The Dispatch Podcast - The Collapse of Build Back Better

Episode Date: December 23, 2021

In the final episode of “The Dispatch Podcast” in 2021, our hosts talk about Joe Manchin’s non-reliability for the Democrats, the increasing tensions between Russia and Ukraine, and the growing spread of the more-infectious Omicron variant. They close by asking a question: How will historians in 100 years view the past two decades?   Show Notes: -Give someone a Dispatch subscription this Christmas -TMD: “Manchin Says No to Build Back Better” -Jonah: “Democrats Are Still Misreading Political Reality” -Dmitri Alperovitch Twitter thread on Russian aggression -TMD: “Biden Inches Toward New Pandemic Paradigm” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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So give the gift of engaging honest journalism, gift the dispatch for Christmas. Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgher, joined by David French, Jonah Goldberg, and Steve Hayes coming to you live from the inside of a mall with a particularly bad, you know, rendition of deck the halls right now. We've got plenty to talk about. We've got Joe Manchin and the Democrat. Russia and Ukraine, Amacron, and all of us. And then some end-of-year potpourri. Let's dive right in. Steve, first of all, let's talk about your music. So you got on the podcast, we heard

Christmas music. And you, your first suggestion was I'm going to go tell them to turn off the Christmas music. You say you have a Grinch hoodie available to do this. Tell us more about your plan to ruin Christmas. I mean, that's fake news, Sarah. As you know, even though you're spreading lies about me, actually what I said was, it was framed as a question. Would you like me to turn it down And so it's not distracting to you, my fellow podcasters. I wanted to keep the Christmas music. In fact, I would like them to turn it up so that everybody can hear the entire time. But you all sort of turned up your nose at that, scrunched your faces, glared at me in our Zoom discussion.

This is just like Marjorie Taylor Green and Matthew Gates. Steve's falling back on, I was just asking questions. Right, right. It's saxophone deck the halls, guys. And so if it sounds like an ice cream truck like David thought or MIDI music, it is, it's both better and worse. I thought it was like a mariachi thing. Yeah, I thought steel drums at first. Yeah, yeah.

Let's get to Joe Manchin. Speaking of bad music, is that, that's the best segue I can come up with. Jonah, coming to you. So, Lord Mansion, on Sunday told Fox News as Brett Bearer that he was a no vote. for a build back there. And I think it's fair to say, adjusting for hyperbole and poetic license and the rules of Washington discourse, that people lost their minds in response to this. And the White House put out, Jen Saki put out a remarkably juvenile statement that they're,

they clearly kind of regret now. And people were talking about how this was, you know, literally the end of democracy. the end of the Biden agenda, the end of the world as we know it. Cats will be sleeping with dogs. And so I guess I'll just, since I feel like this punditry is familiar to a lot of people, I'll stop with the explainer part and just go straight to the question. Sarah, is it the catastrophe that Democrats in the media are making it out to be? Or is this, as Al Gore like to say, the Chinese, which is not actually totally true,

The Chinese symbol for crisis is also the symbol for opportunity. Is this actually as bad news for the Biden administration as people are claiming it is? Yeah, I think it is actually as bad as people think it is. The issue for me is that this wasn't when they should have known the bad news was here. I don't know why they ever thought Joe Manchin was voting for this. I actually agree with AOC. You can ever promise Joe Manchin's vote. And I don't know why the Biden White House thought that was a good idea.

to once again raise expectations on something that to me seemed like a non-starter with what Joe Manchin has been very consistent in saying. But I also think Democrats should stop thinking of Joe Manchin as their 50th vote and then get so upset when he's not a party-line Democratic vote. They should think of him as a bonus vote that they sometimes get because that seat in West Virginia makes no sense held by a Democrat to begin with. Obviously Donald Trump won it by 30 points. Everyone knows the whole spiel. So if not Joe Manchin, you're going to get, I don't know, like another Tommy Tuberville or something in that seat. And so every time Joe Manchin votes with the Democrats, they should be shooting off fireworks. They should not be surprised anytime

he's not voting with them. And if I don't think Joe Manchin will leave the Democratic Party, but if he does, he's just going to declare himself an independent and continue voting exactly. how he's currently voting, and yet we will have this meltdown. We will still cover it on this podcast, obviously, because it's fun to talk about. And we'll be like, OMG, what have the Democrats done? And the answer is Joe Manchin is going to continue voting exactly as Joe Manchin has, will always vote. This is once again a Biden administration screw up. But I said, but why is it calamitous? Why is it so terrible? Because it's the end of his legislative agenda. You know, just that. I mean, I'll, I'll, I'll throw this to Steve.

In 1993, we heard similar gnashing of teeth and rending of cloth over the failure of Hillary care. Hillary Clinton's proposed premature Obamacare, let's call it. And there was much talk about how this was the end of something or other. And yet the dull presidency didn't turn out. quite the way I remembered in 1996, right? I mean, can't administrations adjust to failures in ways that actually are beneficial to them? Or is it, is Sarah right that this is a calamity because it's the end of the Biden agenda, even though Biden's gotten a lot accomplished in his first year already? I just want to note before we hear the Muzac that we keep talking also about Mansion

being the 50th vote. They never had Kristen cinema on board either. So like, yeah, there are several fry short of this overall happy meal. Sorry, Steve. And we also don't know whether like, Jingle bells. We also don't know if, you know, if what's her face in New Hampshire and several others. Right. Push come to shove.

