The Dispatch Podcast - Spinning Out of Control | Roundtable

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

Steve Hayes, Kevin Williamson, Sarah Isgur, and Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle discuss the Trump administration’s attempted crackdown on free speech following the assassination of Charlie Kirk before digging into the details of a new TikTok “deal.”Plus: Is fall the best season, or overrated? The Agenda—Jimmy Kimmel gets suspended—The role of the Federal Communications Commission—Obama administration vs. Trump administration on free speech—‘LOL nothing matters’—TikTok dilemma—Why fall is the best season Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. www.ca.com. Did you lock the front door?

Check. Close the garage door? Yep. Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision? No. And you set up credit card transaction alerts at secure VPN for a private connection and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web.

Uh, I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit TELUS.com. Total Security to learn more. Conditions apply. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes.

On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss free speech and the Trump administration's crackdown in the wake of Charlie Kirk's murder. plus a new TikTok deal? Is it for real? Is it legal? And finally, and not worth your time, is fall the best season? I'm joined today by my dispatch colleagues Kevin Williamson and Sarah Isker, along with Megan McArdle from the Washington Post. Let's get to it. Kevin, ABC suspended late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel yesterday after comments he made following the murder of Charlie Kirk. President Donald Trump posted on social media after that, that. that the suspension was, quote, great news for America.

Do you think it's great news for America that Jimmy Kimmel has been suspended? No, I don't think it's great news for America. I, in general, don't think that paying too much attention to what comedians say about anything beyond the issue of whether it makes you laugh or doesn't make you laugh is a very good idea. I think that having the government and the FCC

and the president leaning on television network in this way is fundamentally unhealthy and illiberal. You know, one of the things I detest in this world is excitement in politics. I don't want politics to be exciting. Anytime there's anything that feels like excitement in politics, I always feel like it's a bad thing. But this really is starting to feel like a real moment of crisis that we're in in a way that I don't like.

I'm not very comfortable with. Not only the crazy post-Charlie Kirk backlash stuff, but the TikTok stuff that's going on, some of the other things. It is feeling like a moment in which things are a bit out of control in a way that makes me uncomfortable and a bit queasy. We are going to get to the TikTok controversy later in our conversation. But I want to pick up on something you said there. Things are beginning to feel like they're spinning a little bit out of control.

I want to put this suspension of Jimmy Kee. Kimmel in sort of broader context by looking back at some of the things we heard from senior Trump administration officials over the past week. Earlier this week, Attorney General Pam Bondi was on a podcast of Katie Miller, the wife of Senior White House official Stephen Miller. And Attorney General Bondi said this. There's free speech and then there's hate speech. And there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened.

to Charlie, in our society. Do you see more law enforcement going after these groups who are using hate speech and putting cuffs on people? So we show them that some action is better than no action. We will absolutely target you, go after you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech. Then the next day, ABC's John Carl was at the White House and asked President Trump about Bondi's comments. Carl said to Donald Trump.

And what do you make Pam Bondi saying she's going to go out for hate speech? Is that, I mean, a lot of people, a lot of your allies say hate speech is free speech. You'll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly. It's hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe they'll come after ABC. Well, ABC paid me $16 million recently for a form of hate speech, right? Your company paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech.

So maybe they'll have to go after you. Those comments are sort of not new from Donald Trump necessarily, but what Pam Bondi said was new and caused quite a stir. Megan, what do you make of those comments and the kinds of things that we're hearing from senior Trump administration officials and all of that and the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel in that context? I'm wondering if the White House doesn't need a memory care unit. Do conservatives not remember that they were the targets of hate speech, and I don't mean hate speech about them, that, but five years ago, the left was trying to crack down on conservative speech by calling it hate speech. Now they have the reins, and they want to do the same thing. Thankfully, even conservatives pushed back. You know, people like Ted Cruz spoke out very strongly against what Pam Bondi said.

she walked it back the next day. But the fact that the Attorney General of the United States needed to be told that there is no legal penalty for hate speech. It is fully protected under the First Amendment. And that this setting a precedent in which the government could go after it would ultimately be as bad or worse for conservatives than what they're doing now. And again, I think this has been the story of the last 10 years, is no one thinking more than three seconds ahead. I have power now. Let me use it. Let me expand it. Let me figure out all sorts of new tricky ways to do things. And none of them think, well, I might not be in power forever. Would I want my opponents to have this power? No. No, you would not. And, you know, even leaving aside the fact that the Attorney General of the United States should have a deep respect for our constitution, for our norms, for our way of life, which has included for the entirety of our existence a profound and unique right to speak your mind without any interference from the government. Even if we just, we don't even go in to that problem, you are still left

with, what do you people think you are doing? Where do you think this ends and how do you think it well. Yeah, Sarah, I mean, I think it's one thing for Donald Trump to sort of fulminate about going after journalists. He's been calling journalists the enemies of the American people for nearly a decade, almost the entire time he's been in electoral politics. He's made these kind of threats before. But we've seen him now act on this, as he points out ABC News paid him in a settlement related to comments that George Stephanopoulos made. He has gone after other media companies and gotten settlements from other media companies as well. And this week, you also had Brendan Carr, the FCC chairman, earlier in the day that ABC

suspended Jimmy Kimmel in effect issuing threats. And I would say not so veiled threats, he said, among other things. There's actions that we can take on licensed broadcasters. And frankly, I think that it's really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say, listen, we are going to preempt. We are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out because we, we licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or licensed revocation from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.

Is this moving from the more theoretical to the practical? They're doing. in this stuff now, right? Yeah. Well, here's what's a little interesting, right? They're saying the stuff that they're threatening to do. And I just want to make that distinction because the threat itself is certainly going to be meaningful to a company. But that is a little different than actually, for instance, blocking the merger.

Like, there are steps you would take to do that separately. Okay, so, but I'm not saying one is good and one is bad, just making the distinction on what doing means. A few things here. One, as Megan noted, I was very pleased to see conservatives, Republicans, Trump allies come out and just like the jaw-dropping stupidity of a lawyer saying that, let alone the Attorney General saying it, and a Republican Attorney General, like, insane. I was actually more pleased and took comfort. How great was it to see the left come out and suddenly discover all of these quotes about free speech that they had forgotten, per Megan's point, for the last 10, 15 years. I just typed in to Google a quote by Justice Alito.

The proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express the thought that we, hate. It's a great quote. Hadn't heard anyone on the left say that quote ever. And all of a sudden it's all over the place, quoted in, you know, every story imaginable, including even the New York Times. And by the way, Alito was quoting in part a famous 1929 dissent from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Long story on that guy's free speech jurisprudence. He was all over the place. But Basically, he came around, and this was from his come-around time. So, A, the left had been, as Megan said, targeting hate speech for a long time. It was the right that had been fighting back.

B, you missed another thing that Pam Bondi said, which for some reason, I think, probably set off conservatives, even more, certainly in legal conservative world, which was that she said that we can prosecute a business that refuses to print a poster for a customer. customer, you know, for a memorial service, basically, for Charlie Kirk, which is basically the exact same facts of the case 303 creative, which conservatives had fought for years and years. This is the facts of masterpiece cake shop about whether you can demand a baker, make a cake, not based on who you are, but with the message that you want. So the Supreme Court held in 303 creative that that discrimination laws prevent a business from turning away a customer because of their race, religion, you know, ethnicity, et cetera. You can't say you're a Jew and I'm not going to serve you. You're

black. You can't come in this, you know, lunch counter. But if someone comes in and says, I'd like you to paint swastikas on my fingers, you're a nail salon, you can say no to that and they can't say, well, you're discriminating against me because I'm white. No, that's, nope, it's, I don't want to paint your message. You're welcome to be in here as a white person and have a whole lot of other things painted, but not that. And so for her to say that was, again, rolling back something that the conservative movement felt like they'd fought for for a long time against the left under the guise of anti-discrimination laws. Okay, so we've got the speech, we've got the anti-discrimination laws. And then we're getting to your point, Steve, which is the weaponization of government regulation, unrelated government regulations. for the purpose of compelling slash restricting speech. Again, we have conservatives fighting this in the Biden administration. It also went to the Supreme Court, by the way. This was about the Biden administration threatening and bullying social media companies,

taking down speech of conservatives or speech they don't like. I'm sort of hard to put it all into the conservative camp. But around COVID, for instance, COVID origins. and just any topics that they found uncomfortable or against their message. So I say all that, Steve, because the stuff that the Biden administration did that came out in the record of that case was outrageous. And similarly so. I actually don't think that one is really different than the other. They were threatening the tech companies with changing Section 230, which provides, you know, large immunity to the tech companies, et cetera.

against defamation lawsuits and the like. And here, the Trump administration is threatening companies about their future business merger because they will need a waiver from the Federal Communications Commission for this merger to go through because they're talking about owning such a high percentage of these local broadcast stations around the country. I say all that because I think if you are trying to look at this from the perspective of the people doing it. This is all part of a story that we've been telling now for seven months. Turnabout is fair play. They did it to us. We're tired of turning the other cheek. We have to show them what this feels like, what this looks like. I don't think that the necessary next step of that is so that

they'll stop doing it and then we'll stop doing it. I wish that was maybe their goal, but I don't think it is. But I do think it's important. This is not new. There's There's nothing new under the sun. And I don't want to start the, like, who started a game, because I'm not really saying that the left started it. But it's certainly a game that they've been playing. And so it's, I do think it's important to see the left coming out and saying, oh, it's bad when the government threatens a company to control their speech. It's bad when the government that I don't like gets to define hate speech. It's bad when the government forces a company an individual to express a message that they don't agree with. I mean, the left hate. the decision in 303 creative. They said it was the Supreme Court agreeing with discrimination. Well, here we are. And so maybe if there's a silver lining, it's that the left understands why conservatives have been fighting for this for so long. Kevin, do you buy that? Are the situations similar? In some ways, broadly. I would love it if I thought Sarah was right that the left would understand why conservatives have been fighting for this for so long. But apparently conservatives

don't understand this either, right? I mean, I don't think we're dealing with so much a tit-for-tat as we are just the ordinary thing of low-minded, basically corrupt people who don't have any principles or values using power when they have it. I think it's a really good argument that the FCC has too much power, and I'm not sure why we have this organization in a lot of ways anyway. There are very few people who watch television over broadcast signals anymore. You know, most people are getting this stuff over the wires. the idea that we need a federal regulator because of spectrum is increasingly less important,

at least when it comes to television, it's certainly still important for radio, and it will be for a while, but radio is a very different kettle of fish. I think maybe it's time to revisit the question of the way this agency is positioned and organized and the sort of scope and power it has, because I think if there's anything that Washington has shown,

is that any power that you give to these people is power that will be abused. Yeah, Megan, at the end of Chairman Carr's comments, as I think he was making this thread, he said that these licensed broadcasters are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC. If they continue to run content that continues to be a pattern of news distortion, do we want the government to be in the business of determining what's news distortion and not? And should the FCC have that power?

Absolutely not. I would note, just as an aside, before I let you answer that question, that he made those comments on a podcast hosted by Benny Johnson, who's a well-known plagiarist, conspiracy theorist, says things that aren't true all the time, hosted Ron Johnson on Ron Johnson's famous interview about 9-11, potentially being an inside job. This is where the FCC chairman chose to make his stand about false broadcasting, news distortion on Benny Johnson's show. Yeah, no, the FCC was given this power because in the early days of radio and television, right, they're allocating scarce spectrum that is viewed as a public good, something that the government effectively owns. And if you are taking a government contract, which is kind of functionally what they're doing,

right? They're buying the right to use spectrum that belongs to the government. Then the government has the right to put some conditions on it. I always thought that this was dangerous power. I think we are seeing that it is dangerous power, although there are also, you know, one thing that's going on here is that one of the affiliates who threatened to pull Kimmel off the air unless they did is that one of those big affiliate networks is facing a merger or wants it to go through. There's a lot of government agencies that have the power to mess with free speech. And that has always been inherent in the government having as much power as we've given it. And I think this is a good moment to kind of step back and say, like, look, do we want the government to have this kind of power?

Do we want the government to be able to say, you know, nice business, you've got their shame if anything happened to it? Because we've given the government a lot of power to do that. liberals like it in many cases but this is where you end up this is once you create the weapon someone's going to pick it up and fire the gun well and to sarah's point earlier um on this question of whether the right is just doing what the left had done before um going beyond questions of the FCC and its reach and influence you know during the obama administration you had the IRS going after the tax exempt status of conservative groups, tea party groups, that it didn't like. And, you know, you had a reasonably senior IRS official apologizing for the abuse of

that power in public at a conference saying she was sorry about it. I think what might be different here, Sarah, and I wonder if you buy this distinction, is that in the aftermath of the that. You had the Obama administration, at least initially saying, hey, look, that's crazy what's happening. We didn't have anything to do with that. That was the IRS doing that. That wasn't a top-down order from the White House from the Obama administration. They sought to distance themselves from what happened. And as far as I know, there wasn't evidence to suggest that they did direct what the IRS had been doing, although I think the IRS could be understood to be trying to please its bosses as the Obama administration went after these Tea Party groups.

