The Dispatch Podcast - Right Thing for the Right Reasons

Episode Date: February 3, 2021

On the coronavirus stimulus package front, Biden has refused to compromise on his commitment to sending $1,400 checks to Americans. Is it wise for the president to push such a bill through Congress in spite of Republican opposition? As Steve argues on today’s episode, “If Joe Biden’s intransigence this early is pissing off people like Rob Portman and Anthony Gonzalez, that’s a tough place.” Also on the menu for today: GOP House Leader Kevin McCarthy’s intra-party spats with Rep. Liz Cheney, the media’s obsessive fixation on Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the United Kingdom’s decision to welcome Hong Kong citizens. Show Notes: -“The Challenge of Going It Alone” by Amy Walter in the Cook Political Report. -“An Interview With Sen. Rob Portman” by Steve Hayes in The Dispatch. -“Can We Have (Another) Conversation About Cancel Culture?” by David French in The Dispatch. -“Republicans Are Playing a Risky Game in Elevating QAnon” by Jonah Goldberg in The Dispatch. -“The GOP’s Conspiracy Theorist Problem” by Audrey Fahlberg in The Dispatch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isker, joined by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French. We have a lot to talk about today. And this episode's going to run a little long because of it. But I think y'all are going to agree that it is worth it. So we are starting with budget negotiations, Joe Manchin as the Grand Puba. We are going to move into Wherefore Kevin McCarthy and the Republican House Caucus problem. And then you will hear my rant, my rant on why we keep elevating these people. And lastly, we'll end with some positive news coming out of Hong Kong. Let's dive in, Jonah. We're starting with you.

I'll be it reluctantly because it's you, but the COVID package is looking like it is on the verge of success, and Joe Manchin is as powerful as everyone said he is? Yes. I mean, I think our new style guy should refer to Joe Manchin as regent or viceroy, Joe Manchin, because he is the most powerful person in Washington right now. I'm kind of obsessed with the way in which that is a natural outgrowth of the Madisonian structure of our Constitution, is that even though you have two extreme polarized parties, you have that by definition takes away power from the extremes and gives it to the people in the middle who can be the different splitters, the majority makers, and whatnot. But that's for our philosophy class later, which only goes to fully paid members of dispatch. I think that, I mean, let's, it's really interesting to me on this sort of very much

eat your spinach punditry topic, how much the 2008 or 2009 early Barack Obama stimulus looms over both Democrats and Republicans about all of this. And my own view was that if you were, you know, look, you could go back to Yoakimafiore, the Gnostic monk from the 9th century to explain where all our problems come from. That's where I was going. I know. Well, I mean, Richard Weaver. How do you jump ahead of me on that?

But I think you could point to a lot of our partisan stuff, at least getting worse, to how the stimulus bill was pushed by Barack Obama and the Democrats. And I used to argue this at the time is that when Barack Obama came into office, he was hugely popular. He had 60, high 60s, something like that, low 70s approval, depending on the poll. The country was in a financial crisis. He basically steamrolled, at least the House Republicans, and pushed through exactly what he wanted without negotiating. He was seen, seen by Republicans, at least, to be negotiating in bad faith from the beginning. And the result was Republicans learned that they could stand in lockstep opposition to Obama and not pay a political price for it. And I remember talking to political consultants back then about how terrified they were that Obama just gave Republicans like a third of a loaf.

It would have split the GOP coalition. half the Republicans would have voted for the stimulus, which would have made the economy a bipartisan thing rather than an albatross around Obama's neck. And then you're just off to the races with the partisanship and the opposition stuff and all the rest. And it seems to me that when you read the accounts of what Biden's thinking is,

it's both the Obamacare rollout and the stimulus are these mistakes they don't want to go through again. And it feels to me like generals fighting the last war. seems to me it's in Mitch McConnell's interest and Biden's interest to come up with some compromise that's brokered by Joe Mansion. It fits on all sorts of levels. But let me turn it to you guys. Sarah, you say it looks like it's succeeding. What does success mean and how is it succeeding? Well, I think for Joe Biden, success is defined as getting this done quickly through whatever means necessary that the vast majority of Americans will not know whether it got passed

through reconciliation or any other means. I think it's interesting that despite Joe Manchin sort of being this bellwether that everyone looks to, it's like on the one hand, people in D.C. think he's powerful. And on the other hand, people in those sort of orbits aren't treating him like he's powerful. Otherwise, there should be a whole lot of other people moving to that center in order to get that level of

attention and love and affection and extra scritches from Jonah. But it's not really happening. Instead, it's just like Joe Manchin hanging out there. I'll be interested to see whether Joe Manchin gets what he wants. Maybe that will attract more people to the church of Joe Manchin. But I think that success is defined quite differently for everyone. I think Joe Manchin's success is the graduated checks. He doesn't want to have, you know, checks going as he said to the same check going to people who make $300,000 as who make $30,000. I think Joe Biden's metric of success is how quickly did we get this done? You know, how many days after getting here can we say that that was off, you know, off to the races? And I think that the Republicans'

metric of success is starting to realize that there is no success. There is no metric of success here. Jonah, to your point, this is not the last war. They've, in the meantime, McConnell's dealing with the upcoming Trump impeachment trial next week. McCarthy is dealing with, I mean, we'll get to this in a minute of what McCarthy's dealing with, but full on lunacy. 2020, not looking awesome as, you know, Rob Portman retires, and now there's another seat in a swing state that they've got to defend. So I'm not sure what the Republicans' metric of success is. There's been some indication that now they do want to, you know, play nice

and that this Republican plan that's being brought by the middle of the Republican folks that they're serious about and they're actually trying to make sort of good faith arguments. But it's like, what are you actually bringing to the table? Yeah, so Steve, I kind of feel, I think David Brooks is the first person I heard say this. And it was my sense of it, too, which is that, They put the $15 minimum wage thing in so they could take it out, right? It was going to be one of these, you know, negotiating chips. It's feeling less that that's the case, but I still think that, like, to Sarah's point,

one thing that I think some Republicans could claim success for is killing that, right? That would be a concession that would play well on Fox for, you know, 20 seconds and then move on to owning the libs. but what do you think the definition of success for Republicans is? And what do you think, how do you think this is actually going to play out? Yeah, I tend to agree with Sarah. I think it's a, Republicans are in a difficult spot, in part because you had President Trump pushing a measure that was basically, you know,

that had very similar parts to it and Republicans more or less supporting him. and now objecting to, in some cases, literally the identical measures being pushed by Joe Biden, although the overall packages are a little bit different. I think, I think your, Jonah, your comparison to 2009 is apt. And it's interesting to me that the history of that moment, particularly the stimulus, has been so rewritten so many times because it was the case that Republicans at the time were terrified of this new president. And they didn't, I remember doing a piece for the Weekly Standard and as I was, I was about sort of what was happening on the politics of the stimulus. And the more members of Congress I interviewed, the more it became clear to me that nobody would blame Barack Obama for asking for too much, you know, $787 billion.