Was that a what's her face we got there? Apology, Senator Hassan. It's an established term in political science lyrics. Yeah, I mean, look, if you just, if you just judge the Biden legislative agenda by dollars spent, they've already had a

heck of a legislative agenda. They've spent an insane amount of money, and this was sort of the bonus for them. I mean, this was Joe Biden and the Democrats trying to pass sort of FDR-style social welfare legislation under the guise of infrastructure by recall by relabeling it human infrastructure. It was never human infrastructure. It was always just a big grab-bag spending item. I think your point about the Clinton administration is apt in some respects. The big difference is Bill Clinton, you know, had the proverbial pivot, right? I mean, he recognized what had happened. And there was also a 1994 midterm election in between there to make it abundantly clear what was happening.

But he recognized it and then sort of embraced this, you know, the old New Deal, new Democrat Bill Clinton and sought to run on centrist. things. I think that's not in the discussion, at least all the early indications after the Mansion news. That's not really being discussed by the Biden administration, in part because he has been told, and I think has come to believe, that he can be the new FDR. There's the famous story that everybody's repeated about him meeting with these historians, and they told him that you could be the new FDR, and he was intrigued and said, tell me more. And, you know, in reality, you can't be FDR with these slim margins, but he wants to be. He wants to be transformative. Certainly the White House staff wants him to be. And I think the other main difference between

now and that part of the Clinton era is that the progressives in the Democratic Party, that is the center of gravity of the party. They are driving virtually everything in a way that they were not back in the early mid-90s. I just want to jump in here also and note that I'm not sure what the sound quality is going to be for everyone else, but that was the fall on your knees portion of Holy Night, done by what sounded to me like an oboe, and it was hilarious. I thought it was harmonica. That's actually just...

I mean, I'm wearing headphones, so you guys are hearing this better than I am, honestly. That harmonica sound is just the melodious euphony of Steve's dulcet tones. So, David, you know, where do you think we go from here? I mean, we've chewed this fat many, many times on this podcast. You know, my view was Biden should have done a mic drop when he got 19 Republicans to vote for infrastructure, said, I have now officially accomplished the thing I promised I would do, which is get bipartisan cooperation on important things that Americans want. Yes. And I actually did something Trump couldn't do, which is infrastructure.

So, see ya. I'm going to go play with my German Shepherds for the next six months and pretend I'm like Eisenhower and just not getting people's faces and deal with COVID stuff. But he didn't do that. So what does he do now? I mean, like, and can he? And let's be a little blunt. Is he up to the job of whatever he does need to do? Well, you know, one, I would like to say, and this is the cynical side of me coming out on this holiday season.

Which you're so famous for. I mean, your cynicism, I mean, like cynicism and David French, they just go together. Yeah, I know, I know, relentless, relentless. I'd like to say, or I'm going to guess that where we go from here is nowhere smart. You know, one of the things that just stumps me, to be honest, is we're in this era where we say, okay, here we have a problem. Here is a giant sweeping legislative package that includes 17 different things. Even if you're the most politically aware person in America, maybe you can name one or two or three of them. And then if we don't get all of it, or if we don't get 15 out of the 17 or 14 out of the 17,

we're just going to throw the whole thing out. And, you know, we've seen this with police reform. You had the core of a compromise with Senator Tim Scott. But they didn't get all that they wanted or most of what they wanted so that you get none of what they wanted. Or you have electoral reform, an HR1, this giant grab bag of electoral reforms, a significant portion of which were actually unconstitutional under existing Supreme Court precedent. That's the whole thing. Take it or leave it. The Equality Act, well, you know, giant sweeping overturning, not just in transformation, not just of non-discrimination law, but overturning a federal.

religious liberty law, got to have that. And here we go with this mansion bill. And, you know, if the Washington Post reports are to be believed on this, they would have had almost two trillion dollars in spending that he had agreed to. Almost two trillion dollars, but not enough. So all of it goes out the window. It's a remarkable phenomenon. You know, if I would, I would hope, and look, Romney immediately tweeted out after this thing fell apart, hey, hello, everybody. I have a child allowance program here. It's a bite-sized piece of legislation. It's much more fiscally responsible than the Biden Child Tax Credit. Can we do that? Can we do that? I'm your 50th vote for child allowances. How about that? And I haven't seen a whole lot of uptake on it.

We've got this thing called the Electoral Count Act that, Sarah, I think we spent 83 advisory opinions podcast trying to understand. I'm so hot to trot on this. Like everything you're about to say, just like add a Sarah underline. Yeah. We got the electoral countout. That is not only bite-sized. It could be nation-saving in revising the Electoral Account Act

and clarifying the Electoral Count Act. But no, we have to do this big thing. And if you don't agree to 90% of it. In fact, Progressives have said, Mark Elias has said, don't be fooled by reforming the Electoral Count Act. You have to pass H.R.1. Don't just, you know, don't do the Electoral Count Act.

It's what Republicans want. What? It's insane. Why don't we all agree on the rules for how a presidential election will work? Whatever they are. I don't think I even care as long as they are in English without 17 clauses in a single sentence and some weird commas and semicolons. Let's just fix that. Yeah. First of all, this is my segment. Second of all, I am not going to let this hostile takeover of A.O. proceed any further. The T-cells, you know, you may have gotten past the antibodies, but the T cells of this podcast are now responding to the AO virus and we're putting it down. We don't want to, we don't need to go down that, that rabbit hole. And further,

