The Dispatch Podcast - Takeaways From Elections in South Carolina and Texas

Episode Date: June 17, 2022

It’s been another week of interesting primary elections, and Sarah, David, Jonah, and Andrew discuss what we learned from Texas and South Carolina. Then our hosts dive into the details of the framework for a possible Senate gun bill and whether the House will learn to settle for compromise, not perfection. Finally, what are the key takeaways from the January 6 House Select Committee so far?   Show Notes: -The Sweep: The Value of a Trump Endorsement -The Dispatch: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the January 6 Committee -The Sweep: The Politics of the January 6 Hearings -Uphill: The Way Forward for the Senate’s Gun Violence Bill -The Dispatch: Can We Make Red Flag Laws Work? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by David French, Jonah Goldberg, and staff writer of the dispatch, Andrew Eger. Plenty to discuss today. Primaries. What did we learn? The Senate gun bill. Merits of the bill, likelihood it gets done. And of course, we'll end with January 6th. How are they doing? Let's dive right in. So on Tuesday, we had a lot. We had South Carolina. We had Alaska. We had Nevada.

We had a Texas special. David, high-level takeaways? High-level takeaway is that, how should I say this, Sarah? Trump's grip is not slipping as much as I'd like. So the big takeaway for me is Tom Rice lost. I mean, that's the big disappointment. This is one of the very few House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. The slight consolation prize is that he didn't beat Nancy Mace.

Nancy Mace voted to certify the election and then was quite aggressive after January 6th and sort of dismissing Trump's election fraud claims and quite aggressive in attacking the events of January 6th, and Trump put her in his crosshairs, and she won. So maybe there was a little bit of premature joy after the Georgia primary. Also quite true that South Carolina is a pretty different place electorally than Georgia these days. Georgia is a pretty purple state. South Carolina is still about as deep red as it gets. We walk through some of this stuff on advise your opinions. And Sarah, you... The flagship podcast. Exactly. Thank you. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for the style guide failure

of not putting that in. And Sarah, you had some really interesting polling data on what the Trump endorsement actually means. And maybe you could walk through some of that. But the short answer, not to like, steal your thunder, is it means a lot. but not everything. My thunder feels stolen. It feels lessened. By the way, do you know the etymology

of that phrase? I do not. What phrase? I feel like I knew this at one point. What is it? Is it a gas thing? And then someone else used it later and he was sitting in the audience and he said, they stole my thunder. And that's really what it came from. Yeah.

It actually means to steal someone thunder. That's great. Because otherwise it doesn't make a ton of sense. Okay. But anyway, so this was a study done out of echelon insights. And I say study because it's not a normal poll where you simply ask people, how much does Trump's endorsement matter to you and take their word for it? Because you all know how I feel about asking people questions that they can't possibly answer

and then taking the answers as if it is like the gospel truth. But what Echelon did was really interesting. They would give people basically candidate resumes with lots of different things on each resume. So, you know, it would have, this person is between 18 and 35. They were a former CEO, their LGBTQ, and Trump endorsed them. And they would mix and match all of these different characteristics. and then at the end, you can actually use sort of regression analysis to see how much any given item mattered. And therefore, the people don't actually know what they're being tested on,

which I found way more reliable. So using that, and we'll put it in the show notes so you can read their explanation, which is probably better than mine. On the Republican side, in a Republican primary among Republican primary voters, if a candidate is endorsed by Donald Trump and other local Republican leaders, they found a 29% bounce. That's just incredibly high. That's like a done deal, basically. That would be very hard to overcome. If a candidate is endorsed by Donald Trump, but not other Republican leaders, it went

down to 3%. And that has also looked about right, even looking at Nancy Mace's race, where she's endorsed by Nikki Haley, the former governor, Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman from the state who goes on to be Trump's chief of staff. but not endorsed by Donald Trump, it appeared that she had some hump to overcome, but it was a relatively low one and one that she could clear. Whether it's 3%, 2%, 5%, like, that all feels about right to me.

Interestingly, David, you know, is a public speaker or talk show host, negative 17% among Republican primary voters? So looking at Pennsylvania, some things feel less true than others. On the Democratic side, by the way, for Democratic primary voters, just to give this some context, an endorsement by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris was only worth 14 points. So compare that to the 29 points on the Republican side, and you do start to see that Republicans certainly care about references more. An endorsement by Elizabeth Warren or AOC, double-digit negative.

