The Dispatch Podcast - Red, Blue, and Green

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

Endorsements don’t matter, Fox News lied to its audience, and experts got COVID wrong. Jonah, Sarah, and Kevin give us all a reality check AND a grammar lesson.Plus: a Jonah rant on journalistic principles. If you enjoyed this conversation, join our Book Club for more presidential talk. Show Notes: -Sarah Isgur: The Sweep: Looking Out for No. 2 -Jonah Goldberg: Utter corruption of editorial leadership -The 10 biggest revelations from Dominion’s explosive Fox News legal filing -Ron DeSantis, Federalist? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Uh, I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit TELUS.com. Total Security to learn more. Conditions apply. Welcome back to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson.

We're going to do some state of the race on the GOP side, little Fox News, what it says about journalism, what it doesn't say about journalism, and some lab leak and our never-ending efforts to curb misinformation. And what happens when they run into, oh, wait, it wasn't misinformation. Let's dive right in. So, Jonah, I wrote the sweep this week on this bet that two of my friends made on Twitter. Jeb Bush endorsed Ron DeSantis. And one friend thought that was a terrible move, that Ron DeSantis is not a good civil libertarian. He's not a real conservative, et cetera. And the other friend said, none of that really matters because no matter how bad Ron DeSantis is, he's not as bad as Trump. And at this

point, in the GOP primary, it's a binary choice. And so any endorsement of Ron DeSantis is de facto actually just an anti-Trump endorsement. The one guy said, I'll bet that neither Trump nor Ron DeSantis gets the nomination, the other guy said, how about a hundred bucks? Who's going to win that bet, Jonah? But also, are they right? So I'm on record going quite a while back on this very podcast saying I favor the field over Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. And so I think I have to say that the guy who says neither of them will be the nominee is right because it's actually conforming to my preexisting position. But I think you're going to go to different ways. with this Jeb thing where I think the interesting question is does a Jeb Bush endorsement

hurt or help DeSantis, right? And I've seen people argue it both ways. And you can make the case, oh, look, this proves that DeSantis is really a closet establishment guy. And I think there's a case to be made for that. Do you know why I didn't ask that question? Because I don't think endorsements make any difference at this point. I think that's right. I think that's right. But also, I think it misrepresents the history of Donald Trump because lots of establishment people endorse Donald Trump. So like this transitive property thing that it makes you a rhino-squish establishmentarian

when perceived, I like Jeb Bush, I respect them a lot. But when people were perceived to be rhino-squish establishmentarians endorse you, that's just not the optics of how these things work. I think, I think Steve was the guy who first got this right. It was that the importance of DeSantis right now is he is the one candidate in this race so far that you can be of the MAGA stripe, the sort of hardcore MAGA personality, good with the magabase a very online Twitter derange type and you're allowed in that milieu I mean Laura Lumer will say bad things about you but in general you are allowed to park your vote

with DeSantis and not be a traitor to this whatever this incoate cause and and so I think that there are a lot of people who are with DeSantis in part just simply for that reason And you can see it in the Trump campaign's inability to get a lot of formerly very Trumpy Maga-type congressman to endorse Trump. I think it's only like 20 Republicans so far have gotten on board and a lot are just holding their water. And I think DeSantis's support on the right is a little deceptive in that regard because it is just simply a safe harbor for a lot of people rather than.

something of passion and they still have time if DeSantis below goes Scott Walker in the early primaries to say well we gave him a shot we'll move on but if he actually succeeds really well then I do think it's a two-person race because there's so many people lined up in prime to be DeSantis people they're just waiting to see how he performs in the early going and I think it's driving Trump a little nuts so I asked an either or question and somehow Jonah made a very coherent both answer that He favors the field over Trump and DeSantis. So no, it's not a binary choice. But yes, an endorsement of DeSantis is an anti-Trump endorsement, or at least can also be, rather than a pure pro-Dissantus endorsement.

It can be an anti-Trump endorsement. I koviyoshi Marood it. Kevin, what parts of Jonah do you agree or disagree with? I disagree with the premise of Jonah Goldberg. but that's a long story. You know, a couple things about this. The Jeb Bush thing is a reminder that being a good governor of Florida is a good launching platform for a presidential campaign, but it's not a qualification that lasts very long.

You know, when Jeb was running in 16, he had been a good governor of Florida, but he was a few years out by that point. And the momentum that one gets from that doesn't seem to have lasted for him. Rick Scott was a pretty good governor of California, too. Not likely to be a presidential candidate or a plausible in any way. So, you know, DeSantis kind of needs to, you know, strike while the iron is hot, I guess. I'm not sure I think that it's a binary choice exactly because there are two things going on. There's, you know, Trump himself and all the particular weird, dangerous, awful things about Donald Trump. But there are ways, the ways in which Donald Trump has really transformed the Republican Party that are not.

not unique to him and his, in his person. And so the DeSantis vote, yeah, I suppose is a vote against Trump and the unique awfulness of Trump, but it's, it's in a lot of ways to vote for the ways in which Trump changed the Republican Party and changed Republican politics. So I think that there are a lot of people out there who, for whatever reason, really like that. They were happy with a lot of the elements of the Trump movement and the Trump style, the kind of culture war all the time stuff. And they're hoping that DeSantis will carry that on. But they worry about, you know, Trump specifically being a little bit of even more of a loose cannon than he was a couple years ago and someone who's not likely to be electorally successful.

But again, I tend to think that normal people are not paying that much attention to this stuff at this point. It's real, real, real early. And I sort of suspect that, you know, in a few months, things look radically different from the way they do today. That's just the nature of elections like this. It's just super, super early. I'm going to go McLaughlin this and say that you're both wrong. That, in fact, as Nate Cohn of the New York Times pointed out, the polls are very predictive at this point compared to actually what we'll have later. And you go back to the 1970s, as Nate pointed out, and the person who is leading in the polls in these few months here at the beginning of the year before has over a 50% chance of winning the nomination. That makes my bet

with Steve Hayes look pretty good because way, way back, Steve and I made a bet that if Trump ran, he would get the nomination. Now, what I think is fun about this bet is that the one guy got two, the two top candidates. And so part of the question was, okay, how much more does that help you? So I just did like a deep dive on the 2008 primaries. And I said all along that to me, whether you're looking at the polling or the narratives around this race, it looks and feels so much like the 2008 Democratic primary. Donald Trump is Hillary Clinton. He's the juggernaut candidate leading in the polls.

