The Dispatch Podcast - Six Months Later
Episode Date: July 7, 2021In this podcast, our hosts indulge in a wide-ranging airing of grievances, starting with a reflection on the political salience of the January 6 Capitol insurrection, six months after the fact. The ga...ng then discusses whether Republicans have lost the right to be called the party of ideas and what might be behind the GOP’s current allergy to nuance. Sarah also explores the tension between Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump that cropped up over Trump’s recent Florida rally. Looking ahead to the 2024 elections, Chris argues that most pundits are missing who will be the biggest player, by far, in the contest: President Joe Biden. Lastly, Chris asks whether the abysmal state of election administration in some cases—as revealed by the recent New York City mayoral race—is proof that Democrats' are not taking threats to the American democracy seriously, and whether the failure to do so will make it easier for bad actors to steal elections. Show Notes: -New York Times: Inside the Capitol Riot: An Exclusive Video Investigation -Straw poll showing Ron DeSantis edging out Donald Trump in 2024 -Chris’ column on NYC mayoral race: “Nobody Will Ever Know Who Really Won” -Ezra Klein: California Is Making Liberals Squirm -Associated Press: Trump announces suits against Facebook, Twitter and Google Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
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Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgir, joined by Jonah Goldberg, David French, and Chris Stierwalt. We've got a lot of fun topics today. We're going to start with January 6th, six months later.
Jonah's got some thoughts on the Republican Party's, well, messaging. We'll then dive into some 2024 how the GOP primary is shaping up with a not just elephant in the room, like a mastodon.
in the room in the form of Donald Trump
and we'll end up with
what the New York
City Board of Elections
debacle means for
election security efforts,
et cetera, moving forward.
Let's dive right in.
It's six months later.
Where are we?
Yeah, so I would recommend, I've got a recommendation.
We can put it in the show notes,
but The New York Times did a comprehensive visual investigation
of how Trump supporters took the U.S. Capitol.
You can see it on YouTube,
and it literally walks you through step by step by step
what occurred on January 6th.
And seeing it again with the cameras on the ground,
the sort of the cell phone cameras from the Trump supporters, the news cameras.
It's really remarkable how, and we knew all this, we saw it, how violent it was.
It's remarkable how so much of it appeared to be actually rather meticulously planned by
some of the individuals involved.
It's a shocking thing to see.
But where I am, where I live in very red Tennessee, I did that New York Times bubble calculator where you put in your address and it sort of tells you what your neighborhood is like.
My neighborhood is 85% Republican. I don't ever hear about January 6th. Nobody talks about January 6th. And there are interesting reactions when I bring it up.
But I want to start with Chris, our, just, you know, welcome Chris, upgrade from Steve and appreciate, appreciate you in enhancing the pod today.
So, you know, you talk to a lot of folks, you talk to a lot of politicians, you talk to a lot of people in the political establishment.
On the GOP side, what is the behind?
closed doors assessment of January 6 because the out front assessment of January 6 is essentially
move on nothing really to see here. Is there in is that is that what's also happening in the
in the quieter conversations? Well I first of all think that as lucky uh as I am to be with you today
Steve Hayes is in Wisconsin eating Bratworth so maybe it's I don't know I don't want to say better
That's a value judgment.
Look, there are twin concerns for the closet normals.
There are twin concerns.
So I think here what we're talking about are McConnellite or normal mainstream Republicans
from the old, from from, from Jan Olden days, who still make up a plurality probably
of the Republican Party.
And if you're in the House of Representatives, if you're Kevin Brady, if you're, we could
think of a bunch of guys and gals like this.
How do you perceive this?
So you have the danger on the one side, which are the Democrats.
But the real danger here is the nationalist right because the reason they can't talk about it or don't want to talk about it isn't the stated reason.
There's some truth in the stated reason.
And as we look at Kevin McCarthy wrestling with the question of this January 6th commission, to put members on, to not put members on, if you put members on, do you put members on, do you put
jack wagons like Matt Gates and whomever on there to a grandstand and turn the whole thing
into a farce, right, which would be the textbook House Republican play. But if you do that,
is that a good idea? The problem is, if you were to be sober-sighted and serious about these things,
the blowback that you're going to get from the nationalist right, from the Tucker Carlson
fan base, from all of this stuff, is so intense because they can.
No one cares about January 6th more than the deniers, the creeps, the weirdos, and the freaks.
They are the most intent on this because it is so delegitimizing for them that they care about it the most.
So I think that's the reason they want to make like a hole in the water is because they cannot ruffle up that 20% or so of the Republican Party that is just, you know, lit.
So, Sarah, does January 6th have any continuing political salience?
Now, we know that on the GOP side, and again, I mean, if you bring it up to folks around here,
there's either a combination of sort of a pained look, which is like, do we have to talk about that?
Is that something that we need to talk about?
or kind of angry
like this is
don't exaggerate what happened there
that was you know
don't even talk about that in the same
you know don't bring that up
unless you're going to bring up the riots in the cities
and so there's this either
sort of pain this
we don't want to talk about this
because that's not really who we are
and bringing this up is like bringing up a bad memory
we need to move on move on move on
but does that isolate
Republicans from the rest of America
Or is this just something that is going to be in everybody's rearview mirror?
It's going to be historical moment that just doesn't have continuing political salience.
For the two bases, both on the left and the right, it will have some political salians.
But frankly, I think those bases that I'm here talking about are very, very small.
2022 will be one or lost on crime, immigration, maybe some education, you know, critical race
theory stuff sort of on the periphery. January 6th will not be the issue that wins or loses
those, you know, the House of Representatives for the Republicans, for instance. I think you're right
that when you have candidates talking to their most ardent bases, it could be in that
stump speech. But, you know, that's not even a turnout issue at that point. That's just
rallying the faithful. Um, so no, I think that, um, you know, you'll have the commission in the
house. I think that will only exacerbate the movie oniness of the whole thing, actually.
