The Dispatch Podcast - Should Mainstream Media Platform MAGA Thinkers?

Episode Date: August 7, 2026

Steve Hayes is joined by Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson to discuss Ross Douthat's departure from the New York Times to CBS News and reflect on the times in their careers where they got an issue wrong.The Agenda:—Who Will Replace Ross Douthat?—MAGA representation in media—Intellectual honesty vs. partisan loyalty—Dangers of political journalism—What Kevin's got wrong—What Jonah's got wrong—What Steve's got wrong—NWYT: Good adviceShow notes:—George Will: Defeating Trump should be top priority of conservatives—Kevin: Why I Was Wrong About Head Start—Steve's Florida piece—Nick Catoggio: Which Republicans are deserting Trump? And why? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19-speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility, and Optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes on today's roundtable. We take a big picture look at this moment in the news media and specifically at the exit of conservative columnist Ross Douthit from the New York Times to CBS News 60 Minutes. Who should replace him? Does the mainstream media have a responsibility to platform pro-Trump views? Then we each share a time in our careers as reporters and commentators where we got an issue wrong. Or if you're Jonah, the many times you got issues drawn.

And finally, not worth your time, advice we wish we had taken seriously. I'm joined today by the dispatch's editor-in-chief Jonah Goldberg and national correspondent, Kevin Williams. Let's dive in. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us today. I want to start with a discussion about the media, which I know both of you. It's your favorite topic. You are always emailing me before we start.

Steve, can we do more on the media? more naval gazing. And I've steadfastly refused. But I'm giving in in this instance because I think there's actually an interesting debate to be had or discussion to be at any rate. Jody, you wrote on Friday about Ross Douth. It's departure from the New York Times. He is headed to CBS News to join 60 Minutes. And there's been much discussion about his departure, what it means for 60 minutes, what it means for CBS News, what it means for the New York Times. There have been much discussion. have been many social media discussions about the need for the New York Times to go get another conservative columnist, to go get another mega-friendly columnist, to go get another new right columnist.

And I will say, I'm not terribly interested in that part of the discussion. You know, who should replace Ross doubt that it's New York Times? If anybody, right? I mean, like, the whole idea that he's got to be replaced with another columnist or with a conservative of is also kind of a, there's a lot of question begging there too. Anyway, go on. I'm sorry. A lot of question begging. Well, let me ask a starter question and we can sort of move from there. Noah Hickey, our producer, posed a question based on part of your G file on Friday. Jonah, you had written MAGA Media is already curdling like a dumpster full of expired milk.

Picking a columnist bound to this fading moment, the MAGA moment, strikes me as folly and not just because I think there's precious little about this current moment worth defending. One of the things you hear is that the New York Times has some obligation, either out of fairness or in the interest of having a full debate. There's an argument to be made that they have an interest to hire a MAGA-friendly columnist for business reasons. I guess the question I want to ask you, and I'll start with you, Jonah, and then move to you, Kevin. Jota, if you were the CEO of the New York Times right now, would you feel the need to hire a MAGA-friendly columnist,

given what you've written there, but for any of the reasons that you've heard, as people have debated this, is that necessary at this point? So, I mean, there are a bunch of different ways to answer this. I mean, so part of my point about how this moment is fading, is, you know, it kind of reminds me a little bit of the conversation you often hear in advisory opinions about how justices were appointed at a specific time when legal conservatism was obsessed with certain kinds of issues

or that they came from a certain experience. Then 10 years later, those issues are no longer the definitional issues of facing the court or facing the right. And you see how these justices sometimes seem like they are creatures from a bygone era because of their approach no longer fits what the priorities are on the right or where the arguments are and all that kind of thing. I feel like part of the problem, trying to find a MAGA-friendly columnist, is that by the time you get one, you work out all the details, and they get their C-legs as a columnist, you're going to be in 2028 primary season, and the relevant issues are just going to be kind of different.

So there's that. Then there's the problem that, and I want to be fair about this, there are a lot of people who I think were wrong in their support for Donald Trump or wrong in their, or that their vote was regrettable for Donald Trump, who are still smart and serious people who I can learn a lot from and all that kind of thing. The problem is, is that the vast majority of those people, the ones of whom I respect, they're like admitting that you voted for the lesser of two evils as they saw it, that they were voting strategically, that Trump is his own worst enemy, and he's not a conservative, and he is chaotic, and he doesn't have a coherent ideological worldview. So if you're that kind of honest intellectual, that doesn't

scratch the itch for people who want a maga-friendly New York Times columnist. And that leaves another category of person, hacks who will take whatever, they start from the proposition that Trump is right and then reason backward from it. And I think those are just terrible columnists. And so you just don't have a lot of great options about who you're going to pick for that role. Now, there are still some people who are way too apologetic for Trump and take positions I have a problem with who'd still be good columnists. But again, like, you know, Chris Caldwell, who I think is a brilliant guy and a really good writer and would be a great, he's already a contributor at the time.

By the time, like, he's up and running, you know, the relevance of having a Trump-friendly columnist means almost nothing. And so I just think it's sort of a silly question to ask at this moment because, and then you're just going to have, there's the fourth reason, which is that because, because, because, Because Trump was a cult of personality candidate, rather than a celebrity candidate, if you don't, if that's too pejorative, there are different factions within MAGA. So you're actually going to have to pick and choose which faction you think deserves representation. And I think that's dumb, right? You know, because there's the faction of MAGA that supported the Iran War.

There's the faction of MAGA that opposed the Iran War. To pick one is to piss off the other, and they're going to say that's not a real person, right? because it's just a dumb way of looking at these things. And so I do think there's an argument to be made for having a columnist who is sympathetic to the general positions of one of our two major parties. Politics is what these guys are writing about, and having someone who is not knee-jerk on the left

or knee-jerk, sort of the Democrats are always right, makes a lot of sense. They had that in Ross, but Ross took positions that, you know, were not necessarily what MAGA crowd is looking for. And I just don't think trying to fit that kind of job description with representation of a faction makes very much sense on any criteria. Yeah, Kevin, let me just put the question to you the way that Noah wrote it in our back and forth. Should mainstream media be compelled to represent MAGA?

Well, no, I'm compelled. It's obviously not. Should mainstream media feel compelled? Or obliged, obliged. Yeah, well, you know, you see, there are a couple of ways of thinking about it, and you mentioned it like as a business concern. And I was just thinking, you know, the Times hasn't really had like a super pro-Maga columnist. I mean, Ross is maybe curious and sympathetic in some ways, but he's not a MAGA apologist. We don't have a columnist like that.

And between the two institutions, we made like $400 million last year. So, I mean, obviously there's no, there's no huge business case for it. And also the, you know, the marginal returns to investments in columnists. I'm not sure what they look like, but if Barry Wise starts trying to poach the puzzles editors up there, like in Steel Whartle or connections, then they're going to be wet in the bed. You know, they'll get over, you know, Ross going and doing something else as much as I like Ross and have enjoyed some of his columns over the years. Some of him I found perplexing.

You know, I think that if you're the New York Times and you want to be the American newspaper, then yes, Jonah is right that you're probably going to want to have someone in there who was sympathetic to one of the major political parties. At the same time, you know, I hate using MAGA as a collective noun. I guess we just have to do it. It's just dumb. It just bothers me. But, you know, this isn't really primarily a political movement.

It's primarily a personality called primarily a celebrity movement. And it's got particular characteristics that are different from other sorts of political movements, your political parties, your enthusiasms. And these include, like, very, very high levels of intellectual dishonesty and other sorts of things that you really can't make a place for in a newspaper that wants to be. like the credible newspaper. You know, it's air a little ancient, dirty laundry, but I was in a discussion,

an unhappy discussion with someone over at National Review once upon a time on our work there. And they said, you know, we have to keep Victor Hansen around because he's basically, he's the best, you know, pro-Trump columnist there is. And I thought, it's probably right. And what does that tell you about pro-Trump columnists?

