The Dispatch Podcast - Republicans Make Their Choice

Episode Date: May 13, 2021

With so much going on in the news this week, it’s hard to pick one headline. Is it Liz Cheney being ousted from her leadership role for telling the truth? Or the fact that a major oil pipeline was attacked by ransomware? Or maybe the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine heating up and heating up fast? The gang discuss all of those topics and why a rise in independent voters may not actually be a good thing. Show Notes: -Cheney speech on the House floor -Cheney after her removal -Why more independents is actually bad -Latest version of “The Sweep” -“Doom” by Niall Ferguson -The Remnant with Klon Kitchen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by David French, Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg. We've got a lot to talk about today, a lot in the news. We're going to start with the ouster of Liz Cheney as the number three Republican in the House. Talk about the rise of independence in our electorate, the colonial pipeline hack, and finally hostilities escalating in Israel. Let's dive right in. Steve, to you first. Wednesday morning, Liz Cheney was ousted from her position as the number three Republican in the House GOP conference. Nobody is surprised by this.

It was, as we speculated last week, It was done by voice votes so that there was not an actual tally of votes for and against keeping Cheney in her position, but fair to assume that the result was overwhelming. She was strongly opposed in the end by Kevin McCarthy, the House GOP leader, Steve Scalise, the number two in the House Republicans, Donald Trump was putting out statements calling for her to be purged. and you had others who have long opposed Cheney sort of rallying people to cause. Cheney herself did not whip to get people to support her in this vote. I think she understood that she was on her way out and that the position would be difficult for her to hold, given her views on Donald Trump and the election lies. My question is actually a bigger picture question.

We've talked quite a bit about this. battle about what it means for House Republicans, about what it means or what it tells us about Kevin McCarthy's leadership. I'm interested in a question about the broader comment that this is on Republicans and Donald Trump. There was a period in the days after January 6th where it looked as if the Republican Party and its leaders were ready to make a pretty clean break from Donald Trump. You had both Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy blame Trump directly for what happened on January 6th. You had even Trump allies like Lindsey Graham saying that he was out. Enough was enough. Time to move on. And in the time that's elapsed since, that's all changed. So my question to you,

and I'll start with you, David. Is the Republican Party more a Trump party today than it was on November 4th, the day after the election? And is it more of a Trump party today than it was on January 7th? Oh, I think the latter, it's definitely more of a Trump party than it was January 7th. Now, I think the thing that is particularly disturbing is that I don't think at the grassroots, it was less of a Trump party on January 7th, which is why ultimately the Washington wing of the party became more Trump-more-Trumpy between January 7th and now, if that makes

sense. In other words, January 6th didn't necessarily really shake the grassroots that much. In fact, I was talking to somebody who's quite plugged in to local GOP politics, and I think I've said this before. Folks are mad at Marsha Blackburn for not being sufficiently supportive of Donald Trump. Marsha Blackburn. Okay. So what ended up happening, I think, is that there was this terrible event occurs on January 6th. A lot of people in Washington were shaken by it. A lot of people who are maybe not necessarily deeply, deeply connected to Republican politics at their grassroots were shaken by it. But the grassroots was all in. And the grassroots, and the immediate immediately a victim narrative spun out of January 6th, which was, you know, at one end was that

this was Antifa, another end that this was not nearly as bad as the riots and protests of the summer or that the law enforcement is treating them disproportionately poorly. And so essentially what happened, I think it's the same level of Trumpiness from November 3rd to 4th to January 6th to 7th to right now, and the Washington part of the GOP has realized that. is the result. So, Sarah, picking up on that, if you think about the position of Donald Trump in the Republican Party today, you don't have the same Republican leaders speaking out against them or criticizing me at all. Kevin McCarthy talks to him on a regular basis. Now, House Republicans have made it very clear that they intend to put Donald Trump at the center

of their efforts to retake the House in the fall of 2022. Senate Republicans. Mitch McConnell has been quieter. He has not restated his previous support for Liz Cheney. I think his decision has been a tactical one that much better to let to not talk about Trump. He said when he was asked about this last week in Kentucky, he said, I'm going to focus 100% of my attention on Joe Biden and what Joe Biden is doing. Is that likely to work? Seems to me that Republicans have tried for five years to ignore what they don't like about Donald Trump. And he's arguably more powerful now, just in pure partisan terms, maybe that at any point in his time in Republican politics. I'm going to disagree.