Woo-hoo. I have one point of information, counselor. So you say that when Republican establishment, let's call it that, and Trump both endorse, it's worth 29. What is the Republican establishment endorsement without Trump worth? You say because Trump's alone is only worth three, what's the Republican establishment's worth? endorsed by local Republican leaders, but not by Donald Trump, negative 10. Interesting. Okay. Interesting. I have questions about this, this regression analysis in general. I mean, it's just going off of the question the science. No, well, I just, I just mean to the, it was a random hypothetical that you brought up. But, you know, 18 to 35, that's a plus in my column. Former CEO is a plus in my

column. But if I saw a candidate that was both of those things, I would have some questions. You know, like, why? What are you doing here? Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. It seems that's sketchy all of a sudden to me. Yeah, I mean, and I think that's where you see the

Elizabeth Warren and AOC endorsements. It's, I think those are actually negative because when people see them in some other context, they sort of picture what that candidate is in their head. It's not that an endorsement by Elizabeth Warren, if you ask them, would ever be negative. And so when they see it on these mixed-up little resumes, they're like, ooh, that means that person's crazy,

even though they would never tell a pollster that, which is, again, why I find this pretty interesting. On the Democratic side, by the way, in their 60s or older, negative 12% is a member of the LGBTQ community was one of the highest. It was plus 6%, which isn't that high, by the way, meaning there wasn't any one thing

that was really standing out to Democratic primary voters. Okay, Jonah, maybe set aside South Carolina. You're an Alaska expert of sorts. I'm off on a fact-finding mission momentarily, yes? Alaska held their first weird primary, nonpartisan primary, where the top four finishers will move on to a ranked choice voting general election. And for the most part, there wasn't anything we were watching, except for one congressional race that pitted Santa Claus,

against Sarah Palin, against a Begich, which is a famous last name, a former senator in Alaska as well. Historically Democratic Party, but this guy is a Republican, yeah. So what do you think? Well, it's funny because I was just asking one of my primary sources on Alaskan politics, who I happened to be married to, about all this. And I was like, so where did the extended Gavora, that's my wife's family, you know, where do they come down on all this. And she was like, I have no idea. I can't wait to find out this weekend. Because it's, it's super complicated up there. I think having not studied it, Palin is by no means

shoe in for anything. And she came in first, but that's not with the rank choice voting. Right. But she's nobody's second choice. Right. And she does have really high name ID. She does. And particularly, in that state, but that's not entirely a good thing. Arguably, she has higher name ID than Santa Claus. Who, again, I just want to say, was running in this race. His name is Santa Claus, and he

basically lives in the North Pole. No relation. Well, for the record, starting tonight, I will be staying in North Pole, Alaska for the next few days because it's a suburb outside of areas. I do want to change. So, as we all know, Alaska is the largest state. It's the biggest state, despite

certain states talking about how big they are. It's literally in our anthem. Texas would fit into Alaska like almost three times, I believe, maybe four times. I actually think the most interesting race, it's sort of like if you could, if you imagine you're telling the story of the last 10 years, 10 years from now, right? So in 2022, you look back on wow, politics have changed a lot. I think the special election in that adorable quaint little state of Texas is, uh, really kind of interesting in in so far it's all Hispanic it's like an 85% Hispanic district there was a special election republican one she's pretty serious Republican uh born in Mexico and uh you know Democrats think that they're going to win when

when they're having the general that remains to be seen who knows um but i think you could see how this is the beginning of a narrative of the competitiveness for the Hispanic vote in in the United States of America in ways that I think would be wholly to the good for the United States of America. Making Hispanics a competitive constituency would bleed so much of the nastiness out of the immigration

debate. It already makes, you know, I love watching these Republicans talking about how proud they are to have you know, a Mexican immigrant essentially as a, you know, a member of Congress who are also the people who just cheered whenever

Trump said, you know, Mexico's not sending its best. It's an interesting distinction. And so I am more hopeful, more about sort of larger issues than sort of the rank punditry, what does the primary stuff mean kind of thing. And just on the Trump question that you're raising from the echelon thing, I kind of disagree with David a little bit. I don't think this was that bad a week for the the bleeding away of Trump's influence in the in the GOP i mean it was always going to be contingent on facts on the ground i think one of the reasons yeah you're right that that georgia is more purple than south carolina but also partisan republicans and georgia remember

losing two senate seats because of all that nonsense and they're so they're they're matter at somebody else than raffensberger and and camp um and i just don't think that you can listen to the debate which we're going to get to the January 6th Committee in a second, you can listen to the national conversation about that and read Donald Trump's 12-page tweet responding to all this stuff and think it was like a particularly good week for the forces of Trumpism.

So I want to burst Jonah's bubble about that Texas special election in several respects. So Texas 34 runs from just east of San Antonio down to Brownsville, right at the border, and just over so slightly, almost touching the capital. Allen. The district's 84% Hispanic. Jonah's right. The Republican won with 51% avoiding a runoff. The Democrat had 43%. So roughly 7.8 point difference. A few problems with this. One, the person who holds the C will only hold it through January because there will be another election in

