The Dispatch Podcast - Rising Tensions in the Indo-Pacific

Episode Date: October 7, 2021

On today's podcast, our hosts discuss China's recent incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, and how seriously the United States should take the Chinese Communist Party’s aggression in the Indo-Pacific. Plus: Democrats are in disarray on Capitol Hill, a State Department official resigns over the Biden administration’s border policy, and Facebook is feeling the heat from all directions. Show Notes: -Read TMD on China’s deployment of aircraft near Taiwan -Subscribe to Uphill for the latest news from Capitol Hill -Facebook Files from WSJ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome back to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, back from vacation. And I am joined by the guys, Steve Hayes, David French, and Jonah Goldberg. We've got some topics today. China, infrastructure, immigration, and Facebook. Let's dive right in. Steve, China. David, China. All right, I'm still rusty. A little.

That's David. Oh, man. And that's Steve. I get the hair confused. I'll make Sarah feel better by going straight to Steve, but I'll set it up. All right. So just to read a paragraph or two here to just set the stage. Record numbers, this is from the New York Times yesterday, record numbers of Chinese military planes probed the airspace

near Taiwan over the weekend, prompting Taiwanese fighter jets to scramble and adding muscle to Beijing's warnings that it could ultimately use force to take hold of the island. And so when we say record-breaking numbers, we're not talking about a few planes. It says the sortie, by nearly 80 People's Liberation Army aircraft on Friday and Saturday, as China observed its national holiday, followed a pattern of Beijing testing and wearing down Taiwan by flying overseas southwest of the island. So I'll start with you, Steve. The question is, in the short term, how concerned should we be by these flights? Is this muscle, just, muscle flexing in response to some unusual carrier deployments, for example, sort of tit for tat.

Is this a, does this seem to be sort of a, one of these periodic short-term Taiwan flare-ups? Or is this signifying, in your view, something greater? No, it's real, and we should take it seriously. You've had some observers suggest that this is just Chinese sort of chest thumping because of this national day and I'm trying to boost patriotism for internal political reasons. That may be part of what's going on here, but there have been very, very clear messages in outward-facing statements from the regime, from the communist regime that suggests we better take this seriously.

This is not mere symbolism. Recent weeks, the Chinese Minister of Defense said national rejuvenation and reunification is the common aspiration of the people. and the irresistible trend of the times, those who follow it will prosper. And Chinese state media, the Global Times, had a headline that said, time to warn secessionists and their fomenters, war is real. Look, this could be, you know, a lot of tutting and, you know, trying to project strength or to keep the United States on its heels.

But when you have a regime as powerful as the Chinese regime is, when you have them saying this not just in the context of the last few days, but similar things over the course of weeks. And when you put it in the broader context of what we know about Xi's aggression, I think it is important to take it seriously and to pay attention when the Chinese tell us what they're doing. So, Jonah, let's look at this from the standpoint. So there's some interesting commentary that essentially has said something along these lines. That is, when the United States and the UK announced their deal with Australia to supply technology to allow Australia to build a nuclear submarine fleet, not nuclear-armed submarine, but nuclear-powered submarines, that it signaled that the balance of power was going to decisively shift against China. These submarines are extraordinarily powerful. China doesn't have anything that can compete with them, nothing really on the horizon that can compete. with them. And that that would be long-term stability, but short-term instability. In other words,

that China could see that its window to potentially decisively win a war if it decided to attack Taiwan was actually in the near term. The question isn't about military capability here. The question here is about the Biden administration. And in your view, is this something where the Biden administration is now facing a very important test of its willingness to deter China between here and at least during its first term. Is this China post-Afghanistan sort of seeing what's left here of American will? Is this the kind of thing that there needs to be decisive, a decisive response, of course, short of war from Biden to demonstrate that this is not exactly the window of opportunity for China.

I sure hope not because like I don't have a huge amount of confidence that the Biden administration is willing or right now psychologically, you know, in the right head space to make tough, hard, bold decisions. You can say that the decision to pull out of Afghanistan was a tough, hard, bold decision, but they did it really badly. And that probably is made a bunch of people gun shy. I'm more comfortable talking about, looking at this from the big picture rather than the small picture, because you never know in these in the moment, you know, from Monday to Thursday of this week, is this really the beginning of a new geo-strategic, you know, know, crisis that redefines the 21st century. Maybe. Maybe not. The big picture is, I think

China is really brittle. It's very strong, like marble, but it's also really brittle. And the demographic problems and socioeconomic problems that China faces are very, very real. And historically nations that are set up like China's unleashed nationalist sentiment as a way to distract from and channel popular discontent and they've been doing that for a very long time and they're getting worse at it or they're getting it the problem is getting worse and I see the saber rattling with Taiwan as part of that I add into it the fact that I think look I'm perfectly fine as I already did keeping a lot of scorn and criticism on the Biden administration in all of this, but I also think that the Trump presidency

and the unpredictability of it, the unciriousness of it in a lot of ways, sent a really bad signal to a lot of adversaries and countries that said, you know, this country doesn't have the same, you know, the United States doesn't have the game at once had. And then Biden compounded it with the crappy withdrawal from Afghanistan and all of us talk about debt ceiling stuff. And so I think you may be right that they see there's this window of opportunity here to, you know, take Taiwan in the near term that might disappear in the long term. But they also might just think, let's just press the envelope and see what we can get away with because it's our moment in the sun.

