The Dispatch Podcast - That's What Xi Said | Roundtable

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

Sarah, Steve, and Jonah discuss TikTok’s influence over the youth (See: Kids call Congress threatening suicide over TikTok ban). The Agenda: -TikTok’s Chinese ownership raises national security concerns -Klon Kitchen being cool on 60 minutes -Robert Hur’s testimony and partisan political narratives -Did anyone watch the Oscars? -Kate Middleton conspiracy theories Show Notes: -Jonah's Gfile: I'm With Hur Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Conditions apply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isgher and I've got Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg to break it down. What is it? What are any of us? But look, I think we're going to start with TikTok and then we're just going to do politics and see where the morning takes us. Hey guys. Morning. Good morning, Mrs. Ger. Something due. Something due economics.

So worth noting at the outset here, Jonah's sick with who knows what malady or malaise. And I've got pink eye, which I haven't had since I was like 10 years old at camp. So thank you to the preschool class for that one. Steve, you're healthy? I mean, relatively, I just don't feel the need to whine about it, like some of you, you know? I'm just asking because, like, you're in a hoodie and the hair, every hair is in place, but nevertheless.

Let's start with TikTok. I think it is a surprise for those who have been concerned about watching TikTok for the last six years plus that we actually have seen movement and a bill coming out of the house, which would require TikTok to be divested from its parent company, white dance, which is Chinese-owned. And there's a reason for that surprise, which is that there was a sense, but several months ago, that TikTok was to the political advantage of Democrats, and so they would never get on board with banning it, and then post-October 7th, as TikTok galvanized, radicalized, whatever term you want to use for it, young voters in a way that was.

was seen as hurting the Biden administration, some of the more cynical people who have watched this have said, oh, well, that's why they're on board. Fair enough. But I've also seen other people point out that, like, that's a cause and effect problem, that TikTok doesn't cause them to take up the Palestinian anti-Israel side, anti-Biden side, that that would be the sort of predilection of teenagers and teenagers anyway, and TikTok is simply the platform on which we're seeing them express their opinions. As we saw that old Klon Kitchen being on 60 Minutes clip has been making the rounds as well where he said, I'm paraphrasing here,

but if there was an announcement tomorrow that China had put 100 million sensors around the U.S. to collect Americans' data, we would all freak out, but yet that's exactly what TikTok is. It's just on your phone instead of on a lamp post with a video camera watching, it's your phone, and it's sending all the data back to China.

So with that incredibly long, intro that didn't have a question mark at the end, Steve. I'm curious if you actually think this will move through the Senate and happen in the end, or if this is a way, kind of for both sides, you know, Trump, who is now flip-flopped on this, remember he was the one who initially started the divestment process through Sipheus and executive orders. He has now said, no difference between TikTok and Facebook. And in fact, getting rid of TikTok would only, increased the power of Facebook and other American-owned social media companies, and he doesn't want that.

I think that's been seen by some as an effort to sort of play the refs, get TikTok to carry more pro-Trump content, and certainly the sword hanging over TikTok from Democrats now in the Senate could force them to put up less, you know, anti-Israel content, anti-Biden content. So, Steve, here's my question. Is this all playing the refs or people actually concerned about America's national security? Well, to answer that question directly, I think lots of people are actually concerned about America's national security. I mean, this has been an issue that we've been writing about since we launched four and a half years ago.

Klon Kitchin spent many of his newsletters for the dispatch writing about the threat posed to Americans by TikTok. So there are real national security concerns here. Having said that, I think you're right to take sort of a sideways look at what we've seen, in particular, the flip-flopping of the political interest here. I mean, it is the case that the Biden administration didn't jump on this before it came and bit them. You know, people have been pushing for this. The Biden administration's been looking at this since Joe Biden was elected was a question posed to him as a candidate. And we have only recently seen this kind of full-throated enthusiasm for forcing bite dance to divest. The story, I think it's sort of hard to explain exactly what led to Donald Trump's flip-flop. Certainly he's used every opportunity when he's been asked to talk about this to go after Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. There's reporting, I think, valid reporting about some top Trump donors who have interests in TikTok, who have been sort of making the case privately for Trump to soften his position on TikTok. You know, can we draw an immediate cause effect there?

I don't know that we have all of the information necessary to do that, but certainly there are suggestive elements. there are pretty good reasons, I think, for people to be cynical about this. As to whether it moves forward, it's been reported widely that there's greater skepticism in the Senate than there was in the House. The House passed this with, I think, I don't know, the exact number, 350 votes or something. This was overwhelming bipartisan vote at a time when we don't see overwhelming bipartisan votes on anything. I do think it's something of a tribute to Mike Gallagher and his committee for raising this and making this a salient issue and the bipartisan work that they did sort of set the set out a path for broader bipartisan cooperation on this. The Senate

has been reported to be more skeptical. I think that's probably right, but now that you have the president saying that he wants it, you have people like Mike Gallagher, other prominent Republicans pushing, been pushing this for a while, pushing it harder right now. I think it's more likely than not that we see this actually passed than signed. Jonah, will you explain where the far left and far right are on defending TikTok? Sure. Let me do it this way. So I've been making this argument for a very long time that if you try to come up with a coherent,

philosophically consistent defensive Trumpism, you're going to get screwed because Trump is going to do a 180 and a 360 on you a dozen different times. And so you end up falling into this, whatever he says is the thing to do. This TikTok thing was a great example of that, right? Where the Heritage Foundation, where Klon Kitchen once worked and then moved to AI in the dispatch, for fun reasons, has been all in on the banning the TikTok stuff since the Trump administration. And then all of a sudden, they got kind of thrown under the bus because Trump changed his position. And I think that Trump's changed position.