They ain't very good. I, can we think of someone who's like an actual pro-Trump columnist who's any good? Now, there are people who are really good, like social media hackery and being an influencer or that kind of stuff, we're very, very pro-Trump. I can't really actually think of a, like a pro-Trump, like an unapologetically pro-Trump columnist who would be worth publishing.

I just can't think of one. I mean, maybe there's one out there. I don't know, but I can't think of one. I'm not going to sit here and listen to you by implication, badmouth Kurt Schlichter like this. Oh, gosh. Does he write a column somewhere? I think he does for Town Hall or did.

I don't really know. Yeah. I don't think the stuff in town. Hall really even counts as columns anymore, but okay, that's maybe just me. No, I can't think of a great, you know, case for compulsion or the New York Times getting up out of bed every day and saying, well, we read this whole, in this huge, you know, hole in our pages that we need to fill because we're down at this particular point of view. I think that the way newspapers like that probably work and should work anyway is that they aren't really all that programmatic about saying we need like

this kind of, you know, hold to fill or that kind of hole to fill. They're like, here's this columnist we'd like to publish. He's really good and interesting. and he's got some interesting points of view, and we can use him because people are going, and he has interesting and useful things to say. When Jonah was writing about this, he mentioned Bill Sapphire. I think it's a good example of that,

where, you know, as Jonah pointed out, that at the time he became a columnist, he was kind of a political hack, really, but it turns out he was a really good writer and a funny and interesting guy, and who had a lot of things to say. I don't think the Times got up one morning and said, we need a Nixon guy over here

to write Nixonian stuff for us. They said, here's this guy who was interesting at that time, young man, and would be a good and interesting writer, and that's what they did. So, no, I don't think anyone should feel super obliged to do it. But on the other hand, if you came across someone who was just, you know, an outstanding person, you could give you 800 words of really, really good, fresh, interesting, provocative copy twice a week who had a very strong MAGA-ish point of view. I don't see any reason why you wouldn't necessarily.

Although, again, given this sort of the characteristics of that movement, I'd be, I'd do a lot of fact-checking on that guy. Yeah. And I'd keep a pretty hairy. eyeball on him for a while, I think. Well, isn't that, let me see if I can sharpen the challenge. If you were to be, I mean, we've used the descriptor pro-Trump columnist. In order to be a pro-Trump, you can't be pro-Trump unless you're defending things that are dishonest, right?

I mean, so much of what the president says and does on a given day is dishonest, is making stuff up, is lying about, you know, Tim Walls trying to. poison Minnesota's water. It's multiples of those a day. And by definition, if you are going to be pro-Trump, that suggests that there's some obligation to defend the guy when he's dishonest. And if journalism is the pursuit of truth, the two are just not compatible. I think that, you know, in 2016, to come out as a voter or a columnist or something and say, you know, all things considered, I think Trump is the better choice between Trump and Hillary Clinton, even though we know X, Y, and Z about him.

It wasn't my position, and I don't think it was the right position, but it's a defensible position. I think it became a much harder position in 2020 and a really, really hard one in 2024. And as you say, the business of being a columnist and being honest and good about your work is going to make you a lot less of a Trump advocate. Because you're going to have to write things like, well, this guy is full of it and he doesn't know what he's doing. And it's pretty clear. Now, I still like him better than I like Kamala Harris, or I still like him better than I like this. or the other, or I think that the Democrats are, you know, on the verge of becoming a full-fledged Leninist Party or something like that. And therefore, I'm going to still be a Republican partisan.

But yeah, telling the truth about Trump and being a Trump advocate are goals that are somewhat intention. Well, and Kevin, just to go back to your point about Victor Davis-Hanson, I remember having a conversation with Victor. This is just a couple of months before the 2016 election. And we were both doing something out at Stanford and just had a casual conversation as I was waiting for an Uber to get back to my hotel. And he basically said to me, I'm more or less where you are on Trump. But, you know, my pro-Trump columns, my defenses have done well. I've been asked to continue to write them. And so I'm going to continue to write them.

But I'm sort of eager for this moment to be done. And then Trump wins. and, you know, for the past decade, he has written more or less pro-Trump stuff. Now, I don't know if he came to believe it or if he now believes all of it or if he was playing a role because, you know, Jonah you've, I think mentioned before Molly Hemingway's plan was always to articulate what she took to be the views of the Trump voter in her participation on the Fox News panel, even if those views were not necessarily her own. But man, that gets messy. Isn't it easier? I mean, I think Chris Caldwell is probably the best person we don't need to get into choosing a columnist for the New York Times. But, I mean, Chris has views that are in some ways, maybe in many ways, sympathetic to the kinds of intellectual arguments that have been imposed on the personality cult of Trumpism.

And he makes them very well. He's brilliant, as you point out, Jonah. But Chris would not be a reliably pro-eastern. Trump column. You would never describe him as a pro-Trump. And I'm not saying that you are. But if that were the criterion, he would not fit what MAGA is saying the New York Times must do. Yeah.

So, but I've read about this a bunch of times in 2016 that Julian Crines, 2017, I can't remember that he launched that. Julius Crine, yeah. Julius Crine. It launched a pro-Trump academic journal, right, American Affairs or something like that. And I remember Eliana Johnson, which she was still at Politico, called me for quote. And I made a prediction, and I refer back to it from time to time, sort of like Kevin's old corner post saying, you asked for this after Trump got a luck. Best corner post I ever did. And my point was simply that at some point, I'm all in favor of a serious journal coming out to try and flesh out and defend Trumpism or America for whatever this is.

Those are good things to have, you know, intellectuals doing these kinds of things. The problem is, at some point, because Trump has no coherent ideology, he's going to screw you. And so at that point, you have a choice. You can either say the president is wrong or Donald Trump is wrong, or you can defend what he's doing when you don't think it's correct, right? This is the problem with the personality cult stuff is part of the reason that the personality cult developed in the first place is that he's so incoherent and so unpredictable and so incoherent. and so inconsistent that the only safe harbor intellectually, quote unquote, or politically

is to say I just trust his judgment, right? Is to say he's a four-dimensional chess player, his instincts are right, he's a disruptor and blah, blah, blah, blah. Because if you say, I'm for tariffs and then he, or you say you're for free trade and he screws you on tariffs, so he said, okay, I'm four tariffs,

and then he's going to screw you on that by rescinding them, maybe for bribes, maybe for politically caving out. If you're pro-war, you know, pro-regime change in Iran, you celebrate him, and then he makes you look like an idiot. You know, that whole sort of,

this is Trump betraying you when he launched the war, it was all nonsense because, like, this was perfectly consistent with Trumpism going all the way back, because consistent with Trumpism means intellectually inconsistent. Yeah.

And so the only way to sort of do it is to say, from time to time, the president is wrong. And there are people who are pro-Trump who are willing to do that. Some of them have the incredibly lame, you know, formulation. You hear a lot from senators of he's getting bad advice, right? If only this are new kind of arguments. And then other times you say, well, this is worth the price because on the whole, he's a net benefit. And I disagree with him on this, but he's still better than Democrats and all these kinds of things. And very quickly,

you're getting into a position, if you're intellectually consistent, of basically indefensible things or downgrading the importance of indefensible things. And that gets you just into, that just gets you into trouble as a columnist. There are lots of people in media who, I mean, this is one of my epiphanies if we're going to talk about things we got wrong. I went into 2016, think that most people had my same job description as me in my line of work. And it turned out there are a lot of people who sincerely and honestly, some of them are in talk radio, or a lot of them were in talk radio, who think their job is to reflect the views of their listeners,

is to give them talking points for the positions that they already hold, to confirm their priors. And I think, you know, Steve, of the things you've heard me talk about even more than you've talked about Spanish wine is how I think that 90% of journalistic ethics boil down to do not lie. Right. Say what you believe. Right.