It feels very much like Japan and Germany at the beginning of the 20th century thinking that they were the new rising powers and that they deserved their moment and that the old powers were fading away. and I think they're wrong to look at the United States that way, but I can't say that it's a crazy way to look at it from their perspective. David, I have two events

that I want to ask you about in this topic. Then you can ask me whatever. But before I answer, there's two things that have been sort of sticking in my mind from the recent past. One is the general Millie conversation with his Chinese counterpart because, by all accounts that we have next,

it seems like the Chinese really thought there was some chance of an offensive action by the United States against China, which from our perspective, I think seems bonkers. Like, no, we're obviously not attacking China. But clearly from their perspective, they really, like they believed it so much, at least according to our intelligence about what they believed, the general Millie felt the need to make a phone call to say, no, no, we're not about to attack your country. Very cold war red phone type stuff. which I think, for me at least, concerns me because China's perception of reality, as we think of our perception of reality, clearly are not the same, how they view us and how we view them. And two, interestingly, this one's forward-looking, but China's view on their winter Olympic games this time and their preparation for it. And I understand it's a pandemic. So it's a little hard to compare. But comparing it to their last summer games that they had in Beijing, wow, oh, this feels really different. As one reporter put it,

those summer Beijing games were for the world, and this time China doesn't care about anyone else. And so China's worldview becoming both more insular, more paranoid, and less tethered to what I would call sort of an international realistic reality, whatever you want to call it, Am I right to be nervous about that? You are right to be nervous.

And I think point one, let me get to point one on something that I don't think that a lot of people understand and appreciate because most news coverage is not written from the standpoint of, nor is it written by people who are conversant really in military strategy. And people would read that and say, what on earth China was worried? we're going to attack them? Are you kidding me? What? On what planet would they think that that was a possibility? But if China's number one, if the war that China is planning for, the war they're planning for by and large, overall others, aside from, for example, consistent border issues with Vietnam and consistent border issues with India, but the one that's front of mind for them is an invasion of, Taiwan, which would, in all probability, kick off with an absolutely massive first strike by China against Taiwan and potentially our own forces to try to eliminate the biggest threat in the region, which is the U.S. Pacific Fleet. If we believed that such an attack was coming, the smartest thing we could possibly do from a military perspective only, let's just remove politics from it, is attack them first.

That's the absolute smartest military thing. Think Israel in the six-day war where the Arab armies were massing against Israel, and Israel hit them first and knocked their air forces out of the war, and the rest was history. And so if you're wargaming and you're planning as China an attack on Taiwan, in all probability, the thing you're most worried about is the U.S. hitting them before they hit Taiwan. That's the thing you're most worried about. So that's why you would have a conversation. That's why you would have these bilateral communications between generals.

But like you've gamed that out more. Like you've gamed it out to like, you know, one chest step back. But then that makes them have a, you know, itchy trigger finger. If they think we're going to strike them first and that makes them more likely to strike us earlier. And you can keep backing that up. And that's concerning. Yes. That's why I brought up last time we talked about this, the Abel Archer 83 exercise.

when NATO and Warsaw Pact tensions were at their absolute highest and why we consistently do have these bilateral communications. Like we had bilateral communications in Syria where there were Russian and American planes in the same airspace because we didn't want to screw up

and accidentally get into war. So that's why when I first heard that Millie report, it didn't alarm me. My default was not to say traitor. My default was to say, this is a time of instability. But it also makes you think, by the way, that China isn't paranoid.

They're realistically playing out their game theory. Yes, right. Which is different. Maybe more concerning, maybe less concerning, but... It is exactly playing out their game theory, just as a NATO in the Warsaw pact did constantly throughout the Cold War. And the Winter Olympics point is interesting to me,

and I hadn't, to be honest, I hadn't really thought of that before, But everyone is caked, right? To be clear, there's no real talk of boycott anymore. They still have concentration camps filled with ethnic minorities. If you are not Han, you do not have the same rights as everyone else. And those two things, I think, make up the ends of the spectrum. And then there's all sorts of human rights violations in between. And everyone's like, well, but China. And so we're doing it anyway. And China sees that. Yeah. I mean, look, the Beijing Olympics and these Olympics. I think you're exactly right. Beijing Olympics were, hello world, look at this global

superpower. And their opening ceremony was incredible. Whoa. And auditioning and training under it was under brutal conditions, but that's another. That's another story. This one is, yeah, whatever, of course, the superpower would have the Winter Olympics. I mean, there's just a different atmosphere about it. I think you raise a really good point. But I have the question for you, Sarah, which is this, how much do you think, as a practical matter, all of our domestic political disarray, as a practical matter, how much should an external power, like a Russia or a China, look at this, should they see it as surface, which would be, which would dissolve immediately in a crisis? or should they see this as profound and something that they could reasonably exploit? That's where COVID, I think, was its most damaging in a sense

because they can see that and say there was a big crisis and it divided them more, not less. You know, you have Portugal, I guess, which is 95% vaccinated. I was in the Galapagos, by the way, which is 100% vaccinated. And I think Ecuador is roughly 60%. It's about where we are.

Of course, they're access to events. vaccines very different than ours, but it's just not political. And ours became so political, so quickly really deepening those divides. I think that's something that they're watching. But I wonder, so there's a domestic component for those countries and a foreign policy component. The foreign policy component, I don't think there's any question that they see it as something to exploit. Obviously, Russia does, right? If there's one thing that came out of the Mueller report, it is, yes, absolutely. Russia was not only attempting to interfere in the 26th, election, they very much did. We indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers for their role in doing

just that. But domestically, I think it gives China a really, really important talking point that they've had, that they've been using the whole time, rather, but more evidence for it, which is see, republics don't work. I think it's, you know, one additional point. You know, If you look at the way that the U.S. intelligence community has assessed these kinds of maneuvers, these kinds of potential threats in the past, there seems to be, and there are many, many differences between what's happening now in potentially the lead up to something with respect to Taiwan and what happened in Ukraine. But there was a very passive attitude, I would say, in the U.S. intelligence community about what we saw in the lead-up to what the Russians did in Ukraine.

This would be way too bold and way too crazy for the Russians to do. So we assess that it's unlikely. And then it happened. And then we were caught flat-footed. I would say just In talking to people, mostly in the pre-election period, who have access to intelligence on China, I was struck by the fact that there seemed to be a similar attitude towards China. China wants stability. China needs the United States as a trading partner. China wouldn't do sort of big, bold, risky undertakings for fear of losing the stability that it wants. that may end up being the correct assessment, but it doesn't give me a lot of comfort.