And I'm going to tell you the silver lining of what is going on. And it's not just a silver lining. I actually think it's like a yellow brick road. So, yes, it's not that anything you've said is false, but it's the opening that it has provided. You know, last week I talked about the Chip Roy caucus, and we had a statement from Chip Roy come out where he basically said, Liz Cheney's forfeited the right to be in leadership. She keeps harping on Trump. That's not helpful. It's not unifying. We have members who, you know, are endorsed by Trump. It undermines that. It creates all these news cycles. At the same time,

you can't have the number three in the conference be someone who's not conservative, basically saying he was not going to support Elise Stefonic to replace Liz Cheney. There is now reporting today that he is going to challenge Elise Stefani for that number three position. So here's my view of what's happening right now. You have the Republican Party that we knew it was going to be in a difficult place. They can't and won't disown Trump. by the way, I don't think it would work if they did. I think that the Liz Cheney model is

unworkable and it is not the future of the Republican Party as much as some people may want it to be. It's just not. It's not where the voters are. It's not where a lot of the House members are. At the same time, you have the sort of triple down folks. I'll put Elise Stefanik is the leader of that. Who are also

backward looking, by the way. She's endorsed the Arizona Bamboo recount audit that is just silliness. It's also a distraction in equal terms. to me, this has created an opening that conservative Republicans should be cheering, which is the Chip Roy caucus. Chip Roy has said all along that the election was not rigged, that there was nothing untoward about Donald Trump losing. He has put his money where his mouth is, put

resolutions on the floor to that effect. He voted against impeachment, but said that it was really because the impeachment itself, Nancy Pelosi, had sort of jerry rigged that so that it was not on impeachable offenses in his view. He wants to move on from Trump. He wants to do it in the most conservative way possible. He's been very policy focused this whole time. This creates a real opening for the Chip Roy caucus, the conservatives who are not anti-Trump, but who are actually conservative. I think he is likely to lose if he challenges Elise Stefonic possibly on Friday, but he may lose the battle and win the war here. if the future of the Republican Party is Chip Roy or the Chiproy caucus that I'm calling it,

that's good news for conservative Republicans. And this whole thing will have looked like a necessary way to get there. So, Jonah, let's say that Sarah is right in purely practical terms. I think, I'll say, nothing you said there is false. But I think you might have cut some corners. Isn't it the case that if you're a true conservative, for whom this opening apparently now exists, you want to take a stand on something as fundamental as the rule of law? And what Chip Roy is trying to do is say, in effect, yeah, look, Donald Trump said this, but that's in the past. We can't really focus on the past, and we've all got to move forward. I would say, before I get to the question of you, Jonah, the problem with that is

Donald Trump is not behaving that way. Donald Trump put out a statement two days ago in which he alleged that Michigan was fraudulently awarded to Joe Biden. He said votes will be overturned in New Hampshire, in Wisconsin. He backed the Arizona bamboo audit. John Ward, who is a friend of the dispatch, and an author writes for Yahoo News, put together a list of the times just recently, and I will not read them because that would take the rest of this podcast, when Donald Trump has issued statements claiming a rigged election, March 20th, April 2nd, April 4th, April 5th, April 6th, April 12th, April 23rd, April 24th, four statements, April 26th, two statements, April 27th, on and on and on.

Liz Cheney let most of those go, responded to the one where she called it a big lie. And beyond that, if you look at what Senate Republicans are doing, House Republicans are doing, they're not looking past Trump. They're putting Trump right at the center of everything that they do. The National Republican Senatorial Committee since April 24th has put out 97 emails that mention Trump. That's more than five every day mentioning Trump as they raise Bunny. It would be great to believe that somehow this is the rebirth of conservatism inside the Republican Party. I'm skeptical. Jonah, am I right or is Sarah? You have, you both have elements of your argument

that have the benefit of not being false. That sounds like such a Kevin McCarthy answer. I'm sorry. wow um look i i as i said last week as i wrote in the wednesday g-file and also last week's g-file uh i think the issue is only incidentally or symptomatically about the big lie stuff um if donald trump were as obsessed you know and look this as so many things of the last five years having to do with Trump. Trumpism is best understood as a psychological phenomenon, not as a political phenomenon. And a psychological phenomenon, both among his fans and with Trump himself. Trump cannot count against the fact that he lost. It's a blow to his ego. And so he won't let this go. And he has a long history of not letting things go that make him look bad. You know, he is, as he says, he whines

until he wins. And if we are in a parallel universe where the issue wasn't the election being stolen, but was instead his claim that he's the richest man in the world or that he's the most handsome man in the world or that a civilization of mole people living underneath the surface were responsible for his high tax rates or whatever it is. That would be the litmus test issue for all of these Republicans. And because it's really about not defying Donald Trump, the person not making him look bad that all these people have to rally. As I think we all agree, most of these Republicans in this caucus, you know, these closet normals, as I call them, they don't believe that the election was stolen.