Say what you believe to be true. Right? And I mean, I get the whole truth, you know, you can be artful and you can, like, avoid arguments that you haven't really thought things through and all these kinds of things. But you can't lie. You can't, like, actually say things you don't believe to be true. And, you know, my friend Adam White, he said, you know, where a lot of people ended up in order to save themselves the pain of cognitive dissidents was it used to be that dumb thing,

don't take them, literally take them seriously. Adam's like, well, actually, what's happened is all these people take. them hypothetically. Yeah. And they start crafting these arguments, well, if this is what Trump is doing, then he's right. And it's like, okay, but there's no evidence that this is why Trump is doing this, and there's lots of evidence that he's doing this for these bad reasons. And they just ignore it.

And so it becomes, even if it's not deliberate, the seduction to be dishonest or engaged in sort of lazy, inconsistent, incoherent thinking in order to defend a problem. partisan position overtakes you, and you just can't hire. I mean, I think there have been columnists who do that for Democrats at the New York Times and elsewhere. It's not as necessarily pronounced because the cult of personality thing is a little different, although the height of Obama, there was a lot of that. Literal hymns.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, we can do the whole cult of, is, I mean, there used to be a wonderful blog called, I think it might still exist, is Barack Obama the Messiah that just collected things, you know, Oprah Winfell. free saying he was the one and and Barbara Walters saying we thought he was the Messiah and all these guys. I mean like look those crazy stuff going on and as Kevin would put it, fish don't know they're wet. You know, a lot of liberals could not see the cult of personality in it in the same way that

a lot of conservative, a lot of people on the right can't see the full scope of the cult of personality stuff about Trump. I just think it's poisonous to your soul and to your integrity to start from the proposition that somebody is right because of who they are or what part. they're in, but a lot of people do that. You know, the most painful thing of this conversation so far is, is Jonah plagiarizing David Foster Wallace and then saying, as Kevin would say, because it's true. That hurts. You know, they actually is sort of a parallel tradition for this on the left, if I may just intercede

for a second. I know Joe has got some time constraints. But when I was working in India, I knew these kind of, you know, non-aligned movement, Leninist intellectual types. And they would say, we're not a doctrinaire movement, our movements, what the working class wants are what the poor people of the third world want. And if they want this, then we're for that. And if they want that, then they're for that. And it's a sort of intellectualized version of, you know, I'm the people's leader. There they go, I must follow them. But there is kind of

a version of that of saying, you know, we're not a, not a movement of ideology or consistent ideas. We're a movement of class interests. And class interests don't necessarily follow a philosophical party line. And that's fine. It's a defensible way of going about the world. But what the Republicans have done and conservatives have done is they've taken this thing of saying, we're to represent the interest of this class of millions or billions of people and apply it to one guy. And so, you know, our movement is whatever Donald Trump stands for today at this moment. And if you can do that with one guy to do with this, you know, mentally unstable, narcissistic, half-bright game show host is going to present some challenges.

Just for the record, I'm not going to make it to my deadline anyways. Jess is ready for it, so don't worry about. So you talked about intellectual consistency. I mean, I think it's possibly intellectually consistent, but not intellectual. honest in defense of Trump, if that distinction makes sense. Because you can be intellectually consistent while being intellectually dishonest if you're just saying the same things in defending him. Jonathan Shade's career.

This was a problem at Fox News in the early Trump era where Fox was constantly looking for people to represent sort of mag world. It's hard for people probably to remember that because Fox has been so thoroughly magified now. But at the time, you know, we, you know, we, Jonah, you got the same emails or we'd have the same conversations with people who are like, who can we get? Help us find somebody who's, you know,

it's from intellectually honest Trumper. And I very early on recommended Molly Hemingway as somebody who could fill that role on the special report panel. The nice theme is stuff we were wrong about. Yeah. I guess I'm getting ahead of myself. You know, there was a time when there was a, we'll just call them a prominent pro-Trump intellectual who, who went into the Trump administration, working the Trump administration for a while,

who I'd known for years, had conversation with him over the years. And as we had conversations, he was increasingly willing, you know, in certain moments to be candid about what he thought about the president. And as the first term went on, he was less and less enamored of Donald Trump to the point where he eventually left the administration. Well, I basically said to him,

if you're willing to do on, Fox on television, what you're doing with me, which is sort of really wrestle with the things you love about Trump, but also be willing to talk openly and candidly about the things you don't and the places where you think he's going wrong and all this. I don't have much sway. I'm just a Fox News contributor, but I'm happy to make a recommendation that they bring you on and maybe sign you up as a contributor. And we went sort of back and forth on this for a while. And we got to the point where, you know, this was somebody who was going to go work in sort of outside think tank academic world, where I think it was likely that if he had decided to pursue that path, he could have done it.

And instead, the people in sort of outside academic world who were going to employ him said, we can't have you on Fox News criticizing President Trump. And so the whole thing kind of went kaput. But there aren't always those requirements from outside potential employers to do that. But I think that there's this sort of unspoken if you consider yourself pro-Trump and you make those kinds of criticisms, you are written out of the MAGA movement. You can't criticize President Trump with any regularity and be part of the MAGA movement, be part of what would be considered pro-Trump world. Is that fair? And that's how vice presidents are made.

Yeah. I mean, I can think of exceptions on the margins that I don't want to throw people under the bus. But generally speaking, as a general proposition, yeah. I mean, this is, ultimately, this is the thing that I think is the real problem, is that there are any number of people who think that their position is to support and defend the progressive position or support and defend the conservative position. and often they do when that defense aligns with the current talking points of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. When those two things

are in tension, an enormous number of people end up defending the Democratic Party or, you know, if they're progressives, rather than the progressive position, or end up defending the Republican Party rather than the conservative position.

And I want to be charitable, to people. There are a lot of people who just don't see the distinction as being as sharp as I do. And they think it's fine to have a rooting interest in the success of one party or another. And they take it for granted that all in all, it is better for their ideological cause if their partisan team wins. And I just think sometimes that's absolutely true. But sometimes it's actually the opposite that, you know, this is one of the reasons why George Will wrote in 2016 that the first duty of conservatives is to make sure that Trump loses in a landslide because he recognized what the damage to conservatism would be if Trump came to define it.

He lost that bet, but I think directionally he was more right than wrong in saying that. I would say so. And that's the thing. But there's just an enormous number of people who think, and part of the problem is that's what TV bookers want. Right. And this is the only thing that it used to drive me crazy. Very true. that I would routine, and I knew lefty people who had the same problem,

is that invariability, it's not just a Fox thing or a CNN, all the networks do this. They put people who basically have our job descriptions to one extent or another, who write what they believe to be true, right, and who have strong opinions, but the principal opinions, we could be wrong, but we have them, right? And then you get put on opposite, like, Democratic consultant so-and-so, or Democratic, you know, activist or former DNC, this, that, or the other thing. And their job is simply to argue the talking points of the day for the Democratic Party. And the problem you get stuck in is that if you concede any of their points, they say, look,

even Jonah agrees that George W. Bush is a piece of garbage or whatever, right? And you end up getting pulled into this place where you only can, you end up having to fight at the 90-yard line against somebody at the 10-yard line because that's what the bookers want. Yeah. And what they hate is riots of nuance where it turns. out that like I can actually agree with a bunch of democracy, a bunch of left wing, serious left wing people about some systemic things in our country or whatever, or if they're intellectually honest. But that's not what they're looking for. They're looking for budding heads. And you end up internalizing this idea that your job is to be an angry pundit for a party.

Yeah. And it just happens to a lot of people. They're not called crossfire, but they end up wanting that kind of crossfire. Pick the party position and argue it. And it's, it's, it's, it's, Boy, it's corrosive and corrupting. We should point out just as a matter of record. The New York Times also has two conservative columnists right now, Brett Stevens and David French. Who's that second one? David French, your friend and mine. David, David, French, you're saying.

Oh, we don't recognize him because he's no longer here. Okay, fair. Fair. I mean, I think, you know, there would some people think that David is no longer conservative. I'm not in that group. I think he's very conservative. I don't think he's changed his mind on many things. but because he's critical of Trump, he's lumped in as sort of the center left.

