The Dispatch Podcast - The Fight Over Critical Race Theory

Episode Date: June 17, 2021

The critical race theory battle has quickly invaded school boards all across the country - but is everyone arguing in bad faith? The gang considers the politics of CRT and the role of legislators in regulating public school curriculum. Plus, Sarah points out the flaws in issue polling and why we should be skeptical of the results. Finally, foreign policy galore. What should Biden say to Putin? Is this summit practice for an eventual showdown with China? Should Ukraine join NATO? Show Notes: -Poll: 29% of Republicans think Trump will be reinstated -For the People (Data for Progress) poll -Charles C.W. Cooke on critical race theory -The Sweep -Jonah’s column Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to another Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgert, joined by David French, Steve Hayes, and Jonah Goldberg. Lots to discuss today. We're going to start with critical race theory in schools, what we should believe about the polling that Republicans believe Trump will be reinstated as president this year. Moving to the G7, President Biden is currently meeting with Vladimir Putin and finishing up with NATO. Let's dive right in, Jonah, critical race theory. Has this not been discussed enough? In fact, it has been discussed too much. And that is the real topic here today. So my own view, I've come around to, about critical race theory, because I get grief when I say it has merit, and I get grief when I say it's not everything that proponents want it to be. I'm going to borrow that line

about supply-side economics and say there's nothing wrong with CRT that couldn't be fixed by dividing by 10, which is to say there's a kernel of truth and legitimacy to some of those kinds of arguments, but they're all being taken crazy too far. That said, it does seem like we are in a moment now where everybody is arguing in either ignorance or bad faith except for the basically about 14 of us on this topic. The GOP has now turned it into its new Frankfurt School Marxism or cultural Marxism or gay agenda. I mean, it's like it's one of these buzzwords that does a lot of lifting for people who really don't understand what it is and just think it's it's something bad and dangerous and then on the left side of the aisle it seems to me

you have an enormous number of people who are either out of ignorance or dishonesty claiming that up until this moment we never talked about race in this country we never taught about racism in this country or about how slavery is bad i mean joy and reed of msnbc literally tweeted this the other night saying that um until crt came on along, basically, we taught in this country Confederate race theory, teaching kids that there was nothing really wrong with slavery and all sorts of other, I would say, legitimately crazy claims. And you have a lot of people in the media claiming that, you know, that if you are, if you're

opposed to teaching critical race theory in schools, that means. you're opposed to teaching slavery that slavery ever happened or that racism is bad or any of these kinds of things which is a stolen base as well and so i guess the question is can it get dumber and since we all know it can will it get dumber um and i will start with sarah because i always know that she has faith and confidence in the american capacity to make things even dumber sarah what do you think? I have been oddly surprised by the salience of this, I think in part because critical race theory has been around for a really long time. This was the whole debate at Harvard and what, David, 1992 to four? Yeah. I mean, it lasted longer than that, but like the peak crazy was

like early 90s when Lisa Frank Trapperkeepers were still super in vogue. So this idea that 30 years later we're like, oh, m. There's a thing called critical race theory. I guess I've just been taken a little by surprise by the whole thing. And the utter salience of the issue with everyone. The, you know, I'm getting tons of emails and DMs about it from people across the country. But even in my own personal conversations, it's coming up as people talk about their schools, their corporations. It is definitely an American moment, and I understand why people feel really strongly at the sort of extremes of it. I think the key is, though, that, and Joan, I'm curious what you think about this. It's still a fad. Is it a fad that you don't want in your kids' school? Totally. And so that, I think, is contributing a

lot to the emotional side of this. But we have political fads in this country pretty often, some of which are net helpful. Like, Me Too was clearly a fad in the sense that it has largely gone away. And there was this, you know, what, 12-month, 18-month moment where it was all anyone was talking about. I think that was a fad largely for the good. But sadly, in some way is clearly a fad because now we're no longer talking about it in every conversation. I think this will be the same. So will it get stupider? I mean, Jonah, that's like the Jonah rule. Like, of course it can. And of course it will. But I also think in 18 months, it will look a lot like me too, where both sides move on to something else, Dr. Seuss-esque.

Yeah, but it's not, I mean, I'm not going to pass it off to David in a second, but I don't, it's It's not, I mean, I agree it's a fad. I would think it's more like a moral panic. On which side? Both sides. Both sides. Both sides are being triggered, are triggering each other. That's the huge, it's the huge problem of, you know, as I wrote the other day in a G-File, you know, the problem with Chicago Way logic is that it's not, he brings a knife to a fight, you bring a knife to a fight.

He brings a knife to a fight, you bring a gun to a fight, right? And so everyone is exaggerating the other side's exaggerations in this bizarre echo chamber. thing. I think one of the reasons why we've got it the way we've got it right now is that anti-racism, this Ibram ex-Kendi concept, which I think is profoundly flawed and really pernicious in a lot of ways. And pretty witch-hunting is a complicated phrase to use in everyday parlance because you can't be, you know, this distinction of non-racist versus anti-racist goes over a lot of people's heads. And so that whole project, which have been building for a very long time, has just been

slid in under the label Critical Race Theory, not for dumb reasons. I just think it's because it's messaging, it's easier. But I worry that it's going to cause real institutional change and for the worse, because teaching white people that they should be ashamed of their whiteness and that they have to prove they have to expiate their genetic sins through affirmative conduct could lead to all sorts of bad things. I want to change your phrasing of that, teaching white people to identify with their race. That's right, right.

That's what I mean. Yeah, I'm sorry. I said it differently than I retract and would like to revise the written record. But David, as our foremost champion of critical race theory at the dispatch. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my goodness. Where do you come down on this? Along with Drag Queen's Story Hour and all these things that David is for, you know.