Nobody would, nobody would say his name. So they would always say Democrats in Washington. And it got to the point where I started to play a game with my sources on this. them and say like, who's responsible for this, Democrats in Washington? Do you mean Nancy Pelosi and, you know, who else? And you couldn't get him to say Barack Obama because he came in popular and because it was viewed as difficult to challenge him. Now, I do think that changed pretty quickly. And as you say, the result of that was Republicans opposed everything at all times. I don't know if that's likely to play out the same way here, but I do think there is some

peril for Joe Biden, too. He campaigned on the guy who was going to be a healer. His inaugural was largely given over to a message of unity. He sold himself to the populace as someone who could come in and fix a broken nation. And I think if you come in, And you have good faith Republicans saying, we want to work with you here. And you sort of dismissed them out of hand. Now, Biden met with these 10 Republican senators. And apparently in the meeting was rather dismissive at the end of the meeting, saying, in effect, I hear you, but we're going big.

You had Jen Saki, the White House press secretary, in effect, say the biggest problem here is that we would go smaller than we're talking about not bigger, and we don't want to do that. So in effect, announcing that they weren't going to negotiate, that they didn't want to negotiate. If it was up to Joe Biden, this was sort of a done deal. And if anything, they might go bigger. That's risky to me. I don't know that, I don't know that, that he can reestablish himself as somebody who wants

to work in a bipartisan fashion if he turns down these kinds of overtures. Last point, think about the, you know, I interviewed. He'd rob Portman last week. Portman, who's made a career of these kinds of bipartisan negotiations, right? He's been involved in all of them. He seeks bipartisan. The guy wants to be a part of bipartisan, cross-partisan deals. He was furious with Biden.

Basically said he's not operating in good faith here. This is not what he promised he would do. When Sarah and I spoke with Anthony Gonzalez, the representative from outside of Cleveland last week, a guy who voted to impeach President Trump has certainly established himself as somebody who's both thoughtful and has an independent streak,

Gonzalez said to us, this is not what he told us he was going to do. Gonzalez is a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, 25 Republicans, 25 Democrats. If Joe Biden's intransigence this early is pissing off people like Rob Portman and Anthony Gonzalez, is he that's a tough place that's a tough place to recover from yeah so david um amy walter has a great column today making the case that trying to do big sweeping things through party line votes

is really really fraught and when and in part i mean the point i was making about the stimulus but what it does is is it completely alienates the other side and you actually in her reading of the polls you don't get any significant credit from independence. And so it just fuels the polarization. It seems to me after what, 47 executive orders mandating, you know, that we all switch to renewable unicorn poop and all this other stuff. And, you know, he's placated the left wing base of the party. And just as an aside, I think my criticisms about the unity stuff and the inaugural have been completely vindicated.

um but uh which you guys all dissented from but um um you're the basically you're the kumbaya guy here you're the let's have national national healing um do you think biden is blowing it by by by still governing from his base rather than trying to take uh you know trying to send a different signal in substantively not rhetorically um i would say well well let's go back and do some of the last war stuff that I think answers the question. The question is blowing it in the sense of maintaining a short term, for the short term, the kumbaya vibe. I think that the executive orders to a large degree did that. They gave the entire conservative media world a lot of stuff to hang their hat on to say, wait a minute, look at all this completely unilateral, some of it radical

action, none of that is unifying. As far as the actual package here, I think part of the last wariness of it all that some folks are missing anyway is that there is a sort of a received conventional wisdom now on the left, that the Obama stimulus was the worst of both worlds in the sense that not only was it, did it, the way it rolled out, did it kick off the fierce partisan fighting of the Obama years, but it just wasn't big enough. And that was the real sin. The real sin, if Obama was never going to get a Republican vote really, truly, for something truly big, why not go really big? Why not really provide Americans with assistance that they could perceive and see and feel and were immediately aware of that too much of the Obama stimulus was

this technocratic, a technocratic engineering of the economy that people didn't have an immediate grasp on. So what you have to do truly, really, is go big, give people something that they can actually put their hands on immediately. They understand immediately. And then if you combine that with ever-increasing amounts of vaccinations, you're going to have in really short order a much healthier country and one that is well much more on the way to an economic recovery and all of this stuff all that we're talking about right now nobody will remember what they will know is that the vaccines are out and that there's cash in their hands and the country is coming out of this and i think that that's the calculus here and if they're right i mean if they're right i mean i let me put

it this way i think there's a chance they're right i think there's a chance they're right i think there's a chance that if they do get a lot of cash in people's hands at the same times that the vaccine is rolling out more and more and more and people by late summer feel perfectly free to go out and by the fall or in football stadiums and the economy is humming, all of this is total nonsense that only the four of us care about anymore. And I think that that's sort of the last wariness that they're dwelling on with the Obama administration was, well, Obama just didn't go big enough. by hundreds of billions of dollars, he should have gone bigger.

And they point to, for example, the early coronavirus relief with PPP and other things that were done early in the pandemic to say, see, look, we could have totally absorbed more relief. And that's the gamble there. I think the unity stuff is,

you know, they're going to look at that, honestly, as a more of a tone thing, in my view, not a substance thing. He's not going to be owning the conservatives on Twitter. He's going to say right things and then hope that his policy outcome is where it is. But as far as the unity stuff, as far as any sort of substantial number of office-holding Republicans saying, yay, this really is turning the page. You know, I honestly think the mass wave of executive orders put a lot of that in the review mirror. The one thing I will say to pick up on David's point briefly is I do think it's the case that,

if it's just Republicans screaming about the unity stuff, and I expect that it probably will be, I don't expect that he will be raked over the proverbial goals by the media on the unity question. There is a sense that he could just sort of shrug it off because it will feel partisan like everything else in our country at the moment. And it's a fair point. And when I expect that Democrats will make with some bigger to say that, you know, wait, these Republicans who followed Donald Trump's every command are going to tell us that that we aren't partisan, that we aren't bipartisan enough. Come on, people. So I think there's a chance, even if I think substantively he will be hypocritical, he will be breaking a promise. There's a chance that he doesn't pay for it in the way