November in the general election, even though this was a special election, not a primary, if that makes sense. It is only the replacement for the stub term. So, what happened was that Democrats didn't spend any money. He raised $46,000, she raised $700,000, and had a million-dollar ad buy from outside groups. Two, this election was held in the old district, which Biden won by four points. The November election will be held in the new district, which is actually going to be more Democratic, so another little uphill bump for Republicans. And three, congressional districts at this point have roughly 726,000 people, I think. 14,000 people voted for her this week, which is just incredibly low, really hard to do some big picture analysis on the Hispanic vote with like seven of

them. My bubble remains intact. I stipulated that I thought this was mostly a literary interpretation. Yes, you did. When a damn breaks, the first thing to come out are a couple little drops, and no one thinks that'll do any damage. So we'll see. I am more than willing to read in a whole bunch in November on this race. And frankly, I think we have a ton from 2020 to suggest that the Hispanic vote isn't a monolith. Yes, a ton. And especially along the Texas. border, the New Mexico border with Texas and Mexico, a little bit in Florida. So again, plenty to suggest this. But like the shriek coming from the Republican side about what a big win this was, I was like, I don't see. Totally fair. Well, okay, can I just add one thing on the

sort of intra-party messaging on all of this, which is the interesting thing to me? I mean, obviously with Trump and Trumpism being the dominant force in the Republican Party, a lot of the the criticism that has been leveled at that at that group from outside for some obvious reasons has been kind of the white grievance politics of of Trump and Trumpism. But there has also been this sort of weird thread of Trumpism all along that is this kind of really optimistic kind of triumphalism that they're going to make like huge inroads with all sorts of non-Republican constituencies. I mean like like Trump always always thought he was going to do better than than any previous Republicans

with African Americans, with Hispanics, with the LGBT community. And there's almost this weird energy or that this weird tension among a lot of like kind of the pro-Trump populist crowd where you have guys like Steve Bannon who are, you know, a populist

populist, but but echoing a lot of that kind of like, no, we're going to do this, we're going to, you know, from, from constituency to constituency, we're going to be great. And then you have guys, guys who are on the kind of much fringier, much more hardcore kind of white nationalist America first type who think all that's ridiculous and insane and that you're never going to catch up with Hispanics and you're never going to make inroads with, you know, gay people. And that really

you just need to kind of rally the white working class until the cows come home. And so as a messaging, from a pure messaging point of view, I don't necessarily mind Republicans kind of like getting behind that. And even if it is a bit of a barrage. I think it's a mirage that's helping the slightly less grotesque constituencies in play here. It's interesting because it's a mirage in some respects. But if you actually look at some of the races and break it out by gender, not as much of a mirage. Latino men in Nevada really divided from Latino women. And then in the L.A. race just two weeks ago, the performance,

former Republican running as a Democrat against Karen Bass, a black woman. She, he beat Karen Bass among black men by 30 points. It's amazing. Wow. That's amazing. Now, people are attributing that to like sort of his law and order message. Frankly, it's impossible to separate that from his celebrity endorsements or any number of other, you know, things that are going on.

It's true. Guillaude Paltrow endorsed him. And that, that brings black men. I mean, they all. They all love their goop products, Jonah. So that's what I've really been watching is the gender education divide because Republicans have been trying to win over black and Latino voters for decades. I mean, after 2012 in the autopsy report that the RNC did,

it was like investing in communities of color and, you know. Little did they know in all that strategizing is that they didn't account for a hard left turn of white progressives. Yeah, which helps too. It's, you know, and that's the thing that if you're, if you're, and I again, talk to smart Democrats, a lot of them are really, really grim right now. And one of the reasons why they're grim is they know exactly what is going on. They know exactly what is happening, this hard left turn and this white progressive base.

And it's so hard to do anything about because these are the people who happen to staff the entire Democratic Party or a big chunk of the Democratic Party. They happen to staff the activist class. They happen to staff the media. Like, this is sort of the core of the entire professional class of the Democratic Party in the left is the very people. It's the very people who are alienating huge sections of their own constituency. And what do you do about that? David, are you performing acts of grievous punnery by talking about how grandma of this is. After the Ryan Grimm article.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was a big article in The Intercept this week. I don't know if you guys have talked about it at all in the pot already, but from Ryan Grim writing in the Intercept, basically just describing and really concrete terms this phenomenon that you're talking about where all of these progressive advocacy groups have, you know, I don't remember the specific ones. They talked about the ACLU, Sunrise, Sierra Club, had basically just been convulsed by some. sort of internal strife and supposed kind of ideological sorting and and and and um purity tests and and things like that and that that have really actually kind of made them less effective as uh as advocacy organizations over the last couple of years um i guess that's kind of an aside but just i i couldn't resist the grim thing i had to yeah no it's a great it's a great article it's

fascinating. And it mirrors what so many people have told me from different walks of life on the left, whether you're in one of these advocacy groups or whether you're sort of an normy liberal professor. You actually kind of live with some fear in your heart, especially in the last couple of years. All right, Andrew, any last thoughts on primary special elections or Santa Claus? No, I mean, the only thing I was going to maybe mention is that we should, of course, expect, as far as like the Todd Rice in South Carolina versus the previous races in Georgia thing is concerned, it's not a statewide race, you know, like in a Republican district, Trump is going to have more influence over, you know, the Republican electorate in one specific, very red place than he would across all of Georgia, which, as you say, is increasingly purple. I don't know. I'm not the kind of analyst who knows exactly where to put all those boxes in terms of assembling the full picture. But that is the one thing I had to say. In terms of the House, I mean, nothing has changed on the prediction that Republicans can't really not win the House,