Uh, the only part that won't are the ongoing prosecutions. You, uh, will have trials starting at some
point, some of those will have fireworks. Not many of them. A lot of them will plead out. A lot of them
will be pretty state affairs as criminal trials actually tend to be despite the movies.
But given how many we're talking about, I think it's likely that you have one or two where you have
sort of a, what was that a Colombo moment? What like 1970s show, you know, where you have this massive
thing happen on the stand, just the odds are that something like that happens. You know,
if that happens in October of 2022, could that have some salient? Sure, I don't want to say that it
won't. But at this point, crime and immigration, man, and obviously the economy and jobs.
Like, that's a known, known, known, known to honor the late Secretary Rumsfeld. But yeah, no, this will not
be in the top 10 issues.
All right.
So Jonah,
putting on,
can you be a predictive
historian?
Does that work?
Putting on your,
if you had to look,
if you're going to be
looking back on this event,
say five years from now,
is your best bet
that what happened on January 6th
will be seen in hindsight
is the peak
of a particular kind
fever that sort of slowly broke over time or is it a harbinger will it have been seen as sort of
a harbinger of increased political violence still to come is this something that was that's the
warning bell in the night saying this is how polarized and angry we are and this was this and
this is going to be the thing that should have awakened us but didn't or is this the thing that
Republicans are going to look back on an embarrassment and move away from and try to and sort of
slowly move towards normality. And I guess this might segue into your topic a little bit.
Well, also, this is a good way of phrasing the question because it, it, it, it segues into my,
my, my basic agreement with Sarah, with one exception. But before I get to that, just for the record,
and for the sake of clarity, and to avoid a riot in the comment sections, the TV show that would regularly feature a huge revelation on the stand would be Perry Mason, which was not quite in 1970s.
It was 60s.
And, I mean, it happened in other things, Ironside.
There was, of course, the Brady, Matt Locke, and there's, of course, the Brady bunch where Mike Brady throws his.
briefcase down on the floor and proves the guy doesn't in fact have whiplash.
So, I mean, it's happened in other episodes.
The stunning revelations and TV shows that in Colombo typically happen in someone's living
room where Colombo would say, oh, that's it, great.
Oh, just one more thing.
And then get the person to admit that, in fact, they had killed hundreds of people and ate
their livers or whatever it was.
So be that as it may.
I think Sarah is absolutely right if one is making a generally straight line prediction about
where we are to where and the trajectory of where we're heading.
The problem, the only thing, the only caveat I'd have, which I'm sure Sarah would agree with
to some extent, is events, dear boy, right?
I mean, things can happen.
And if the proud boys and the oathkeepers and these other knobs,
somebody, or if Trump incites them again, which some of his statements lately kind of sound
like he is, all of a sudden dots that are, you know, right now for a lot of people on the
right who don't want to talk about, and not even on the right, just a lot of normal Americans
don't want to talk about January 6th, it's one dot. But like in geometry, if you have two dots,
you can then draw a line between them. And if you have a couple more dots, and those dots are
significant and scary, then all of a sudden it could be disastrous for, for Republicans, I think.
I mean, people forget how adept, and I thought fairly dishonest and cynical, Bill Clinton was
at pinning Oklahoma City on Rush Limbaugh and Republicans generally back then. I don't think Biden
has the chops and the environment is so different now, but Trump supporters could help, right? And they could
they could help by like doing more of this kind of thing and if they do more of this kind of
thing then i think it will really it could really change the zeitgeist that said in five years
i think my hunch would be january six is remembered as a searing at minimum as a searing shameful
embarrassment for the country and for the right in general and i think in 25 years it will be
you know, it'll actually
loom in some ways larger
because it will by then
be stripped of its
partisan own the libs
own the cons kind of polarization
stuff and instead it'll be taught in some classes
in grade school about this terrible thing that happened
and it'll be kind of like the bonus army
kind of march and that kind of thing
and
but right now there are just too many people
who are too invested in the idea
that this thing shouldn't be used against them for, you know,
Republicans to join in and actually describe the thing accurately, I think.
And I think just if I can say, David, to the question about its salience in the midterm elections
and the quadrennial, it's salience is enormous.
We just can't talk about it.
It won't be in ads.
Well, it'll be in a lot of Democratic ads.
Democrats are not going to shy away from rubbing people's noses in it.
but it's it's going it is uh the it's the water we're swimming in in a big way and we just won't be
able to see it in its right scope for another decade or so can i actually draw i mean so i i want
to piece together two things jonah said and together i agree with them one is that obviously events
matter uh i thought you're going to go with colombo stuff i was so sorry and two that this will loom larger later
So let me give you an example of, you know, John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry.
I think that if that in 1859 had just sort of been this one-off event and, you know, nothing much happened and we still had slavery today, I don't know that we would all remember John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry or that we would have, you know, the phrase bleeding Kansas and things like that.
the reason that John Brown's raid we all know so much about is because a year later we have a civil war
and it was seen as this precursor event. I think events do matter as they unfold. I think January 6 will loom
very large if that was a precursor event to bad things. I don't know if America just sort of goes
back, the pendulum swings the other way, the populist moment starts waning. Maybe it will be seen
as the high point of the populist moment, maybe, but, you know, I think you'll have to be in sort
of college history books to be reading much about January 6th versus high school history books
where I think you will need some event down the road. You know, that's one thing that I think
this both gives me, there's a way in which this gives me a tiny bit of optimism that people
will move on in a way it gives me pessimism, and that is the let's not talk about this
cringe, move on reaction from sort of your normal mainstream Republican, which indicates on the
one hand, this sort of cringe, can we not talk about this, let's move on, indicates that's
not what they want to be. They're not proud of it. But at the other hand, the refusal to hold
people accountable to sort of lean into purging this says that the, you know, that the malignancy
remains. And so it's still there. And the, you know, you still have this hardcore base. And now
there's this minor cottage industry of saying sort of the real crime isn't the protest at the
Capitol, but the wave of arrests of the protesters of the Capitol. That's the real crime.