I think it has something to do with donors. I think it has something to do with his vengeance and hatred of Zuckerberg. But I think more broadly, it has to do with the fact that TikTok is really popular with a lot of not particularly engaged, politically engaged people. And those people are seen as some vast reserve army by both the far left and the far right. And the far left and the far right consider engagement on social media to be their real currency. And the ideological stuff comes second. And one of the things that TikTok does for both the left and the right is it deals with its language is emotion, not reason, right?

It seeks to get these sort of dopamine hit kind of reactions from people and both the far left and the far right. live on that. That is their bread and butter. That is their fuel. And so I think there is a sort of, there's a cynical kind of just sort of, this is where my market is. I'm going to side with whatever, you know, there go the people, I must go with them kind of thing. But there's also a kind of like, this is, this is really close to who they are and what they are. And there's a reflexive, I have no problem saying it. If you want to come up with a better term for, you know, the place where the horseshoe theory works the most powerfully is, on anti-Americanism.

Like, there's just simply a strong current of blame America first. America sucks. America's always wrong. How dare America protect its own interest? How dare America act like a superpower? Who are they to act like a superpower? And I can list a dozen different sentiments like that without, without you being able to guess, whether they came from a crazy right winger or a crazy left winger.

And TikTok is just in that, in that wheel, or this issue is just in that wheelhouse. And I think this is why I took, and I'll stop here, but like, I thought one of the best stories, the most heartwarming, reaffirming, hopeful stories of the last 10 years was when TikTok tried to activate all of its users to besiege Congress with phone calls and texts and whatever. And it completely backfired on them. Because it turns out if the argument is we don't want a foreign adversary to have too much control over our youth, And then a whole bunch of people who don't know Jack about the legislation start calling and threatening to commit suicide or set fire to themselves or set fire to Congress or whatever

it is. One caller impersonated the son of basically a pro of a kid, of a pro TikTok legislator in California claiming it was they were kid and they had a medical emergency to get them on the phone. And congressman resent that. And I think that's one of the reasons why it was so, it was such a better number. for the Gallagher bill is it pushed a lot of people on the other side. And to me, because it proved the point to people like Gallagher, that you can't have a foreign power with this kind of influence over, you know, 10, 20 percent of the American people,

even if you're not talking about, like, the data mining and all the other stuff. Interesting little notes here. I've seen a lot of the far right or far left saying they're trying to use anti-China sentiment to do X with not a whole lot of recognition that, like, there's a reason for the anti-China sentiment. Like, we have information on what China's doing with this data. It's not good. And I think back to my time of the Department of Justice, part of the Mueller investigation, in fact, the whole purpose of the Mueller investigation, if you remember, was to determine

whether any laws were broken in an effort to influence the 2016 election. Everyone focused on the Trump part of this. But there were 12 indictments brought against Russian GRU officers. from their, you know, military intelligence side for many of their efforts around, for instance, hacking the DNC, but also they were using bot farms to try to gen up racial resentment on social media platforms. Legally, they were spending lots of money

to influence what Americans thought and sort of just brew chaos. They were against Hillary Clinton. it's hard to say whether they were pro-Trump, but they were definitely anti-Hillary. And my point being, the left was very clear that they did not think that was a good thing

that Russia was able to do that. And many people on the right, I will add also, didn't love it. What China is able to do with TikTok makes what Russia did look like tidilywinks. And I mean, this like, Jonah, the like tween age zombie army is just like the newest example of how they're able to

potentially weaponize TikTok. Like, Russia had to work through a platform that they didn't own and that they just sort of had to work with the algorithms as they were the best they could was sort of pretty rudimentary bot farms, frankly. The Chinese bot farms are way more sophisticated

and they know exactly how to do what they want to do because they own the platform. And another thing worth noting is that from a business person, perspective, ByteDance would want to sell off TikTok at this point. Right? The enterprise value of TikTok will never be higher than right now. Once they're forced to divest, that would cause all sorts of problems in selling off TikTok potentially. But they can't because China passed a law banning the

export of algorithms. Why do you think they did that? Because it has so much value to the CCP. So, you know, I see folks, again, on the right or left, it's sort of indistinguishable, saying there's no evidence that China's using this data or is monitoring Americans, it's, you know, is trying to influence our political outcomes. Then why have they banned the sale of TikTok? Yeah, so there's so many inconsistencies in all of this, right? On the one hand, they say, oh, you guys, you don't, you know, look, bite dance, the CEOs from Singapore, it's an independent company, it's not really China. owned. This is paranoid. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's completely independent. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they say, oh, but we can't possibly cut it off from the rest of the company because it's so intertwined with the part that is owned by China and all that. Which is it? Right. It can't be completely independent,