Everyone thinks he's kind of unbeatable, even if they're not that into him. And then you have the change candidate, the, you know, David to the Goliath coming out and everyone sort of pouring their hopes and dreams into that campaign, and that's DeSantis, Obama was running in the number two slot the whole time. It never changed. The polls were incredibly stagnant all through 2007, actually. And you still had John Edwards, Joe Biden. At this point in the race, they were putting Al Gore in almost every poll. And so even the polling just looks so similar. So in that race where the number one person didn't win, so it's the you know, other side of that coin flip, the number two did. Now look on the Republican side,

person who was leading from January to June, and actually quite beyond that, on the Republican side in 2008, was Rudy Giuliani. And remember, that's the race where like at various points Mike Huckabee overtakes it. Fred Thompson is in the lead for a little bit. But if you actually look at who is in the number two slot for the first six months of 2007, it was John McCain. And it's not close. So I think that if you're just making a sort of actuarial bet, Trump and DeSantis looks pretty good. I'm not saying it's definitely a binary race, but I very much fall on the, yep, it is almost certainly a binary race at this point, not just because of the polling, also because of the narrative that's surrounding the two, and that we haven't seen any other candidates

even talked about that are out there that are going to be able to move that narrative and grab these headlines. I mean, right, Nikki Haley gets in and refuses to name a single thing in which she disagrees with Donald Trump on. She hasn't created a wedge for DeSantis, really. Mike Pence has maybe done the best job of all of that. And I think, interestingly, sort of your, the best case scenario that it's not the number one or two person is probably a Mike Pence theory that Mike Pence looks like John McCain, even if he's not in the number two spot from 2007. He's got the high name ID. It's just no one's excited about him. He's sort of the heir apparent in a lot of ways. And Mike Pence actually is drawing distinctions with other

candidates. He said he's in favor of entitlement reform, Social Security and Medicaid. he said he disagrees with Nikki Haley's competency test idea. Okay, maybe. I think that's a long shot. I mean, do you guys disagree that there's someone waiting in the wings who's shown that they're ready to actually campaign for this job? Well, I think one thing to keep in mind is that in 2008 was only the 39th time Joe Biden had run for president.

He was still kind of figuring things out. If he'd really had his legs under him at that point, I think it would have been a very, very different year. I was going to say, you know, we're giving short shrift of the fact that Nikki Haley is crushing Don Lemon in the early primaries. No, I think those are all good points, but again, not to go back to my Kobayashi maroing, but like, I still think DeSantis is the field, is part of the field right now if you're talking about, you know, a binary thing. and it's Trump versus Republicans. And I think that the search for historical parallels to this moment is of more limited utility than normal,

which is always of limited utility, because Trump is so sui generis in terms of American politics. And, you know, this thing which we talked about dispatch live about him refusing to endorse the eventual nominee if he doesn't get the nomination kind of thing. That's something that normal Republican politicians don't do, right? And the question is, is it, and one of the answers I think from Kevin or I can't remember was that, well, that's maybe because he's just not going to go debate at all. And so why should he agree to that pledge? Well, if you're going to have a race where Trump is not on the stage and you're going to have

debates where everyone is much more liberated to sort of get into this weirdly virtuous cycle of increasing criticism of Donald Trump. That's just a weird dynamic that we've never seen before in America. Like not someone's going to hit me with some fantastic parallel to Chester Arthur, but like in the television age, we've never seen anything like that before. And so I just think it's more unpredictable than normal and that the the weakness of the parties are more make things more unpredictable and the dysfunction of the right wing conservative media space is what makes it more unpredictable so i just i i i'm going with my gut still i don't think either from their nominee and you can take your little pointy-headed numbers and do what you want

I said, do you know who was tied for number two in 1991? On the Democratic side or Republican side? On the Democratic side. That makes sense. Paul Songas. He was tied for number two, but so was Bill Clinton. That was the year of the Seven Doors, remember? Yeah, yeah.

Where Mario Cuomo refused to run because he was sure that H.W. Bush was going to win running away. And so he had all these sort of second tier guys who just wanted to get name ID out of running for president and one of them actually became president. Look, I found everything you said super, super persuasive. Maybe not persuasive enough to change my mind, but like, I don't disagree with anything you said. I think that historical parallels are, you know, tricky in politics anyway. We only do this every four years.

I also think the weak parties thing can't be overstated. But I think the point that most moves me, I guess, which you hinted at, is not just the ecosystem of Republicans or even conservative media, but you're in the middle of a party realignment and a shift within the Republican Party. And it's just hard to compare that within our modern primary system, as you said, like, it'd be great to go back. I'm, I just finished a book on the 1920 election. This would be so helpful if they actually used any of their primary results to decide who got the nomination and that people actually participated in primary. marries in any real sense or that they campaigned, you know, that stuff, but it's not.

So, you know, the last real party realignment was in that goldwater to Reagan era, probably. But you've got the problem of much stronger political parties. And it's just hard to go back and see a lot of parallels to that. That being said, the one part I will push back on is that, And you didn't say this, but while Donald Trump is sui generous in many respects, Donald Trump in 23 is not Donald Trump from 2015. And he looks much more similar to a traditional candidate than he did in 2015. He's got a record. He's got, you know, we're actually looking at his fundraising numbers, all sorts of things that he wasn't held to in 2015. And that's where I think the Hillary Clinton the comparison gets more apt. Kevin?

One thing that I think, Jonah said that I'm interested me, he was talking about this weird dynamic of having everybody on the stage except for Trump, but given the relative importance of social media versus traditional sort of dog and pony show stuff like debates, from a different way of looking at it is for Trump's people, Trump is on the stage wherever he is and the rest of these people aren't. You know, he's going to be doing whatever the thing that is that he's doing in his weird campaign. Maybe this is just wishful thinking. I have a hard time seeing Trump's the nominee,

and I don't know many people who think that he will be. I know there are some numbers that suggest otherwise, but what he is likely to be is a chaotic presence, you know, someone who's going to cause all sorts of trouble and tear things up. And that's going to be true whether he's close to the nomination or not very close to the nomination, I think. He's going to, you know, be the agent of chaos that he was born to be.