Also worth noting, they had a very mysterious hard drive failure where shockingly, and I was in IT before I was a journalist. And so, like, I looked at their explanation where they had insanely been backing up everyone's files to their local drives rather than to a server, which is something that even in, like, 1995, I wasn't doing. And so, like, yeah, maybe. Maybe that's, like, I understand why conservatives are suspicious there. I will also note that when I tried to, I was pretty brutal on the Obama administration about this. And after that happened, I couldn't get anything out of public affairs at the IRS, even really normal.

Like, how many people in the United States have 529 accounts? Nothing. Totally frozen out. Didn't respond to my emails. So, like, as Sarah says, there is a. long tradition of people. And, you know, the woman who did that, Lois Loner, she had come over from the federal elections committee. I think that she thought she was doing the right thing. I don't think that she understood herself as cracking down on conservatives because she was so deep into her liberal

bubble that she just assumed that, like, there's something deeply dangerous about these Tea Party people. They're not legitimate. This is not. And of course, I have to crack down on it. And I think conservatives have a lot of strong feelings about that kind of behavior and about the fact that like liberals need to understand and this is in no way saying that this is like why Trump is doing this. I think he's doing this because he is thin-skinned and corrupt and has no respect for any of our institutional norms and that he would be doing he would be trying this stuff regardless and a lot of conservatives would be cheering him regardless because that's like that's how things are. But what the left got

to rely on was the fact that almost everyone in the law, in the bureaucracy, in all of these big mainstream institutions was liberal and would make those calls with that set of assumptions. And I think the COVID misinformation stuff is a really good example of that, is if you tell liberals, look, the COVID misinformation stuff, the government threatening social media companies in order to stop them from saying things about, from criticizing administration policy on COVID, is really bad, they'll be like, no, but that's different. That's public health, right? And now when conservatives are making those institutional decisions, they don't like it. And I will say that, like, one of the things I have seen is a lot of media reporters conflating what the administration

is doing, which is dangerous, unconstitutional, illegitimate, I will stop ranting. With, like, David Ellison buying CBS and maybe putting Barry Weiss there, those are not the same. The thing that you think you own everyone in the media and any attempt to change the partisan balance of the media in any way is inherently illegitimate is itself a problem. And you do need to examine that. That said, does not in any way. Excuse what the Trump administration is doing.

Explain what the Trump administration is doing. It is wrong and dangerous. But I think what we need to do, we can't keep Trump from getting elected. what we can do is set strong guardrails so that no one can abuse the power that the government has. From your lips, the distinction I'm trying to make here, and maybe it's not an important one, but it seems to me one that's worth making, is, and Megan, I covered the IRS scandal as well. I do think it was a scandal. I do think there was a cover-up.

There are lots of things we don't know about how. high this went up, who was giving these orders, if anyone, what happened to this information? I don't think Obama wandered into the IRS to, like, issue orders directly. I don't think so, but I think your pushback is fair. There's a lot we don't know. We'll stipulate that. I think that the distinction I'm trying to make is at the time, the Obama administration, even if just for rhetorical purposes, sort of recognized that this had gone too far when they got called down on. I think you're absolutely right about the nature of the bureaucracy and people didn't realize

this. They all shared assumptions that the Tea Party was dangerous, that there needed to be crackdowns, that they were potentially abusing their tax exempt status. All of that is true. But at a certain point, you got to where Barack Obama and other people at the White House said, like, hey, wait, whoa, whoa, this is too much. Even if it was just because they'd been busted, right? They said, okay, this is too much, this is wrong.

here what you have is Donald Trump's saying it from the White House lawn saying go get these people. And you have Stephen Miller at the beginning of all of this. And I think I ask about the FCC questions. I ask about the Pam Bondi questions, all sort of in the context of what we heard from Stephen Miller at the beginning of this, of all of this, which was, I think, striking in, the way that he talked about using the power of the federal government to go after their perceived enemies, he said, Stephen Miller said, and bear with me while I read this, promised that the Trump administration would use the federal government, quote, to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence.

Because the power of law enforcement under President Trump's leadership will be used to find you. We'll use to take away your money, take away your power. and if you've broken the law to take away your freedom, Sean? I guess the difference I make. I mean, I find the phrase, if you've broken the law, pretty significant because it implies that they would do all of these other things to people who haven't, of course, broken the law. But the difference that I'm driving at here is, you know, back in the Obama administration, whatever abuses there were, there seemed to be when they were exposed, a recognition that

they were abuses, that this was inappropriate. And here, you not only don't have that recognition, you have this being driven by the president and his top a top aides. Is that a worthy distinction, Sarah? I just think you're wrong about the distinction and one being better than the other. Maybe the Biden administration's social media bullying is a better example. You're right. They lied and said they weren't doing it. And then they went to court and said they weren't doing it. And then when the record came out, they said there was nothing wrong with it. So you end up in the same place. I guess I would rather a government say what they're doing

because then at least we might be able to have a conversation about whether the federal government has too much power. To Kevin and Megan's point, we can sit here and talk about the FCC shouldn't have this power. A lot of these agencies shouldn't have this power. The presidency shouldn't have this power. When you lie about whether you're doing it or not, then the conversation, becomes, did you do it? And so the Obama administration, I mean, I guess I just, I don't agree with your characterization. They just said they didn't do it, and then they kept doing it, and they didn't look into it, they didn't punish anyone, they didn't fire Lois Learner. They, in fact,

stonewalled Congress when they tried to look into it. I mean, I take your point why one might be better, because at least you're giving lip service to the norms, but I think there's a way to look at it and say that the others worse? I think the Obama administration has a lot to answer for on a lot of this stuff. I dislike the tendency in our current conversation. I don't mean this conversation. I mean the national conversation.