but also so integral that it can't be removed, right? It's not, it's either it's, it's the company's spleen or it's a appendix. One is removable, the other one is it, right? You know, I have a lot of criticism for and sometimes harsh words for American nationalists and America First people, but I could use a little nationalism right now on this stuff. China bans the version of TikTok that we use for its own people. In China, you get videos of kids playing chess and doing science projects and maybe tickling a panda, and that's about it. And in America, we get, you know, dead Palestinians

and mongrel hordes, you know, poisoning our bloodstream by crashing over the border. Moreover, none of our media companies are allowed to operate freely in China. But we're supposed to let a Chinese company operate as it wishes in the United States. When we, in fact, don't allow foreign companies, foreign countries,

certainly adversarial countries, to own any major media properties. And so like this idea that this is special treatment or especially punitive or a bill of a tanger type thing against one company or one country is just garbage. Like lots of companies have to sell off assets because the FCC does not allow them

to own a local television station. When you get like 20% of Americans getting their news from TikTok, that's a bigger deal than having the flagship television station in a Tumwa, Iowa. And we wouldn't let, you know, a foreign country on that. Steve, another thing that I found very persuasive on that cause and effect question, right? Is it just that the kids already believe this or already inclined to believe it and then we're seeing it on TikTok? Or is the Chinese government through TikTok driving the political

opinions of an entire generation of Americans? You know, when you would sort of, if you asked ex-ante what you thought teenagers would think about... Uyghur concentration camps or Tibet, set aside the October 7th stuff, right? Just take Uyghurs and Tibet. You will see the influence running, I think, from the TikTok side to the teenagers. Because it makes no sense that we have a generation of Americans young should be on the left, and the left should be sympathetic to the Tibetans as they've been for 30. 40, 40, 50 years. Why all of a sudden is this generation anti-Tibet? What? And pro-concentration camps?

It makes no sense, even in their own paradigm of, you know, colonizers and oppressors and all of that. It still doesn't work with the Tibet thing, except if you look at the foreign policy beliefs of the CCP, they line up perfectly with where these tweenagers are on TikTok right now. that, I think, is a pretty decent piece of evidence on which direction the cause and effect arrow is going. Yeah. And look, I mean, I think on an even simpler level, the people who are making the argument that, think about the phrasing you're using, tweenagers, right? These are preteens and teenagers. And people are seriously arguing that they have well developed foreign policy views. I mean, come on, that doesn't even pass the laugh test. It suggests people who don't actually have daily interactions with teenagers. in the way that some of us do. They don't have these sophisticated foreign policy views. They're not supposed to.

They're teenagers. So when you can introduce en masse these kinds of arguments that are sort of flushed into their peer groups and they're told to care about something they've never given a day's thought of, of course it's going to be influential. Some cool kid in the junior high adopts a view on the Palestinians. and everybody follows. They share the videos. And it's not very persuasive that...

And most importantly, Steve, if you adopt a view that the CCP approves of, you're going to get a lot more views and a lot more attention. And the kid who adopted the opposite view doesn't become a celebrity in their school. And so the incentives align themselves very nicely with how that foreign policy belief both spreads writ large,

but also at a micro level, it incentivizes individual content creators who want attention. Well, one thing's going to get more attention than the other. Yes, it's what they want most. I mean, I think that's true of anybody who creates content or anybody who's on these social media apps. But it's particularly true of kids at that impressionable in age who, you know, to an extent that's really unhealthy, in some cases, determine their self-worth based on how many likes they get. So, yeah, they're going to want to do the things and make the arguments that get them the most likes, and that points in one direction. And that's traceable. I mean, we've seen this. There are studies that make this very clear. I mean, I think, you know, of the two sides of this argument, both are sort of equally compelling. One is the public facing what do we see and how do people act and what does the CCP do to influence American thinking and particularly the thinking of American youth. The other side, though, I do think is deeply troubling. And, you know, the TikTok spokespeople play this game where they say, hey, the CCP never asks us for this information. And if they

asked us for this information, we would, of course, say no. But the CCP doesn't have to ask for the information because they have prior right to the information based on the national security law in China. So there's no need to ask. And it's naive in the extreme to believe that they don't already have access to this data and aren't already using it in ways that are detrimental to the national security interests of the United States. The Chinese Communist Party has such extraordinary hacking abilities that they basically live in the systems of major U.S. American banks. The idea that that... that they wouldn't access data that they, by their own laws, have prior right to, just beggars believe.

All right, Steve, before we leave this topic, do your teenagers have TikTok? They don't. They sometimes go on TikTok to watch videos, which can be problematic in its own way, right? I mean, TikTok part of the data that's collected are keystroke patterns. You can learn a lot from keystroke patterns. But they don't have TikTok as an app on their phone. Interesting. Has that caused any tension?

Have they been mad about not having TikTok on their phones? Or are they bought into why they don't want TikTok on their phones? I mean, no. I'm just sort of curious as a parent because part of the argument from the other side from parents is, once every other kid has a medium that they're using, your kid will be socially excluded. It's true. So either all the parents have to get on board or you just make your kid a pariah. They don't know where the cool, you know, where the parties are, who's going where because they have no ability to communicate with their friends, which isn't really fair to that kid either.

