The Dispatch Podcast - The Battle Over H.R. 1

Episode Date: March 10, 2021

Congressional Democrats’ omnibus voting rights, campaign finance, and ethics bill, H.R. 1—also known as the “For the People Act”—passed in the House last week, and our hosts are here for the breakdown. Stay tuned to hear the gang chat about retirements in the GOP Senate, whether arguments about cancel culture are trumping more substantive public policy debates, and a surprise tabloid-y topic you won’t want to miss! Show Notes: -Democrats’ For the People Act and Republicans’ Save Democracy Act. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Steve Hayes, David French, and Jonah Goldberg. See, I switched up the order there on you this week. We have a, well, it's an interesting podcast today, no doubt. We're going to start with HR1, the For the People Act, sort of the grab bag first bill introduced by Democrats that has passed the House. We're going to talk about GOP retirements in the Senate and what all you can actually read into that. then we'll do why we're talking more about Dr. Seuss than about the COVID $1.9 trillion bill that is about to be signed into law. And I guess I'm just going to leave that last topic as a surprise, except, I don't know, brush up on your God save the queen. Let's dive right in. All right, we're going to start with H.R.1. This is known as the For the People Act. It has several components to it, including an ethics component about lobbyists and the definition of lobbyists, having the Supreme Court justices, abide by a judicial code of ethics,

which right now they don't have to. It also has some campaign finance parts that are, frankly, less interesting to me today than the first part, which is the national election changes and uniformity. And I just want to run through some of what is in that first section of HR1, requiring all states to use information in government databases like the DMV or public assistance to automatically register eligible voters unless that voter specifically opts out. So right now at the DMV, for instance, it's an opt-in. do you also want to register to vote? This would be a, do you want to definitely not register to

vote? Otherwise, you do register. Mandating that every state permit no excuse absentee voting and at least 15 days of early voting, guaranteeing voters same day registration both at early voting sites and at precincts on election day, creating a really difficult process to remove inactive voters from registration rules, requiring every state to create an independent commission with five Democrats, five Republicans, and five independent for new congressional lines. So that's their gerrymandering plank. Mandating that states with voter ID requirements accept instead a sworn written statement to an election official under penalty of perjury that the voter is eligible to vote in lieu of an ID, requiring states to allow all citizens convicted of a crime to be allowed

to vote unless they are currently in a correctional facility. So, So this is like the Democratic wish list that I read this and think these are the things they've picked out that they think will do the most to increase their voter turnout in the next election. These are all quite partisan to me. Republicans answered with the Save Democracy Act, it's basically if you take the For the People Act and reverse it, prohibiting states from implementing automatic registrations. which only allows for opt-out. Mandating states require voter ID.

Mandating states require new voter registration include a social security number and proof of citizenship, prohibiting states from no-excused absentee balloting, and prohibiting ballot harvesting. Now, what's interesting about that to me is that actually, if you go back to 2005, Jimmy Carter and James Baker headed up a community, after the 2001 election to see how they could improve the United States' federal elections,

and they came up with 87 suggestions. And basically, versions of HR1 and the Republican bill are in the commission's report. They just cherry-picked the things that they think are on, quote, their side or the other side. So my question to you, Steve, is, Can we look at this in a big picture way? Why did nothing happen on the commission? And now 15 years later, we're taking the commission's ideas, but only half of them for each side, because we've moved that far from even the concept of bipartisanship.

And what does that say about everything else in our politics over the last 15 years? Well, I'm afraid my response won't be terribly original. We live in a very polarized time, and partisanship triumphs virtually everywhere. And I think that's the short explanation here. We had an interesting internal discussion about this and H.R.1 more broadly, the Democrats bill more broadly, and what kind of legislation it was meant to be. Often the first bill of every session is meant to be a messaging bill, more. more than a bill that's actually likely to become law.

And I think that's very clearly what Democrats did here. They wanted to put out these proposals. You know, no doubt some, maybe many of the Democrats who support this legislation believe that these are the right things to do. But it's also no coincidence that they thought Republicans would oppose these things. And Democrats think that they can run on these things. We talked a little bit last week about some of the various efforts in the states, particularly in Republican-led states by Republican legislatures, to restrict voting access in one or in some cases several ways. This happened in Iowa.

This is happening in Georgia. It's happening in various states around the country. It seems pretty clear that we are going to have this big fight over the next few years about who can vote. and how. And it's likely to continue along these partisan lines as far as the I can see. And I think doing this on a federal basis was never likely to succeed. And they didn't think it was likely to succeed. David, if someone right now turned the 2005 Carter Baker Commission into a bill, let me just read you some of those 87 recommendations, universal voter registration system so that once you register once in your lifetime, like, that's it.

Universal voter ID, creating a real ID card across the country, so you don't have to do it in each state, mandating early voting start no earlier than 15 days, mandating that disability absentee voting exists automatically, so you don't have to request your absentee ballot each time, restoring felon voting rights and prohibiting ballot harvesting. So if you took all 87 of these suggestions and turned them into a bill, are there enough people in the middle for something like that? And why hasn't that happened? I don't think there are enough people in the middle for that.

And I'm not actually sure how much of a middle exists on this issue, to be honest. It seems to me that when you're talking about the real energy for voting reform, it's on the edges. It's much more towards, let's expand, you know, the automatic opt-in, the lack of any sort of picture ID requirement. You've got a lot of energy for that on the left. You've got a lot of energy for restricting the amount of the early vote. You've got a lot of energy for restricting or banning the opt-in on the right. And, you know, you do have some folks, I think, sort of what you might call in the good government middle who want to iron out some quirks or maybe tinker on the edges, but the real energy here seems to be on the edges.

And look, Sarah, I'm going to plagiarize you, basically. And it seems like what's happening here is that the arguments about voting rights are being used primarily as turnout mechanisms all by themselves. That essentially what you're saying, what you have is, look at the GOP. They're trying to engage in massive voter suppression, so you have to. come out and then the right turning around. But it doesn't work quite as well on the right, especially if you mix it with a big vote fraud message because what you're telling some of your people is it'll just be taken from you even if you win.

But this idea that, look, you're going to have to overcome these cheaters. You're going to have to overcome these suppressors is being used as a vote turnout mechanism as a base mobilization strategy all by itself. To me, I feel like if anyone was actually serious about voting reform, you don't throw a giant omnibus bill that includes basically everything in the world straight into the Senate where you know it has no chance unless there is filibuster reform. And this isn't going to be the bill that is going to be the vehicle of filibuster reform, especially since the ACLU. the ACLU has come out and said that big chunks of this are unconstitutional.