They're just not willing to say so very loudly because they don't want to piss off Trump. And I think that's the real dilemma. And where Liz Cheney got caught up is that she couldn't do the Never Trumper Act against Trump because she was never a never trumper. She voted with him. She was more loyal to his agenda than Elise Stefanik was. She just wasn't more loyal to the cult of personality. And then January 6th, I think she saw it as a useful means to separate the party

from this cult of personality stuff. And she got screwed by a lot of people. I mean, you know, there's this old gag in Abbottagostello. It's in stripes, right? Where you have these guys, these soldiers all lined up. and the sergeant asks for a volunteer and or asks like who's responsible for this and like Bill Murray will like gesture that he's about to step forward

and then not do it and then the other people step forward and they get screwed. That's what Mitch McConnell did to her. That's what a lot of people did there. They signaled that there was this groundswell to say, okay, this is our moment. And if not for this, then what? And that's my concern is that, as I wrote in the G-File,

If I describe Donald Trump's first impeachment to Lindsey Graham in 2016 as a hypothetical scenario, he'd be like, that's outrageous, that's impeachable. And then I said, oh, and by the way, you'll be an abject head past the sphincter, ass kisser, apologist for all of it. He would be outraged, and he would be sincerely outraged. And then the actual event comes by, and because of a series of decisions that he has made, where he has sold off pieces of his soul over the year, and made these compromises, he had no choice but to follow through on that.

And then you fast forward to the second impeachment. If I had to describe that, even in 2020 to him and said, oh, by the way, he's going to get impeached again because he's going to lie about the election being stolen. He's going to try and steal the election through those lies. And he's actually going to incite a mob that storms the Capitol and tries to hang Mike Pence. He'd be like, no way would I ever support that. And then that's not even speculation because we know that's true. Because like the day after the siege, he goes on the floor of the Senate and says, I'm done with the guy.

And then, of course, he backtracks and is once again Renfield. And I think that the problem with this Cheney thing, yes, it's overblown and yes, it is inside politics or inside the Beltway or inside baseball, whatever you want to call it. But it is another example of these little decisions that foreclose the ability to, stand up to the guy down the road. It's going to be like much less likely or possible for any of these politicians, including Chip Roy, to frontally criticize Trump's claims about the election being stolen or the next crazy thing that he wants to do. And to me, that's the disturbing thing is that we are now on this, we have this path dependence towards the party becoming essentially a personality cold. And it doesn't matter if everybody actually believes it. I mean, I think one

the most telling and damning things in this whole spectacle was that when Liz Cheney this morning was voted out, was defenestrated, she got a standing ovation from the conference. It's crazy. It's just baddy. But it just shows you that you can't get on the wrong. You can't do anything that cuts into Trump's self-esteem to Trump's standing with the base. So yeah, I mean, Roy might be able to push more conservative policies that defied Trump. But Trumpism, again, is not an ideological program. It's a psychological tendency. And I think it's just going to get worse before it gets better.

I keep thinking of, well, Sarah, there's this quote from the French Revolution. Yes. Where are the people going so that I may lead them? Yes. And this is constantly happening. I mean, this is the Washington GOP is not a leading edge indicator of where the GOP really truly is and it's hard of heart. It's a trailing edge indicator.

And when they got out and over their skis after January 6th, the grassroots snapped them right back. And so that's, I mean, I just think that's fundamentally where it is right now. And Sarah, before we get to your, I think this next topic that we're going to talk about with you helps us get to a real explanation, I think, for a lot of this. But one of the, just a final point for me, I'm so struck by the unwillingness of Republicans to confront the basic truth of the matter. I mean, if they can't sort of stand up to, like, we know that the election wasn't stolen, right?

I mean, that's what Donald Trump is saying. That was his statement on Michigan a couple days ago. He gave a speech down at Mar-a-Lago a couple weeks ago, which made the case that the election was stolen, and it might be overturned still. Like, this is total battery. This is craziness, and they won't stand up for him. I thought there was a moment last night when Liz Cheney got up to give her speech. on the floor of the House, and all but one of the Republicans' president filed out as she prepared

to, I think, tell them the truth of what happened. And we've seen this again and again and again. There was a political briefing that the Washington Post reported on over the weekend for House Republicans conducted by the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is charged with winning elections for House Republicans. And in this briefing, they withheld the slides that talked about how unpopular Donald Trump was in swing districts, just withholding the truth. You remember during the impeachment, you had senators and others look away when they played the video of the insurrection. Again, just withholding the truth, just a refusal to confront what reality is. And I think that's going to be the long-term problem as much as

anything. And I think it's directly related to what you want to talk about, Sarah. It is. I get the last word because it's my next topic. I think that Chip Roy is the future of the Republican Party, whether you like it or not. Wow. All right. So here's my topic. Pew does this, I mean, forever, they ask whether people identify as a Republican or a Democrat or people can identify as independence. And in 2005, 2006, about a third of the country identified as each of those.

33% Republican, 33% Democrat, 33 independent. But today, over 40% say they're independent, while fewer than 30% say they're Republicans or Democrats. But that sounds like we should be moving into sort of a post-partisanship world, less polarized. And you look around, and that's clearly not the case. Why are so many people identifying as independents and yet we feel more partisan than ever?

