The Dispatch Podcast - Right-Wing Theater Kids

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

Steve Hayes sits down with Jonah Goldberg, Megan McArdle, and Kevin Williamson to discuss the events in Minnesota, sanctuary cities and immigration policies, and international tensions. The Agenda:��Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and the Leak Wars–The killing of Alex Pretti–Jedi mind tricks aren’t working–Time for the purge?–Trump’s political instincts–Overseas tensions–NWYT: Weird injuries Show Notes:–Dispatch Editorial: The Cost of Silence–Trump says 'violent day' of policing will end crime–The Immigration Frontlines–There's a way to stop Trump. First, drop the fascism debate. The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠⁠⁠The Dispatch⁠⁠⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠⁠⁠by clicking here⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Dispatch podcast is presented by Pacific Legal Foundation, suing the government since 1973. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss the aftermath of Alex Preti's death in Minnesota. Is Donald Trump backing down? And we'll look overseas to the massacre of protesters in Iran and a potential show of force by the United States. Finally, and not worth your time, we'll look at injuries. Old man injuries, weird injuries. injuries, funny injuries, lots to discuss. I'm joined today by my dispatch colleagues, Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson, as well as dispatch contributor and Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle. At Medcan, we know that life's greatest moments are built on a foundation of good health, from the big milestones to the quiet winds. That's why our annual health assessment

offers a physician-led, full-body checkup that provides a clear picture of your health today, and may uncover early signs of conditions like heart disease and cancer. The healthier you means more moments to cherish. Take control of your well-being and book an assessment today. Medcan. Live well for life. Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. Do you love the dispatch is journalism but don't have time to read it all? We hear this pretty frequently from our members,

which is why I'm very excited to introduce Dispatch Voiced, a member's only podcast feed that helps you keep up with our work on your schedule. Here's how it works. We've built two feeds, editors' picks for our biggest stories and the morning dispatch for our daily newsletter, powered by realistic AI voice models created by 11 labs. These high-quality audio versions are delivered right to your favorite podcast player. Whether you're commuting at the gym, out grocery shopping, even walking the dog, dispatch voice fits our reporting into your schedule. Jonah Goldberg's latest column? The biggest News from Capitol Hill, our most colorful cultural analysis. Now it's all available in your podcast feed,

ready when you are. Most episodes use advanced AI narration that sounds remarkably like a professional audiobook reader and will occasionally feature authors reading their own work too. Ready to take the dispatch on the go, members can set up their feed on their account page at the dispatch.com. Not a member yet? Start listening today when you join the dispatch. Welcome all. As I sit in my note to you all yesterday, I'm looking forward to a discussion where we don't have to focus all of our time on Donald Trump and the things that are in the news. There are all sorts of issues beyond the headlines that I would like to discuss with this group, but this is not going to be that week. We are going to talk a lot about what's in the news. And I want to start with what's

happening here domestically. We are five days after the killing of Alex Pretti. in Minneapolis. One of these moments that seems to have broken through beyond the people who follow news beyond the political discussions and debates that we have in this country, to the point where you have Dave Matthew making a song and Bruce Springsteen making a song and Victor Wembejana, the NBA star from France, weighing in. This is something that has kind of pushed beyond the normal collection of people that we might expect to talk about this. President Trump in the last few days has sent signals by the changes in personnel that he's made that he may be backing down a little bit or rethinking or at least making moves that we might consider PR moves. He seems the White House

and Trump seem to recognize that there's something wrong that this is striking people as something that went too far. And you're seeing a leak war emerge from the White House and the cabinet agencies with people seeking to avoid blame and people seeking to assign blame. Megan, five days out, where are we on both this shooting and the killing of Alex Pretti and this bigger debate? Do you expect to see any changes or is this sort of a tactical pause from President Trump in the White House and we're likely to see him continue doing what we're doing? I do think I expect changes because I think that the administration has belatedly realized that the Jedi mind trick strategy where you just tell people things that aren't true and they kind of mindlessly repeat them is not going to work. And they tried that with Renee Good.

She was a domestic terrorist, right? And they tried it again with Peretti saying he'd been brandishing his weapon and he clearly tried intended to massacre cops. And that just failed. And you can see it in the polls. And Trump, I think the thing to understand is that, well, Trump really does have a deep opposition to immigration and trade that goes back decades. He really does think that these things are bad for the country. He's not an ideologue in the way that Stephen Miller is an ideologue. And he's much more politically sensitive than either Miller or Christy Noam, who has been running.

the show. You know, Nome's incredible political instincts are represented by the fact that she thought it would do her good to talk about shooting a dog. Which she mentioned in her own book. She described in her own book. Yes. She thought that was going to be something you should tell people. I don't know if it's true or not. It doesn't matter. If you did it, that would be something that you should never, ever, ever mention in public. Except as a terrible old Yeller kind of. kind of it broke my heart to do this thing, right? But she kind of like bragged about how proof she was a tough mom kind of thing. Yeah, because she did it herself.

She didn't let the vet put this dog down, right? Like, I mean, so just first of all, yes, in the 19th century, this was perhaps an appropriate way to think. It is much kinder to let your dog go gently to sleep than to shoot it, right? Like, you don't, taking responsibility for a creature means taking responsibility for treating it as well as possible. Every dog owner has faced the terrible choice of having to decide when the dog's time has come.

And it's an awful thing to have to do. I sobbed wildly. I have sobbed wildly every time it was time to let a dog go. It broke my heart, but it has to be done because you are in charge of making sure that their life ends as well as possible. as well as that their life is as good as possible when they're alive. But like, why would you, why would you do that in the first place?

And then why would you tell people? Because you are an idiot. And. Or possibly because the dog was interfering with a federal law enforcement action. Yeah, possibly the dog may have been a domestic terrorist, right? And that, Trump, whatever else you say about him, he does have pretty good political instincts for when he has gone too far and the public is revolting. And I think you've seen this with terrorists, too.

He has done stuff, realized he's gone too far. He doesn't, like, say I went too far. That was a bad idea. But he kind of quietly backs off because the thing he cares more about than tariffs, even, is that he cares about people not hating him so much that his life becomes a misery. And, or I should say, he cares about the public.

He doesn't care about, you know, owning the libs remains near and dear to his heart. And so I think Trump has read the tea leaves and has realized that leaving these morons in charge of the operation can only do him harm. And he's pulling back. And I wouldn't be surprised if, like, Nome, for example, gets quietly separated, announces that she wants to resign

to spend more time with her family complaining about getting fired. Like, that's, so I do think we're going to see less of this. But that doesn't mean that I think there's going to be a good turnaround on immigration policy. I don't think that this means that the, administration is like getting its act together and is going to do good things. But I do think that Trump is not going to let it go so far that he is spending all of his time dealing with complaints about citizens being shot by border patrol agents who just aren't doing a good job, who are acting like thugs. I'm sorry, I got no other word for it, right? They are acting,

you know, there's the incident the other day. They tried to chase someone into the Ecuadorian consulate, which is not U.S. territory. And when the consulate said, you can't come in there, they were like, if you touch me, I will, like, hurt you. No, you, you, that is another country's territory. You are threatening to invade it. You are obviously not trained for this. Obviously do not understand the natural and good limits on government power. And I think we have seen that over and over again, and I am sure it's a very hard job, but if you are not capable of doing that hard job without shooting people, you should get another job. There are many other jobs out there. Yeah, it must be sad. And the Atlantic has done some good reporting on this, that the group of people

who are working for ICE these days is different than the group of people who are working for ICE a decade ago. I mean, they've gone on a sort of a recruitment surge. They have lowered standards in some ways they have minimized training. And, you know, I think you're seeing appeals to to come work for ICE, you know, in a way that's recruiting people who might behave in the way that you behave, Megan. I want to go back to Megan's point about Christyneum. I hadn't really thought about it in this way. But, you know, Megan, it's certainly true that Christy Noam thought that she was going to win plotts or tough girl points for including. that story in her book. I guess I wonder whether it maybe worked, right? I mean, she got the job.