Big chunks of this thing violate the First Amendment. So, I don't know. I'm going to give an example of one of the sections that you think violates is unconstitutional just for funties?

Yeah, so this is something that is, as I said, it's a grab bag of a lot of stuff. It contains a version of the so-called Disclose Act, which is going to require covered organizations that make campaign-related disbursements,

aggregating over $10,000 in an election cycle to begin listing names and addresses of beneficial owners of the organization. You're talking about donor disclosure. And one of the interesting things here is so the bill includes sort of this, well, wait, I mean, if somebody's going to be threatened, if somebody's going to be in a situation where they're going to face some sort of reprisal for disclosure, well, they'll be protected in that circumstance, but the way that sort of the culture works now, you can be under no threat making a donation today. And two years from now, that donation becomes incredibly controversial

retroactively. So it's a situation where this mandatory disclosure really, truly squelches anonymous speech in the American political process. And an anonymous speech has a long tradition in the U.S. as being sort of instrumental to the founding of the republic and all also instrumental in multiple American social reform movements and is clearly constitutionally protected. And so, you know, I kind of think of this as like government mandated doxing as the Disclose Act. It's sort of a government mandate that if you're going to participate financially in the process, everyone's going to know your stuff and going to know who you are and what you did. And I think particularly in this climate, that's got a major chilling effect.

Okay, Jonah, as my sort of go to, hey, what an old school conservative like this guy, I want your opinion on three of these. Two are from the Carter Baker Commission. One, universal voter registration that's a national thing where, like, you move around and it's fine. Once you've registered, you're good to go. Two, uniform voter ID system that would go with that. So that would sort of be a package deal. What would you think of that package?

That's my first question. And then second, in HR1, I'm curious what you think about the redistricting commission, you know, ending partisan congressional line drawing and mandating that all states have a, and by independent commission, obviously it's not all independents

because there are partisan members of it, but they can't be members of the legislature, they can't be elected officials, blah, blah, blah. So those two items, I would like, your conservative qua, conservative take. Okay, so before I get to those, and I will answer those because I have answers to them, I think listeners might want to know

that when Steve and I were first talking about dispatch and about bringing you, Sarah, on board, one of our biggest misgivings, I'm just being honest here, was we were worried that you would not be able to restrain your fan girling for the Carter-Baker election Thorne Commission of 2006. And you've done a remarkable.

I mean, we're like, what do we do? On the one hand, you know, she's kind of polymath and she's charming, but, but on the other hand, this standing for this silly, this goddamn commission and just, well, anyway, so, anyway, I want to thank you that it's taking you this long to give in. But here we are, and boy, it's coming out. Yeah. So, all that said, um, okay, so the first conservative qua conservative, point, the hackles on your back of a conservative's neck should go up just the second

they hear the phrase for the people. Because for the people is generally what Maoists and Bolsheviks and various populist groups do say when they are doing something to the people. Secondly, I'm, I'm, the substance of the ideas for like the voter ID tradeoff, universal access kind of thing, I am open to in principle. But the secondary principle I have is that, I mean, the first, the other first conservative quo, conservative hurdle is, why the hell are we federalizing American elections? And that's essentially what this stuff does, right? For sure. But I think after 2020, like, states, for instance, some counting their absentee ballots ahead

of time, some not. Like, I'm curious if you think that is okay. Like is, and I think it's a fair argument to make that it was totally fine. And yep, we have 50 different elections. But I could see someone like you saying, look, there are things that can be nationalized about elections, just not everything. Yeah, I mean, like serious guidelines that we really sort of lean on states to adhere to and best practices and that kind of thing are fine by me,

but like the wholesale takeover of elections by Congress seems to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution to a lot of these things. And look, so my big picture take on this is that both Democrats and Republicans, quah Democrats and Republicans, I'm just going to use qua a lot today because Sarah brought it up, is there, they both have sort of organizational myths, sort of like the myth of the general strike. The left has believed for a very, very long time that if everybody voted, they would always win because there is this hidden reserve army of lump and proletariots and working class whatever's that don't show up at the polls. And if everybody voted, that would be a sign that the processes of scientific history unfolding are that people have realized their class consciousness and that they are voting their interests, yada, yada, yada.

Most political scientists, I don't know that this has changed, but the last time I wrote deeply about some of this stuff, most political scientists, I've read about this, think that if everybody voted, the results would be pretty much what we get. the swing would be about 1% one way or the other. Because if you just think about it, if a normal poll can be fairly representative of the national split, and it's taking the temperature of about 1,200 people, a poll that takes the temperature of 100 million people, 150 million people, is probably going to be even more accurate.

And so the Dems work from this sort of general principled position, and then within that context, they try to get their side to turn out as much as possible. all this stuff is about turnoff. The problem is the asymmetric disadvantage that Republicans have is that Republicans think the Democrats are right and that if everybody votes, they'll lose. And so they try to restrain voting. And in a country that claims to be a democracy with a heavy democratic bias, small D democratic bias, the position of saying more people voting simply has more moral power than let's make sure the right people vote.

and that puts the Republicans at a disadvantage, and frankly, it should put them at a disadvantage. But I'm, so anyway, on the actual public policy stuff, I think, sorry, if you could convince me that we weren't in fact federalizing the elections and that this was somehow a way to sort of maintain the idea that the states actually elect a president and whatnot, and you satisfied all my other concerns that David brings up, I am definitely open to the idea of regularizing

and making more reliable American voting. I don't think HR1 is about that. I think HR1 is about messaging and it is attempt to federalize the elections. Okay, well, Steve, now that we've left my pipe dream of the Carter-Baker commission, no doubt we'll come back to it next week

and the week after, though. Don't worry, Jonah. Now that we've opened this, yeah. How can I contain myself? You can finally light the candles to your shrine. Look, in last week's Voting Rights Act case for the Supreme Court, that is what the Arizona law was about. It was an anti-ballot harvesting law,

and they pointed to the Carter-Baker Commission, and so the Supreme Court's basically going to decide whether the Carter-Baker Commission was too, you know, partisan or racist or something, which is why, in fact, that vote's going to be at least A-1. Oh, I could just go on all day about the Carter-Baker Commission. Steve, you want to talk retirements in the GOP Senate. Yes, speaking of elections.

