have a Democrat-controlled Senate and a Democrat in the White House.

It would be interesting if only as a kind of parliamentary exercise for Republicans to pretend to be serious about this and say, well, what kind of deal could we negotiate in the current circumstances? Because whatever deal ultimately gets negotiated, the only way to get a stable political settlement that's really going to work on the budget over a 20 or 20. year period, which is what's needed, is it's going to have to be one that has really a lot of broad political buy-in. It's going to have to naturally be the one thing that nobody wants, which is a bipartisan compromise. You know, bipartisan compromises are currently seen on both sides of the political aisle is, you know, anathema. And it's something that shows that you're not morally and politically serious about, you know, serving your base and all that. That really is the only way this problem gets solved, which is why it's probably only going to get solved

once the other options have really been taken off the table by financial markets. by other outside forces. Yeah, so it's funny when you put it that way, right? Because basically, the only plausible version of success is some sort of bipartisan compromise. I agree with you there.

And so basically both parties have come to believe that success is failure, right? Because they think a bipartisan compromise is failure. And that's a very kind of real world Orwellian kind of place to it.

be um i i i do think though like and i tried to make this point during the mccarthy speakership battle and most people looked at me like i had six heads and i get that the politics don't actually work this way in part because people think they're not supposed to work this way but um democrats want to portray themselves as the grown-up party the serious party whatever right and the problem i have with that analogy is that in the real world when when a bunch of kids are behaving like jackasses, grownups don't say let them have their fun, right? Or they'll work it out.

I mean, yeah, sometimes you let two brothers fight because they're going to have to get out of their system kind of thing. But if you've got a whole high school senior class, with loaded guns, tearing apart the swimming pool, yeah, shooting guns in the air, whatever, teachers and administrators don't say, let's be grownups. Let them just work this out on their own, right? And when Biden says we won't negotiate at all, we shouldn't have to negotiate, this is their problem, this is their vote, I get the political calculations of it.

But it seems to me that like if you actually consider yourself to be the grown up, you might sort of do what Kevin is proposing preemptively and say, hey, look, this is the only thing that we're willing to do. you meet us here be grown-ups knowing that they'll refuse it right so like you get a and the same thing could have happened in the speakership fight Leonard Jeffrey not Leonard Jeffries

Hakeem Jeffries Leonard Jeffries by the way is Hakeem Jeffries uncle. Fun fact Small world. Yes anyway my only pose is like you know Hakeem Jeffries could have just simply come up with a very reasonable grown-up sort of proposal

about how to like bail McCart out at the fifth vote or something where worst case scenario is McCarthy accepted the deal. Best case scenarios that he rejected it, but both of those scenarios are better than what we've got

because it would have been the grown-up thing to do. And so my only problem with the sort of Democrats need to, the Democrats messaging on all this is they want to message that they're grown-ups. They don't actually want to be grown-ups, which is a different thing.

Yeah. You know, I actually kind of don't get the politics of this in some ways, and maybe you guys could help me to understand it better, that it seems to me that putting an offer out there, as you mentioned, would give the Republicans something to fight over. And if what the Democrats really want is to

heighten the chaos and disorder and dysfunction within the Republican Party, then giving them something to actually have a fight about would be probably preferable to just letting them sit there and pretend that they care about this and that they're eventually going to develop a list. Remember how in the Trump here?

they're always two weeks away from a health care proposal. That's what this spending list is going to be, right? It's just down the row. We're going to have a list of stuff that we really want to cut. If, as you say that, you know, McCarthy in some world could actually sit down and work out a compromise like that, that would be the end of his speakership, of course. And I think that Republicans would throw a fit about that. So if we imagine a world in which McCarthy throws himself on the grenade in the name of fiscal probity,

which makes me laugh, just even thinking about it, that's still kind of a political win for the Democrats, right? Because then you're going to have another Republican leadership fight and more chaos. You're probably going to end up with someone even more grotesque and disreputable than Kevin McCarthy in the job. I take your point, Kevin, about wanting to give something to Republicans to fight over. I think the White House is anticipating and probably accurately that the bigger fight over whether we should default or not is enough for Republicans with the majority being as small as it is and with there being enough unsurious people in the conference to have that. They make the point that raising the debt limit is not, and it's correct, that it's not authorizing new spending.

It is allowing us to pay for things that has already been authorized. And, you know, as we've talked about on this podcast and on plenty of other dispatch products, is a lot of that new spending is not entirely Democrats' fault. A lot of it is, but a lot of it is deficits that were increased from tax reform and all these other things. So I get what they're coming from there. That said, it just doesn't, as to Jonah's point, it doesn't necessarily come off to me as super responsible to just say, we're not budging whatsoever.