And is it far less concerned with what the Chinese Communist Party thinks than my kid having friends? Well, I mean, the good news is the Hayes kids are used to being pariahs. They were very late getting phones. They did not have social media. One of them, one of the older kids still does not have social media. media. I think she's sort of the last in her friend group might well be the last in the entire school. We take some measure of pride in this. So they're used to it. I think the other potentially influential factor that probably most kids don't have is the Hayes kids have been

exposed to lengthy and detailed conversations with Klon Kitchen who can sort of walk them through the actual details of this. So as I say. Oh, but also Klon Klan's so cool. If I were a teenager, I would really want to listen to what Klan says. Yeah, you listen to Klan talk about his experience in the U.S. Intel community, and then he tells you this is dangerous, and you tend to believe him. And he looks like Jack Ryan, red-headed Jack Ryan. Yeah, I'd listen to him. 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

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already applying through ethos. It builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ETHOS.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. All right. Jonah, you're giving me a look about the red-headed Jack Ryan thing. heard really thought of klan having red hair and um he does and doesn't look like jack ryan to me i mean he there's this commercial for like a suboroo or something that has this family that reimagine itself as vikings and every time i see it i'm like it's the kitchens going for a country drive um but uh other than i i i got nothing i'm basically i'm on a vision quest right now from cold medicine so like there's there's steve in one window there's several

and then there's like this half-naked Indian telling me I need to find my soulmate. And so just keep going. Jonah, don't tell people what you're searching. Moving on to the political side. So Rob Her, the former DOJ special counsel charged with investigating Joe Biden's retention of classified documents, had his day on the hill. Worth noting to listeners, I worked very closely with Rob. Rob her when I was at the Department of Justice. He was overseeing the Mueller investigation

on a day-to-day basis as Rod Rosenstein's deputy. And obviously, I was there, too. I did not help Rob with his testimony at the Hill, despite what you may have read in certain publications that then issued corrections. That was a long and lengthy disclaimer to, Steve, we talked about her's testimony on our dispatch live and you declared Rob Her the dispatch mascot of the week.

I think that was me. It was Jonah. Fair. Steve, you allowed Jonah to declare the Robber the dispatch mascot of the week. By the way,

I did give Rob a heads up. I told him that it came with a gnaw dog mug. seems very pleased with that. Do you want to explain why you guys felt that the testimony was dispatchian? Well, I'll let Jonah explain because he took it further in yesterday's G-File, which was very good. But we used the headline, I'm with her, H-U-R, which was pretty great, because I tried the entire last segment to come up with a way to use that's what she said in reference to the leader of China, and I just failed.

So we can, Joni, you can tell us why you're with her. And that was actually, I'd say maybe one in 20 times. Do I actually submit a headline with the G-File? But I picked that one. It was good. Basically, look, I mean, there are, I've heard some good legal criticisms, or colorable, plausible legal criticisms about why, or should have brought at least some of the, like, gross negligence charge.

and that kind of stuff. I can credit both the pro and con side on that stuff. But on the big picture stuff that obsessed the media, that obsessed the Democrats and obsessed the Republicans, what I liked about hers testimonies, I pissed them both off. Because both the Republicans and the Democrats were flagrantly, unapologetically, profoundly cynically in that hearing just to do narrative maintenance for one campaign or one party. or another. And so you had her get browbeat over and over again to say he exonerated Biden. And hers is it. I did not say exonerated. It's not in my report. I did not exonerated. And then you got Republicans on the other side going nuts saying, so he's guilty. What you're saying

is he's guilty, but he's just too old and too frail to prosecute, but you got the goods on him. I didn't say that either. And it goes back and forth, right? And on the, question of this one sentence that has enraged, you know, so many Democrats, is that Biden would come across to a jury as a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. They're convinced that this was an absolute slander, absolute outrage when what it was, was essentially, you know, the legal equivalent of a Kinsley Gaff. The whole, like, you wouldn't go crazy angry. about someone calling Joe Biden elderly and with a poor memory

if you didn't think it was true. And we know they think it's true because that's what they all say when the cameras aren't off and aren't on. Joe Biden is admitted to the elderly part. Joe Biden is also something like seven or eight years older than the average life expectancy of an American male. So if he doesn't qualify as elderly,

I don't know what we're going to do here. And whether he has a poor memory or not, Of course he has a poor memory. And yet you see the Democrats losing their minds to say that this was an outrageous slander, it's partisan, and what they're trying to do is shut down this line of criticism to make it seem as if it is illegitimate to point this out. And the reason why I kind of felt like he was the spirit animal of the dispatch this week is that we did this editorial where we said we have two bad choices that we've been running

presidential elections as a contest between the lesser of two evils for a very long time now, and this is where you end up. And a lot of people were just very, very, very, very mad at us for not subscribing to their preferred narrative of the current state of American politics, which is either that you have to vote for Trump to save America from Biden, or that you have to vote for Biden to save America from Trump, and you should put all your misgivings aside. And our approach was... Reasonable people can come to those conclusions if they want to. I, obviously, I'm not a huge fan of Donald Trump.