Poor conservatives to try to change the subject on this stuff and say, what about the Democrats and what about the Obama administration. But yeah, they have a lot to answer for. I would like to point out for the record that I was the first person to write about the lowest learner issue way back in the day. And I should have probably pulled out that story a little more closely than I did. But I think about it in terms, like, you know,

the Obama administration assassinating Anwar Alalaki, who was a U.S. citizen who was killed by a drone attack for being the Osama bin Laden of Facebook, which is such a ridiculous phrase that I can't help saying it every time this guy's name comes up, because Osama bin Laden of Facebook is just goddamn hilarious. And it's not much of a reason to kill somebody, particularly someone who's a U.S. citizen.

But I think you can draw a pretty straight line from that to this Venezuelan boat fiasco, right? Once you've got presidents out there saying, well, we're thinking of these people as enemy combatants And, yeah, I mean, the guy was driving off to have breakfast somewhere. It wasn't exactly a, you know, a hot shooting battle. And we've been targeting him with the blacklist that we were bragging to the New York Times about for months before that. But, yeah, let's pretend like this is a heath and fog of war kind of situation.

And there's no other way to do that. So isn't the distinction there, Kevin, just to jump in, that the targeting of Anwar al-A-Lawki was done broadly under the authorization of the use of military force that was passed after 9-11. And there isn't one right now. Well, if the authorization of the use of military force means you can whack a U.S. citizen for putting stuff on Facebook that you don't like, then that's a problem. But it's a different problem. I agree with you. We can have an argument about whether that's a problem, but it seems to me a very different problem than doing this. I don't think there's anything in that AUMF. It says you can do that. If the AUMF is to be interpreted in such a way that the president can call anyone in the world, including American citizens, and citizenship is supposed to mean something. thing, an enemy combatant because you don't like what he posted on Facebook. I don't know. I don't think that's, I don't think it's even a plausible interpretation of what's in that,

in that language, although Sarah's the lawyer here. She can speak about this stuff more than I can, but that seems to me like a real stretch. And the more you stretch things, the more stretchable things are, right? The more you stretch something, the harder it is to get it to bounce back into its ordinary shape that it had before you stretched it out. And so don't I know that after two kids? You know, I was, I was going to make that joke. But then I thought, no, Kevin, this is not your joke. This is someone else's joke. And this is probably, this probably gets to be Sarah's joke.

And so you're welcome. And she delivered, as she always does. She delivered. That's a good way of putting it, too, Megan. But, Kevin, to your point, I mean, I think there's a parallel here, actually. you can criticize the Bush administration as you're doing for stretching the proper understanding of what was permissible under the authorization of use of military force. Obama administration was talking about there.

Obama. And you can make the argument that what they did was went beyond, stretched the understanding of what was permissible. But they made the argument, right? There was at least some pretense at this being. important that there was this AUMF, that this happened. And now it's just we are picking random Venezuelan boats to attack, and we're going to kill these people. They're making the argument. They sent their letter to Congress under the War Powers Act and discussed all

sorts of things about their legal authority. You may not agree with their legal authority. Kevin doesn't agree with Obama's legal authority, but I'm not sure I see a distinction there. They are justifying it legally. Yeah, and that's the problem with pretending, if we take this stuff seriously, right? Like, people can come out and say any ridiculous thing. You know, you can kill someone in Sarah's a lawyer. She knows this. She said all sorts of things she doesn't believe in life, I'm sure.

But, you know, you can kill someone in self-defense, right? And because you feel threatened with immediate grievous bodily harm and you feel that physical force is the only way to protect yourself or another person. That's the usual kind of standard you see most places. And if you show at someone's house at 4 o'clock in the morning and ring his doorbell and shoot him in the face when he comes to the door. And then you tell the police, well, it was self-defense. you know, I felt really terribly threatened and it was the only way to do it, no one's under

any obligation to take you seriously. Just because there are some words and sounds you can make with your face or put on paper that fulfill the requirements of this form doesn't mean that anyone's under any particular obligation to take them seriously. And that's the problem with this whole emergency line of thinking, right? So after 9-11, we have this real national emergency mentality because it was a national emergency. It was a real thing. And but then it has a way of creeping into every other thing. And now it's a national emergency because Jimmy Kimmel says something unkind about Charlie Kirk. That's not a national emergency.

Wait, to be clear, also, he didn't say anything unkind about Charlie Kirk. Or if he did, or someone did, or some guy working in a burrito shop somewhere. I just think it's interesting, right? Jimmy Kimmel got fired. I think what Jimmy Kimmel said was outrageous. But Jimmy Kimmel didn't get fired for him. Technically, not necessarily fired. Put on suspension indefinitely.

He might be brought back on. We're not really clear about it. Put on suspension indefinitely for saying, something bad about Charlie Kirk. He got put on suspension indefinitely for criticizing quote unquote MAGA for trying to score political points by trying to argue that the person was not one of theirs. And I actually think when it comes to Donald Trump, that matters. I'm curious what would have happened if he had said something negative about Charlie Kirk and whether you would have seen the same reaction because this seemed far more about Donald Trump than about Charlie

Kirk. Yeah. But you think that matters to Trump? You think Trump has any idea what Jimmy Kimmel actually said? Oh, yeah. He watches that stuff all the time. Are you kidding? He basically spends all his time on watching television. So yeah, I think he probably has seen. Absolutely. And I think he cares very much whether you're criticizing someone else or him. I mean, the look on your face, Steve. Just totally don't know. Yeah. I find that, I find that very hard to believe. I grant you that he watches, that he watches a lot of television. Yeah. No, me too. Yeah. Me too. Probably most of us have. I guess I don't think it's likely they would have had a different response if Jimmy Kimball had actually just criticized Charlie Kirk and not MAGA, I think. To me, what we're seeing here with Trump, what we're seeing here with Stephen Miller, these are things that they've wanted to do since the beginning. Donald Trump campaigned on retribution. What we're seeing now is the use of these events. Yes, retribution for himself, as in, like, you're right.

He wanted to do this for a long time because of criticism to him. Yeah, but his whole argument on retribution was I'm standing in their way. They're coming after you. For supporting me. It's still like, it's, yeah. Yeah, that's campaign fluff, Steve. I mean, you know, if you think about what he said to the guy from ABC, it was like, you know, because you wrote some unnized things about me or you've been very unfair to me and your heart's full of hate to me.

It's not about, you know, the country or some movement. movement or something. These things are all just ancillary to him. So do we think that the things that we're seeing from the Trump administration now, whether it's the campaign that Stephen Miller announced, the New York Times is reporting, Ken Vogel is reporting that they are prepared to really apply great scrutiny to IRS status of a variety of left-wing groups and potentially yank their tax-exempt status to the FCC moves to all this.