And so you do have something festering that is still there that is not being expelled
by the people who are ashamed of it.
They are ashamed of it.
They don't want to talk about it.
They're not doing anything at all affirmatively to expel this element from the party.
And that's why I think that, you know, the future is really up in the air on this.
All right.
Well, I handed to Jonah, although now I want to change my historical analogy to the Brooks Sumner affair.
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All right, Jonah. Your turn.
Okay. So I will pull back the curtain a little bit. I'll break down the fourth wall, as it were, on this podcast, and reveal that I came to my subject in part because I was away for the weekend. I completely tuned out politics, except in over cocktails. And I get back and I finally plug basically back into Twitter and whatnot. And I encounter almost in rapid,
machine gun fire succession, a series of incandescently stupid things.
I mean, just really just dumb, dumb things, not smart, different, you know, spell checkered
an M&M factory dumb.
And it, it vexed me.
And I'll give you a couple examples.
Mike Lindell came out and gave a statement saying that Trump, that Joe Biden must resign.
He must acknowledge he stole the election and resign without seeming to be aware that
under our constitutional order that would not make Trump president.
It would make Kamala Harris president.
And then maybe Harris would have to resign too, which would then make Nancy Pelosi
president.
At no point in the chain of command does Donald Trump get to be president in this scenario.
But fine, Mike Lindell's fringe character, whatever, he gets a lot of airtime.
Fine.
Alan West, who is, I believe, running for governor.
Accurate.
And was a former congressman, former head of the Texas GOP.
as head of the Texas GUP said that Texas should consider a secession,
which is dumb.
I'm just going to stipulate that.
He said in an interview on Newsmax that in very serious tones,
like very, very serious like I am a scholar here, tone,
said that the basic truth is that the Texas tax code is basically is fundamentally built on,
I'm not quoting, but this is the gist of it,
is built upon the planks,
which I didn't know there were planks,
the planks of the Communist Manifesto.
And because property taxes are bad for some reason, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And, you know, you could look it up.
Property taxes existed before the Communist Manifesto.
Last one was Kaylee McEnany on Fox saying that
all of the main,
whatever that means. What all of the main founding fathers opposed slavery and knew it was evil?
And I don't expect Gailie McAnney to know much of anything about anything. But my old friend,
Bill Bennett, is sitting there nodding as she's talking about all of this. And it's sort of
heartbreaking to me. And then we can go far and wide. We've all seen these examples. There seems
in that video that the New York Times put out about the siege, you have the guy who was on January 6,
barricading the door coming out saying this was no different than a tourist visit.
So the question is, what is the source, what is the need to take fundamentally stupid positions
or fundamentally cockamamie positions to stand out from the crowd?
It used to be that, you know, Pat Monaghan, it wasn't that long ago, said the Republican Party was
the party of ideas.
And now it seems to have gone a completely different way.
And yes, there is stupidity on the Democratic side.
Cory Bush says crazy things, yada, yada, yada.
But what is the driver of this as a media messaging political strategy that rather than take a little more effort and make a smart point, it seems like people are determined to make dumb points?
And I'll go with Sarah first because she thought this topic, I was kidding when I brought up that this was going to be my topic.
So she gets for a stab.
That's not the first time this has happened.
And David was talking about Adrian Vermeul's common good constitutionalism.
And I said, no, David, you're missing it.
This is sarcasm.
I would say that David was right.
I think that David might have been right.
I just got my copy of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy and the cover, like,
the main article is common good constitutionalism, why it's better or something.
And I was like, oh, God.
Um,
So I actually think, Jonah, that this is capitalism at work, intellectual capitalism of a form.
On advisory opinions this week, David and I ran through some of the issues that came up in the last orders of the term,
one of which was on defamation of public figures and that you have to show actual malice.
And in Gorsuch's lengthy, hey, I wish we would take.
this at some point writing, he discusses how the incentives of the current media environment
are pretty perverse. And that, you know, back when they came up with the actual malice standard
in 1964, you had your three networks, you had a few, you know, major national newspapers.
All of those newspapers had hundreds and hundreds of employees and fact checkers and editors.
And that now there are good things that have come with the democratization of media.
and social media, no doubt.
People's accessed information
is just wildly higher
than it was before,
and their access to give their stories
is much higher as well.
However, he cites, for instance,
a study which shows that
disinformation had advantage over truth
in every category
on at least one platform
that shall not be named.
It was disseminated wider.
Yes.
It was disseminated wider, faster, by more people, I mean, all of it, than the truth.
And so the legal incentives for anyone publishing information because of the actual Malice standard is that they are better off saying mistruths about public figures.
And the business incentives are, in fact, to have fewer fact checkers, fewer editors,
because the more sensationalist information does better,
gets more clicks, sees more eyeballs, moves faster,
and gets your story around.
All right.
So how does this apply to what we're talking about?
Jonah, their incentives are to do exactly this.
What are we talking about right now?
The things that they said they were wrong.
I remember being on the Carly campaign
and us just never getting any traction in the media,
in polling, et cetera.
And looking back, I'm not saying this is the only reason,
but I was having this conversation with a fellow Carly alum.
I did a huge disservice to my candidate.
I proofread everything, literally every single thing,
before it left our campaign, every press release,
every speech, every op-ed, every fundraising appeal
to check for typos, grammar, all of that.
And the result was, you know, we had a sort of perfect,
We never said something that wasn't footnoted in a speech.
There were never grammatical errors to mock.
And the result was nobody paid any attention to anything we said or did.