Which proves the point, right? Is that if you're not? Which proves the point? If you're critical of Trump, then you're no longer conservative to a lot of these people. Right. That's the point. Because it's a red versus blue. We'll end with the famous Charles Crowdhammer quote that we have used before, Charles

said of people who do what we do for living. You're betraying your whole life if you don't say what you think and you don't say it honestly and bluntly. which I think helps create the problem for people who are trying to hire based on partisan affiliation. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the dispatch podcast. Summer heats up in FX's The Shards. Set in 80s, Los Angeles, the Shards follows a group of beautiful, privileged prep school students who are preyed on by the trawler, a serial killer targeting teenagers across the city.

This fever dream of youth, beauty, sex, and mystery. is a must see. FX is the Shards. Now streaming on Hulu on Disney Plus. Sign up now at Disneyplus.com. And we're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. So I want to get to this second part because I think this is likely to be interesting and fun. We had a discussion about doing something a little bit different and sort of a collective effort of the group produced the idea for this segment. We thought it would be useful to go back over the years that we've been doing this kind of thing. We didn't put any strict

time constraints and try to come up with a moment or a policy issue or a political view that we've had where we now recognize with the benefit of hindsight that we were wrong and walk through both the original erroneous position and how we came to

understand that it was incorrect and how we think about these things now. So Kevin, you wrote a piece about one of yours, I don't know, if it's the same thing that you're going to talk about today, but it was a terrific piece. People really responded positively to it, I think, in part because people aren't used to people like us saying, I was really wrong about this thing. So what's your policy view or political issue that you were very wrong about, or changed your mind about it? Well, I did write a piece for the

dispatch some time ago about being wrong about Head Start. And a lot of us who are, you know, conservatives who kind of came up on the right, heard for years and years and years that there had been pretty rigorous studies of Head Start and that it did not produce any meaningful, long-term educational benefits that were still detectable in the data, you know, after 10 years or something like that. And that is true according to essentially one study and a few other studies that relied on more or less the same data set. And I went to a session at the Old Parkland Conference, which is a very useful periodic gathering, mostly oriented toward talking about issues of importance to black Americans. And there was a presentation on Head Start. And as it

turns out, it's a little more complicated than that. And there's a bunch of different versions of Head Start and different ways to implement it and other similar kinds of programs of early childhood education. And the data does seem to show that these actually do provide some some pretty good results in certain circumstances. Again, they're better and worse ways to do it. And that does necessarily mean that every one of these programs is worth what it costs or that it's a better use of money than some other thing would be. But there certainly seems to be a pretty good body of evidence that certain kinds of early childhood education programs can produce real benefits from real results and that they're worth spending money on. So when there's different evidence,

I'm not afraid to change my mind about stuff. And one of the things I've been thinking about lately on the same theme is that, you know, as someone who's for a long time advocated libertarian positions on drug legalization and gambling and prostitution and things like that, I've always acknowledged that they're going to be tradeoffs. There will be, you know, cost to these changes as well benefits and that even if you think that these programs or these reforms are the right thing to do on moral grounds because you think people have a right to do with their bodies what they want and with their lives what they want even if that means smoke and crack or take a heroin or working as a prostitute or betting on football or whatever it is but i think that there's pretty good evidence now

that a lot of us grossly underestimated the externalities and social costs of some of this stuff and overestimated what the benefits are going to do, which I think you tend to do as an advocate. You know, you count the evidence on your side and discount the evidence on the other side. You got to be careful about that as a journalist because we're talking about our first job is to try to be honest about things, get things right. And so we've got, you know, some years of data now on liberalization of marijuana laws. And you've got a lot of data now about liberalization of gambling, both in terms of policy and social attitudes toward it. We have less about prostitution because there isn't that much legal prostitution. in the United States, and the costs associated with it pretty high.

And some of the benefits that we had hoped for have not come to pass. So we have not really seen a great defunding of cartels and drug-based organized crime organizations. We have seen higher mental health costs and other social costs associated with widespread, more widespread use of marijuana, and particularly by younger people. And these things we have to account for, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the wrong policy, but we should go into these things with open eyes. And gambling, of course, has mutated in ways, I think, that were surprising to a lot of people. We've now gotten, you know, essentially the casinoification of every aspect of American life. And you've got the White House teleprompter

operator, you know, making bets about what the president's going to say because you've got inside information. And that's some pretty good science fiction stuff that nobody was thinking about 20 years ago. It turns out to be obvious, I guess, and sort of banal. So, yeah, I think in general, move toward liberalization on these things is still probably the right policy, but the particular shape of those policies is really going to matter a lot, and the externalities and social costs associated with them have to be really accounted for, I think, in a rigorous kind of way. We should be modest about the benefits we expect to realize as well. Let me ask you just to sort of sharpen a little bit.

Was it your position when you were to broadly pro-legalization and we'll stick to the drug question, set aside the gambling issue for now? Were you sort of the kind of reason magazine, Peter Tosh, legalize it persuasion? Was that your, are we legalize it all? Come what may. And where are you now? How far have you moved on those? I was and am probably to the radical side of a reason on a lot of this stuff.

I am a guy who believes in legalizing drugs. I would much rather people be consuming drugs that are manufactured by Bear and Merck than drugs that are cooked up in a basement laboratory somewhere in a jungle in Central America. I think that still the cost-benefit analysis pretty much weighs pretty heavily on that side. I thought at the time that, you know, broad legalization of not just marijuana, but other drugs or, you know, decriminalization of those drugs would probably have pretty catastrophic consequences for one or two percent of users and moderately bad consequences for some larger share of users.

But it's got catastrophic consequences for a larger number than that, I think. But also just the long-term bad consequences of persistent regular marijuana use are just worse than I think most people had expected and worse than the best evidence we had at the time would have suggested. That's in part because they've made pot so much more powerful than it was 30 years ago, right? I mean, capitalism's awesome, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, this is part of the problem. I mean, this is part of my complaint. about the libertarians, like I remember David Bowes in his book, talking about how much,

how great it would be if corporations could get in the business of selling really clean, concentrated good heroin. Yeah. Which they used to. I mean, heroin's literally a brand name, as you may know. Yeah. It was a bear product back in the day, I guess. There are some guardrails that you're going to need, I think, both in terms of corporations'

views of their own responsibility, but also probably in terms of regulation. I mean, opioids are manufactured by major corporations and they've ravaged huge segments of the population. Right, but they're being distributed in such a way that people don't really know what the concentrations are and the dosages are because, you know, people aren't getting, they aren't getting clinical packaging and clinical doses of fentanyl. They're getting fentanyl mixed in with other stuff and they don't know exactly what, pardon me, they're taking, which has been a problem with other sorts of drugs that have, that are very concentrated in terms of volume, you know, for a long time. Like, it's hard to accidentally smoke too much marijuana. It is really easily to accidentally take too much edible marijuana because it's in this very concentrated kind of form. And also because we live in the dumbest timeline, just like tons of it is packaged to look

like candy and snack foods, which is like, that's a great thing to put around both children and chronic marijuana users who love candy. And like this, why didn't you just make it look like Pringles? You know, that would have been a great idea. And these guys would just kind of even gotten me in. of then. Yeah, Pringles are good. Pringles are terrific.

For a potato chip that's not made out of potatoes, it's... They are sometimes as addictive as crack, I can tell you. It's polished off full tins of the brinkles. The easiest pringle to say no to is the first one. Right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, so I think that I was overly optimistic and insufficiently skeptical about the tradeoffs

and evidence on those issues and have vowed to reform my ways and go about it a different way. Although there is even some evidence here on the prostitution front, too, where, you know, I lived in Las Vegas and Anderson, Nevada for some time. And Vegas is an interesting case because they have had legal brawels in Nevada for a long, long time, not in Clark County, not in Las Vegas, because you can only do it in counties that are under a certain population, yada, yada, yada, and that hasn't really done much to alleviate, you know, street-level prostitution on the streets in Nevada and other tourist places in Nevada. And in some ways, it's made the problem a little bit worse because you get all these tourists who show up in Vegas and they think prostitution's legal there when it's not. And so they're out, you know, looking to, you know, pick up prostitutes on the street and casinos and stuff not knowing or not fully knowing. And the fact that they're all falling down drunk doesn't help very much either, what their legal, you know, burden is there. And in some ways it's made it worse because, well, there's a whole long story about various ways in which it's made it worse, which I'd like to write with the dispatch. at some point and probably will get around to doing hopefully sometime in the next year.

