The Dispatch Podcast - Somebody's Wrong Online

Episode Date: December 16, 2020

In the weeks following November 3, a surprising number of state Republican parties have made it their mission to attack any high ranking GOP officials in their state who have certified or somehow acknowledged Joe Biden’s electoral victory over President Trump. How will this GOP infighting play out over the next few months? Declan joins Sarah, David, and Jonah on today’s show to discuss his new piece on the site explaining this strange phenomenon, with a close look at Arizona and Georgia in particular. Stick around to hear our hosts discuss the 2021 races they are keeping an eye on, all things Hunter Biden, and Joseph Epstein’s controversial Wall Street Journal op-ed about Jill Biden. Show Notes: -“Begun, the GOP Civil War Has” by Declan Garvey in The Dispatch. -“Is There a Doctor in the White House? Not if You Need an M.D.” by Joseph Epstein in the Wall Street Journal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined this week by Jonah Goldberg, David French, and wait for it, Declan Garvey, our associate editor and the author of The Morning Dispatch. We have a lot to talk about this week. We're going to discuss state GOPs during this post-election, whatever it is we're calling this time period. A little 2021 campaign at election preview. What's going on with the Hunter Biden investigation? and we'll end with Jonah, where he will betray me as my feminist ally to discuss whether Jill Biden should be called Dr. Jill Biden. Let's dive in. Guys, we've had some tech problems getting this show off the ground. So I think we're all a little punchy right now. Let's dial it in. Focus. We can do this. Declan, we are so pleased to have you. We are less pleased than we were like an hour ago when we tried to start recording. But now you're really with us. Tell us about the piece that you just have up on the website. What do we need to talk about this morning? Yeah, well, thank you for having me back. I'm sorry

I delayed this about 40 minutes here, but good to be on the podcast. Yeah, so I have a piece up on the site today, looking at the kind of growing civil war between state Republican parties and the elected officials that theoretically those Republican parties exist to defend and support. And so looking at specifically Arizona and Georgia in this story, as these Republican elected officials, Doug Ducey, the governor of Arizona, and Brian Kemp and Brad Raffinsberger and Georgia, the governor and secretary of state, those states obviously went for Joe Biden this year and it has caused a lot of strife within kind of the Republican ranks. And so I was looking at the attacks that, so if you look at Arizona, the chairwoman of the Arizona GOP, Dr. Kelly

Ward has been kind of on a kamikaze mission against Doug Ducey in the past month where she's accusing of them being a coward and not loyal and abandoning the president, all because he certified the election results in Arizona as he was required to do by law. In Georgia, the chairman of the Republican Party there, David Schaefer, has filed lawsuit after lawsuit against Brad Raffinsberger, the Secretary of State in Georgia, who is a Republican who donated thousands of dollars to Trump who voted for Trump, who said he hoped that Trump would win, all because he is refusing to go along with some of these conspiracy theories about voting in the state. And so the piece looks at that and tries to suss out kind of where these various factions

are and how that's going to play out. So my question for you all is kind of how do you think that the lines are going to be drawn in the civil war because, you know, it's not like Ducey and Raffensberger and Kemp were anti-Trump for the past four years they weren't. They were very pro-Trump. But, you know, how is this going to play out where there's obviously the small Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, Liz Cheney, wing of the GOP, but these generally pro-Trump, but not necessarily Kelly Ward levels, are going to have to differentiate themselves in the post-Trump era. And I'm curious to hear how you guys think they're going to do that.

Well, I'll dive right in. So I think it was Ross who made this point, Ross Douthit, that the people who actually have jobs and responsibilities have behaved much better than the people who don't, which kind of dovetails nicely to my argument that the parties are too weak and don't really stand for much other than sort of branding exercises. And so the head of the state GOP, I mean, I'm sure Sarah could explain this that they actually do have responsibilities that they should do.

They just don't care about them very much right now. And they're more just sort of associational titles that get you on TV and give you an opportunity to be a pundit. Just to jump in there really quickly, I talked to the predecessors of Ward and Schaefer in these two states. And they said the job of the state Republican Party is to, quote, win elections, period. That's it. And so that's theoretically what they're doing or supposed to be doing.

Yeah, but I think reasonable people can say that Kelly Ward authorizing tweets calling for people to die Rambo style for Donald Trump is not textbook, let's win the next election. behavior. I mean, I mean, reasonably people can differ with me on this. And I think that the sort of the divide is between the people who are performative rather than the people who are responsible is one way to look at it. For right now, that's going to change. I think as we get further and further into the Biden presidency, where Trump becomes more and more of, a sort of a fringe brand, as it were, and you'll see that, you know, if he really does start associating with the sort of newsmax OANN crowd and all that, I think that the civil war will look more like grownups versus populists, but, and take on new flavors as other

people try to move into the space who actually have influence. I mean, I don't know that, like, Jim Jordan is going to be wildly deferential to Donald Trump six months from now when Donald Trump can't do much for him that he isn't, you know, now that he isn't president, but it'll be sort of one of those symbols of our side kind of, you know, Trump will be the unlikely Joan of arc of sort of the asinine fringe of the Republican party. And maybe not be, you know, fringe, the half or two-thirds. is for a line. Sarah, David, thought.

I wonder whether the folks like Kelly Ward, their role in all of this, whether they know it or not, I don't think they do, is this is more metaphorical, I guess, but sort of moving the Overton window, this idea that, you know,

the acceptable dialogue has shifted. It's a little different than that, because it's not just the dialogue. It's more like moving the Republican Party ideology so that, no, the center of the Republican Party is not where Kelly Ward is about, yeah, like dying to get Donald Trump inaugurated in January. But because that exists over on the far, far, whatever side of things that is, it allows so many other Republicans to have said up to this point, like, well, we've got to let the process play out. Now, I think the big, interesting

moment here is McConnell basically saying, and see, we're done with this nonsense. Now, all of you Republican senators, sit your little butts in your seats. Don't you dare sign any of the objections of these lunatic House members over there.