But we were just describing the parlorist state of American politics in an editorial. And much like Robert Herr, the expectation was that we were going to just commit to a certain partisan narrative about the state of things. And we didn't. And it seemed serendipitous. So, Steve, just to give an example. example of what partisan brain can do to one. Friends don't let friends have partisan brain. So the Democrats at this hearing were trying to make the point that Joe Biden's memory was sharp as attack. The reason that her included it in the report was as a reason not to indict,

not to recommend charges against Joe Biden. So taken to its logical conclusion, what Democrats actually were agitating for was that her didn't have a good reason. reason not to recommend charges against Joe Biden. On the Republican side, Republicans were trying to make the point that Her had more than enough evidence to recommend charges against Joe Biden. Take into its logical conclusion. So they're great with the Trump charges because there was at least as much evidence against Donald Trump, if not more. But no. And her included that. And her included, of course. Her said that. Her said that. Yes. So you had Democrats saying, saying his memory sharp is attacked,

implying that you should have recommended charges, but also you exonerated Biden, weird, and Republicans saying you should have charged him, which means you definitely should have charged Trump, but also Trump will be able to use all the defenses that Biden used so Trump shouldn't have been charged either. Incoherent to me.

And it gets to the point of the editorial, perhaps. Yeah, it does. I mean, I do think it says something, larger about this political moment and the speed of information, something we've talked about here before, where, you know, it used to be the case that parties and individuals and people who are spinning on behalf of parties and individuals were concerned about those longer term arguments. They were concerned about consistency. They were concerned about hypocrisy. They were worried that they would be called out or have video of them saying one thing, you know, in March

and the opposite thing in May. But I think because of the speed of information and the way that our politics have evolved or devolved. It's all about winning the moment. And that's what both sides in this hearing were trying to do. They just wanted to get the good headline out of the day. So they were sometimes making these preposterous arguments like the ones you described, Sarah. There was another point at which Eric Swalwell tried to claim, seriously, with her sitting there that her had had conceded that Joe Biden has a photographic memory. And if you look at the context in the her report, he was talking specifically about photographs, her was talking specifically about photographs in the Biden House and Biden's understanding of

where these photographs were. And I don't know if it was some kind of a tongue in cheek you have a photographic memory because he'd just spent a paragraph or two talking about photographs or if he was specifically talking about Biden's ability to recall where things were in his house. Or what prosecutors do all the time would just flatter you to try to get you to be more forthcoming. If prosecutors say something nice to you, do not take the compliment to heart. Yeah. And there were so many examples of that. I mean, it was one of the stupider moments. Yeah, there were just so many of those stupid moments on what was a profoundly stupid.

stupid day. And I do think it tells us something about sort of the way that partisans operate in this environment is just to win the moment. And they're perfectly willing to be sort of dishonest or to set aside objections, reasonable objections or counterarguments to make their case. As really, it's the editorial. I mean, a couple of a couple thoughts. I think Jonah's right. Like, that's the reason we wrote the editorial. I will concede as I did on Dispatch Live that I made a mistake in the editorial by not including something that sort of is obvious and known to those of us who work at the dispatch and undoubtedly less obvious and less known to people who don't, and that is we don't do institutional endorsements. We've never done institutional endorsements.

It's hard for me to imagine a time when we do institutional endorsements. We didn't include that fact. So I think some people read this broad sort of series of observations about the state of the race today and how Crimea politics are and then expected an endorsement. But As Jonah pointed out on Tuesday night, it's a little silly to think that we would endorse eight months before the election if we were going to endorse, and in any case, we aren't. Look, I mean, it's not surprising to me that partisans who read, first of all, I want to point out a lot, a lot of people really liked the editorial and agreed with it, including many, many of our members, majority of our members, and the feedback we got from outside

was far more positive than it was negative. But for the people who were critical, I'm not surprised that people, I do think there are good faith criticisms to be made of the case we make. That's what you do in an editorial. You have a big conversation. I've talked to our members,

including a lifetime member I had dinner with just a couple nights ago, who made good faith critiques of the editorial. Fair enough. I think there are some legitimate points to be made there. But it's not surprising to me that partisans would react to an editorial decrying the distorting effects of partisanship by being partisans. And that's what we've seen. And, you know, for the most part, these arguments line up sort of the way that you would expect them to, the people who are, you know, who want Joe Biden to win because they're Democratic partisans or because they're Republicans who believe that Joe Biden is not nearly the threat to the republic that Donald Trump is.

they wanted us to go further and make an actual endorsement of Joe Biden. But, you know, some of these critiques, I think, came from people and from places who weren't making them on good faith. It was bad faith, sort of cheap shot arguments and probably not worth much of our time pushing back on them. Jonah, something that I've been concerned about moving forward is this idea, like we saw in some of the pushback to Robert Hurst, testimony, for instance. By the way, that whole watching the hearing was like an advertisement against

representative government. It really, like, wow, you know, I spend literally an entire other podcast talking about Congress do your job. And then when you see them kind of do their job, you're like, I don't know about this. But for the next, you know, six plus months, I fear that everyone is going to be thinking in the back of their head does the thing that I'm saying, does the fact that I'm talking about help or hurt the side that I want to win and maybe more to the political

negative polarization argument it's actually not about helping your own side it's are you accidentally helping the bad guys and there's a real fear if I do X if I acknowledge X that could help Trump

and I worry that it will further degrade trust in journalism, like for the next six months, that it could get really bad as a lot of reporters were like, I read the transcript and Biden had no memory lapses whatsoever. That's just not true. And at the same time, the people who were like, I read the transcript and Biden's a vegetable. That's not true. I think that there's a really fair narrative coming out of this that there were memory lapses, but they weren't throughout and some things he remembered fine. And I think it's probably just a personal opinion of which, you know, on the needle of which side it tilted

to where you fell. And I think it's fair for people to say, overall, there were fewer memory lapses than I thought there'd be, or overall, you know, I think that this shows that he could not, you know, really do four more years. Whatever that is, that's fair. But to say at the extremes, there were no memory lapses in the transcript. Again, partisan brain. And I don't think they're doing it because they're rooting for Joe Biden. I think they're doing it because they're worried if they say, anything different, it could help Donald Trump. It's also worth just on the specific allegation here, like what Hurst said in the report was like it was his judgment that he would seem this way to a jury, right?