I agree with you entirely on the merits, but eyes on the prize people. Electoral count porn, not your thing. Hey, Jonah, there was one other thing on this, though, that you, you sort of just touched on the is Biden up to it portion. And I want to read, um, uh, something that Kevin Liptack from CNN posted yesterday. After Biden said that Manchin, quote, was speaking to a liberal caucus in the House and said, Joe Biden didn't mislead you. I misled you. The White House followed up, quote, the president wanted to clarify that Senator Manchin did not characterize himself as having been misleading, which again, Joe Biden said that Joe Manchin said, Joe Biden didn't mislead you. I misled you. So like the

whole, all of the verbs really in that are the word mislead. And then the White House is like, well, no, the word mislead shouldn't have been in that quote, which would leave you with Joe Biden didn't I, you. Yeah. So, I mean, we talked a little bit about this off air and I'll leap on the grenade. I think Biden is showing his age. And I remember I recently talked to baby stodder about this. This is not an ageist thing. Like Bernie Sanders isn't. You know, there are some people who age faster than other people do. I mean, I'm basically on time lapse. By this time next week, I'll be dust. But, you know, so it's just different for different people. And I think this is a real political liability for him because Americans may not be experts

on inflation and they may not be, well, actually they are experts on inflation, but they may not be experts on lots of foreign policy things and all sorts of stuff, they know from their own lives what it looks like when someone's starting to lose a step from age. And he cannot hide it. He's starting to slur. But the political point here, I think, is also important is that, or a political point is also important. I've been telling this joke and speeches, and on this podcast, I am sure, for a long time, long before he was president of the United States, that there is a well-established finding in the social science literature that at any given moment, Joe Biden might just shout, get these squirrels off of me. He says weird things. He said weird things in his 30s, in his 40s, in his

50s. When he was vice president, he talked about how FDR at the beginning of the Great Depression went on national television to reassure America, despite the fact television did not really exist at the time. He says weird stuff. He, um, uh, I wrote a book. But that one at least wasn't about him. You've mentioned the other one. Yeah. So there's this thing, which I brought up, which people don't really remember. So Biden's always been remarkably intellectually insecure, which is weird, given the fact that he was like one of the youngest senators in American history.

But he, there's a famous episode when he was running for president in 1988. So look, he had already been a senator for like 15 years. one would think some of the chips on his shoulder would have gone away. But he got into some trouble because there was a major plagiarism scandal about law school and all that. Anyway, he was approached by some critical voter, some voter who was insulting to him. And Biden responded, I think I have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect. I went to law school in a full academic scholarship. The only one of my class to have a full academic scholarship.

In the first year in the law, I decided I didn't want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class. But then I decided I wanted to stay, went back to law school, and in fact ended up in the top half of my class. I won the international moot court competition. I was the outstanding student in the political science department at the end of my year. I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school and 165 credits. Only 123, I only needed 123 credits. And I would be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours. Now, that's a really insecure thing to say, like, if you're still remembering your college credits, first of all, a lot of these things aren't true. I mean, like, I don't

think he was first. Most of the things aren't true, right? Most of them. It's hard to find one that's true. Yeah, the full academic scholarship thing. I mean, it's been a long time, but like, they're just, they're almost all outright lies. And, and just to fast forward, Biden has been telling this story for years, and he told it again a couple weeks ago that, um, uh, he was a special liaison between the Egyptians and the Israelis in the, in 1973, and he had this special relationship with Golda Maier, and even CNN had to run this fact check on it,

because first of all, the meeting that took place was, he said it was during the Six-Day War in 1967. It was in fact, it was five weeks before the Yom Kippur War in 1973. He wasn't any kind of liaison. he just made stuff up and he makes stuff up and maybe this is good because okay so he gets this like whole what joe mansion said things like it's a total lie and like the white house is playing cleanup but it sounds like if he had been president at 30 years old he would have done the same thing and the white house would have played cleanup it's not an age thing yeah but as as as

orwell says a man can be feel himself a failure and take to drink and become all the more of the failure because he drinks. You combine his age and the decline with this natural tendency and the get these squirrels off of me problem becomes much, much more pronounced. Yeah, my grandmother used to say, when people get older, they don't change, they just get extra. Yeah. And I think that is exactly right. 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

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application times may vary, rates may vary. Okay, Steve, it's time to pivot to Russia and Ukraine, another match made in heaven. Which is a little more disturbing a subject to discuss after the last three minutes of discussion here. True. So earlier this week, the Russian defense minister said that the United States is preparing a provocation. in Ukraine using chemical weapons. You had Russian President Vladimir Putin in a very provocative speech, say that the tension developing in Europe is their fault, meaning the U.S. and NATO.

Every step, Russia was forced somehow to respond, said that he has no choice but to respond. we have nowhere further to retreat. Do they really think we'll sit idly as they create threats against us? This is Vladimir Putin. Again and again and again, former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, said, I've listened to more Putin speeches than most. I've been in meetings with him face to face for five years.

This speech is something different. Putin's list of completely fabricated threats here is truly striking and scary. If he's trying to scare us by acting crazy, he is succeeding with me. And finally, when the Russian hockey team took the ice earlier this week in a game against Finland, they wore the old CCCP uniforms, the old USSR uniforms. And lost. And lost, yes. Fittingly lost.

Which is sort of perfect. Tom Wright from the Brookings Institution reminds us of some dates that might be relevant. December 24th, the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. December 25th through 30th, the anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. David, we've been talking about Russia and Ukraine on this podcast for quite a while. And I think it's fair to say that we've been highly attuned to the possibility that there will be military conflict. As you read these things,

it seems to me that military conflict feels almost inevitable. Is that overstating things? Or are we going to be talking about military conflict in Russia, between Russia and Ukraine and others in the coming weeks? I have moved from possible, I have moved from very possible but not likely to likely but not inevitable on the calculus. And the reason I'm saying not inevitable,

and I'm not even saying not almost inevitable, is there are a couple of things that appoints against. Let me just sort of do the devil's advocate on why he wouldn't. That might be compelling. First, everything that you're hearing from him now is transparently ludicrous propaganda to everyone outside of Russia. I mean, what this is is trying to galvanize public. opinion in Russia. This is trying to make sure that he has the domestic support for a military

move that could cost thousands and thousands of lives, conceivably, maybe not. Maybe he would have very limited aims and he could achieve them very quickly. So this is trying to galvanize public opinion. The other thing, and this is an interesting thing, Jonah forwarded around an AEI report earlier today, and it highlighted something that I think is worth considering. And that is Ukraine doesn't have to be able to defeat the Russian army. It cannot do that. It cannot do that. It doesn't have to be able to defeat the Russian army to deter an invasion.