I like everything bad, everything bad. No. Look, I mean, this is one of the most frustrating conversations. I've been dealing with critical race theory and the ramifications of critical race theory for more than 30 years. And so if you go back to the early 90s, as Sarah was talking about, that's when critical race theory really became fatty, especially in elite law schools. So it was really born, and a lot of the heart of it is a legal theory, a very jargony, difficult to understand legal theory that had some relatively simple manifestations because one of the elements that not all, not all, because any time you say anything general about critical race theory, you've always got people to say, well, what about this specific person and what about this specific person? but as a general matter, one of the problems with critical race theory is not necessarily its diagnosis of how systems were created that perpetuated racial injustice.

In some ways, that can be very helpful to discern, but the way in which it rejected, and much of it rejects small L liberalism. And so what it essentially does when manifested in policy, and what it did when it was manifested in policy was that it creates things like racial classifications that disadvantaged people because of race, or it created the speech code on college campuses that tried to completely rework speech dynamics on college campuses. And all of those things, you know, I litigated against that stuff for years and years and years. And so one of the things that's frustrating about the debate is in some ways it's very old, but in some ways it's very new.

and what's very new about it is this idea that all of a sudden is the moral panic. And I wrote about, I'm writing about it today. I'm writing about, you know, what can be done about it. And, you know, one of the things you're seeing in the debate is critical race theory because nobody really truly has read it, actually, or very few people have. It becomes everything and nothing. So on the one hand, on the right, it's everything. if you see a ridiculous slide from a corporate PowerPoint, which may or may not have some

tangential connection to some strain of critical race theory, that's critical race theory. It can even be, if you're advocating for police reform, that's critical race theory. Everything becomes critical race theory that is basically race stuff I disagree with. Well, then on the other hand, you sometimes have this sort of disingenuous response on the far left, like Jonah describes. If you're saying, I don't want critical race theory being taught. in schools, you are not saying that I don't want slavery taught in schools. That's not the same things. Critical race theory is a specific kind of theory. It is not saying, these bills do not say

we will not speak facts about American past. They do have some problems and how you emphasize the facts that are very vague and broad that I think cause a lot of issues. But then they'll say, they'll look at even something like some of these crazy corporate policies and these crazy corporate actions and then say, well, it's not critical race theory because Derek Bell, you know, a critical race, legal race theorist would, would not approve of this, or Kimberly Crenshaw would not, you know, and they'll go sort of into the deep into the academic weeds. And so critical race theory to some folks is everything good and nothing bad. All the bad stuff is not true critical race theory.

And then for other folks, critical race theory is just everything they don't like about race. And so you literally, you just can't even have a conversation about it. And so my proposal is this, let's just pause, and this is what I write in my newsletter day, pause, take a breath and apply concepts we already have to protect people from toxic applications. And those concepts are race discrimination and race harassment. Title VII. Title VI. These things prevent people from being subject to toxic workplaces or schooling environments because of race. It's a well-developed body of law. So we should focus much less on trying to ban an idea, which is a very difficult thing to do, especially when the idea isn't actually even well-defined in the statute, quote-unquote,

banning it because not one of these statutes bans critical race theory, and instead focus on dealing with conduct. And the conduct is something that civil rights law protects us from. It protects us from racial discrimination. It protects us from racial harassment and apply these concepts. So, Steve, not to be too crass about all this, but let's wallow in some rank punditry about this. As a debating point, just as a fodder for cable news hysteria, is the debate, quad debate about CRT, is it a net benefit for Republicans or Democrats?

I would say probably a net benefit for Republicans because as a cultural issue, I think Republicans, you know, if they don't get caught up in the excesses of their own arguments, which, I mean, they're Republicans, so they often do, can boil this down to a sort of common sense cultural argument, which is, hey, it's no longer a just to want to treat everybody the same. It's no longer enough to not want to take race into account at every turn. Now, we're being asked to take it into account, and, you know, this is speaking for, you know, vast majority of Republicans who are white or are non-minorities and say, we don't want to do this. We don't want to go down this road that the schools are forcing us to go

down on a cultural level. And if you think about, you open Jonah by saying it's like the old supply setter joke and you take critical race theory and divide by 10. The problem with that is you have school districts in San Francisco and elsewhere are saying you can't do that because math is racist. And math doesn't present us with objective facts anymore. So there are no objective facts. And you get into that kind of, I think, mental.

masturbation, and it's just outrageous for a lot of Republican voters, rank-and-fired Republican voters, for whom this wouldn't otherwise be necessarily a tremendously significant issue. If you're talking about the political implications, that's probably the largest thing. The challenge becomes, and both you and David have written about this before, how does that translate into policy prescriptions? And, you know, in many cases, it doesn't, right? It's, it is just, it is nothing more than sort of the, the, the outrage pushing. And that, I think, is one of the reasons that it's so popular on, on Fox News.

It's one of the reasons that it's so popular on the sort of new right, the MAGA right. And it's one of the reasons that it lists the kind of sort of reactions and counterreactions on the left. And as Sarah says, one of the reasons that this is nearly certain. to get dumber and dumber, because it may be a benefit to the fringes on either side of the argument, but to the detriment of virtually everybody else. I mean, one other thing, like, I'm so glad you brought up to say the San Francisco Unified School District.