Did Jimmy Carter or James Baker say anything about retirements in the GOP Senate? Just out of curiosity. I'm sure they probably did back in the day, but I don't have that at my fingertips. I'm surprised you can't recite it for us from memory. Astrowsy would say it was implied in the security of silence. Read between the lines. We had the, I think, surprising news that Missouri Senator Roy Blunt would be retiring, said he will not be seeking a third term.

Republican, you know, a member of the Republican leadership in the Senate, very close to Mitch McConnell, and brings the number of retirements, Republican announced retirements already to file. including Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, Ohio Senator Rob Portman, and Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey. I have a lot of thoughts on this, but I would actually like to go to you all right away, and I'm going to bounce this directly back to you, Sarah. Why are all these Republicans retiring? I think that the news headline reason is, oh, they don't want to be up for re-election. They're worried about being flanked from the right.

They don't want to bother with having to run to their right. But it's also worth remembering that some of them are just quite old. What? I mean, Chuck Grassley is 87 years old or some number that is very high and, like, would give you a very good GPA. And then some of them, I think, have potentially broader ambitions at home. And so they don't want to get dragged into a primary where they have to do or say things that would make that long-term ambition harder. But I don't know that I think that that's the case for the vast majority of these guys. Some of them are sick of being the Senate.

Some of them are older. Some of them want to make money because their kids are about to be college age, which is a sort of popular retirement time for some of these senators. where they want to not take on student debt on behalf of their children or for their children. In part also, I don't know how effective the Trump machine will be at primary in these folks. They haven't been that effective

in the one time we've seen them do it in 2018. So this idea that all of these Republican senators are reacting to that threat, you know, they're pretty politically savvy guys. They got elected in the first place several times. And, you know, in 2018, if you weren't Donald Trump and no one was, the Trump movement didn't do all that well. You know, Donald Trump, for instance, put out a statement that I thought was pretty funny, you know, threatening Lisa Murkowski, the only senator who voted to convict him who's up for re-election in 2022 saying that he was going to do everything he could to defeat her. She doesn't have a Republican primary. They have ranked choice voting. So, you know, good luck.

luck to run to her right, you'd actually be better off running to her left. Or weirdly, the libertarians, the one who has done the best in the last two times, she's been up for re-election. So I think that there's a lot of growling and barking coming from the MAGA team when it comes to these primaries. I'm still very skeptical over how much bite there will be. So I think the retirements, I take them on face value. So, Jonah. Days before Roy Blan announced that he was retiring, Eric Greitens, the former governor of Missouri, let it be known that he was... Resigned for interesting reasons, right? Who resigned for very interesting reasons.

Has been making regular appearances of late on Fox and let it be known that he was potentially interested in primary. Roy Blunt, he has turned, certainly turned in a nationalist Trumpy direction. If we're listening to Sarah, she would suggest, not to put words in her mouth, that that may just be coincidence, that there may not be a causal effect there. Is she just avoiding the obvious answer to give us a clever contrarian answer? Well, I will not speak to Sarah's motives. Well, we all know that Sarah is basically like the Laura Ingalls-Wilder

of this podcast and is always thinking the best of people. Oh, yes. Totally. Good points. So, no, I think she's... As I often say on my podcast, I am opposed to monocausal explanations of anything. And, you know, no one goes into a car dealership and says, I'm here today to buy a red car. You know, people do things for complicated and mixed reasons.

And I suspect that if we had just concluded the second term of the Mitch Daniels administration and the GOP was solidly debating the trade-offs between tax cuts and spending reductions and deficit reductions and was full of wonky, earnest talk. Blunt would probably stick around. But given the craptacularity of sort of the political environment these days and the fact that this guy Gritens, who is... First of all, let's remember, until 2015, he was a Democrat, switched to become a Republican

so he could run for governor, was almost impeached, did some... was charged with some felonies, did some weird things. He would... And his main line of attack against... Can I just have a moment here that the dispatch, I'm very proud of the dispatch

for this, but footnote, other outlets will say that he was involved in a sex scandal, and that drives me crazy. It implies that his, you... you know, crime, quote unquote, was that he was unfaithful to his wife. That is not what this was. This was not a sex scandal.

The dispatch does not refer to it as such. And if you see some other outlet refer to it as such, you should hurl your iPad across the room. You know, one of the many things he did was blackmail his mistress. That is not a sex scandal. That's a crime. Please continue, Jenna.

No, totally fair. And it kind of reminds me of Troy McClure and the Simpsons when Homer Simpson says to him, I know your secret, you're gay. And Troy McClure says, gay, I wish. They don't have a word for what I am. Anyway, so, my only point about Gritens is that he is willing to do pretty much anything. And his main line of attack on Blunt is that Blunt committed the heresy of actually acknowledging that Joe Biden was the president of the United States

and that the election results were valid and the idea of having that kind of primary challenge only to then have to like deal with all of the barnacles that you've stuck to yourself to deal with that kind of primary challenge to do a general election challenge and a and they still

swingier state than people realize maybe not as much as it used to be only to come back here in the minority and deal with all his MAGA nonsense you know who can blame the guys, eh, who needs this? And I think the eh, who needs this stuff is partly about

the MAGA things, but it's partly about the broader climate. And it's partly because the Senate itself doesn't do its job anymore. And for people who actually went to the Senate to do the job, going there and not doing the job after you've been there for a long time, probably is pretty unappealing. We should point out just as a matter of fact and accurate reporting that there was a Missouri Ethics Commission investigation into some of the campaign finance questions around that were raised about Gritens and the panel, quote, found no evidence of any wrongdoing, unquote, even if they did raise concerns about some in-kind contributions from some outside groups. So, David, just to pick up on this,

I think it's certainly the case that the existence of Donald Trump and the turn of the Republican Party toward a trumpier to becoming a Trumpier party is playing a role and I think is playing the leading role here. I think that's what's happening. And if you look at the kind of senators who are leaving, these are, you know, I think we would, they, on a range of conservative movement to kind of, kind of, old school establishment Republicans, to me very much a conservative movement guy. I'd say blunt and Shelby more in the dealmaker establishment mode. But there are people who came to Congress to legislate. And we have this new gaggle of senators, particularly on the Republican side, who seem much more interested in coming to Congress to own the libs or give speeches or be famous, which isn't to say that they don't care about ideas. I'm not dismissing that.