I don't know about Chester author, but I was thinking that, you know, one of the nice things about the way the Romans did politics was there wasn't any comeback for Caligula. You know, he just, that problem was solved and they were able to move on as an empire. All right. Let's shift topics. As y'all know, my husband is involved as an attorney in the Fox versus Dominion litigation. And that's had an interesting effect because normally I'd be all in the weeds on a story like this. but it's odd because I'm not, in part because he's involved, but yet we also don't talk about it. So I'm like the least informed that one can possibly be on this in a lot of respects compared to usual. I have some thoughts, but Jonah, I've been very curious because you've been on CNN talking about this, you've written about it. Set aside the legal part of this. Just from a

journalism perspective. What are the things that you've learned that have stood out to you that have moved you in particular for those who maybe haven't read, you know, every single story and jot and tittle and email and text of all of this? And if you would, include the latest bit about Rupert Murdoch as well. So, and I have to do my own, it's not normally my marital full disclosures about my wife having work for Nikki Haley. Now, you have the marital full disclosure, but I have to disclose, I was in fact subpoenaed by Dominion. I gave a deposition. Nothing I'm going to, I'm not going to talk about the deposition and nothing I say here really has. Were the snacks good though? They were okay. Um, I got to say they were all right. But, uh, the fact that I am, my name does

not appear in any of these filings so far gives you a sense of how pertinent my deposition was in all of these things. So unless they're like holding something awesome, I don't remember saying back, you know, but, or I'm the redacted bits. My problem with all of this is that I have a, a passionately and violently nuanced position on all of this. I think a lot of the problems with Fox, let's put it this way, a lot of problems with, I'll start with what happened.

Dominion is suing Fox for $1.6 billion. They're suing because on count, well, actually they've counted, but on many occasions, Fox allowed or either to have guests on who went unrebutted and were credited as being truthful or hosts themselves repeated the lies of those guests like Sidney Powell and others that Dominion had been you know I mean some of the lies are so back guano crazy like Dominion was invented was was founded in Venezuela and it was used originally it was invented to it was created to and it was created to and it was was owned by Smartmatic and that it was founded to steal elections for Hugo Chavez, all just you know, opium den hallucination stuff, right? It was, uh, founded in Canada and it's headquartered in Denver and no relation to. We're saying we're sure none of this stuff is true. Yes. That's what. Okay. Just, just check. And apparently the genesis of a lot of the

Dominion stuff came from, uh, an email that Sidney Powell got over the transom that might as well have been from someone speaking in tongues into their iPhone recorder. I mean, it was just nuts. So anyway. But wait, Jonah, I actually do have a question on this point. To Kevin's point about like, let's tease out, you know, for those again who haven't been following all of this. So there's like, let's put it in the gap, that guano bucket, what all the like Hugo Chavez, like, it was created to steal elections. Okay. But there's a different bucket, which is Dominion's voting machines had serious problems and yada yada and they were easily tampered with and things like that where, and again, I just want to totally make clear that I am no expert on

this whatsoever. I'm not secretly holding back on you guys. But like I remember there being stories on CNN way before the 2020 election about concerns about specific voting machines, including Dominion, and that even in some of these filings, there's Dominion executives talking about like, uh-oh, we're concerned. We have problems with our voting machines. And like, so can you also talk about that buck? Yeah, sure. I mean, I think that's a perfectly fair thing to point out. And I think that if Fox had a bunch of guests on who gave these sober assessments of these security vulnerabilities of Dominion machines, Dominion would not be suing for $1.6 billion. So that's not really what a bunch of these defamatory statements are. They're more

in the bat guano bucket. Yeah. If you read the filings, it's, there's, They're not talking about that stuff. They're talking about all sorts of crazy things. And, but I agree with you. This is part of the riotously nuanced position I have. There have been Democrats going back to 2004. I remember being like just inundated with stuff about how Bush stole the election in the Dibold with the rigged Dibold machines in Ohio.

So I am wildly both sidesist on a lot of this stuff. I think that a lot of the problems that affect Fox, affect cable news generally. including full disclosure, CNN where I am at, I think even more so in MSNBC. This blurring of opinion and reporting is a problem everywhere. Fan service to audiences is a problem everywhere. There are all sorts of things,

and there are all sorts of legitimate criticisms of Fox News prior to 2015 that I think have merit. But I think the thing that's getting lost in a lot of this is that basically you have this problem of a cold front and a hot front coming together, where you have the cold front of longstanding hatred of Fox News that predates Donald Trump, coming in alongside the radical transformation of Fox News

that was caused by Donald Trump. And these two things completely ruined visibility of the issue when they come together and form the storm, because, you know, the Fox changed with Donald Trump. And I can show you the DMs from Fox personalities, you know, there's nothing to do with dominion, but like just like people who passionately wanted to stop Donald Trump, thought Donald Trump would ruin the nation, ruined conservatism, ruin the Republican Party, who are now out there saying how glorious and

wonderful Donald Trump is and did so for seven years. And Fox, I think the problem that Fox got into was it basically created a monster. It let its audience watch TV like it was some choose-your-own-adventure video game. And the realities that the audience wanted were the realities that Fox, particularly on the opinion side, gave the audience. And then by the time you get to the 2020 stuff, you have these executives who are all but screaming,

at least in these filings, we cannot offend this monster that we created. right it's like the dry riding the tiger can't get off of it because it'll eat you like and so these memos and again they can be taking they can have stuff out of context who knows what the brilliant lawyers some of whom are are married to my co-panelists here have will say in rebuttal but if you just take it at good faith that they're not really distorting things susan scott who i think is to leadership what rice paper is to construction materials um based basically just says...

And she's the head of Fox News. Yeah, she just cares about brand protection. And what they mean by brand protection is not upsetting the audience so much that they go off and find their crazy at OAN and Newsmax. That's the essence of this story. And you have Rupert Murdoch, and I said this on CNN yesterday,

and I think it dropped like a lead balloon. There's this part of the testimony where Rupert Murdoch says, you know, after they decided they were no longer to have election deniers and conspiracy theorists on air, Rupert Murdoch says, well, we had to let Mike Lindell back on because he advertises with us a lot. And he says, this isn't a red or blue thing, it's a green thing. And what I said on CNN was like, and this was the moment where Rupert's lawyers took out their black tar heroin and started tying off their arms

because he just said it out loud. I mean, you're not supposed to say that, right? And that's the kind of thing that will play well with the jury. And so I think that this is actually a problem for dominion in a certain sense because the real source of the lies and disinformation

wasn't Fox. The real source of the lies and disinformation was Trump and they were bending to Trump. And I think you can make that as a legal argument that, you know, look, this is a lagging indicator, and the people who think the election was stolen don't think of it because they heard it from Mari Bar to Roma and Sidney Powell.