So because every controversy is nationalized and now, what ends up happening is somebody reads something about, you know, the San Francisco Unified School District, or the Dalton school. You know, we've read, heard so many things about these elite upper west side, upper east side. I don't know where Dalton is, but these elite upper west side, upriest side, private schools or like, say, Loudoun County schools in Virginia. And everyone has this perception that here comes CRT. And so you've got then these, like, say, a local school board official and, you know,

Murray County, Tennessee going, wait, what? What are we talking about? And so you have this, a news report about 2 plus 2 equals 5 or whatever somewhere, or you get a news report of this horrific PowerPoint at some elite private school, and you say, I got to save us from this when the reality is in your local jurisdiction, you're so far from having something like that, that's just, that's not something your local school board would do. There's miles and miles of cultural differences and political differences and ideological. differences between these two places. And so, you know, my thought is that, weirdly enough, thanks to negative polarization, you're going to probably end up entrenching some of this, you know, some of the more radical stuff in some of these bluer districts just because they don't want to be seen to be given in to the red moral panic. And the red, the red districts

who aren't, weren't going to have it anyway. I just, I just don't think much is coming positive from this. But couldn't you make the, couldn't you make the flip side of the same argument on nationalization that precisely because it's, all of our debates are nationalized, it makes it far more likely that these things will travel from places like San Francisco and elsewhere to places at the center of, of red America. Because we've, I mean, you know, there's the old, that everything that starts, everything that starts in California and eventually moves the rest of the country. You don't think that's, no, red America is reddening. Like, it's reddening.

And now, if you might be in a purple place, a purple state, and, but you're going to have much more back and forth. But, I mean, if you're going to look at the trajectory of public policy, say, in the state of Tennessee in the last 20 years, there is not a leftward pull here. What the nationalization of politics does is it makes red redder because what you're doing is you're establishing the bulwark. You're establishing the, you know, you're putting the wall high and strong. You're building that wall high and strong.

And so sometimes, actually, that's, I like it. I like it. You know, it's going to be a cold day in hell before Tennessee voters go for an income, a state income tax anytime soon. So, for example, Tennessee passes very pro-life laws. I think all of that is quite good. But when you're getting into moral panic range, you get exactly. exactly what you see here, which is just a cavalcade of poorly drafted laws that immediately

become sort of the PC litmus test of the location. So, no, I do not think. Now, I do think that there are other places where there's more, you know, cause for contention and concern, but the answer to that is not, the answer I don't think is these big sweeping laws that, A, do not ban critical race theory. In Tennessee, we just passed one that prohibits disparaging a creed. A creed. So I can't say, a teacher can't say communism is bad in Tennessee anymore. Yes, disparaging a creed. It's just weird, poorly drafted laws. My solution is, if you're a parent, you're concerned about CRT, get involved in the curriculum decisions and watch out for racial discrimination. Choose better curriculum and use legal means to reverse racial discrimination and racial harassment, and you're

going to knock out 90 plus percent of the worst elements of this stuff. Oh, I will say one thing, though, which is, like I was saying about Me Too, I think there are positives that can come from fads as well. I think there were positives that came from the Me Too fad. I sort of hesitate calling at that, but I think you guys know what I mean in context. So this will never get taken out of context, no doubt. But it started a conversation in a bunch of workplaces among men and women of what is appropriate, what isn't appropriate? And I feel like there were positive things that came out of that, which is partly why then the Me Too movement died down as a day-to-day topic and moral panic, is because those conversations then happened. People felt like they were more on the same page.

I think that in the wake of Ahmed Arbery and George Floyd, a similar thing needed to happen. There had been this gulf where these conversations weren't happening, and they are. Is critical race theory in its most extreme forms, how we want that conversation to end? No. But it has been a vehicle for all sorts of people to have this conversation and for it to come up, you know, over dinner or drink, or whatever else in a way that I think overall actually will, in five years, have been good for the country. I'm not sure about that.

I mean, maybe. I mean, maybe the good survives and the bad stuff gets flushed away. You know, I was just reading my friend Charlie Cook's piece about this essay by Eric Deggans of NPR on Eric Deggans is the film critic for NPR. And he criticizes Tom Hanks, who. wrote a sort of classic white liberal sort of, you know, as my daughter is taught to regard good white liberals in school, a white ally piece about how Tom Hanks's essay in the New York Times, which decried the fact that no one was taught about the Tulsa, you know, race riot,

or I'm not a race riot, you know, the massacre, is an outrage and blah, blah, blah, blah, and Degans just basically wholeheartedly embraces the anti-racism argument and condemns Hanks for not going far enough and having and not embracing anti-racist policies, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And my problem with this is sort of the theme of my second book is that a lot of this stuff is just really crude power politics where what they're trying to do is say, which is a very old technique on the left, if you disagree with our specific policy proposals, it's because you're a bad person, aka a racist. and it's a way of stealing an intellectual base in our politics and it's amazing to me how much the mainstream media

I mean I hate doing a media criticism point but how much the mainstream media allows for this essentially sort of bullying tactic gives it oxygen promotes it promotes it often honestly and I think it is manna from heaven

for the Republicans for precisely this reason because whenever they're not actually talking about serious public policy but instead of infuriating cultural issues and all that kind of stuff, it just benefits them. Well, you also just, you also just describe the new right. I mean, that, that's the entire response, which is, hey, if you're not for this specific bill in Tennessee, you want to do nothing. You are for surrendering in the face of the radical, you know, you know, and that's, that's exactly

what's happening now, which is this, if you're not for the specific, this specific policy proposal, You're just not on the team. And it's a very powerful mobilizing technique because people want to be on the team. But I would just say, let me just say one last thing. I mean, I think very clearly, I think the new right folks have taken a lot of this too far. And, you know, I think many of their arguments are tinged with pretty clear racism. I mean, you read some of the sites on the new right. you don't have to read into stuff to see the racism there.

It's there. Having said all that, you know, some of these concerns come from a real place and serious, I think, substantive concerns. You know, it's, it's, and this isn't a new issue. I mean, you know, David, you talked about CRT at Harvard. But when you talk about the curriculum fights over the years, I think there are our parents who say, I mean, I've heard this, who say, It's a problem that my eighth grader knows more about George Washington Carver than George Washington.