The people I was talking to were talking in that particular context about the election. And, you know, in effect, said, China has the capability really screwing up our elections if China wanted to screw up our elections. But they don't want to because they want us as a trading partner, all the things I said. I'm less comforted by that baseline assumption in this context, particularly when you look at the belligerent language coming out of Beijing now. One of the things right before World War I was there was a lot of people are saying, we're too close now. We have too many trade relationships.

Heck, marriage between the royal families. It was the new globalization before World War I. but de Belicose language won out to say the least. Well, maybe if Hunter Biden, if Hunter Biden could marry Xi's daughter, we could solve. Such a great idea coming from Jonah. I don't even know if he has a daughter.

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And, like, there's so much tied up with the infrastructure conversation. I just want to, like, tell. So we're really talking about the Hill because there's bipartisan infrastructure plan, which has been languishing in the house, didn't come up for a vote like we were promised. By the way, really funny to leave for the Galapagos, which we did not have internet, leave for the Galapagos. And it was like this frenzy over infrastructure. and I come back

and it's this frenzy over infrastructure and I was very confused because it looked like I had gone into a time warp. It was like the exact same news story and I was like, wait, but what, huh? I have since caught up and like, or I could have just not caught up as it turns out.

So there's bipartisan infrastructure, there's reconciliation package, there's the debt ceiling and then of course there's the looming shutdown over you know, budget problems. So a lot going on on the hill let's talk about all of it

maybe I don't know Jonah what are we talking about excellent question it's a it's a hot mess and and also I mean it's funny the only real news that you missed was a mob

of idiot activists chasing Kristen cinema into the bathroom and people wanted to make that the issue I think in part because some of us are so tired of talking about infrastructure that we have to put out cigarettes in our forums just to feel alive again. That felt like one of those issues to me

that I've talked about a lot with reporters in particular that everyone can have an opinion on whether you should chase someone with a video camera into a bathroom. It's really easy. Whereas talking about the different infrastructure packages and the debt ceiling and oh, they're actually different, that takes actual expertise.

Like, you need to be Haley Birdwilt to talk about that. who has been awesome, by the way, if you're not following Haley on Twitter. I know she subbed in for me last week, and it was great. But just an extra shout out to Haley, both a thank you for subbing, but also she's brilliant. Not only is she good to follow on Twitter, but she's also good to follow in her writings for the dispatch,

which have value as well and pay our bills. Okay, so a bunch of different things going on. First of all, as you hinted at, we talked about in the green room, a lot of people are confused. about all the different things going on that are all the different pieces of all of this uh there's a the bipartisan infrastructure bill which has acquired the nickname of the thug from the back to the future movies biff um that is like traditional infrastructure it's a it's what is a 1.2 trillion

dollars 500 billion of new spending and expansions of some other stuff it's confusing but That's like bridges and roads and whatever. Then there's the what some people are calling the reconciliation bill, which is also the human infrastructure bill, which Bernie Sanders says the progressives have already compromised because they wanted $6 trillion in spending. And they're willing to come down to $3.5 trillion in spending. This is very much like my daughter is saying she compromised by saying

she only wanted one pony for her birthday, rather than three ponies for her birthday. And then there's this really arcane word magic thing called reconciliation, which is a budget trick or budget scheme that was put in place to work around the filibuster, which says on budget issues and budget issues alone, you can get stuff passed with only 50 votes

instead of, and skip the filibuster stuff so you don't need two-thirds to overcome a filibuster. And the issue of the day is that they want to do the full $3.5 trillion through reconciliation because that way they can get it passed. But Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kristen Sinema of Arizona don't want, have not fully committed to doing that. So people are mad at them and following them into bathrooms. Meanwhile, there's a whole other thing called the debt ceiling where we got to raise the debt ceiling. Otherwise, we can start defaulting on our loans, which would be what economists call bad. And so the idea is, but Mitch McConnell says the Republicans aren't going to help. Lots of people think that's irresponsible. Democrats can do it

alone, since they're in charge of the whole budget process in both houses of Congress. But the only way the Democrats can do that, and this is the thing I think confuses a lot of people, is if they do it through reconciliation. And so they want to get the debt, they want to, Democrats, the Republicans want the Democrats to use reconciliation and use up reconciliation

with using it for raising the debt ceiling. The Democrats say, no fair. First of all, you raised all this debt. So you should be in favor of doing it. And you should just let us do it through the normal process. And then Joe Biden had a gaffe,

a Kinsley gaff, where he said, look, one of the reasons why we don't want to do this is because if we do, we'll have to have Democrats vote on all sorts of things they don't want to vote on, which was not a good thing to reveal. So with that in mind, with that schoolhouse rock moment over. Wait, the shutdown. You didn't do the shutdown.

So then there's the shutdown, right? So if we don't raise the debt ceiling, correct, then we don't, if we don't do the debt ceiling or do we don't reauthorize a new budget, the government starts shutting down and shutdowns are stupid. They've never worked for people who push them, but the party that gets blamed for them usually suffers for it. And of course, the deep state has a practice where they are essentially like a weird animal who has its sort of vital organs on the outside, and they start closing down the stuff that normal Americans care about first, rather than the stuff that nobody cares about, and all arguments during shutdowns become profoundly stupid.

So, with all that said, Steve, there were many of us who had high hopes that Joe Manchin was the sane Democrat. You know, we've many times here, David, what do you call him? He is first Lord of the Coal Soaked, first of his name, Lord of the Coal Soaked Hills. That's right. He's the plenipotentiary titular president of the United States of America. And he says it is now, his position is now that he is for the hard infrastructure thing. And on the soft infrastructure package, he can't go higher than $1.5 to $2 trillion.