Ah, because it's the next question. So 75% of those independents still vote exactly the same as they used to. Yeah, they don't say they're Republican, but they vote straight-ticket Republican. In fact, according to Pew, you can't tell the difference between an independent who leans Republican and someone who identifies as a Republican in their voting pattern. So here's the problem. As those people leave the party, they don't put up yard signs anymore. They don't attend the local county Democratic meeting.

people like me no longer work at the R&C, and so the most strident partisans and the most extreme partisans rise and become the voices of the party. So the parties move to the outer edges. But because those independents aren't changing their voting behavior, the parties aren't punished as they move to those extremes. So we have more independence and more polarization, and even worse, it's a vicious cycle because as the parties move to the extremes,

more people leave the parties. and it goes and goes and goes. So my question to you, Jonah, are we doomed? Having just recorded a podcast with Neil Ferguson on his book, Doom, I have thoughts. But no, first of all, listeners should read Sarah's edition of The Sweep, which covered a lot of this, was very, better than usual, and it's usually very good. So it was a really great addition. It's, so some of this stuff, you know, we've seen these trends for a little while now. I remember with the rise of the tea parties where that was the first time you really saw lots of people who were real true blue conservative Republican types calling themselves independence because they had bought into sort of the Ted Cruz war on the establishment stuff.

They didn't trust the party. They thought Boehner was a rhino or whatever. And so they started calling themselves independence, even though they were more Republican than most Republicans in the ways that really mattered and what they wanted from the Republican Party. And, you know, David's friend Yasha Monk, you know, has done some really interesting stuff about how basically, you know, it's sort of like an after-school special.

It turns out the partisanship was in our hearts all along, where a enormous number of people, And Jonathan Roush has done some great stuff on this as well, too, where an enormous number of people who are Republican in terms of their voting behavior or their name or their affiliation or whatever actually hate their own party a great deal. They just hate the other party more. And that's because as we've partly because of weak parties and this, and I think you're right about the catalytic effect that this process has to make the parties even weaker. But part of it is that we have turned. political orientation into a form of identity politics where it maps in many ways like a religion in terms of how it plays out in society and they now social science for the first time in ever

social scientists in recent years have found that there is more bigotry along partisan lines than there is along racial or ethnic or gender lines like they do these controlled tests where they give people resumes, and they'll say, and they'll make the name on the resume, you know, obviously like African American or Jewish or whatever, and they'll find a little anti-Semitism or a little, you know, racism and that kind of stuff. But then they'll change it to like giving clear tells that someone is a Republican or a Democrat, and it's off the charts bigotry. And I don't know how you get out of this process without, first of all, having a lot of people come to their senses.

But second of all, without strong parties, which actually care about their long-term brand identity, their long-term goals, their long-term integrity. And that requires things that I want to do like getting rid of primaries, but it's going to be a long time coming. Steve, is this why the Republican Party ousted Liz Cheney today? Yeah, I think it is. I mean, if you look at the number of districts, and I don't have the exact number. offhand. Look at the 2020 elections in the House of Representatives and the number of districts where Republicans won but by less than five points, for instance. And compare that to the number of districts that Republicans won by 20 plus points. The fact that there are more of the latter

helps explain the problem. These Republicans in, you know, sort of reddish districts are worried about, or swing districts are worried about losing in a general election. Virtually everybody else in the Republican House is worried about being primaried. And they're worried about Donald Trump stepping in and endorsing a candidate who's trumpier than they are and losing a primary and losing their seat. And I would say one of the things that I have underestimated and you, I'm happy to, I'm happy to accept the criticism that I was a naive midwesterner for far too long is just how much retaining their seats mattered to these members of Congress. For me, my assumption was always that most of them, even if they took shortcuts or

did things for political expediency to win a seat or to retain a seat. they were basically there to do the people's business they were there because they were interested in these things they wanted to improve the country in some kind of altruistic way and you know bless your heart yeah no i mean i mean now really like looking at what what happened today in the house that just seems hopelessly naive i mean there are just very few people who would be willing to to say and i think you know liz cheney went in with eyes open on this i'm going to lose my leadership seat and I could well lose my seat in Congress because these are the things I believe and we're in trouble. And I think that's what she did. I think there's just fewer and fewer

people who are willing to do that. And that goes back, I think, to your point, Sarah, you know, when you have so many people in so many Republicans who are elected in these just crimson red districts where really the only chance they could possibly lose their seat as if they lose a primary the only way that they're going to lose a primary is if they sort of poke their head up and Trump comes to smash it, that's why they're doing what they're doing. And this is a long-term conundrum for Republicans. I think it will probably help them in 2022, or at least not hurt them, still expect that they'll take the majority in the House of Representatives.

I think the long-term prospects for this are entirely grim for the Republican Party. David, I left the Republican Party in 2018. Should I feel guilty about that? No, because, well, you should feel guilty that you left two years late. I left in 2016, Sarah. You're late to the party. But I'm totally not going to hold it against you

because I want to thank you, my podcasting partner in crime, advisory opinions, the elite podcast of the Dispatch Podcast Network. You allow me to do what? Talk about my book eight months after the release. And let me just quote Darth Sidious and say, all is unfolding as I have foreseen. I don't like that at all. If you skip to page 119, it doesn't go well. It does not go well. Well, let me put it this way. This is negative

polarization at work. This is hyper-partisanship at work. And this is what happens when you have this phenomenon where this larger and larger group of people who are alienated for, from the day-to-day work of politics and alienated from the day-to-day news cycle are what are called by the more uncommon project, the exhausted majority, with the operative word being exhausted. And that doesn't mean they check out of politics entirely.