And that's not an idle concern. I mean, I think that's a legitimate argument. Say, geez, what are we teaching? Why are we displacing some of the history about our country with stuff that I think can rightly be called feel good history about our country? Or in some cases, depending on your perspective, feel bad history about our country. I think those are legitimate issues. I'd love to have a real debate about those. think in this current environment, we're unlikely to ever get one. Yeah, and not one of the bills does one darn thing about that. Not one of them. So, I mean, that's what I keep going back to.

So this argument is taking place in the context of specific pieces of legislation that are being sold to the public as the end of CRT, and that is full on, not true, full stop, not true. And what really is an issue is what's in the textbooks, what's in the curriculum. And that's always an issue. That's always an issue. But these bills just don't deal with that. I think we do have a slight disagreement here. This reminds me more of the prayer and school panic that happened in what, David, at least the last one, 1999, 1998, when Santa Fe came down, the Supreme Court decision that said no prayer at football games. And there was a total, like, oh, my God, well, what are these schools doing to our kids if we can't have prayer? And it's

the end of our Judeo-Christian moral philosophy. And it wasn't. It was okay. Curriculum is important in schools. I think that's, David, where you get frustrated and where I get frustrated, too. Like, I say this, and I think the response is going to be, Sarah doesn't think curriculum's important. No, I think curriculum's wildly important. And I think people, should be involved in their schools and and have a voice in what the curriculum that their kids are being taught is. I just don't think we're on the brink of, you know, our kids not knowing who George Washington is. I don't know why you think curriculum's not important. That was my only takeaway from there. Sarah says curriculum's not important. And the guy on the Tucker hit is not the guide,

is not your guide through this issue. Like, let's just establish that. Not long ago. I saw, saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months. Ethos keeps it simple.

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Thanks, Steve. So the fact check was a headline that said a majority of Republicans believe that Trump is likely to be reinstated this year. And the fact check was false. But the fact check was false in sort of this deeply unsettling way. The fact check said that this headline was based on a poll, and the poll doesn't say that a majority of Republicans think that. The poll says that 29% of Republicans think that. I was like, okay, well, I get that that's not a majority, you know, numbers, speaking of curriculum that maybe we need to teach people about what majority equals in terms of numerical value. But like, 29% still pretty. darn high. So I dug into this poll and then Chris Steyerwalt published this thing on issue

polling and I was off to the races. I had I have lots of feelings. So first of all, after our whole polling meltdown in 2016 and then our polling, I don't know if it wasn't a meltdown, a warming, you know, like a la mode on a hot pie melt in 2020. those are polls where you actually have verifiable results. You ask people who they're voting for, and then we find out on Election Day who they did vote for. Issue polling, where you ask people

how they feel about something, are never verifiable. And I believe they're flawed methodologically in the sense that that's not how people, people are unable to tell you black or white, how they feel about something because we all, you know, we contain multitudes. So I looked at this poll. Now, the question was fine. The question was, how likely do you think it is

that former President Donald Trump will be reinstated as U.S. President this year, if at all? But then when I looked at the cross tabs where you can break down like literally every individual and how they answered by ethnicity, religion, their employer, what they think of Joe Biden, what are they served in the military, how much money they make, all of these. these things, it's so noisy. And what I came out with was three other headlines that could have been written from this same data. Millennials, three times as likely as baby boomers to think Trump getting reinstated as president. Nearly one in five Democratic men say Trump could be back in the White House this summer, or my favorite. One third of government employees think

Trump will be reinstalled. What do they know that we don't? So, Jonah, to start with you, A, I want to talk about the substance of this. What percentage of Americans think that Donald Trump is going to be president by the end of the year, but also the role that polling and these headlines play in furthering a narrative that actually doesn't have a whole lot to go for it otherwise. Yeah. So let me start by agreeing with you entirely on the whole thing about like sort of issue polling. I think it's one of these, I mean, you know the stuff better and I do, but like it's one of these, it's a spillover thing from from private sector corporate market research stuff where, you know, you can do polling to find out whether or not, you know, American moms

prefer organic peanut butter and it really doesn't matter if it your poll says 68% and really the real number turns out to be 74% because you're just looking for directional stuff what what terms play better what concepts are warm warm and fuzzy with the American people and the problem with political polling is that elections at the end of the day are really really precise and really really rare compared to the things that they poll for in in in the private you know corporate world and there's just it's a huge apples to oranges thing there's also just sort of the stick it to the man quotient in a lot of polling where people know what pollsters are trying to get them to say and they want to screw with them either you know either consciously

or subconsciously and um so i just i don't trust a lot of this stuff to be particularly precise. That said directionally, right? It is absolutely true that a lot of Republicans are essentially getting high on their own farts on this idea that Donald Trump can be reinstalled. And so it's probably not 51 or 52%. I think we can all agree on that.

But if it's 25%, not good, Bob. And I, you know, and so I have a hard time trying to calibrate my own response to some of these things because, again, I think you're right about the media's roles and the pollster's roles in all of this is they want headlines. They want to get, you know, it is very good for their business model to have this stuff all over the place, get their name ID up there, their branding up there. And so asking crazy questions that lend themselves to good headlines, even if they don't lend themselves to good analysis is part of the problem. And I don't think you can fix it in

any meaningful sense. But I guess where I am is the right has a real paranoid conspiracy theory problem. And getting too hung up on trying to quantify it kind of distracts you from that. And I don't know how to, but I don't know how to like fix the problem. Because if you talk about it is if all Republicans believe this, you're actually making it more likely that Republicans will believe it. So you have to sort of have nuance and all that. And I don't know how you can do it in a way that actually improves the situation. So now I'm going to go cut myself. So Steve, what I thought was interesting in this poll, if you take it relationally, as Jonah said, Republicans are actually not the most likely to answer this question in the affirmative. In fact,