It wasn't, it wasn't, she didn't, she wasn't disqualified. I mean, there was sort of two days of chatting about it and the public discussion on cable news and elsewhere and most people were horrified and people in the administration went on to, to bring her aboard if I've got my timing right. And so she's in the position. And there is, I wonder, I mean, we had heard before this rhetoric from the president, rhetoric from Donald Trump as a candidate, rhetoric from Donald Trump in his first term that justified what he called rough treatment of criminal suspects in a strategic way. I mean, he gave a speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, a month before the election, in which he called for one real rough, nasty, and violent day

of police retaliation that would eliminate crime immediately. He said one rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out and it will end immediately, you know, it will end immediately. The campaign said, well, the president was just saying this in jest, he didn't really mean it. I'm not suggesting that the president is calling for things like we've seen with Renee Good and Alex Prattie. but when you use that kind of language, you use it repeatedly over a decade, don't you help set Kevin the, set the environment for cops to behave in this way? And when the cops, ice, border patrol,

we should definitely not lump them all together. But for the purposes of this question, law enforcement broadly, see this or see the administration leap to the defense of the officer who shot Renee Good, as Megan says, you know, and they immediately suggested she was a domestic terrorist. Does that not create, if not incentives, to use Jonah's favorite phrase, permission structure for this kind of aggressive law enforcement tactics? Yeah, I'm picturing him like flipping channels off of Fox News because there's someone on that's boring or it's, you know, it's a dentures commercial or something. and he's like, he hits the purge for a couple of minutes.

And he's thinking, hey, we can do this. We could work with this, right? This is a way we could do things. So I haven't seen the purge. Can you just give me a one paragraph synopsis? So it's like 24 hours when the law is suspended. And anyone can do anything they want. And it's essentially like a population control kind of method.

But I think that what in many other contexts would be called terrorism is his plan here. It's what he wants to do. This is why you send ICE and Border Patrol into Minneapolis in response to a welfare fraud scandal that doesn't have anything to do with illegal immigrants. It's about theater. It's about scaring people. It's about intimidating people and provoking confrontations. And so he's getting what he wanted out of it. He just thought it would be more popular.

I'd like to, and forgive me if I'm repeating myself here, but I'd really like to sit down with Trump and ask him what his theory of the case is about why he can't hire good people. Because he does this thing where, and Christian Noam's getting it right now, where he develops this sudden amnesia. And like, people will ask him about things they've said, well, I've never heard anything about that. Or I don't know about that. And then he suddenly forgets these people exist. And after he fires him, it was like, I never really knew that guy. But I want to ask him, like, you've had, you know, attorneys general, you've had, senior political people, you've had senior military commanders that you put in place in national security people that within a year, 18 months, you had to say, oh, he was stupid,

he was incompetent, he didn't know what he was doing, he was terrible. Why do you keep hiring such bad, bad people? I mean, we know the answer to that, right? Because Trump's only real test for people is abject loyalty and media presence. And Christy Noem is a loyalist, and she looks like what he thinks a human being is supposed to look like on television, which I'm not sure he's entirely right about that in his judgment, but that's that's his point of view on that. So she's the, you know, she's the female Pete Heggseth. She, you know, she's got a big media presence and she looks like what he wants the person in that role to look like and whether she has any administrative ability or the ability to manage a large complex organization to achieve a complicated and

difficult policy outcome is, is beside the point as far as Trump is concerned. But he goes through these cycles of putting these people into sensitive positions like that, realizing their terrible at it, realizing that the American people at some point want government to be good at the things it does and not bad as the things it does. I mean, mainly the American people don't care. They're there for the show, too, but at some margin, it gets bad enough that people start to push back. And I also think the fact that it's Minnesota, it would be different if it was Chicago or if it were New York City or Los Angeles, but it's just kind of, you know, Midwestern famously nice people sort of thing. It's like, if you can bring that out these people, and now we all know

Minneapolis actually isn't that Minnesota nice. It's a very different sort of place with some pretty nasty local politics in some ways. He doesn't know how to do the thing that he's trying to do. And I think that he's running into the limits of the reality television version of politics and of the presidency. He likes the drama. He likes the theater. That's his main thing. That's really what he's in it for.

But it only goes so far. Now, it goes farther, I think, than any of us thought it would in 2015 or 2016. It goes real, real far. But there are limits to it. And I think that Trump is running up against those limits. Jonah, Megan mentioned the sort of hasty response from administration officials, again, in the killing of Alex Preti, as they had in the killing of Renee Good, some three weeks earlier, to try to shape the narrative. Making claims saying things that not only weren't true, but obviously weren't true if you had watched the video. And there were many videos.

anybody who washed them could see. There was no evidence that he had come to commit a massacre, which was one of the early claims, that he was also a domestic terrorist. One of the things we've talked a lot about this inside the dispatch in our Slack conversations in our editorial meeting, why do you think they do this? Why do they say things and make claims that are demonstrably untrue in the face of video evidence to the contrary? Well, I mean, the short answer is because they're what social scientists call liars.

I think that's a big chunk of it. I mean, so part of it. But they have to know that they're going to be contradicted, right? There's video. Well, see, but that's that's the weird thing, right? So, first of all, we should say the fact that so many people can disagree about what a video, what multiple video show gives you a sense of, first of all, how much easier public officials had it before the penopticon of the iPhone world existed, where you actually had to take

people's word for what happened, right? I mean, imagine if there were no videos. They could probably get away with claiming that he was brandishing a weapon because he did have a weapon, right? But they can't get away with lies to that extent, to a certain extent. I think there are two things. One is a very meta point. I think that this administration, because there is really good about criticizing the left,

about caring about narratives, right? It's a thing the concertives have learned from their own elite four-year higher education experience is how to speak the language of the left on a lot of things. They talk about narratives and semiotics and all these kinds of things. But they've also internalized a lot of that crap. And so, like, they care about the narrative. And it's a kind of a print-the-legent approach of just asserting what you want your very loyal spinners to say. and that then that kind of forces people to see the videos the way you want them to be seen.

This is really clear, I think, with the shooting with Renee Good is that they kind of understood in a cynical but accurate way that if you let the Black Lives Matter version of the George Floyd video gel into public consciousness, there's no refuting it down the line. And so they wanted to, and I'm not saying that their left Black Lives Ladder version of the George Floyd video was entirely wrong or anything like that. But he wasn't actually choked to death. It was something else that killed him. And it still was a terrible thing. But my point is, like, with the Renee Good thing, they got out really quickly to say that the version of events that don't believe your lying eyes and the version of events that you're being told by Rachel Maddow is not true.

This guy was in fear for his life, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it worked to a certain extent, right? It made it contestable space rather than consensus. And they, I think they felt a little bit of success doing that with Renegood. And so they tried it again with this case. And it was just a couple bridges too far in terms of the egregiousness of the lie. The second thing, and this gets to something where I have a slight disagreement with making it about the.

So first of all, you know, there's been a lot of reporting on this that there are basically two factions in the anti-immigration world of the Trump administration. there's the side that wants spectacle, right? This is the Stephen Miller side that wants it to be as ugly and as scary as possible to strike fear in people so that, first of all, people will act on the fear and you'll get more spectacle, but also that a lot of people will self-deport, and it makes Trump seem strong and manly and strong like boat, right? And then there's what you might call the hawkish but actually professional. Kemp, which is represented by Tom Homan.