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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. And with that, I'd like to move to our next topic. Steve, I sort of think of Kevin McCarthy as a single dad with two teenage daughters that are in trouble. One daughter is having trouble fitting in at school. She doesn't have a lot of friends. She didn't get into her first choice college, she's working too hard at night, and you're just worried that she's going to sort of have kind of a break at some point. And the other daughter, you found drug paraphernalia in her room, and her boyfriend on a motorcycle keeps revving the engine and has,

you know, a neck tattoo. And you're just like, I don't, this is not, they didn't make a parenthood book about this. Processing. Processing that. So the first daughter would be Liz Chady and the second daughter would be Marjorie Taylor Green. That's right. I mean, I suppose if you're Kevin McCarthy, that might be the way things look to you. I would say there are certainly signs that he would be a failed parent if he looked around at the Republican Conference right now because being a single parent is hard, Steve. Nobody said it was easy, but in this moment, it would seem that he's making virtually

every wrong decision at virtually every step of the way. Look, I don't think Kevin McCarthy has an easy job here. He's got a House Republican conference that is filled with people 138 who voted in a way that suggests that they thought the election was stolen. the election wasn't stolen. You have an increasing number of conspiracy mongers who are taking up the, at the very least, the media oxygen of more serious Republicans. And you have, I think, serious and thoughtful Republicans, many of whom our guests on recent podcasts accepted, are afraid to speak up and afraid to speak out. So you've seen Kevin McCarthy, I think, flailing. You had you had McCarthy both on January 6th in the aftermath of the assault on the

Capitol, schooled, condemned Donald Trump. A week later, Kevin McCarthy was saying the same thing. Donald Trump bears responsibility for this. But shortly after that, he literally said, I don't see how you can point to Donald Trump's speech as playing any role in what we saw here. And shortly after that, he made a trip down to Mara Lago. to kiss the ring, to unite with Donald Trump. He sent emails out from a Trump's Majority.com email address. And Kevin McCarthy has very clearly gone all in. The two problems that he's dealing with, in my view, are not two problems.

One is a problem. Marjorie Taylor Green, being a 9-11 truther, making openly racist and bigoted comments, even if this was before her time in Congress, that's a problem. Kevin McCarthy had people imploring him to step in in the primary to support the doctor who was running against Marjor, Taylor Green. He declined to do that. He welcomed her into the Congress. Donald Trump has blessed her even after the revelation of all of these things, and Kevin

McCarthy appears to be standing by her. Now he's talking about potentially removing her from a committee or two because Democrats are threatening to do it on their own. But nowhere in this entire episode handling of Marjorie Taylor Green has he shown any leadership in any way. On Liz Cheney, I would say the opposite. She is not a problem. In fact, she's the solution. And Kevin McCarthy is creating a problem where one need not exist. You know, he came out after Liz Cheney said that it was a vote of conscience. She had to vote to impeach the president. Kevin McCarthy came out and sort of weakly said, well, I support her. No, she shouldn't be run out of her leadership position. But in the days and weeks since, as he has

returned to Trump, as President Trump himself has been calling members of the Republican conference to get Liz Cheney removed from her position, McCarthy has echoed Trump's complaints. So he went in an interview with Greta Van Sustrin. He said, look, well, I support her, but she's been really unhelpful. She's not coordinated with me on her message. She's putting members in a difficult spot, what have you. First of all, I don't think that's true. I think it's just false that Kevin McCarthy went into the impeachment vote without knowing what Liz Cheney was going to do. Seems sort of absurd on its face. But secondly, the answer there is to say this is somebody who's operating from a position of principle. There's no political upside as everybody has, as everybody realized when it happened

and certainly has realized in the time since. She didn't do this because this was part smart principle. She did this because this was something she believed pretty fundamentally. If I were the leader of the Republican Party, I would want to encourage people to act out of conviction and principle and say, we'll figure out the politics of all this, but that's why people are in Washington. This is what they should be doing. And Kevin McCarthy has done. none of that. So there is a leadership problem in that House Republican conference. I think Republicans should be talking about who's a part of that leadership team, but they shouldn't be talking about getting rid of Liz Cheney. They should be talking about getting rid of Kevin

McCarthy. Jota is, wait, I want to keep going for a little bit longer. am i am i being too harsh on on poor kevin mccarthy should we view him as a as a single parent who has an impossible job and troubled teens you know so i sat here trying to game out sarah's analogy on this and i think it's got some merit uh but i think given his personality and given his leadership style he's more like not the president of a fraternity, but the social director of fraternity and the sorority that they're teamed up with

for the big spring fling thing has this problem between the Marjorie de Green and the Liz Cheney characters and his attitude is sort of like chicks be crazy, I can't deal with this, hold my beer. But we can explore this analogy

further another time. Look, I think the most, if you were writing a sort of a grand sweeping history of the last 10 years of the GOP, you would take note, significant note,

that of the three young guns, who are supposedly the future of the Republican Party, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy. Kevin McCarthy is the only guy left in Congress. And full disclosure, my wife was the writer on that book. But, and Kevin McCarthy, of the three of them, is the least intellectual one. I'm not saying he's dumb.

I'm just saying he's not an egghead in any way. He doesn't really care about, you know, he won the lottery, bought a deli, became a congressman. I mean, it's a nice American story. Least philosophical. Least philosophical. That's fine. That's a good way to put it. And I think that what I thought at the time,

time was just a really regrettable flub or gaff turned out to be really telling about Kevin McCarthy. During the Benghazi hearings, he went on Fox, and he was asked whether or not the Benghazi hearings were a huge waste of time. And he said, no, look, all you got to do, I'm paraphrasing, all you got to do is look at Hillary Clinton's poll numbers. Now, the idea that those hearings and these investigations into national security and terror and dead American, and a consulate were all justified to take down Hillary Clinton's poll numbers is reprehensible. And at the time, a lot of us were like, oh, God, why does he, you know, make these mistakes? I think it was a Kinsley Gaff. He was, you know, accidentally telling the truth about how he sees the world.

And I think that completely amoral view of politics is ill serving the country and the party at this particular moment. And it is a, I've always had a soft spot for Mitch McConnell, but it is a remarkable thing that at the past that the country is in, Mitch McConnell is coming forth and by against the benchmarks of where the Republican Party is today as a high-minded, principled, take the high road, moralist and statesman, you know, and if Kevin McCarthy can make Mitch McConnell, A guy who I've always described as the sort of dude who swims across motes with a knife in his teeth look like that.

You can see the problem that we've got. And my own view is someone who cares more about conservatism than the GOP. I think you just got to, you got to draw bright lines and say, hey, look, we're a big tent. But there's a Mitt Romney's point. We're a big tent. But at some point, there are just some people who have to be outside. the tent. And if you're the kind of person who says Nancy Pelosi needs a bull in the head, if you're the kind of person who claims that Hillary Clinton cut off the face of a small child

and wore it as a mask, seems to me that's like not a hard decision to say that's outside the tent. And like, these kind of hot tanks are not for the dispatch, Jonah. These. So they're just, the problem is is that everyone's trying to game this stuff through polling and political stuff. And that's the time horizon on that crap is so short that you can't make smart decisions you got to you got to find true north and go towards it and the polls will bend in your favor over the long term that's how I see is that hopelessly naive David I mean think about what Jonah's saying do the right thing I mean what is he talking about bless my heart who acts that way well I let me let me go at this at a different angle here's what's hopelessly naive what's hopelessly naive is thinking that she

you can have the boat parade without Trump. And I think what's happening here is you have this situation where a lot of people have drunk this Kool-Aid of the 74 million, this huge number of people that Trump turned out and said, wait a minute, this is the biggest GOP coalition that we've ever had. And it also includes an awful lot of people who haven't been engaged in politics or to the extent they've been engaged in politics, They've kind of kept they're crazy on the down low.