They believe it was stolen because they heard it from Donald Trump. But it gets to the utter corruption of the editorial leadership of Fox News that they let Trump basically dictate their position. And the last thing I'll say is that Roger Ailes, who we all can agree was a flawed, human being. This is one of the great understatements of Western civilization, would never

have tolerated this stuff. He understood that the credibility of the news side is what gave the credibility of the opinion side power. And what happened under Susan Scott since his death and since they made so much money is that they got into a position where the news side, which still does honorable and good work, and I'll defend Brett Bearer and Jackie Heinrich and some of the other people that Tucker and those guys tried to fire for telling the truth, I mean, which actually comes out in these texts. I think that those guys are left in this position where the tone, tempo, and focus of the network is driven entirely by the opinion side, and the news team is sort of like an internal think tank that just sort of, you know, that the internal brain room is now

the news division that gives some facts to paper over the opinion side. And the network should probably be called Fox Opinion, which has a little, an adorable news division. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you could take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy

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from $599 bi-weekly at 3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event. Condition supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. Kevin, I just want to talk about the journalism side here for a second, because everything Jonah said just now, unimpeachably true, was absolutely correct. It's not that I disagree with any part of it. I guess I disagree with the conclusion that somehow this is an indictment of Fox News instead of every news organization, in the United States at least, has always had these two very common.

contradictory pieces, making money and journalism ethics. And maybe some news organizations forego making more money because they believe so much in their ethical duty. But look, at the end of the day, I can't say I'm particularly shocked that a news organization, at least some of them, put the making money part over the journalism ethics part because at the end of the day, there's no journalism ethics without the making money part. They cease to exist. And particularly in the cable news sphere for a moment. It'd be one thing if Fox News was some huge outlier in their fan service or audience service as they tried to double down on their niche within the market. And oh my God, like they're just an entertainment network. I had no idea. Like that's what cable

news is. It's on TV. It's on cable. The whole thing is entertainment and fan service. I understand that there are good journalists who work there, but that seems more accidental to. to me, then that it's part of the, or rather, it seems like it was simply part of the business model. And if that stopped helping the underlying business model, then I guess I'm not totally shocked that they leaned on the entertainment side. And I know I've used this example before. And I get it. It's a totally different example. It's seriousness is different. All of that. All the disclaimers on that. But the way MSNBC talked about the Steele dossier and about the ongoing Mueller investigation at a journalism standpoint, at an entertainment,

standpoint and at a business decision audience fan service standpoint doesn't look that much different than me to me. No. It's just a question of whether there was actually, you know, defamation involved in any of that. Sure, sure. That's why I said. The legal side's totally different here. So I think that you don't have it quite right in a sense that it's not a two-way relationship between trying to do journalism and trying to make money. It's actually a three-way problem that you've got journalists who want to do journalism. You've got journalists who want to fight the culture war, which is a different thing. And you've got organizations that want to make money. And these three things work together in complicated ways. There aren't very many former newspaper editors who are

as big a fan of libel suits as I am. I think they're actually a really good thing. And I think that I think that there should be more of them and more news organizations should lose them. And I think it should be easier to sue them for various ways. This is how I think that more lawyers should be disbarred and sanctioned. That's true, too. I'm a vindictive man, I suppose. But so Sarah Palin did not win her libel suit against the New York Times. I thought she should have. But the Times didn't libel her because they thought they would make some money off of it.

They libeled her because it was a culture war thing. I mean, Sarah Palin pops up or some issue pops up and how can we use this to get a sideways shot at somebody who's not actually in that case, even involved in the story. But you don't think that's part of knowing who your audience is, what they want hear? Well, I think it's, I think it's both, right? So I think there, certainly in the case of Fox News, certainly in the case of NBC, MSNBC, it's probably stronger in cable news than it is in some other places, although there's a lot of, you know, kind of online printish outlets that have the same problem, where it's not just about making the money, it's not just about serving the audience,

it's that you're also hostage to people, particularly, you know, often younger staffers who have these culture war commitments that are much bigger than their commitment to journalism and that they don't really particularly care about whether that's financially good for the institution or not. Without disclosing anything, I can certainly tell you that I did my best to make it not financially good for the Atlantic for them to chase me out of there. But that was not about, you know, business model. That wasn't about anything like that. That was about people who have these crazy cultural commitments that are a lot bigger than the commitment to journalism. And I think that in some ways, that's probably stronger in some of the left-leaning outlets. You know, the New York Times

has its weird internal problems that aren't really so much driven by the desire to make money as they are driven by the desire to engage in certain kinds of cultural war politics. Whereas I think if you look at some of the, you know, scammy or griftier, kind of right-wing sites, they are maybe more self-consciously just milking the cow in some ways. Can I add a point on this? Because I, yeah, just the right of rebuttal to Sarah's entirely well taken. Why are we getting, why are we so surprised by all of this gambling in these casinos? I get the point.

I think it's part of my point. I think I said at the beginning, I think these are problems that are endemic to media across the board. there is a difference. And maybe it's because I've spent 30 years as an opinion journalist. I think opinion journalists have certain ethical obligations too. And that don't necessarily fall under journalists of ethics. I mean, you can pigeonhole them into it. Just fall under ethics. And one of them is don't lie. And, you know, there's a difference between George Will, who marshals facts and reason to make strong arguments and Gateway Pundit

which makes outlandish false claims and sprinkles them with true facts to make them more plausible, right? And the difference in this situation isn't, I agree with you entirely that group think and opinion masquerading as news runs riot through places like MSNBC

and certainly through CNN in recent years I think they're trying to fix some of that stuff now which is one of the reasons I'm over there. But the difference here is that we actually have texts from opinion journalists literally saying that they know this stuff is untrue, but we got to say it anyway. But what was their why? Because their why was a business reason. Well, I mean, it depends on the person. Some of it is like, yeah, it's a business reason.