barring some massive event between now and November. On the Senate, you know, Adam Laxalt won the Republican primary in Nevada. I think he's got as good a chance of any. But like, you know, you're going up against an incumbent Democrat in Nevada, a relatively blueish, more than purple state at this point. But famous, famous last name in Nevada. So the last two that really are going to determine, I think, control of the Senate, Missouri, Arizona. And until we have those two, it's really hard to say that the Republicans do or don't have a good shot at taking the Senate. because if they nominate, you know, the wrong people in those two states, two states to lose would be huge. So that's sort of what I'm still watching for. The Missouri race is going to be

wild because, I mean, of course, Eric Greighton's former governor, former disgraced, resigned governor, very quick turnaround is now looking pretty strong in that race. A lot of people, I mean, and then basically Republican watchers are basically evenly split there between if we nominate Eric Gritens, we could actually really like step on a rake and put the seat in play and others. Mitch McConnell has said that he thinks they could lose that. Right. Well, some of it is special pleading because nobody wants Eric Gritens to be in the Senate for like 500 different very valid reasons. So like, I mean, he could because the allegations against him are very credible. They have not been debunked at all. And even even before that,

he was not well liked. He did not have a lot of allies internal to kind of like Republican political apparatus in Missouri, which is why, part of the reason why everybody dropped him incredibly quickly after the allegations came out. There was no circling the wagons at all. But anyway, so nobody likes him in the Senate. Nobody really likes him in the state. Steve Bannon likes him, and that's getting him quite a ways. But I would be interested to see, I mean, it does not seem like a complete done deal that if he wins that nomination, he would not win in November, even though that's possible. I mean, I think it makes it more of a toss-up, and I think that people are making that point for both of those reasons.

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of it that I think could be pretty significant is it contains incentives for states to pass red flag laws. So this is not a federal red flag law bill, which, as we've discussed on the flagship podcast, has some practical and legal problems attached to it. This is a a part of the bill that would give DOJ grants to states that have or will implement red flag laws that meet certain conditions for due process. And this has a chance to do something where, you know, we had a really good piece on the dispatch homepage sort of trying, not trying to, but actually bursting the red flag bubble a little bit. But one of the really important points in there was how rarely they're used in many jurisdictions. And so,

hopefully the funding here would allow people to be trained in them to become aware of them and actually utilize them. That's an important piece of this. Another important piece of this is the enhanced background provision check provision for those under 21. One of the problems when, you know, under the current system, if somebody's 18 years old, they could have fairly recent juvenile problems that if those things had happened as an adult would have disqualified them for moaning a weapon. But there was no way really to screen for those individuals. And it's still going to be a little bit difficult to see how parts of that work out in practice. But giving an enhanced background screening that hopefully allows authorities to dip further into

a person's juvenile life to determine whether they should own a gun, I think, is an important piece. Another important piece is strengthening straw purchase, prohibitions against straw purchases. This is, so red flags, that's an issue aimed at two parts of the gun violence problem. That's mass shootings and suicides. The straw purchase element is really aimed at a part of the gun violence problems. It's common crime. This is where a lot of criminals get their guns, just normal, common street criminals get their guns, is through a straw purchase. That's where a wife or a girlfriend or a friend who can legally purchase a weapon, purchase it, and they and gives it to you who cannot legally own a weapon, that's strengthening that kind of prosecution

regime, I think, is important. There are other things, you know, money for school security, fine, money for mental health, fine, depending on how it's used, that are worthwhile. But the three really big points here are the red flag, the red flag provision, the strengthening of background checks for under 21s, and the, and the, and the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, straw purchaser, uh, tougheting straw purchaser restrictions. And I think those, each one of those things are important. And I'm not going to say any one of them solves anything. I mean, that's, that's, we're talking about a massive cultural issue here. But I do think they have a chance to make a difference. Jonah, does this have, have any hope of moving forward or like with most

things in DC, bet on status quo? Well, it's always safe to bet on status quo. And it's also as, as a matter of punditry. And, you know, I can give a little tip to Andrew here as he enters this exciting life. You can always just say, I think it's got about a 45 percent, 45 percent chance of passing. See, this is why they put you on TV. And like, you know, if you're proven right, if you're proven wrong, what does white mean? It might as well be like Brian Fantana saying, you know, 60 percent of the time it works every time. I mean, it's just like, what? But, I kind of think it will pass to be more serious about it. I think that the

and one of the reasons why, or the very least, if it fails, it will be interesting in a new way for failure, right? I mean, like, that's one of the great things about this era in Washington is we're coming up with new ways to fail, not just the same old tired ways of failing. And because this, odds are it passes in the Senate. So if it dies, it'll die in the house and normally the elephant graveyard of all big ideas is the senate not the house because the house can pass anything at once because the way you know majority rules there um so i suspect it

passes because they need something to talk about democrats needs something going into the midterms to talk about and passing something modest and productive and then beating up on republicans for not being more ambitious is an easy talking point to do while at the same time you get you got to get to you got to get to brag about the best of both worlds succeeded with some bipartisanhip but of course the evil gun lobby prevented us from doing the really important things that we need to be reelected to do yada yada yada and um and i think chris murphy has successfully convinced enough senators at least that getting

some modest successes is good on the merits politically because it can teach Republicans that I think I was saying this last week that it's not a death sentence to sort of do something and Mitch McConnell can encourage enough people

encourage enough senators all the 80s 10 who are running in competitive purplish states that bipartisanship looks good for them. So I think it, I would bet it passes the Senate. And if it passes the Senate, I'd be

surprised if Nancy Pelosi couldn't get enough Democrats to vote for it or enough sort of moderate Republicans didn't break away to get it over the top. This would be such a huge loss for Joe Biden if it passes the Senate and doesn't

pass the House because of the left flank. I mean, catastrophic. That would be political malpractice at a staggering level. And yet, it feels very possible. Oh, it does. Very possible. 45%? 55%.