They're banking on there being enough Republicans to threaten to send us into default, and then they win by, you know, acclamation. If we default on this and markets go crazy for a couple days, then that is a huge political cell phone for Republicans. Well, if we actually defaulted markets go crazy, for a lot more than a couple of days. But I don't think that I don't know that Republicans actually have the power

to make that happen unless they stop, you know, collecting taxes. I mean, the Treasury Department can collect taxes and the government can send the money out the door toward whatever it needs to go out toward. I mean, they can make decisions about what gets prioritized. So it just seems to me like such a remote possibility.

I mean, I hate to, all bad news is a possibility, I think, in my view. But I don't want to be the buttercup optimist here, but it just seems like that's something that would be, it's something somebody would have to expend some effort to make happen. It's not something even being dumb and irresponsible you're going to just stumble into. Right.

Although once the administration gets into the position where the Treasury Department is explaining that they have to pay bondholders before they pay Social Security beneficiaries? Chinese bondholders. Yes. Just an aside here, by the way, one of the reasons I'm looking forward to another Republican leadership fight is just the fact that my political...

coordinates are so paleolithicly cold war that every time we talk about what's McCarthy going to do, I just have a little bit of a flashback to a period that was 30 years before I was born. And I don't know how many people named McCarthy we've had in Congress since Joe McCarthy. It's been a few. But I can't talk to Andy McCarthy without thinking about Joe McCarthy just a little bit, much less Kevin McCarthy being actually in. I have a very similar problem about that. just as a quick

go ahead go ahead Sarah's not here to make the trains run on time we can do whatever we want as a quick aside before we jump on you know none of this is confirmed

but I've heard rumblings throughout kind of the speakership fight that some of the would-be challengers to McCarthy didn't put their name or didn't make more of a push to you know cut them off at the knees

and promote themselves into into this role the Scalises some of these other candidates that because they know that this fight is coming and that they want to have kind of a sacrificial lamb take the heat on debt-sealing negotiations and somebody else can come pick up the pieces afterward. Do you think that there's any validity to that? Do you think that McCarthy's speakership is over come end of June? Well, I have, I, I, there's a real danger in our

line of work and making predictions because then you bend all your analysis so that your predictions become true. And also you can be held accountable and you hate that too. So, but I've been on record saying that I've been on record saying that I think McCarthy got, I predicted that McCarthy would have a tough haul, but he would eventually become speaker, and then he would become the Liz Trust of American politics and loses speakership pretty quickly. I think, you know, we don't have a cabbagehead cam to see, you know, exactly where McCarthy's tenure is, but I think that's a safe bet, although I also think, like, the

criminology opportunities are pretty great these days. There was this big story I had to talk about on CNN the other day about how Elise Stefanic knew or may have known or whatever was a huge booster of George Santos and that she's responsible and all that. And I thought it was a lot of silliness to the whole story. But the big takeaway I had was, huh, I wonder if Kevin McCarthy's people are trying to take her down a peg so she doesn't make a move on me prematurely. And I think we're just going to see a lot of stories that you're like, why are we hearing

these people on background saying these terrible things about Steve Scalise and Elise Stephonic and whoever and it's it's because Kevin McCarthy's people are trying to keep you know Abe Vagoda and whoever else from Godfather from setting up a meat all right

we were talking briefly there about seriousness and responsibility and being a grown-up we don't have to dwell on it but those are words that do not come to mind in the current state of handling of classified documents today um uh Declan we're recording this on thursday morning um right now it's 945 eastern time have has jimmy carter come out and said that he in fact has some classified documents that he needs to uh atone for

I'm really glad... Or anybody else. I'm really glad that you got down to the minute there because odds are this podcast will be outdated on the classified document front by the time it's published in a couple hours. Which is why we're not going to dwell on it too much. Yes. So just to catch listeners up,

Mike Pence, former vice president, was added to the list earlier this week of former high-ranking officials who have mishandled classified documents in some way. His lawyers citing press reports about Biden's classified documents conducted their own search. He retained outside counsel to search his own property in Indiana, and they found a handful of documents with classified markings that the FBI then came and

retrieve late last week. And so it's just kind of relitigated the whole debate. And I think now that it's almost, you know, all factions of all parties have had their own cheerleaders caught up in this. People of all political stripes are starting to have the, you know, Maybe we are over-classifying too many documents, things. Even Mike Pence is falling in follow this. And I do think that there's at least something to that that Mike Pence probably did not do this intentionally, knowing what we know about him and that...

Wait, what do we know about him that would make us think that? But he's such an honorable, outstanding guy. He's a Weeblow scout grown-up. I don't know. You and I have very different views of Mike Pence, but go ahead, please. I think that he can, you know, make some difficult personal calculations, but I think he wouldn't knowingly violate federal statutes.