But if you look at what's likely to come out of these retirements, isn't it more likely, given the current environment, that we will see more of the latter and fewer of the former in the aftermath of 2022? Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm going to refer to the sweep, Sarah's newsletter yesterday has a segment by Chris Starwalt in there. And he points out to my state. So my state, I think, is a really good example of what can happen in a very red state as sort of this more establishment old guard retires. So you had Bob Corker leave, you had Lamar Alexander leave, and they're replaced by Marshall Blackburn, who's obviously last seen defending Neanderthals as a resilient, though extinct, precursor to modern-day humans.

And Bill Haggerty, who used to be about as establishment as you can get, but ran in a primary against a Mani-Sethi, a physician here, and they basically competed to see who hated Mitt Romney more. Now, why was that notable? It was notable because Haggerty happened to have been a longtime friend of Mitt Romney, who just totally tossed him overboard in the quest for Senate, all of this massive Senate power and notoriety, and was last seen Haggerty hiring Julia Hahn, who's known for, I believe, writing more than three dozen posts at Breitbart, hyping good old white nationalist Paul Nalen.

So this is, I think, one of the issues. I totally hear Sarah's point. I mean, look, it's only in politics, that you're wondering why somebody who's like Shelby 86, Roy Blunt, 71, Grassley 87, Pat Toomey is really the only young one in the group, Richard Burr, 65, only in politics, are you wondering why people are in their 80s or retiring. But I think that the real issue is what comes next. And if Tennessee is any guide, what comes next is either people who are trying and flailing about to own the libs are people who maybe used to be kind of establishment and responsible

but have tacked so far in the own the libs direction that they're almost unrecognizable at this point and part of me wonders if we're in for another round of Sharon Angles and sort of Christine O'Donnells as Republican nominees the people are going to come out of these Senate primaries in states that are winnable for Republicans but not locks for Republicans

or near locks like Tennessee is, and are we going to see sort of another round of primary voting where maybe a Richard Burr would have won, but when he's out of it and doesn't want to deal with it anymore, that the person who does win is somebody who is going to have a real problem in the general election or if they squeak through in the general election is going to be, let's be honest, kind of an embarrassment in the Senate to mean, you know, another, another, the replacement of the Jeff Sessions seat now being held by

Tommy Tebberville is another good example of that phenomenon. And the GOP is not better off in this process. I mean, these people are not legislating, as you say. And then one of the thing I just want to say, I was talking to somebody, former elected official not long ago, and we were talking about that it has become, and I think that this is something that is, Worth remembering all of these folks are human beings. And the job itself has become, for a lot of Republicans, miserable, miserable. You know, on the one hand, you've got people on the hard right who, they're not just opposing you. They're trashing you in the most personal and vicious terms constantly.

But then if you sort of hang in with the GOP and you say, well, there are policy ideas that I still believe are valuable and good and good for America and good for my community. and so you don't sort of turn completely and turn into full-time dissident against the whole rest of the GOP, then you're constantly hammered as a coward by the other side. And so it's just this caught between a rock and a hard place that where human beings don't like to be. This is not, you know, you're constantly being pushed into all red all the time or all blue all the time. And that's not what a lot, as you said, legislatively, they came there for a job that they can't do. and what is being replaced with is just constant viciousness all the time. And people, why do that?

Like, why subject yourself to that, especially when you're 86 or 71 or 65? I think your last point is really the key point in many of these cases. And I've had conversations with some of these folks about that. It is, it's not just the prospect of losing in a primary. It's what you have to do in a primary to prevail. And if you're somebody, Pat Toomey was never a comfortable fit with the Trumpy shift in the Republican Party. And this is somebody who's an old school conservative movement guy, you know, strong, deep beliefs in limited government. government and

and free trade. And free trade in particular, yeah. And watched as the Republican Party moved away from that, if Pat Toomey were to run and got a Trumpy primary challenge, in some respects in these Republican primaries, because the president remains popular with, you know, anywhere from two-thirds to three-quarters of the Republican Party, the contest would in effect potentially have become who's trumpier.

And that shorthand is something I think somebody like a patumi just doesn't want to do. He doesn't want to have that argument. And so it's easier and it allows people who, you know, I think the more thoughtful folks to just say, I'm done, I'm out. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes

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That's eth-h-o-s-com slash dispatch. Application times may vary, rates may vary. And with that, David, you've got a tweet you want us to discuss. Well, it's a tweet that it articulates an idea. So I have an idea that I want to discuss. Yeah, Sarah. It's about the Carter-Bacon-Baker-A-Ford. We know where Jonas has it.

Somebody's hungry. So my question is, does Sarah's hatred for tweets, would it be overcome if you were tweeting the Carter? what was it, Carter Baker Commission on voting? If there was a tweet thread about that, would you finally like, okay. It would be awesome. It would redeem all of

Twitter. I mean, let's not go that far. Just kidding. This actually flows in an interesting way from Steve's topic. And this is what Eric Erickson said via a social media platform

that many of us dislike, but are all on. And he said, I know a lot of smart people are out there saying the GOP was so focused on Dr. Seuss that they couldn't mount an effective opposition to the COVID plan. I think they need to learn what I've started to learn. More voters will remember Seuss when they vote than the COVID plan. Now, this is getting to something that I think is, and then he followed it up later, he said, the media hoard blasting the GOP for focusing on Seuss while singing the praises of the COVID bill is another reminder the media is in the same bubble as the Democrats and cannot see what's

coming. I think we got actually two bubbles here. We've got a a sous bubble as well as a media a quote media hoard that's dealing with the COVID bill. But it raises, I think, an important question. And that is, is how dominant now is this fight against cancel culture becoming within the GOP and in the GOP grassroots? Is it truly overwhelming policy? Is it a substitute for any discussion about policy.

And if it is, in fact, dominant, is it a pathway to victory for the GOP? Is it actually something that the GOP can capitalize on politically as opposed to in conservative media, as opposed to on talk radio or online? So is this something that actually has some political purchase for the GOP beyond the ability to provide content for right-wing media for a new cycle or two.