And if you go and you read the passage that is the most controversial passage about his memory where he can't quite nail down or can't seem to nail down what year his son Beau died and what year he left the vice presidency. I'm willing to forgive all of it and understand it on all sorts of levels. But you just ask yourself, how would that seem to a jury? And it would seem like pretty much what her said it would seem like, which is sort of the point.

On your broader point, you know, one of my favorite scenes in Barcelona, the movie is where there's one guy says, so I understand that what subtext means some sort of, implied or insinuated or somehow some sort of hidden meaning. But what's above the subtext? What do you call that? And the other guy goes, the text. And so much of our politics now is done on subtext, right? It's like, and so much of journalism. Why are you

saying this? What are you leaving out? What is your agenda for why you're saying it this way and what facts, you know, what inconvenient facts have you left out? A couple weeks ago, I asked on Twitter, what's the best article about cutting off aid to Ukraine that you've read, right? Because I wanted to write about it, and I wanted to read like a good argument, different than my own. And it was one of the most depressing response. I mean, like, there were a lot of perfectly fine responses, but there was also a lot of people who needs articles with air quotes around it to come to their position on this stuff. Why do I need to read people or read experts on this?

And it was as if the whole idea of, my favorite was, why should I read your articles when I can do my own research? I was like, what do you think doing your own research involves, if not like reading things? but we live in a sort of environment now where it's basically vibes and opinions unsupported by facts that dominate everything and the problem is

that some people are actually speaking the text they're not speaking the subtext but if all you have is hammer you think everything is a nail if you think everything is a subtext you're going to read all the text as subtext too and it creates this very postmodern world you know I wrote a piece a while back about critical Trump theory

where, you know, critical race theory says anything that ends up having a disparate impact, negative impact on certain racial minorities is objectively racist, even if there was no intent, right? That was the whole reason like critical race and institutional racism and all these sorts of academic notions come up. A lot of the right now operates from what I call critical Trump theory, which is that anything that turns out to be inconvenient to Donald Trump is just assumed to be illegitimately anti-Trump. And I think that that has gotten into the heads of the audience, and it's gotten to the heads of the journalists who write to those audiences, too.

And everybody wants to sort of game the system on subtext levels without just sort of just telling the truth and letting the people come to their own conclusions. Okay, let me just steal the mic from Sarah for two seconds, and I have a question of you guys. Who do you think, after my long diatribe about subtext and content? and all this nonsense. Let's go back to the rank punditry. Who did hers testimony help or hurt more? Trump or Biden? I don't think his testimony will be remembered at all. I think the report will be, and I think the report obviously hurt Biden. Yep, 100% in agreement. What's interesting to me is that the transcript seems like a draw. And I think if the transcript had come out simultaneously with

or before the report, that the transcript would have been much worse for Joe Biden, but the report actually took a lot of that blow so that the transcript ends up also being something that I don't think will be remembered at all. It'll be interesting to see if the audio comes out. Republicans are already agitating to get the audio out. I don't know that that'll make much of a difference. Like, it's now so baked in what people think about Joe Biden's health and memory. I just don't know that there's going to be a whole lot that makes a difference on

that topic for the next six months aside from, you know, a major health incident that could change some people's minds. But it's not going to be other people talking about Joe Biden's memory. I will say, I did think the reporting on the transcript was misleading and distorted for the reasons that Sarah suggests. The report came out. And reporters having no other information at their disposal had to report on what the report said. and what it claimed, and then got beat up for weeks by Democrats for having given from airtime or oxygen to this report. Then when they were given access to a redacted transcript, I thought many of the reports I saw

coming out of the reading of the transcript leaned heavily in the direction of giving sort of of the quote-unquote Biden side of the transcript in a way that you would do if it's a you know, the so-called second-day story rather than the first day story. To me, reading the transcript, the news out of the transcript was still, wow, Joe Biden had forgotten a lot of really important things. And that's bad for somebody who's the Democratic presidential nominee and the leader of the free world. The way that it was written about in many publications and covered many of the networks was there were moments where Joe Biden seemed completely lucid and did not have problems with recall. Therefore, that's the news because the news out of

the Her report had already been reported that Biden's memory was failing. So I don't think the back and forth over the transcript or over the hearing is likely to be meaningful in any way, any lasting way. But I do think the report itself, because it confirms what everybody can see, because it confirms what we already know about Joe Biden is likely to have sort of lasting impact. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online.