And I am Mitch McConnell. I have won in the face of all things. I am the 300 all by myself except I don't die at the end of the movie. Well, he also took out the stinking Diaz brothers in Miami. But that's a story from his cocaine Mitch phase. That's right. I mean, just the cocaine empire itself would be worth admiring. But really what he's been able to accomplish

for Republicans in the Senate, I think will lend him a lot of credibility with the other senators. So, you know, Ron Johnson and Rand Paul at one point were sort of signaling that they were open to signing objections from House members. Because as David, you and I have discussed, On January 6th, when the House meets to count the electoral votes, that's when you can object. But a House member and a Senate member both have to sign an objection. And so there's all, you know, Mo Brooks says he's going to have all these objections. But unless he can find a senator to sign it, he don't got no objection.

And Mitch McConnell has congratulated President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and has told all the senators to sit down and shut up. So, you know, the Kelly Awards, I think, were what allowed it to get to this point, which was stupid in a lot of ways. But I don't think that it's that the Republican Party has moved all the way over there. I think it's just that they opened up a new part of the board. David, you're a gamer. You know what I mean. Like, you know, by opening up that way far off thing, there's now like this whole center part of the board that people get to play in that is, let's use a swamp as a metaphor.

I don't know. You know, I think that part of what you also see happening is a lot of these people, like the Kelly Wards, Alan West, Jenna Ellis, you know, the Trump attorney, these are not people who are new to the GOP or even new to having some degree of notoriety in the GOP. But what Trump has done is sort of given these individuals a prominence and a cachet. that they do not naturally have. Like, we just have to be honest about that. Or deserve by any stretch.

I mean, and so what you have is a collection of people who are in positions largely due to their absolute loyalty to Trump, their willingness to just defend him through thick and thin, that know that that era is over. They are satellites orbiting a planet that is about to be, you know, whether it's going to be neutralized over time or alderond over time, you know, remains to be seen. But they are orbiting a planet.

That planet is in decline. And there's a degree, I think, of very real panic and fury because these are their Halcyon days. I mean, this has been the time when they have achieved a level of influence. they have achieved a level of prominence that they were never going to achieve, never, and never deserved to achieve. And so, yeah, I think there's just a huge amount of self-interest that's wrapped up in a lot of these battles right now, to be honest.

I mean, just a huge amount of self-interest. And it's positioning themselves for what's going to come next. You know, we're going to be talking about 2021 races, and I'm going to sort of throw in my twist of the 2020. one race I'm most interested in. But the, you know, we have, let me put it like this for, a lot of us have spoken in years past in the before times, as Jonah calls it, to like GOP gatherings. You go and you speak to like the Republican women of Williamson County, where I live.

And, you know, in the before times, you would have a whole group of people who were super, like, respectable, you know, really just sort of salt to the earth. suburban moms and grandmoms and then orbiting around sort of the edge of the thing would be a person had like their own little business card and it would be

Republicans willing to die to stop the income tax and it was like these fringe people who were everyone kind of kept him in arm's length but hey it's a big tent we're not going to throw you out but we're embarrassed of you and then you know with the rise

of the tea party some of these people started to have tea party business cards And then with the rise of Trump, they started to have the Trump, team Trump, you know, identification. And then when Trump wins, they become something they never, ever were before. And this is replicated all across the country. And I think a lot of what you're seeing now in some of these individuals is a recognition that the person that gave them everything that they've ever wanted is receding from the scene. He was defeated. And there's an awful lot of fury and panic about that?

I tried to make the metaphor in this piece and I wasn't able to work it in, but it reminds me a lot of kind of the people who peaked in high school and graduated and then keep hanging around the high school as everyone else goes on to college or to get a job or to start a family because those were the best years of their life and that's what they, that's what they want to remember. I mean, talking to people in Arizona, they are very, clear that Kelly Ward wants to run for Senate again in 2022. She ran in 2016 against John McCain, lost, ran in 2018 against Mark McSally lost, and she's going to do it again in 22 when Mark Kelly's going to have to run again

because he's filling John McCain's seat as part of a special election, and that this is a precursor to that. And so you kind of see this split screen where Doug Deucy just last week on December 9th was announced that he was elected chair of the Republican Governors Association. It's going to give him a much bigger national profile, potentially looking at higher offices as he kind of keeps going. While on that same day on December 9th, Kelly Ward was putting out a video to her followers about how,

even though the Arizona Supreme Court shot down this iteration of our lawsuit, the fight's not over. We need to keep going. We need to, you know, so it's going to be kind of a split screen and see how, how this splits playing forward. That would be fun to watch. Let's take a quick break to hear from ExpressVPN.

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So 2021, believe it or not, there's lots of elections in 2021. These are non-federal races that run in these off-off years. By the fun history that I'm sure Jonah can sing chapter and verse on. Way to mix a metaphor there, Sarah. This all for New York, for instance, goes back to 1894, the Tammany Hall days, where, surprise, surprise, they thought it would help their team to have the lowest turnout possible. And so then they picked an election time

that they thought would basically only have people coming out to vote if they already were like Tammany folks. So they picked the year after presidential years to vote for New York's mayor. And it's been that way ever since. I know I've talked about this in some other context where people who complain about money in politics or people who complain about lobbying or corrupt influences in general, I just don't know anything as corrupting as the influence of incumbency. It is its own mammoth thing. But that is a rant for another day, a rant for another day. So here are just some of the races that we're talking about for 2021, Virginia governor, New Jersey governor, lots of mayors including New York, but also

Minneapolis. And then, of course, we have several special congressional elections, particularly to fill the seats of people going into the Biden administration. So my question to each of you is, it's Christmas. What are you looking forward to, oh, unwrapping in your 2021 election box in a year. Declan? Well, the highest profile one, as you mentioned, will be New York City mayor. And I think that that's going to be an incredibly fascinating race for a variety of reasons. I think mostly because Bill de Blasio is the incumbent is almost universally disliked. It seems like from every wing of both the Democratic and Republican parties.

And so one of the candidates who just recently filed Max Rose, who was a congressman from... Important to note, by the way, that Bill de Blasio cannot run again. He served as two terms. He's term limited out. So he's out. The reason that his dislike is interesting or dislike of him is interesting is that, you know, it's not like someone can run for the third term of de Blasio because that would generally be seen as maybe not a great idea. Yes.