I'll start with you, Sarah. Yeah, I mean, this is the most depressing topic of them all, isn't it? I don't know. Wait till what's next. No, no, Steve, bad Steve. That was a tease. So I've long wondered about the salience of policy discussions, within the general electorate, not because people aren't smart enough

to understand policy, not that they don't care about policy, but you have a bunch of forces working against it. It is hard for the media to cover policy. You need policy kind of mini experts to be able to write intelligently about it. Those cost more, first of all. But also, they have to do research.

It takes a lot more time to write a 1,200-word piece on the COVID bill, than it does to write 1,200 words on Dr. Seuss because everyone can be an expert on whatever culture issue. So, okay, that I think is a first barrier. And then you've got a second barrier, which is this emotional barrier.

People don't feel emotionally about policy just because they agree or disagree with it. That doesn't mean that people don't feel emotionally about policy. But in those cases, I think they have turned more into shortcuts, talking points. You know, David and I, you and I have discussed some of the policy areas that people think other people feel incredibly strongly about, but it's almost more of a stand-in for a whole bunch of other emotional characteristics.

And so when you talk about the COVID bill, who is getting emotionally invested in $1.9 trillion just by itself versus who can get emotionally invested in Dr. Sue? And I think that answers itself. So over time with social media, with the dispersal of mainstream media, what you have is a continuous move to the easy to report and emotionally resonant topics and more and more that's becoming less policy-oriented. Think about immigration. That was a huge policy topic that had a lot of emotional revenue.

for people in 2016, build the wall, except was that really about immigration or was it about a whole bunch of other things that fit under the banner of build the wall and that build the wall was actually an emotional topic. And so as you move forward, you're seeing, I think, politicians work less hard to make policy topics emotionally resonant and just accept whatever the easy, low-hanging, emotionally resonant fruit is. And that's what I think you have here. So, yeah, I think that tweet is correct, but I think why it's correct is way more depressing than it looks on its face. Well, I was already pretty depressed reading that tweet because I think he hits on, I do think, as you said, he hits on something. So Jonah, Seussgate has some ironies to it.

one of them is that this was it was actually initiated by the owner of the copyrights saying there are specific books Seuss books that I'd never even heard of them I had never heard of these Seuss books were being pulled from the shelves and the titles here were and to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street if I ran to the zoo the classic McElegates pool on beyond zebra scrambled egg souper and the cat's quizer. And when I actually dug into it, I looked at some of these pictures and some of the statements in the books and they were actually pretty bad. Like, you know, the kind of things that,

not PC bad, but bad, bad. Like, would you read any of those books to your granddaughter? Not remotely. I didn't even know they existed. So then you had this other irony of, To protest Seuss pulling these books from the shelves, people bought more Seuss books, which poured money into the coffers of the people who pulled.

There was so much to this. But anyway, so what I was wanting to ask is we see a lot of emoting about this on Twitter. And we've seen a lot of emoting about this. What I guess what I want to see, what I want to ask you, Jonah, is number one, Do you see Seussgate as part of the toxic cancel culture, sort of part of this toxic cancel culture phenomenon? How do you see it playing out politically? And also, have you ever seen in all of the anger and emoting an actual viable political avenue for dealing with any of this? We'll take the last part first.

No. You cannot ask people who own the copyright, who own literary properties. you cannot force them to keep them in their catalog when they don't want to and nor do I want to live in a country where you could. Yes, I think it's part

of the cancel culture thing, but if I were debating cancel culture with someone who doesn't believe it exists, I would not bring this one up because it's such a crappy example. It's so fatally flawed, it's so silly,

and you know, you can get the sense of the cowardice, the intellectual laziness and the cowardice on some of the stuff when Kevin McCarthy reads green eggs and ham, right? If it is so frigging outrageous to ban if we own a zoo, read that and pay the political consequences for it.

But they won't do that. Instead, they read to something that hasn't been canceled. So, I mean, I think it's a hot mess in a bunch of different ways. I think Sarah's really onto something and write. I would phrase it a little differently, though. I've been arguing for a while that we have, and I won't get into weak parties, stuff and all that, But we have turned politics into a lifestyle where we wear it on our sleeve.

In my neighborhood, you've got people with signs out in front of their homes. And this home, we believe that, all this kind of stuff. We care about, you know, we police stuff about where people shop and what they eat. But just as we've turned politics into a lifestyle, we've also lifestyleized politics. And I was listening to this remarkably interesting, in part because it was on Morning Joe, conversation about, you know, this guy, I don't know his first name, but his last name was Shore. It was really interesting interview of him in New York Magazine about how defund the police hurt the Democrats. We talked, we mentioned it last week. He was on Morning Joe this

morning and Scarborough was recounting how he has a data guy in Florida that he's relied on to forecast elections for 20 years and he's always been right. And he called him up on the eve of the 2020 election and was like, do you, um, you know, do you honestly think Trump's going to win when Biden's up three or four points in the polls? And the guy said, yeah. And he ran through the reasons. And two of the three reasons are familiar ones to us, you know, the socialism played bad, defund the police played bad. But another one was how important the issue of the NFL was to Florida voters. And the taking a knee stuff and all that kind of stuff. And the thing is Florida voters remembered the NFL thing. even though it was not part of the conversation anymore. And so I think in the same way the Dr. Sue's stuff will be part of the conversation

will be remembered by voters even if it's not part of the conversation. And this gets to the core problem. This short guy was explaining how since there's almost no split ticket voting anymore and people basically vote for an R or a D or against an R or a D

depending on what their overall perception is, if you have a large swath of Democrats saying, the ones who are put on TV the most, saying defund the police. It doesn't matter if candidate X does not believe in defunding the police. You just simply are voting for the party that you associate with certain points of view. And so even though there is no public policy role whatsoever for the Dr. Seuss thing, if the Democrats get seen as the party, as dumb and as unforced an error as that would be,

if they get seen as the party that's against Dr. Seuss, I think you could see people voting with that being a major part of their mental calculation or formula, even though the connective tissue to public policy and the actual candidate means very little. And that's the problem you get when you start voting as if we live in a parliamentary democracy where you're voting for a party in your overall impression of a party or against a party in your overall impression of the party and not on ideas, but really just sort of lifestyle, culturalized political sentiment. And that's one of the reasons why I still think the party that can actually say, you know, we're going to be grown-ups. This is stupid. The base of my party is doing is stupid. With the base of their party is stupid.