The Trump campaign put out things that like, you know, the capitalization, the punctuation
in random places, misspelling literally everyone's name they ever referenced.
And every single time, it got attention.
And so what have people learned from that?
To say that the majority of the founders were against slavery, because now there's a whole
conversation about just how many of the founders were against slavery and her statement
got her attention. And that's intellectual capitalism and the perverse current incentives
that we have. The end. I have thoughts, but I want to keep the ball rolling. Let's assume that
Sarah has got a point here, which is always a safe assumption, or almost always a safe
assumption. Chris, can we blame the people, right? Because if her point is, it's the marketplace,
well, the marketplace is driven by the consumers.
So do the people want the stupid?
I mean, I'll give you another example over an American thinker.
They had a very long piece, which had charts, charts and tables,
demonstrating apparently that Joe Biden, in fact, lost California,
which he won by about 30 points.
And you picture a guy with filthy fingernails sitting at his keyboard, clacking away,
writing this thing. And it's all based on random number generation software, blah, blah, blah, blah,
and how you can tell the digits were plate. You're like, whatever you're smoking, you need to either
smoke more of it or you need to smoke less of it. I love that piece. That was truly great.
Okay, so, but there's clearly a market for this stuff. And I understand a site like American thinker,
which depends, which does not have, it's not a first order site. It needs traffic. It needs to
to come up with garbage stuff that that you know like the gateway pundit model writ small but like
what why would leading republicans you know why josh mando all these people do people actually
want this stuff or is it purely a media messaging play to get attention well if they were smart enough
to be stupid on purpose they wouldn't be stupid uh but they're stupid and here's the you know you mentioned
Bill Bennett. So there's an example of a guy who we know was smart and then changed, right? And
what changed, how it changed, whatever. But so you, so there are some people who you know are
smart people who are going along with things that are not. And so that is certainly a subcategory
and there are market pressures there and there's other stuff, for sure. But here's the thing.
Conservative populism is cultural populism, right? It's George Wallace. And, you know,
George Wallace used to talk about a pointy-headed intellectuals that couldn't even park a bicycle
straight. And they are looking down their noses at you. So there is a strong current, not necessarily
of conservatism, but in the American right, on the culture war populist side that has total contempt
for credential, total contempt for capacity, total contempt for intellect or intellectualism anyway. And
when you get a political movement that is basically arranged around the idea that the experts
are always wrong, and it's stupid to be smart, and that celebrates the enthusiastic ignorance of
Donald Trump and many of his supporters, right?
They feel things.
They don't know things.
It's very romantic.
It's very emotional.
And that set of desires punishes people.
who are thoughtful, punishes people who are learned, punishes people who are trying to be a thorough
in their investigation of questions. And it rewards people who just say stuff, right? Because one of the
things, by the way, that voters liked about Donald Trump was he tells it like it is, which he didn't,
but what they meant was, and in poll after poll, one of his high attributes, tells it like it is.
And what they mean is he just says stuff.
He doesn't seem like he's being thoughtful or he doesn't seem like he's, as John Kerry would say, nuanced.
And what has basically happened is the George Wallace wing of the Republican Party has, is driving the bus.
And we ought not be surprised that as it's driving the bus, it keeps slamming into walls, abutments, guardrails, and crossing guards.
Okay, so David, Chris has just laid out.
a case that it pays
it pays to
draw in bright crayons outside the lines
and that people who
use
nuance and subtlety of shade
within the lines get punished
for it. Now we are finishing a long week
we just got to have a long weekend
where you have been punished for precisely
that for several days now.
I've lost track
about which one of your
someone said that you were demon
Was that a joke or was that?
I can't remember.
Possessed.
Possessed.
Yeah, okay.
To be fair, only possibly possessed.
So this person has an open mind, is open to persuasion that I might not be possessed.
So, you know, we need to be accurate.
And then folks at another semi-fringe site made the also clever Vichy French pun, which, you know,
it's like Vichy French jokes to me are only slightly less original, unoriginal than jokes
that play on the name Jonah, which I exhausted hearing all of the various versions of
Jonah and the whale jokes in, like, third grade.
If David got exhausted from Beechy French jokes in the third grade, though, I will be
impressed.
Yes, that would be impressive.
That would be really impressive.
That did not occur.
Those are some real mean girls in third grade.
That said, so, David, the thing that's interesting about a lot of the attacks
on you is that they, they still cling to the form of being cerebral, of being clever,
of being nuanced.
And the fact is that most of them, you know, I mean, people can disagree with you.
I have my disagreements to do.
But like most of the disagreements that invoke demonic possession or, or, uh, Vichy
Franz are in fact at the end of the day, remarkably dumb.
They've used some gold leaf to gussy them up.
So where do you come down on this?
Well, I mean, one thing I think that is absolutely clear is that there is a deliberate
exploitation of public ignorance combined with an enormous amount of carelessness and
ignorance on the part of people who have platforms of various sizes.
So, you know, let's just take, for example, this little thing that was written in the American mind, Vichy French.
One of the things that I've argued in context of critical race theory is that there are legal remedies that exist under the law already, namely under Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that protect people from discrimination and harassment on the basis of race.
and they have been used by people of all races
to protect themselves from discrimination
on the basis of race.
And so in this one area where I'm being compared
called Vichy,
there is this declaration.
Has anyone ever, has a white person ever won a case
on Title Citi, you know, on Civil Rights Act?
Well, you know, Sarah's already looking like, what?
Yes. Yes, in fact.
I mean, this is a longstanding precedent
that it protects people of all races.
And yes, white people have one cases
under the Civil Rights Act.
But A, this person probably has no idea of that.
And B, has no curiosity to determine
whether or not what she's saying is accurate.
Let me Google that for you.
Yeah, exactly.