it was all non-Christians, religious non-Protestant Catholics, government employees. I'm trying to think of who else, people who think the country's on the wrong track. Can I go for two seconds? Because I'm fascinated by this designation. Religious non-protestant Catholics? Isn't like non-protestant embedded in the concept of Catholic? It's religious non-protestant slash Catholic. Oh, slash Catholic. I thought you were talking about, I didn't know the slash. there. And I thought there was a very weird modifier for Catholic. Fair, fair. The point being that Steve, I think when you look back at the Obamacare polling, for instance, Republicans

made a huge miscalculation because they thought that a huge percentage of the country was against Obamacare because of their internal polling that they were using for political talking points, but then they started to believe their own partisan polling when in fact some percentage of the country didn't like Obamacare because it went too far, but some percentage of the country didn't like Obamacare because it went not far enough. When I look at this polling, what I'm seeing is there's some doom porn going on here that actually there's also people who are worried that Trump will be reinstated. And that's why you're seeing the high government employee numbers, maybe the high Catholic numbers, but particularly the high all non-Christian numbers.

And so I think that even we sometimes are conflating, like, oh, well, when we see a high percentage of people think that Trump's going to get reinstated, they're all like proud boys, January 6thers, when in fact, it's coming from all different directions and it's hard to parse out that noise. And I think people are answering the wrong question of, are you afraid Trump will come back? Do you want Trump to come back? They're not actually always answering the question. Do you think he will come back? So I think you're right in virtually every particular there. And it's very clear just in this brief discussion that you've given this far more thought than most any journalist who's written a story about these numbers or written, especially written a headline about these numbers. And that's, you know, that's a thing that I think sort of average news consumers probably underappreciate about how the news gets put together.

it's so imprecise and virtually everything is an attempt to impose order on chaos of real life and a lot of times that order is fake order it doesn't exist and you'll look journalists will look for trends or clean narratives or storylines that can be simplified that they think will help people understand I mean I think that they come generally from a good place, at least in terms of intent, motivation here. But I think the result is not always, but is often sort of a net negative in terms of furthering actual understanding. And I think this is a good example. I'd be interested to know, and I don't know if you have the numbers right in front of you, but if you look at the breakdowns, if you look in the cross tabs and you

look at the breakdowns, how many people are we talking about in terms of government employees? How many people are we talking about it in terms of non-protestant slash Catholic to draw these big conclusions? 28 government employees and 32 non-protestant slash Catholics. Now, from the non-Christians, 28. Yeah. So it's not a lot of people. We're drawing, you know, in some cases, journalists will draw pretty broad conclusions from pretty narrow sets of opinions.

And again, we could, if we wanted to go further into it, we could get into what exactly is a government employee. You know, I think probably many people listening to that will immediately think bureaucrat. But, of course, it could mean police officer or it could mean garbage collector or it could, you know, there are lots of people who are employed by the government who might not fit the, the sort of immediate understanding of what a government employee is. Anyway, I think you make a good point. Let me throw a question back at you, though, because we're, you know, solutions-oriented people here. What do we do with this?

Okay, so let's say you're right. Let's say your little rant. I mean, I will say I'm entertained by the fact that you started off. You had sort of a mini rant on the imprecision of feelings, and you started off by saying, I have feelings. What's the answer? So what should, should we just not report on these polls? Yes. Just ignore them all together. Just leave it out. Yes. So issue polling is like this should never be reported on. I understand why campaigns internally might want to put these types of questions alongside their actual like voting questions. But it's for a use for operatives that is totally different than what these headlines are saying. The only issue polls that I think are worth the news media's time are the tracking polls that ask the exact same question over time.

And in those, it's not that you take the raw number and say 53% of people approve of Biden. Right. It's directional. It's directional. It's what they said last month and what they say this month. But they're hugely expensive. Yep. Cost prohibitive for anyone other than the big boys. So what about, I mean, if we're having a big debate about, you know, information. infrastructure right now nationally, don't, don't journalists or media companies shouldn't do anything

to give people an idea of how these discussions, how the arguments that each side is making on these are landing with, uh, with voters? I'm so glad you asked that, Steve, because the answer is, oh, absolutely not. Those are the worst type of polls. Because when you ask people about the infrastructure bill. If you just said, do you support Joe Biden's infrastructure bill? The answer you will get back will look remarkably like Joe Biden's approval numbers. If you ask, do you support the infrastructure bill? You will get 59% don't know, and the other ones are lying. And then here's how those questions actually get asked, some version of this. So this is a poll about the For the People Act, that sweeping election reform bill?

The For the People Act has been introduced in Congress. Supporters of the bill say it would limit the influence of big money in politics by empowering small donors, make voting easier and more secure, end gerrymandering, and give the public more information about who is lobbying our government. Opponents say it would be an overreach by the federal government and that state should control their own elections. Do you support or oppose the For the People Act? What's the problem, Sarah?

It's so loaded. Wait, who wrote these questions in this specific poll? So this specific poll was by data for progress, which is a Democratic polling firm. A left-wing group. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's hilarious on a number of levels because the question prepping is kind of comical. But you'll notice that it's never called Against the People Act. You know.