Maybe I have a wrong read of the guy, but we're in a place where basically every, you know, leader of every faction of the different parties have their own scandals here, and we're waiting to see if Merrick Garland will appoint a third special counsel to, you know, they'll be able to form a basketball team soon. Jonah, to speak to your original question, Jimmy Carter said that he had classified documents in his heart, and he felt guilty for it needed to be forgiven. I am going to give Kevin an opportunity here to vent his bile at Mike Pence.

Oh, I've done that already. But I was saying this the other night on the dispatch live, podcast, this does feel a little like Kevin's old enough to remember. It feels like the Zoe Baird period in the Clinton administration where Bill Clinton kept trying to appoint an attorney general and one after another hadn't paid his or nanny's social security taxes or their

gardener's social security taxes or whatever. It does feel like we're just going to, we're in one of those threads where like we're going to be surprised that no one else has come out. to admit that they have classified documents I do feel like this has destroyed any chance of a serious prosecution against Donald Trump on this stuff I don't say rightly or wrongly

I say wrongly but that's not the world we live in and so like Kevin you have you have a very strange mix of I should not say strange you have an unusual with strange any typical mix of small D democratic tendencies on some things and small A anti-democratic tendencies on other things. Oh, it's getting capital eyes now.

Where do you come down on this argument about over-classification and secrecy? I think we classify way too much stuff for for dumb reasons. And it's one of those deals where you never get in trouble for being too cautious about something. you know so if you it's it's like the FDA you know you get you're in trouble for approving something not for not approving something so you you get in trouble for letting stuff out not for for overclassifying things that being said I'm a I'm a big proponent of the idea that

we should be really punctilious about enforcing the law when it comes to people who have political power people who are in elected office and who are adjacent to elected office I think that if there's charges to be made in these cases and there are charges to be made in these cases. I mean, the statutory crime is removing a classified document to a non-secure location, right? And they're all guilty. The facts of the case would seem to suggest that's at least a chargeable crime, and they should all be charged. They've all confessed, in effect. Yeah, yeah, they have. I think we should, you know, we should, whatever the maximum penalty is for this stuff, if it's, you know, 60 days in the lockup and you lose your, you know, security clearances and

there's a $100,000 fine or whatever it is. I haven't even looked at what the penalties are. And I know there's this thing the Justice Department has where they say that as a matter of policy, although not really as a matter of law, they can't indict a sitting president. But you can write up the indictment and put it on the desk and let it sit there. You can put it on a post-it note and tack it up. And the day this guy leaves office, charge him with it. Yeah, I think that there should be some...

That guarantees Biden runs for a second time. That's true, but you're going to do it anyway, I think. There should be some example setting here. I think, some example-making happening, and this would be a good opportunity to do it. You were talking about the Zoe Beard thing. I was thinking more of the other Judge Ginsburg, the one who didn't get to serve on the Supreme Court

because the weed thing. And I was particularly thinking of the wonderful John Lubbett's portrayal of him on Saturday Night Live where he's with the students. And they say, but Professor Ginsburg, isn't marijuana illegal? And he says, yeah, yeah, yeah. please call me professor toke yeah this stuff's illegal you know and even if it's a bad law if you are in office you should be following the laws and and i certainly don't want to hear anything about this from people who've never until this day ever talked about classification reform

ever talked about secrecy reform until it's you know bitten them on the on the posterior when these are the people who have the power to do this sort of stuff you know joe biden And as I always point out, you can't see me on a podcast because it's an audio medium, but I've got a very gray beard. And Joe Biden was elected to the Senate the year I was born. This guy's been in public office forever. And, you know, if he really cared about this issue, if he had any thought about it, you know, he's had his opportunity to do something.

He was a senator for a million years and vice president, now he's president. And I think if there are laws on the books, we have to assume that he's happy with him. he hasn't challenged him or done even a little bit of something to deal with it. So, yeah, I want to see these people frog marched off to whatever appropriate federal pokey we put people like this in. Actually, we could put them all in the same cell. That would be great. That'd be awesome.

Steel cage. And just make a prison riot out of it. And whoever survives, he gets to be the next president. Thunderdome. Just one quick point on this throw-em-jail thing or throw the book of them thing. I think I might talk with you about this, Kevin. And I know I talked about this with Andy Smerick on the Dispatches flagship podcast. You know, I read or I listened to this summer the Adrian Goldworthy biography of Julius Caesar.