And what we cannot do, we're not going to get the 74 million. We're not going to get the boat parade. We're not going to get the Trump trucks. We're not going to get the whole thing if we say, absolutely, we're completely distancing ourselves from the Facebook feeds of millions of Americans, because that's the really unpleasant reality here. Undergirding all of this, it's that when Marjorie Taylor Green talks about crazy things, she's reflecting where a lot of people are.

And she's not just reflecting where a lot of people are. She's reflecting where a lot of people who immediately spit back their venom to congressmen are. And so there's this sort of carrot and stick dynamic going on that on the carrot is, look at the 74 million. And the stick is, if you turn your back on the quote unquote, the 74 million, never mind the fact that the vast majority of that 74 million would have voted for any person with an R by their name.

not just Donald Trump, but if you turn your back on the 74 million, then you're going to face our wrath, and our wrath is really, really, really unpleasant to face. And so I think that that's one of the problems you have here is that if you're just analyzing this and you have no, you're not analyzing it through a moral lens, or you're not analyzing it through a policy lens, you're just sort of saying, what is it that can keep together this coalition, it puts you in a tough position regarding Marjorie Taylor Green and put you in a tough position because it also happens to be the fact that a lot of the people who are believing and sharing and talking about the same thing she believes and shares

happen to be some of the more active of these new Republicans. And it's a bad problem. And a party that wants to say healthy in any way, shape, or form or have any kind of moral center all, this should be a pretty easy decision. This should be a decision, and we should talk about this later on in the podcast, and I suspect we might, a, you know, William F. Buckley getting rid of the Birchers kind of moment. But you don't have the will for that here. You don't have the will for that. And here's the problem with all this talk you see all over Twitter of the $74 million, $74 million. Well, there's a couple problems. One, they round up to $75 million all the time, which is a little annoying. The other one is there's a math problem that says 81 million is greater than

74 million. And so if you're putting together a movement that inflames 81 million people to vote against you when their candidate doesn't even campaign, then maybe your math is bad and maybe your approach is bad. But that seems to have been obscured. But I think what we have here is a situation where a blot of the GOP is trying for something that is unsustainable and untenable, which is trying to cobble together a coalition that includes an awful lot of conspiracy theorists, outraged, unhinged individuals

who just so happen to also be among the most vocal members of the constituency, and therefore people are terrified to cross them. They think they're going to lose and they're worried about, you know, often worried about their own health and safety. It's an awful situation. Sarah, what would you do if you were Kevin McCarthy? I'm going to not answer this question and use my time to go to my topic and just add that time to my topic. Fair.

So hot. Bold. Bold. Yeah. So you'd be a dictator. In effect. I mean, the very short answer to the question is you do the right thing for the right reasons and let the chips fall where they may. there's a reason that the other two guys aren't in Congress anymore,

like them or dislike them. At least they, for the most part, went out believing what they believe. That seems like a good way to sleep at night. Okay. I need to preface my topic. There's a reason that I am not the ranter, really, on this podcast. It's not because I don't know how to rant. I think my husband would tell you I'm a decent ranter.

But I am actually the least articulate on the issues that I care the most about. And so when we're talking about something that I maybe have strong feelings about, I try to like set that back a little and come to it with my like full rational brain and do my best. However, late last week, I realized what I was going to talk about on the podcast this week and that there was no way to do that because the rational part of my brain, cannot win this fight because I am just too worked up about it. So head back to 2016. I am running Carly Fiorina's campaign for president.

I'm not saying I thought Carly Fiorina was going to win the nomination. But to the thing I was just saying, you fight the fights, not the fights you think you can win, but the fights you think are worth fighting. And I thought that was a fight worth fighting for sort of the soul in the future of the Republican Party. And I knew we'd be up against a whole lot of things. I don't think anyone fully understood the $3 billion in earned media that Donald Trump would get. And right after the election, they have this thing at Harvard where the campaign managers from each of the campaigns come together and sort of talk about what it was like. And it's our only time that we actually do this.

People think that like we're all sitting there, I don't know, like backstage. or something throwing spitballs at each other, but it doesn't happen. And so there's this dinner at the end, and Jeff Zucker, the head of CNN, is on stage being interviewed. And he's just giving this like very, you know, he's like, look, Donald Trump was just better at earning, you know, getting earned media. That's why he got covered so much. And I did not know the event was on the record. And I had also had two glasses of wine. And so I yelled from the back of the room, I don't remember being invited to call in. Meaning, like, Donald Trump got to just, like, call into programs.

He didn't have to go to the local affiliate. He didn't have to, like, find a satellite truck. You know, he got to sit in his PJs, which, like, that is taxing stuff on a candidate, especially a female candidate to have hair and makeup done by 4 a.m. to do those morning shows, especially when we were on the West Coast, for instance, for the California debate. And Jeff responded something, you know, like, we offered all sorts of opportunities to other candidates.

And it was like this Spartacus moment where all of the other campaign managers in the room stood up. It was like, we weren't invited to call in. And then the Rubio table stood up. Neither were we. And again, I didn't actually know it was on the record. Luckily, the reporters in the back for some reason were like, who started it? And it was like, Sarah. And it got reported as Sarah Huckabee started it, not me.

So I am outing myself today, that that was actually me, Sarah, not the other Sarah. Okay, so five years later, surely, surely we've learned something. No, we haven't. And let me tell you why. Members of Congress, backbench members of Congress, freshman sophomore members, there's only three things that they actually do as members of Congress. One, they could vote on legislation or other motions that come before the floor. Two, they can draft legislation or amendments.

Three, I guess, they can frank. They can use the franking privilege and send mail to constituents. That's something that's real, I suppose. And yet, now there is this Trump-sized hole in the media. And it is being filled with more. outrage porn. And now the outrage porn is about lasers that identify with the Jewish faith. And I'm, I'm not angry. I'm, I'm bewildered. I'm befuddled by this. They are not, and then they sit there and say, like, well, it's newsworthy because she's a member of Congress.