So now there are libertarians out there who will say the problem in Nevada is that you don't have enough legalized prostitution. It's just a very small number of brothels. And so there's not very much competition and they're very expensive. And you can't, you know, compare a, you know, $1,000 experience at one of these legal brothels with a, you know, $15 drug-addicted streetwalking prostitute on Tropicana in Las Vegas. And man, these are going to provide some just great lines to take out of context. I'm really looking forward to defending this for the rest of my life. You're going to promote the hell out of this on social media. Yeah, that's going to be great. So much for no clickbait at the dispatch. Yeah, so you haven't seen any discernible reduction in

illegal prostitution in Las Vegas and another tourist places in Nevada. And if anything, it's probably gotten a little worse in some ways, driven in part by the expectation of access to legal prostitution. Jonah, I'm not going to ask you about your use of legal prostitution ever, even though you once made a joke about me and hooking up, I think, with a prostitute at a speech, at a public speech. It was pretty funny. We'll set that side. It was actually very funny.

I hate to give you credit. It was very funny. If it turns out Spanish wine is a euphemism. Spanish wine is not. What is something that you have either, where you now recognize that you were just very wrong in your earlier years or have changed your mind? Well, so like I made a quick list going on like the beginning of this conversation that we had over email about it, about places where I've moved. Because there are a lot of things I'm sort of like, you know.

Starts with hiring Kevin. No, I'm sort of like Kevin on the drug thing, which is that he had a nuanced position where he acknowledged the tradeoffs and then realized, came to the conclusion that the tradeoffs were greater than he thought, right? So it's not like, oh my gosh, I was wrong. It's like my, you know, cost-benefit analysis was missing a decimal place, you know, or something like that, which is just a different thing, right? And so I made a quick list. I don't think it's exhaustive by any stretch of the imagination. And, you know, some of them were just predictions.

Some of them were like different. Anyway, I'll just go through it very, very quickly and then we can pick up on it. So I thought in 2016 there was a really, serious chance because Donald Trump was a Democrat that he was going to, once he got in power, start selling out Republicans and making deals with Democrats. I did not anticipate that he would do this base-only kind of presidency. Yeah. I was wrong about that.

I've changed my mind about Citizens United. I think it was correctly decided on the constitutional question, but I also thought it was going to be a good thing, and I think it actually, the consequences of it have been bad. So I was half wrong. I talked to Mike Renaud about commissioning a piece from this, somebody who really knows this stuff, but I think that I'll leave Kevin out of this for a second, but I think people like you and me, Steve,

and a lot of our friends on the right, who are hawks, neocons, conservatives, you know, strong believers in national security, all that kind of stuff, we have been pretty dismissive of the whole war powers resolution thing, of presidents having to go to Congress, they get a declaration of war.

We've allowed the national security arguments, which I think a lot of us sincerely believed, to trump a pretty clear constitutional requirement. And so it's one of the areas where I... And what's interesting about it is that most of the people I'm talking about, and I'm including myself, claim to be really serious originalists

in all sorts of other realms. But then we roll our eyes at the idea or rolled our eyes at the idea that the president needed to go to Congress to get authorization to use force. And I think we were right on a lot of the national security questions, but wrong on the constitutional question. And I'm still grappling with that

because the last thing I want to do was be on Team Rand Paul. We've done climate change about, I think climate, this has been my position for a long time, I think climate change is real. I'm sort of like Kevin on the drug question is that just my cost-benefit analysis

is different than where the alarmist are on it, but I used to have, this is all a hoax thing. I haven't had that position in 10, 15 years or something like that. I was wrong about birtherism, not so much that I thought it, it, it, that, were you a birther? I was never a birther, but I never thought it was an important debate or issue, and it turns out it was. Yeah, it turns out. And that it led to a lot of bad things in our politics, and I was really dismissive of it. Similarly, I haven't made up my mind yet, but I am really losing my commitment to the unitary executive theory stuff, but we can come back to another. A minor one, congestion pricing.

I thought this was just creeping socialism back when it was first coming into New York. I was wrong. It's fine. And then the last one I'll put in, I still have some serious criticisms, which I've bit my tongue about in terms of Charlie Kirk. But one of the things that I believed prior to was murder, which was horrible, and it's one of the reasons why I've bit my tongue on other criticisms. But one of the things that I was wrong about was that he was a pretty astroturfy guy and didn't matter to that many people.

And it turns out he really did matter to an enormous number of people. And I got that, I got that wrong. So there's a list for you. Coming around to the Kevin point of view on the Warpower stuff, I love it. This has been so unbelievably enjoyable to listen to Joe. We just asked you to give one and go deep on it. and instead you came up with the list. I would just say, I want to invite our listeners to email in other areas where Jonah's been profoundly wrong.

Roundtable at the dispatch.com. And we can do an entire episode on all of the places that Jonah has been wrong over the years. I would say I would get much more enjoyment out of this sort of semi-confessional. If I wasn't with you on like half of those or probably more than half of those. I was going to call you out if you would. You know where Jonah is most wrong is he's a cat accommodationist. I'm for that. Okay, that's good.

I'm with you, Kevin. Yes. I was going to include that is that I was, I'm more pro-cat. Wow. Kevin is going to get nasty emails from listeners, especially Alex Deemis on our, on our staff. Yeah, I'm with you on a lot of those. The war power, executive power thing in particular is something that I just have spent so much time in the past 10 years thinking about. because I certainly was an executive power guy.

And while I don't know that there's a longer conversation we could do it some other time, I don't know that I agree with you, the constitutional reasoning was wrong. I think the facts have been negative for the reasons that are manifest. Here's the problem. I think about, because I've been thinking about,

I've been wrestling with this for a while now. Part of the problem is that when you had presidents who actually wanted to live within broad, guardrails. And we could argue, critics could say that their guardrails were too wide or too narrow, but, you know, basically there's been no president in our lifetime that did not have some sense that they were stewards. Yes. And had an institutional, fiduciary obligations. And we could have profound disagreements about how they interpreted those obligations and what they did with those obligate, but like, like, they cared about how they were remembered and they cared broadly about the

institution as being bigger than them to one extent or another. Yeah. That is not Donald Trump, right? No. And so in that environment, you know, getting an authorization for the use of force or working within the sort of broad sort of spirit of the war powers resolution, given that for them, they had to meet a threshold in their own conscience. Yeah.

About being at least faithful to the spirit of the constitutional arguments. Trump has no concern about the spirit of the constitutional argument. He's never thought about this stuff. Yeah. And so, like, all of a sudden, you start realizing, like, there was a slippery slope problem that we didn't recognize. And it's a problem. You know, it's a real problem. Yeah.

I mean, look, I think what we're seeing from Donald Trump was nowhere in the sort of wildest imagination of Dick Cheney and David Addington, who are the, you know, two of the most outspoken proponents. Or Barack Obama, even Barack Obama using drone. against an American citizen abroad, who was also a freaking terrorist, right? Like, it joined a terrorist organization, or at least that he believed, he did. I see Kevin Wright running to defensive terrorists as he wanted to do.

But, like, again, you could have an argument. Like, Randolph had arguments against that that I kind of rolled my eyes at. I roll my eyes less at it now. Because, like, I would kind of rather have bright lines on this stuff. And it is in the kind of, like,

I think John Yu is just wrong about this stuff. And doesn't mean he's not a brilliant guy. I mean, he's right about some of it. He's right about it. There's merit to some of his positions. Like, the president obviously

can respond without going to Congress to a cross-border incursion, to an attack on an American base. He doesn't have to, like, run and ask for authorization and that kind of stuff. But, like, you now have a president of the United States, openly saying it's a war. Yeah.

and that he's thinking about destroying a civilization and all this kind of stuff, and then saying, not even winkingly, just straightforwardly, well, we call it a limited military operation because if we call it a war, then people in Congress think we need their permission. It's like, this is Seinfeld. You've already said spite. Like, he can't return it, you know? And, like, he says the quiet part out loud. And, like, that's not tolerable, you know?