But this is the way you have to ask these type of poll questions. You have to give your best version of what proponents say and what opponents say. and then ask voters what they think. But that's not how the real world works. And that's how you end up with the sort of wildly, like, you know, 89% of people support universal background checks, but then we don't have universal background checks. Why? Because you're asking a multiple choice question on a non-multable choice issue. Do you vote on that issue? How strongly do you feel about it? Here's what universal background checks would do, and it's just impossible. That's why we have a Republican government, I mean, Republican with the small R, because there is

no way to ask legislative policy issue questions in any other way. And so, yeah, they're useless for headline purposes. You know, one thing I'm always looking at is other indicia of accuracy. So, for example, we've written and talked about. a lot about vaccine hesitancy. And there was polling about vaccine hesitancy before the vaccine was widely available. And so my view on it was it was more of a warning flare than a conclusion. It was, I think this is a sign there's work to do in certain American populations. And then as the data came in, initially there was sort of this explosion of uptake. You know, people in the low,

as the low-hanging fruit got picked, you didn't see a big disparity. But then over time, we have a big red-blue disparity on vaccine uptake. And those issue polls forecast it, although we'll never, we, you know, we won't know until sort of the whole, the initial wave of vaccines is complete, like how hesitant were people actually, what were the actual numbers? But they definitely forecasted an issue. But see, David, I would argue that wasn't an issue poll because you were still asking a tangible question. Will you get the vaccine when available or not? That's much closer to are you going

to vote or not? And it's it's verifiable on the back end, which issue polls, how do you feel about a piece of legislation? You never get to vote on that piece of legislation. You're not in Congress. Also, just to tie the first topic and the second topic together, significant peeve of mine. I'm in favor of harassing, or not harassing, but condemning people who won't get vaccinated on the right, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the way in which the media uses these kinds of polls to demonize and mock sort of MAGA country right wingers, while immediately going incredibly condescending and supportive of people of color who don't want to get vaccines is a bad thing for the media to do.

Like, it's a bad way to talk about this. More on troglodytes over here, oh, we have to, you know, we have to support them and understand where they're coming from over here. Either it's good to get, either vaccine hesitancy is a problem or it's not a problem. And treating different demographics as if, you know, they can be demonized because of it and others must not be demonized because of it is not a great way to talk about it. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime.

That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Turns and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca. slash Y Annex. Speaking of demonizing, let's talk a little bit about the G7, Steve. Yeah, in some ways, I think there hasn't been enough demonizing taken place. as it relates to Vladimir Putin.

I want to, G7 was interesting, NATO was interesting. There were a number of interesting disputes between NATO countries and our G7 partners in the way that we talked particularly about China to a certain extent with Russia. But I want to sort of fast forward to the Biden-Puton debate that is taking place this morning. We're recording Wednesday morning. Biden and Putin are meeting as we speak. We discussed last week the wisdom overall of having the summit. And I have to say that I am going to lead into our discussion of this topic

in much the same way that those loaded questions prepped the respondents to give the answer that the questioners wanted. If you look at what happened, we don't know what happened with the outcome of this meeting. I think there's not a ton of upside in my view in terms of substantive policy outcomes here for the United States. I think it gives Vladimir Putin a floor and some legitimacy that he didn't deserve. And those fears that we expressed last week seemed to be realized this morning. In their photo op before the actual meetings took place, multiple reporters who were on scene noted that Joe Biden nodded in the affirmative when he was asked if he trusts Vladimir Putin. The White House communications director scrambled via Twitter to make clear that it was a chaotic room and that he was just nodding in general, wasn't actually nodding in response to that particular question.

as I say, in real time, a number of journalists there, including a number of journalists, I would add, who are pretty friendly to the Biden administration, said that he was nodding in response to that, saying in effect that he trusts Vladimir Putin. In any case, in his opening remarks, which I assume were prepared opening remarks, maybe it was extemporaneous, but Joe Biden referred to Russia as a great power, I think unnecessarily elevating Russia at a time when Russia doesn't deserve that designation, even if we think, according to our national military strategy, that they are a power to be contended with. I guess I'll start with you, David.

If you look at this in the context of Russian provocations, which I think have been pretty aggressive in ongoing military exercises, stepped up disinformation, and in particular in cyber. I mean, the solar winds hack was just earlier this year, attributed to Russian intelligence, estimated to cost at least $100 billion, affecting both private sector and significant public sector governmental resources. What is Joe Biden doing here? You know, I think we're in an atmosphere in which it is, in which mistakes are easy to make. And this is what I mean. you have a situation where you have a foreign power, Russia, engaging in a series of extraordinarily provocative, both military and cyber and other forms of activity that are incredibly provocative,

that are very dangerous. I mean, he just piled close to 100,000 troops right on the border of Ukraine recently. He, you know, there's a lot of informed speculation, I guess, way you'd say it, that he was instrumental in permitting the hijacking of an aircraft over a Belarusian airspace. We could just go on and on and on. At the same time, you have an American president who, quite frankly, has a public that doesn't want aggressive foreign measures. It just doesn't want them. I mean, if there's a bipartisan aspect to American policy right now, foreign policy, it is that there is not an interest in aggressive moves overseas. And that's exactly the scenario where you go to a summit, hoping to ease tensions, but without as strong a hand

as you actually think you should be able to play and you make mistakes. It's why you don't do the summit. It's one of the reasons why I think you just don't do the summit. Because if Putin knows American domestic and politics even halfway decently. He knows that there is not much of a stomach in the United States of America for aggressive confrontation overseas or any really kind of particularly risky measures overseas. And that means Biden is too weak right now politically in this respect to do this on top of some of the other reasons why you shouldn't do it that we discussed last week is it Sarah it you know one of my sort of sort of criticisms of the Obama administration unfortunately I think we're seeing it manifests itself again during the

Biden administration the early months with respect to Iran with respect to Afghanistan respect to Russia probably less with less with respect to China but I think present there as well is this inclination to see the world as Joe Biden wants it to be rather than the world as it is and to make policy accordingly. Is that what we're seeing again here? I wonder whether this is, first of all, they don't have much choice.