And it sounds like it will vote for something that hits those numbers. Joe Mansion has already voted for $6 trillion in spending relating to the pandemic, including a $1.9 trillion. a COVID relief bill earlier this year. Agreeing to 3.5 additional trillion dollars in spending would have, like five years ago, marked Joe Manchin as a Bernie Sanders crazy big spending left winger. Now it marks him as the rock of moderation in the Senate. Is this a sign that we are going to spend ourselves into oblivion and should we all buy gold?

I mean, yes, on the first one. No, I think that's very useful framing. You know, Sarah and I had Brian Riedel from the Manhattan Institute on the podcast week and a half ago and asked him a lot of these kinds of questions, just ask him to put these things in proper perspective for us. And, you know, it was the case that until at the time of pre-pandemic, we had racked up $16 trillion in publicly held debt in the history of the country, if these things pass and anything close to what is being currently debated, sort of on the higher end,

we will have $44 trillion 10 years from now. I mean, that is just insane growth. It's unsustainable and uh despite what you might hear from the biden white house this is not all paid for um this is not likely to be dollar for dollar free or zero cost as uh as they've taken to saying it that's the other thing that sarah missed was that the white house was claiming that they could spend three and a half trillion dollars for zero cost because they'll be taxing people to pay for it which is not earth math. My favorite is when they say that like fixing the tax loopholes or enforcing the tax code will make up that amount of money,

which just has been debunked over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Ways fraud and abuse. That's the liberal version. It's funny to hear the White House and Democrats make these arguments. I was on Fox News Sunday this past Sunday and Cedric Richmond, And a former legislator from Louisiana, who's now a top advisor at the Biden White House, was talking to Chris Wallace and Chris said he made this claim for zero cost. And he not only made the claim that this $3.5 trillion in new spending, or not all of it,

new spending, increased spending would be zero cost. he then said that the 2017 Trump's tax cuts were very costly, which, again, if you're letting people, you can be in favor of those tax cuts or oppose them, but if you're letting people keep their own money, it's hard for me to argue that that is a cost to the government. But that's the way that he framed it. So two important developments, I think, this past week. One, we learned via reporting in Politico about this. deal that Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer had reached in which Manchin laid out in pretty great detail

what he would be willing to do, how much he would be willing to spend. And he did this on a document that he had Chuck Schumer signed back in the summer. So all of this talk from progressives, from Democrats, from folks to the White House that they didn't really know what Joe Manchin wanted, that they were perplexed about how this would proceed because Manchin was this black box. It was all nonsense. They knew exactly what Manchin wanted. They just didn't want it, too. Second point on the question of debt ceiling and using reconciliation to get there.

There's a report in Punch Bowl news earlier this week that the parliamentarian had quietly advised both Democrats and Republicans that Democrats wouldn't use up their limited ability to go to reconciliation for the big package if they used reconciliation for a debt ceiling hike, which took away a key argument that Democrats had been making, as Jonah laid out earlier. At the same time, Joe Manchin, who is opposed to nuking the filibuster, who is indicated that he doesn't love reconciliation on the big package, said that he would be open to reconciliation for a debt ceiling hike. So I think it leaves Democrats with a pretty tough argument here. You know, when we had Brian Reidel on, he talked about how Democrats used to kind of uniformly

oppose debt ceiling hikes when Republicans had power. Republicans have opposed debt ceiling hikes when Democrats have power. But what's happened more recently is the majority party gives the minority party. gives the minority party something in exchange for some support on a debt ceiling hike. And he pointed to 2018 when Republicans agreed to give Democrats a three, I think it was a $300 billion lift in spending caps. Nancy Pelosi still voted against that. But what's happening now is Democrats are essentially saying, no, we're not going to give you anything. We're not going to do that kind of a deal because it's really important that the debt ceiling be raised.

And at the same time, they're saying we are also going to pass, you know, potentially $3.5 trillion in massive social spending on a purely partisan basis. So while I don't think Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, would ever let this crisis get to the point where the debt ceiling really was breached, I think they're on pretty solid ground making the case that Democrats are acting in bad faith. They can do this on their own if they want to. They're not giving any concessions to Republicans, as has become custom in the past several years, and they're insisting on passing this massive new spending bill without Republicans,

because they didn't want to include Republicans in that conversation from the beginning. So one note to what Steve just said, but Mitch McConnell is making the very precise. I think, statement, here's his quote. The debt ceiling is often a partisan vote during times of unified government. In 2003, 2004, and 2006, Mr. President, referring to Joe Biden, you joined Senate Democrats in opposing debt limit increases and made Republicans do it ourselves. You explained on the Senate floor that no votes did not mean you wanted the majority to let the country default, but rather that the president's party had to take responsibility for a policy agenda which you opposed. Your view then is our view now. Yeah, pretty pretty. That's good stuff.

Yeah, pretty standard statement. I, um, I also though, there's, here's my question. Joe Manchin has said that the Hyde Amendment, the amendment, um, that prevents federal spending on basically abortion in short, uh, it's been included in every budget thing, uh, since going back to what Henry Hyde in the 1970s. Um, that if they don't include that, that is a red line for him and that the spending plan would, quote, be dead on arrival if it's not included. I don't see how Democrats are going to include the Hyde Amendment, how they could, how the progressives could agree to that. So is this conversation over? Who's bluffing? I don't think that Mansion is bluffing. And this is a good segue. I was going to ask. question, but it's actually a good segue from my David question, and I'll circle back on this era.

So you wrote about the goon squads going into the bathroom with Kristen Cinema. The, I think I'm characterizing generally, fairly, or directionally correctly that the argument, forget the argument about whether or not it's right to follow women into the bathroom. Fact check, it's not. And, you know, it says so. the Talmud and the rest is commentary. But the argument from the left about why they're so mad at Cinema and Mansion is their argument is that two senators should not hold up this whole agenda. And the problem with that argument is that two senators aren't holding up the whole agenda.