And one of the things that really came through that I guess I never really thought about seriously before was one of the main sort of bulwarks of maintaining a notion of a republic was this constant process of just. trying the most prominent officials in the Roman Empire with various crimes. Usually crimes of, like, loading up their togas with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, when they were territorial governors, but they come back and then, like, senators would be the prosecutors and they would put them all on trial and they would shave back some of their graft and sometimes, you know, bad things would happen to him, but that was how the, the regime communicated to the rank and file that nobody was above the law.

And I think when the history on this is written, we're going to go back and the two people who are going to get a big chunk of the blame in all this are Sandy Berger and Hillary Clinton because that was really what set up this notion that the people in charge aren't susceptible to the same rules about this stuff as the people who actually have to execute these rules. Yeah, I mean, the Romans, unlike the Soviet slater, they really knew who had to get the most out of a purge. They were real purge artists. I think maybe we should be studying that period in history a little bit more and learning how to do it. Yeah, the Sandy Burger thing, which I think probably no one under about 45 has any memory of,

of this guy literally walking in and, you know, stuff in his pants full of his socks, wasn't it? It was in documents in his socks. He loaded classified documents in his socks and in his pants. and just walked out with them and then nothing happened. Yeah. And the reason for it, I mean, what bothers me is like the crime, the action, like this goes back to old home week for Kevin and I in our days

because I had a lot of fun with the Sandy Burger story. I'm not going to lie. I mean, the only competing thing I probably have had fun with as much were Dan Rather's MemoGate stuff. and the tube-in-missile crisis. So, but anyway, but people forget about what Berger did there was he stole the documents so that they could better prep to cover their asses in the wake of what, the 9-11 commission stuff, right?

And it was just incredibly egregious and outrageous. And like the whole point of these classified document things is mens rea. And that's why I think both Hillary and Berger are such bad actors. You know, Kevin's seething hatred of Mike Pence notwithstanding, at least Mike Pence has a colorable argument that this was a screw up, an unintentional screw up. And so does Biden, right? Hillary Clinton literally created her own home brood server to handle classified stuff. And, right, and do they really have that argument? I mean, these papers, they will say, you know, classified at top. And it's got the classification written on every page.

the paper. I get it. I get it. But there's, look, look, again, some circle essential evidence is quite strong as when you find a trout in the milk. Also, as when you find classified documents in your pants. On this from the man who famously can't afford to buy a pair of pants. That's exactly right. At least you got the accusation right. Okay. So we should move on. This self-indulgent twaddle would never happen on, on Isger's watch. So originally, uh, Adam and I talked about talking about this, the brouhaha in Florida about Ron DeSantis not allowing this test program for an AP course in African American Studies to go through.

I wrote a long G-File about it where I basically get his back on it. And I think, I'm happy to talk about that, but I think it's better as just sort of a linchpin to a broader question that ties in the classified document. stuff and also the debt ceiling and speakership stuff that we've already been talking about. It seems like it is literally impossible

for the GOP to organize around and get worked up around a straightforward public policy argument anymore. It has to be turned into either a culture war thing or

or an own the libs thing, right? Some version of both of those things. You know, Kevin and I have very strong feelings about the gas stove thing. It didn't need to be made a cultural war argument. And I would argue that the left started it, and I actually have written that, but at the same time on debt ceiling,

on Ukraine, on basically everything that DeSantis does, the valence, the frequency, the messaging of it is not about the policy itself so much as how much it will annoy the other side or how we're fighting the other side, so much so that even the club for growth has declared that Mitch Daniels is a cuck, rhino, weakling, squish

establishmentarianism, establishmentarian. What does this say about 2024 and the future of the GOP going forward? I put it to you, Declan Garvey. I think the logic behind this DeSantis move and the logic behind a couple other moves that we've seen from 2024 hopefuls in the past couple weeks is that the main lesson that they seem to have learned from the Trump years is that picking fights with the press in particular is an incredibly successful and worthwhile endeavor if you're trying to win over the hearts and minds of Republican primary. voters, you know, looking, talking to a lot of people who were milk toast on Mitt Romney in 2012, but loved Donald Trump in 2016. The main difference there, I mean, there's a lot,

there's a lot of differences. We could record a four-hour podcast on the differences between Donald Trump and Mitt Romney, but people expressed frustration that Romney and his team did not push back hard enough on the slanders in the press, the stuff about the dog on the roof and the binders full of women and that he didn't fight and kind of defend his own honor and in turn the voters. And so DeSantis is smart about the fights that he picks in that it's stuff that he knows is catnip for a certain sector of the mainstream press. And I think this is a kind of a continued example of that where as Jonah you wrote in your G file this week, he might be, you know, correct on the merits, but a lot of articles and reporters are not going to look into the merits.

enough to kind of pick this fight. We saw something similar with, and this, I don't think he's actually right on the merits per se, but he might be more correct than people give him credit for is Mike Pompeo in his book about Jamal Khashoggi. He wrote that the press was too sympathetic to Khashoggi and that the United States' relationship with Saudi Arabia was not worth blowing up over this one.