But like, I think we would find all sorts of interesting things. You know, and we heard sometimes the quiet part said out lied, what was it, was it Les Moonvis who says, I think Trump's bad for America, but he's good for CBS, right? You know, I am no alien to profit motives, you know, I want the dispatch to one day acquire the New York Times. But that all said, there is, as an opinion journalist, forget the money thing. Like, I worked at National Review for 20 years. I've been to syndicated columnist for 25 years, something like that. If you told me in private, you know, like I've had conversations with columnists. I've said it myself all the time. Yeah, that's a column I can't write right now, right? That's different than saying, I'm going to write a column that I know is full of lies and things I don't believe. And that is the equivalent to what Tucker is doing, right?

Tucker says in private that Trump is a destroyer, he's a monster, he's ruining this country, he's ruining, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then he goes out in public and he says, how awesome he is. Sean Hannity, Susan Scott says all these people know this stuff is bogus. They say it in private, but then they refuse to say it in public. And you can say it's a financially driven decision. I think on the part of Rupert it is. But it's also caught up in this

culture war stuff about wanting to be loyal to a team. And I think that's a big chunk of what caused the corruption at Fox was this loyalty to the cause. Two things that have jumped to mind. One is that, Joni, you are uncharacteristically underplaying something, which is how crazy that email to Sidney Powell was. So I don't know if you went back and looked at it, but the woman who wrote the email claimed to be the disembodied spirit of someone who had been decapitated and was getting these messages like literally from beyond and this sort of thing. It wasn't someone saying, hey, I work at Dominion, and I'm going to be a whistleblower

and tell you about this. It was a decapitated ghost. She said that most of the allegations she learned in a dream. Yeah. And so that's maybe not the most solid. And if I were, not to make this the legal discussion, but if I were looking for something to call reckless disregard for the truth, maybe I'm getting my sources are decapitated ghosts and their dreams. That might be one thing. But when I saw about this stuff from Rupert Murdoch saying, yeah, we're just doing this for the money, it made you think of a libel case that we used to talk about when I was in school a lot, which was there was this horrible situation where there was a guy who was working in a women's dormitory at a school.

It might have been SMU. And someone called him up and said, you know, this guy is a sex offender. And he, you know, committed these horrible crimes a few years ago. Now we've hired him here. And he was a guy who had a really unusual foreign name. And, but as it turns out, there are two people with that unusual foreign name and the one who was working at the dorm was not the sex offender. And anyway, I think it was the student newspaper ran with the story, though, and they published it. And the next day, their lawyer called them up. And his

advice to them was, if he asks you for anything less than a million dollars, write the check and that's that. And when I saw that stuff from Rupert Murdoch, I was just thinking, they're not going to get $1.6 billion. But they're going to get some money. money. And there's, I mean, I know this is a weird field of law and I'm not a lawyer and Sarah knows a lot more about this stuff than I do. And I'm often surprised by the outcomes of these cases. But man, it's, that's going to be just hard to go in and defend. So look, I'll just say that the biggest legal thing that I'm interested in in this case is the idea, the philosophical idea, right, against what Kevin believes that you want journalists to have a really wide,

ability to have people on their shows, to talk about things to get to our next topic, right? About the lab leak theory. Because if you narrow that too much, now forget what the Fox host said for a second. But when they're being sued for having Sidney Powell on, who's then saying insane things from the decapitated head, that that falls into basically a journalism privilege when it comes to defamation because otherwise all of a sudden you have news organizations being really scared or narrowing who they talk to or can have on. And set aside Fox News or any of this about 2020 or January 6th or all of that. Philosophically, that's interesting because whatever the standard that is set here will then apply to the New York Times as much as Fox News, as much as any news

organization, the dispatch or otherwise. And so, you know, I do find it, there are major differences between the New York Times Sarah Palin case and this case. But in general, the people who are screaming about how Sarah Palin shouldn't be able to sue the New York Times because it's a free press and this is trying, or, you know, DeSantis's bill on defamation, which I don't agree with in several parts or slash just think it's silly in several parts. Again, if you're screaming about how this hurts a free press, but then you're telling me that Fox News should be bankrupted. I'm going to need you to get into the weeds a little on how you distinguish these two cases. There are things that distinguish them, but it doesn't seem like a whole bunch

of people are interested in that. You do hit on something that is really useful that maybe people who aren't in journalism or don't have legal backgrounds don't understand, which is that, you know, journalists have to go out and cover what people are saying and talking about. And certain people, you know, you just have to write down what they say and report it. And we're in a weird era where you've got to cover people like Rudy Giuliani who's out there saying things that everybody knows are not true, but you can't pretend like he's not part of the news and what he says doesn't matter. One of the sort of weird problems we have right now is that public figures are so willing to defame other people or to say things that are just routinely not true, that reporters

still have to cover the stuff. But then you don't want to put yourself in the position of being the guy who says, well, I'm a reporter, but I'm going to step aside here for a second and say, well, this thing I've just reported. Obviously, this is not true. And the New York Times does this thing where Donald Trump said, without evidence or blah, blah, blah, this will actually transition as I guess to our next story in some ways. But it's an irritating thing they do, but I understand why they do it. It's a really hard line to walk, I think, to report and to try to have some decent regard for the fact that sometimes some of the things you're hearing when you're reporting are absolutely, you know, not true. And obviously. I agree. I agree with all that. Just

If you read the filings, though, it's pretty clear that the executives said time and again, don't have these people back on. We got to stop pushing this stuff. And they said, okay, and then they pushed it anyway. And they had them back on, right? And they knew it was false. And they were told by his appears it was false. But because Susan Scott cannot say no to people with good ratings, they let them keep doing it.

And then when they saw they were losing audience to Newsmax and OAN, they all of a sudden and change of the strategy to do more of it. So I just think knowing disregard for the truth is just a real problem. Lastly, I'm with you, Sarah. I get it. I think that's a really interesting philosophical and legal argument about where we draw these lines. But let's just point out, look, England, I think, has way too liberal, you know, libel laws.

And I think America has too strict libel laws. England's still a free country. Canada is still a free country. America is still a free country, you can move these lines a little bit without getting us into 1984 territory. And I think in large part after listening to advisory opinions and increasingly disagreeing with David about New York Times v. Sullivan, I think New York Times v. Sullivan is too broad. And I think you could come up 10 yards short of it, be closer to the right position, without sacrificing the important freedoms that make this country so wonderful?