Do we think this is happening because of the murder of Charlie Kirk and the response that we've seen to it? Or do we think that this is what they were going to do anyway and they're just not doing it? It provides an opportunity in a pretext. So there's this, you know, kind of moment of national moral panic. And you've got a lot of people, particularly on the right, but not just on the right, genuinely upset about this. And they're just exploiting it. It's, you know, it's the Rahm Emanuel never let a good crisis go to waste cliche that we all have to mention at least once a podcast.

Can we also just, I don't know if this is a cul-de-sac, a footnote, I'm upset about it, right? I think there's a difference to be made between being upset about it and using the levers of the federal government to coerce and compel and restrict and punish speech. But I just want to be clear. I'm upset about it. I'm obviously upset about what happened to Charlie, but it is also exposed a moral rot, especially, not surprisingly, I think on university campuses, where you have a generation of young people who have told us over and over and over again in polling that they believe that violence is, in some cases, an acceptable way to shut down speech that they find offensive. And then someone does that. And to talk about your point, Steve, there's not even the like, well, violence is

never the answer, but there's been plenty of that. Don't get me wrong. But they've dropped the top part. You know, fire came out with their latest survey on college students, 68,000 college students they surveyed. By every measure, speech, acceptable speech restrictions have gone up, acceptability of violence, acceptability of preventing other students from going to see speech that you find offensive. And this number, I mean, it still shocks me. Maybe it shouldn't anymore. Shouting down a speaker that you disagree with was now at 77%. Violence, by the way, was still below 50%. So I guess we can all pat ourselves on the back for that. But I just want to be very clear, this exposed a moral rot that goes far beyond.

boy, I wish the kids, you know, embraced free speech and were willing to debate controversial ideas to, no, speech is violence and violence is speech, has really taken hold in a way that I think should scare the shit out of us. Oh, it does. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we will be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. 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 that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else

is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months. Ethos keeps it simple. It's 100% online, no medical exam, just a few health questions. You can get a quote in as little as 10 minutes, same-day coverage, and policies starting at about two bucks a day, build monthly, with options up to $3 million in coverage. With a 4.8 out of five-star rating on trust pilot and thousands of families already applying through Ethos, it builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's E-T-H-O-S dot com slash dispatch. Application times may vary.

Rates may vary. During the Volvo Fall Experience event, discover exceptional offers and thoughtful design that leaves plenty of room for autumn adventures. And see for yourself how Volvo's legendary safety brings peace of mind to every crisp morning commute. This September, lease a 2026 X-E-90 plug-in hybrid from $599 by week. at 3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event. Conditions apply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates

or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style. It's quick, intuitive, and requires zero coding experience. You can also tap into built-in analytics and see who's engaging with your site and email campaigns to stay connected with subscribers or clients. And Squarespace goes beyond design. You can offer services, book appointments, and receive payments directly through your site. It's a single hub for managing your work and reaching your audience without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. all seamlessly integrated.

Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Before we return to the roundtable, I want to let you know what's going on elsewhere at the dispatch. This week on The Remnant, we have Claire Lehman, founder of Quillette, and a contributing writer for the dispatch.

She joins Jonah Goldberg to discuss the radicalization of young women, the new wave of wokeness, by figures like Zoran Mamdani and why Australia is a terrifying continent filled with creatures that want you dead. Search for the Remedit in your podcast app and hit the follow button. Now let's jump back into our conversation. Speaking of distorting the minds of the youth. What a segue?

There was a deal, or at least the outlines of a deal that the Trump administration is in the process of announcing. We're still learning details of it with the Chinese government on TikTok. Megan, have you had time to sort of dive into what we know? And if you have, can you enlighten us? Yeah, it looks like a consortium of American companies is going to buy TikTok, but they're still going to use the bite dance algorithm. So bite dance is the Chinese company that owns TikTok. And there have been functionally two objections to allowing TikTok to continue operating in the United States. One of them is privacy, that, you know, this app might be scraping data from your phone, sending it to China, allowing them to spy on Americans. The second problem is that China, you know, technically this is a private company

in China that is a distinction without a difference. If the Chinese government does not like what you're doing, they can shut you down. Sadly, this seems to be coming. closer to an American fact as well. So the idea that, like, basically this app, which is incredibly popular, especially among young people, was funneling Chinese propaganda to the United States. China has long wanted to export its censorship regime to the United States. We have seen appalling compliance by U.S. companies on everything from taking Taiwan off of maps to, you know, John, what, Fina, is that his name? It's an actor.

Sina. Sina. Sina. Actor, wrestler. Yeah. So he apologized for speaking about the Hong Kong protests. The NBA apologized because they want to, for one of their people speaking out about the Hong Kong protest because they want to do business in China. And so what the worry is that that algorithm will kind of suppress things that the Chinese government doesn't want you to see. And indeed, there is evidence that that is happening.

It is very difficult to get things like Tiananmen Square or the Hong Kong protests, other things. Those things don't go viral on TikTok. More worryingly, you know, with the, when October 7th happened, pro-Palestine, content was much more likely to go viral on TikTok than pro-Israel content. And while there were some attempts at explaining this, oh, well, it's, you know, it's really popular in Malaysia. So probably they're just boosting it. This is nonsense. So it seems very clear that the Chinese government puts its thumb on the scale when deciding what goes viral. Not always, right? They do not have the capacity to micromanage everything that happens, but that this could be a tool for kind of sewing dissent in the United States, for suppressing information.

You can imagine dangerous things happening. For example, if we got into a military conflict with China, what would, you know, if all of these kids are getting their news through TikTok, and a lot of them do how that might influence our population. So the deal solves the privacy problem. It doesn't solve the algorithm problem because they still have to get the algorithm from bite dance. And I think this is deeply worrying. It's probably, like, on the business side, probably a good deal for the Ellison family, which will now have Paramount, which may have, and CBS may also end up buying Warner Brothers Discovery and then could get one of the most popular social media apps, giving them a kind of instant mega media company.