He called him an activist, not a journalist. That is obviously designed to provoke outrage to get mad at Mike Pompeo and then he can have that debate. So I think the culture war thing, yes, I mean, it's the nature of the issues in some cases, you know, like DeSantis's law and just instruction of gender identity and that's just a culture war issue. It's not a, you know, it's not a fiscal reform, but it's also perfectly designed to capture attention and make the correct enemies. And he's actually, I mean, looking at this AP African American Studies fight,

he's gotten the college board to say they're going to revise the proposal. They're going to revise the syllabus. They haven't made it public and they haven't said what the revisions are going to be, but that is theoretically a notch in DeSantis's belt. You could look at Disney backing down from some of its political activism in Florida over the past year in response to DeSantis' arguably unconstitutional threats to revoke certain privileges in response to their political activism last year. Bob Iger was a huge,

he was pushing then current CEO Bob Chappecke to be more vocal against the quote-unquote don't-say gay bill. But then when Bob Iger was installed in November, he said, oh, we probably shouldn't have waited into that. That was a mistake. I think that's a real win for DeSantis to show that, you know, if you punch these people back once and hard,

then they might shut up about it. But he gets to have that debate where he pisses off the media and he gets to point at all these unfair attacks on me and I'm fighting for you and that connects you with primary voters. Yeah, I mean, so Kevin, I mean, I agree with everything Declan says, but again, taking up, we don't have to go back to the debt ceiling stuff because we're in charge here, but that really just shouldn't be a culture war argument, right?

That shouldn't be an own-libs kind of thing, or maybe you think it should. But like, you know, at some point, entitlement reform and fiscal solvency, you're not going to be able to culture war your way to a victory on those kinds of things and it seems to be the part of the point of being a conservative is, you know, there's always one of Bill Buckley's points

that no one ever believes you was here's about. Conservatism is about realism, right? And not everything fits squarely into the other side is all evil, we're all good. And also just as a sort of a matter of pure sort of punditry, is that, I mean, I agree with Declan and I agree,

I agree that DeSantis is really good at this stuff and he is benefited by the fact that the people who don't like what he is doing on the left mischaracterize it that allows him to say they say I'm doing this like I found a million people saying he's trying to ban black history and erase black people in Florida which including the White House spokesperson.

And it's nuts, right? And so he elicits overstatement from those guys which makes his own people think they're so smart because look how dumb the other people are and all that. I get it. Does that formula work to win the White House? Yes.

It probably does, unfortunately. I mean, there's, I mean, so if you want to be responsible about this stuff, right, there's there are issues of focus and proportionality. It's fine to criticize Disney for its various kinds of corporate activism. It's fine to criticize your local school board or your

local, you know, library. administration for how they run their affairs or to criticize various aspects of a school curriculum. God knows that a lot of them need to be criticized. But it's a matter of, you know, how you present things and how you talk about things. I mean, if you listen to Republicans and if you listen to, you know, Fox News and Talk Radio, you would think that if you wanted to, you know, walk out of your house and go down the street to the store on the corner, you would need a snowplow to clear your way through the hordes of drag queens that apparently have taken over every aspect of American life, and that's all we talk about. And of course, you know, as sure as

Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengetty, the only drag queen who's currently prominent in American life just got elected as a Republican to the House of Representatives. So there's a bit of, you know, built in. Be careful about what you make. And we should also say there was a pedophile who was the Speaker of the House for the Republican Party. Yeah, there was too long. There was that. So, you know, I mean, that was kind of the country's reaction to there was that. And let's just move on. Let's move on. I think this stuff is politically effective, yes, because of the nature of, you know, the primaries that we've all talked about and abominated in various kinds of ways. And also just the particular kind of cultural moment

where there's a combination of, I think, a natural series of regularly occurring moral panics that have always been part of societies like ours that are interacting in a particular way with the development of new forms of communication, social media and all that, which has been around for a while, but it's just really still working its way through the culture in terms of its effects of how people deal with one another

and how they think about politics and the way in which it's made. Politics is already becoming sort of an Ersat's religion for a lot of people, but it's the social media thing has really made that essential to some people's lives in a way that it wasn't before and central and it's become part of people's identity.