So, I mean, one of the candidates, Max Rose, was a... congressman from Staten Island who just lost his race, a Democrat. But even during the, during his race to regain his seat in the house, he was running ads saying Bill de Blasio is the worst mayor in the history of New York. And, you know, so that was one way to distance himself from, from de Blasio, but also potentially setting up what, what we're now seeing is a bid for his, his position. And so we have him. There's going to be a lot of local New York City politicians in city council and Andrew Yang, the candidate for the Democratic nomination last year, is heavily considering a run as well. So it's going to be a really interesting push for kind of what the Democratic Party

in big cities, in the biggest city stands for. And so there will be kind of this fight between the very progressive wing and the Max Roses of the world who, you know, is a little bit more culturally conservative, a little bit more, or a little bit less technocratic and whatnot. And then the Andrew Yang that is a very economic, progressive, universal basic income. So it'll be an interesting fight and knowing where the media is based and what the media's interests are. It'll be one that we're hearing a lot about over the next. couple months. So that's the one that I'm keeping an eye up. In some way, kind of a redo of the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, you know, you're

going to have a candidate sort of representing every stripe of the Democratic Party. Will you have a kind of repeat of a Biden emerging within the field? All right, David, 2021. I'm going to cheat completely. What? That sounds like you. You're a cheater. I'm cheating. I'm cheating. I'm cheating on the question. I'm going to say the 2021 race I'm most interested in is the race between Fox News, Newsmax, and O-A-N-N. Okay, that is cheating, but I like it. Please continue.

Still, you will never prosper. I know, I know, I know. I'm going to pay a cost for this cheating. I'm just going to be very interested to see what Trump does from a media perspective once he leaves office. Is he going to jump on board with a Fox News competitor?

Is there going to, is this sort of emergence of audience with Newsmax? Is this an artifact of the election fight itself? Is it sustainable? What will be Fox's response if there does seem to be a credible attack from sort of their right flank or their more Trumpy flank? Because I think honestly, what happens in conservative media over the next 12 months is going to be more important, arguably, to the fate of the party in 2022 and 2024 than any of these races, especially since some of them are happening in, for example, Virginia,

which has just been a GOP dumpster fire for a while. But I'm very interested, and I have to say, I'm skeptical that Newsmax and OAN will have any real staying power here. I could be wrong. I could be completely wrong. But I tend to think that they will over time get rolled by the Fox juggernaut unless

say a Trump goes all in with one of these guys. But that to me is going to be interesting because as many problems as I have had with Fox primetime as opposed to the hard news side of Fox, which has got a bunch of great folks in it,

But as many problems as I've had for Fox with Fox prime time, they're basically what, Edward R. Murrow compared to Newsmax and OAN. And if that, if Newsmax and OAN sort of become the dominant tone and Fox feels like it has to become more newsmaxy to fend off this challenge, I think that has profoundly negative effects, not just for the GOP, but for any sort of broad-based conservative movement going forward and for the country for that matter and for the country okay that was the more i really thought about it it was even more cheating so jonah yeah so to use uh sarah's analysis about kelly ward moving the overton window on what is permissible to do um i think david is now the kelly ward of this podcast because he is completely violated

all of the norms, and when one side violates norms, it gives a permission structure for everybody to violate norms. So I have opinions on all of this, and I'm going to run with it. There's a shock. Sarah, you're not a nice person. Sarah, also, your thing about the corrupting power of incumbency could not agree with you more, having grown up in New York, and having watched my brother try to run for city council, the incumbency, racket in New York City is profound. They say that their public finance campaigns, but really what that is is a massive subsidy to incumbents because there's a huge barrier to entry to get in. You bring up this Tamney Hall 1921 thing. That tradition lives on because basically the

jack wads who constantly rant about voter suppression in this country as if it's purely a function of right-wing villains leave out the fact that the greatest and most expert practitioners of voter suppression in this country are public sector unions in places like New York who deliberately do everything they can to have maximally low turnout because if you only have 5% of the electorate show up for a primary which is the only thing that matters then the teacher union vote the municipal union vote dominates everything if if everybody showed up in a in a New York City election they would be a rounding error.

So then that moves to the 2021 question per se. And I have a weird answer, not as weird or as norm violating as David's. The thing I'm actually kind of looking at is the unelection of Gavin Newsom and whether or not the recall effort there will succeed. I am generally against recall efforts. I got on a lot of grief when I was against the recall of great. Davis because I wanted the Democrats to own the problems in California. That's the only way you get accountability and fix incumbency problems. As Ed Koch, mayor of New York City once said

when he was asked who's going to run for a third term and he said no, because he got lost the election. He said, no, the people of New York fired me and now they must be punished. And I think that's how these things are supposed to work. But I think the Gavin Newsom thing is interesting for a bunch of reasons. One is they try to make them into a golden boy of the Democratic Party. And two, as a bellwether of the generally profound effect, I think the pandemic has had on normally reliable Democratic voters to say, screw you people. I'm sick of having my kids home doing Zoom classes, my restaurant closed. I think we could be looking at a transformative thing in American politics that we haven't really taken into account yet. And the canary in the coal mine might be Gavin Newsom.

and on the Fox thing I will just say I'm somewhat conflicted here because I am a contributor at Fox so take that for what it's worth I think that we're going to see a lot of churn but the thing that I have it on fairly good authority from some people

who knows some stuff about Fox that they look forward to the siphoning of the wackadoos at least on the corporate side to places like newsmax because those viewers are actually not great for advertising. The show that gets the best ad revenue is not the prime time.

Tucker Carlson has the highest ratings in the history of television and the ad sales guys like the five because you can sell diapers and cereal on the five without worry of like boycott problems. And I'm making a bold prediction here that the real threat to Fox, if there is one, and I'm not sure there will be, but if there is one, it ain't OANN, it ain't, it ain't, it ain't Newsmax. It ain't whatever the hell they're talking about. It's Sinclair. Um, it's certainly not Blaze. It's CNBC. I think CNBC is coming for Fox. It's trying to, it's going to, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's editorial lineup to, to do that. That's one of the

reasons why they hired, um, Shep Smith. Shep Smith. Um, and, um, so watch that space. Fascinating. Facingating. Jinks. I think that for the same reasons you're watching Gavin Newsom Recall, that's why I'm sort of watching that Minneapolis mayor's race, kind of on the reverse. In the sort of height of the George Floyd protests, Jacob Frey is the mayor right now of Minneapolis. He's a 38-year-old, sorry, 39-year-old civil rights lawyer. He was elected in 2017 on the promise specifically to fix the broken relationship between the community. the police. And then, you know, George Floyd is dead at the hands of the Minneapolis police. He says he doesn't want to defund the police. He gets booed. He gets shouted down from things. But fast forward, you know, the city council kind of sort of voted to defund the police. Then they kind of sort of took it back. They passed a budget now that's actually a very