And C, knows that the audience,
which is thirsty for David French's Vichy content,
will applaud this.
owning of me that's based in fundamental falsehood.
Like, it's just completely, the question she asks has an answer, and it is not the answer
that she seeks.
But yeah, there's an inlet.
What is happening is we have an awful lot of people who are responding to, if you, let's
look at your examples, Jonah, okay, Marxism and property taxes.
do we expect average Americans to know much about Marxism? No. No. Your average American doesn't know much about Marxism. They know it's bad. It's really bad. Well, in fairness, Marx did believe in property taxes. Really confiscatory property taxes. Yeah, very confiscatory property taxes. Does the average person know about Marxism? No, but they know it's bad. So you're going to be able to exploit public ignorance, okay, by saying, I'm tying this to Marxism.
Well, let's look at Kaylee McEnany and the Founding Fathers.
Honestly, do many people know how many Founding Fathers own slaves?
Not really many people, but they know that the 1619 project is wrong.
And so, therefore, they're going to be very receptive to any information that proves,
proves, in air quotes, that, you know, the founders were better than critics say they were.
So time and again, or Mike Lindell, I have him.
information that Donald Trump actually won. Do people know the ends and outs of these election
disputes? No, but they know what they want to be true. They know what they want to be true.
So time and time and time again, what people are doing is deliberately exploiting public ignorance.
And then the idea of calling them to account, calling people you to account or calling someone
to account for that becomes elitism. So you're exploiting public ignorance. And then when you call
people who account for it, it's elitism. I'm old enough to remember when people thought maybe
that Gerald Ford, now I'm displaying my absolute age here as the oldest dispatcher, when people
thought Gerald Ford might have lost the election in part because he inaccurately said that
Poland wasn't part of, wasn't under Soviet domination during the Cold War. And that that geopolitical
mistake or that misstatement that Gerald Ford made really cost him. And now we're at a world
where, you know, that kind of nuance won't even make, who cares? And it is, and that's one of the
things that I think is making me very worried about the future of our country is that we
we now have a political class
that strategically,
intentionally, relentlessly
doesn't just exploit civic ignorance.
It fosters it and it cultivates it
and it nurtures it for its own gain.
That being said, so two things.
One, this pot has so far felt quite a bit
just like an airing of grievances for us
for 40 minutes or whatever it's been.
But also, this is happening...
And what's your point?
This is happening...
David literally confused.
He was like, Anne.
This is happening very much on the left.
I think we could spend 40 minutes talking about,
because because of what I think my point,
which Jonah so graciously said might exist,
which is the incentive structure
is the exact same,
no matter what side you're on,
disinformation or incorrect information
that people can point out as incorrect
on one side, defend on the other side.
That is not a partisan,
incentive. And so when we talk about we're picking on the right, but again, I just want to point out
we could absolutely do this exact same thing on the left, but let's stay on the right.
But I have an example real fast to that, Sarah. Just to make it concrete, did you all see the
meme that was floating all around Twitter that when the Gulf of Mexico was on fire, it was because
of capitalism? Yeah. And what turns out is the state-owned, you know, Mexico's state-owned energy
company. It wasn't capitalism. But that didn't stop that from flying all over the place.
Just as an example, Sarah. There was another one that blamed COVID on capitalism, a disease
that, you know, escaped a communist country's state-owned lab. But anyway, I take your point.
Yeah. Go. And don't forget that Joe Biden said that at the founding, the Second Amendment
prevented people from owning cannons, which it just did not. Okay. So Chris and I are doing
doing a four-part series on 2024 for the sweep started this week.
Yeah, I didn't actually tell Chris about the other three parts yet, but they're coming.
So we're running through all the potential candidates, strengths and weaknesses.
This week we started with the senators.
But there is something interesting percolating out there between Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and Donald Trump.
So this week, Donald Trump spoke in Florida and Ron DeSantis was not there.
Those are the facts as we know them.
Now, here are some things that are out there.
Trump says he told DeSantis not to come.
DeSantis says that he wanted to stay in Surfside where the building collapse.
They are still recovering bodies there.
At this point, I believe that the count is up to 39 bodies recovered.
Also, Donald Trump didn't mention Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in his speech in Florida.
not once, didn't come up.
And perhaps people are speculating.
That's because in a recent straw poll in Colorado at the Western Conservative Summit,
Ron DeSantis beat Donald Trump for who should be the 2024 nominee.
Now, let me tell you a little bit about this poll.
As you know, polling, right?
This is my...
It's not a poll.
It's not a poll.
an online, like, if you want to do it non-scientific, feel free to, you know, click on some things
here. So A, not scientific. B, it's an approval poll, which is interesting. So you're actually
only picking multiple candidates, but anyone you would approve of being the nominee. And
in that fashion, DeSantis got 74.1%. Trump got 71%. Ted Cruz got 43, Mike Ponzi.
Pompeo got 39, Tim Scott got 35, you get the point. I do want to run through some of the previous
winners. Herman Kane, 2011, Marco Rubio, 2012, Ted Cruz, 2013. Ben Carson won back to back in
2014 and 2015. And in the 2016 poll, they asked who should be the VEEP nominee for Trump
and Newt Gingrich won. So this poll has just a
amazing track record. But word has it that it has annoyed Donald Trump that DeSantis is beating him
even if he runs in a non-scientific poll that has never predicted the winner ever, ever.
So my question to you, Jonah, how should Ron DeSantis maneuver? He has re-election in 2022.
Presumably he does want to run for president. What do you do with Donald Trump hanging?
out there as both a promise and a threat.
Yeah, look, I mean, I think it's a great, great question because if you were going to be a
betting person and you just wanted to take the field, right, and say every single person
who gets close to Trump eventually pays a political price for it, you would win, you know,
what, like a 26-bet parlay.