No, that's not why it's newsworthy, actually, because it's not something she's doing as a member of Congress. And who cares? We had Steve King in Congress for God only knows how long I can't count as high as we allowed Steve King to be in Congress. And yes, Steve King made news occasionally. Steve King was removed from committees in the end. Steve King, by the way, is an avowed white supremacist. He said he didn't understand why it was a bad term, in fact. He got nothing. He got one iota of the coverage over his 10 years of absurdity that Marjorie Taylor Green has gotten in three weeks. And you know who else, by the way, has gotten this level of coverage totally outside of being a member of Congress is Elon Omar on the other side. Elon Omar, by the way, I want to distinguish

for someone like AOC because AOC actually is quite popular within her party, within a certain part of her party. She is able to influence politics. Elon Omar isn't popular. She barely one or primary. Marjorie Taylor Greed isn't popular, but you know what makes them popular? Millions upon millions of earned media coming from people who enjoy feeling superior and outraged and smug about it because they get to talk with this condescending tone about the Jewish space lasers. And the result is the equal and opposite reaction on the other side. These people know what they're doing because Marjorie Taylor Green put out a statement explaining it that every single time you talk about the Jewish space lasers, and I've talked about it now four times so far,

she raises, let's call it, $10,000. She's getting wealthier and wealthier. Her name ID is skyrocketing. No one knew who this crazy person was a month ago. And more and more money gets into her pack, and more and more people know who she is, and more and more and more people I identify her as the person who the smug assholes don't like. And mark my words, this is not like Steve King. This is not like the Birchers, because none of those things happen in this current environment. And by the way, something about being a woman, because I'll note that there are very few women in Congress. And yet Elon Omar and Marjorie Taylor Green happened to be women, but we can set that aside for a second.

And here we are. And frankly, the dispatch has mentioned her several times, not that. that many. Not as many as most. But every single time I see her name and anything, I think about how much money we just put in her pocket and why? There's no reason. Oh, boy, you're so wrong. But anyway, who wants to go next? Um, I, did you say let Jonah answer? All right. Uh, I feel like Kevin McCarthy all of a sudden at the fraternity. No, look, I hear you. I think you make a perfectly valid point about the outrage culture.

It's something David and I have written a bunch about, you know, David's phrase, nutpicking where each side picks the other side, the worst example of the other side says they're representative of the entire enemy tribe. You know, the Democratic Party isn't Elon Omar and the Republican Party isn't Marjorie Taylor Green, but the other side has a vested interest in painting them as such. and I dislike it when the right does it about the left. I dislike it when the left does it about the right. I care more, again, as I was saying earlier,

I care more about the integrity of the right than I care about the integrity of the Republican Party. And one of my longstanding criticisms of what's happened to American conservatism is that a lot of American conservative intellectuals and reporters and writers think it's their job to be de facto political consultants. And they put the interests of the party

over the interests of the country end of their ideals, and it's not because they're not patriotic, it's because they're confused about what their proper role is. And I don't think that Marjorie Taylor Green is an isolated phenomenon and an isolated figure. I think she is symbolic of something larger. There are other Republican Congresswoman and men who flirted with or are part of this Q&ON stuff. This guy from Utah's fourth district who, you know, played footsie with Q&ON. There's this Bobbert woman who, you know, wants to carry guns into the house and was texting locations inside the house for the mob to go to. That's not super useful. And for me, again, caring more about the integrity of conservatism

than the integrity of the Republican Party, it is a lot like the Birch situation, but it's much, much friggin' worse for the reasons you will allude to, because it used to be that you had enough elite media institutions that could serve as gatekeepers, that could discredit and disqualify people from public life. I'm not a fan of the fairness doctrine, but back in the old days, if William F. Buckley said you were too crazy for William F. Buckley, you were too crazy to be on Meet the Press. That's what people like Rand Paul and a lot of those guys, not Rand Paul, and a lot of those guys from the 1960s, they had to go to not our kind of newsletters, but like Purple Inc. Mimeograph newsletters and put them in the mail because they couldn't get their stuff published

in any reputable place. National Review was closed to them. Even some places that National Review thought were not reputable weren't open to a lot of those kinds of people. Today, for the reasons you allude to, it's dopamine clicks and, you know, dopamine hits and clicks and ratings and all of this kind of stuff. And it makes it so much easier to do the stuff that you're complaining about, and I think rightly, and at the same time, that makes it all the more important to draw bright lines. And, you know, the complaint, going back to Steve's topic, we are at the end result of a lot of bad decisions over the last 10 years. And among them, you know, like if you wanted to give the American politics or the Republican Party a giant barium enema, so you

could light up various bad decisions on the x-ray is Kevin McCarthy and all of these people not saying, look, people like this, they just can't run on our brand. They can't be part of the Republican Party. I don't care that it's an open primary and people get to run whatever. We're going to dry up all the money. We're going to dry up all the attention. And we're going to back somebody else. We're going to win that seat anyway, as long as it's a Republican. And instead, as has been my obsession for a while now, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party don't give a rat's ass

about their own institutional integrity and long-term interests. The Republican Party's worse because it's been so damaged by four years of Donald Trump, but basically it's a friggin brand name that it's willing to rent out to anybody willing to write a check,

which makes it a lot like CPAC these days. But that's a topic for another time. Jonah, two quick follow-ups. One, you allude to this, but could you please go into a little bit more detail on how the birchers were snuffed out and whether you think if every Sunday on Meet the Press, they had talked about how crazy the birchers were, whether the birchers would have been snuffed out.

So, I mean, first of all, the birchers are still out there. I mean, they're like, you know. That's right. And they're not the topic of meet the press every Sunday. That's right. But they are like herpes. They flare up every now and then, right? But Marjorie Taylor Green will be the topic of every Sunday show.

Would the birchers have disappeared if they had been the topic? every Sunday for months? I, look, I take your point entirely. I think it's a good point. My problem is that you can't make bad decisions, bad decisions, bad decisions going down a long road and then all of a sudden say, well, we're in a really bad place. We shouldn't be doing this. This is the place that the GOP got itself into.

This is the place that the Wright got itself into when it took Donald Trump seriously as a presidential candidate five years ago. Okay, fair. It's where the media got itself into when they destroyed. newspapers in this country. One other question for you. You and David both spent a little bit of time discussing this person in your newsletters. And by the way, I do not think you did it for clicks because that's not how our newsletters work. So you had no particular incentive. I want to be very clear about your motivation. My incentive was rage, but go on. Your motivations come from a deeply pure place.

I know that. But I am curious whether if I said in order to make that the topic of your newsletter, you have to cut a $50,000 check to her pack whether you would have done that. I would have thought about it more. To be fair, I didn't make a newsletter as my column, but yeah, I guess I did meant a newsletter too. I don't even remember times a flat circle. This is part of the problem I'm getting at

is that when you're in a bad place and you have no bad options, you just got to try to do what is right. I understand I'm throwing more attention to Marjor Taylor Green when I write and talk about her. but if she's so insignificant, if she's so trivial in her power and her influence, it should be very, very, very, very easy for Kevin McCarthy

to treat her like a sinner in an Amish community and say, you are shunt, we want nothing to do with you, right? He won't do that because he's afraid of pissing off Trump. He's afraid of pissing off a lot of voters that think that she is this culture war symbol of some nonsense or other. And that makes it more, I think it makes it more, important to put pressure on him to say, do the freaking right thing. And if that makes her more

popular with a bunch of crazies, that's one of the reasons why, you know, we can't have nice things. Jonah, I appreciate you saying that you would have, you understand the $50,000 to the PAC. David, would you have written a $50,000 check to her PAC in exchange for publishing your newsletter? I don't answer ridiculous hypotheticals. Not ridiculous. It is. It is. Because my newsletter is not that powerful. So here's the bottom line. The question here is... You're of Frenchism.