traditional budget supported by the mayor. I think that Jacob Frey will get reelected. And I think that that race, there should be a lot of attention paid to that race because it will show that I mean, maybe you know, there's two major events that happened this year. One is the pandemic and one

are the protests and riots that happened over the summer. I think one of them will have lasting political influence within the Democratic Party. I think that's the pandemic, to your point, Jonah. I think that the protests over race, we have

yet to see whether that will have any lasting influence. and that's what the Minneapolis race will be for me, is does that issue have any staying power? And that'll be sort of the canary in the coal mine for that one. You know, part of the pandemic, I wonder if you're going to start to see a lane for people who are like, I was sensible, rational, and non-hypocritical during the pandemic. That, you know, that, which I'm not going to say,

nothing has ever truly post-e ideological. You have to have more than one people to, more than one person to form a party. Right. Well, true. True. But, you know, you weren't going to catch me dining at the French laundry while I was shutting down restaurants. You weren't going to catch me posturing for teachers' unions. You were, what I was trying to do the whole time was figure out the right course of action, stick to it, be reasonable. And that was who I was through this. And that actually fits

with quite a few governors in the U.S. that fits with some of the people who haven't made headlines and they haven't made headlines because they weren't hypocrites and idiots. And I wonder if there's going to be a non-hypocrat decency caucus that emerges in state and local politics.

You know what I haven't seen, though, is any real effort on the Republican side to do the level of candidate recruitment that you see them doing in House races, Senate races, governors' races, state attorneys, general races, state, even legislative races. You don't see them ever really do that

at the mayoral level. I don't see that changing on a dime. Candidate recruitment is actually a pretty detailed, thorough thing that happens within a party structure. So I think that at least this time around we'll still be looking at within the Democratic primary, which candidates are emerging David on your like, hey, I'm not a whack-a-do.

So I don't think what we're going to see, maybe with some exceptions where someone sort of recruits themselves to run for mayor for whatever reason. I don't think we're going to see a lot of gains in Republican mayors. I mean, right now the two biggest cities with Republican mayors, I believe, are Miami. That's a real one for sure. But it's also, you know, a special snowflake of why it has a Republican mayor. And then Fort Worth, you know, Fort Worth being the like little cousin of Dallas right next door. Otherwise, it's all Democrats, I think, in the top 25 with maybe one independent or two or nonpartisan. So, you know, don't expect a total sea change where all of a sudden there's a wave of Republican mayors.

That ain't happening. Well, and let me uncheat for a quick second. I am very interested in the Andrew Yang prospects. No, you don't get to come back and get to hang out with hashtag math because you all of a sudden want to talk Andrew Yang. No, I get to. Yeah, you can't ride the hood. chie men trail of this podcast, David. Stay on one side of the border or the other.

You just can't keep... I'm riding it. I'm riding it. I don't think you'll win, but is there a... You know, Andrew Yang is a very progressive guy, but he's like, I'm progressive, but I'm not mad about it. High name ID within Democratic circles. Somebody kind of radiates, radiates liking people.

You know, it's one of these zig in the face of the polarization Zag kind of moves that he's so I'm very interested in his prospects I mean I do think that a tone of our national politics and the tone of politics in general improves when he's in the conversation even though I disagree with multiple his policies and the guys are super intellectually curious I mean he's the he's a kind of politician that you feel like if you walk into and I'll walk into his office and engage with him with on an idea he'll engage with you um so I'm very curious to see I His thing on democracy dollars during the primary. I think that by and large, that experiment has been tried in some places and has not particularly worked. But you know what? Love the idea of new ideas. So I agree. The Andrew Yang candidacy in New York could be really interesting. Okay. Next topic to you, David. Hunter Biden. Oh, yeah. Okay, so I'm bringing this up because I've gotten a lot of emails about this from dispatch readers and they want an explanation, I think because some folks have sort of read Twitter and think that the likes of us owe the likes of the New York Post an apology. And which I honestly to me is one of the more, it stumps me. It stumps me because I think that people didn't understand what we wrote. So the news has emerged that Hunter Biden is,

under investigation, apparently for tax issues. And so that is supposedly vindicating all of the attention that the New York Post paid to the Rudy Giuliani hard drive that was sort of dumped in their laps right in the closing days of the election. Now, this is sort of an onion to peel, and that is part of it is, as we talked about in some detail, there was a lot of aspects to this. There was the social media company reaction to the information on the laptop. There was New York Post decision to print, to publish the hard drive that was purportedly from a laptop.

It was the large-scale media reaction of how much the mainstream media covered the information on the laptop. And so I was kind of stumped by like this idea that we owed anyone apology because my stance was, if anybody much less Rudy in an op-o dump with Steve Bannon walks in with a hard drive that purportedly comes from a laptop that was delivered to a blind repair man and says, this is Hunter Biden's. The last thing I'm going to do is immediately go, cool, let's put this online. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to try to verify the heck out of that thing, as I would if when anyone gives me anything.

And it seemed to me that, you know, one of the hallmark, one of the problems that was an immediate red flag is that media figures had passed on this story because they couldn't verify its origin, and that's not a problem. That's a good thing. I don't know. Am I wrong, Jonah?

No, I'm sort of with you. When you say media figures, including the main reporter for the piece at the New York Post, refuse to put the name on it. I think, look, I mean, I don't blame folks who thought this story was a big deal and who believed it from the beginning to be saying, I told you so. That's fine. I mean, I think that they don't really, to the extent that you and I and the dispatch matter much in that whole debate,

I don't, I think they're just lumping us in with NPR, which had a sort of a different argument than what ours was, you know, and I, you know, lots of people, including people that, you know, if you had said a year ago, asked me who they were, I would have said, oh, they're kind of my friends, were trying to dunk on me on Twitter because I had responded to somebody saying, wait, you believe this story, you believe this story at face value, and now the response is, well, turns out that the story was true at face value. I still don't know that. And I still think, and part of the question is, I don't know which story per se you mean. You know, is it that that Hunter Biden is corrupt?