It just has to impose unacceptable costs on the Russian military. And if Putin believes that he'd incur unacceptable costs and material, because this is not a rich country, it is a country that punches above its weight militarily, but can't necessarily immediately, quickly, and easily replace the kind of equipment and material damage it could incur in a full-scale invasion. So I think that either the combination

of Russian public reluctance and or potential heavy losses or the fear of unacceptable losses can still deter here. I'm not sure that sanctions can deter anymore, but the actual reality

of potentially losing an unacceptable number of tanks, an unacceptable number of advanced aircraft that are difficult to replace, that might. But I'm, Steve, I'm in the point now where it's starting to feel likely that this will happen and that if it does happen, it could very well shock us how ineffective the West's response is and that we might see really, once again, Putin get away with a brazen active military aggression, more brazen even than the seizure of Crimea?

Jonah, how brazen would it be? I mean, you've had, we had reporting, we discussed it on this podcast just a couple weeks ago from David Ignatius to Washington Post saying that the Biden administration was doing everything it could to send signals behind the scenes, that they were willing to accede to Russia demands on Ukraine. You've had the Biden administration basically, I think, bend a knee to Russia in the context of Nord Stream. You haven't had the administration, aside from the occasional, don't you dare do this statement, make a big stink about this. Joe Biden himself, when he was talking about this, sort of went out of his way to suggest,

I mean, he actually declared that the U.S. would not engage unilaterally in military conflict if Russia were to further invade Ukraine. And every time the administration talks about it, they, again, go out of their way to warn about possible economic consequences. I think it's possible if you're Vladimir Putin, looking at the West, saying there's obviously no will to try to stop us.

And frankly, given the lack of will that that rhetoric suggests, there doesn't seem to be much interest in trying to slow us down. Yeah, so I have a theory that Putin, you know, who's, all you've got to remember is a gangster, but he also is a gangster with glorified pretensions of restoring Russia to all its honor and glory. And I think he sincerely believes, as do a lot of Russians, that Ukraine is historically part of Russia. and that the, you know, the worst tragedy of the 20th century, according to Putin, was the fall of the Soviet Union

because it was the carving up of what he called historic Russia. And I think to sort of see, to David's point, he recognizes how weak his country actually is and that this is maybe his last chance to fulfill all of these dreams and glories of restoring, you know, Russia, the Russia of the Tsarism in some way. And he looks,

France is obsessed with its elections. Germany just shut down four more, I think, nuclear power plants, which makes them more dependent on Russia and Russian gas. And I think he sees the time running out.

He's got sort of China at his back. China is looking to sort of, this is a test run, I think, in some ways for Taiwan, in China's mind. saying, hey, look, let's see how the West responds to this, and we can sort of game out with the new data, what we're going to do. And that said, it would essentially spell the end of the geopolitical order of the post-Cold

war and even the Cold War years. It would, we would be returning back to, if we let it stand, we would be returning back to a multipolar world where we had spheres of influence for various big powers, and we didn't care whether they were Democratic or not, and it would be horrific, even if it's not recognized by the Biden administration. I also, though, again, to David's point about the costs, there's another factor. There's an inherent inconsistency in what Putin's talking about. Putin says Ukrainians are just Russians, right? There, you know, there are a subgroup of Russian ethnicity and Russian culture, and it's true that, you know, 800 years ago, Ukraine was central

to the foundation of Russian civilization. Sending troops to kill other people that you say are Russians is not a great look. And it's one thing to repel invaders or, you know, expand the empire into places like Afghanistan. He's basically saying, these people are our brothers, and that's why I must kill them. And that is a bad messaging problem, even in a country dominated by propaganda. And Russia, its history of being moved, its governments falling and changing because of screwed up wars is pretty well established. I mean, Russo-Japanese war basically created the first Russian Revolution 1905. World War I, but for World War I, you don't get that. the Bolshevik revolution, I would argue that but for Afghanistan, you don't get basically

the fall of the Soviet Union. And so the stakes are very, very high for Putin, and he might recognize that. And I think that, you know, the phrase, careful what you wish for applies to your enemies as much as it does to you. And this could be a historic blunder on Putin's part, but it would still cause untold mayhem and bloodshed and destabilizing the world order, which is not great, Bob. So, Sarah, I think Jonah and David are not nearly alarmed enough by this. I mean, I said it's likely.

I'm just not saying it's inevitable. That's pretty alarm. Still, not leaning forward nearly enough. There is a terrific, informative Twitter thread. And you know that I think it's really, really good. because you know how much I hate making reference to Twitter on this podcast at all. But it's very, very good from Dmitri Alperovich, who has, who is the co-founder of CrowdStrike, expert in cybersecurity, knows this world very well, and goes through at some great length

all of the reasons that what we've seen, both in the buildup in terms of military hardware, in terms of the movement of battalions, in terms of cyber preparations, of all of the things that Putin has done are not things you would do if you were bluffing. These are things you do to prepare for war. And I've had conversations in the past couple weeks with U.S. officials familiar with the reporting on this, who have said effectively the same thing. Like, this is not what you do if you're going to bluff. And they make the point that doing this over the holiday season is, puts at risk that the tenuous support that Vladimir Putin does have.