And so, like, there are other things that was wrong about. I thought Congress was always going to be a jealous guardian of some of this stuff. I thought our elite institutions would hold on a lot of those. I was wrong about those things. And so it's sort of, you know, it's a brave new world kind of like problem. You know, facts can overpower a position, you know, is it Justice Jackson that Sarah Isker likes to quote saying that different cases presenting different facts will have different outcomes? Yeah.

Like I think you're thinking about executive power is very different when you're expecting presidents to be like Dwight Eisenhower and Mitt Romney and George W. Bush. Trump is not like that. And I imagine that that's probably caused a lot of people to have second thought. it's about less considered views about executive power than they thought they had. 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 a month for free. And speaking of ads, if they aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, two free gift memberships to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders, and much, much more. Okay, we'll be right back. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. So, Jonah, let me ask you one follow-up to your collection of mistakes over the years.

The charge that you get, and I get, is since Trump has come around, you're so trump deranged that you've abandoned all of these once held positions and you've become a liberal in the old school sort of FDR or Michael Dukakis understanding, a progressive. And you're not really a conservative anymore. How do you respond to that attack on you? And are there places where you've become more liberal because of what you've lived through over the, last more liberal slap, you know, not classical liberal, over the last decade. So, Steve, just throwing out chum.

Yeah, I mean, first of all, on the first question, I think that's, the technical term for it is moronic. Like, I don't concede any of it. I mean, you go through my list, and, like, none of them are real violations of core conservative stuff. In some ways, I've become more of a constitutionalist, not less of a constitutionalist, right? like the, you know, Declaration of War and Unitary Executive thing, when conservatism was defined sort of as a strong presidency kind of thing,

I can see people saying, okay, I'm less conservative. Guilty is charged if your definition of, of, an essential component of your definition of conservatism is deference to an overweening unchecked executive branch, okay, fine. But on the other stuff, like, I don't know how the Trump derangement syndrome claim would explain any of it, right? And so, like, I am more pro-free trade than I was.

I was always pro-free trade. I'm more pro-free trade now. So, like, the idea that somehow I've become a New Deal, liberal, is crazy. I have pretty much the exact same views on the problems with entitlement spending and debt and all of that. So that's not an issue, right? I'm hard-pressed to think of. the place where one could say I've moved leftward on public policy issues. Yeah.

Because of Trump. I'm open to the suggestion of something. I just don't know what it is. I mean, roundtable at the dispatch.com. I mean, I mean this sincerely. I don't know. I don't know what it is.

I don't think you are. No. I mean, I asked this. I mean, I wasn't chumming the water, Kevin. This was me trying to, Molly Hemingway-ask style, speak for the listeners. Or the people who have attacked Joan on that. I get it, too. Yeah.

And I don't think, I mean, I think I could go back 25, 30 years. And the one position, one policy issue where I've just changed my mind and it was 20 years ago, probably more than that, is gay marriage. But I don't think otherwise I've become more liberal, really. I think I basically believed the same stuff I believed 20, 25, 30 years ago when we got into this business. always being open to new evidence. I'm willing to revise my views, update my views, what have you. But this is something that Jonah has regularly attacked for, and I don't think the attacks pulled up. Yeah, I think a huge amount of it has to do with the fact that a lot of people assumed, I think, somewhat unfairly, but with some merit in some cases, that my hatred of the left would win out over any other consideration.

And for me, the issue where I've changed a lot is I'm just much, much more comfortable than I used to be talking to left-of-center people who I think have integrity and are driven by facts and are willing to make arguments. Then maybe, I don't know, I used to do those debate things. I was close friends with Peter Barnard before he went crazy on Israel and all that kind of stuff. So it's not like there was no precedent for it. But like, I now find that the sort of the sane caucus is more of my tribe than the, let's just be as right wing to own the Libs tribe. And I think a lot of people thought I was more in that tribe than I was. And as I've been saying now for 10 years, I'm sorry I failed to live down to your expectations. But, you know, on that, I just don't, I don't get it.

in the broadest sense of the word partisan, I think probably all of us, and certainly me, were more comfortable being kind of partisan bomb throwers 20 years ago when it seemed like this... Partisan as in pro-Republican, like in the literal definition of the term?

No, no, no, no. Partisan in the sense of being politically tribalistic of owning the lips, right? Of having this kind of, you know, we're the conservatives, this is our team, and we're going to throw bombs and be obnoxious about it and, you know, play with sort of,

extremism and rhetoric and play with sort of extremism in ideology. Why not do this thing? Why to do the next thing? Why not take seriously the idea that taxation is theft, which kind of do so. But there was less, I think, of perceived need to be accommodating and ameliorating, I guess, in our approach and our views when it seemed like the norms are all going to hold and the institutions were going to be okay. Yeah. Yeah. And that all of this stuff wasn't just going to be so easily. The consequences felt small, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It seemed like the stakes were pretty low to play with some of that kind of stuff. And to needle people, you know, throw bombs a little bit and have a little bit, you know, of kind of mean-spirited fun with it.

And also to be subjected to that by people on the other side. It was kind of those how, that was the rules of the game, right? 15 years ago, maybe. And it was fine. It was fun. But it probably was not the right way to go about it. I've just made this point a million times. But like, one of the things I resent the most about this period is that for most of my career, I was the guy who the sober responsible people would say to me,

you know, you're right, but you're going too far, be more responsible. Don't work that blue. You know, really, that's going to be the cover of your book, you know, like all that kind of stuff, right? And I know Kevin's had this experience where, you know, an editor would call and say, can we just tone this down a little bit, that kind of thing. I was that guy. And one of my great frustrations in the, you know, the Trump era was the guys who, you know, were 15 years older than us and sort of the elder

statesmen, the responsible, serious people, an enormous, not all of them, I know, not Robbie George. I mean, I can name people who were responsible, but a enormous number of them were like, look, at the end of the day, we're Republicans. And so therefore, we're going to be for this guy. And then very soon, it became less hold your nose for this guy to, can you believe how awesome this guy is. And that's one of the reason why we launched the dispatch is like we'd both been looking around saying, well, surely someone responsible is going to do this. And they're like, holy crap, it's us. The moral of the stories are the worst part of all of this, that in our 50s we had to become grownups.

Yeah, no, but there's a certain. There's a certain truth to that. And so like... And one of the things I really lament is, like, I had not appreciated back in the day how a big source of inspiration for funny writing was that partisan sort of...

Yeah. ...angor at the other team that drove you to find the most cutting, joky insult, the whatever, the most ridiculous description. It's nutpicking, right? I mean, it was fun.

Yeah. But I... I just got cut off from it because it's not so much that it still couldn't caricature the other side, and I still believe in some of the caricatures of the other side, but it was that my own mental process as a writer thinking, well, what's your response when someone says, well, what about your side? And I used to not have that worry, right? I mean, yeah, we had a few crazies, you know, in the fever swamps and stuff like that,

but they weren't running the party. they weren't, you know, defining the party. They were marginal players, right? The birthers, we didn't take the birther seriously because they were, there were 10 of them, and you shrugged them off. And they were like, they'd be the kind of people who'd come up to you after a speech

and, like, harangue for not doing more on the birther issue. And you're like, okay, guy. But it wasn't worth like a big fight about it because they didn't seem consequential. Every now, I don't know if you guys had this experience, but every now and then at some, not necessarily an NR, event, but an event that a lot of NR people were invited to because either in New York or whatever,

you can't know you meet someone with their USS Liberty T-shirt or sign or whatever. And for listeners who don't know, U.S. Liberty was the ship that was hit by Israeli forces in, what, 67, I want to say, something like that. And for a real fringe bunch of people on the right, this was a deliberate act of anti-American murder and the Jews, this and the Jews, that. and all that kind of stuff, when instead it was a terrible mistake. And, like, the historians are kind of settled on this. And you'd meet these people, and you're like, oh, yeah, fever swamp people.