Yeah. You're right here. But Andrew was about to jump in. I saw you, Andrew. Oh, well, no. I was just going to say that there is one initially plausible sort of way this could die that seems like it's not shaping up, which is that I was initially a little bit surprised that Schumer and other parts of Democratic leadership were willing to do the whole,

you know, don't make the perfect, the enemy of the good sort of thing on this issue. Because on a lot of, maybe not a lot of, but on certain bills in the last few years that we've seen sort of compromise come into play in the Senate, I'm mostly thinking about the criminal justice reform thing with Tim Scott, ended up basically falling apart on the grounds that, know, Republicans were just not actually willing to negotiate on any of the real main issues. That was Democrats' contention. And so they spiked some of these efforts. And I was at least pleasantly surprised that this doesn't seem to be what's happening with this thing, with Schumer saying, you know, we would like this bill with all these other things that the president wants

and that we would like to see. But we're definitely going to move forward on this if and when they get the handshake. You know, it would be interesting to do a piece on if the Democrats didn't have the perfect as the enemy of the good philosophy, what could already be passed? That's what I was going to say. What if we applied this thinking and methodology to any number of other things? And specifically, immigration, which I get is thornyer in a lot of ways. There's so many more moving pieces, frankly, than in the gun conversation. But it's also, I mean, it really needs to be fixed.

There's a lot of low-hanging fruit out there. Yeah. I mean, asylum stuff. alone. They don't even tackle anything else, just asylum. Also, though, on the, like, very other side of immigration being a mayor's nest, David, advisory opinion, shout out on that one. Um, Joe is thinking. Why am I in this podcast? That's Jonah. The electoral count act. Yes. Fix. That does seem to be moving forward. They said they actually have some language right now. But again, like, why is this taking so long?

This seems like a really easy thing if everyone would just put on their big boy pants. And yet. Can you imagine, like, if Trump wins in 2024 without them having gotten that past, what, like, what history textbooks look like, you know, 100 years from now? You know, like the proto-insurrection happened in 2020, and that was kind of messed up. And nobody really did anything about it. And, yeah, no, it was a, yeah. They really wanted to make sure drop boxes were mandated everywhere.

I mean, it is staggering. hour water burger drop-offs. You could have asylum reform. You could have some modest electoral reform. You could have some decent police reform. You'd have this gun reform. I mean, Carter Baker Commission finally put into action, like the action transformer figure that it is. Dare to dream.

Yeah. Now you're way overreaching. Someone on Twitter mentioned, like some school paper that they were like a teacher mentioned the Carter Baker commission. And they took a picture of it and tagged me. I was like, yes, this is what I want. I want my fan base when they see Carter-Baker commissioned to think Sarah Isker, I have already won. There's no more that I need to accomplish. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside.

So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Turns and conditions apply. Learn more at MX.com. All right, Jonah, you and I are going to talk. I mean, everyone else can, like, join it. But I want to talk to you about the January 6th committee so far.

You have thoughts, and then I have questions. Yes. So I wrote my column this week on how I learned. The headline was how I learned to stop worrying and love the January 6th committee. And my basic take on. on it is, is that everyone's going to be disappointed. Everybody, except me. And what I mean by that is, like, Trump's not going to get criminally prosecuted. I have lots of thoughts about this criminal referral thing, which I just ranted about on my podcast. Like, it's such a red herring.

The thing's already been criminally referred to DOJ. There's nothing more that a criminal referral would do because the DOJ has already said we're looking at this. but that's other Gallum fray that we don't need to get into since you're talking about mayor's nests. The, I think it's not going to help Democrats in the midterms very much.

It's not going to give me the satisfaction I want where all of a sudden, all of the people who've been wrong in the last five years in defending Trump dropped to their knees like John Belushi, and Blues Brothers and beg for forgiveness. That's not going to happen.

But what it is doing is it's creating a certain amount of space to simply say what Trump did was bad, that January 6 was bad, that he is largely responsible for it, and we need to move on. And part of the reason for that, I don't want to belabor this, is you can't argue it's time to move on and this is old news unless you're conceding that what he did was bad.