So these tribalistic kinds of strategies, I mean, they worked in other periods in time too, but they worked for kind of limited purposes. You know, there was the, I mean, the famous cliches, you know, if you're a conservative, you're a Republican, you're running for president, you run to the right in the primary and the center in the general election and Democrats to the opposite. And now that's not really the case so much because there's no longer a kind of, you know, shared ground to return to. there's just, you know, there's the no man's land is very small between the two entrenched

armies in this particular culture war. So I think that also there's no downside to talking about this stuff, right? So if you want to be a responsible person and talk about, well, here's what we have to do to reform American public finances in the long run. That's telling a bunch of people, you don't get what you want. You know, and you're going to have to pay some taxes you don't want to pay and you're not going to get some checks you're expecting to get. Whereas this other stuff is just like, well, let's all just hate these people together. It feels good. It doesn't cost anything. And it doesn't mean that anybody doesn't get a check that they're counting on. So until this particular kind of weird convulsion we've been going through for the last about, I don't know, since 2008, I guess really, maybe, kind of starts with the Obama administration, I think.

It becomes very intense around that time anyway. until that kind of, you know, exhausts itself, which I think it eventually will, it's going to be a really good political strategy. So I think that if I were DeSantis, yeah, I would be doing exactly what DeSantis is doing. I think he's a pretty cany politician. I don't want to try to get in his head, you know, and say what he actually believes and what he actually cares about because you never really know about that sort of thing. But, yeah, it kind of, it seems like it works. But he's not the only person in the world who knows that that works. I mean, there's a reason Republicans are not.

not winning a lot of elections right now, they're not in strongest position as they expected to be. There's a reason there are not 15 people out there who have the kind of national profile that DeSantis is developing. And, you know, both sides of the fence know how to play this game, I think. And I think if anything, the recent elections have suggested that Democrats currently still play it better than Republicans do, even though Republicans maybe play it with a little more gusto.

All right, so this is actually a good segue to something I wanted to squeeze in here. Our colleague, Nick Katagio, wrote about it yesterday. There are these persistent, bad rash-like rumors that Marjor Taylor Green is angling for the VP slot with Donald Trump. And I was just saying that my wife this morning, like one of my favorite lines

that longtime remnant listeners know this one of my favorite lines from Seinfeld was when Elaine was explaining why she loved what was then Declan a new product stuffed crust pizza and she says look it's going to be years

before they find a new place to put more cheese on a pizza and the thing I like the amazing thing about the concept of Marjor Taylor Green being Donald Trump's vice president is that you would

you actually would have someone that would make you worried that Donald Trump might have a heart attack and that's wild I mean like before it was like Pence was the backstop right like Marjor Taylor Green like you're just like you know all of a sudden you're telling Trump

be careful going down those stairs and that's some wild stuff But so your theory is, is that the leaning into the culture war stuff is smart politics. Is that leaning too far? Well, I mean, from what point of view, right? If your point of view is to maximize your appeal among the moonbats who are going to pick the next Republican nominee for the White House, probably not. If your point of view is, let's do what's good for the country.

and try to be, you know, patriotic, sensible American adults. And, of course, yeah. You know, there's a third question there because, like, you were saying how, the question I asked where you went on your tear about how this is all good politics, not about Marjor Taylor Green, but about culture war stuff, was I asked, is it a good way to get to the White House, right? So, like, the question is not whether it would be useful for him to play footsie with Margie Taylor Green in the primaries.

to sort of, you know, because that's what all presidential candidates do in primaries is, or before the pick a VP is they consider lots of people, in part because it's a way to get contenders for the slot to raise money for you. And in part, it's to sort of add your, to the size of your coalition. But it's another thing, do you think she would be a drag on Trump's reelection prospects in a general election? No, I don't think she would actually. You know, Trump was elected because he's a celebrity.

He wasn't elected because he's a great policy thinker or because he's got a particularly impressive business record or anything like that. He was elected because he's a celebrity. That's how he won the nomination, and that's how he got elected. Celebrity is a very, very powerful force in American life. It's much more powerful than, you know,

most sort of normal dynamics and politics. And Marjorie Taylor Green, I think, is probably the most famous member of the House right now, isn't she? Up there. George Santos might be. If you ask the average American, you know, name a Republican in the House of Representatives. She'd be the first one they would say probably. I mean, she's the one that Saturday Night Live is making jokes about.

You know, she's probably the only one that most people would recognize from a photograph. One of the few that most people would recognize from a photograph or that a lot of people would. So if you're, you know, a celebrity candidate, which is what Trump will be again if he runs. And your issue is, we hate these people. people, let's have a therapeutic hate session together, then, yeah, I mean, he could hardly do better than her. I'm going to go out on a very far limb here and say that Marjorie Taylor Green is not a good general election candidate for the Republican Party to put up. I think looking at the lessons learned from the 2022 midterms and obviously everything's hindsight's

2020, but a big enough percentage of voters showed that they are not willing to vote for a Republican no matter what, no matter how kooky or crazy they are. And that's why you don't have Governor Kerry Lake and Senator Blakemasters. Let me put it this way. How many people out there do you think, knowing what they know about Donald Trump today, after all the post-election stuff and everything he's been up to since then, are going to say, well, I'm going to vote for Trump in 2020. But, oh, no, I was going to vote for Trump, but not with Marjorie Taylor Green on the ticket.