52 senators are holding up the whole agenda. And Kristen Cinema did not get elected to be a lockstep vote for the Democratic Party, she got elected to be the senator from Arizona. Joe Manchin, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Joe Manchin understands his state better than most of his critics do. In a state that Donald Trump won by nearly 40 points,

that he only won by 18,000 votes, I think. The idea that he should vote him, he should be the Marjorie, Ms. Goliz, Mitzinski, whatever that woman's name was, who voted for the Clinton tax bill and vote himself out of office. for the benefit of AOC and Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders does and against the will of what he

thinks the people West Virginia want them to do strikes me as sort of silly but this is where we are and so I guess the question I have is how does this budget stuff reflect the larger culture war polarization stuff that you and I that you in particular wrote a whole book on this is it is all being subsumed into red versus blue or they're you know or does the math actually matter to anybody at this point well i don't i think that one of the key issues is that people don't know the math i mean they so one of the key issues is it's not just that people are very divided and want different things they're often under dramatic misunderstandings or they're operating under dramatic misunderstandings of their own power and what they can actually accomplish and so

for example if you if you if you there are folks in the left who believe that all that is between us and sort of this enduring domination is enough mobilization of our base and you see that same thing on the right and so therefore squishes are to be just shoved aside in favor of sort of this you know this massive wave of immobilized ideological force now that's not going to happen in west virginia. but I have actually seen people who know better, who should know better, arguing otherwise, that there's sort of this untapped resource of West Virginia progressives that could sweep aside Joe Manchin and hold this Senate seat, which is just nuts. And I think that one of the things that we have to recognize as part of our political debate is there is an awful lot of partisans who are just quite simply operating in a different kind of political reality. And that includes people on the Trump right. That includes some people on sort of this democratic socialist left. A lot of them, for example, have rely a great deal on sort of this

issue polling that a lot of more left-wing pollsters do, where they consistently poll that a lot of these economic issues or a lot of these democratic agenda items poll really well in isolation. And in fact, you know, there was this University of Virginia study or poll that just came out that showed that the vast majority of sort of the big package is supported by large numbers, in many cases, a majority of Trump voters. So the Biden package, if you ask Trump voters line by line. But politics, that's not how politics is conducted. And that's not how these coalitions, uh, exist in the real world. And so what you're dealing with isn't just a set of real differences that exist, which are substantial and important and meaningful, but you're also dealing with an enormous amount of sort of false confidence

and a false belief that one side or the other is really, truly the voice of the people. And if they can only get what they want, it is going to, they're going to sweep into power, not just sweep into power more, but maintain that power. And so I don't think they look at Cinema and Mansion and think the smarter ones might say, well, it's worth it to lose their seats for the policy win.

The smarter ones might say, this is a cost-benefit analysis. They'll lose their seats, but we'll get the policy win that will help America. A lot of them are laboring under this belief that's, we can have our cake and eat it too. and Joe Manchin just doesn't see it. He just doesn't see how great all of this is.

One last thing on the numbers, just real quick. It is difficult to remember that, so we've already had an infrastructure bill that is part of a bipartisan agreement, and Manchin would be up for what, $1.5 trillion more in spending? The Tea Party got going over an Obama stimulus plan

that was, oh, I don't know, or no, four, five hundred billion less than the already agreed upon stimulus package. I mean, already agreed upon infrastructure package. That is, the Tea Party got going on a stimulus package that was 25% of the total spending, or 30% or so of the total spending that Joe Manchin has already agreed to. I mean, this is the path we're on. This is the path we're on. And no one person should think it ends here, not one person.

And so, you know, that, this is what really concerns me far more than the inside baseball about whether is this going to end up being $3 trillion total or $3.8 trillion total. It's going to be too much. And five years from now, we might be negotiating over numbers that make this look miserly. So you're setting me up. I appreciate it, you guys. You're setting me up for my question for Sarah. Sarah, like, I know I'm not going to step on the toes of the Baker whatever election reform commission.

We all know that was the greatest commission in the history of commissions. If they had a commission on what the great commissions were, they would say that the Baker-Carter commission was the end of all commissions. But there was also this thing called Simpson-Bowles. And the only reason I bring it up is that it was supposed to be about deficit reduction. And Simpson-Bowles had this quaint idea. that revenues and spending in the United States should be pegged to around 21% of GDP. I thought that was reasonable at the time,

even if that resulted in my taxes going up. And I checked, it's really hard to tell because the numbers have been all over the place, but right now we're it somewhere between, depending on the time of day, like 35% of GDP or 44% of GDP, which is either a little below or a little above the EU norm. but the one thing that's completely gone

is anyone giving a rats derrier about debt this used to be something that was a major like you've taken the position that foreign policy doesn't really matter in elections seems to me like debt doesn't either A is that right and what is your theory about why that at least seems to be the case I think the chicken little stuff over debt

doesn't matter anymore like oh if we raise the debt one more time the sun's going to explode. It was becoming so increasingly world ending. Like it was those doomsdayers where they had to start picking dates like next week that the world was going to end. And they're like, oh, my calculations were off. It's actually in two weeks. And that is dead now. But what is very much alive and very, very much, I think, matters in this next election is inflation. And while the two are not, you know, sitting right next to each other, they're not not related. And so I think as people will say they're voting on inflation and pocketbook issues, that could sort of reverberate back into a debt conversation.

And that, you know, there's nothing more powerful than going to the grocery store and finding out that your orange juice is twice as expensive. Oh, the sun exploding is more powerful. But yes, I agree with you on a day-to-day basis. And Americans love their bacon. And remember the bacon shocks of. of COVID. I mean, can we all just take a moment of silence for our, to pour one out for our bacon times.