There's an ism named after you, my God. So here's the deal. Let's not do revisionist history of 2016 for crying freaking out loud. All right. Number one, two things happened at once in 2016. One is the left and the giant media industrial complex

gave Trump an enormous amount of attention. Just enormous. All negative attention, by the way. All negative. 97% negative or something. Negative attention. Laughing at him. Yes.

Yes. Yes. Okay. Lacking at him. Ha, ha. Look at what Republicans are doing. I'm with you so far. You know what a lot of Republicans did?

Ted Cruz, my friend Donald. My friend Donald tore each other apart often. Chris Christie demolished Rubio in a debate. Why did they do that? Well, already a lot of them were afraid of Trump and his supporters. A lot of them assumed that Trump would implode. They assumed Trump would implode. I remember writing in December of 2015, somebody in the Republican field, not named Jeb Bush, stand up and take him on directly. Carly Fiorina, one of the ways that she made her way, I have a special place in my heart for Carly Fiorina. One of his worst moments was when she stood up and took him on.

directly. Sarah, you remember of all of the writers at Nashville View, who was standing Carly Fiorena more than me? Why? One of the reasons, she was one of the only ones who would stand up to this guy from directly within the party. Everyone else was sitting there going he's going to implode. All these other people and all these other forces are going to destroy him. He's going to destroy himself. And so what I'm saying about Marjorie Taylor Green, and which who by the way isn't exactly super fringe when Trump called her a future Republican star and said in all cap she's a winner when Jim Jordan said and I'm quoting she's exactly the kind of fighter needed in Washington to stand with me against the radical left and oh by the way

it was her mindset and ideology that just sacked the capital and so we're sitting there in saying after we've been through a situation where, yeah, the outrage cycles of the mainstream media elevated Trump, but on the Republican side, what we have seen for years is a pattern of cowardice. It's a pattern of what aboutism. It's a pattern. And you've seen this, this is the thing that is almost hysterical to me. You've seen a lot of voices from other from right wing publications saying, how dare you elevate a back bencher nobody and write about them, shame, shame.

And I've gone to those same people's publications and pulled up their Ileon Omar tag and it is page after page after page after page of elevating Ileon Omar. And so once again, what are we doing? Replaying 2016 in the sense that says, well okay if that the mainstream media is coming after this person we're not taking her on from within the right we're not taking her on and and then she's going to implode and she's going to

and all of the and that and it's not just to her it's this whole mindset it's this whole mindset this conspiracy theorizing this violent ideation all of that stuff that led to january freaking 6th, and we have to directly address it. If this was just some lunatic who, you know, I've been upset for years that my neighboring district is represented by Scott Desjardet. I was going to mention him as someone who gets none of the attention. This guy is in Congress, my God. And I thought we held everyone in Congress who says and does crazy stuff to this standard where we just pay a ton of attention to them until the Republicans do say. something about it. Nope.

Scott Desjarlane. David, David, David's written about him. I've written about him repeatedly. You've written about Steve King, by the way, too. I am not calling y'all hypocrites. This is, I hope you understand. My rant is bigger, bolder, and more ranty. Sarah, I have had two almost political races in my life.

One was the, I still can't believe when it comes out of my mouth that the 2016 almost almost totally futile, independent run. But it's how we met, David. It's our, it's our backstory. It is. It's your MECU. Yes. And the other one,

the other one, the other one. He was an independent thinking about running for president. She was a... No, he's a devout, married Christian. The thing about running for president. Really ruins the whole plot. The other one, the other almost futile run that I did was I almost, years before, I was so frustrated that Scott Desjardet had the Republican nomination,

I came close to trying a right-in campaign against him all the way. I think this was 2010 to try to stop him. But then I realized it was too late even for a right-end in Tennessee. Like I was literally on the phone with people saying, how much money could I raise to stop this guy? And then I realized, well, well, I mean, I'm even past the right-end deadline. So I've had two almost runs to try to stop this nonsense. And that's, you know, I think that's where we are is that what we're doing often,

we're having this, what is quite frankly a cowardly reaction to things that come up within our own midst, which is we're going to try to rely on everyone else to snuff out what we should be snuffing out ourselves. and that kind of calculation permeated the 2016 election. And I remember I'll never forget the one time when finally, Cruz and Rubio went at Trump. And you may remember this, and it was the debate where Trump was so rocked back on his heels

when Corey Lewandowski went up on the stage against the rules to try to calm him down in the commercial break. And then like a moment, it was just there and it was gone. And then since that time, what if we had, We've had just capitulation after capitulation after capitulation within the GOP to the worst people in American politics. And so I kind of think enough is freaking enough

after January 6th. Steve, I saved you for last for a reason. So an observation, a concession, and an argument. Love it. The observation is that I love the irony built into the fact that you shouted for five minutes, filled with outrage while denouncing outrage culture. I know. I know.

It was pretty great. I feel it. Pretty great. But I enjoyed, like, if we were having the live Discord tracking the rant, the rant meter, that it happens in our dispatch live, Sarah would have, like, leaped into the frontrunner position. You know what it kind of reminds me of, though?

Bill O'Reilly used to do these specials on Fox about the pornification of America where he would be in a little tiny box on the bottom right of the screen, and then he would run pixelated B-roll of strippers and porn all through it. He's like, look at this terrible stuff. You know what it is?

I'm reliving 2016 because David, to your point, it makes me very sad, actually, because you're right, Carly Theorina did take on Donald Trump. And that didn't get her attention. I mean, it did in the 24, 48 hours afterwards. Of course it did. But then it went right back to if Donald Trump, you know, pointed to that squirrel and said that, you know, squirrel was purple, then we talked about the purple squirrel. The attention culture and the outrage culture didn't reward that good behavior. You know, you wrote a thing on Carly and it was awesome. And then the world moved on.

And that's what happened with 10Movio as well. They attacked him. And the next day, nobody paid attention to what they were saying. And people went back to paying attention to Trump. And I'm... You're undermining your case that David French's newsletter is worth $50,000. Thank you. We should have let Steve back.