You know, every now and I'd meet someone from the John Birch Society. It's like, oh, or I get attacked from V-DARE. And I'm like, oh, okay, yeah, I remember that. Those are those people. And the liberty is the United Fruit Company of the right. Yes, exactly. That's exactly. Yeah.

And those people, when Trump came in, not all Trump, Trump people were those people. But what happened was Trump knocked down all of the barbed wire, all of the fences, all of the lines, demarcating what was considered sane, sensible, defensible conservatism, and what was considered fever swampy. And, in fact, to call something fever swampy meant you were part of the establishment and the conservative's always fail. What have the conservatives ever conserved and all those nonsense? And now just vast swaps. I mean, the New York Young Republicans Club, a more, like, I used to have so much contempt for that crowd because they were the, you know,

Elizabeth Dole is awesome blue blazer wearing dorks. And now it's like, you know, two clicks shy of, you know, the American Bund over there. And like the number of people, like a number of institutions that have been taking, over by fever-somp crankery, who you're supposed to have in the big tent, but you can't have Nikki Haley. It's just a different thing now, and I lose my ability to sort of say, you know, I'm so grateful for the Democratic Socialist of America stuff, is because, like, these people I can make fun of. Like, these people I have full carte blanche to make fun of, and it's amazing

how many lefties are now attacking me for making fun of them. And they're like, why don't you criticize the people, the crazies on your side. I'm like, have you been reading me for 11 years? Hello. You know? Elizabeth Duller is awesome. Well, yeah, I mean, there's so much to say there. But I think we'll just wrap the segment about our big mistakes. Thank you both for volunteering.

I'm going to just not volunteer any of mine. We'll move on. Oh, come on. You had to have come here. It was something that you were wrong about. You don't have to explain it. I don't have any mistakes. I got nothing to say.

No, that's not true. I mean, I've got a lot. Fourthcoming column. I don't have, yeah, I don't have a list. Once you get that Taliban piece done. Yeah, exactly. I don't, I don't have a list like Jonah does, although I will associate myself with a bunch of yours. I will say my most embarrassing probably was a piece that I wrote for the weekly standard. My, our managing editor at the time, Richard Starr, is a terrific editor, terrific guy, asked me out, this was when I was out, I was reporting all the time, I was on the road all the time. I was talking to every single Republican presidential campaign. I was really plugged in. I was. very well sourced, hey, you know, take everything that you've learned on sort of a cumulative basis and just spit it out as a ranking. Like, who's the most likely Republican to win the

Republican nomination in 2016? And I think I've told parts of this story before. But I did that. So I said, okay, I'll take a few days and hide away in a cabin somewhere and write this up. And so I wrote it up. And I went, you know, one to however many there were, 16 or 18 or or something like that. And I included Donald Trump in the ranking. I had already at that point had several run-ins with Trump. He had come after me several times. I had called him a clown at a New Hampshire, like sort of one of the very first moments where the potential Republican candidates came out and were seen. I had, he was there. Melania Trump was retweeting my stuff when I was quoting his speeches. I criticized him. I wrote this piece. And,

And about a week before I'd written the piece, Paul Ryan, who was thought to be a potential presidential candidate, hadn't been the vice presidential nominee in 2012, had taken himself out of the running, said, I'm not running for president, it's not happening, there's no way it's going to. And I wrote the piece and thinking I was really hilarious, I put Paul Ryan at, I don't know, whatever the number was, 15, and Donald Trump at 16. So Paul Ryan had already actually taken himself out of the race, and I said he was still more likely to be the Republican nominee than Donald Trump was. So I was as wrong as one could be on that.

On a more substantive level, I think the thing I've gotten wrong, and I've mentioned this in passing before, but I don't know that I've ever done this sort of full confessional. I used to obsess about the gallop polls of self-identified conservatives, moderates, and liberals. And there came a time in the Bush years and beyond when self-identified conservatives surged. And there were many more self-identified conservatives in the country than there had been self-identified liberals. And when I analyzed this, I just made this colossal mistake in assuming that all of those self-identified conservatives were conservative in exactly the same way I was, which meant Ronald Reagan, limited government. deeply ideological, had read the Federalist papers five times, students of Tocqueville, spent a ton of time reading Hayek and Von Mises, and were these deeply ideological actors in a way that, like, I look back on and out, that's insane that I ever thought that. I mean, such a fundamental mistake of

analysis that I would have thought that of most of them or even some of them. But I would, can I make a, please jump in, pile on. I did it to you. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I hear you. No, that's fine. But I was going to say is that point that you're making is worth keeping in mind when you hear all about all these polls where people say they like socialism and don't like capitalism. Yes. Because as Kevin and I have been banging our spoons on our high chairs for a long time about, they don't, they haven't read marks either, right?

Right. They haven't read the Federalist paper, so they're not conservative and they haven't read marks so they're not, you know, they're not socialists. They just don't like, it's a thermostatic thing. And it's not. right. It's not an ideological thing. Look, I mean, it's consistent with Sarah's point, Sarah Isker's point, that she makes regularly about the sort of folly of issue polling. But I would say the current analog to this, I think, in some ways. And I have to sort of remind myself on an active conscious basis, not to make the same mistake again, occurs when we talk about non-Maga Republicans. Nick had a great call on this on Friday. We'll put that in all of these other. embarrassing things in the show notes. But sometimes when I hear non-Mega Republicans, I think, oh, these are people like me. You know, so now if you've got 50, 60 plus percent, I mean, I'm not a Republican in any definition. Never really was, but certainly not anymore. But non-Maga conservatives,

non-Mega Republicans, I think, oh, these are people who are conservative the way I'm conservative, but just don't like Donald Trump or don't like what he's done to conservatism. I don't agree with him on a policy level. That is not who non-Maga Republicans are. They come in all sorts of varieties. But also, you should have the same epistemic humility about the people who describe themselves as MAGA Republicans. Because a lot of them, like, I mean, maybe Kevin had a different experience. And it's been a while, but like how many people I would meet on National Review cruises

who were clearly sympathetic to Trump? and some of them, you know, one of the weird things about National Review Cruises is how many people didn't read National Review who went on National Review Cruises, but some of them did not know what my positions were on Trump. And, but they would still say, Johnny, you, you know, you know people in the Republican Party, you know, you, is there any way you can talk to you to just tell him to stay off Twitter? Because he's his own worst enemy and, you know, and he's doing good. Like, there are an enormous number of people out there who don't follow politics closely, who I have, I have them in, you know, my extended family, I have, you know, like there are people out there who, if they only watch Fox, they get the best version possible of Trump and they think that that's actually Trump. And it's not, but that doesn't make them, you know, sort of deranged, weird, you know,

cult of personality people. It just makes them wrong. And like, there isn't a, don't get me wrong and I want to get Kevin started, but there isn't an irreducible number of people who, are deranged cultural personality people. And there's a bunch of people who are monetizing their access to those people in all sorts of ways and selling them all sorts of Trump's swag and all of the rest. But that doesn't mean every single person. I mean, like, there are lots of people who are wrong who were not bad people. And that's something that is like I'm trying to internalize that both for the left and the right.

and which is why I'm grateful for when you get people who are just like clearly both wrong and bad people because then you can write about them unrestrainedly. And if you've read, if you were part of a party or a faction of the DSA that says you are Maoist, you know, I don't have to be like, We don't have to hear both. I'm so welcome our new Maoist, you know, interlocutors.