With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at MX.ca. All right. So we're going to give kind of short shrift to immigration this week. We'll give longer shrift to it, appropriate shrift to it in the future. But in short, we've had resignations from the Biden administration, Harold Coe being the most recent. He was on the legal team at the State

Department. Yale law students will know the name well. He said that the Biden continuing to use Title 42, the Trump-era health measure to expel people from the country without an asylum hearing, is illegal and inhumane. Basically, these resignations pushing the immigration issue from the left while Biden is undoubtedly getting squeezed from the right with events like Del Rio and 15,000 people camping under a bridge. And my question to you, Steve, is just politically for a moment, the Biden administration, the Biden White House, I think they're filled with some pretty smart people, politically smart people there, who understand what happened in 2016 that immigration did become a major issue. And you had a backlash that then put Trump

into office. There's 47 reasons why Trump got elected, right? Each one's sufficient on its own, but undoubtedly immigration was one of them. So if they cave to the left and simply say, yep, borders are open, they very much risk not just a Republican majority in 2022. I think that would go without saying, actually. But some real uphill stuff in 2024 and potentially, you know, Trump walking into the White House. At the same time, resignations from your left, base enthusiasm dropping, you talk to progress,

and this is their number one issue right now. And they think that this, they, they believed Biden during the campaign and now they're looking at his actions and they're horrified. So Steve, politically, what's the smart move for the White House? You know, it's interesting because, I mean, other than Title 42, I would say that his actions haven't been that antagonistic to the left. He hasn't given them everything that they want, certainly. But you can go back and trace, the course of his White House's immigration policymaking and there's plenty for the

for the left to be happy about he's rolled back a lot of Trump's initiatives. They don't want ICE. They don't want border patrol. They're using the video with the reins and saying like this was happening under the Biden administration. They are clearly trying to enforce a border in an inhumane way

and I don't want to get into the whole thing on the reins and the whips and the whatever because frankly it's like the cinema thing like it's this thing we can all argue about that kind of misses the point. But the point is they were trying to enforce something at the border. Sure. Yeah. I mean, it's the immigration equivalent of the defund, the police arguments. I think we heard from the left. Look, but look just at last week to make my point, you know, the Biden administration came out with a new rule, a new guideline for ICE, in effect

saying, hey, we're going to prioritize detaining the people who present a threat. And we're not going to allow Border Patrol officers to just detain anyone who is here illegally. And this was something that I think, you know, the left liked to a certain extent, although they did get complaints from some groups on the left, that it gives Border Patrol officers too much discretion to detain people as they want to. But I think the challenge on top of that is they're doing something that they think is likely to mollify the critics on the left. But at the same time, it has real world policy implications because what I think Biden has done again and again and again, even as they've sort of, I think, quietly said to these migrants, don't come, don't come. their actions, one after another after another, are saying, we're not the Trump administration. And it's definitely the case that smugglers and others are using just the existence of the Biden administration, the fact that it is a Biden White House and not a Trump White House to encourage people to make the trip north,

which exacerbates the political problem that the president faces on this issue. All right, Jonah, quick. I have a very short take on it, just sort of summarize, because I agree with Steve. Yasser Arafat, former head of the PLO, he used to, it was famous for, he would say one thing in English for American audiences and another thing in Arabic for Palestinian and Arabian and Middle Eastern audiences. And the problem of the Biden administration has is that it's trying to do that, but it's only speaking one language.

So both audiences here. And so the immigrants and refugees, they all hear, we're going to be humane. We're suspending prosecutions of illegal immigrants unless you're a terrorist. And a lot of these guys are like, hey, well, I'm not a terrorist. And at the same time, they're talking about Title 42. I just heard a piece on NPR about how they're still building the wall and doing eminent domain. I heard a thing on Fox about how they are not building the wall. And I think that the problem is that the Biden administration cannot send one set of messages.

to the progressive base without other people like whether it's Fox News or migrants hearing that message and jumping ugly on it and vice versa and that's why this is going to continue to be a mess for long time.

David, what do they pick in the midterms? What do they pick in the midterms? What's the message coming out of the White House a year from now on this? I would imagine that a year from now, one, there's probably going to be fervent prayer that this seasonal influx prediction finally, finally plays out. My prediction is, this isn't going to be what they're going to talk about in the midterms. They're going to want to talk about anything but this in the midterms

because they're kind of, they're in this bind where there's this statistics in the Harold Co. in the memo, his resignation memo, and this is fascinating. CBP statistics indicated that nearly 700,000 people have been expelled under Title 42 since February this year. Okay, that's a number that is shocking to the left for a lot of reasons that co-outlines. It's also stunning to the right, because I bet if you asked a average Republican, how many people is Joe Biden expelled in 2021? They would say zero. It's open borders. and 700,000 is the number, but they're not going to say, oh, well, I had no idea Joe Biden was expelling so many people. I'm going to vote for them now. So he's in a bind here. So

my guess is what they're really, really wanting. And if he is going into the midterms, here's what the message that he wants, which is by next November, the pandemic is decisively under control. The economy is quite robust. And the Republicans of the party of anti-vaxxers, anti-masker, weirdo, Donald Trump, January 6th conspiracy theories. And that's the messaging. And he hopes to talk about immigration as little as possible. All right. Steve, where I thought you were doing China, it turns out you're doing Facebook? I am indeed doing Facebook.