I think I've been saying that for 18 months. I think you've been saying that for 18 months. I mean, the Burisma thing was so shady. Lots of people knew that. And so I think that, you know, one of the things a lot of people are trying to do is the stabbed in the back narrative is migrating. And that you'll even see it. There are all sorts of the sort of die marker pundits who do this stuff,

who we probably name if we wanted to, who have moved from, it was fraud, and the election was stolen by Democrats. Actually, moved from Never Trump or stole the election to the Democrats stole the election. And now the election was rigged because the media refused to cover the Hunter Biden story with the question being begged there,

using that phrase correctly, is that they assume that if the New York Times and the Washington Post and ABC and NBC and CNN all covered the Hunter Biden story the way they wanted it to, it would have cost Biden the election. And I don't see any reason to, I mean, it's possible. I don't know if it's plausible. But there is this, you know, even Megan Kelly, who's has a, in a strange new mode on Twitter, was talking about how this alone proves, you know, whatever, whatever people say about the. fraud stuff, this alone proves that it wasn't a fair election. And I just, I think that they are investing vastly more importance in the Hunter Biden story as it is, because they want some narrative to say that Trump was treated unfairly. That said, as I said, as I believe you said, Twitter behaved stupidly with the New York Post story. The Facebook behaved stupidly. I'm not

defending the mainstream media here. I just think that this is, this is another cry for help as people try to come up with some sort of narrative that says Trump is a victim, Trump voters were victimized, the system was rigged because they can't prove it in any other way other than this sort of airy-fairy thing about media bias. The, I'm, Bill, go ahead, Declay. I was just going to say, I mean, if you go back to prior to the election, you had a lot of Trump allies and Trump advisors telling him to stop focusing on the Hunter Biden stuff so much and start talking more about the economy and vaccines and the things that would be on the horizon in 2021.

And he didn't listen. And so, I mean, Ted Cruz did, I think it was with Axios. He did an interview where he said, like, I don't think the president should be focusing on this. It's not going to move a single voter. And so now it's easy to look back retrospectively and say that, you know, everything would be, possible, or everything would be changed if this was covered differently, but you can't prove

that counterfactual. I'm more interested with the, with the Hunter Biden story, the impact that it might have on Joe Biden's attorney general pick in the coming days, because he's promised repeatedly that he's going to get back from what he calls the politicization of the Justice Department over the past four years. He told CNN that he's, quote, not going to be telling. his Justice Department what they have to do and don't have to do, and that he's going to really defer to whoever he puts in the Attorney General spot there, it gets a little bit more complicated now when whoever that Attorney General is is going to be overseeing an investigation into his own son. And so I think that he's down to four candidates, I want to say, for that

position. It's Obama administration, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, Alabama Senator Doug Jones, or former Alabama Senator Doug Jones. Marek Arland, who, of course, was nominated to the Supreme Court in 2016 and then former Massachusetts Governor DeBal Patrick. And so I don't particularly know which one of those will have a certain approach to this Hunter Biden investigation over another, but it's definitely something that is now part of that calculation that wasn't a couple weeks ago. That's why you should pick Hunter Biden to be Attorney General.

So I was just going to put on my DOJ hat a little bit here and say that what we understand so far largely from Hunter Biden himself is that he is under investigation by the Department of Justice for tax evasion and money laundering. Hunter Biden has not been charged with a crime and so people dunking that like,

oh, this is being investigated, therefore he committed tax evasion or money laundering? No. And by the way, if he is then charged with one of those two crimes, that doesn't mean that you can dunk on me. The point is that the process here is important. They open this investigation according to media reports in 2018. It's been ongoing. I know that people like sort of the speed of Twitter stuff and are very frustrated every time on any side when DOJ doesn't move in the speed and alacrity, with which social media would like them to. But the Mueller investigation took quite a while, the Hunter Biden investigation will take quite a while. And I think the people probably the

dunking and the dunkers should all hold their horses and just wait to see what the evidence actually is, to see what indictments are actually brought, and to calm the F down. Declan, I think that the Department of Justice under any of those potential attorneys general will have a hard time not appointing a special counsel to finish the investigation. You know, the Mueller investigation

got a lot of attention for it being a special counsel, but special counsels are not that unusual in the Department of Justice. I believe Bill Barr in his initial four years in the 90s, not even four years. He wasn't there for four years.

No, no. Yeah, I think he appointed like two or three special counsels during his year, 18 months back in the early 90s. So there's just not going to be a lot of faith in the outcome. No matter how great of an attorney general and how lauded they are, when you're looking into the president's son, some amount of accountability that the special counsel regs provide will, I think, give people confidence in it. for instance, that you can't decline any avenue or shut down the investigation without reporting to Congress, that there'll be a report at the end, things like that will probably feel like they are necessary at the time. And Sarah, what, I'd love to get your thoughts on Attorney General

Barr holding this investigation and keeping it from becoming public throughout the entirety of the election cycle. Obviously, if it started back in 2018, he was aware. And how do you I think that that compares to how James Comey handled the Hillary Clinton investigation in 2016. Okay, but first, use the actual question that you asked me over text when this went down. You're going to have to remind me. It was a Harry Potter reference. Oh, is Bill Barr Snape, the person you think is the bad guy the whole time, but turns out to be working undercover for the people.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, it was Bill Barr Snape. Yeah, I don't know that we know he's Snape yet, but I thought that was actually pretty funny and like spot on because that's what you have to kind of like tilt your head sideways and think Bill Barr had every opportunity to release this through any number of means that with fingerprints or without fingerprints back to him, frankly.

And he didn't do it. And my, from talking to people, there were plenty of people who knew about this investigation of the Department of Justice, this was not bar alone and a U.S. attorney. And so the Department of Justice was functioning like it's supposed to function, leak-free, which, you know, even during the Mueller investigation,

people think there were all these leaks during the Mueller investigation. There actually were no leaks from the Mueller team or the Department of Justice folks. When you interview witnesses, they then, of course, go talk about what they were interviewed about. And that's, you know, a source familiar

with the investigation all of a sudden. which can be very frustrating. But kudos on the Department of Justice for following the rules. I'm not that inclined to give them more than that because, again, they're doing what they're supposed to be doing. But, you know, that can be hard, I suppose, and it's good. And Bill Barr has, I think, resigned over it, which I think is also the right thing to do when someone tells you to break the rules. So good. And one thing, can I just Yeah.