For what it's worth, I think I generally agree with that. Like I said, in DeSantis' defamation bill, by the way, a lot of what I disagree with it is is that it's too vague to apply in court, and so it's just going to get tossed. We can always get into that. Well, we'll get it on advisory opinions later, I suppose. But I think the actual malice standard for public figures versus private figures and all of that is nonsensical. And I agree with Kevin that by and large, probably news organizations should be held

responsible for the harm that they cause. It's not a punishment. It's simply an economic transaction, right? You screwed up and you hurt someone's reputation. They did nothing wrong. You lied about them. It doesn't really matter whether you had sort of a good heart about it. Probably, since you were trying to make money off of it, you owe them some money now. And it's probably worth pointing out that in 100% of these cases, we're talking about statements that are factually false. You know, no one loses a libel suit for something that's true. But I think my point is that it has to be across the board.

Whatever you want to set that standard at, just because you hate Fox News or you hate what they did around the 2020 election, you're going to have to apply that then same standard. And I think on sort of a knee-jerk reaction, it was like, yeah, yeah, of course. but my preferred news organization never does something like that. It's like, okay, let's hope you're right. And preferably a standard that is not, as one of my favorite legal commentators characterized you the other day, made the F up. So let's talk about a little bit about the lab leak theory

because I think when it comes to COVID and an emerging news story, there was just, when I say there's so much we didn't know, there's everything we didn't know. We knew nothing, and we were trying to learn things as we went, all of us, whether you're a reporter or a president or sitting in your home, chloroxing your groceries. None of us had any clue. And yet, this conventional wisdom narrative pops up on a few things.

One, first, masks don't work. Then, masks do work, and we have mask mandates, pop up both from government and from private organizations. Two, that the vaccines prevent infection and prevent the ability to pass on COVID to others. There's this Rachel Maddow clip where she literally says, here's what is true about vaccines. You won't get COVID and you cannot give COVID to someone else. And three, that the idea that COVID originated from a lab in China in Wuhan that was studying these types of viruses was racist or was simply evidentially unfounded a conspiracy theory, quote unquote, and was not to be discussed by polite company, smart people, things like that. as others have pointed out, it is some peak of hilariousness that the not racist theory

was that it was from people eating bats. Okay. So, and look, so here, let's fast forward two or three years, depending on which one of these we're talking about. You have two intelligence organizations saying that, um, they believe the most likely scenario is that it originated from the lab. And you have about four intelligence organizations who still believe that it's most likely that it did not, that it originated from some other source.

You have the Cochran study, which is a meta study, right? It looks at all the other studies, some about COVID, most about not COVID, about flu or other respiratory-like illnesses, that it didn't find that mass are ineffective, by the way. I do get annoyed with people who are saying that. What it found is that there's not sufficient evidence to say that masks are effective. It's nuanced, but a little bit different. And lastly, on vaccines, as anyone who's been, you know, not living under a rock can tell you, yeah, look, they're helpful, but no, they're not some absolute.

They do not prevent anyone who's vaccinated from getting COVID, obviously, and they do not prevent anyone who's vaccinated from giving COVID to someone else. though they almost certainly help on both of those fronts. So we're talking percentages, just not absolutes. Okay, I find all of this interesting because if you had asked someone before COVID, I think they would have probably been able to tell you the likelihood that the nuanced version was true and that the absolute version wasn't true. but somehow in the midst of a national emergency and a pandemic, a bunch of things got labeled

as misinformation and you weren't allowed to say them. And you even have out in California, Governor Newsom signing into law, a law, a law with penalties for doctors who told their patients anything about COVID that was not part of contemporary scientific consensus. Contemporary, of course, having the word temporary in it, as Jonah has likes to point out. But that would have, of course, included the idea that masks, that there was no evidence that masks actually were preventing the spread of COVID or that vaccines were not 100% effective at the beginning of the vaccination period. They were penalizing doctors for this in theory. Now, he got in joined before it went to effect, but they were willing to. So, Kevin. This episode is bro.

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through your site. It's a single hub for managing your work and reaching your audience without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Did we learn anything? And I don't mean us. I mean we as the global American we about misinformation. Are we done with this word now? Unfortunately, I don't think so. Well, I think this goes back to what I was talking about before, which is we have this huge problem with journalistic organizations that are really more interested in fighting the culture war than they are in doing journalism.

So, you know, it became about who do we anathematize what ideas are literally unspeakable now, at least in California, without legal jeopardy, that sort of thing. The healthy skepticism that journalists are supposed to bring to official pronouncements and such things has really been turned on its head in lots of ways. Right. I mean, isn't it the peak of irony that the journalists were the ones on the side of the government? Well, that's, again, that's the interesting. That's terrified.

That's the action-reaction thing, right? So we've got a situation now in which you've got the kind of trumpist element of the right is very anti-institutional. It's very anti-establishments of all kinds. Don't trust the man. Don't trust the police. They don't like the FBI anymore. I heard someone, was it maybe Dana Lash on the radio that they're saying that she wouldn't

encourage her children to join the military, all these things that the conservatives used to be the institutions they cared about and trusted. And now that they are skeptical of those. things and the people who hate them have to be super buttoned down 100% in favor of those things. It's this weird completely reactionary thinking and journalists of all people should be able to get themselves at least one or two steps kind of outside of that and look at that dynamic and say that, okay, that we've got these people over here who are always going to say, well, we don't like Anthony Fauci, we don't like what the CDC is doing because we're

Republicans and we're in our weird kind of, you know, Charles Manson hippie phase where we don't trust anything, we're nihilists. And then we've got people on the other side who suddenly become, you know, superestablishmentarians and super institutions about everything, not because they believe in these things, but because they think it's a way to hurt or, or disempower the other side. That being said, I think by far that the biggest and most interesting part about the recent part of this story is how cool the Department of Energy turns out to be. They've got, you know, Z-Division crazy, like, you know, science fiction kind of sounding thing. It also turns out that the Department of Industry has this weird, very low-key commando force

that's out there mostly to deal with security emergencies at nuclear facilities and things like that. So it's not just nerds with solar panels. The Department of Energy's got all sorts of cool stuff going on. So I think it was Jonah was actually pointing this out the other day. When the DOE came out and said we think it was probably came out of a lab, there was a bunch of predictable, well, what is the DOE? know about this. Well, as it turns out, the DOE knows a whole lot about this stuff because it runs

the national laboratories, and it's been involved in research regarding weapons of mass destruction for a long time, growing out of its responsibility for nuclear stuff. There's a weapon of mass destruction right there, adding her two cents. Pancake apparently is very excited about this. So, yeah, people need to slow down a little bit, and especially journalists need to figure out that you can do journalism and not have to be a full-time, 100% cultural person all the time. And in fact, probably is a long-term business proposition that's not going to be good for institutions because these things change, right, as we've seen. You know, there was a time when the figures on the right who were the most, you know,

sort of respected and adhered to, and there were some financial benefits that went along with that, suddenly, you know, the whole world changed and they were out and these people didn't want to read National Review anymore. And they're going to go look at, you know, Owen Ann instead of Fox News and and all the rest of these things. And whereas actually doing good work and providing real journalistic value, it's not going to do a dispatch pitch here, but I promise I'm not going to. It really does create long-term value that people will pay for, I think, over, over time. Whereas the culture war stuff is like fashion, you know, it changes really quickly and it changes in ways that are inherently unpredictable.