Last month, the Wall Street Journal ran a series of articles known as the, became known as the Facebook files, based on documents from inside of Facebook that called into question public claims that Facebook was making about its business practices, its efforts to provide a good platform for people to communicate on, and a variety of other things that. Facebook leaders had said over the years. Then this Sunday, Francis Howgan, the whistleblower who provided those documents to the Wall Street Journal, gave an interview to 60 minutes in which she detailed her reasons for doing this and the substance of her complaints. And then she testified before Congress on Tuesday. And sort of the long and short of what she said is that Facebook has been up to really bad things for a long time. And number one and number two, Facebook has not been straightforward about these really bad things Facebook has been doing for a long time. My question, back to you, Sarah, this comes at a time when you have critics on the left and the right looking at

Facebook and other big tech companies in search of some kind of regulation, different reasons for different sides, but that seems to be where this is heading. Does this, do these revelations give that enough momentum to actually push Congress into doing something? Or is it the case that because Democrats and Republicans don't agree on what exactly to do, there will not be the kind of regulation that you have so many people calling for? And that the doing something that both sides think they want to do don't at least easily make sense

as to why those would solve the problem. I think if it were, you know, the rallying cry regulate Facebook, great, but the second you get past that, it's a mess. It's a mess even when you get to how they want to regulate Facebook. Get rid of Section 230. That's not going to change the problem

of teenage girls' body issues. it has nothing to do with it, in fact. You know, break up big tech. How do you know unless you try? I heard a progressive yesterday talking about how we needed a break up big tech and using TikTok as an example. Okay, well, TikTok is a Chinese company. How would you like to break up a foreign company? And that's not to say that it's entirely stupid.

Like, if they're the same way that China has banned all sorts of stuff, social media over there, we could do things about that here. But it's not, it's just not that simple, like break up big tech. Or again, how that would solve teenage girls' body image issues. The conversation that we haven't been having, and I am just like looking around me, wondering why, is the tobacco litigation. I don't understand. This is starting to look more and more like tobacco in the sense that the tech companies know the detrimental public health effects, the addiction and the public health consequences of their product and have been misleading the public

and potentially lying under oath in front of Congress about it. And you have this example from the 90s that is also messy, by the way. But, you know, we did it with tobacco companies in a way that is insane to me. Like if you just look back at the history of that the settlement that the tobacco companies agreed to with the Department of Justice. But I wonder if 10 years from now, if we're just, it's too soon.

But I think that's actually where this will end up closer to something like that than Congress actually figuring out how to regulate it in a way. Again, let's assume that just for a second, the problem is the addiction and public health consequences. So young girls' body images and people being not able to turn off the app, nothing that I've heard the Democrats or Republicans come up with actually addresses that at all. David, I think critics of that argument would say the two things are not at all similar. You know, smoking causes direct physical harm and kills people. You know, there is at least, you know, a sort of a triple bank shot to make the argument that social media has the same

effects. And there's, you know, Facebook has made the case for a long time and other big tech companies that they do a lot more good than harm. Now, I think part of the problem for Facebook is they released data showing that they were doing good and they withheld data that suggested they were doing harm, which is problematic when you're trying to build trust to make your arguments. But what do you make of Sarah's case about a comparison to tobacco litigation? Yeah, I don't buy the comparison to tobacco litigation all that much. I mean, by the time we had the tobacco litigation, the evidence of that there were actual physiological things that happened when you inhaled tobacco smoke, that it's not as if there was no way to say, well, if I used

to cigarettes in this way, it's good for my body, as opposed to if I'm using creating a Facebook group that is setting up a community prayer chain for somebody who has an illness, there's no comparison here. I'm beginning to get a whiff of a lot of the, you guys remember sort of the violent video game panic of the 1990s. There's this new technology that were kind of rap lyrics. I mean, the parents advisory council, do we remember that? I mean, that we've been through a lot of this before. And it has a lot of echoes of that, to be honest, in my view. And the other thing that's really interesting to me is, I don't know if you guys have noticed it. I think you have, because I think we might have texted about it. But is there, are you sensing this from the

Right. Big Tech is bad. Big Tech is bad. Then here comes this whistleblower, like, laying in to Facebook over allowing too much speech. And now some people on the right are, oh, wait a minute, hold on. And it really illustrates left and right do not have a meeting of the minds as to why big tech is bad. Other than there is some meeting of the minds on, well, impact on young people and anxiety and depression. But if you look at back, if you look at the whistleblower complaints, and some of this stuff really,

the effect on the 2020 election, hate speech, human trafficking, that deceptions that Facebook isn't as big as people thought it was, some of these things are directly contrary to this right-wing drive that says, let more speech on Facebook, more stuff on Facebook. And that's been a message for a long time from the right.

And a lot of these, a lot of this whistleblower, this whistleblowing material gives ammunition to the left. This is no, Facebook is way too permissive. And I think it's one of the reasons why you're saying, hold on, wait. We need to, you know, there's a, and it shows the right left divisions over big. tech regulation. But the bottom line is, here's, here's the real, here's the problem in social media. Us, people, it's people. What social media does. But David, we don't blame people for being addicted to cigarettes. But that's apples and oranges. Nicotine is a physically addictive substance. And so is social media. It is addictive. No, no, no, no. By any

wants to get mad at us. Hold on. No, I know. We're going to, we're going to, okay, let's end the podcast here. We're just going to stop right now. Jonah is, Jonah is eating his microphone. He's so eager to get in. All of the breathing that you've just heard for the past minute and a half has been Jonah waiting desperately to get in. So thanks for joining us today in the Dispect podcast. Go, Jonah, go. All right. So first of all, I'm, I'm more sympathetic to Sarah's case about the tobacco companies than you guys are. I don't think it's, great, but I think that the addiction thing is real. And I think that Facebook is living down to what its starting principle was, which was to objectify the male gaze, which is what it started

as at Harvard. And it's coming, circling full back to that with Instagram. But I think where the tobacco comparison falls down is, like, there's a great way to get people to stop smoking cigarettes. Make them stop smoking cigarettes. Who on earth thinks that the government is going to stop people from using social media entirely. It's just not going to happen, right? But the, I want to take a step back. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I think I'm well known as not a conspiracy theorist. I smell a rat with the whistleblower. This whole thing was put together by Bill Burton in a PR shop that Jen Socky used to work at. When was the last time? Bill Burton, a former Obama White House staffer, Jen Socky current White House spokesman. It's rare that sort of whistle

blowers have a PR rollout that is perfectly coordinated with a huge dump to the Wall Street Journal, followed by a 60 Minutes interview on the eve of Senate testimony. Does it mean that she's lying? Doesn't mean that the stuff she has isn't real. I'm not saying, you know, there are people out there saying this is like the 2016 Russia collusion, you know, steel memo stuff. I'm not saying that. But take a step back for a second.