They're still gonna vote and they're gonna vote for whatever candidate has been served up by the hyper-partisan wings from the party that they lean towards. But what's happening is, Sarah, you explained it perfectly. What you're seeing is even though, independents are rising, partisanship is rising. Why? Because institutions are defined by the people who care the most about them. And the people who are caring most about our political process right now

are the absolute most polarized hyper-partisans. That's exactly where we are right now. And until people who identify themselves as independence begin to behave in truly an independent fashion, I'm not sure that's going to change. I was talking. with some of my friends around here who are not super political, but they were kind of gobsmacked by the Stop the Steel stuff that was going on. They were gobsmacked by January 6th. And I remember talking to one of my friends whose his dad was an area business, a pretty prominent businessman locally, really hard-nosed, not super partisan, but was a Republican. I said, what do you think your dad would think right now of all of this? And he said, he would think the Trump movement and all the Trump,

true trumpets were just ridiculous i said but would he vote democrat or not vote at all oh no he'd still vote republican it's just that that's the identity that's who you are i mean it's unthinkable unthinkable and i remember debating eric metaxus twice and um in during the run-up to the 2020 election and this binary choice argument was made binary choice binary choice binary choice and when i was looking at the audience, the few audience members, because it was in the pandemic, when it got to the point where I was making an argument that you don't, it's not binary. There's more than one name there, or you can write in a name. There was this kind of look of incredulity. Like that, that's just not what you do. You make a choice. And if you're a Republican leaning,

you're going to choose Republican, no matter how upset you are about it. And so what ends up happening is exactly what Sarah described. We get more polarized, even though more people describe themselves as independent because the people who described themselves as independent are not really independent and not super engaged. So it is left to the wings and the wings are driving us to doom Neil Ferguson's book. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer, security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance

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it builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's E-T-H-O-S dot com slash dispatch. Application times may vary, rates may vary. Jonah, let's get to the Colonial Pipeline cyber attack. yeah um so it's kind of a fascinating topic to me it's amazing how quickly it has become i should do a little background what happened was a group which is like i kind of love because it's

like straight out of a james bond thing mean like they they own the fact that they're villains and they even have a code of conduct about how they're villains and they claim it's called dark side i'm sorry david it's not dark seed the ultimate villain in the snider cut it's dark side disappointing but um they did a uh one of these you know hack jobs where they wanted to extort money from the colonial the owners of the colonial pipeline which delivers 45% of gas and fuel um to the eastern seaboard and um they insist that they are not working for russia but they do also say that they don't do any of this in former soviet block countries and which basically means that they are given it's one of the reasons why it's very clear that

they are given free reign by the Russian government to do their thing so long as they leave the Russian interests alone and I think the media coverage of it has been very strange because it is focused almost entirely on coverage of gas shortages as if that's the most interesting part about this. And I understand that it affects people's lives, but it's not the most interesting part about this. It seems to me that this is a sort of a peek into the future of a lot of geopolitics and not just in terms of geopolitics, but in terms of what the sort of stateless actor world is going to look like in the future. And I guess I'm going to start with a point of personal privilege because this is one of my obsessions as listeners of the most popular podcast in the

dispatch universe of the remnant now. I'm obsessed with this idea that the government should issue letters of Mark to our own cyber privateers to deal with some of this stuff. Not only is it constitutional by precedent, it's literally in the Constitution. And I would like to get David's take first on that. or on what your main takeaway is from all of this? Because there are people out there who think that this should be a wake-up call akin to 9-11, not the death toll, but because of what it portends for the future. Yeah, I mean, I continue, and let me preface this by saying,

there may well be things that we are doing that I don't know anything about that our government is engaged in, that are quite effective in the cyber cyber warfare arena. For example, we were quite effective in using cyber warfare, allegedly in cooperation with the Israelis to delay and damage the Iranian nuclear program. So let me preface this by saying there's almost certainly stuff that I don't know here, but I will say that for the time being, for the time being, it appears that we are a disproportionate recipient of problematic hackings, problematic cyber intrusions, and it does alarm me. And I think there's sort of two things that once that alarm me. One thing that, you know, you're talking about right now, this particular

hacking that has had some very real world consequences. And then the other one, it's already forgotten. It's just totally forgotten. Like it never happened. And that was in Nashville, the Christmas bombing that took out one AT&T node. And you would not have believed the state of communications in the southeastern United States for several days. And those two things together, when you have a cyber attack that leads to oil shortages that seem to happen with almost a casual amount of effort and then a weirdo, one single node attack

on our communications infrastructure, and it takes out much of the Southeast's ability to communicate with each other, tells me that if you actually had a determined hostile force, one of real capability that we are not nearly as impregnable and vulnerable as we believe that we are. And so I don't think wake up call on the order of 9-11, but wake-up call, absolutely yes. I mean, this is a strategic vulnerability, and it's a strategic vulnerability that's particularly distressing, given that I would say we have the best tech industry in the world, in the world.