You know, they've got military personnel on the border who have been away from their families for some time risking, you know, further frustration if this is all for nothing. Do you think we're going to be talking about when we talk about this at a month on this podcast, are we going to be talking about this as a hypothetical as something that may still happen? Are we going to be talking about this as something that we're surprised didn't happen? Or are we going to be talking about it as a war? So, Steve, I want to turn this around on you a little, mostly to anger the comments, of the podcast because I enjoy the hate, y'all. Keep it coming. It's fun. I read every single one. So, I'm just going to say it the most blunt way that I can think of. There are wars that

happen throughout the world on a fairly regular basis. They result in bloodshed. In Africa, for instance, there are civil wars that have been going on for years, if not decades. There was an entire genocide in Rwanda, speaking of not great bobs. And it didn't really affect us. I know it did, and I don't want to minimize any of that. But take what I mean in the spirit in which I mean it. I get the like, this is a play, you know, China's watching, everything that Jonah and David said as well. But it's very basic. Why should Americans care if Vladimir Putin rolls through Ukraine, wins pretty quickly, now has control of Ukraine?

So, first a brief aside on Rwanda, I would say the lesson or one of the lessons from Rwanda is that minimal preventive measures can help put off catastrophic results without having to engage in in full war. What China figured out, what I think China learned so successfully from both Germany and Rwanda, don't do it quickly. Don't do it with a high immediate body count. do it slowly through sterilization programs, and it turns out you get the same result if you're just a little bit patient. It's like China passed the marshmallow test that, you know, Germany and

Rwanda failed. Well, I think, yeah, China's in a bit of a different position just given its economic power. And we've seen how, you know, not only major U.S. corporations, but countries will turn a blind eye to China's atrocities. America continues on as genocide is occurring in a number of. other country. So again, why should Russia be any different? So I think Russia should be different for

a number of reasons. Most particularly, a point that Jonah made almost in passing as he otherwise downplayed this whole thing. I did no such thing. It's just like a series of lines. You're so easy. You're so easy. There's so much fake news. I can

cast the lure there and I can just watch it. A hook set in the in the lip um no i think jona's point earlier is that um this would pretty dramatically have the potential pretty dramatically sort of reorient the post world war to international order um there's been no greater beneficiary of that order than the united states and its citizens but that's i mean just because they have ukraine um no not just because they have ukraine it would be All of the things that allowing them to have Ukraine would say about that order, about the

existence of NATO, about the United States and its will to defend allies, about promises that we've made and broken. That's all kind of philosophical. I mean, Sarah, it sounds a little bit like, I mean, Prime Minister Chamberlain, why do we care if Sudetenland goes back to Germany? I mean, this is, what you're talking about are aggressive military moves designed by pure force of arms to adjust international boundaries amongst great powers. And this is, history has demonstrated among the most dangerous, this is, these are among the most dangerous kinds of aggressive military moves for international peace and security. And they tend not to be, they tend not to be confined and limited.

I mean, two thousand and eight. Your Sudetland argument is persuasive to me, but then I want to know in ways in which this is similar to and different from the Sudetenland. And I, it is, it is similar in some ways and different in some ways. Yeah, if you have a, so part of the problem here is that you have a much like you had with Germany, fortunately, and I'm not going to say that Putin is a genocidal maniac like Hitler, but you do have in many ways what Russians would view

as a rump of a country left over from a much larger empire in much the same way Germany in the late 1930s was a rump of a country left over from a much larger empire. The allies had extended security guarantees to countries in the periphery

of that rump of a country. No, you're naming all the ways in which it's similar. I want you to name some of the ways in which it's different. One of the ways it's which it's different is this would take place under the protection of the Russian nuclear umbrella. That's what I was just going to say. That difference is actually the most important difference

and it doesn't weigh and it doesn't tip the balance in the right way for that argument. Yeah, I mean, similarly with China. I mean, China is not just an economic power. It's a military superpower. It now has the largest Navy in the world, which is a little bit cheating because it's including a lot of smaller ships.

enormous army, its own nuclear umbrella, which is not as large as Russia's nuclear umbrella, but its own nuclear umbrella. And what we're dealing with here is the return of great power politics after the end of the Cold War and sort of the unipolar world order. And for all of the fraught, all of the dangers of the Cold War and all of the sort of, you know, the war on terror and some of the instabilities and the periphery of the unipolar world order, It has had this really wonderful characteristic, which is the absence of great power conflict. Because great power conflict is extraordinarily deadly, extraordinarily dangerous,

and our weaponry has gotten only more deadly and dangerous since 1945. And when you're talking about the reemergence of the kinds of aggressive military maneuvers that historically have led to instability in great power conflict, we should absolutely care about that. And we should do what we can to deter Russia from going into Ukraine, what we reasonably can. I am not suggesting that we should defend Ukraine from Russian aggression. There is not the American will for that. But I am suggesting that assisting Ukraine and deterring this would be of tremendous benefit, not just to the Ukrainians, but to a world order that we have taken for granted.

It's also worth pointing out, let me just make one final point. It's worth pointing out that Russia has spent Russia, which is not a wealthy country, as we've pointed out, has spent a considerable amount of its resources on modernizing its nuclear forces. It's possible that Russia is doing that as sort of a big show, the nuclear equivalent of chest thumping. I wouldn't want to make that bet. I think it's possible that Vladimir Putin, who may not be a genocidal maniac like Adolf Hitler, but has shown himself to be an aggressive risk taker, and we just have to point back to 2014 and Crimea to make that clear, would take risks that we would assume he wouldn't take. but that you're bad enough if your Kaiser will help yeah those assumptions are are mirror imaging

the fallacy of mirror imaging on our part i think if we take great comfort in that as is becoming a regular refrain on this podcast for me Hitler isn't the minimum threshold for badness he's well right of the tail on the bell curve I think that's all true I Steve now to circle back to your question, I am, because all of you have taken the over, I will take the under. I think this will be less of a thing than you all are predicting at this moment. And I'm very open to being wrong. And I know the comments section will say so. If I were directing this movie in a month, this podcast would be in Russian. 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 amex.ca.ca. slash Yannex. David, Amacron, sweeping the country like the Backstreet Boys. You know, we're already moving on in time.