Because to date, every elected official
who gotten too close to Trump eventually pays
and or just prominent, you know, official
has paid a price for it.
Just ask Bill Barr or Bob Barr, Bill Barr.
I have this problem with the bar.
Probably both. Probably both.
Probably both.
I mean, part of my fantasy is that
the Republicans take back the House
and Trump immediately endorses
Jim Jordan for speaker.
just to punish Kevin McCarthy.
And so I think there's...
Don't forget that Donald Trump himself can be the speaker.
You do not have to be a member of the House.
I know that.
And there are people, you're doing this as a fun-triggering parlor game,
but there are serious people who actually want him to be speaker.
And I think it is incredibly...
I think there is a real chance of it.
No, I don't.
Not like a 50% chance.
I think there is a 15% chance that Donald Trump is the next speaker of the house.
Do you? Really?
I don't. I don't. Because someone will explain to them that he will actually have to, like, understand a parliamentary procedure.
No. He doesn't want to be Speaker of the House.
No. Yep. 15%.
Look, I'm sure Louis Gomer tries to nominate him. I'm sure Paul Gossar will take the pillow case off his head long enough to vote I.
But anyway, I think the smartest thing that DeSantis can do,
because it's a real problem
and he's got to be aware of it
that Trump cannot handle the idea
of the limelight being taken from him
is to be as
to basically be governor pothole
for a little while
and to the extent he embraces the national media
which he has to do a little bit
to hold on to his lead
to be purely a media critic
and chief guy
and pick his battles
and like that 60 minutes thing
I think it was used said
it was like a $10 million in-kind contribution
to his campaign
but other than that
I it's very difficult to see how if he stays popular
Trump doesn't eventually punish him for it
he'll lay down various tests to see if he's loyal
and eventually one of these tests
will be one he can't meet
and then the response will be you must hate Trump
as Barr learned so
I don't have a great answer for it other than to stay
like incredibly focused on the needs of his state
because if he gets reelected, he'll be in better position regardless to run.
And other than that, just don't poke the bear is my sort of answer.
Chris, what are your thoughts on how, I mean, yes, it's still 2021.
We're 18 months even from the midterms.
But how do you see 2024 shaking out for all of these GOP candidates?
What's the referendum here?
Well, I wish I would have known about the four-part series before I wrote what I wrote for the sweep,
and now I feel bad for attacking the premise of field picking.
I did not know.
So it sort of goes like this.
The most important actor in the 2024 election is Joe Biden.
And it's not even close, right?
It's not like Donald Trump is a close second to Joe Biden.
What Biden's, let's start with this understanding that it is extremely, extraordinarily hard to beat an incumbent president.
It's only happened three times in the modern era as a person won a first term and failed to win a second that they tried.
And it's just Carter, H.W. Bush, and Trump.
and you need a real special set of circumstances for that to come into place.
If Joe Biden, who is pretty popular, and as a matter of fact, he's losing some ground among
Democrats, but gaining some ground among independence and even some light Republican leaners.
So the big test for Biden are all still ahead.
And I don't think that his approval numbers will look like this in November, or in, let's say,
the presidential election starts 30 seconds after the polls close for midterms, right?
So in November of 2022, the presidential election begins.
I think it is unlikely that Joe Biden will be as popular as he is now.
Or I think it's more likely than not that he will not be this popular.
I don't know if I'm in a quadruple negative there, but I don't think Biden will be this well
off at this point after 2022.
He may be way worse off.
he may be better off, but if he were here, you would see the Republican field basically
collapse and you would see very few people. If you're Ron DeSantis, you say, okay, am I really
going to run for president? You're the governor of Florida and you're young. You don't have to
run for president. And if Joe Biden's rocking a 52% approval rating and looks like a lock for
reelection, you're not going to go run. This is what
happened in 92, Mario Cuomo and other big-name Democrats opted out because George H.W. Bush was going
to be undefeatable. The hero of Operation Desert Storm was not going to be defeated. And that's why
I won't call him a marginal candidate, but a longer shot candidate like a moderate Democrat from Arkansas
was able to get in and run because he was facing Paul Songis instead of the biggest names in the field.
They were called the Seven Dwaras, remember?
Totally.
And because I was cool in high school.
So the truth is the Republicans are all thinking about Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.
It's an exhausting, tedious affair.
What I know about Donald Trump is, he's pretty old.
He's definitely lazy.
And he is totally unwilling to risk his own reputation and pride.
he the my joke uh in the sweep was uh the the it was uh frederick douglas who said uh one what is it
being right makes a majority or something uh and uh don't trump's version of that is we'll see what
happens so i think for a lot of this stuff you could you could fake yourself out if you're ron
desantis or a bunch of other people you could fake yourself out thinking about trump i think
Pence is doing a pretty good job.
So I would say also in the category with DeSantis' Nikki Haley, who has twisted
herself into 17 Bavarian pretzels trying to hit the right tone for and against Trump
and all this stuff.
I think if you're serious about running in 2024, go do it.
Go run.
Don't think about Trump too much.
Don't think about that other stuff.
Because what's really going to be determinative here is what is the overall political
climate going to be like. And that's going to depend on how Joe Biden's doing more than anything
else. David, do you think any of these guys run if Trump jumps in the ring?
That's a great question. I think he, by and large, clears the field if he jumps in. I think he...
What about Pence?
I don't... Well, and doesn't it depend? Like, I don't... I don't... I don't... this. This
assumes, right, that he's as, he is as popular among Republicans, two years hence as he is today.
Well, you know, it's going to be hard to predict the, it's going to be very hard to predict the
political lay of the land. I think that perhaps the best case for him in many ways is that if
the Republicans do retake the House and essentially what, what, you know, looks like, you know,
Chris, your outstanding hangover series of a party that lost its majority faster than any other
party in 70 years. If the sort of the Trump side of the House says, wait a minute, it was a blip,
it was a blip. It was this two years between 2020 and 2022 that's all heavily influenced by the
pandemic and the stolen election. And we're already returning our sort of our rightful populist
power. If Trump works at it even a little bit, he, I think, would find himself in a pretty good
position. If the Republicans are still in a free fall after 2022, I don't know. I don't know.