I'm really concerned. I think, well, I suspect, actually, that they're probably. people out there who are like, well, we're a little disappointed in Trump and we're feeling like he's maybe, you know, lost a step. But we really like Marjorie Taylor Green. Yeah, so she might actually be a net gain to the ticket, crazy as she is. I think that's a reason to not nominate Donald Trump in the first place because I... Tim was with you on that one, that group of people is, is too small to win a general election. No, they aren't. They are not. I love this disagreement. I am more with Declan than I am with Kevin.

I think the midterms kind of show make Declan's point, which is that there was an anti-Trump institution. There was an anti-Trump headwind of three to five points in a lot of these races. And I understand presidential elections are different. But who is really, normally you get a vice president to reassure voters about something, right? That's additive. Yeah. Who is reassured or added to Trump's column.

by Marjorie Taylor Green. Anti-vax people. All right, that's true. Start with him. That's true. Sort of the more, you know, kind of Q&N element she sort of speaks to those people. Right, fair.

People who also suspect that, you know, Trump is just old and too self-obsessed to really be their, you know, tribune the way they want him to be. You know, you've heard some criticism from people who are Trump types along those lines. You say, you know, he was great last time around, but, you know, he's done his thing

and he's kind of been expended. Some of those people are very enthusiastic about people at Marjorie Taylor Green. Her slogan to be ready on day one to be batch crazy. Goodness gracious. But, yeah, no, I think, I mean, if I were betting my own money on it today,

I would not bet either that Trump is the nominee or that he would win a general election. I wouldn't bet my own money on it. But I'm not sure that Marjorie Taylor Green would actually, given the character of the people who are going to turn out and vote for Trump, that she would be a net drag on the ticket rather than a net benefit. And with that, I'm applying for immigration status to the first country that will take me. And, you know, every time I buy a gun, you have to do this questionnaire.

And one of the questions is, have you renounced your U.S. citizenship? And I always think to myself, when I fill it out, not yet. mostly jockey point, but if you've read any of the D.C. Hill-focused publications over the past two weeks, our conversation and our opinion of Marjorie Taylor Green might be outdated by November 2024 because she's become a very serious legislator who's learned a lot through the process, you know, really cozyed up to Kevin McCarthy. And now she's on Homeland Security Committee. She's going to be really digging into the issues. By the time she's, you know, on the ticket as Trump's vice president in 2024, she might be one of our most kind of renowned legislative voices. And so in that, you know, she can surely reassure some of these people.

I mean, it's true. I was on a board meeting of the Rothschild Space Laser Company, and we were thinking about, like, making amends. So, you know, we were talking a little bit earlier about people knifing, Elise Stefanik, potentially being McCarthy about speaker. It could also be MTG about vice president. You know, I think a Stefanic is always. also angling for that role.

And, you know, there's a couple other people who are as well. But it will be fun to watch and see who Trump picks. Yeah. So at the end of the day, the reason why I don't think he will pick, and I don't think anybody here was arguing that she's the most likely choice or anything. But the reason why I don't think you pick her is because he needs a straight man, as it were, right? And he doesn't want someone who's going to. So not Santos.

In the context that I'm talking about I think Santos could actually play the straight man But like me That doesn't want anybody who steals his limelight And it's possible for the reasons that Kevin's laying out That the crowds would go most wild for her And that is a strike against her for in Trump's size Also you know Trump is

So thin skinned and so as such a chip on his shoulder About being taken seriously and all that kind of stuff I think at some level he kind of understands that she's low rent and low class. And if he's thinking he's got to get a woman to be his running mate, I think he would look much harder people like Nikki Haley than he would ever look at Marjor, Taylor Green. But I think he would just purely pick the one he thought was most attractive.

I think he's very, very predictable in his views about the relative worth of women being reduced to their attractiveness. All right. So other than the previous conversation, we normally have a question of whether something is worth your time or not. Sarah called an audible and changed it from discussing something that was not worth our time to asking a question Ron Burgundy like

you know like stay classy San Diego a sort of not worth your time kind of question. So the question I want to ask you guys is I need to get up to more up to speed on it. Is this M&M's controversy worth my time, I ask you, Declan? Depends how much you value your time.