Now, I have my disagreements with Tom Homan, and I think to Kevin's point, he does not look like what Trump thinks people on TV should look like, but he actually knows the job. And I think, and this is where my very slight disagreement with Megan on this is, is that what Trump has said in this case, it's not so much that he's backing down. He's like, I gave the right-wing theater kids their shot, and they blew it. So now I'm going to put in the guy who actually knows how to do this stuff. And I watched the first 20 minutes of his press conference this morning before we started recording this.

He gave a press conference. I kind of like that he did this at 7 a.m. Minnesota time, get everybody before drive time, make all the reporters get up. And again, I got my disagreements with him. But he makes a very compelling case for his case. He's trying. And he was like, I'm not. to tell you what the federal government has done prior to me being here has been perfect.

Now, he's throwing his own people under the bus. He's throwing the performative people under the bus, the gnomes and the millers there, because he's won Trump's favor to do this stuff. But I actually, Megan said something along the lines of, I don't think we're going to get any improvement in immigration problem or policy or something like that. I think we will because even really tough, hawkish but professional, immigration enforcement, immigration law enforcement is superior to the craptacularness that we've

seen over the last month or so. And, and Holman's perspective, like, this is the point I've been trying to make forever is that the, you can agree with all of Trump's policy ends on immigration, and I agree with a lot of them, right? I mean, like, you've got to enforce federal immigration laws. The way they've been enforcing it is contrary to their own actual stated goals because it puts their own agents in risk and danger. It undermines public support for it. People don't like masked agents running around all over the place, you know, kicking in doors, scaring the crap out of people, picking up five-year-old kids, jumping on moms, picking up their kids from daycare. So the Nome Miller approach undermines good governance, even if you define good governance. even if you define good governance as very severe enforcement of immigration law.

And so, like, I'll take that trade, right? I'd rather have the government be really tough on immigration enforcement, but abide by proper policy, right, about how you conduct yourself professionally, you know, codes of conduct, which, you know, you kept talking about. You kept talking about how this is a professional law enforcement agency. The known approach is like we're going to be a militia and we're going to drop down on you and we're going to arouse anger and rebellion from the local populations and brag about how we're being tough on them.

And that's not how you deal with Americans. That's not actually how you try to achieve your policy aims. So still plenty of room to criticize the Trump administration immigration policy, but like, this is an improvement, I think. What's maddening about this, if I can interject for just a second, is that it's not an easy to solve problem, obviously, but it's a problem in which 75% of it has a fairly straightforward, if hard to do solution, which is you get rid of the guys in the masks, you bring in the guys with the green eye shades, and you start running business records, and you make it economically

more expensive to hire illegal immigrants than the economic benefits of hiring illegal immigrants. And you'll know they're serious about this the first time some white Republican voting general contractor in Harris County, Texas, goes to prison for 15 years for hiring 200 illegal aliens in his construction crews. Or when Congress passes E-Verify, right? I mean, like, E-Verify is the test. Some guy who owns a whole bunch of inexpensive roadside hotels in Missouri goes to jail for all the illegal emergency hires. It's not exclusively an economic problem. The economic lure for illegal immigration is strong, but it's only probably, you know, know, 70, 75% of the problem. But if you do what you need to do to make it essentially impossible

to work as an illegal immigrant, you don't solve the entire problem. You've still got transnational crime organizations and people who are involved in drug trafficking and human trafficking and other things like that. Be a solve a big, big piece of it. And once you've got that 75% solved, then you can take the resources you still have and concentrate on that much smaller, you know, 20% piece. I know that that leaves 25% over, but I'm assuming that 5% never gets solved because it's, you know, it's a government problem. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. Do you love the dispatches journalism, but don't have time to read it all? We hear this pretty frequently from our members, which is why I'm

very excited to introduce Dispatch Voiced, a member's only podcast feed that helps you keep up with our work on your schedule. Here's how it works. We've built two feeds, editors' picks for our biggest stories and the morning dispatch for our daily newsletter, powered by realistic AI voice models created by 11 labs. These high-quality audio versions are delivered right to your favorite podcast player. Whether you're commuting at the gym, out grocery shopping, even walking the dog, dispatch voice fits our reporting into your schedule. Jonah Goldberg's latest column? The biggest news from Capitol Hill? Our most colorful cultural analysis? Now it's all available in your podcast feed ready when you are.

Most episodes use advanced AI narration that sounds remarkably like a professional audiobook reader and will occasionally feature authors reading their own work too. Ready to take the dispatch on the go, members can set up their feed on their account page at the dispatch.com. Not a member yet, start listening today when you join the dispatch. We're back. You're listening to The Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in.

Can I read to you, I want to read to you a. but a section of a piece that we published actually at the weekly standard a decade ago on sanctuary cities. And I want to read it to you because I think it's still the very best description of the fight over sanctuary cities that I have read. And after the piece ran, I think I may have mentioned this piece before here, it was written by my colleague Tony Masea. I got an email from a very hawkish on immigration senator saying it was the best piece that he had read about immigration. and a very open borders think tanker who said it was the best piece on immigration he had read. This was before Kevin's piece where Kevin went out and explored some of these same issues earlier this year. We'll post both of those in the show notes.

But I just want to read this. It's a little bit of a chunk. Many of the most pressing crimes in the United States, terrorism, gangs, and drugs are fought in tandem by federal and local law enforcement. On immigration, counties and states nationwide are increasingly backing away from what has traditionally been their part of the bargain. Some cities are calling themselves sanctuaries in opposition to the policies of the Trump administration, but more and more, even those that don't use the moniker are directing their police not to cooperate with ICE. This was published in 2017. Contrary to the way they're portrayed by critics, sanctuary cities are not rogue jurisdictions, brazenly flouting federal law. Instead, in an approach blessed by federal judges, they are exercising policy judgments about whether their jailers will hang on to prisoners so ICE can collect them or even communicate with ICE at all. They have decided that they're residents are best served by building trust with local police and keeping immigrant families intact. With no sign of comprehensive immigration reform coming out of Washington, sanctuary cities are taking matters into their own hands and slowing down deportations. Making federal law enforcement

less efficient has consequences, though. It means fewer criminals are deported to their home countries. It places ICE officers in riskier situations because they have to encounter criminals at their houses instead of collecting them from jails, and it distorts who stays in the country and who goes? That's because when tracking illegal immigrants with criminal records, ICE officers often encounter that person's relatives and friends who've done nothing wrong but come to America illegally, and they often are the ones who wind up being deported instead. Is that, to your understanding, Kevin, an accurate description of the debate? Do you challenge any part of what I've just said? And if so, you know, part of what we saw this week after Tom Homan was named was Minneapolis mayor

Jacob Frye, on the left. And, you know, there have been these conversations between Trump administration officials and local and state officials in Minneapolis where people come out afterwards and say, hey, we're making progress. These are good conversations. But we still disagree about these things. And Jacob Fry, who I would say has a flare for the dramatic, likes to poke and prod, likes to drop the F-bomb, you know, said after his, conversation with Tom Homan, no way. We are not going to cooperate with federal law or federal immigration officials. And the Trump administration has suggested that if Minneapolis, Minnesota more broadly, would do so, they might draw down. Is that sort of the crux of the problem here?

Well, I don't think it's the crux of the problem here. I think it's a problem more generally. I mean, he also asked for their voting records and stuff. He's, he's a weird dude. Right. So the sanctuary city's thing is, as a constitutional matter, I think, pretty straightforward that states have the powers to do this and cities have the power to do this. You know, they can't be commandeered as the legal language puts it by the federal government. Insofar as it relates to people who are incarcerated, I think it's a bad policy. I think that for people who've been convicted of crimes, there should be a pretty strong presumption of their deportation of their illegal immigrants after that.

Now, if the city is saying we're not going to cooperate when it comes to our public school records or our health and human services or things like that, we're not going to share those records. we're not going to give federal immigration personnel access to those facilities or records or whatever. I think that's probably a more defensible policy in some ways. I think that the policy of not deporting people who are both illegally present in the United States and convicted of crimes is just, is this foolish? I mean, if you're going to deport people, that's where you start. And that seems, and they're also there. It's convenient.