They have to do this. All paths lead through Russia over the course of four years. So it's not like they can just pretend they don't exist. I wonder if they see this as a bit of a dry run for Xi and the Chinese, you know, how Biden does here. is really a practice round for them and getting their sort of bilateral feet under them a little and for their team. I mean, remember, this administration is still relatively new. They haven't had a lot of big tests yet. I was reminded of this over the DOJ subpoena issue as the Garland team

sort of scrambled to deal with the New York Times story that there had been subpoenas to congressional members that they hadn't really dealt with any big, you know, top line news stories and practice can be good. So I know that we don't think of the Russians as like the JV practice team, but when you compare it to China and the importance, the relative importance of those two conversations, I'm curious what you think about this, Steve, but I'd argue that, yeah, actually, Putin probably is your best practice for what you then need to accomplish with G later? I mean, I can understand the thinking behind that kind of a dry run if that's in fact what they're doing, but you have to be mindful of the fact that there are real consequences

to doing this in public. And, you know, I think just, again, look at solar winds. Look at what they're doing. They're literally conducting military exercise, provocative military exercises off of Hawaii. In the past several days, you've got bellicose rhetoric from Vladimir Putin. You've got them promoting false reports and disinformation on January 6th. Vladimir Putin's acting like an enemy because Vladimir Putin is an enemy. He runs an enemy state. It's the right way to regard Russia. And I think going in and sort of glad handing and, you know, I think an elevation calling Russia, this great power, you know, particularly as David pointed out last week in the in the aftermath of the waving of nordstream sanctions and other

sort of preemptively friendly gestures uh just misses the mark and and if it is in fact a dry run for for she i would think he's got to be kind of rubbing his hands and saying well if this is how biden foreign policy is going to be conducted with unfriendly maybe even hostile maybe an enemy powers this might not be very hard. Jota, is that crazy to think that way? If you're she and you're watching this unfold, what are your thoughts? Yeah, so, I mean, I agree with you guys.

I didn't think you should have the summit for the reasons we've all discussed. I didn't think it made sense. Though I find Sarah's point kind of intriguing. But it's happened. They're doing it. One of the things, you know, I wrote about this in the, in my column is up on the dispatch today, I think it's sort of important for, I mean, for both pro-Biden people and Biden critics

to kind of move on from trying to see these things through the prism of Cold War international relations in so far as, A, Cold War is over, B, Russia, well, and enemy, for sure, does not play the same role that it played during the Cold War. It is not trying to win the hearts and minds of the world. It is not seen as a real alternative system that anybody wants to emulate, except a bunch of would-be despots. And Putin is doing this largely for domestic consumption, for his own domestic political needs. And it seems to me that the stakes here are actually much lower than a lot of us have been saying for precisely sort of the reasons that Sarah is saying is like, this is largely for domestic consumption

for Biden as well. And so I mean, I think what Biden should just do is just go in and tell Putin, here are the bright lines. You cross them. We're going to hit you over the nose, you know, on the snout with a rolled up newspaper. and walk out, and that's it. Because it doesn't need to be complicated. There are people who out there who think that a guy who was obviously murdered a great number of people or had a great number of people murdered, who throws democracy activists in jail to die, isn't going to be persuaded to move off of his political, ideological worldview

when he's basically a mob boss. And that's who Putin is. He's a glorified mob boss slash Latin American dictator in a country that, by the way, their entire GDP is smaller than Biden's first COVID relief package. And I agree it's bad that we're elevating them as a great power or telling them that as a great power. But I don't think anybody around the world believes it except for Putin and the people he needs to believe it at home.

And unless we think we can have some good. old-fashioned regime change with Putin. I don't know that the stakes of all that are all that high. Um, so maybe having a practice run, maybe sort of being clear with Putin that, you know, these are the, these are our bright lines, the are our red lines don't cross them. Um, may be good enough. I don't know. I just, I'm having a, I'm trying to sort of shed the, seeing everything as a replay of Cold War international diplomacy, which you can tell a lot of people, you know, all the diplomatic press corps, you know, you got people reporting from Geneva. I mean, they are so, it's like they want to be in a Graham Green novel or something

like that, you know, and, um, and they, and I remember my old boss, Ben Wattenberg used to give crap to people like Elliot Abrams and all those guys after the Cold War ended saying, you're not the most important people in town anymore. Because there was this whole sort of like, people who get to go on summits, it's basically like CPAC for cookie pushers. And I think just the stakes in some ways are a lot lower. It doesn't mean it's not dangerous and it's not important, but it's just not the same thing anymore. And getting out of that mindset is probably helpful. Or I'm wrong. Last topic, NATO, David. Well, after Jonah just said this isn't important, we should probably just wind down. It's a perfect transition, actually.

Well, between Sarah's saying the school curriculum doesn't matter and me saying that, you know, international relations doesn't matter. And David, being for critical race theory. I guess I'm the only one with any sense here. Yeah, but you said that you don't like kids. So, I mean, like, it's a, it's a win, win, win. We just all need to be canceled immediately. So Ukrainian president Zelensky tweets out that Ukraine is joining NATO.

and which causes me to immediately, and it causes little mini tempest on text threads, on Slack threads, like, what is going on because that would be very dramatic, very dramatic if Ukraine was to join NATO either now or very, very soon. And then later on it emerged that, no, all that we're talking about, is sort of this pie in the sky aspirational statements that date back to 2008 or so that, yeah, maybe one day, Ukraine. If this and if that and if this and if that, then Ukraine could join NATO. But I thought it might be an interesting conversation to ask, should Ukraine join NATO? Is it kind of a moot point because the American people wouldn't want Ukraine to join NATO?

I'll just start with you, Steve. I mean, I don't know what the polling is on that, Sarah. Sarah, what are the American people think about joining Ukraine, joining NATO? I'm going to throw something at your head. That's what I think. Wouldn't be the first time. Wouldn't be the first time. Yeah, it's very interesting sort of thought process to go through.