So I'm just going to introduce it like this. Amacron, Jonah. go. Okay, so, you know, there's a long tradition of... Just to be clear, that is David's topic. And he, I punted to David, David punted to Jonah. Jonah, I'm surprised you're actually taking this. Okay, so I got to just, I got to be clear.

All of the evidence, most of the evidence still points to the fact that I was right. Omicron is much more contagious, much more transmissible, but less severe. There's a new study out of South Africa that says, it's 50 to 80% less likely to lead to hospitalization. We're seeing a decoupling of case rates from hospitalization rates and mortality rates. Almost everybody going to the hospital is unvaccinated. Doesn't mean it's not important. Doesn't mean it's not serious.

And look, if you have, even if it's less severe in a statistical sense, if you have like 20 million people getting it in a week, it'll screw up a lot of things and a lot of people will die and a lot of hospitals will be crowded. So I'm not saying we shouldn't be taking it seriously. math here is actually pretty simple. If five times as many get it, but you're three times less likely to be hospitalized, you still have a net increase problem. Exactly. So I agree with that. Here's, so, I mean, if anybody who wants to argue with me about that stuff, we can have that argument and, and all the rest. I want to sort of introduce a different idea for you guys to noodle. I, and I've already said, I think that the panic in the media is, was misplaced,

that it showed that they have a bad news bias, that there was just as much evidence to say this was good news than bad news, but they didn't want to run that story. They're obsessed with case rates more than anything else. You can have that argument if you want. But what is different is that the elites,

the coastal elites, particularly the Assella Corridor types, who are, you know, talent and producers at places like MSNBC and CNN and the major news networks and at the New York Times, And people in our own networks, maybe not necessarily David's in Tennessee, but like, you know, in my professional network, I know more people who have gotten COVID in the last 10 days than I've known who've gotten COVID over the preceding two years combined. I mean, it just doesn't. And it's not even close.

Yeah, it's just dozens of people I know have COVID. And I think that that is going to be a really fascinating thing because the way this pandemic has played out culturally. for the last six months to a year has been much more about social economic status and cultural status than it has been about epidemiology, I think, in terms of how we discuss it. And for the first time, a lot of the people who have been treating getting infected as if it was a moral failure, right, oh, look at those dumb Floridians. Look at those dumb Magahat people. They're getting COVID. And it's not the end of the world. Most of them are going to be fine. The overwhelming majority of them are going to be fine because they're all vaccinated. Some most are boosted probably

too. But I think what it's going to do is what I hope it does is break the fever of COVID hysteria. And I think that this is the last gasp of COVID, COVID hysteria, in part because you're now going to get all these people who have gotten it and they feel like they've checked the box. They've got even more immunity. We're all of a sudden going to hear the media talking about the benefits of natural immunity from having gotten COVID, which they've been downplaying for two years. And I hope I'm right because the alternative is that the sort of the hyper Fauciism, which, you know, Fauci said recently that people are going to have to wear masks for the rest

of their lives in some circumstances is crazy and it's dangerous and it's disruptive to the social fabric and it's unjustified because everyone's going to get this disease at some point no matter what mitigation efforts have not worked. So, Steve, you're our resident COVID hysteric. It's a little true, though. It is a little true. That's totally not true. What are you talking about?

That's talk about fake news. What was that about the hook? Such fake news. Such incredible. The funny thing is, actually, Jonah, I was going to pause. response, the question you asked, to just sit in awe for a moment at your mastery of the English language, speaking extemporaneously about Omicron, you talked about breaking the fever, you talked about

the last gasp. I mean, it was like you were going through the symptoms of COVID to make your point. It was beautiful. It was brilliant. But screw it. I'm not going to say any of that. now. I'm not, I can even talk about that. I'm the Jesse Waters of rhetorical epidemiology. Anyway, so, David, I mean, Steve, you know, look, I mean, you've been sitting alone in a bunker hugging your knees for two years about this disease. Where do you see things going? Well, the good thing is regular listeners of the podcast, and they are keen. listeners who pay careful

attention to facts and details understand that the premise of your question is to be blunt about it. Total bullshit. My position... E rating. Has evolved.

He thinks he protests too much. My position on this whole thing has evolved. Actually, in a manner pretty close to yours, I think. At the beginning, I thought it was worth being overly cautious. because there was a lot we didn't know.

Then we learned more, and I thought it was appropriate to adjust our behavior based on the facts and data. So you'll remember that this COVID hysteric hosted a staff party for the dispatch at my house. What was that in the fall of 2020? So not that hysterical. We were sitting inside. You touched a nerve. We were sitting inside.