Jonah, I have two things for you. Two T-balls that I want you to knock off. T-ball number one. But what does this tell us about the Fox News case, right? If we want journalists to be more skeptical and not accept the government's line, that everything is fine and voting machines all worked, and you want them to actually talk to the people

who seem a little whack-a-do because otherwise it's just all this conventional wisdom. Should that make us feel differently? Okay, that's T-ball number one. Number two. This feels like, to me, very much the progressive movement, not the not progressive as we use it now, meaning like super woke, liberal, whatever terms you want to use. I mean progressives like the Wilson Teddy Roosevelt progressives. The idea that if we just put all the experts in charge of government will all be better off. And if you have to break some rules to get there or throw

some people in jail because they disagree with you, that's fine. there's just a greater good aspect to progressivism because it's about experts and putting the people most able to, the smart people in charge. La, la, la, eugenics. That felt a little bit like what the journalism industry as a whole seemed to be pretty on board with during COVID. And I wonder if now that a lot of that has been undermined and frankly, expertise has been undermined. Whether it's, I mean, I hate to say this, but the FBI or public health or anything else, are we ending the progressive era? Again, that progressive era from 100 years ago that has been continuing on in various forms.

Those are your two questions. So just a usage correction. I believe the correct formulation is yada, yada, yada, yada eugenics, not la la la, eugenics. But so. Yada, yada, yada, lobster bisque, eugenics. La, la, la does sound a little nonchalant. Yeah. So on the, what does it say about the Fox stuff?

I think one way to think about it is to bring back our, I think one of our favorite points around here is the weak party thing, right? One of the problems with Fox is that its greatest similarity with MSNBC is that both of them are basically water carriers for a specific party. And, you know, broad generalization, their exception. Some of them aren't really water carriers for Republican Party. The water carries for Donald Trump. But when Trump was president, that's a distinction with very little difference.

And so you get a lot of journalism that is really party work by proxy. And party work by proxy is fine if you admit that's what it is. But when you gussy it up and put lipstick on it and say, this is independent. fair-minded, you know, fair and balanced journalism, when really it's regurgitation of not necessarily wrong, but partisan talking points, it gets all very murky and confusing. And one of the weird dynamics in all of this is that I think, so there are lots of reasons. We've seen a lot of these quotes around from like Medi Hassan and some other people saying how, you know, we couldn't give credence to the, you know, the lab leak theory because it was lumped in with conspiracy

theories and we didn't want to give these people credit. I think that there's a lot of that kind of stuff going on and there was a lot of that stuff kind of stuff going on. We didn't traffic in it. Our former colleague Jim Garrity did great stuff on the lab leak at National Review. I had Matt Ridley on several times to talk about lab leak stuff. He wrote a whole book about it and he's very responsible guy. Um, but I think you, I think you put your finger on it a little bit, Sarah, when you talk about how the, the questioning the government seemed, isn't that what journalists are supposed to do? And I think what unites, and this will segue into the progressive part of the

question, what unites a lot of mainstream elite journalism with the government, other than ties of marriage, is, um, is that, uh, uh, the, uh, the, the definition of responsible journalism is not encouraging the unwashed to believe that they can be right about anything. And it is entirely possible that, as you mentioned, this could have gone the complete opposite way. In fact, it was going the complete opposite way in the beginning. In the very beginning, all of the usual forces came forward to say it is outrageous and racist to suggest that there's anything wrong with non-Western dietary habits. And there are these videos coming up and you understand the culture of wet markets

and even wet market is pejorative and all those nonsense stuff. And then all of a sudden it flipped around and became, it's racist to think that there was an accidental lab leak. Similarly, I remember Nancy Pelosi and Bill de Blasio saying it was racist to wear masks very briefly, at least at a Chinatown celebration, right? I mean, the conventional wisdom was almost completely arbitrary and jailed along partisan lines based upon whether Trump was for or against something. And that gets to the progressive part. One of the reason why the progressive era sucked, one of the reasons why this sort of Walter Lipman ideal of the

disinterested public servant is a problem, is that when you claim to have no bias, that is the easiest time to be biased. When you do not do a rigorous personal inventory of your own biases and say, hey, you know, what is my motivated reasoning here? Because you think you're immune to it, that's the easiest time to become enslaved by motivated reasoning. And I think that you have an enormous amount of, particularly during the pandemic, there's an enormous amount of thought, what's his name? Who's the guy who's the guy who does? technological stuff for the for commentary um migs uh he did uh he used to be the editor of of popular mechanics and he wrote this wonderful piece about elite panic and elites often in and out of journalism

are terrified that that while they can handle difficult news they don't think the normals can and so they start massaging the truth and you find this i think so much in that progressive in that progressive tendency that just simply use appeals to our own authority as to why we're right about everything. And the best example of that and the corruption of it was the insistence that mass gatherings were horrible, evil, you can't go to funerals, you can't go to your kids' wedding, you can't go to your kid's birth, you can't go to any meeting unless it's to protest racism. Because COVID gives you an exception for protesting racism. And For a lot of people, this was like, oh, I get it.

You just like bossing people around. And I think that that's the sort of worldview of a lot of people who go into mainstream media and it'll go into government and it's why they can defend government because if they agree with the buyers, you know, the Fox News thing is irritating because it's a way that it cashed discredit upon other reporting about election fraud. And election fraud, as it turns out, is a real thing.