And there was that, you know, I don't remember exactly how long it was three, four hour period when we were all texting furiously back and forth about what this meant. and the wisdom of it. The first thing that should be said is Zelensky does this, right? I mean, this is, he does, and I think it's disarming for a lot of American reporters. He's sort of Trumpian in that he makes policies via Twitter, and he does it pretty often, or tries to make policy via Twitter in this case. Look, this is where I think it would matter.

I mean, this is where I disagree with Jonah's last point. You know, on the one hand, you can look at Russia's GDP and you can look at Russia through the lens of the former Soviet Union and conclude that it's just such a shadow of its former self that it isn't that big a deal. Then you can look at Russia's nuclear arsenal. You can look at Russia's hands involved in creating trouble for the United States and American allies, virtually everywhere it possibly can. and its aggressive actions, not only with respect to the United States that I mentioned just moments ago, but also in the region with Ukraine, in Belarus, with Vladimir Putin's backing of Lukashenko and his tacit approval of the state hijacking. I think Putin still does matter. And I think it's important to, I agree with the general sentiment that Joan offers that we don't want to, we don't want to overstate him. We don't want to inflate him. We don't want to make him more important than he actually is. Unfortunately, I think he's pretty darn important. And I think steps that we can take, preferably through multilateral institutions like NATO, to confront him and to keep him in check are good. I think, admitting Ukraine,

NATO is one of those steps. I would be in favor of it. I think it would send a good message. Of course, it would leave the very naughty question of what the hell to do with the Crimean Peninsula. And I think this is one of the reasons that Joe Biden marching out after a meeting with Putin and declaring a whole new series of red lines won't be taken terribly seriously because we saw what happened in 2014 and after that. Or the shooting war in the Donbass region. Or the shooting war and the Donbos, yes. I mean, or Iran or Syria. So, Sarah, is this the kind of, if you're talking about, let's focus just on the right for a little bit. Is this the kind of expansionistic, well, not expansionistic in the sense of America expanding its control, but America expanding its commitments that would be.

exactly out of step with where the party is right now. Would you see a strong Republican response to anything like that? If this became slightly realistic, is this something that you would see the new Republican Party really rally against? I'd be very curious where Tom Cotton ends up being and where Marco Rubio ends up being. for different reasons. I think Tom Cotton is, I mean, I've said this on this podcast before, I think Tom Cotton in the 2024s is the more foreign policy focused. And I think he will try to have a little bit of his own lane there. And so how he sees that politically will be clear in his

response to it. Marco Rubio, I think, reflects where he thinks the Republican Party is while trying to be the voice of reason and, you know, middle-wayness. So his response would also be really interesting to me. Sure, you would, of course, see all these like sort of America First isolationist voices becoming really loud at that point. That, to me, won't be particularly interesting. I don't think that they're leading. I think they are reflecting what they think they're seeing.

So what you want to see are those sort of like in between. You don't want someone who's always doing their own thing. Like what Mitt Romney says, for instance, not actually that interesting. You want to find those people who have higher political ambitions, but also are both leading and reflecting. And I think, yeah, I think Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio would be the ones to watch in that situation. So, Jonah, bring us home. One of my concerns here is that we need to understand that NATO is a fundamentally a military alliance. It's a military alliance.

It's not just a club of countries who are friendly. It's a military alliance. Would we really go to war in the Ukraine? Sorry, I apologize. That's Cold War air language. It is not the Ukraine. Would we really go to war in Ukraine? Would we, or would be rewriting, you know, writing checks we couldn't truly cash?

That's just, that's a concern I have. Yeah, no, I'm with you. I mean, like, I agree with Steve that in the abstract, having Ukraine in NATO sounds like a great thing. The question is, does it pass the cost benefit analysis? And I think as a general proposition, I'm on pretty solid ground when I say we care less about the borderlands along the, you know, the lands of, the near broad in Russia, in Eastern Europe, than Russia does. And, you know, what would we think if Mexico joins some alliance with Russia? We would have an interesting conversation about that.

This is not to say that I'm not trying to do moral equivalence, but, you know, going way back even before the X telegram and all that kind of stuff, it is a simple fact that Russia has a long history of, you know, vacillating between. sort of isolationism and western you know and westernization and the the feeling of paranoia in that country that they are being encircled by their enemies is a constant theme in Russian history going back centuries and of all of a sudden Ukraine joined a military alliance that we see is defensive but the Russians do not how provocative is that I don't don't know. And this is not to say that Russia would be justified in attacking Ukraine and attacking

NATO if we made Ukraine part of NATO. The question is, would he? Or would Russia do something like that? And then you have the possibility of testing the resolve of NATO. And if you don't defend Ukraine, then NATO is broken for all time and is useless. And that's a big cost-benefit analysis to make, particularly at a time when more and more people are talking about how we shouldn't defend Taiwan. And I just don't know the answer to that. I would rather see Ukraine fully join the EU first. And it seems to me like that is a perfectly reasonable act of diplomacy by the United

States to say, hey, look, you have your own internal problems. You're not fully modernized. You have corruption issues. you, you know, your democracy is, you know, you got some kinks in the hose. So maybe get in compliance with everything that is required for EU membership. And then we'll talk about NATO down the line. And I think that's a good signal to send. We're not cutting them off, you know, we're not, you know, leaving them out on a limb. But at the same time, I just, I could see it become a huge populist issue on the American right. You know, do you want your boys, you want your

children to die for Kiev. And I obviously have problems with that argument historically and in general, but that doesn't take away its political salience, particularly at this sort of populist moment. And so I just think it's something that you got to think about really hard. All right. That's a wrap for us. Thank you so much for joining us this week. Be sure to rate us on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you're getting your podcast. We appreciate the feedback. We'll see you again next week. This episode, is brought to you. Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online.

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