And that we, you know, when you say, oh, we all knew this, what you're in effect saying is, yeah, we all knew he tried to steal the election, then he lied about it, and that he had something to do with the January 6th riot, and that's all bad. You have no new information. And that gives a lot of permission structure to Republicans to sort of move on. And I can criticize Bill Steppian's personal integrity or courage about how he handled all this kind of stuff. But the fact that a lot of political apparatchiks feel like it's in their interest to tell the truth about all of this kind of stuff is a good sign. And I think that that's good. At the same time, I think that the

hearing is not going very well on its own terms in the sense that it seems I thought it was a very bad sign. I'm curious what you guys think that they had to cancel impromptu all of a sudden they canceled the DOJ hearing and their excuse was,

or postponed it, I should say. Their excuse was basically the guys in the AV shop need more time to put the videos together. And the only reason why that strikes me is plausible is that it's such an embarrassing explanation that it's kind of a test. on yourself. It's sort of like when politicians say something like, oh, there's no way I could

have taken a bribe on that date. I was with a hooker. It just sort of like, it, and I personally, I suspect that it may have had something to do with the fact that John Eastman dumped, that the court released all those John Eastman emails that made them think, oh my gosh, there's some, there's something new here. Or it could have been that the internal bickering that was on display on Tuesday about whether or not they're going to do a criminal referral caused them to just say

let's kick the can down the road because that was going to be the theme of the day or it could just be just the truth that they just they literally didn't have their ducks in the row I just find that hard to believe given that Bill Steppian canceled

at the last minute and they had all that video keyed up for that but this event was planned for a long time and they're like, we don't know how to get this stuff ready. And that's a weird excuse. So it started a panic and legal Twitter. And frankly, like network news was, you know,

sending around emails because people thought there was a chance that they delayed because they knew somehow that the Dobbs opinion was going to come out from the Supreme Court on Wednesday morning because it was an opinion hand down day, Wednesday at 10 a.m., which was when they were scheduled to start. In any other year, I would have felt, so confident, you know, emailing a producer back and being like,

let me tell you why that's the dumbest thing ever. Members, staff on the House committee have no clue what the Supreme Court's doing. They get no heads up. Nice try. Except that this year, you know there is a leaker in the court.

And for all I know, they did tip off the committee. And so I wasn't willing to say that it wasn't true. And it, like, also was praying that it wasn't true because leaking the Dobbs opinion, we don't know their motivation and there's any number of versions of why they did it. But if then they had tipped off the January 6th committee to

delay a hearing, it would have been so partisan and gotten the court so much more enmeshed in partisan politics. I think I actually believe it would have been worse than the original leak to have had that coordination going on. So very relieved when we got five or six snoozers on Wednesday. And it means Jonah, like, maybe they, maybe the Supreme Court was a factor. They were worried that Dobbs was going to come out and realized that they had, like, not paid enough attention to their timing on this, given that it was June. But as we, as you said, like, there's also like three other reasons. Yeah, they, they, on Tuesday or whatever day that was, Bill, Bill.

Stepion had to go with his wife and everybody in the committee. He's like, how did we not have that on our calendars? And then they're just like, casting around like, oh my gosh, what could happen tomorrow? And they're like people, the Supreme Court is going to hand out. And wouldn't that just be our luck? So yeah, I mean, I will say that there was a weird energy Tuesday night. There was, I was getting an unusual number of questions about whether it'd be available for media on Wednesday after the Supreme Court's announcements. I was getting texts from folks, a number of folks saying, is it just me or is there something building here? Like, there was a, there was a kind of weird, and maybe that's just going to happen before

every single hand-down day between now and between now and the end of the term. But there was definitely something in the air Tuesday night that made me think, wait, do some people know some things that they're not supposed to know? Yeah. So, David, I have found the committee, as I think I am the worst possible audience for these hearings, because I'm a contrarian. And so every time I hear something, I want to ask the follow-up question of like, yeah, but. And there's no one on the committee to do that because nobody is actually skeptical of the thesis of the committee. And so I want to know, you know, these are depositions that they're largely working from when they're showing these videos, which means,

means there's no cross-examination. Depositions are one side getting to ask questions. Well, the whole thing is cross-examination. There's no direct examination. Fair? Kind of. Some of these people, I don't know, whichever way you want to think about it. But regardless, it's not an adversarial process, really. And so it appears more like a theater slash PhD presentation and less persuasion, actually. Because to me, an adversarial process is far more persuasive to have someone poke the weak arguments and then know what the pushback is to those. And instead, everyone already agrees who's there. And so I don't know. So you're not the normal audience.

I know. Okay. So the whole reason why you have an adversarial process is because when one side gets to say it's peace and the other side doesn't, the one side that says it's peace is more persuasive. So if you only have the prosecution, that's not advantageous for the defense. You know, like that the defense. Except if you're me. This is like when I gave dating advice on advisory opinions and someone got in the comments and was like, dear men listening to this, Sarah is not normal. Yeah.