You know, you don't have to go hunt them down because they are in a jail cell somewhere. and in the process of discharging them, it's a fairly straightforward logistical thing to remove them from the country. So it's a constitutional policy, but I think it's a bad policy. But the problem, particularly in Minneapolis, isn't that it's a sanctuary city.

There are lots of sanctuary cities and jurisdictions around the country, including in, you know, some red states. There's some in Texas and places like that. The problem in Minneapolis is that we've just sent people in to do something that's not their job. And I keep coming back to this point

that dealing with illegal immigration is partly a matter of getting control of the border, but then after that, for dealing with the illegals who are present in the United States, it's a difficult management problem. It's a problem for accountants and lawyers and judges and people like that. And this, you know, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump version of,

well, let's just scare people into doing what we want them to do so that we don't have to do the hard part of public administration is just absolutely cowardly. And it's also bad politics. I think, ultimately. So you've got an executive branch, and the executive branch's job is to execute the laws of the United States. That means doing this hard management stuff, figuring out how to go about dealing with a problem that's now millions upon millions of people and prioritizing that. It's not a super sexy thing to do. It's not a lot of juice politically and doing it the right way.

But it's just, that is the way it needs to be done and ultimately has to be done. And the idea that we're just going to to use these theatrical tactics and armed masked histrionics to get people to deport themselves out of the country is, I think, morally questionable, but I also think it's practically questionable. If you're a very poor person from Guatemala who's come to the United States and you're working illegally as a hotel made somewhere and you've got children who are dependent on you, you're not going to see what's going on to Minneapolis and go, well, hell, I guess I'll just uproot my life and quit my job and somehow get myself back to Guatemala with my kids and face goodness knows what prospects there. I don't think it's likely to work. It might work in some,

you know, edge cases. You've got some people who are on both sides of the border pretty regularly, particularly in places like Arizona and South Texas, who may say, okay, well, you know, it's looking like my prospects are better on the Piedras-Negro's side of the border than they are on the Eagle Pass side of the border. But for the millions upon millions of people that are here illegally, the idea that we're going to scare them into quitting their jobs, leaving their homes, uprooting their families, and going back to countries that they might not have been to for 20 or 30 or 40 years? Nonsense. Yeah, and I want to echo, too, that like sending the Border Patrol, Peter Moskos has been saying this. He's a former cop. He's a sociologist. He teaches at John Jay. That one thing that you just see in this, right,

is that this is not their job. Border Patrol doesn't know how to do urban policing and they're really bad at it. They're not great at being a border patrol. Well, fair enough, but they're definitely not good at being urban cops. And, you know, Moskos and others, I had Bill Bratton on my Washington Post podcast a couple weeks ago. He is the legendary New York City Police Commissioner who turned around the NYPD in the early 90s. And I had him on with Ken Corey, who is also a high-ranking former NYPD official has just been announced. He is now the executive director of the policing Leadership Academy at the University of Chicago, which is one of the coolest crime fighting programs in the country where they're training district commanders to actually use data,

police better. You know, Bratton sort of gently said, look, would I have denied, would I have refused to let a doctor go to treat Renee good after she was shot? Probably not. Also, that, you know, that the administration had undermined its own credibility by going out immediately and saying, hey, this is like domestic terrorism rather than saying, we're going to wait and see where there's going to be an investigation. And I think that the lack of experience with these kinds of problems has shown up over and over again. These encounters are so much more violent than normal policing. And yes, there's a lot of protests, but there were a lot of protests in 2020. And we did not see protesters killed the way we are seeing people killed now.

You know, Peter Moscoe said, has said, look, you've got a lot of guys in that video. You take them down. You get one on each arm. It's really hard to subdue someone who's resisting. But this is not a situation where you need to shoot someone, right? This is a situation where urban cops know how to do this, and the Border Patrol clearly doesn't. They have hundreds of times a day. Yeah.

Yeah. People get this armed all the time, you know, without getting shot after. being disarmed. And so the fact that they're sending that they are trying to do the wrong job with the wrong people is really contributing to this. Steve, can I, the question you ask, Kevin, so like, I've mentioned this a million times. Like, I long had a policy of not writing about interest rates or monetary policy because it's one of the few areas where I have people I really respect and whose intellect and expertise I admire on completely different sides of the question, and it freaks me out. And I'm like burden's ass because I cannot decide who's right. I go back

and forth on this question. You know, I have friends, Dan McLaughlin, Charlie Cook over at NR, are talking about how what Minnesota is doing is nullification and it's, it's incredibly dangerous and it is the undermining of national sovereignty. And I really respect those guys. And I don't think they're just being partisan on this or anything like that. And at the same time, I have, I know people who take the view that is sort of as Kevin, you know, articulated that what Minnesota is doing is you can disagree with the optics of it and the performative nature of it and like, not like what these protesters are doing with their whistles and all of that. And you can concede that, you know, there are outside agitators. But at the end of the day, Minnesota is within its constitution.

constitutional rights and legal rights to do what it's doing cannot for the life of me make up my mind on the merits of these questions. I go back into there are days. I'm on one side of it and there are days I'm on the other side of it. On the politics of it. I think my friends, you know, like Charlie of those guys, I think they miss a point, which is this thing I keep harping on about what the Trump administration is doing is so pretextual, right? and that the, yes, the federal government has the colorable argument on it, and has the argument on its side that it is the right and obligation to faithfully execute federal immigration laws. But when it does so in a way deliberately designed to strike fear into people,

that endangers federal law enforcement agents that is performative in theatrical, and is designed to arouse these kinds of responses from places like Minnesota, it doesn't help their case, right? I mean, it's sort of like, yes, the federal government, the executive branch has the right to do all sorts of things with war powers and all that kind of stuff. But it can't consistently lie about why it's doing things, that it's fighting a drug war or whatever, and then say, oh, it was really always about taking the oil. You can't give Stephen Miller carte blanche and Corey Lewandowski, of all people, dear God. carte blanche to like make these arguments and then fall back on the argument, well, the president has the, is faithfully executing the laws. He's executing the laws.

I don't buy the faithfully part. And I just, I really, I struggle with this. And it doesn't help that Tim Walts is kind of a moron. It doesn't help that Jacob Fry is a performative jackass. It doesn't help, you know, like Tim Walts in this interview, he's talking to, about how this, what's going on in Minnesota might destroy the country, you know, is this Fort Sumter? I was like, really? You want to be the governor responsible for Fort Sumter?

Is that where you want to be in this analogy? And I keep coming back to this phrase. I use it all the time to CNN. Everyone looks at me like I'm weird. I know you are. Kevin and Megan are, you know, exactly what I'm getting at. There's a real Baptist and bootleggers. I even know what words you're going to use.

But it's a real Baptist and bootleggers problem where the lefties benefit from heightening the tensions and getting their people on side and making Prattie into more of a martyr than he is. I think he was completely unjustifiably killed and he does not need to be slandered by anybody. But there, you know, you have these people turning them into, you know, trying to beatifying him because it helps their cause. And at the same time, you have the performative people benefiting from saying he's a domestic terrorist, when the reality is he was a pretty, I think he behaved sort of irresponsibly, but totally legally.

And in no way did he deserve to be executed, but like making nuanced arguments somewhere in the middle just enrages people on both sides. And that's sort of why I struggle with this. Is Minnesota doing the right thing or not question? Yeah, I think you saw this. Remember Kyle Rittenhouse? Like this kid who, like a jackass, decides that he is going to single-handedly police the Minnesota riots by carrying a gun. This was in, yeah, Kenosha, Wisconsin back in 2020.