Can I just interject real quick here? There's always been a flaw in the comparison between the Hunter Biden situation and the Hillary Clinton situation. And the flaw is that Hunter Biden was not running for president. Okay. Hillary Clinton was the actual presidential candidate under FBI investigation. Now, doesn't mean that everything was handled properly with Hillary Clinton. But the comparison to Hillary Clinton, Clinton and Hunter Biden has always suffered from that really salient flaw, which is Hunter Biden

was never the presidential candidate. We've had a long history in this country of sleazy kids or cousins or brothers or sisters of taking advantage of the family name. We've known this about Hunter Biden. We've known about Hunter Biden's drug problem forever. And so there's this, I think, this essential fundamental flaw in a lot of this now, because we always knew, didn't we, that every Trump story, every negative story eventually has to, especially in parts of right-wing media, become about the media, become about mainstream media. It's always at the end of the day the mainstream media's fault somehow, and we've reached that stage here. But there was, Hunter Biden's name wasn't on the ballot. Hillary Clinton's name was on the ballot. That's a very big difference.

And I wouldn't say that there's anything that we've learned about Hunter Biden other than the fact of the investigation in any of this that has surprised anyone who's paid attention to him at all in any way. And so I think that there's, we just need to lay out that there's a, there's a massive difference between Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton. And I will save my thoughts, feelings, and rants on what happened at the Department of Justice in the summer and fall of 2016 for another time. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them

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insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's eth-h-o-s dot com slash dispatch application times may vary rates may vary jona as you are aware i have a jurist doctorate and i'm just wondering if you're interested in calling me dr isger from now on um you know if you want to ask me about like role play stuff i don't think this is the appropriate venue to do that. Oh, man. Oh, my God. HR.

Like, I want to be very clear here. I have no problem. I want to say up front. No problem with people not liking Joseph Epstein's op-ed in which he poked fun of Jill Biden for insisting that she be called doctor. And I thought the op-ed

was fine. You know, I think he made a problem about maybe he didn't read the room right in some ways. That's fine. But I have no problem with the piece. I have no problem with the Wall Street Journal running it. I have no problem with the underlying argument, which is one I've made for like 10 years, not just about Jill Biden, but about lots of people who insist on calling themselves doc. But I'm on record basically making the same point about Jill Biden from at least 2013. I have no problem with people saying, well, Jonah, your position is wrong. That's fine, right? If she wants to call herself doctor, she should be allowed to be called doctor.

If she wants other people to refer to her that way, that's fine, too. I'm stipulating all of that up front to say simply this. In Park, I anticipate Sarah having issues here. I'm ready to pass. The audience can't see, but she's literally sharpening a bayonet as I talk about this. And I think the freak out. The mainstream media freak out about that op-ed is vastly more interesting, vastly more revealing of something, and vastly more unreasonable than what Joseph Epstein wrote.

And so I'm curious from each of you. You guys can fight among yourselves if you want to get in Sarah's way. Do you agree with that? And if so, if not why, And if so, what do you think the – and I can give you a chapter because I think I'm going to write a G-file about this. I can give you some chapter and verse about the level of the freak out. I mean, like on Morning Joe, not since that image of the guy crying as Nazi Germany invaded Paris on the newsreel, right? Have I seen people more worked up about something?

And it was – it's bizarre to me. And again, stipulating, you can disagree with it. But the freak out is amazing to me. Um, what do you think it says? Is it that, that there, this is a, this is sort of a norm enforcement effort to say, don't make fun of the Bidens because they're special? Or is it something about midlife career women in the meritocracy that they deserve more respect? Is it a feminist thing? Is it a democratic politics thing? Is it, uh, one of the weird things you get from withdrawal pains when you don't get to whine about Trump anymore? or all the merits are these people right, which I think is the most insane possible of the options I've given, but I leave that to you guys to adjudicate.

David? I think we should have the men weighing first, and then Sarah can. All right, now, Sarah, you want to go, you know, ladies first. Jonah, you ignorant slut. Oh, my. And it went down from there.

Okay. First of all, I think the thing that most people, like, just right off the bat, slaps you in the face is literally the fourth word of the op-ed. And you know what I'm talking about, Jonah? I sure do, kiddo. how dare he show such disrespect to a woman that he does not know does not show respect for and in doing so to talk about her title

and to call her silly and comical and fraudulent The kiddo thing, I think, reverberated with a whole bunch of women out there who have been called pet names as a way of demeaning them. And then to have it followed by an op-ed that is demeaning. So it's not like he called her, you know, kiddo, let's talk about what you're going to concentrate on his first lady. You could do this or this. Like, no, it was kiddo, you're a fraud, you're comical, and your thesis. I mean, he mocks her thesis, having not read it, by the way. Student retention at the community college level meeting students' needs.

F off, Mr. Epstein. Like, what's comical about that? What do you feel as, quote, unpromising about that title? Community colleges are incredibly important. And by the way, she was a community college professor. So she probably knows more about it than you do. I think that also, for me having read it, it reminded me of a frustration that I think I feel less acutely than the women who came before me, which is there

was a time when teaching was a male-dominated profession, and it was highly respected, and the teacher in the town was considered, you know, the end-all and be-all-educated person. There was a time when, you know, nurses would have been male as well. And it basically, as women interested, the workforce post-World War II and became to dominate those professions, we then started to demean and lower those professions in our sort of social hierarchy. And so now women are getting PhDs. And so what happens? Do we welcome them in to the PhD club? No, we instead say that education PhDs don't matter as much. Now, yes, he talks about other PhDs, but like he could have written a whole op-ed about how people with PhDs are kind of jerks for calling themselves

doctors. I get the idea that like maybe we should only call MD's doctors when we're talking to them sort of at cocktail parties in case someone falls over from choking. We want to make sure that we've only met people who could help someone who's choking at that cocktail party. But he didn't write that. He directed it at Jill Biden, the first lady elect who has a PhD in education. I mean, why? Why except to demean her? I mean, literally, the words in there are just so dog whistles. It's not even dog whistle. It's just regular whistling, Jonah. I heard the whistling. And I think that what will be interesting is as women continue to become the majority in certain professions, women are not the majority in law firms, for instance, but they are the

majority of lost students. So that's a profession that is potentially reaching a tipping point in the next few decades. I'll be curious to see whether we suddenly start devaluing some of these other professions as we have done with teaching as women now are in even the administrative ranks of teaching that that's no longer impressive. All right, other gentlemen, jump in. David, are you going to be, are you going to go full feminist ally here? What's, what's a Look, I thought the Wall Street Journal op-ed was a troll. Like, I think it was a troll. You know, look, it's the way it starts was Madam First Lady, Mrs. Biden, Jill, kiddo.