There are people who will tell you, no election fraud. well, in that case, I've got a big story for you because we've got people in jail in Texas, people in jail in Pennsylvania, people in jail in Kentucky who have been, you know, convicted of election fraud in various kinds of ways. We had a judge of elections in Philadelphia who got caught, you know, stuffing ballot boxes. We had party operatives in Texas who were going to memory units of hospitals and filling out, you know, ballots for people who had dementia and that sort of thing. So, but they get so committed to, well, the conspiracy theories are these people they're cooks and we can't do anything that helps them or adds anything to their case.

So we end up ignoring, you know, the actual stories that are going on up there, not doing, not doing any real journalism. And that's how you get to the absurd position of people, you know, media people, reporters and stuff saying, well, I just have a hard time believing that the government of China would lie about something like this. I mean, what, what evidence do you have of that other than everything they've ever done for the entire time they've been in power, pretty much? So, you know, the lab leak thing is something that really should have been pursued by everybody in a big way, you know, the circumstantial case for it.

I mean, it just would have been one of history's greatest ironies if this coronavirus had popped up in a place where they do coronavirus research, but it wasn't, you know, from the lab. And not to say things, unusual things happen, coincidences happen. But to treat it as something that, you know, makes you, you know, persona non grata in polite society, if you're willing to dig into it. or look at it is the opposite of what journalists are supposed to do. And it's the opposite of the sort of culture that we should be trying to inculcate, not only in journalists, but in intellectuals, an academic life and other places like that, and also in government. And fortunately, as it turns out, we've got a couple of people in the Department of Energy

in the FBI, apparently, who actually still care about doing their jobs. So God bless them. Last up, not worth your time, question mark. Jonah, you learned something this week. and you know, you're a really smart guy. You just are. You know a lot of things. And I was tickled by how jarring you found it to discover something that not only that you didn't know,

but that you thought you knew. So I regret to inform listeners that the word restaurateur, like one who owns restaurants, does not have an N in it. And I find this to be like one of the most, it was so, I saw this. I know we don't, not supposed to talk about Twitter, but this isn't the not worth your time. Someone had tweeted, it is so wildly effed up that restaurateur does not have an F in it. And, I mean, an N in it. And, and I immediately thought that's nonsense. They were just playing with me. And I went and Googled it. And all of a sudden I was I felt like everything I'd ever known or believed was now

cast into doubt because this this this this this this this lacuna of the letter N had been existing in plain sight in a word that I I see I pronounce with an end all of this time and it it it it it it vexes me and it makes me wonder what other what other haunting uh disharmonies in the space time continue are out there that I am destined to encounter. Kevin, I think the not worth your time aspect of this is in this age of AI and chat GPT and frankly computers, is spelling worth our time? Yes, because you look dumb if you can't do it and I will want to murder you. Five hundred years ago, Shakespeare couldn't spell his own name the same way in the same document. Spelling for smart people is a modern invention.

You know what? And if you're Shakespeare, I cut you. you all sorts of slack. You know, I'm sure there were times when Baryshnikov walked funny, you know, but that's, that's a different sort of thing. I mean, I collect these things, like, you know, there's no period in Dr. Pepper and that sort of stuff. You know, I was a copy editor for a long time, so I care a lot about those sorts of things. No period in the S and Harry S. Truman.

Well, that's a matter of debate. Yeah, I know. Although the S didn't stand for anything. So it, in a technical sense, probably shouldn't. He seems to have written it that way, though. There was something actually when I was supposed to talk about Twitter or someone sent this to me.

Someone had tweeted that the days of a milk toast Republican Party are over. And she had spelled the term M-I-L-K-T-O-A-S-T and people were mocking her for it. And of course, that's the original expression. Milk-toast is a real thing that people, for some reason, used to eat.

It's toast with warm milk on it. And the word that spelled M-I-L-Q-U-E-T-O-A-S-T from Casper Milk Toast is a fictional character. whose name was derived from the actual weird mushy bread dish. So, you know, in a sense, she was going back to the original, not making a typo. And there are places in the country where people do still apparently eat milk toast. So, you know, be careful before you get too judgy about things. But do you start on long-lived versus long-lived?

Where do you come down? This may end your relationship with the dispatch. It's long-lived, obviously. long lived is a mistake that's just how people say it but it's long life means having a long life not having a long live

whoa whoa you know one of the things I always like to point out to people because you know you still hear the expression from time and time

the greatest thing since sliced bread sliced bread was invented in 1928 just what 15 years before Joe Biden was born Slice bread is very young.

Google it. Well, yeah, but it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. So, like, if I said it's the greatest thing since Shakespeare, for instance, it's a very different time frame. I'm saying it's like the greatest thing in a really, really long time. But if I say it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, I'm saying it's the greatest thing of the last hundred years. Yeah, go on and poll people.

I think people hear the expression, greatest thing since sliced bread, they think it's like saying the greatest thing, like, since cooking food or fire or... That kind of thing. They don't think, oh, you're, oh, you only mean since, you only mean 95 years ago? Speaking of presidential middle names, I'm very confused why we associate some presidents with their middle initial and not others. So like, why does Warren G. Harding get the G. We all know his middle name starts with a G.

But yet Grover Cleveland or Taft or any of these guys, like we don't use their middle initial? The only one that makes sense is George W. Bush because he had to distinguish them from his dad. Correct. Yeah. It's a good point. Yeah. And like, yes, we, you know, we know William Jefferson Clinton, Donald John Trump. Like, I'm not saying I don't know some of the modern president's middle names, but like it's very random, which ones when you talk about them, you include their middle initials. Well, some people use middle initials because they make it, they think their names sound more aristocratic. That was why John F. Kennedy often did that. Especially if you've got a very plain name like John. Yeah. Yeah. But like Warren G. Harding.

Like, it was a weird... I think he was just, you know, presaging the rapper Warren G. And just crushing it with the ladies, by the way. P.J. O'Rourke called him the original Get Down Republican. If you're curious to learn more about Warren G. Harding, join the dispatch, become a member, and you can be part of the dispatch book club

where this quarter we are doing the 1920s. We just finished a book about Woodrow Wilson's sort of civil libertarian, sorry, civil liberties overreach, and now we're doing the election of 1920, the election with six presidents in it. Let's see if I can name them off the top of my head here. FDR, TR, Wilson, Harding, Hoover, and Coolidge. You saved the best for last. She lands it. I was heading for a Rick Perry moment, and I saved it, and I'm so proud. Thank you all for listening and we will talk to you again next week. I'm going to be able to be.