Yeah. Right. And he takes a rifle to a riot. And he is not trained in law enforcement tactics. And this was a bad idea. And he clearly had a cowboy fantasy about, you know, policing the frontier. And my ultimate read of that situation was that he justifiably feared for his life and that the people who were chasing him also probably justifiably thought that he was a threat.

That that was just a tragic situation. but that he should not have been convicted and indeed he was not convicted of murder. It was worth saying, like, 17-year-old kids should not be dragging guns and trying to be vigilantes in riots, right? And you can then go back and, like, well, the police should have been doing a better job.

It doesn't matter. He shouldn't have done that. It was really dumb. But if you contrast the attitude of both conservatives on the left on Kyle Rittenhouse versus Alex Pretty, it is incredibly instructive, right? The left was convinced that the act of carrying that gun

meant that he basically sacrificed any other rights he had after that and that he could not possibly have shot in self-defense. And that because we also know he's a bad person because he's MAGA, that he therefore, like, obviously had bad motives and we can know that merely by who he was, right? And the right was like, he was a hero. He went in and, like, he was defending himself, against the forces of barbarity.

And those positions are now exactly reversed. The fact that Alex Preddy, as far as the administration is concerned, and a lot of MAGA people, the fact that he had a gun and may or may not have kicked the taillight out of an ice car, you know, 10 days before, therefore means that anything that was done to him is fine because he is not the sort of person who is allowed to carry a gun or do anything or defend himself because he's bad, because he's a bad, because he's a good. a protester and he's against the righteous forces of order and law and American border integrity. And the left is like, well, yeah, sure, of course.

He walked into a protest with a gun. Like, that's his Second Amendment right, which it is, to be clear, very much. And that the fact that he kicked the tail out out is irrelevant, which I think to the question of his shooting is, in fact, irrelevant, right? It doesn't matter what he did 10 days before. But everyone's trying to turn this into same. and sinners, rather than saying, like, on the one hand, please do not bring your weapon to an anti-ice action. It's just like, it raises the temperature on things. It is, in fact, does seem

possible to me at this juncture that what happened is they pulled the, they just, they took the Sig Sauer off of him. And I gather, although Kevin, you certainly would know better than me that this is a gun that has an accidental discharge problem or allegedly has an accidental discharge problem and that it may have accidentally discharged, which then convinced people who had just heard the word gun shouted that this guy was a threat. We'll find out more in the investigation. Yeah, it looks like the New York Times analysis has pretty well conclusively demonstrated. I think that the gun did not go off that it was. Okay. Well, then I take that back. Which immediately made a long piece I had written completely irrelevant an hour after. Oh, dear. But please do not bring guns to protests. And also, I don't care.

that is totally irrelevant to this question because that did not in any way give ICE the right to shoot him. It's relevant only to the extent that there may have been a tragic situation where a bunch of people heard gun and misunderstood what that meant. But that just goes back to the urban policing problem

because as Peter Moskos just said on Twitter yesterday, like, this happens all the time. You're wrestling with a guy, someone shouts gun, and like takes the gun and then we don't shoot him, right? Like this is actually that it's not really an excuse, but it probably did make things worse. And it would have been wiser if he had not brought the gun. But, you know, we cannot have a situation where unless our citizenry behaves with maximum wisdom all the time, they get executed.

You were just making me think. I used to live in this very small town in rural Colorado where there was a lot of elk hunting. It was a big elk hunting mecca. And so you would see people walking down the streets with rifles over their shoulders just all the time because there was sort of one restaurant in town where you could have breakfast and it opened at seven in the morning. And there was a bar in it, of course, because you could get a drink at seven in the morning too. And they essentially had a coat check for rifles when you go in because you're not allowed to have a firearm in a place that

serves alcohol. And so there are completely organic, normal ways for people to develop protocols for being responsible with firearms, even in a town where you'll see people walking down the street at 8 o'clock in the morning during normal business hours, the great big rifles over their shoulders. But if you are going to, you know, be Kyle Rittenhouse and insert yourself into a problem. That's not good gun ownership. The pretty thing bothers me a little bit because I've been through a couple of different concealed carry permit classes because I've had permits in a few different states. It's not a legal obligation that you avoid places like that in most places, or some places it is. But one of the things they really stress is that you take on certain

responsibilities when you're carrying a firearm. And one of those responsibilities is to keep yourself out of situations where you're likely to be in a confrontation like that. I think you're certainly, was being irresponsible by taking that firearm into that situation. Nice gun, by the way. He had a pretty high-end gun. But yeah, I completely concur, of course, this is no reason to shoot. And particularly after he's been disarmed, you know, he had a gun thing is an argument if he has a gun. You know, here's where paying attention to grammar really matters. Has a gun is a whole different thing from had a gun. He had a gun before they shot him. He did not. have a gun when they shot. Yeah, I need to move us on because we, I want to get to some brief

discussion of what's happening abroad. We are going to come back to a question that I wanted to pose to this group. We will reconvene. Megan had a very interesting article about the use of fascist or fascism to describe what we're seeing and argued that it was counterproductive, that this is not helping the dispatch had an editorial this week in which we use authoritarian, it's worth actually getting into the best way to talk about this. But we're not going to talk about that today. One of us should write a book about fascism. Yeah, I have no opinions about fascism. It's a good idea. Before we take an ad break, please consider becoming a member of the dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles.

You can sign up at the dispatch.com slash join. And if you use the promo, code roundtable, you'll get one month free. And speaking of ads, if they aren't your thing, you could upgrade to a premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, two free annual memberships to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders, and much more. Okay, we'll be right back. We're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. I do want to spend a moment about what we're seeing overseas, because in some respects, I think that that may be of all of the insanity and chaos and disorder that we've seen over the past several weeks, it seems to me that what we're seeing overseas may end up mattering more, even than the craziness that we've seen

at home, whether you're talking about the apprehension and detention of Nicholas Maduro, whether you're talking about the strikes in Syria and Nigeria, whether you're talking about threats from the president to potentially use kinetic force in places like Colombia, Cuba, and it must be said, Greenland, which is part of Denmark, NATO ally. He's pulled back. But I want to start with Iran. If you're following the news, there are credible estimates of the extent of the massacre perpetrated by the Iranian regime that range from 5,000 to more than 30,000 people over the past month. And, Joe, I'm wondering if you can help put that in context. We don't know. The Iranian regime has, I think, acknowledged up to 4,000 people have been killed,

and 10% of those, they claim are Iranian government officials. But credible estimates beyond those estimates and the sort of lower level ones from the United Nations suggest that this is an unbelievable mass slaughter in Iran. How does that sort of stack up to other kinds of slaughters that we've seen over the past 30 or 40 years. And do you expect that the United States will make good? We are now positioning more assets in the region behind President Trump's threats from a few weeks ago to actually do something to take kinetic action. Do you expect that?