So that was my observation. My concession is that I think you're right about sort of attention be getting attention. There's no question that that's true. And I think it's a really hard, it's just a naughty problem with journalists to wrestle. Journalists of goodwill, journalists who actually care about the truth and not just making a buck on capitalizing on outrage. I think think that's a difficult challenge. And the fact that we talk about this kind of thing so much internally, I think speaks to the fact that we're concerned about it. You can go and there are a number of studies that show that fact checks of disinformation can be counterproductive because they have the effect of simply elevating the disinformation. They make people more aware of the bad information and the

correction to the bad information is secondary. So I'm sort of constantly wrestling with how we address things like that. And I think you make very, very, not only fair points, but good points about the need for media institutions to be responsible and not just seek to capitalize on outrage. And there's no question that that drives a lot of what happened. I mean, you, you know, there was the, there was the famous quote from Les Moonves of CBS who said Donald Trump is bad for America, but good for CBS. That is true. It was true. It was good for so many of these media companies who made a ton of money by making every single issue at all times about Donald Trump. Obviously, we came at this reporting from a slightly different perspective, but I don't think

the answer is to simply ignore people like Marjorie Taylor Green. I think you have to cover people like her. Yes, I get that she's a backbencher from Georgia and is, you know, one of hundreds of members of Congress and isn't necessarily on her own deserving of the attention that she's gotten. But I think David makes a valid point. When he says it she's part, she helps us tell the story of the increasing conspiracization of the Republican Party. And that's what is going on here. You have a Republican Party. I mean, as I mentioned earlier, 138 Republicans voted for a measure more or less suggesting that the election was stolen. The election wasn't stolen. There was never evidence for this. What did Republicans as a party talk about more than anything else from November 3rd to January 6th, our stolen election?

It was a bullshit conspiracy theory. It wasn't true, and yet it consumed the Republican Party for two full months and led some of its members to try, by means both legal and I would say illegal, to overturn the election. That's where we are with these conspiracies. And I think it would be irresponsible for an organization like ours to simply shrug it off and say, yeah, you know what? We don't want to cover that because that will give her attention. that will give them attention. You have to cover it when somebody like the president of the United States is either making the argument on his own or is amplifying people like Marjorie Taylor Green who are making

these arguments. And unfortunately, we're in a situation where he is doing that. He remains very powerful. And we're in this. It's not going away. And the final point I'd make just quickly is on your question to Jonah about meet the press and the birchers, you can't even have that. conversation because we're living in a totally different media environment. Of course, the

birchers would have benefited from the attention they would have gotten had they been elevated to a Sunday show. They had no other means to get publicity. As Jonas says, they were relegated to sending mimeographed newsletters, and that would have been it. A big part of our problem, and I do think, honestly, I believe this is probably the gravest threat we face as a country, as a Republic. We're in this crisis of information. It's a crisis of noise. And you can't sort of wish your way out of that. You can't pretend that this bad information that's out there will simply go away if responsible people don't pay attention to it. So Marjorie Taylor Green, you know, wouldn't be, wouldn't be smothered by not being spoken about on Meet the Press. She would raise money

by being spoken by not being spoken about on meet the press you know you have you have the tech companies saying in effect we don't we don't want to elevate her she goes and raises money off that this is a bigger problem that if you have when when you have people who either ignore her or try to just stamp her out she can go around and find other ways to talk about it that's why I think it's incumbent upon journalists of good faith to write these stories. You know, we ran a terrific piece from Audrey Falberg on our staff back on July 10th, talking about the Republican Party's conspiracy problem and looking carefully at a lot of the things that Marjorie Taylor Green had said.

And you look at her writing about Q&ON and about Marjorie Taylor Green and about the numbers of people who were willing to, if not, support this outright. at least sort of shrug their shoulders and say, yeah, she may be, she may be crazy, but she's our crazy. That was a prophetic piece. I'm glad we ran it, and I'm glad we've continued to cover it. Now, we don't do it in an exploitative way at all. We don't, I mean, our whole model is not for clicks, so it would be really stupid to try

to do it for clicks. But I do think it's important to cover, and I think we'll continue to cover it. We won't obsess about it, but as part of this broader problem, that's a huge threat to the Republic, I think we have to cover it and cover it in a responsible way. 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.

Turns and conditions apply. Learn more at mx.ca. slash Yannex. Deep breath. Yoga pose. David, I saved your topic for last because I knew that it would actually. actually bring me a lot of joy. And so talk to us about what the U.K. is doing right now. Yeah. So this is one of these good stories. A good story amidst a much larger, a much larger terrible story. I guess that that's kind of the way of the world now. We're finding

some of our good stories amidst some pretty terrible stories. The crackdown, on Hong Kong has led to the United Kingdom to essentially extend its arms to to Hong Kong residents to say, if you are oppressed, come here to Great Britain, which is something that sort of fits in the grand tradition of the fight between the communist world and the free world during the Cold War. We also, we would have an open door, for example, to people who are fleeing oppression in communist tyranny. And so here comes Britain, standing in the shoes of the free world, you know, of the free world inheriting that mantle and opening its arms to immigrants from Hong Kong.

And the best guess is that hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong residents will move to Great Britain, hundreds of thousands. I just think that's a good story on a number of fronts. One, you have the moral, sort of the moral courage of the free world reasserting itself in the face of a crackdown. Number two, you're going to end up with a cost paid by the People's Republic of China as there is a brain drain from its own, from its own shores to the free world. It's going to be a cost. It's going to take a bite out of China to lose potentially hundreds of thousands of citizens who would be among some. some of the, you know, the best citizens in the Chinese nation.

And, you know, there's another interesting aspect of this. This is something I was just talking about with a writer for the economist that what's interesting about this is a lot of these immigrants back into the UK are going to be Christian. Hong Kong has quite a bit of evangelical Christianity in it. And so you're going to actually be in. into a nation that has, for a long time, been receding from Christianity a large number of new Christian immigrants, which is going to have an interesting effect on the U.K. and U.K. culture. And so I just thought it was an important story to highlight that this was, and to ask,

why are we not doing this? Why are we not offering this alternative and the alternative of freedom? And then one other thing that I would say is I also was talking about with this writer from the economist who's been in the China beat and also on the Brexit beat. Like I guess everyone for a while in Britain was on the Brexit beat. And he was talking about how different the discussion around Hong Kong was in that a lot of the Brexit controversy arose around immigration. And there is a widespread embrace of this initiative by the Johnson government. And, you know, he said, part of this is kind of that problematic model minority language that you sometimes get when that is, you know, that comes up in the context of immigration from China. But he said, still, there is an enormous amount of embrace of this initiative. And I thought that that was a good news story. Also, one of the thing interesting on the Brexit point, and this is not what we discussed in the green room, but it's a It looks like there's a lot of pride in Great Britain right now that it is way outpacing the rest of the EU on vaccine distribution, that the UK is the third leading country in the world on per capita of vaccinations and just way outstripping the EU, which is causing some folks to see some of the potential wisdom in Brexit in a surprising way.