A bit of advice in what may seem like a small, but I think not an... I mean, a bit of advice? Oh, my God. Like, my whole body is just, I want to punch it. I mean, it was a rude troll. That's what it was. And it wasn't an argument. It was a troll. That's what I thought about the op-ed.

Did everyone react in proportion to what the troll was? No. And then the Wall Street Journal sort of then sort of adapting, We will not be deterred from Twitter, from aggressively. Come on. Come on. was a, you know, classic, you wrote the op-ed, the moment you put it out there, you knew exactly what was going to happen. This was Kabuki Theater from start to finish. We are going to

troll the first lady with a stupid op-ed, with a stupid op-ed that was rudely written. We're going to generate a backlash. Part of that backlash will be too much. You know why? Because part of every backlash in this country is too much. And then we'll focus on the two much backlash and label ourselves the victims of some sort of attempted cancellation. And they got exactly what they wanted out of this. They got, you know, 24, 48 hours of maximum attention, faux, and that ends in sort of faux courage. I mean, I found the whole thing just to be ridiculous from start to finish. And the problem is the problem is the the op-ed itself with just a troll.

And I'm not going to jump on defense of trolls. I mean, we've had way too much of this. We have had way too much. It was written in a deliberately inflammatory way, deliberately disrespectful way, and then spare me, spare me, the fake bravery of the Wall Street Journal of,

I mean, come on. Just come on. There was nobody was going to do anything to you other than Twitter shame you. You know, big freaking deal. Okay. So anyway, that's my tech. Declan, I feel like you will largely agree with David and I.

I know you are a feminist ally. But here's my question to you, Declan. Oh, boy. Aren't you glad we solve those tech issues, Declan? I think it's cutting in and out here. Declan. Set aside the op-ed for a second, Declan. should we as a society only refer to people with MDs as doctors,

or should PhDs be referred to as doctors as well? So I think I might be conflicted out of participating in this conversation because my girlfriend is starting her PhD in the fall. So I'm going to try to very- No, no, we need to know. We need to know. To be clear, she passes Joe, Epstein's stupid test because she's also, she's also getting an MD. So, um, yeah, so that doesn't get you out of this question.

I know. So that was just like a not even a humble brag, but I love it that it was just a full on brag that you're dating someone who's going to have an MD PhD. We're all shocked, Declan. You're not the only one. I don't think it was a humble brag. It was a, it was a very subtle dog whistle to the audience that he's terrified of his girlfriend. And no way wants to get in trouble she's in the next room over she'll she'll enjoy this part of the podcast she's inside the house um so no i i i i just i i agree i agree with david's take that um dodging i just i just don't think it matters that much i think that if people who want to who go to school to earn a doctorate degree want to mention that they have a doctorate degree like more power to them it's like the same people if

if you win a weightlifting competition and you want to tell people you want a weightlifting competition you can like you did I like it sure it comes off as braggadocious at times like know the context but I don't think it I don't think it's any different than people bragging about any other accomplishment that they've acquired in life and so I I had written down in my notes for this exactly what David said is that the Wall Street Journal editorial page got exactly what it wanted out of publishing this piece which is us talking about it six days later. I don't think. There's much more to it. The principal of the elementary school where my kids, all three of my kids went to elementary

school, she got her doctorate in education. And we immediately shifted to calling her doctor. Or as my youngest called her when she, after she got the degree DACA. And it was when she was in kindergarten. We immediately shifted to calling her doctor. She didn't ask us to, but we wanted to acknowledge that she'd achieve something pretty important. And so to me, that's just politeness. It's just manners. Just manners. Why can't we have manners, y'all?

We need manners. So here's something I think we can all agree on, though, which is I knew a person who had an honor J.D. She also ran for Congress at one point. And she insisted on calling herself doctor with an honorary J.D. I think we can, A, all agree that that's insane.

Lawyers don't even call themselves doctors, let alone honorary JDs, but perhaps more to, I don't think honorary doctorates get doctor status. So there's, I agree

with that. I believe my I agree that. I'm just going to be called doctor, and she had an honorary thing, I think. And look, I understand that this is fraught with all sorts of interesting cultural things. You know, in the UK, you call MD's general practitioners doctor, but surgeons, mister, for archaic reasons. There's all sorts of interesting things going on. And I understand that in our culture, making fun of, say, Martin Luther King's being called a doctor would be offensive for all sorts of reasons. for reasons that I think Sarah is sort of implying about, about poo-pooing Jill Biden's

doctorate, that it's a sign of you're just, just, you're trolling, as David might say. You're just deliberately insulting somebody and showing bad manners. I get that. I think the kiddo thing, I agree with you, that it was ill-advised. My understanding is that what he was trying to do was play on how Joe Biden in public calls her kiddo all the time. But I think that missed a beat of connective tissue because no one paid attention to that. And it's very different when, you know, the things I call my wife, I forbid all of you from calling my wife.

Never mind in an op-ed, right? So there are different things going on there. That said, the standard here has changed. Again, I said up front, I got no problem with people. criticizing the op-ed. I think, and I think David's point about the Wall Street Journal and Declan's point about the Wall Street Journal and getting what it wants, totally fair. I don't think they're a profile in courage. I don't think that, like, you know, they're heroic in the great battle of the Joe Epstein op-ed or any of that kind of crap. But, you know, this morning,

on day two or three of the coverage on Morning Joe, they had someone come on and talk about how this shows how every editorial page in the country must now reveal. the race and gender of every author who submits an op-ed so they can show the institutional sexism and racism that could lead to this kind of atrocity. There is something else going on here, and I think some of Sarah's explanation kind of works, but I think the freak out over this, the L.A. Times had gently poked Jill Biden about this a decade ago, the sort of insistence about everybody around them. Lots of newspapers refused to call Seb Gorka doctor, which I don't think any of us lose sleep over the rudeness of that.