But from a national security perspective, I'm not sure I see that this deal solves the biggest problem with TikTok, which was not the privacy concerns. And are we really sure it actually solves a privacy problem as well? I think probably yes. Like the Bidance is still going to be a minority stakeholder in the company, but all of this stuff will be segregated on U.S. soil. And most importantly, because that was doable without blocking the deal, it will be controlled by U.S. investors. The fly in the ointment is that, like, if you have to get your algorithm from bite dance, there is, they have, they still have a pretty powerful lever to put pressure on your company because they can say, well, I'm cutting you off. And, like, yeah, you can take them to court, but in a Chinese court, you're going to win that fight. Right, right. What was interesting among many things that were interesting as we began to see the details of this deal.

trickle out over the course of this week is pretty strong condemnation of the deal on both the left and the right. You had a senior Biden national security council official saying that this was a complete surrender by the Trump administration. You had a top Republican commuters saying, a communicator saying this is pretty much the whole ballgame for a TikTok deal. If China maintains control of the TikTok algorithm, it will continue to be. be the digital fentanyl that President Trump tried to ban in his first term. Is it that bad, Kevin, in your understanding? There's a lot of stuff to hate about this deal.

You know, a few years ago, Elizabeth Warren had this crackpot proposal where she was talking about, um, you rewriting corporate governance rules in order to give like labor groups more of a say over who gets named to corporate boards. And under this, the government's just going to be having control over at least one seat on the, on the TikTok board. The deal is being brokered in a way to benefit people who are politically close to Trump, not only Ellison, but also Andrescent Horowitz, which is Mark Andreessen's firm. And so, yeah, there's a lot to dislike about it.

And it's, you know, it's Chinese spyware. That's what it is. TikTok is Chinese spyware that's been made entertaining to such an extent that they don't have to sneak it onto your devices. People put it on themselves. It's a brilliant strategy. And, yeah, I don't think that there's, I don't have the technical ability to speak to this, but to me, the notion that the algorithm and the data can be really strictly segregated in that way is at least questionable.

Because the algorithm response to the data, obviously, and it's part of how that stuff gets managed. So the idea that our federal government is going to be the people who have the great technical expertise to make sure that this is not being used. in ways that this deal is supposed to keep it from being used is something I will look at with a very, very hairy eyeball and a great deal of skepticism. So, no, I hate it. You know, I wrote a really angry email to Tom Cotton last night because Tom Cotton has introduced this piece of legislation

that would keep foreign nationals from serving on certain nonprofit ports because we're worried about malign foreign influence. And while Cotton has been willing to criticize the Trump administration, at least a little bit for its coddling of TikTok, he hasn't actually done anything to try to force them to follow the law while they've been flouting it for all these months and months and months. So I have reason to believe that none of these people are actually very serious about this stuff.

And Tom Cotton seems like a very serious guy in a lot of ways, but he's also a guy who obviously knuckles under political pressure when it's coming from the White House and it's not going to be the guy to stick his neck out on this issue and actually stand up and do something. So, LOL, nothing matters. Is that where we are, I suppose? So I want to get back to the legality of this

and ask a question to Sarah, but Kevin, I can't help but follow up on that. Are you a serial letter writer? Do you write to your congressman and your senator? Do you write to city council members? I'm that guy who writes random people. And often I'll send people a note like that when I'm thinking about writing a column about them.

And so the letter will end, you know, if you have one, give me a reason to think you're serious about this because I don't think you're serious about this. And I'll start taking you seriously when you start taking you seriously. When you act like you're in the U.S. Senate and you have some oversight power here and you can actually make the president do something. You know, I mean, I want to go off on a whole rant here. You know, Ted Cruz jumping up and down on Pam Bondi about not understanding, you know, the First Amendment, which you would think the Attorney General ought to. You know, you can do something about that, right?

You know, there are things you can do to push back against the administration, short of impeaching the Attorney General. there are lots of things you can do besides issue a press release or a tweet or something but just none of them are willing to do it and they are just contemptible little specimens I don't like them. We will be looking for your column on all of this

next week, maybe, week after. Sarah, why are we even having this conversation about TikTok? You've pointed out more than once, shall we say. None of this is legal. What's happening? Yeah, I guess I'm sort of out of words on this. Congress passed a law. President signed it into law. It was duly enacted. Now, 241 days. It has been 241 days that TikTok was not supposed to be able to be downloaded on anyone's phone. And here we are. So look, like we could have a whole podcast. And in fact, thankfully I have another platform to have this conversation about the take care clause in the Constitution and whether the president is bound to enforce all laws

and how exactly that works. And there is wiggle room to be had there for sure. But this is so outside that like interesting conversation that, yeah, I don't really know why we're here. And I actually laughed out loud like an actual lulls when I saw that the president had extended the deadline to December 16th. Because we're talking. about a deal that hasn't happened. So give me a break. He extended it to December 16th, again, just unlawfully. So I don't know why we're talking about a deal at all. There's no deal. Why, Megan, did President Trump flip on this? I mean, he was very strongly against TikTok in his first term. He warned about it. It was his idea. This was his executive order.

Yes. Right. He didn't just warn about it. He banned TikTok, and then it got stopped by a court because Congress needed to do it, not the president, to be clear. Two reasons. He has a donor who is an investor in TikTok, a major donor. And also, his content does well on TikTok. He likes that. It's not more complicated than that. I actually do think, by the way, a lot of people blame the first reason. And I'm not saying it's irrelevant. Maybe it is irrelevant. But I actually think the second reason is a far, far bigger reason. He started to do better with young people. His content did well on TikTok. And he was

told correctly that he was crushing Biden and Harris among the TikTok world. And I think that had a lot more to do with it. So as the child of a lobbyist, I have a different view of how donor influence works than most people, which is that you can't buy policy outcomes except on really tiny stuff that no one cares about, right? Yep. Yep. This is totally true. If you want some trivial tax code change that no one else will ever know about, then you may be able to buy that. The chicken and egg are in the other direction. Yeah. The thing you cannot buy is major policy changes that people care about because the reason

they want your money is to get elected. They will not do things that will make people mad in order to please you. What donors, what donations buy is access. It is the ability to make your pitch. And so, I mean, one example of this is that Dick Durbin was friends with a major, he's a senator, was friends with a major retailer CEO. I believe it was Target. And that retail CEO cared a lot about up debit fee interchange fees, debit card interchange fees,

which are basically every time you swipe your card at a retailer, the retailer has to pay the bank for the privilege of taking your credit card. And debit cards, for those who are old enough, you may remember, you used to be able to get rewards on your debit card. I used to love my American Airlines debit card, branded from Citibank. And then they lowered the interchange fees. Now, this was part of the post-financial crisis reforms. Did debit card interchange have anything to do with the financial crisis? No, it had to do with the fact that Dick Durbin knew a reason. retail CEO who wanted his interchange fees to be lower. That's the kind of access that major

donations buy you, but that's access that you can use to explain that, hey, dude, you're crushing it on TikTok. You really don't want to, you really don't want to shut this app down. It also just to, sorry, to go off on Megan's point, you give money to the person who already supports your position to help them win. You don't give money to the person who doesn't support your position. That's what I mean by the chicken and egg thing. And, yes, access. And also to people who are more likely to win, right? So people would say, like, incumbents are getting all these donations.