Let's just do these serious people with a little charisma, a little Bill Clinton-style charisma. That party could be the majority party. And I don't know, but since both parties are racing still to be minority parties, I have no prediction on which one it would be. So, Steve, I have a rough theory of cancel culture. I want to get your thoughts on this. And I'll preface it with an example. You know, an interesting example, and no reason for you guys to have been following this. But yesterday, it was announced at Beth Moore, a very popular Southern Baptist Bible.

She leads Bible studies and got so famous that people would just flock by the thousands to hear her Bible studies. and to read her Bible studies by the millions. And she left the Southern Baptist Convention yesterday, kind of an earthquake in conservative Christian circles. And in the big story about it by Bob Smitana, it noted that from 2001 to 2016, she ran up, surpluses, built her assets from about a million dollars to just under 15 million

for her living proof ministries. And I promise you this is going somewhere. 2016, she comes out against Trump, starts to question a lot of the Southern Baptist Convention's sort of political orthodoxy about race and really challenges a lot of the church's approach to sex abuse scandals. And she goes on between 2017 to 2019 to lose about 1.8 million. Living proof lost about 1.8 million. So here's my basic theory about cancel. culture. When right cancels right, you're in trouble. When left cancels left, you're in trouble. When right cancels left or left cancels right, you're a hero. And that what we're, what we're beginning to have here and what cancel culture has become is a way, so if you're, if you're a conservative and big tech comes after you, in many ways, even though there might be negative long-term

implications for the culture of free speech in the short term, it's a good day for you. And similarly, if the right goes after the left, it's a good day for you. But I think the real danger of cancel culture is what's happening in not across ideologies, but within ideologies that's polarizing us so much more and enforcing so much more conformity because internally when you are canceled, there's a real negative consequence as opposed to the other side. So I wanted to try that theory out on you. Yeah, so I buy it. I think that's really smart. Sounds like a good subject for a Sunday newsletter, actually. Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that. I think if you look at the cross ideological cancel culture, you're exactly

right. And it's why we spend so much time thinking and talking about it. Right. I mean, that is that is part of the problem. And there's the obvious chicken and egg question, how much of this is playing on things that people on each side fundamentally really care about and how much of this is driven by the outrage machine that exists on both sides, both in our politics, but I would say in particular in our information environment. You have an information environment in which this is what people focus on. This is what people talk about. You look back at the way that we had these hearings last week on what happened on January 6th. I thought pretty revealing and significant hearings about what it happened, about what the FBI had learned, about what

Capitol Police learned, about what it happened at the Pentagon, about the deployment of the National Guard. It's sort of probably not bombshell after bombshell, but major revelation after major revelation. You had Christopher Ray saying, no, of course, this wasn't in TIFA, had them laying out the delays and why there were the delays and deploying the National Guard, really newsworthy stuff. And Fox News didn't take it. Didn't take it live.

But there was lots of discussion on Fox about Dr. Seuss and about these kinds of issues. And, you know, on the one hand, you can understand Fox programming decisions. and saying, look, this is what our people want. This is what our viewers want. On the other hand, isn't Fox, in that sense, contributing to this information environment by giving them that and not giving them the stories of the FBI, the FBI director saying, no, this was not Antifa when half of the Republican Party thinks that it was Antifa behind the January 6th of that. So I don't know, I mean, I'd be interested in your thought on this, David.

I don't know if which is the chicken or which is the egg or which comes first. It's probably some, you know, unvirtuous cycle feeding off of one another and expanding it. But it's definitely a huge part of our politics, maybe the dominant part of the politics, particularly on the right. something that I had underestimated. You know, Andrew Breitbart was always famous for saying politics is downstream culture, made these arguments for as long as I knew him. And I sort of had the sense that he was right as he built out his arguments. He was sort of ahead of his time in some of these cases.

But I didn't appreciate exactly how right he was. And I think we're seeing today as this plays out how right he was. Yeah, it seems like there's the only tangible way, like the wall point that Sarah brought up, it became not so much about the wall, is it became about Trump's refusal to back away from the wall. And how Trump would say, okay, the wall just got three feet higher every time somebody came against him about the wall. But we, let's move on from that singularly depressing topic. And look, good news, the copyrights on McGillacut's pool, whatever that book was called, will run out in about 40 years, roughly.

So there, this will all resolve itself for those who are concerned. Jonah, as much as I love the Carter Baker Commission, or the Carter Bacon Commission, maybe even more. A carton of bacon commission. There we go. I'm pretty excited for your topic. I know you are. I'm excited for the topic because of the topic,

but I'm also excited for the topic because I get to watch Steve's reaction. Please go. Yes. And so I have a clever plan on this. We talked about this in a meeting yesterday. Steve put on his grumpy boss face when we talked about doing this

and then he admitted he watched the whole Oprah interview because he is nothing if not a servant to his wife and and so before I even lay out the groundwork of why I actually think this is a significant thing and worth discussing

and because Steve may have to leave us as well why don't my first question other than Oprah interviewed this British couple you may have heard about it. They said some things that caused some controversy. Lots of people are interested in this and talking about it. Lots of people are rolling their eyes. Some people like me actually didn't watch the interview because unlike Steve, I wasn't all that interested in the gossip

stuff. But before we get into the details, why don't I just ask Steve right up front? Why were you, why did you think, in my opinion wrongly, that we shouldn't even discuss this topic on this august panel of distinguished political commentary? It doesn't matter that much, honestly. I don't think, you know, who cares at the end of the day if there's a dispute in the British royal family doesn't affect us, doesn't affect how we think about politics, policy, and culture. And there are so many other media outlets using.

this as clickbait because the people who care about this really, really, really care about this. And there are many of them. So I didn't want us to use it as clickbait. And the deal we struck, am I jumping ahead of you? No, no, no. You can say it. The deal we struck was that we could discuss it, but we will not use it in any promotions so that we are not guilty of the royal clickbait scheme. Okay, so you have fallen for one of the oldest blunders. The first being, never get involved in a land war in Southeast Asia.