and we are still demonstrating that kind of vulnerability. So, Sarah, I mean, David raises an interesting point here. I would argue that things like hardening our communication nodes and retrofitting our vital energy supply infrastructure fits the definition of needed infrastructure spending better than, say, subsidized daycare. and yet there's been almost none of that kind of talk to

this solar wind stuff what is it about this vulnerability that doesn't spark politicians into talking about actually publicly taking it seriously I had Klon Kitchen on the remnant this week and he actually says

we do a lot of amazing things under the radar on this front but not in terms of like making it so that one 18 T-Node throws a big chunk of the country into, you know, phone silence. So A, the reasons are we're doing more than you think, but not enough. B, most of the members of Congress don't understand the issue and they don't want to wade into a topic where they will be embarrassed. Think these series of interconnecting tubes, the Ted Stevens

internet comment at a hearing. Or the comment just from the last second to last time, Mark Zuckerberg, was testifying, where a senator asked, how do you make your money? And Mark Zuckerberg in this very condescending voice, said, Senator, we run ads. Okay, well, three, they agree. That's the biggest problem.

The reason that daycare is in the infrastructure bill is because it's a partisan issue. Therefore, it's a talking point. Therefore, you can tout it to your people and cause a little dust up where they take your side and it's to the ramparts. Nobody's against hardening our infrastructure, and therefore it's not a political.

winning argument for either side. If you compound that with the fact that they also don't understand it, that's how you end up where we are right now. I think the letters of mark and reprisal is interesting, but I'm curious, Jonah, you know, in that case, the mark is to attack, the reprisal is to bring it to the home port where, generally speaking, you split the worth of the vessel with the U.S. government. What is the equivalent here? bags of gold handed over in dark alleys that know that is that are untraceable or whatever i'm hearing duch coin and nfts that's what you go i mean what you want is some look i mean look so you just put a bounty on their head basically what dark side is

is essentially they basically have a letter of mark and reprisal from the russian government and they're creating havoc in the West. They're extorting people. They're screwing with people. They're also providing code that others can use and they're exposing vulnerabilities that are useful for the Russians to exploit later in their planning.

It seems to me that if we want some plausible deniability about some of that kind of stuff, we could be creative about it too. And Clon Kitchen, who likes this idea, who's a former CIA guy, um he um he argues that you know we actually do a lot of this stuff but one of the things that um the asymmetry is that we're a free society so like when someone screws up one of our institutions or pieces of infrastructure you can't keep it secret in a free society but when we do

this kind of stuff to china or to russia uh they don't want they're terrified of telling their own people that the U.S. got one past them, and they also don't want to make it sound like they're vulnerable, and so they keep it secret. But I just want more creativity out there than what we've got now, and I'm sure we could figure out a way to compensate our private tiers in ways that would work to everyone's benefit. Steve, any thoughts?

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the other problems is, you know, you talk to folks who work in cybersecurity, and they'll tell you that we're so, vulnerable in so many ways that escalating creates new risks. We don't even know where we're vulnerable. And if we escalate or we retaliate, you know, they're living in our systems in some cases. I had a fascinating conversation with a gentleman, this is probably four or five years ago, who was really one of the pioneers of cybersecurity for Wall Street. And he said, you know, at the beginning of this game, we used to do everything we could to keep the Chinese

out of our systems because we didn't want them in. There were these vulnerabilities. We knew that they could cause problems. He said, and again, this is four or five years ago, the big challenge now, the Chinese live in our systems now, right? So they're in there. They're in there all the time. They live in there. And the big challenge now is keeping them from taking too much and doing too much damage while they're in. But as he said, they're largely at the mercy of what the Chinese want to do. And, you know, you think about the possibility that we're sort of living day to day in this pre-9-11 moment where we could suffer one of these devastating attacks at any minute. And the capability may be there right now. I'm not convinced that,

That's a reason not to retaliate. It sounds sort of like giving up before you have the fight, which I don't like. But I take seriously the claims that we are as vulnerable as they say we are. You just have to imagine that, you know, at some point in the not too distant future, we'll look back on this discussion and there will be, you know, this public outcry in the aftermath of a major debilitating attack, nationally debilitating attack, devastating attack that takes a serious chunk out of our, you know, one of these systems that we're talking about it, everybody will lament the fact that we didn't do more. Well, now's the time to be doing more. So do more.