Yeah. No, I just, you know, it consistent with my approach to all of these things. and the way that we run the dispatch, facts matter. So I'm just laying out the facts. You made the staff go with that silkwood nuclear power plant decontamination chamber where everyone got hosed and then like had to be put in hazmat suits. Anyway, there are going to be people who believe you, Mr. Trump. No, I look, to get to your actual point, I think there are still lots of reasons.

to believe that this will end up when we look back on it in a year being at least as much good news as bad news. But I think it could be rough getting to that point for the reasons that you've suggested. I mean, I think that the hospital capacity issue is a real one. We've seen that. We saw that in previous waves. We saw that in Delta wave. We've seen that between waves. I think Sarah had personal experience with this. My family had some experience with this in Wisconsin. Sarah's was in Texas. You know, I think, thank God, nothing serious happened about it. But it's a problem if you need to go in for what would, in normal circumstances, be a routine surgery or a relatively routine surgery, and you can't, or if you need to go in for a complicated

procedure, and you can't, or you have to have it at a facility that's not best equipped to do those kinds of things. I think we'll see repercussions potentially there, and I think that is tragic. I think, you know, the Biden administration, the White House president, has taken a lot of grief, for being sort of blunt and critical about unvaccinated people. And I guess, to me, this week is sort of, you know, for the people who have made vaccination, this culture war signaling thing, and it's all about freedom.

This week has revealed at least some of the unvaccinated to be snowflakes. You know, they went from wanting to be not forced, to get vaccinated, then they didn't want to have either the government or private companies engage in vaccine mandates. And I was with them on the arguments. Now they basically don't even want to be criticized. No, we're not getting vaccinated. And you can't say that we're wrong to not get vaccinated. That's a pretty big shift. You're free to not be coerced into getting a vaccine, I suppose. You're not free from being criticized for it, particularly when there is overwhelming evidence that those choices collectively have serious implications for the rest

of us who have been vaccinated. You know, Sarah, one of the things that I'm really getting kind of tired of the endless COVID debate because it seems to me that we've known for a long time exactly how to get past this. And the way we've known for a long time on how to get past this is to be vaccinated. It's not like we're going to be able to eradicate COVID. It's not like COVID is going to go away. It's here. It's going to be here. Probably each one of us will get it at some point. But there's a way to get through this and that's to be vaccinated. And at some point, where do we go from here in this? debate. I mean, where to this, it just feels like we're just spinning our wheels here and we're

facing a movement of people and it's unbelievably tragic. You know, you guys in your social circles are people getting COVID who are vaccinated and they're coming through it fine. Almost every week, I know somebody, a friend from college or a friend of a friend from college who's not vaccinated who's, who has downplayed COVID and they're getting it and they're in the ER and they're in the AR. And that's that's the reality around. here. And I just, I don't know. I'm at my wits end, Sarah, in talking about this. That's why I punted to Jonah. I'm at my wits end. We know what to do. Well, this is actually a good segue to our last section. This is our last podcast of the year. And I wanted to ask you all kind of a big

picture question. A lot of people are like, oh, what's the most important political issue of the last year and blah, blah, blah. I want us to move out, move up. We've just finished the first quintile of the 2000s, whatever we're calling this millennium. How will history, a hundred years from now, look back on this quintile, what will be sort of the takeaway of how we got here or what transpired? And you can take that in any direction you want. I have a couple in mind that I will start with, as you guys ponder. So Shadi Hamid, who's this wonderful writer, Wisdom of Crowds. Live, if you want to find him, and I'll put it in the show notes. He had this piece called Amacron Panic and Liberal Hysteria.

Shadi, by the way, not a, you know, conservative writer by any means. And he's talking about how as religion, religiosity has decreased, people have to look elsewhere for anchors in their lives. And this is the line I want to read. If you are a progressive who believes you have located, quote, the right side of history, and then you apply that mindset to the pandemic, then you have an ideology. That ideology, his point is, is to sort of grasp onto this forever pandemic constantly living a not normal life, regardless of the fact that we have booster shots, that there's going to be different variants coming and going for a long time. it seems, and that the more we can get back to a normal way of life, similar to the flu.

You know, after 20, sorry, 1918, we didn't live in perpetual flu panic. We sort of built it into our lives as we pursued happiness, whatever that means to you. I think that there could be, that historians 100 years from now could look at this as the time that religiosity fell off in Western civilization and that other things replaced religion and that there were political consequences to that that reverberated throughout these self-governing countries that had long-term effects far beyond what we felt in the day-to-day.

Steve, you're up next. I think the biggest story in some ways as we look at the first 20 years of this century is going to be the, the male effects of information and the misuse of information. I think what it's done to American political discourse, where we are today in our ability to govern ourselves is in serious question because the proliferation of misinformation of misinformation has been so

damaging. There are, you have a conversation with somebody, casual conversation with somebody about, about this stuff, about the stuff we've been talking about COVID, about vaccines, um, about our politics, about the election of 2020. And you will find otherwise sane, thoughtful, normal people spouting back at you things that are total nonsense are provable lies, conspiracies, things that aren't true. This happens to me with sort of frustrating regularity, with people I know and have known for years, with people whose judgment I had come to trust, often over years and years of knowing them, who say things that you can't even imagine Alex Jones saying sometimes. This has affected

the way we interact with each other as political actors. It's affected the way that we interact with each other as, you know, as extended family members. It has in some cases, thankfully not mine, affected the way that we interact with one another as brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, husband, and wives. And it's having, I think, profound and lasting effects that we don't yet realize. The number of people who are getting together, I used to make fun of the old saw, the old columns about getting together at Thanksgiving

and everybody have to prepare to have a political or religious conversation with your relatives. I didn't think it was a big thing. It seemed to me overwrought, sometimes a cliche in column writing. But it's now a thing. Families are making rules about getting together over these holidays about what they can and can't talk about. And I think it's, we're just seeing the beginnings of those effects.