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Visit rbc.com slash avion. Last up, and I know Steve's been really looking forward to both of our not worth your times this week, because there's two, Steve. The first is on the Oscars. Did you watch a single thing that was nominated for an Oscar? Anything. Documentary.

I don't think so I mean I did but we're asking Steve I don't well I mean here's the problem with the question I don't know what was nominated so I don't know did you see Barbie did you see Oppenheimer no no did you see the last repair shop

no kills the flower moon no okay I think we're done Jonah what movie did you like so I still have not seen Oppenheimer I'm very mad at myself about that. I'm going to remedy that shortly.

I have seen Barbie, but not in one continuous sitting. I find that it's a very entertaining movie in about 10-minute doses, and then you come back to it, channel flipping another day to finish, to do another 10 minutes. I watched the entire Oscars, which is very unusual for me.

I thought the Glazer speech about Israel was very bad. Will you tell people who that is and what that was? Because I didn't watch the Oscars. Oh, okay. So, God, no, Steve didn't. Steve doesn't even know what the Oscars are.

I want to say his first name is Nick, Nicholas. I can't remember for sure. But he won an Oscar for apparently an absolutely amazing film about the commandant of Auschwitz and how he was trying to live this bucolic, wonderful suburban, you know, perfect life outside of Auschwitz. and I don't think you have to be a film major to understand the invitation to compare and contrast is pretty strong there, right? And apparently it's a truly great film.

And then he comes up when he accepts it, and he has this, he's clearly very nervous, and he has this very poorly written little speech about the perils of dehumanization, and as a Jew, he refutes his Judaism, mumble, mumble, mumble, being associated with bad things happening in Gaza. And it's become very Jesuitical in the reading of this.

Lots of people are saying, people are treating this guy unfairly because if you actually look at what he meant to say, it doesn't come across that way. There are other people saying, how dare you do this as a Jew thing where you exploit your Jewish status to do both sidesism about,

you know, what happened on October 7th and Gaza and whatnot. What about any vocab nerds who say that's not what refute... Right, and there's that too, right? There's all sorts of... I mean, like, again, this guy is just won an Oscar for being a master communicator.

Write something better if you're going to do this because you're going to piss off a lot of people and there's really... First of all, I don't think you should do it anyway, but like, if you're going to do it, do it well. And so I just thought it was sort of professionally... Like, it's, it, as my people would say, it's Ashanda. But it was, it was, it was bad on the text and the subtext on this case.

And, um, and I think Jimmy Kimmel was remarkably unfunny. You know, I am the foremost advocate here at the dispatch for dad jokes. But I wouldn't do a lot of dad jokes if I was hosting the Oscars. And he did. And a lot of his stuff felt like a, like some AI program, chat, GPT, scoured film Twitter and dad Twitter and vomited up

a lot of really subpar jokes but I think they were thinking they could play it safe and maybe that was smart I am delighted the Killers of Flower Moon got no Oscars my hot take is it got no Oscars because it wasn't a very good movie

and the movies that beat it were better than it and there's no other explanation required. Well my take, of course, is what nobody has said, like, in any of these entertainment stuff that I've read, which is they actually decentered Native American women in the movie. They were far more central in the book, so you shouldn't get rewarded for, like, oh, look, we cast a Native American woman in a lead role.

Yes, but it would have been a much bigger role, and there would have been a lot more of these women had you followed the plot of the book. So, like, the fact that you, in fact, centered two white dudes. Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio and then go around complaining that you didn't win like for DEI reasons like what? Totally totally backward to me crazy

okay Steve now the not worth your time that you've been really waiting for. Can I just say one thing about the Oscars? I do I have to correct you guys I do like the Oscars because every year I don't ever know when the Oscars You just don't like movies.

It's going to happen. I like movies. I just don't prioritize watching them. I don't have a lot of time to watch movies. And it takes like two hours. That's a lot. But I do like it when the Oscars, like I never know when they're coming. And then it'll be Oscars Day and you'll see all sorts of speculation.

You know, people will be talking about the Oscars. And I love that the Oscars happen because, if your job is to follow the news and I don't do that job as intensely as I once did, you know, when I was writing all the time, it's great to have like a night and then the following day when you know that whatever else happens, unless it's like some really major news event is going to be obscured by the Oscars. So you don't have to pay attention for like a 24-hour period to the news because I don't care about the Oscars and what happens there. And whatever news I need to know about, it goes on like a 24-hour hiatus. And it's just wonderfully relaxing 24 hours in my life. All right.

We're talking about Photogate next and the British Royals, who I've compared to Chinese pandas, marching towards extinction but propped up by American interest. You know, when the story first broke that for British Mother's Day, the palace released a photoshopped picture of Princess Kate with her three children, I thought, wow, it would be so hard to find me caring less about this story. But I will admit that some additional information has intrigued me, namely, that they haven't released the original photo,

and that at least some folks have noted that, the children appear to be wearing the same clothes that they were wearing six months ago and that perhaps there was no photo at all, not just that it was touched up or something. I don't find the conspiracy theories that this means Kate is, I don't know what, because we've actually seen videos of her like in a car with her mom. She's fine. But it makes me think about in political world where sort of calms people or consultant class people surround their principles so tightly so as to prevent any outside advice from getting to them. And so yeah, I just feel like the royal family doesn't ever hear from dissenting voices in the room. It's like, you know what? Maybe that's

not a good idea for us to create a photo out of whole cloth from a bunch of stuff from six months ago and hope no one notices because we're not the world's foremost experts on Photoshop. I think this will turn out to be much to do about nothing. But the conspiracies around

they're getting divorced, William cheated, she has cancer, but she can't be allowed to say she has cancer because she can't out cancer her father-in-law. This is what they have wrought.