Yeah, I mean, Steve, you are, I mean, singing my song on that pre-9-11 moment. This is something I've been just thinking about and obsessing about for, for some time, is that this, that we, we are likely ending the honeymoon period, the decades-long honeymoon period of no great power conflict, which is an aberration in world history. I mean, it's not like we turn the corner and figured out how to be great humans and figured out how to manage great power conflict in a way that humanity never has before. And I really do worry about that. And I worry about that also because if you really think about how do you defeat the United States of America, it has to, given our, a lot of our advantages we have,

it almost has to begin with the 9-11 Pearl Harbor style surprise attack. Because if you, we know you're coming, if we have warning, if we can prepare, if we can strike first, then that's that. But there is an enormous amount of capability that our opponents have a closing gap in qualitative military technology that gives them the ability to strike first, to strike very, very, very hard to achieve a limited objective and then say, what are you going to do? Are you going to go, are you going to mobilize your country and risk massive escalation to reverse the gains that we just achieved? And, you know, that's something that that's just sort of a known opposing military

strategy right now. We know, we know that's where their heads at and we don't prepare for it. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful

backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at mx.com.c.org. All right. Last topic. Israel. So, yeah, from one great topic to another great topic, so Hamas is lobbing hundreds and hundreds of homemade rockets and other projectiles at Israeli population centers arguably, well, I think almost certainly the largest attack since sort of the latter part of the Obama administration. Israel is responding with targeted strikes.

there's kind of want to come at this in three ways first we'll come at this sort of geopolitically and Steve what's interesting to me about this this is there's a deja vu here we have seen this kind of confrontation before what is interesting to me is it seems like the Israeli alliances that were achieved during the Trump administration are holding for now and that seems to be something quite different. And A, is that, do you feel like that is true? And B, what are the implications of that going forward? I do feel like that's true. I mean, in some ways, if you think about it geopolitically, there are things that are sort of dramatically different. And I think you pointed to the most important one. And there are things that are, I would say, frustratingly similar.

The things that are dramatically different is you're not seeing Israel's new allies whip up the so-called Arab Street or jump in immediately to defend the kinds of things, the kinds of attacks on civilians that Hamas and others are conducting. The frustratingly familiar part of this, and it's early, so I don't want to get too far, far out. But I would say the Biden administration's response has been, you know, one that suggests that everybody needs to cool their heels, sort of creating equivalence between Israel targeting terrorists shooting at civilians with the terrorists shooting at civilians. And I don't think they're the same.

The other thing that I think is worth noting sort of on a geopolitical level is the extent to which Iran lurks in the background of all of this. I mean, Iran funds Hamas. Iran funds Palestinian Islamic jihad. The money that we returned to Iran and the Obama administration, even John Kerry had to admit that some of it was going to go to finance terrorism. You had a Palestinian Islamic jihad official Ramezza Halabi say the rockets were using to pound Tel Aviv, our weapons, our money, and our food are provided by Iran. I mean, they're not, they're not subtle about this. And, you know,

you think about the ways in which the Biden administration seems intent on repeating the mistakes of the Obama administration with respect to Iran, despite the fact that they signaled in confirmation hearings and elsewhere that they were going to be more deliberative and more thoughtful. They seem not at all to be doing that and want to, again, as the Obama administration did, treat Iran as a would-be ally rather than the enemy that it is. And I think sending the messages that the U.S. government, the Biden administration, has sent in the first four months of the administration, I think emboldens the bad actors in the region. And it's a, it's a frustrating thing to say, and it's a frustrating thing to say, again, five, six years after we said it the first time. All right, Sarah.

David, I want to talk about the politics of this. That's what I was going to ask you about. So let me ask my question. Oh, fine. That's what, okay, Sarah, what are the politics of this? Can you talk about that? That's a great question, David. Wow.

I mean, that's, I prepare for this podcast. So on the right, it's been very pro-Israel, and it has turned into a bit of a partisan issue. So you had Andrew Yang this week tweet, the people of NYC will always stand with our brothers and sisters in Israel who faced down terrorism and persevere. Then on Wednesday, he backtracked, saying he felt that my tweet was overly simplistic in my treatment of a conflict that has a long and complex history full of tragedies. My volunteers felt it failed to acknowledge the pain and suffering on both sides. I mourn every Palestinian life taken before its time, as I do for every Israeli support of a people does not make one blind to the pain and suffering of others. We've seen this before on the left.

it has been increasing, to the point that now you don't see it as often because nobody does that first tweet in the first place. Right. I think it is incredibly bad for the country of Israel that this has turned into a partisan issue

in the United States. You know, Joe Biden just got off the phone and had a very long conversation with Netanyahu. We're seeing reports from that. You have to be a little worried if you're Netanyahu at this point. Israel's holding its own.