But the second is, never answer in good faith a question from Jonah Goldberg on this podcast framed in such a way. Oh, I knew it was a setup. Okay, so I'm the straight guy. Yes. Sorry, I will tell you guys afterwards, the joke. about to make uh so um take out your dispatch bingo cards or take your remnant bingo cards or your g-file r bingo cards whatever you want to call i don't know how many times i've brought up

here in one venue or another my riff about why yuvall levin's theory about why things are going badly is right and it is but it boils down to we used to live in a society where instance formed us where we gave over ourselves in a spirit of sacrifice and public service or community service to an institution, whether it's a patriotic one or whatever. And now we tend to use institutions as platforms to preen, to grandstand, to grab the spotlight. We now have perhaps the greatest example of this on the international stage in decades where this by my lights, not believable, ambitious, deceitful woman, married to a guy who probably got the points that you get for filling out your name correctly on whatever the British equivalent

of the SAT in an interview, basically trashing the British institution, which has made both of these people, anybody in Famous, trashing his own family, the family that she married into, insinuating, without very good evidence that it's racist, buying into all of the shibbolists of woke America and celebrity culture about white privilege. And as if, like, the problem with the British monarchy

boils down to white privilege. Really, Uther Pendragon, when he was killed. killing all of those invaders of the British Isles, were they not white? I mean, there are other issues, there are other forms of privilege, and monarchy is like the freaking oldest one. And it has nothing to do with whiteness. There are kings, there are monarchs in Africa, too. Anyway, I could go on about that too.

My point is that this is, you know, there's a wonderful line in the TV series and also the novel American gods, you are what you worship. and the whole premise of it is is that the old gods of Norse mythology and Greek mythology, whatever, are being replaced by the new gods of technology and celebrity and all of this kind of stuff. This was a battle between the old gods

and the new of aristocracy. The woke aristocracy of victim and disclosure, victimhood and disclosure, poor, poor little princeling has to reach into his own pocket to pay for, you know, because his parents or his grandparents cut them out of his allowance. And look, I think that Megan McArdle has already leaked to Vanity Fair that she wants

to run for president one day. And she is following very much in the sort of Trumpy celebrity playbook model. She's been doing that since she came in. Yeah, not Megan McArdle. What did I say? Megan McArdle. Megan McArdle. Oh, yeah. She's not doing that. She's a wonderful lady. Megan Marble is not, is doing that. I would be intrigued into Megan McArdle president. She'll run. I actually would. I'd vote for Megan McArno. But so she, you know, and just one small example of how she wouldn't bend herself to the institution. She freaked out at the idea that she was still supposed to curtsy to the queen in private. She thought that was like too much to ask for her as she married into this fabled storybook family and all the rest. She is about

herself. She would rather, rather than be the queen of England, she would rather be Kim Kardashian. And the fact that this is playing so well in America is, first of all, we should have stopped Hitler at Munich. We got to stop this woman now because I'm telling you she's going to be president. And I'm exaggerating a little bit there. But she is representative of a very pernicious thing in our culture and our politics. And I think it is as a matter of symbolism. I don't care about the soap opera stuff. I think it is very potent.

Sarah? Wait, I get to ask you a question before you go to Sarah. Uh-huh. You got all that from an interview you didn't watch? I did. I did. I watched, well, look, I did some homework. I watched the clips that I was supposed that were important.

I read, you know, which I do from time to time. My lips get tired, so I don't do too much. And, and, yeah, I did my homework. And, like, I don't care about their actual trails. But his homework didn't involve watching it. Not the whole thing. I mean, I can. But the context.

Don't you think the context matters? You're, look, I checked out the relevant clips on YouTube and whatnot. You're a victim of what we, yeah, you're a victim of what we were just talking about. You have partisan people, interested people, anti-woke and the woke pulling select little tidbits out, trying to make them representative of something not, trying to make them representative of something they're not. And you fell for it. That's unbelievable. What did I get wrong?

So where do you disagree with me then? Are you just trying to shoot the messenger because I so ably demonstrated how wrong you were that we shouldn't discuss this? Well, I still don't think we should be discussing this. I mean, what's so interesting to me about this and it is about the only thing that's interesting to me about this is how quickly it became a partisan thing in the U.S. Like, I watched the interview. I thought it was, eh, you know, I thought there were some moments where what she was saying was hard to believe that she didn't ever Google Harry or look up the royal family before she got involved with him, like seems to stretch the truth. But then there were other parts of the interview where I thought, you know, I was sympathetic to her. I thought, boy, that would really suck to be trapped in the way, in the way that she was trapped.

And yes, of course, this is all relative. Like, they live a life of tremendous privilege, but I don't think that's really the point. Like, you should feel bad for them because they live in a huge mansion in California. it was these institutions that you offer knee-jerk praise for can also be oppressive if they're corrupted. And in this case, I'm pretty well convinced that they were corrupted.

Well, so you're making me making my point. But we were just talking about Dr. Seuss and how quickly people want to massage it into sort of culture war, lifestyle, politics stuff, and you're shocked that the most famous family in the world and one of the most tabloid selling soap operas in all of human history fits into this stuff too. And my only point is that it fits into this stuff

in ways that highlight like a die marker how screwed up our culture is. Sarah, I know you want to get in here because you're very concerned about the, the perniciousness of white supremacy inside the Windsors and really are the Sussexes. I don't really know. Don't care. Who's right here?

I will withhold some judgment until I see some of the following. So I had been not really following the royal family very much, but I did watch the weddings because they're full of history and pomp and circumstance. and I like the little trivia aspects of it like, oh, this stone inside the Archbishop of Canterbury has been here for however many years and several people have died on it.

I like that stuff. That headlines that Kate and Megan were getting that were on the exact same topics were outrageous. Yes. And it is hard to accept

that there isn't some reason behind them. Now, those reasons can be, but are not limited to race, that's a possibility, that the firm, the royal family itself, was basically wanting there to be a hero and villain

because that's how the relationship was going to work with the tabloids. And so they needed Kate to be a hero because she's the future queen and they were fine with selling Megan as the villain as the anti-Kate. If that's the case and that's the family you married into,

damn. Yeah, I'd have some issues. with that. When I say I'm going to withhold judgment, to the extent you are right about her wanting to be Kim Kardashian, I want to see that then. You know, her complaints that I take very seriously are how badly she was bullied over there. It was constant. Her talking about how she couldn't leave her house because they told her she couldn't leave her house. I found that very believable and that that would be really hard on someone. If Jonah, you're right, then what we should see is her tipping off paparazzi here, her having sort of a constant tabloidiness here, and her leaning into that reality star aspect of her new lifestyle.