You know, one thing you see a lot of people do is say that this is more civilian deaths than, you know, in the entire Gaza conflict over the last two, three years. Some pro-Palestinian people object to that. Some on the merits, for good faith reasons, some because they just lie. But the important distinction is, if you're going to do that distinction, is that Iran's not a war zone, right? Like a lot of civilians die in very compact urban war zones. This is a campaign of execution. This is, I mean, there were some people in street fighting that were killed.

because it was street fighting. But a lot of this is going to people's homes, arresting them, torturing them for a bit, find out where their friends are, and then executing them. It is not genocidal in any sort of UN international law textbook kind of way, but the intent of it in terms of taking people

who are simply a category of people who are not armed, who are not militarily resisting you, and murdering them is on a moral level, closer to that kind of thing than anything that the Israelis were doing. Ken Pollock, my friend, who's now the, like the vice president for policy at the Middle East Institute used to be an AI scholar, he says that whenever you hear these, the regime estimates from Iran about how many people they killed, you should, you know, multiply it by three or four as a rule of thumb. Could be a little bit more, might be a little bit less, but that's about the range. And so what this regime is unapologetically

doing is simply murdering people who don't want to live under this regime anymore. To get a full, like, I don't, we don't, I would say the dispatch and the Daily Mail are different publications in many respects, but the Daily Mail is great about showing the lifestyles of the children of the leadership of the Iranian regime. And they're in places like Monaco, they're on, you know, yachts. with, you know, a dozen escorts and, you know, hooker and cocaine kind of vibes all over the place, while these people, these, you know, theocratic authoritarians are murdering their own people at home. On terms of what Trump did, I said this last week, I think, on the Remnant, but if you're

measuring things about national interest and America first and all that kind of stuff, Trump's posture towards Greenland, which remember, that was the controversy a week ago, was worse than what he's doing with Iran. But if you're doing it purely on a moral calculus, purely on a good versus evil kind of thing, encouraging these, encouraging these movements to continue resisting and rising up and seize the institutions, help is on the way, and then not showing up, having the cavalry not show up, I think morally, is worse. And I don't, I'm glad that Trump is sending the armada there. I hope he gets some, make some progress out of it. But he did not in fact, he blinked, right? He said if they start

killing their own people, we're going to do something. He couldn't do it because most of our forces were, our usable forces were in the Caribbean. Our quote unquote allies in Qatar and elsewhere wouldn't let us use their bases to launch flights from. And then the media got distracted with the the Minneapolis stuff. And he blinked. And Iran used that opportunity to round up and butcher thousands of people who just wanted to live in a fairly normal country. And it's shameful.

So, Kevin, we're seeing the United States ramp up. There's been reporting that Donald Trump, when asked for his military options a couple weeks ago was disappointed that he didn't have a stronger option. The reason he didn't have a stronger option is because we had many assets in the Caribbean, Central South America, and he has asked for a new set of options. He now has them as we've moved these assets into position to potentially do something more. What can the United States do? There's been discussion of some kind of attempted decapitation strike against Iranian regime assets. That seems to be in line with the kind of thing that Donald Trump would prefer to do.

He talks and has talked and campaigned against these so-called forever wars for more than a decade. Doesn't seem that he'd want to be engaged in that. You've had administration officials from Marco Rubio and others suggest that that's not the way Donald Trump approaches this. But what happens if there's a decapitation strike against the Supreme Leader and, say, many of his top advisors? And then is it the case that the United States can then simply do nothing, that that's good enough? You know, a related point I'd like to address real quickly is I've long been skeptical when my friends tell me we don't spend enough money on the military and that we don't have enough, you know, ships,

boats and this and that and the other thing. I just find that difficult to believe, and I can't think of too many aspects of the American government that we need to spend more money on. But if it is true that we couldn't carry out some sort of punitive retaliatory raid against a handful of elderly religious fanatics in Tehran, because our boats and stuff were all busy carrying out massacres of unarmed civilians in the Caribbean and stealing oil and kidnapping the occasional head of state, that might mean that we don't have enough boats and stuff, or it might mean that we're making some bad policy decisions. But if it really is the case that we don't have enough boats and stuff to do both of those things at the same time, then I guess we don't have enough boats and

stuff. I have a part-time imagining us doing something very productive in Iran after a decapitation strike. So, you know, the whole Bush-era democracy project, you know, we're going to build liberal democracies in places like Afghanistan and the Arab countries of the Middle East and Iraq and Syria and all that stuff. The best case scenario for that is Japan, right? We actually did sort of build Japan. We tore it down to the studs and built it up as a new society and made a pretty good place out of it. But we still have troops in Japan. It was a very long, very expensive project. It was a real intergenerational national commitment of the sort that I don't think Americans really are capable of making anymore. And certainly that you don't expect.

the Trump administration, who thinks in five-minute intervals between pillow ads to be thinking in those terms. So the notion that we're going to go into Iran and help them make the transition to even something kind of like they were back before the 79 revolution, sort of a crappy but acceptable country, I think it's unlikely. Would I like to see us go in there and just have a list of people who need to get whacked and whack them, I won't lose a lot of sleep over it, if that happens. But once you're involved, you're involved.

And, you know, what happens next from there? I'm not sure. You know, for the Trump administration to do a very Barack Obama-style red line, if you do this, this thing will happen. And then that thing doesn't happen. Tends to undermine your credibility. But it's always Taco Tuesday at the White House. You know, he is the Trump always chickens out, is the thing.

he's doing the same thing in Greenland, which I'm glad he's chickening out about Greenland. I'm glad he's chickening out in some other things where he's got some really bad ideas, but it would be useful to either be perceived around the world as a reliable ally or a reliable enemy. Ideally, it'd be better if you were both, right? That your friends can trust you and your enemies are afraid of you.

Our friends definitely don't trust us anymore. And our enemies are starting to discover their reasons not to be that afraid of us, we can be backed down in certain kinds of situations. You know, we're the toughest guys in the world if you're Venezuela or Denmark, which has the population of Harris County or something like that. But, you know, when it's Iran, when it's Russia, when it's China, people who have real power. Iran's not a real power, but it's adjacent to real power.

And it's close to having nukes. Yeah, and that's, you know, and I was talking about this the other day, maybe on one of our podcast, But, you know, there was talk of Rezapalabi, the Shah's son, you know, coming back in and playing a leadership role. And I was saying, if I were him, whatever I did, if I made a transition to a liberal democracy or a Turkish-style, you know, atta-turt kind of autocracy, but with pro-Western and pro-secular views, I'd finish up the goddamn nuclear weapons program, first thing. Because now you've got real sovereignty. And, you know, nobody is going to give you any grief about that. So as a kind of Machiavellian, you know, real politic matter, can you blame them for pursuing nuclear weapons? I want us to stop them from pursuing those nuclear weapons, but I certainly understand why they would do it.

And if I were any other country in the world with the capacity to do it, I would do it. I'm shocked the Japanese haven't done it. They could probably do it in about three days. They've got the technological, you know, skills. And they would be like the world's most convenient, well-designed, impressive, you know, nuclear weapons, the kind you would want to have of your own at home. With little kittens on them. They're kittens on them. Funny monged stickers.

You're like you're Sony nuclear weapons, right? They would be awesome. It's a mess for which there is no good solution. I think we probably could do the decapitation strike, but as for what comes next, Marco Rubio has 30 jobs right now, so he's not going to be thinking about it. I guess we could send Corey Lewandowski. Please. Actually, that would be great.

To send him. Uranians might be more worried about that than decapitation strikes, actually. Absolutely. Megan, final question on this topic to you, pulling back the camera a bit and taking a bit of a big picture look. We have seen the President Trump with this bellicose rhetoric with respect to Iran. As Kevin says, we haven't seen anything yet. I think we probably will see something in the next week or two, some kind of kinetic action. But he's talking at the same time about striking a deal and sitting down and talking through this. We saw, you know, repeatedly the president suggests that he will.

was at least open to using military force to take Greenland. We have seen him taking shots at longtime allies, NATO itself, about the reliability of those allies as trade partners, about NATO not paying its fair share, these things. I wonder, you know, as Kevin points out, in each of these instances, he uses maximalist rhetoric and then steps back. And his defenders will say, therefore, there's no, there are no consequences to this. And Trump, you know, makes progress. This is the art of the deal. That's what you do. You go in,

if you want to buy a house for $200,000, you go in and, you know, you, or if somebody wants to buy your house for $200,000, you tell them it's $300. And then you start the negotiations from there. is that what he's doing here? And are there any consequences to this? A house for $200,000? Hey, the house for $200,000. Not everybody lives, not everybody lives, you know, in the fancy gilded suburbs that you live in, Kevin. There are houses for $200,000, you know.