They're going to be fine. but the last thing you want is either your issue or your country to become the partisan volleyball in U.S. politics. It just can't turn out well for you. So the politics, the politics are bad for Israel and I don't think a lot of American voters

are deciding their vote based on it. Now, with the exception that as we've talked about those independents and the parties in the extreme, the left-wing extreme who controls the Democratic Party cares very much about it. It is a deal breaker for them in the way that some other sort of issues

like birthing people might be. But it is not going to dictate winning elections. It will dictate those base voters and they're the ones who are giving money. So I think it is bad news for the Israelis more than anything. So, Jonah,

am I imagining things or is there an awful lot of blatant anti-Semitism online right now. I tweeted this yesterday, and it's as a matter of law of arm conflict, it's about as true as you can get, and as a matter of morality,

it's about as true as you can get. And I said, there's no equivalence, either in morality or the law of arm conflict between firing unarmed rockets directly into civilian population centers and responding with aimed fire at militants hiding in civilian population centers. And many of the responses that I got were along the lines of,

I wish Hamas had missiles so that they could aim better. What the heck, Jonah? Yeah, so I want to sort of answer this question by wrapping around to the question you asked Steve for just two seconds when you talked about how the geopolitics of the region and how the alliances from the Trump administration seemed to be holding, and then borrowing from Sarah's answer about the politics, one of the key takeaways here is that the progressive base of the Democratic Party and blue checkmark Twitter is more anti-Israel than the Arab League. And that should tell you about where things are right now in a lot of ways.

And we should do the caveat that you can be a critic of Israel and not be anti-Semitic. But the problem, as Sarah was noting about this becoming a partisan issue, is that what gets washed away in this tale of good versus bad or good versus evil and all that kind of stuff are the actual facts on the ground. And as you say, David, I mean, this is a very old tendency to confuse arsonists with firefighters, which is what people do with Hamas and Israel. real. But the reason for all of this has to do with very complicated stuff going on on the ground. The Palestinian Authority canceled some elections because they knew they're going to

lose to basically Hamas types. And Hamas, and you had this specific controversy about these housing, these tracks of land in Jerusalem that belonged to Jews in the 19th century and then were given to Palestinians by the Jordanian authority. And this was being adjudicated in court and the Palestinians freaked out about this just by even having a here a legal proceeding about this and um and hamas sees this opportunity to uh sort of show solidarity with the quote-unquote Palestinian street in Jerusalem and they decided to lob a bunch of rockets into Israel and um the I know we try not to do media criticism here but the way in which so much of the media criticism boils down to why can't both and also the Biden administration, why can't both sides

calm down and ratchet and pull things back is so grotesquely unfair to Israel because the way things get calmed down, the way things get pulled back is for them to stop lobbying rockets at schools, hospitals, buses, you know, downtown streets. And that way, you know, B.B. Netanyahu wouldn't be responding. And I will say, well, you know, This has a long history of craziness in American politics, but Bibi Danyahu, I'll say on the pro-Bee-B-side, this idea that he orchestrated this to, for his own political purposes, is lunacy. He's had plenty of opportunities to orchestrate wars that he has declined to do.

There was actually talk about Israeli Arabs joining the coalition government in Israel. This is not what he needed. and this sort of glib he's a warmonger stuff is often borders just on the straight anti-Semitic stuff at the same time he deserves a lot of blame for accelerating the partisan nature of this because he so threw his lot in with Trump during the Trump administration that the signal he he cemented this idea that being pro-Israel means being Republican in ways Before that, remember he addressed the House during the Obama administration at the invitation of the Republican House in a really pretty direct confrontation with Obama. Yeah. And Obama deserves some of it because it's one of these, you know, they're chickens and eggs as far as the eye can see on this stuff.

But at the end of the day, the moral clarity of Israel's position, you know, is clear. Every state has a right to defend itself from rocket attacks. And the idea that Americans would tolerate Mexicans launching rockets into southern Texas because of the claim that Texas really belongs to Mexico, which is a colorable argument, sorry, Sarah, is ludicrous. And it's just this idea that Israel isn't a normal country and shouldn't be allowed to behave normally. Well, you know, one of the things that I, I agree. I've got a little, not a whole album side, not a whole album side, just a track, just a track on one thing.

One thing that I don't think people understand is the extent to which Israel restrains itself in these responses. They look at the different casualty counts. They look at the superior ability, a superior capability of Israeli weaponry, and they think that Israel is a bunch of bullies. I can tell you from personal experience, if the United States of America was involved in this combat, if the United States of America was involved in a similar situation and we employed the tactics we've employed in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gaza would be in a far worse condition, in a far worse condition. I'm going to talk a little bit about that in my newsletter for tomorrow. I think I've hit a checkmark of almost, we've hit a checkmark of almost every dispatch product

in this podcast. But I'm going to show readers aerial photos of Mosul from 2015 and Mosul from 2017 after the Battle of Mosul where American firepower was deployed to defeat ISIS. And you will see what Western weaponry does when it is unleashed to defeat terrorists. And that is not what Israel is doing. And so I think that's one of the things that I think is Israel is constantly laboring under this burden that says that they are the bullies, that they are the big boy on the block, just pounding and pounding and pounding these poor helpless Palestinians who are lobbing hundreds of rockets when The reality is by every conventional method of urban combat in Western armies, Israel is dramatically restrained.

And we're going to end this podcast with some news you can use. Chick-fil-A is now being forced to limit the number of sauce packets. It's giving out to its customers because of industry-wide supply chain issues. That is terrible news for those of us who love a great chicken nug pack. If it's a dark side hack, then we'd really pay attention. All right, everyone. See you next week. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online.

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