If that happens... Her new deal with Netflix will help her do that. Well, but for instance, the movie that I've watched that she's the voiceover is on elephants. It was not particularly clickbaity, Jonah. It was a very lovely, loving story about a mother and her love for her family. If that's what she's doing with Netflix, then no, I think you're wrong. If she isn't tipping off paparazzi as to where she is

and leaning into that reality aspect, then I think you're wrong. I don't think we know that yet. And I think... You don't think the two-hour special with Oprah somehow is an indication of something? So weirdly, I don't. I think that if something like this happened to you

and people kept... You knew you were going to have to talk about it eventually. If you wanted to do anything else with your life, you were going to have to address this. She had to do an interview, and I think that the way they chose to do it, not a reality TV show, not letting cameras follow them around in their home, sitting down with Oprah at a friend's house, not with Archie, for instance. I thought that was about the best way you could do it while trying to maintain some of your own privacy. I said this on advisory opinions,

and I've said it on Dispatch Live, I think, to our members. But this, idea that we think that authentic people are the ones who are super comfortable in front of a camera and don't come off as, you know, ambitious or this or that word, those are the sociopaths. You shouldn't be that comfortable in front of camera. So to the extent she came off as unlikable, I weirdly found that to be sympathetic and an authentic self, because she is uncomfortable, clearly, talking about some of this. She's also made her, she also was an actress. I mean, so, I mean, the idea that she's particularly comfortable in front of cameras, I'm not sure I buy it.

I look, I just, I'm not sure I buy it. Okay, fair enough. I take your points, and waiting for evidence is always a defensible position. But, you know, like, she made, one of her first headlines when she married into family is she went to Ireland and started talking about how wonderful it is that abortion was now legal there. And members of the royal family aren't supposed to be weighing in on politics, particularly in other countries. never mind on controversial topics like that i i i think that the she is you know the future president is in with i i think the marcoe car dashing administration is going to do all sorts of interesting

things david where do you come down on all this yeah um don't care that much um i think the the royal family is going to survive this this is do you a fraction Pardon? Do you think they'll survive this? Yes. I think this is a fraction of the nightmare that occurred around the Princess Diana, Prince Charles' marital disillusion. Yes, but that occurred in a totally different media environment.

I agree. I don't think they could survive the Diana episode in 2021. But thankfully for them, it didn't happen in 2021. I mean, what's the mechanism for them not surviving? I mean, this is a new cycle issue. To the extent that I care about it, I think that we, you know, one thing that Sarah said, look, I'm not going to say that Megan Markle has made all the right choices here. I also think we're dealing with human beings, just like I said with these senators. And we often act as of people who are famous, who have a lot of money or a lot of wealth or a lot of privilege, somehow that that insulates them from being human beings. In other words, from being responsive and sensitive to critiques and attacks and double standards. Let me just, I'll just give you an example. So here's Daily Mail.

Not long to go, pregnant Kate tenderly cradles her baby bump while wrapping up her royal duties ahead of maternity leave, and William confirms she's due any minute now. Daily Mail. Why can't Megan Markle keep her hands off her bump? Experts tackle the question that has got the nation talking. Is it pride, vanity, acting, or a new age bonding technique? Here's another one, Kate.

Kate's morning sickness cure Prince William gifted with an avocado for pregnant Duchess same newspaper Megan Markle's beloved avocado linked to human rights abuse and drought

It's unbelievable It's unbelievable That's Point one to the opposition All right, fair enough So I mean And I could go on Like if you actually go into

So here's in the article bumping along nicely, the Duchess was seen placing a protective hand on her tummy as she exited the event. And then same story about the bump. Personally, I find the cradling a bit like those signs in the back of cars, baby on board, virtue signaling as though the rest of his barren herons deserve to burn alive in our cars. I mean, that's insane. So part of me says, you know, look, can we just kind of give her a break? here a little bit and because the answer is not well you're a princess you don't or a duchess or whatever i don't know what her official title is you're you're wealthy and you married into a royal

family so whatever you get just you get to you get to brush it off that's not the way human beings work it is not the way we work and we're not built and we're not constructed and created to endure an avalanchea hate and especially if you think your own family is doing it to you. Your new in-laws. And you're not, yeah. And if a steady stream of things are being said about you that are not true, and you are expressly forbidden from trying to correct the record. I mean, that's, that's tough, I think. But maybe we could, maybe we could end out a point of agreement. Not that I'm trying to cut this. Not that I'm trying to cut this short. Not that I'm trying to cut this short. But maybe we could end on a point of agreement.

here. Maybe the worst part of this or one of the worst aspects of this is the reemergence of Pierce Morgan in America. Didn't we get rid of him? We didn't have to see him or think about him or hear him bleat on for a few years. He used to, I don't know what he did. He did some popular show here. He was on CNN for a while. And then he just disappeared. And now he's back and we have to listen to this guy again? Horrible. I had the best one. From the Express in the UK

on the wedding of William and Kate, why you can always say it with flowers. Okay. The Express. This is Harry and Megan. Royal Wedding. How Megan Markle's flowers may have put Princess Charlotte's life at risk.

I think we can rest our case. Jonah's wrong. We've been defeated. All you guys are doing is seeing you're taking the side of the person who is the victim, which is a very American thing to do these days. And, you know, it's sad. I just also want to, like, give a shout out to those, like, to the bump holding. If you have not been pregnant, let me explain why women hold their bump.

There's two reasons. One, clothing looks ridiculous if you don't put a hand under. underneath the bump. Otherwise, you are just a large dump truck moving around the earth. Number two, the little critter moves a ton, and he's kicking you the whole time. And one of the ways to prevent yourself from sort of getting jerked around while you're walking is to kind of like hold it in there and like prevent like little legs and arms and shoulders from like bouncing out of you like you're in an alien movie. So honestly, either way, the like, oh, it's tenderly cradling or it's vanity or pride. No, it's dump truck an alien movie. There's

tender about it. It's miserable. So there. What was the, what was the, uh, Baker Carter commission's position on bump holding? They had several recommendations related to it. One of which was simply to clothing lines to do better at making maternity clothing, uh, which I feel like they have not done. Although, in fairness, I was doing most of my bump time in quarantine. So I just bought a bunch of Excel t-shirts and didn't leave the house. So it didn't really matter. And with that, thank you all for this podcast in particular that hit on so many of the nation's most important topics. Dr. Seuss to a totally other country's royal family.

People who will no longer be U.S. senators. it was it was really i think one of our best i laughed i cried we will see you all next week thank you so much for listening we so appreciate your support 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. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at mx.ca.ca slash yamex.