But, you know, based on the fear that he still strikes in the heart of your typical average Republican
office holder and the total unwillingness that they have to take him on, the total unwillingness,
I'm going to need evidence that that changes before I'm going to say somebody's going to step
up to the plate that's very serious, that's got a real constituency and can go toe to toe to
with him in a primary campaign. I got to see the evidence of that before I'm going to say that
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You know, we've talked here a lot about how seriously Republicans take January 6th,
how seriously they take any of this stuff.
What I want to know is how seriously do Democrats take the quite real threat to the continued
good order of the Republic.
And what brought this to mind for me, and I wrote about this in my column for Monday,
brought this to mind from me, was watching the
asinine
incapacity
and boobishness of
the New York City
Board of Elections in conducting
their mayoral election. Congratulations
to Eric Adams,
the next mayor
probably, unless Curtis
Slewa of the Guardian Angels
and owner of 15
rescue cats
pulls off the upset of the century in November.
But if you understood, I should start with the premise,
I believe that the possibility that we will see the discontinuity in the American
Republic is very real.
And that the real point of January 6th is that we may soon lose.
And, you know, we talk a lot about 2022.
If the Republicans take back Congress and then Joe Biden or another Democrat wins the presidential election in 2024, is it a real possibility that, especially thanks to election laws that are being passed in states that make it easier for politicians to interfere with the conduct of elections, is it possible we have a no verdict that we have a deadlocked Congress that cannot execute?
its basic functions and that we see the disruption of the republic. Yes, it's possible. It is a
thing that could happen. And it's not like a, I don't want to put a percentage on it. Sarah was
risky to say her 15%, but it's, let's just say, it's a non-zero thing. And quite frankly,
it is the matter of greatest concern to me in American public life right now. Our greatest
inheritance is our peaceful transference of power. The French have had five republics in the time that
we've had one. We made it through a civil war. We made it through pandemics. We made it through
depressions. We made it through all that stuff. And we might throw it away because we're high on our
own toots. So anyway, as I watched the incapacity of the New York Democrats and Republicans too,
but just as I watch the incapacity of administering that election, and then you look around the
country and you see whether it's in the For the People Act or whatever else, effort after effort
by Democrats to make elections longer, more complicated, and less decisive.
I sat in a decision desk room for a week, sleeping three hours and working in shifts
to call the 2020 presidential election.
And as Jonah, as you said, it was a pandemic and you're like, okay, weird stuff is going to
happen.
As Democrats look to make permanent these changes and more mail-in balloting, and in California,
it's 17 days.
17 days for ballots to be counted.
Other states, it's two weeks.
I think Illinois is two weeks.
Many states have 10 days.
We need decisive, clean elections in order to stand up to scoundrels like Donald Trump who want to steal elections.
If you want to not have elections stolen, you must have clear deadlines, you must have decisive results, and they must happen quickly.
And so my question, and I'll start with you, Sarah, is.
is do you think, how cynical versus sincere do you see the Democrats on the question of
saving the republic, et cetera, et cetera, does their effort to make elections more complicated
cast doubt on their sincerity?
So a lot of things cast doubt on their sincerity.
I think the sincerity is closing in on zero for the people in leadership.
I think there are absolutely people at all sorts of other levels who,
100% believe what they are saying
and truly believe that they are on the side of the angels
trying to make voting easier and all of that.
However, the way that I know that it is insincere overall
is because no one has proposed to simply say, fine.
Jonah, you know where I'm going.
I'm going to take all 87 recommendations
of the 2005 Carter-Baker Commission.
We are going to have secure elections
and we're going to have open, fair,
and easy-to-vote election.
elections. And I'm going to do it in a bipartisan way, you know, that at this point is old
enough that like there's no sort of feelings involved anymore. We're not going to have ballot
harvesting. We're going to have precinct voting. But we're also going to have, you know, just
much, much easier voting mechanisms. That would be an organization that I think, you know,
or an elected person, whatever, who I think is sincere about making voting easier. Because
they're willing to say part of making voting easier
is also making it more secure
because the whole point of voting
is that we have to have confidence in the results.
The New York Board of Elections debacle
is such a joke,
but it's a serious joke
because nothing's going to change.
There are no Democrats,
national Democrats, even New York Democrats,
really coming out and saying,
we have to overhaul the Board of Elections
top to bottom.
Look, yes, rank choice voting was always going to delay the results
because they allowed absentee ballots to come in for so long after.
But the truth is what undermined confidence in the results
is the incompetence of the Board of Elections matched with the fact that then,
you know, this whole rank choice voting thing did mean that would take longer.
So then when the board of elections...
It wasn't ranked choice voting.
It took New York six weeks to count the results.
of the 2020 House results.
Maine does rank choice voting
with more votes than were cast in New York City
and they do it and they do it right off the bat.
This is nincompoorri, not complexity.
Yes.
But that's, it's going to be a more complicated story
moving forward for them because they're going to have
to separate the two and are they willing to call out
these, you know, cousins, nephews, et cetera
of powerful Democrats to say that they are the
income poops who must go. Because if they aren't willing to say that, then it is going to fall more
on ranked choice voting. And I think you're exactly, your point is exactly right, that all of this mess
undermines the Democrats' overall narrative, that we don't need to secure elections. We just need to
make it a lot easier to vote. Well, if you can just include all of the test ballots and forget
to delete them, release results when you're missing 120,000 ballots, include 13,000.
35,000 of the test ballots instead.