We're going to have the, I don't want to get Kevin started mug, in the dispatch merchandise that's pretty good I like it I don't know I would wear I don't want to wear Kevin I don't want to get Kevin started

hoodie Jonah mentioned Steve's forthcoming Taliban story and I was just thinking Steve's sources for that are the only Taliban guys who ever die of old age got to put that to bed

hey at one point I Jonah wanted to make the new Steve's Taliban story my Florida piece and I wrote the Florida piece you did

You did. It was excellent. The primary is coming up. Speaking of putting it to bed, I got to do some of that in a minute. Kevin has written 40,000 words since then. I've written 35,000 words since then. But anyway, go on. So, like, no question, way more than 40,000. Yeah, yeah. You both have probably written 100,000 words since then. So we don't have, we don't really have any time left. We've blown way past all of our. Yeah, my wife's pissed, but go on. I'm sorry, you can blame me. Not that you need my invitation to blame me. It's literally in your bio. that he blamed Steve Hayes for everything. On the long drive on Thursday that I'm going to have, I'm actually going to let her listen to this podcast. That's great.

She'll love it. She's going to love it. Yeah. It's good that she's the smarter, handsomer, better part of the Goldberg-Gabora. Pretty easy to clear those bars. But anyway, go on. Make sure I got that in.

So the last question, the closing question, is a pretty simple one. I wanted to ask you both, what piece of advice have you gotten over the years? Understand this as broadly as you want to understand it. What piece of advice have you gotten over the years, professional, personal, family, that you wish you had taken seriously a long, long time ago because you now understand

just how correct it was or helpful it would have been had you taken it seriously earlier. And Joan, I'll start with you. Sure. Well, I mean, I'm tempted in the eulogy area. wrote to my dad, one of the pieces of advice he gave me, and you guys know, I talk about my dad's advice all the time. But when I was six or seven, we were on our way one Sunday morning to get locks and bagels, as was Goldberg family tradition. And he stopped dead in his tracks around 88th Street and Broadway, squeezed my hand and said, Jonah, and I'm not making this up.

Jonah, if you were ever arrested or pulled over in a South American country, tell the police officers you're sorry, you didn't mean it, and is there any way I can pay the fine right here rather than go down to the jail? And I was like, okay, daddy. I mean, like, what am I supposed to do with this? I'm like, I'm 10 years out from even being able to drive, you know, but I haven't had to take advantage of that advice yet, so I'll leave that aside. The other piece of advice that my dad gave me that repeatedly, and he wasn't the only person,

but he was the one I should have listened to, is don't. develop the discipline of keeping a journal. And I think that's right for all sorts of professional reasons that I, like it would be incredibly helpful to me about insights I had or things I learned or quotes or whatever. I could write a memoir if I had kept a journal. There's no way I can write a memoir now. But it's not really the professional thing. I did not plan on being the sole survivor of my family.

and there are so many things about like the sort of the stories of my family that I would love to be able to tell my daughter and pass on. I can't remember and I have no one to check with. Right. I can't call my brother and say, who was that guy or how did that happen or what was going on? They don't exist and so they're gone. And I wish I had kept the journal, but I just never had the discipline to do it. I am definitely playing this part back for my kids. Yeah.

Take a, keep a journal kids. Kevin, what about you? You know, I had a friend named Ron Gibson, and Ron had first become a newspaper reporter. He's very young, maybe in the late 1940s, early 1950s. And he worked with a guy who was this old legendary reporter who had been, you know, war correspondent and covered World War II and some other stuff.

And he passed on something that Ron passed on to me, and he told him, you know, when you're out, covering a story, and you're out on the road, never order the Swiss steak. You've got no way of knowing what's underneath that gravy. And I've taken it to heart. The more serious one that I got from a lot of people, and it's the most obvious one, save more money.

I really should have saved more money. Save more money, yeah. Compounding interest. The compounding interest advice that I ignored back in the day, boy, I'd be in better shape now if I had it. So do you never order a Swiss steak? Have you ever ordered a Swiss steak? I don't really even know what Swiss steak is.

It's like glorified hamburger with gravy on it, isn't it? Right. That's kind of what I thought. And I've spent a lot of time in Switzerland. I've never seen it on the menu. My mother used to make this stuff she called Swiss steak, but my mother, who was a famously horrible cook, would just take like a round steak

because it's the cheapest steak you could buy at the grocery store and cook it in the skillet for like 40 minutes until it was just like jerky. It shredded. And then dump a can of stewed tomatoes on top of it. And that was Swiss steak. And I'm pretty sure the Swiss don't do that. In fact, I'm pretty sure if you try to serve them that, they would abandon their position of neutrality and invade your country.

Mine is much less funny and much less profound than either of yours. But it's very simple, and I've come by it honestly. People have been telling me for my whole life to get more sleep. And I've ignored them forever, particularly in the first four or five years of the dispatch when I was editing the morning dispatch and answering emails. at answering emails at midnight and getting up and doing the morning dispatch at five in the morning. And I never really, I never gave any thought to getting more sleep, but it never occurred to me that I would perform worse if I were exhausted. And I didn't, I didn't think a lot about my performance, but even like doing TV and stuff. I never took it seriously.

And now I mentioned this when we talked to Kyla Scanlon a few weeks ago, now that I have this, this, this. or a ring, it tracks it all for you. And the difference it makes to get real sleep every night. It's huge. I mean, this shouldn't be like an epiphany. To me, it's unbelievable what a difference it bakes. Like if you get, you know, six, seven, seven plus hours of sleep as opposed to four, your brain fires in a totally different way. And you make a lot more sense. I ignored that advice from my entire adult life until very recently. And I think if I had to do again, now there are, of course, these sort of long-term studies about the long-term effects on your brain of not getting enough sleep at various points of your life. And, you know, going years and years getting four or five hours

of sleep can increase your likelihood of developing dementia and other things, which I didn't pay much attention to before. But man, getting sleep matters a lot. And I'm doing better on that front now. I've been pretty good about getting myself enough sleep, but I miss that ancillary, that corollary piece of advice, but it's also important that you make sure your wife gets enough sleep, but I'm just a bad husband, and I let her get up at night and deal with the kids when they wake up at 2 o'clock in the morning. So also get your wife enough sleep, yes. But you're an early to bed early to rise, guy. Yeah, yeah, I get up like, yeah, before five.

My emails from you are four in the morning or something. Well, so, like, one piece of advice I did take was the morning is the only part of the day, you control because by the afternoon the day controls you and that's like I learned 15 20 years ago not to force writing a column or a magazine piece right I mean columns different because you got to get it done by the deadline but like a magazine piece where if I had you know a day or two to get it done better to stop at four or five in the afternoon wake up early because I could do better at 45 for 45 at 6 a.m. than I could trying to force it for four hours

at the end of the day. And there are a lot of ways in which I think that's true is that really as you get older, your brain starts the sunset much earlier in the day, and like you're just much more productive in mornings. Well, speaking of brain sunsetting, we're grateful to the eight of you

who are still listening, almost an hour and a half in. We are now gone to sort of Joe Rogan length. If you could all email my wife and apologize, that would be great. We should also know this is close seven o'clock of evening east coast east coast time uh this is not our usual recording time if you have other examples of jonah's errors over the years please send them to going into business with steve at the dispatch dot com we would appreciate those we can do a big like a post we do the the

monthly erata column we could just do a jonah erratica yeah just as long as you pronounce erotta not erotica anyway i got to get home so i'm i am not at home i am not at home i am in the office. You guys are just doing it in your basements or whatever. So goodbye. Yeah, you live a couple blocks from your home. Thanks for listening, everybody. See you guys. Finally, if you want to support what we're doing here, you can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast, Player of Choice, to help new listeners find us. And speaking of support, here's a shout-out to a few folks who recently joined as founding Lifetime members,

Richard Woolery, Buffy Bailey, and Kevin Johnson. We're glad to have you aboard. One quick note, we are ending our founding lifetime membership offer at the end of August. For seven years, we've offered founding lifetime memberships for $1,500. But at the end of this month, that price doubles. So if you're interested in supporting the dispatch and enjoying a lifetime of dispatch editorial goodness, now's the time. Please join us as a dispatch founding lifetime member today. 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 from people who think they've never made a mistake. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible, Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.