But I don't know exactly how to launch that conversation, but let me just go to Steve. I have an idea about that. So I actually wrote a column that touched on some of this a while ago. There's a lot, you know, as we all know in our private conversations with some Republicans, that there is this sort of the political equivalent, the GOP political equivalent of next year in Jerusalem, where a lot of Republicans talk about how, once things calm down, we'll just go back to Reaganism and everything will be fine, right? And I wrote a column about how Ted Cruz is a great sign of why that's not true. Because the one thing we can all rely on Ted Cruz to do is

to pursue his political interests assiduously and go where the, the, the, the, the, the, the, base of the party wants him to go in a clever way. And even though Ted Cruz says very Reagan-esque things, quotes Ronald Reagan, issues videos quoting Ronald Reagan about the freedom of, about the independence of Hong Kong and how the fight against Chinese tyranny must be, you know, fought like the Cold War. He single-handedly scuttled an effort to give Hong Kong refugees in the United States and Hong Kong refugees who wanted to come to the United States, a slight edge. And he was like, we can't do it because they might send spies.

And so he thinks it's more important to pander to Chinese, anti-Chinese stuff than actually live up to me. Like Reagan would have, at the drop of a hat, offered this to Hong Kong. And all of the people around Reagan, with maybe a couple exceptions, would have been all on board for it. And I think that that,

it makes me very sad that the U.S. is not going that way. I think it's kind of idiotic that it's not going that way. But it really does, I think it's a good die marker or good, you know, illustration of how the GOP, despite all of its talk about Reaganism and Reagan and Reagan and this, is actually not that Reaganite anymore. At least it doesn't have the courage to act like it's Reaganite. Sorry to make a bad news story, but there you go. So I can make it a good news story. once again in response to your question of why we are not doing this it appears that we might be doing this anthony blinkin the secretary of state recently sworn and gave an interview to andrea mitchell yesterday um monday monday um where she asked him should the u.s join britain and

opening its doors to refugees fleeing the political repression in hong kong and blinkin said without qualification, I believe we should. And then went on to talk about China's egregious actions and his sort of double talk on Hong Kong generally. So he didn't qualify it. Maybe there are qualifications coming, and I'm sure we'll understand better what the actual policy looks like in the coming days, I hope, sooner rather than later. But it does appear that we are going to be following Britain's lead on this. But the bad news there is that that because of negative partisanship, the stuff I'm talking about the GOP, they will oppose this as bringing in the yellow peril and all of this kind of stuff rather than embrace it as something

in the best traditions. I mean, you could be right. You know, the smart bet is on cynicism at this point. If they do, it'll be yet another clarifying moment. I mean, and, you know, I, sometimes I hate how many clarifying moments we've had, but they are useful. They clarify. Things are pretty clear. they clarify. Sarah, bring us home. Bring us home, Sarah. Did any of the three of you watch Saturday Night Live this past weekend? So the cold open was pretty well done. Kate McKinnon is herself. She's not playing a character. And it's Kate McKinnon. And the segment is called What Still Works. And it starts with government question mark. And she interviews someone playing Marjorie Taylor Green and obviously like, oh, you're a member of Congress. Okay. Government does not work. The Republicans aren't stripping you of committees. They're not doing anything. Got it. The second one is the stock market.

And they have Pete Davidson play, you know, one of the stock guys who buys into GameStop. And she's like, now the stock valuation is supposed to go up when the company is doing well and down when the company's not doing well. And, you know, that goes on. Number three is a tech company, social media. And they have, you know, a Mark Zuckerberg and a. Jack Dorsey trying to explain why anything

that they've done is remotely okay and then the last segment of course this is the punchline is Tom Brady and she says now your job

is to play football right and he's like yeah this is John Krasinski playing Tom Brady and and you've you're 43 years old

you've been playing football a long time right yeah and you switch teams. You went to a team that was one of the worst in the nation, and you single-handedly got your team to the Super Bowl. He says, no, no, look, I have these amazing teammates. She goes, stop, stop right there, Tom Brady, don't you dare. Nobody can name a single person on the rest of that

team. You did it, Tom Brady. And he's like, whatever. And she's like, so your job is to win football games. You're 43 years old, and you're still winning football games. And he says, yes. And she goes, wow, we have found something in this country that is working and I bet the entire country is rooting for you this weekend, right, Tom Brady? So, this is my question

to you. Why, given that, which I thought was one of the clever S&L skits of the last several years, why aren't each of you rooting for Tom Brady? Steve? I mean,

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers beat my Green Bay Packers. And while it's tempting to acknowledge that victory, I think, in fact, the score, the counting should have been stopped when the Packers were doing better. And we shouldn't have continued to count the score. And he shouldn't have been able to run it up. I mean, after all, I came into the game with expectations that the Packers would get more points.

than the Buccaneers. So I'm just befuddled as to why they let this happen and declared Tom Brady the winner. Fair. Jonah. Why aren't you rooting for Tom Brady? I'm not a rooting kind of guy. More eating the pigs in the blanket and the onion dip with the Super Bowl. Yeah, I'm rooting for wings.

But, you know, I just, I, you know, I don't have a huge investment in the, either team or in football as much of these days. David, I feel like for sure your team Patrick Mahomes all the way here. No, I'm rooting for Brady. What? Yes, I'm reading for Brady. Is it because you're both old? Well, there's part of that.

But it's not because I just, it's dislike Patrick Mahomes. Patrick Mahomes is going to have a glorious and long, maybe even Brady-esque career. But there's something amazing to watch of like this last stand of the old quarterback. And I'm reminded of the movie Gladiator. You know, you have Russell Crow

and, you know, his glory days are behind him. He's fighting in the arena. And you have that, you know, what his friend said to him, I will see you again, but not yet. Not yet. And so that's like Brady to his family in every playoff season. Like there will be a time, we'll be together during the playoffs, but not yet. He still has another fight in that arena. And so I, for one, am really looking forward to this Super Bowl. And I'm rooting, I'm absolutely rooting for Brady. I'd like to see the old warhorse win one more

and not yet pass that torch to his era parent, to yank it out of his era parent's hands at the last moment. Because Mahomes will have more moments, but this might be Brady's last. So I think it's drama. It's awesome. I love it. I had a personal Super Bowl victory this week.

My favorite Super Bowl food is Pigs in a blanket, little smokies with Pillsbury Crescent Rolls. And they're always super sold out because I never remember to go until basically Sunday, circa 1 p.m. I went two days ago and bought tons of little smokies and tons of crescent rolls. And we will not run out. Also, Coke Zero. I went to the front with my two little, you know, 12 packs or whatever of Coke Zero.

And the woman was like, no, it's buy two, get three free. And I thought she meant, you know, buy two, get one free, which means you get three. So I went back and I got another one. And she goes, no, no, no, ma'am, it's buy two, get three free. So I now have Coke Zero that just fills my house. I could pour all of the Coke Zero into the basement and just swim in it. and I've never looked forward to a Super Bowl more, maybe. So thank you all for joining this week.

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