And then when one of the candidates questions it, everyone attacks him for hours until it turns out he's right.
Yeah, I think that wildly undermines their messaging on this.
David, decisive elections.
We remember a time in America where it really was election night, right?
And not election month.
How do you see, and I know that because of my profession, because of my vocation,
I have stronger feelings about election counting than other people do.
But I see this as a real problem.
I see the proverbial dangling Chad hanging out there as a big problem.
Am I right?
Oh, you're 100% right.
And I am absolutely kicking myself for a failure of imagination because I, you know,
I wrote a book about the potential that America could break apart.
And one of the, and I had these scenarios of how it could possibly happen.
to sort of make it concrete to people.
It didn't cross my mind that one way this thing could happen
is somebody just flat out exploits uncertainty around election outcomes
and popular distrust and slow counting to just say, I won, I won,
and when they didn't win, and what would that do to the Republic?
And the fact of the matter is every single botched election,
combined with some of all of the other trends
that we've talked about today
where you're exploiting public ignorance,
you're exploiting public distrust,
you're whipping up people into a frenzy and a fervor
like we saw on January 6th.
It seems to me that one of our top priorities
to not just feel good about ourselves an election night,
but to actually preserve the republic
is a clean, decisive, solid, prompt election.
count. I mean, we're just fortunate that right now that our elections don't turn on California
because, my goodness. My goodness, how long it takes them to count votes. I mean, my goodness.
And then there's this whole other thing, though, there's this other interesting aspect of this.
It's not just elections that smart progressives are now saying, wait a minute, if we can't even
count in these dark these deep blue areas if we can't even count votes competently what's that doing
for a sort of our progressive enterprise that's saying oh hey here's the you know our all-encompassing
government program is going to make your life better and i'm reminded by i'm reminded of
uh esra klein's really smart piece from february that's entitled california is making liberal squirm
if progressivism can't work there,
why should the country believe it can work anywhere else?
And so this is of a piece,
not just of the election crisis,
which is republic-threatening at its edges.
This is also a government confidence crisis,
which that's already scraping the bottom of the barrel,
but everyone who has a program about making America better
through the awesome power of government
needs to focus in on this stuff and say,
you know, if we can't even count votes, how good we are at, how good are we at other stuff?
Jonah Goldberg, because you look tan and I resent you for it, I will give you this question.
How do you begin to fashion some bipartisan consensus around this point about elections?
Because we have such demagogic absurdity on both sides.
Jim Crow 2.0, say many Democrats about fairly, you know, the recent Supreme Court decisions on Arizona
as typical that it is racist to forbid ballot harvesting is the preposterous assertion that the DNC made
there. But so Jim Crow 2.0 versus stop the steel. Where is, how do you start to put together some sort of
bipartisan coalition on this? Or am I, should I give up? You probably give up. I mean,
stipulated. Yeah, I was going to, I was going to bring up the, you know, reaction to the
Supreme Court cases, which is, you know, a good case in point. I mean, Sarah rightly chastised us
for the first third of half, whatever turns out this overly long podcast being of being an airing of
grievances about our own side, but it's worth pointing out that, like, I listen really
carefully to how, say, the New York Times and NPR covered those Supreme Court cases
about, you know, Bernovich, whatever the thing was called. And, you know, in the, in the
NPR vision of this, this was a sustained, essentially white supremacist attack on the Voting
Rights Act. And, you know, nowhere in this is there.
any in that coverage, was there any mention that like the last
person to really violate ballot harvesting laws? Was that North
Carolina? And C-9. And C-9. And every, I wish I mean, I've had time
if I cared to that enough. You just go back and look at what all the Democrats said about
how terrible ballot harvesting was when Republicans did it. And it's bad, you know. And
I think part of the reason why you should just give up all hope and just start day drinking
is to use it as an analogy, you know, the fight over critical race theory stuff, which
we're not going to open that whole can of worms. But for, you know, for months now, a lot of
elite liberals have been telling us, you idiot right-wingers, no one's teaching this. It's not a thing
unless you're going to Harvard Law School. You know, no one wants to teach this. You know,
this is a moral panic, McCarthyism, yada, yada, yada, yada. And as I think misplaced a lot of
that stuff was, that was the message. And then in the last, what, 72 hours, America's
teachers unions have forthrightly come forward and said, we are going to teach this and cram it
down your kids' throats. And so you have this problem where all that, all you need for one side
to be against something is for the other side to be for it. Preach. And if one side proposes
utterly reasonable, you know, like light another candle on Sarah's shrine to the,
Baker commission of 19 of
2005, 7, whatever
you know, she can cut out more
teen beat bods and put Jim Baker's face
on them, you know, on the
poster. The second
someone on the right proposes this stuff,
it's a huge problem. And so I
kind of, I hate gangs
and I don't mean crips and bloods. I mean like gangs of eight,
gangs of 10, whatever. But it seems
to me that the only way you get there
is to have someone like a coalition
of Joe Manchin types propose it for the
Democratic Party and a coalition of Mitt Romney types propose it for the Republican Party and then
you figure out some sort of centrist thing that drags a plurality of the other parties along
for the ride and it would have to be so unbelievably non-ideological that no one could cling to
some bogus complaint about it and that just that seems like a really hard effort going into
2022 never mind 2024 never mind the fact that we're going to be sucked into the hellmouth by
2028.
And with that, you know, while we've been on this podcast, former President Trump has been holding
a press conference announcing his class action lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter, and we're
told that YouTube will be added at some point.
I, for one, am looking forward to the deposition transcripts.
David?
It will it make it to deposition, Sarah, because he's claiming a violation of the First Amendment
by Facebook and Twitter.
This will get tossed out
on failure to
state a claim upon which relief
can be granted.
Ah, well.
Thank you all for joining the pod
this week. It was an airing of grievances,
but it felt good. It felt real good.
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