I don't live in the suburbs of anywhere. There is a real problem. This was also true on the left. I spent a lot of time arguing about against this on the left, and now I'm arguing. against it, on the right, this theory of negotiation that is asked for the stars, you'll get the moon. This is not a real negotiation theory, right? If you talk to game theorists, there is that, like, there is this theory where you walk in and you just, like, offer a ridiculous price and then you negotiate your way to something reasonable that is a better deal than you would have gotten.

And this is really common in movies. And the reason it's really common in movies is that it is a negotiating strategy that you can just, you can film in a minute. And you don't have to waste like 20 minutes laying out the various ways in which you attempt to improve your, what's called your bat anna, your best alternative to negotiated agreement.

But the problem is that, you know, because they're relatively few Americans now engage in negotiations regularly because we don't have, we don't like negotiate in the bizarre the way is still common in many countries where the price is not the price. We buy at retail at fixed prices, very little limited room to negotiate. And unless you are a professional negotiator in a fairly small handful of fields, you don't have a lot of experience with doing that. The closest is your house, and especially in the housing market in the last 10, 15 years,

where it has been either like total bust or huge boom, most people haven't even done that. And so because of that, people have these wild theories of how, yes, if you act like a total lunatic, you can get stuff that you wouldn't already get. And I've had so many people tell me that, you know, he's a New York real estate guy,

the real estate guy, the New York real estate world, it's like wild. And, you know, this probably makes sense there. I'm like, you know, fun fact, my father was a lobbyist for the heavy construction industry in New York. Now, didn't do real estate, did tunnels and bridges and so forth. But they, you know, he knew his counterpart at the Building Trade Association. And the thing I know about construction in New York is like, this is not at all how you negotiate in New York. It's an incredibly small world.

The big buildings tend to be dominated by a fairly actually small handful of players. And construction is also very small world. all of the big contractors were members of my dad's association and also members of the building trades. All of the unions were members of both associations, right? Or we're, sorry, we're not members, but we're negotiating with both associations, had relationships with both associations.

If you screw someone in that world, if you behave like a total crazy person, word gets around real fast. The madman theory of international relations works somewhat. I mean, you know, like being more unpredictable can get you gains you wouldn't otherwise have gotten, but it can also get you losses you wouldn't otherwise have gotten. The United States was standing astride an incredibly dense network of alliances, sitting atop an incredible store of soft power in terms of our commercial ties, our Hollywood, our cultural influence. And he has

squandered a phenomenal amount of that for nothing, right? I actually agree that NATO, that Europe has been free riding on America for too long. And not only that, they were snotty about it. They would be like, you know, it's so embarrassing that you guys don't have a huge welfare state and these like eight-week vacations like we do. And what's wrong with you? It's like, well, you know, we have to pay for your defense as well as our defense. We're paying for your prescription drugs as well as our prescription drugs.

Like, maybe be a little grateful. They were, like, trust-fund kids who lecture their parents on how their parents should be building the fortune that they are living off of. And so I think that it is somewhat good that Europe has gotten the idea that, oh, like, actually, we're going to have to take more responsibility for our defense. And I think they're now a little worried also about things like pharmaceuticals as the United States starts copying some European-style price controls. And as our vaccine policy has made us incredibly unreliable, right?

The CEO of Moderna just said, we're not doing new vaccines because we're not putting any more into late-stage trials because, you know, if you can't go into the U.S. market, nowhere else is going to pay for the R&D costs. So he's not, his critiques weren't entirely wrong. and they were never wrong, right? Like, people have been making this critique since the 80s. Probably since the 60s, I wasn't alive then. But here's the thing is that we got more,

even though it was like not fair and all the rest of it, we got more out of that than we put into it. And we are losing without winning. And it is incredibly distressing. And the idea that this is all some kind of 5D chess that he's a master of strategist, I'm sorry, no.

It was true in real estate where he was not much of a developer, and it's true now. I want to end today with a not worth your time that I'm going to put under the broad heading of injuries. And when I was originally thinking about this, there were several different kinds of injuries started sort of narrower and now have expanded it. I wrote a piece back in the weekly standard days about what my friends and I used to call

old man injuries. And they ranged from the kind of silly injuries that you would get. And they were, you know, we said old man, but they could easily. apply to women as well. There were the kind of silly injuries you would get that you wouldn't have never gotten when you were a teenager or in your 20s and more fit. Things like pulling a groin as you sat up from the toilet or waking up one morning with a finger that you couldn't bend and you have no idea why that is the case. So that was the original idea was to talk about old man injuries. But as we sort of kicked it around behind the scenes, we thought we would expand that

the injury discussion to include sort of weird injuries of all kinds. And it reminded me of one of my favorite pieces of writing, I think of all time. And it was from Bill Bryson, who included it, this mini essay in a book called, I'm a stranger here myself. This is like 25 years ago. And he wrote about injuries that appear on the statistical abstract of the United States. And, um, They are the strangest kinds of injuries you can imagine. And I'll read just a sentence of this or a few sentences. Here's a fact for you. According to the latest statistical abstract of the United States, in one year,

nearly 400,000 Americans suffered injuries involving beds, mattresses, or pillows. Think about that for a minute. That is more than 1,000 bed mattress or pillow injuries in a day. In the time it takes for you to read this piece, four of my fellow citizens will somehow manage to be wounded by their betting. And he goes on and reads from a table called the injuries associated with consumer products. In 1992, almost 50,000 people in the United States were injured by pencils, pens, and other desk accessories. How do they do it? I've spent long hours seated at desks where I would have greeted almost any kind of injury

as a welcome diversion, but never once have I come close to achieving. actual bodily harm. So I want to ask you about weird injuries that you may have suffered. And I will lead, because as it happens after I sent out an email yesterday sort of touching upon what I wanted to cover, I had one of these injuries. We are, I'm a little outside of Washington, D.C. You've all read about the storm. The way that the storm hit our, area where I live was about six hours of snow covered by 18 hours of freezing rain. And so you have this weird phenomenon where you, the top of the covering is, it is just ice and the bottom is snow. And it's hard, even for somebody as fat as I am, to walk on top of it. I can walk on top of it

without breaking through the ice, which means it's really strong. So I was going to do a hit on NBC yesterday. They sent out a big SUV. And I was walking to the car in, they were, I was wearing boots and made my way across our front yard over to the driveway. Very nice driver waved at me, sort of gestured kind of, do you need help? I assured him that I did not. I'm a gritty Wisconsinite.

We don't need help in such moments. this and then walked around the car to the passenger's side and absolutely bit it. And there are two ways you can go down on ice like this. There's the kind of cartoon whoop-whoop way where your legs go out from under you and you just crash on your back. And there's the other way that I think about, so Beckins back to America's Funniest Home Videos when you see somebody standing on a dock and they put their one foot on a boat, and then the boat kind of goes out from under them, and they gradually do the splits. Well, that's how I went down yesterday. I kept falling, this almost slow motion. I was wearing my sport coat. I was wearing my backpack. The sport coat, when I went to

plant my left hand to brace myself, went, I did break through, went into the snow, totally covered in snow. The backpack slid underneath the front of the vehicle. And I found myself on my back like a turtle. And I could not, there was no way for me to get up. There was nothing for me to grab. It was ice everywhere. I tried to grab onto the ice. It didn't work. And so for 15 or 20 seconds, I was just kicking my arms and legs, as you might imagine, a turtle incapable of standing up and the poor driver comes over and he's, you know, he's wearing flat dress shoes. He wasn't going to be much help. He's, you know, can I help you up? He couldn't help me up. There was nothing I could do. And finally, I was able by force of gravity, like a turtle would,

kind of flip myself over onto my front facing directly down and push myself up, at which point my legs went out from under me. Anyway, if this had been captured by our security cameras or something, this would be a sure $100,000 winner for America's funniest home videos. Alas, it was not. Megan, do you have either a similar moment or incident or injury that would qualify as weird or funny? Goodness, how much time do you have? So I once, speaking of turtling, anyone who was hiked with an external frame pack will know the phenomenon known as turtling, which is when you fall on your back wearing a very heavy external frame pack,

there's no way to flip yourself over. And I actually slipped crossing a stream, turtled, and I was with a group. And the thing was, I was by far the slowest person in the group. So it took them, I was at the end. It took them like 20 minutes to realize I was gone. And I'm in this stream. And I am like, I have my head above water. But, like, otherwise, I'm totally submerged. Everything in my pack is getting soaked. And, like, finally, they're, like, hanging out, you know, because they would sit, they would probably likely stop and wait for people in the group to get the group back together.