It's because the system's corrupts. Like, no, people are betting on the person most likely to win the next election. Yes, for that access. So, like, betting on the incumbent is for access. Betting on the person who supports your policy is trying to get them to win. In that sense, it's exactly what we want people, what everyone donates for. But giving a lot of money makes it, well, it actually used to make it more likely that they would win. really diminishing returns slash maybe negative returns at this point at the national or statewide level.

Well, that's depressing too. No, it means the system works better than most people think. Well, what we need right here, by the way, is a big expensive advertisement from the government of Qatar. I mean, I guess because the corruption isn't still quite as direct as some people might imagine. Although I would say if you watch the pardon process in the last few years, it's not necessarily lobbyists, but the quid pro quo seem pretty clear, maybe clearer than in the broader sort of lobbying campaign that we're describing. It really depends on the math of the issue of concentrated benefits versus dispersed costs. Sometimes we have some very, very, very, very concentrated benefits. You know, like I joke about guitar, but they actually are pretty good about, you know, buying influence in this way.

you can do that. But, you know, everyone's, I think, is right about that. People talk about this in the context of the NRA a lot. Like, the NRA just goes out there and gives people money and they're against gun control. No, it's not how that works. They get a lot of high-intensity voters. They give money to people who are against gun control.

Right. But also the main thing that the NRA has is not money. It's that they have a lot of incredibly high-intensity voters, less than they used to after all the scandals, but they have a lot of incredibly high-intensity voters had who will go out and vote on the issue. And this is like, people think that the reason we don't have gun control, even though it pulls pretty well, is that it's money. It's not money. It's the fact that people who own a lot of guns really care about the issue and will 100% vote against a politician who tries to ban them. People who don't own a lot of guns may care about the issue briefly when there's like one of these big shootings, but they have nine other things they're voting on and guns are not their top issue. And like, you can go down the list of every major issue that gets blamed on money. It's not money. voters. We're going to take a break, but we'll be back shortly.

Stop leaving savings behind at the pump. Get up to 7 cents per liter in value every time you fill up at Petro Canada. That's 3 cents per liter in instant savings plus 20% more points when you link an eligible RBC card to your Petro points. Find out more at RBC.com slash Petro dash Canada. Conditions apply. What a run! This champ is picking up speed. But they found a lane. Phenomenal launch into the air.

Absolutely incredible! Air Transit! Fly the seven-time world's best leisure airline champions, Air Transat. We're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. So I was struck. We've had a couple of rainy days here in Washington, but I would say for the past, the better part of the past two weeks, if you live in and around Washington, D.C., the weather has been spectacular, glorious, 70 degrees in the daytime. sunny, dry, beautiful out. And then, you know, 50s at night, great sleeping weather. And one of the few good things about Washington, there are things I like about being in the general Washington area, but one of the best is the long fall that we have here in Washington, D.C. It's not uncommon for my family to have Thanksgiving dinner outside on our back porch because the fall lasts so long. So my view is this is the best time of year.

Autumn is the best season, particularly in Washington, but I think everywhere. Am I right about that? Kevin, you're wearing autumnal orange as you sit here today. You look like you're ready for Halloween. I always look like I'm ready for Halloween. I knew that joke was coming. Fair, fair. You don't live in Washington, but you're in sort of this.

this region generally, is autumn the best season? Well, I don't know if autumn's the best season, but it's definitely my favorite season. I write this column almost every year. Maybe I skipped it this year, but I'll probably do it again, of why we should think of fall as the real new year, especially those of us whose lives have been, you know, largely bound up in academic calendars in that particular schedule. So for me, autumn always feels like part of the year where life is really beginning and new in some ways. And probably that's because I think I was someone who liked school, and so I still have that psychologically imprinted in me.

But part of I think is also being from Texas where, you know, summers can be just so hot and miserable that, you know, our summers are like winters and other places where people tend to stay inside. And particularly Houston, where Sarah's from, is just unbearable. I say this is the one who lived in Bombay for a time. Houston's really, really hot and really, really humid in the summers. And the relief from that, kind of the first cool day in Texas is almost sort of a local holiday in some ways. And people will go outside. Of course, Houston's funny because like the first day that's below 60 and they only get like four of them, you'll see women wearing like ankle-length fur coats because it's 59 degrees outside and there's only time they get to wear them. And that's always a bit of a hoot.

So I do like the poll. I'm not sure it actually qualifies as the best season. I actually think there's a case to be made for winter as the best season because it forces us to be introspective. That fits you so perfectly. Yeah, it really does. In so many ways. Yeah. That would be the way answer I would expect you to give.

Yes. Yeah. Maybe you and your Santa Claus beard can hold your opinion on that for a while. But unfortunately, it's also a Santa Claus belly. These things happen. These things happen. So I do love the winter, but I think the fall is definitely my favorite time of year. I probably said more about this than I needed to. Sarah, do you wear ankle-length fur coats when you're in Houston in the fall? So I've always had this problem in like cocktail conversation when it comes up like, where did you go to college or whatever? And I'm like Northwestern, they're like, oh, was that like so amazing? And I'm like, um, I mean, I probably should just come up with like a whole little like lie that just gets me out of the conversation.

But the truth is, no, it wasn't amazing. I didn't have the best time in college. And I really think that the plurality reason is because I came from Houston and had no concept of what one does in winter to stay warm. You know, A, we had cars everywhere and parking lots everywhere. And B, I didn't own socks. I went to college without socks. Looking back, I now see that that was a mistake. Sox are an important part of keeping you warm.