I think there are, and also, I should say, you know, to you lawyers, in, you know, I posted it the other day about how it drove my dad crazy that the New York Times insisted in calling Fidel Castro, Dr. Castro. And the defense came back. well, that's because in Latin America, everyone calls lawyers doctor. And my partial response to that is, that's great. Last I checked, the New York Times wasn't actually the Mexico City Times or the Havana Times, you know, their preferred economic policies notwithstanding. And so there are weird cultural ticks all over the place.

But this, it feels to me, much like the other stuff going on with the Bidens, is there is a signal going forth that they're going to try and make them as uncriticizable as the Obama's were. And I think that is a grave mistake for the Democrats. I think it would be much better for the Democrats if they had a better sense of humor about the Biden's. Maybe they can still be mad about this op-ed. I don't know that it deserves several major newspaper articles about an op-ed for god's sake um uh but and i also think there is just there is there is some insecurity or some anger issue about jill biden and hers and the status class anxiety that comes with uh education the education establishment and all that kind of stuff and maybe sarah's right

about the declining role i have some skepticism about the tale that she tells but we can have that debate another day. And I'll also just simply say that education grad schools are actually a net negative for the United States of America, regardless of how great a wonderful woman Joe Biden might be. Two quick things. One, I think Jonah's absolutely right that what we had for the last 48 hours was one of these signal flares that went up, somebody's wrong online. And so. To the bat pole. alert somebody was wrong online um and so we've had the typical overreaction pile on when one of those flares goes up my whole thing is they were sending the flare on purpose like this this is all yeah everybody knew when the word kiddo was in the first line the die was cast i mean the die was cast

everything that happened all unfolded to quote darth sidious all is unfolding as I have foreseen. Everything unfolded the way it was foreseen. That's one, so in one sense, this is kind of a really boring topic, although we've all been pretty animated about it. But the real, the real victim here, the real victim here is the person who I know somebody with a doctrine and education who is consistently not referred by their honorific. And that is Shaquille O'Neal. Shaquille O'Neal, most people don't know. has a doctorate in education. He is Dr. Shack. And by golly on NBA, on T&T, I never hear Charles Barclay or Kenny Smith or EJ or anyone in the NBA refer to him as Dr. Shack. And I intend to

refer to him. I think Joe Epstein should have to go up to Shack and call him Kiddo and see how that goes. So as part of the dispatch style guide, I shall now refer to Shack as Dr. Shack to give the man the respect to the deserves. It's particularly outrageous, giving the Julius Irving did not earn a PhD, and yet he got called Dr. Jay. That's true. I think we need an emergency podcast about this. But isn't that, I mean, just as a tangential point, that's fascinating, that Shaq, he did just finish his degree at LSU.

He went on and got a doctorate in education. I mean, that's kind of a cool story. Not too many people know about it, but, you know, I come to me whenever you want to know anything about the NBA. I can make anything in NBA story. All right. Final question related. There are lots of cool titles out there. Doctor is arguably one of the less cool titles. What is the title that if you could wave a magic wand and people had to call you that title, you had earned that title. What title do you think is the coolest one out there? David, I feel like, you know, Supreme Ork or something is a thing, maybe, no?

supreme orc. No one wants to be an orc. Nobody wants that. Chief of the orcs. Nobody wants that. You know, I did have, we did have an actual, because back in the day when you remember, y'all remember when Game of Thrones was really good, I loved the way they used honorifics even within families.

So it was my lord father, you know, lady mother. And so we had a, we had a, I expressed a wish at the dinner table that I do wish that my kids would refer to me as Lordfather. And they were resistant to that. And is it, is it Grandfather, Lordfather now? I mean, how do we update that? Yeah, I don't know what the Game of Thrones style guide is, how you elevate it when it's grandfather. But I can't remember we bet on something. And the terms of the bet where they had to refer to me as Lord Father for a month at dinner

if I won. And I won. And so for one glorious month, I did not answer to anything at dinner except for Lord Father, which I just thought was spectacular. So I'll just stick with that. Declan? Huh. I think it would be really cool to be like a fifth or like a very long line.

of your name. One, because that tends to signify something about your socioeconomic status and how well you're doing. But yeah, so I think tying that back to your family history would be interesting. So maybe I'll have to start that and send a bunch of little Declan's running around there eventually. Jonah? There is somebody in my social circle named their daughter.

Declan, but spelled L-Y-N-N, and I think it's the worst thing in the entire world. I'm so sorry to hear it. The Holocaust was pretty bad. All right, Jonah. What's your title choice? This is a tough one. I'm going to have anxiety about this for days, but I think I, you know, Steve wouldn't let me put it in the masthead for the dispatch, but I lobbied pretty hard for a master

scribe and monk of bliss and um but uh i'm a sort of anti title so you know because i'm an egalitarian unlike you people um you know i got three harvard yachts here um you know all of you know drinking your tea with your pinky extended and and going knowing all the handshakes for porcelian club or whatever that thing is called so um um I'm a man of the people, and I think that unless you are actually someone who can do a tracheotomy with a ballpoint pen at an airport, you shouldn't be called doctor. And unless you're an actual judge, you shouldn't be called judge. And almost nobody should be called honorable, except on letterhead and formal diplomatic correspondence. One of the greatest things that the founding fathers ever did was get rid of titles of nobility.

and just because you sions of the meritocracy want to reverse all of that out of fealty to Jill Biden doesn't change my mind one bit. And my answer is Supreme Allied Commander. Oh, that's good. That's tough to be. That's a good one.

I don't think there's any title in the United States that sounds better than Supreme Allied Commander. It covers all the waterfront. You are supreme, you are allied, which also implies you're part of the good guys and your commander. I mean... Well, yes, it's not just that you're the supreme commander for America. It's like all your militaries belong to me, which is like really cool. So I'm just going to ignore everything else, Jonah said, as I do usually.

And I'm going to start every email I send to Jonah this week with, let me offer you some advice, kiddo. Fortunately, fortunately, I am secure enough that I can handle that. I mean, I guess, you know, some people have, you know, get triggered by that kind of thing. But, holy kiddo, I'm fine with it. All right, listeners, thank you so much for joining us. And we will be off for the next two weeks for Christmas and New Year. So happy holidays to all of you. We will miss you desperately.

And we'll see you again in the new year. Thank you, Dr. Isger. With Amnizabeth. Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot track side. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing

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