If it's more than five cents an hour, probably not. But, you know, there are some people who enjoy this kind of thing. So, okay, so what is actually happening? It's unclear if this is kind of a, a lot of companies do this kind of thing and like the lead up to the Super Bowl, where they, a couple years ago, planters killed off Mr. Peanut so that they could have him rise from the Ashes in their Super Bowl commercial in the library with a candlestick. Yes.

So I'm a little bit hesitant to say anything's official, but as of earlier this week, Eminem's, Mars, announced that they are putting the cartoon versions of their candy out to pasture in their advertising, and they are replacing them with Maya Rudolph. And she is going to be the new spokeswoman for the candy because over the past couple years, apparently the M&Ms have become so politicized

and so entrenched in the culture wars that Mars has decided it's no longer worth it to keep them as they changed some of the attire that the M&M cartoons are wearing. They decided to roll out an all-female M&M's package to celebrate women's empowerment. And I think other than defending the honor of the January 6th rioters,

Tucker Carlson has spent more time on M&Ms than pretty much anything else over the past two or three years. So there was just the one female Eminem, right? You know, I can't tell you with any degree of certainty. Because I was thinking it was like, you know, it was like there was just one Smurf Ed, you know, and that was a real imbalanced kind of demographic setup in the Smurf Mushroom Village there.

And I was thinking maybe Eminem's had roughly that and the same problem. I wish I could tell you. I think green is at least one of the female M&Ms. Brown might also be female. Yellow and red are kind of the oafish guys who don't really know what they're doing. And was it the green M&Ms that Van Halen used to demand taken out of their brandy sniffer?

Or was it the brown ones or I can't remember what you was. I think it was green M&Ms. And there's an actually great episode of, I think, a Freakonomics podcast where they explain that story. Yeah. We should tell listeners the famous like diva thing that Van Dalen would require was writers as these are known yeah they have a writer that would

demanded a big bowl of green m&Ms in their um dressing room or their green room or whatever and everyone it became code for like being a diva and their explanation for it was it was like 25 pages into their contract and their contract was full of all sorts of pyrotechnics and like swings and trapezes that required an incredible amount of safety and attention to detail and this was a way to test whether or not the venue actually read the full contract which I think is kind of brilliant

if it's true it also could be a post hoc you know just so story but so I like the most valuable piece of information I've gotten out of this is the Super Bowl

cynical thinking here because that makes a lot of sense to me when this story broke the other day I remember saying and my wife, this makes no sense to me because I have dropped a lot of money with my daughter at the M&M store in Times Square when she was younger

and the idea that they're going to just throw away all of that branding and just sell Maya Rudolph plush toys strikes me as unlikely. But I didn't close the circle with the Super Bowl thing. It actually, this makes it, that angle makes it more worth my time, I think,

because that makes it sort of an interesting marketing thing. And I can't tell if it's, mocking the M&M announcement, but we put it in the morning dispatch the other day that A&W root beer, their spokes bear, they decided to announce that he's going to start wearing pants from now on. You know, if something good comes out of it that we're not, you know, going to be exposed to cartoon bear genitalia anymore, more power to Mars. Maya Rudolph is charming, though. So she's, she'll be a good... She is indeed charming. She'll be a good spokesperson, I think. If I were, if I were picking so much,

someone just ex-Neilo to be a candy spokesman. I think maybe Maya Rudolph would be pretty high on the list. Sure, indeed. I think that's right. I also heard a piece on Marketplace yesterday, either Marketplace or NPR, I can't remember, that this company, which puts out this canned water called Liquid Death, is selling, is doing fantastically well

because it's convinced all these boys to drink water instead of soda, like, and they get these letters from parents saying, thank you. This is the first time I've got my, you know, 10-year-old boy to drink any water because it's called liquid death. Yeah, there's some precedent for that. There was a brand of cigarettes once upon a time. They were called, I believe they were called death.

And was it coffin nails? There was, there were a few that were along those lines. The one that's death, I remember, because I believe the menthols were called green death, which I kind of like. But, you know, their thing was they would print certain generals warning like, the whole package size like you know as a warning these things will kill you they're really really dangerous you definitely shouldn't smoke and uh they were you know pretty pretty successful at uh at doing that all right uh Declan garvey um Kevin Williamson uh you have titles which I

couldn't possibly tell you what they are uh but you are part of the dispatch family and everyone should subscribe to um the morning dispatch our our sort of flagship news product and to Wonderland, Kevin's fantastic and indispensable newsletter. And if you're not a paid subscriber to the dispatch generally, seek medical attention.

And with that, thanks everybody for listening, and we will talk to you next time. I'm just, I'm just trying to, like, see if, like, Sarah jumps in from the top rope to stop me.