I know this will sound really dumb to people, but again, like, just imagine living in flip-flops for your whole life. I thought that, like, yeah, your feet would be colder, but, like, who cares? Your feet are, like, way down there, and they're very small, just like other parts of you, you know, get cold or whatever. I did not know that, like, a bunch of heat escapes through your feet, and it would change the whole rest of your body's warmth. Didn't know that, because, again, didn't grow up where there was ever cold or snow or anything like that. So winter is terrible. I obviously have seasonal effective disorder, vitamin D deficiencies, all of those things living away from my native planet of Texas. I'm disappointed to find that fall is Steve's favorite season because it has always been

my favorite season, and I don't like having that in common with Steve, but it is just so obviously true. I think that Kevin adds a lot of artistic and poetic gloss on why autumn should be the favorite season. But yeah, to me, it like, I don't know, it's like reading a separate piece and the crunchy leaves and it's just a very romantic season to me, not romantic in like the love sense, romantic in the like thoughtful, you know, historical sense. Well, and you are the pumpkin spice latte of legal commentators, you know, so I think. Kevin never misses an opportunity to assault me.

in some new law way. What I was going to worry about, what I was going to think about, though, is the fur coat issue, because you have, like, funny opinions about animals, right? Are you pro or anti-fur? Do you have a, do you have a feeling on that? I would not buy a new fur coat. I do have a... Would you make one?

I did buy a antique-used fur shawl for my wedding. Or, what do you call it, Megan? It's just like the thing that goes around your shoulders and hooks in the front. Stole. Yes, thank you. I didn't think pumpkin spice latte was an insult. Seriously? It's like one step away from Karen, dude.

They're delicious. Oh, wow. We're learning a lot more than I thought we were going to learn. Do we have another hour for this podcast? We've got to keep going. Megan, is autumn the best season in Washington, D.C., and sort of more generally? I will say that my favorite seasons are the liminal seasons, right? I like spring and I like fall.

It's liminal. It's liminal. It's when things are changing, they're shifting. I do not like, I do not like winter. And I also went to school in Chicago, although for grad school. And now I have a lot of experience with winter. But that's not, you think you have experience with winter. Oh, yeah. You think you know winter. I met people in Boston. I'm like, no, no. Boston is a stroll in the, you know, spring breeze compared to Chicago. I had a dog in Chicago, so I would be out there in the 15 below weather. Bull Mastiff loved it. There I am. I remember actually walking. I once, I got a ride to school, and then I didn't really think about how I was going to get back. Because I lived about a mile away from campus. And I remember walking home in somewhat inadequately warm clothes.

And there were snowdrifts that were about waist high along the sidewalk. And I thought, I am going to die. And then I will fall into one of those snow drips, and they will find me when it melts in the spring. Because it was so cold. I was wearing jeans, and you know how, like, when it's really cold and you're wearing jeans, there's something about them that wind is straight through them. Yep. It's like having, it's like encasing your legs in a sheath of ice. Yes.

And then trying to walk. And so I'm not a big winter fan, especially because now my back is not up to skiing anymore, so, which was about the only good thing about winter. Summer in D.C. is exceptionally miserable, but now I am getting out of D.C. for the summer, and it's lovely where I am right now in Boston, where it's – you know, we had one really bad day where it was 96 degrees, and I had to sleep in the car with the dogs because the dogs can't – I could handle that. The dogs cannot handle 96 degrees with no air conditioning. I woke up with five miles of range left on my car and white-knuckled it to the nearest. gas station. Like, I glide it in on fumes. But in general, like summer's fine. Winter's not great. But spring and fall, when our hearts are turning to what's next, when we are seeing the renewal and the cycle of life, that is the perfect season, whether it is a spring season or a fall season. Unless you have allergies, spring is less pleasant. Certainly in Washington, in D.C. when the cars are caked with yellow pollen and make us miserable.

Someone told me that the reason that allergies are so bad in Washington, because they really are, even people who don't have allergies, get allergies in Washington, is that because all the national governments donate, like, flora, and it all ends up at the National Arboretum and other places, that if there is anything in the entire world that you are allergic to, it's in Washington, D.C. It's here. It's here. Yes. I mean, so I dissent a bit. I used to love winter as a kid.

I've become a wimp. I don't do well in cold anymore. But winter as a kid growing up in Wauitosa, Wisconsin, winter was glorious because there were all of the outdoor sports. You know, my elementary school, a block away from my house, had its own ice rink. And we played there before school. We played hockey at lunch. We played hockey immediately after school. We played hockey all weekend.

You could ski, as Megan mentioned, you could build massive igloo forts in your yard and, you know, have tunnels going from one yard to the other. And getting to and from high school in the winter was a blast because we would skidget it. Are you familiar with the term? Nope, never heard that in my life. No. That's not a thing. if my kids are listening they should turn this off right now i'll deny that it ever happened

that we ever did it but most days in the winter i lived maybe two miles from my high school i would skidget to school if the roads were at all covered with snow or ice and skidgeting is basically creeping up behind an unsuspecting driver grabbing the back bumper locking your knees down in a crouch and then having the car pull you to school. And we skidgeted to and from school most days if there was ice or snow on the roads. And that was most days in Wisconsin in the winter. Well, I'll be asking my husband about this. And it was obviously really stupid, very, very dangerous.

I'm glad to still be alive. but man it was so fun we had a blast doing it I survived between the subway cars not during the winter coming home from school because I went to school in the Bronx and so they're like you were outside and it was amazing and lovely and also when my father found out when I was like 35 he freaked out it's like a lot of people get killed that way

yeah I don't know if my parents know this may be the way my parents find out that we did that we would get caught occasionally but we did it more than that I'd like to remember. And I do. It's one of many times that I look back on my youth and wonder how in the world I survived between that and climbing trees. You just do it on your shoes, or do you have a, do you have a little, like a snowboard or something that you're a steeple? No, shoes. Just your shoes. Yeah, usually you'd choose your shoes on that day. They'd be like your most worn, sold tennis shoes. You got your skidgett shoes. Yeah, you basically had your skidgett shoes. You did not wear your

grippy boots or back in our day the moon boots moon boots were not good skidgeting boots as cool and stylish as they looked in other contexts it was your yeah it was your skidgett boots anyway thank you for indulging me in this discussion of of seasons i'm excited for the rest of fall and hope that it's as glorious for the next two months as it has been for the first two weeks uh thanks for joining us we will see you all next week. If you like what we're doing here, there are a few easy ways to support us. You can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. And we hope you'll consider becoming a member of the dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus

podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up at thedispatch.com slash join. And if you use my promo code roundtable, you'll get one month free and help me win the ongoing, deeply scientific internal debate over which Dispatch podcast is the true flagship. And if ads aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership, no ads, early access to all episodes, exclusive town halls with our founders, and more. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at roundtable at the dispatch.com. We read everything, even the ones from people who love winter. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in and a big thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible

Max Miller, Victoria Holmes, and Noah Hickey. We couldn't do it without you. Thanks again for listening. Please join us again next week.