It's weird that they're not moving faster to tamp that down. So, Sarah, I'm... Worth your time? No, this whole thing is definitely not worth our time. And I'm so resumed,

resentful that you have somehow drawn me into a substantive discussion of this nonsense with your claim that because we've seen a video of her in a car, she's fine. Really? Like, that doesn't mean she's fine. I don't buy any of the conspiracies. I don't know what the conspiracies are, so I don't know enough to buy them or reject them. But I can't believe you just made the argument that, like, they've photoshopped this whole thing. They're doing all this stuff to obscure whatever is going on with her. But you saw a video of her in a car with her. mom so you know everything's fine come on that's crazy talk all right that's as much as i'm saying well i mean she's not dead there's like a version of this where like she died a couple months ago and like

well no obviously not uh or that she's like being held captive but her mom's the one driving the car unless you think her mom turned on her like sorry i just that but if she was in a car she it could still be true that she has tentacles for legs that's true because you only see her from the head I don't have much for you here. I guess, look, no, here's the not worth your time for both of you. In an age where we're talking about AI, you know, writing motions in court with fake court cases, we, I think, have already crossed the Rubicon into the point where you're going to show someone a picture, like think Anthony Weiner, think Gary Hart. And, you know, there's going to be a whole

entire percentage of the population is just going to say, no, it's not real. And you're really not going to be able to prove otherwise because powerful people are kind of abusing this. I mean, the palace photoshopping of photo, which they've acknowledged they did, really undermines public trust because it means every photo from now on either isn't Photoshop or they got better at Photoshop. So earlier, I mean, I know your eyes were glazing over when I was doing my whole text, subtext thing, but I just gave a talk about this at World Forum along these lines where I think that one of the things that fuels a lot of the cynicism and distrust out there is not just

AI and CGI, but the fact that most of our lives now is mediated through screens. And that, you know, I'm kind of a Marshall McLuhan guy in the sense that sometimes the medium is the message. You know, TikTok changes kids' heads in significant ways. It shortens their attention span, all sorts of things. These things have real effects on the way, on our, or in our epistemological sensors, right? And so in an era of very high social distrust, the idea that even these things that we've counted on for a very long time as verité evidence of reality, photographs, can now no longer be trusted. Recordings of voices

can no longer be trusted. That is just a huge amplification of these other trends going on, right? And I don't know how you get the genie back in the bottle. And then you add in the ideological agenda approach to it, right? People are pissed off because textbooks

are pushing one agenda or another agenda, and that makes everybody crazy. well, Google Gemini, 10 days ago, two weeks ago, came out with this thing where like, show me a picture of a Nazi and you get, you know, a black guy in an SS uniform or, you know, show me a picture of a Viking and it's an Asian woman in a wheelchair, right? I mean, the idea that these, what are supposed to be these objective finders of fact, right? these like the inside the living encyclopedia of our age is so ham-fisted that it's going to cram this ideological agenda stuff down your throat is really dangerous and like they're going

to get better and that's going to make people distrust them more you're so racist Jonah I can't believe you're saying that outrageous there were a lot there were a lot of of Sally Chang's in the the stormtroopers in 1939 in wheelchairs. I mean, like, totally. They, there was the ones who, like, led the charge to take Poland. Steve is crying. So good. That's great.

All right. Well, look, I think that it, the photo gate from the Royals is worth our time in the sense of the Biden, uh, robocall and everything else where you get to now have a bespoke reality and you get to deny other people's reality because it may not be real. And I think it's a big problem when governments do it, which is exactly what the British Royals did. And everyone's so focused on what it actually means about Kate, they're missing the real story, which is that a government put out a Photoshop photo at a time when trust is so low to begin with. I don't know.

So you're going to hate me for this correction. I mean, hate me. I mean, like seriously hate me. Yes, it's not the government. I know what you're going to say. It's not the government. It's the state. the queen is the head of

the monarch is the head of state, but not the head of government. I didn't say she was the head of government. I said it was the government that released it. Well, the royal office released it, right? Yes. Not the, not like Rishi Sunak's office, right? I'm just saying it's like, civics 101 in the UK, my understanding,

I'm open to correction on this, is that there's a serious distinction between the state and the government and the royal do not run the government. They run the state, and I'm done. I agree that they don't, they are not the head of the government, but I would still argue that they are part of the government in the way that it is used to mean that includes the state. I have every confidence that the next time I see you in person, you're going to throw a drink in my face for this entire thing. So I'll just leave it here.

I just look forward to that, actually. All right. You know, it's really embarrassing is like I worked in the House of Commons for a while. And so, you know, the fact that we're about to get a whole bunch of listeners siding with you is deeply concerning. Though, to the point, perhaps, I worked for the government. But colloquially, I think you're right. I mean, I think your point still stands. I just was being a pay in the ass. As Jonah is want to do, thank you listeners. We'll see you next. I'm going to be able to be.