And unless we can sort of get serious about or get our arms around it, I think it portends not great things. David? I am thinking we're going to look back and say that this is the in beginning of the end of the unipolar world, the reemergence of great power rivalry. And on a more happy note, the reemergence of space exploration, which could have immense significance as we move forward in human history. And that's, so that's the much more optimistic. But a lot of this feels to me-

As people try to get away from the relatives they don't agree with and- Exactly. Finally, Mars. Mars is where Uncle Joe, Fox News does not reach Mars. And so I do think, you know, we are seeing a reemergence in an interesting ways of an older world order. And I also think that we're in, you know, just as the industrial revolution was deeply disruptive to our way of life, the information revolution is deeply disruptive to our way of life. the information revolution is deeply disruptive to our way of life. So I think we're in an information revolution.

We're seeing the reemergence of the older forms of international relations. And on a happier note, there reemergence of a positive direction of technological development. For a long time, we've been kind of stagnant. This phone, which is remarkable in many, many ways, is a very, it is a device that has kept our eyes down and I think that the development of SpaceX and other space exploration initiatives

are maybe lifting some of our eyes up and out. Jonah. Sarah. So it would be weird if I didn't have the answer that I have given that I wrote a very long book called Suicide of the West which was basically addressed to this question.

And I agree with everything people have said. the Shadi Amid stuff is stuff I've been writing about for 20 years about political religions going back to my one-time obsession with the philosopher Eric Vigalin. I think that what we're looking at over the last two decades is, as I would put it in my book, is the powerful, I wouldn't say reassertion because it's always been around, but the powerful intensification of what I call on my book, romanticism. but which is really sort of a turning inward into the belief that the only true arbiter of truth and authority are your own instincts or feelings. And one of the problems that we have in a society that has essentially eliminated scarcity in historical terms, has eliminated, you know, what would be recognizable as poverty

up until about 100 years ago, is that all of our new technologies allow for us to cut out institutions. That institutions originally were things that were created to do things, to help us accomplish things because there is strength in cooperation, there's utility in cooperation,

when large groups of people get together to do things, and now you can have your phone do something that a whole office could once do. now you can do something on your computer or shop in ways that let you cut out middlemen and retreat into yourself. And because the institutions that are breaking down, oh, and also, you know, those, you also, it used to be, it is dethroned experts in ways that are both positive and negative, but like you now have a world, particularly if, if people all believe that what they want to believe is by definition the truth, doing your own research can, you know, yield the fact that

you know, who cares what some guy from Harvard says, lizard men are in fact running society. And, um, and I think that these trends, which have lots of causes are, um, allowing for the reassertion of human nature, which is always trying to find a way back in. The jungle always wants to grow back. As the Roman poet Horace said, uh, you can chase nature out with a pitchfork. It will always come rushing back in. And, um, and this is really problem. for traditional religion. It's really problematic for democracy. It's really problematic for core ideas like conservatism and classical liberalism because those things are hard and they ask a lot more from you. And we are training generations of people to think that everything should be delivered to us via Amazon Prime in some sort of brave new world. And it's going to take a lot of work to explain to people that a lot of the old dogmas existed for a reason and they have value for a reason. but we're seeing on almost every stage imaginable the breakdown of those dogmas in preference for passion-driven policies and approaches. Well, on that bright and sunny note, hey, Steve, what are they playing right now?

I think we're between songs. Maybe did it go away? The Christmas music went away. It kind of sounded like it went away. There was someone behind you with a mask in a giant spray can, which was a little. I was hoping they were going to turn and hit Steve. rodents. No wonder they came at me. Well, thank you, the three of you, for another wonderful year of this podcast. I've been having a great time and it's always fun to see you guys every week. And for all of you listening, thank you so much. We hope you have had

already a wonderful holiday season. Merry Christmas to those who are celebrating in just a few days. Happy New Year to us all. we will be back in the new year with lots of thoughts and I mean really taking a week off we're saving up the thoughts the thoughts will have become more concentrated more potent yeah and you know as one

listener of the flagship podcast wrote thank you and may it please the pod hope you are all thriving and we hope you are all thriving I have one quick final note for those of you who are listening to this before Christmas, one of the best Christmas gifts you can give is an annual membership to the

dispatch. If you are a regular inhabitant of malls on December 24th, the afternoon, scrambling. Now, I always told myself that I liked to go and do my shopping then because there were so few people and they were all men. And deadlines focused the mind. It was just in a hurry. And deadlines focused the mind. Correct. And I still believe that.

That is true. But if you can avoid that by giving somebody a really fantastic gift of an annual dispatch membership, I would encourage you to do it. Just go to www. Thedispatch.com backslash gift. and we can hook you up. That's a great idea, Steve, just totally contemporary era.

Yeah, no. This would be the moment for Steve to finally, to once again, you know, embrace his COVID hysteria and talk about how the malls are petri dishes of deadly disease and they are unsafe. Because I'm not a COVID hysteric.

That didn't even occur to me, Jonah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Anyway, people should get a gift. It's not only is it a gift for the person you're giving it to. It's a gift for the four of us because it helps us. Every new member helps us do more great and wonderful things. And it's a gift for you because that means that person in your life and you will have lots to talk about together. You can have your weekly conversations where you catch up over Zoom and talk about it or in the comments section. I love

our comments section. I really do. Even though they beat up on me every week, I love you guys. I don't know what that's like. All right. All right. Happy New Year, everyone. Sorry. The Muzac Christmas music is particularly bad right now. A Muzak edition of the Dispatch podcast. It's particularly good.

So brought to you by shopping mall orchestra. Caleb, audio question. Should Steve, like, when he's not talking, be on mute? Or will you clean that out later? Okay. Is it at all possible? No. Well, is it all possible that you can take him out when he is talking? Can you turn up the Christmas music when I'm talking?

Weird, better, whatever. I'm just so festive. All right. The rest of you are the Grinch's, bitches? It's almost like people are ready for a vacation. All right. All right. 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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