I'm a big fan of a Marxist historian named Gabriel Colco. Gabriel Colco is one of these Marxists who is so far to the left, he thinks the progressives were right wing. And his argument is he has a wonderful book called The Triumph of Conservatism, some wonderful history in it. And one of the points he's utterly persuaded me on, it was a big, big influence on me in my first book, is that the whole myth of big business or the whole idea that big business and government are at war with each other is a myth. And it's been a myth throughout American history,

going back to the railroads. The head of U.S. Steel pleaded with Congress to socialize the steel industry because they wanted to lock in profits for themselves. You can look at almost every big regulation, Fortune 500 companies. They like the idea of major regulation because it becomes a barrier to entry for smaller firms

and provides them certainty. And I've written about this a bunch with regard to Facebook. Zuckerberg has been begging the federal government to regulate all of this stuff for several years now. In fact,

every time I turn on cable news in the mornings, I see commercials with these hipster, you know, 25, 30-year-olds talking about how back in the 90s,

when I was born, people still use dial-up and they had, you know, lanterns made from, from whale, fat and it was and and they were you know wrote around in horseless carriages and that was the last time that they regulated the internet don't we need new regulations facebook really really wants to be

regulated because it doesn't like having to deal with these problems and they've basically been begging congress to do it i am not saying that she is some deep plant or anything like that what i am saying is that i predict that we end up getting regulations because of all of this more moral panic stuff about it. And I shouldn't say moral panic in dismissive way. I think a lot of these things are legitimately bad. But we're going to get, end up getting regulations that solidifies Facebook's place as the dominant incumbent in this space rather than hurts it. Because this is what has happened time and time again going back a century. And I can do chapter and verse on the new deal on this. Facebook wants to be regulated. I think they're going to use this as an opportunity

to be regulated and the Democrats are being smart about and I do think that this is part of a Democratic PR campaign. They did that a lot with the tobacco industry. They did that a lot with a lot of other industries. And it just smells like that. It doesn't mean it's a lie, but I bet you when we look closer at some of this stuff, it's pretty exaggerated. And this woman kind of has the same feels, that public health official in Florida, who kept accusing the state of doing all of these terrible things, and it turned out that she was kind of, you know, exaggerating a bit. Time will tell, but that's where I come down on it. So real, real quickly, I think you're right that Facebook wants to be regulated.

They have, as you point out, made that clear again and again and again. I don't think there's any scenario in which they wanted this, in particular, the document that were released before she put a face to her whistleblowing. You know, it's interesting, if you look at, we should note here that the dispatch is a part of the Facebook fact-checking program. We partner with Facebook in our fact-checking. And, you know, our role in that context. You can tell here how much that biases are.

Right, right. Yeah, we have been, I think, pretty consistently, of Facebook in a number of different ways. And let me add to that criticism now. I think a big part of the problem here is, you know, if these documents and if some of this testimony is to be believed, you have Facebook on the one hand, you know, encouraging things like a fact-checking program. I think, you know, we do a fair amount of good in the fact-checking program. We do fact-checking in the context of Facebook. We do fact-checking outside of Facebook. But we're proud of of what we do. We think our work stands up and we think it's helpful for people to see it.

But if it's the case, as Ms. Hogan claims, that Facebook sort of tweaking the algorithm to make hateful, you know, conspiracy-fueled content go viral because it keeps people on the platform, which then they can advertise, monetize through advertisers, it would mean that that would overwhelm any of the good we think we're doing and any of the good that the Facebook fact-checking program is doing. So it will be problematic, I think, if we get further confirmation, there's further documentation of the claims that she's making there. But I think you're right, Jonah, that, you know,

this may be one of those moments where, while Facebook would never have wanted, some of this stuff to come out. I mean, in particular, the documentation on the studies about young girls and Instagram, that they may see this as a lemons lemonade moment and use it to push for a regulation that they like because they know regulation is coming. All right. If you've made it this far with us, it's that season, and I have a favor to ask of dispatch listeners in the comments on the website, the dispatch.com. You can get to this podcast there for our members. It's Halloween season. I need a Halloween costume for the brisket. He's now 15 months old and a giant.

He has three baby girlfriends. So bonus, if you can come up with a Halloween costume that incorporates three girls and a large, large meat brisket. So thank you in advance because I am stuck. I cannot think of something good. And guys, maybe next week I'll ask you if you've come up with any good suggestions for the Halloween costume theme this year. Last year we did baby Yoda. So that seemed obvious. Could he be Bosley and they all be angels? I think that'll be hard though to like get the angel thing with like baby girls. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, what am I going to put them in tights?

Like that's what baby girls wear anyway. No. Like I can't put them in heels. You can put up in like actual angel costumes like a pun kind of angel. That's true. They could be pun angels for sure. This is the problem, you see. So thank you.

And thank you for listening. And again, rate us wherever you're getting your podcast. Tell your friends about this podcast. We like new people. Thanks, guys. So... Wait. Did the New York Times use the term sord-tees?

Sorties. Yes. Sorties. Caleb, we can cut that. you, I want you all wearing your sword tees. No, I thought it was like sword teas, as in to tease someone. Oh, I thought you're saying like a sword, two swords and you make a tea out of them. I thought you're saying a sword as a t-shirt.

Literally a t-shirt, yes. Yes, a sword a t-shirt. Which David probably has, let's be honest. Oh, several. Like a tease, though, like if you tease the country by like with your sword, like, oh, am I going to hit you? Am I got it? And I was like, that actually, like, would make a ton of sense, but also would be, like, really phallic and weird. I mean, nothing quite as funny as Chinese aggression.

I was really confused. Okay. All right. All right. We're back. Sorry, David. Please continue. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. SquareSpace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, you're writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one.

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