Yeah. The defense does not make the prosecution more persuasive. Like that's not the typical process. But aren't you left wondering what some of these folks would say if they got to answer, like basically? questions. I mean, even on the like Bill Barr, Trump is unattached from reality. I wanted to have someone on from the other side, from the Trump team, poke at that. Ask him questions. Trump is very attached to reality. Nobody's ever been more attached to reality. He is the most attached to the best reality. Since I'm, since I'm sitting in for Steve here,

I want to quick make a point that he's made on Twitter about this thing a couple of times, which is just that like, I think you're right, Sarah, that that there, that it is, um, At the very least, it's an arrow in the quiver of people who want to, you know, just wave past all the January 6th stuff, like, oh, it's this show trial thing. It's not an adversarial process. That's just a permission. That basically gives a permission structure to ignore the whole thing altogether. But I think from a kind of reasonable-minded person coming at this sort of thing, one important point is that these are all people who you would think that their personal interest, and at least their previous person, loyalty is that they're Trump people. So, like, even though it is only one side of the story, it matters that it is all of these people giving that side of the story. And, you know, they're the ones about it. Well, sure, it means that I believe that what they are saying is accurate, but it doesn't

mean that I believe that it is the whole version, like that if you ask them other questions that you wouldn't get a more wholesome, fulsome version of what occurred, if that makes sense. I agree that they're like statements against interest in some sense, but like if you can't ask follow-up questions, I don't know what we're doing. It is telling to me that the argument you're making, Sarah, tends to end, begin and end with process. Because if I have a, if I have a strong defense, here's what I'm going to say. My defense is going to be, how dare you not have my defense representative here at the table, because if he was there, this is what he'd say. Okay.

So the Trump people, it's how dare you not have my defense representative at the table? And then you say, well, okay. Well, what would he say? Well, how dare you not have my defense rep. Fair. So that's fair that like they have every opportunity through other means to push back on this. And we're seeing no pushback of any real sort other than the process argument. And again, I want to be clear that I think my position on this is different because I am inclined to agree with the thesis, but the fact that I don't hear from someone skeptical, like, makes me less comfortable with it versus I don't want to agree with the thesis. It's because I want to agree with the thesis that I want that adversarial process.

I agree. It would be more effective, I think, if you had Trump defender, some Trump friendly people there. to make, you know, counter- Or frankly, if Liz or Adam played that role on the committee, they don't need to fully buy into it, but if they would play at least a little bit of a more skeptical role, it would help. I agree.

At the same time, it's, and I agree with David's points entirely, but, like, at the same time, the way I think about it is that this is basically the prosecution's summation to the jury in a way, right? And unfortunately,

this summation to the jury should have been made in a friggin impeachment trial a year and a half ago. Right. Right. And so this is this is a impeachment by other means continuation thing politically and psychologically and all sorts of other things and reflects the failure of our leaders in all sorts of ways. At the

same time, I think there's a, I think your version of this criticism is a good faith and perfectly defensible criticism to make. There's also a very bad faith version of it, which basically is like, if Jim Jordan were there, he'd tear them a new way. All of this would be

knocked down because he's this brilliant good faith debater he's the Clarence Darrow of our age and he would be bringing up all of these facts you know these substantive rebuttal facts that would show what a farce and

Stalinist socialists and guys if I keep hearing people call this frigging thing Stalinist one more time I mean like a Stalinist show trial involves like threatening to murder a dude's wife in front of them if they don't confess to a crime. That's that's not this.

I think the best example is that at the end of the impeachment hearing, with lawyers on both sides, I felt very comfortable knowing exactly what my opinion should be on that and how I would vote. If you asked me to vote at the end of this, I think I would decline to do so for a lack of having, what would the best arguments on the other side be? And we should note that this is exactly the strategic calculation that Republicans made going in, right? Yeah. It was Republicans who, when Pelosi said, you can't put Jim Jordan on this thing,

he voted not to certify the election, you know? You can't put stop the Steelers on this committee. Republicans then took the, like made the strategic calculation that that putting people in the position to have this opinion that Sarah is putting forward is actually better for Republicans in the long run politically than if they had put people on the committee to, to, you know, make the process more adversarial. So I do take your point about, like, well, why couldn't Cheney or Kinsinger have done it? And I think maybe there's something to that.

But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that why it is that there aren't any Republicans on this. That's an excellent point. That's why we have an adversarial process because that is a very persuasive point to me right now. Well, there you go. All right. Well, with that, one quick update from our fact checkers, me Googling, while probably David was talking, let's be honest. Wait a minute.

To update on stealing thunder, I'll just provide the facts that I didn't have at the time. It was actually an 18th century playwright in his unsuccessful play, Appius and Virginia. He used an artificial thunder machine. And then he showed up to a performance of Mick Beth, and he is purported to have said, that is my thunder by God. The villains will play my thunder, but not my thunder. plays. And that's where Steal My Thunder came from.