And finally someone said, wow, Meg's really behind that they finally came and found me. Did they actually have to flip you over? Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, it was, like, my pack weighed, like, 50 pounds. And I was not, this is, I was in high school. And I was not, I am a large girl, but I was not a hefty girl in high school. I weighed like, I don't know, 120, 130 pounds. So it was, it was very, it was a challenge.

I have walked into a cabinet door, which caused my eye to get very black and go bloody. And it was actually fine. It, like, didn't do any damage. But I will tell you that if your boyfriend takes you to the evening. because it's a Saturday. And you say, your weightlifting, bro, boyfriend. I walked into a door.

You get a lot of attention from the people in the ER. They were like, I need you to go fill out paperwork. And he was like, well, we're not married. She was like, no, no, it's just you can fill it out. And I was like, no, I walked in the door. She's like, you're in a safe space. I was like, no, I walked into a door. I'm a moron.

I'm hoping Jonah tells a story. about getting his ass kicked by a deer, because I think that story's a lot funnier than he thinks it is. Oh, gosh, I didn't even think about that one. Yeah, so, all right, so very quickly, for listeners who don't know, and I can post, we can put, if you want pictures, I have there. I remember. This is a safe space, Jonah.

About 10 years. I remember it was like, it was October of 2016. The election was coming up, and I had to get to New York for a speaking event that Dan Cynor had invited me to. And so I'm walking Zoe and Pippa, then young. energetic dogs. The dingo was extremely adventurous and it was dark and it was cold and I'm in the dog park and I just start hearing this rattling fence sound and I'm just like, huh, the wind's really, but the wind was blowing really, really strong. You know when you hear like really heavy footprints

like if you're on the soccer field or on the football field because like that kind of thing. So what happened was Zoe had cornered a massive deer on the soccer field in my dog park. And the deer was running away from Zoe who was chasing in a full gallop. And there's a massive cast iron fence for the field that was closed. And the deer didn't see it. And I'm walking towards it. And I just hear this really fast, heavy foot hoofprints. and the deer runs smack into the fence,

knocks it off its hinges, and it hits me in the head and the rib cage. And there's like this iron bolt that hits me in the rib cage that left like a hairline fracture in my rib and I had this terrible, like, massive welt on my forehead

that like made it very difficult to do any TV for a little while because it was just like this golf ball size red just gross lump thing. and I had a unicorn stump. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And I was like,

the hellboy horn shaved off. And so I'm just lying there, like just lying there in the grass. And the deer runs off there. It's fine. Dogs are like, hey, why don't you get up? Come over. Gonna sniff me and walk away, whatever. Lost my glasses.

Had to drive home squinting. Come back when the light came on, came out, when the sun came up. to find my glasses, which were like some, like crushed in the grass. So it was just a weird way to begin today. The one I was going to bring up is not an old man injury. It's actually a stupid young, immature boy injury that I'm embarrassed to be guilty of because it happened to me only about two months ago. As we talked about on the Christmas episode, I've got this fire calendar thing that I like

to sit by people on the editorial call. Well, no, I sit there. Sort of end of the summer, middle of the fall. I was playing around like a 12-year-old with burnable things because I'm an idiot. And I had gotten used to using kerosene, you know, to like get the thing going really fast and you play with it. You know, it's not whatever. And, you know, like old-fashioned lighter fluid.

And I was out of that. And so I had this crazy idea of using butane. And I would like soak it into the wood. and then I would light it from a distance, and it would go up and it would be kind of cool, whatever, and I got kind of too lazy doing this. And I had, like, put in so much butane that it aerosolized entirely inside of this thing.

And I light it, and then it explodes in a jet of flame, burns the crap out of my left hand so that, like, skin just comes off and really, really painful. And lost a huge, part of the front of my hair. What? So that like for a while,

it looked like, why did you just shave your, you know, the widow's peak kind of thing? It's like, I didn't. And like the makeup ladies at CNN were like, we can't do anything with this because it's too short.

And I lost, I would say 40% of my left eyebrow. And the thing that hurt the most was just how unbelievably stupid I was. So there you go. How did we not know? noticed that. I didn't see any of it. I was very careful about it. We'll put a picture of Jonah looking weird in the show notes. Uh, well, weirder. Kevin, you sent me a picture. I mean, I guess this doesn't count as a weird injury because you've had it, um, regularly, but you sent me

a picture not long ago where you have a circle right in between your eyes, uh, sort of a bloody, small one inch diameter circle and you had gotten it by shooting high-powered rifles. Yes, yes. But that's a regular thing. That's not weird for you. Well, it's unusual for me. Normally I'm better about handling my rifles than that. I hadn't shot this one in a long time. It's a pretty, it's a lightweight, pretty high-powerful rifle. So it kind of, it does tend to jump around your hands a little bit. I was just thinking these other kinds of injuries I don't get as much. So I wear a long suit jacket, but I have like a size 30 inseam on my jeans. So I'm shaped like a cartoon orangutan.

And people like me, I can take a fall pretty easy. Like if I fall down, you know, it's not that big. Like if Megan falls down, it's like a building collapsing. You know, if I fall down. Especially because I'm the opposite. When I am sitting down, I frequently will be like at a dinner where I'll say, well, you know, I'm really tall. And people will kind of look at me funny. And then I stand up and they're like,

like, oh my God, because my body is not that long, but my legs are extremely long. Yeah, over the years, you've written a couple of columns about having the difficulty you had in finding clothes. And every time you write that, I just think to myself, you must get so much sympathetic male about being, oh, I'm a very tall, slim woman with very long legs. That's just, it's a tough life. Women are writing you from around the country to express their sympathy, I'm sure. Feeling your pain. But I do scope myself every now and then. That's probably my mind.

My most common injury is usually something I've brought upon myself through bad behavior. And that happens every now and then, although maybe less than it used to. But I do scope myself every now and then. But other than that, I've got nothing to add, really. I had a medical appointment about it a year ago. And my doctor was saying in some exasperation, he's like, there should be more stuff wrong with you because of all the dumb stuff you've put your body through, you know, between, you know, I was spending a good seven years drinking a whole bottle of whiskey every day and at various times being well over 100 pounds overweight.

And he's like, you should have some bad knees or high blood pressure, cholesterol or something. Nope, everything's fine. I have all of those. No, old man injuries. Just do fine. All right. Well, thank you very much. If you have strange injuries or old man injuries or woman injuries, feel free to let us know in the comments or send us an email roundtable.

at the dispatch.com. Thanks all for joining for a longer version of Dispatch Podcast Roundtable, and we will talk to you next week. If you like what we're doing here, there are a few easy ways to support us. You can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us.

Please hit pause and go do that right now, on Spotify, on Apple, even if you're watching us on YouTube. Subscribe to the show. It helps people find us, and it really works. And speaking of support. here's a shout out to a few folks who recently joined as premium members and I'm guessing on some of these pronunciations. Annie Gedicki, Parker Presnell, and Lane Slabaw. We're glad to have you aboard. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at roundtable at the dispatch.com. We read everything, even the ones from people who, like Jonah, have been attacked by deer.

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