Now, that was very much worth your time, I think we'll all agree. But on things that are perhaps not worth as much of your time, Lynn Wood, one of the attorneys who was part of the stolen election narrative in Georgia

has come out recently as a flat earther. And Jonah, can you fill in any more blanks on flat eartherism? or this version of flat-eartherism. Yeah, so he posted on social media that he, so the fact that he came out as a flat-earther is interesting,

or it's amusing in a trivial sort of get this, you know, call the orderly's in and have this man removed kind of way. But he says that the Bible says that the earth is flat, and so therefore he is, he believes the earth is flat, and then a follow-up post he said you may have heard that I have entered the the flat-earth debate in America which is like my favorite sentence in a long time and he um and then he made this argument which I actually think is kind of clever in a twisted kind of way since he grounds his belief in this in the flatness of the earth as a biblical thing the people who are attacking him for being a

flat earth are really attacking the bible and um i'll defer to david and egger on on the theological questions here but um i really do love this idea that he can you know he he he he considers the flat earth debate one of these like open debates that america is like raging with like like like red flag laws or the january sixth committee whether the earth is in fact flat these are like the debates that everybody's engaged in on a regular basis, and I find it amusing. David, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God,

and I'm curious how you answer this if the Bible, in fact, says that the earth is flat. Point of order. It doesn't. No, no, no. It's like a figurative reference to the four corners of the earth is where they get this. Can you make four corners out of a circle?

Andrew? Are you asking me to do it right now? Like right here on this audio-holding podcast? I don't know. I mean, it's absurd. It's so absurd. I will say this, though. I did one evening when I was completely bored and I couldn't sleep,

went down flat-earth YouTube, the flat-earth YouTube rabbit hole. And it's something else. And I will say this, that if the earth was flat, it's not, but let's just pretend in a world that it is.

It's cool. Like this whole, they have this whole thing where there's like a wall around the earth. Like there's this shit. Yeah, there's this huge.

Like Truman Show? Yeah, it's like Truman Show, except it's an impenetrable ice wall. But that's interesting because that means that the earth, like it's still a three-dimensional space then. Yeah.

So think of it more like a cone with the, circle at the top is flat. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So we're trapped inside the ice cream cone. So the mole men live at the bottom of the car.

Correct. It's turtles. Turtles, Taurus. The whole cosmology, yeah. No, it is amusing. It's also very grim. I mean, just to kind of trace Lynn Woods' descent into smaller and smaller and more and more insane concentric circles. I mean, when Jonah said he posted this stuff on social media, he's posting it on his

telegram, which is like the most echo chambery, insane way that a lot of these nuts end up doing all their posting because it's literally just his channel. It's just his thoughts. He just fires off his thoughts and gets a million clicks and likes and things like that. And there's, it's, you know, Nick Fuentes is on telegram. A lot of these people are on telegram. But Lynn Wood, you know, formerly sort of flamboyant. kind of well-respected lawyer, becomes a stop-the-stealer. Shortly after becoming a stop-the-stealer

becomes like the most insane stop-the-stealer of all time, such that many other Stop the Steelers disown him. Yes. Regular villain who is brought up at David Perdue campaign events in Georgia, who is a stop-the-steel candidate. His whole purpose for existing is Stop the Steel. But he and a lot of these Stop the Steel people who came out to support him all can't stand Lynn Wood. All think Lynn Wood was a detriment to their efforts in 2020. And as he just kind of gets more and more conspiratorially minded and is preaching to a smaller and smaller choir of people who are as insane as he has, I mean, there's literally no bottom. I mean, there's no bottom to flat earth. It's really, it's really unsettling to me. I mean, I don't know. Well, if you see the cone shape,

there is a bottom to the flat earth. Right. Yeah, yeah. Here's something, Andrew, you said he's He's on telegram. He's not just on social media. He's on telegram. You want to know a chilling fact? Telegram has more users than Twitter. Doesn't really? Yeah. It has more users than Twitter. So, yeah. Well, tragically, one of the leading flat earthers died in 2020. He wanted to go up into the, you know, first layers of space with a homemade rocket. and that didn't work. He was filming the stunt for a science channel series, although according to Wikipedia, at least,

after his death, a public relations representative revealed that he had only used Flat Earth as a PR stunt to acquire funding for his homemade rocket that ended up killing him. So Flat Earth, also a little dangerous. I want to meet the investors

who would not invest in a private rocket thing unless it was to prove a Flat Earth thing. Because I feel like I could get some money out of them for all sorts of things. Have you guys seen or heard of this movie from a couple of years ago? I want to say it's called Beyond the Curve or Behind the Curve, something like that. It's a movie about flat earth people and kind of like high ups in that community. And it's a really interesting, really kind of like human moving documentary because it just, I mean, it like treats people as people and not as like punchlines and kind of examines all of the ways in which, well, examines. all the ways in which they've kind of like found

a real sense of belonging and purpose here and that's part of why they're so impervious to... Yes, but this is my argument for all sorts of things. People look for community and they're finding it in increasingly dangerous places. Flat Earth is not a dangerous place aside if you're going to make a homemade rocket

and go up too high and fall down. But Sarah, you also think that this podcast would be better if we had an adversarial conversation about Flat Earth stuff. This has become an adversarial conversation about Flat Earth. It is now. Yeah. I feel very adversarial.

Yeah, but like you wonder why these young men are finding white supremacy and stuff. Like, this is why it's the same thing as flat eartherism. It's a community that welcomes them and gives them a sense of meaning and purpose and leadership that they're not getting at home and not during COVID. When they were just bewilderingly not allowed to go to school, but also not allowed to play outside with friends. Good plan. Everyone, that worked out super well.

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