The Dispatch Podcast - The New Antisemitism | Roundtable

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

Steve Hayes hosted today’s roundtable, joined by Jonah Goldberg, Michael Warren, and Megan McArdle to discuss the disturbing attack against anti-Hamas protesters in Boulder, Colorado, and the horrific rise in antisemitic violence. Plus: Is the “woke right” a thing? The Agenda:—The recent slew of antisemitic attacks—Violence within the pro-Palestinian movement—The house is on fire and Rod Dreher is in the foyer—Young people are entertaining taboos—Jonah's brush with antisemitism and the Trump movement in 2016—Tucker Carlson as lightning rod for the woke right—Youthful idiocy—Mike’s trips to the liquor store near the office The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Dispatch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and regular livestreams—⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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or go to explorevolvo.com. Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's episode, we have Jonah Goldberg, Michael Warren, and Megan McArdle of the Washington Post. We will discuss a recent spate of anti-Semitic domestic terror attacks and the rise of left-wing anti-Semitismismatism. We also get in. We also get in. into the woke right. Who is the woke right? Why do they exist? How much power do they have? And what role does anti-Semitism play on the new right? And finally, we will talk about New York City mayoral candidate Zoran Mamdani's plan for city-run grocery stores. Morning, everybody. Good morning. Morning, Mr. Hayes. Thanks, Jonah. Thanks, I mean, aren't we supposed to start with energy? This is what you've gotten in all your media training over the years?

I said, good morning. I want to start with, in Boulder, Colorado and the attacks that happened there. Last Sunday, June 1st, an Egyptian named Mohamed Sabri Solomon, armed with a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails, attacked a largely Jewish gathering in Boulder, injuring 15 people. Solomon shouted free Palestine as he launched the incendiary devices at the crowd, organized by a group called Run for their lives. which sponsors walks and runs in communities across the world calling for the immediate release

of hostages taken in the aftermath of the October 7th, 2020, attacks by Hamas. Suleiman came to the United States in 2022 on a non-immigrant visa, which expired in February 2023. Despite remaining in the country past the expiration of that visa, he was given a two-year work visa in March 2023 and did not depart when that visa ran out in March 2025. He recorded a pro-terror video filled with anti-Semitic language on the way to the attack, and after he was detained, Solomon was unapologetic, telling law enforcement after the attack that he disguised himself as a gardener to get as close to the group as possible,

acknowledging to police that he conducted the attack to, quote, kill all Zionist people and that he wished that they were all dead. That attack, of course, follows the targeted killing of two Israeli embassy employees last month in Washington, D.C., by a pro-Palestinian activists with ties to left-wing activist groups, and in the early morning hours of April 13th on the first night of Passover, an attack by Cody Balmer in Pennsylvania, attempted to burn down the governor's mansion while Governor Josh Shapiro and his family slept, telling authorities after he concluded the attack that it came because of what Shapiro, quote, wants to do to the Palestinian people. Megan, a regular cry from pro-Palestinian activists at

rallies since the October 7th attacks has been a call to, quote, globalize the intifada. Is this globalizing the intifada? Look, I think that it is dangerous to blame movements for what radicalized people do in their name. And conservatives have long correctly complained about this, that whenever some guy who seems to have some right-wing views commits an atrocity like a mass shooting, that the left sort of blames normal Republicans, and I don't think that's fair. That said, the Palestinian movement is modeling really disruptive tactics as their primary vehicle, which is a bad idea. They are not policing the people in their ranks who are doing things like defending Hamas, which is, look, even if you think that there is a case that

Hamas has a point, you're doing political action and trying to argue that Hamas has a point is a complete political dead end in this country, I think rightfully so. And, you know, not that I don't have my critiques of Israeli policy. I do. But I don't think that those critiques somehow lead to paragliding over the fence and slaughtering civilians. And I think that the issue is that they have chosen rhetoric, and more importantly, just that they are not going out there. I mean, the thing about when, you know, a white supremacist would commit a mass shooting in 2014, and, and And liberals would race to say, you know, this happened because some senator said that, like, Obamacare is bad. That all of the Republican senators would be like, this is disgusting, this is terrible, this is appalling.

And there is some of that in the pro-Palestinian movement. It is a diverse movement, like any political movement. There's not enough of it. And if you look at things, like even stupid things, like some idiot cut the heads off of a bunch of people. and then, you know, put up a sign saying flowers don't matter, people matter. Well, like, what was the point of this activity? Is there anyone who is like, you know, I didn't use to support the Palestinians, but now I've seen this. I understand how serious their cause is. This is ridiculous. And the movement isn't policing any of that enough. It needs to model. I mean,

I just think this broadly about kind of insurgent protest movements. Respectability politics works. it helps contain it's not going to keep every deranged person who has bizarre fixations and we should remember that when you dig into these cases over and over again what you see is that these are disturbed people that's not true in every single case but it is often that like yes they have seized on free Palestine or they have seized on abolished the IRS but then you dig into their beliefs and you just find a disordered mind where that is one of a huge melange of insanity none of which connects together in any kind of logical way. But, you know, the less you say globalize the intifada, the less, you know, you make signs celebrating people and paragliders, you know,

shooting down into a music festival to kill random civilians there, the less you are going to get not only this kind of attack, but the kind of blowback that the movement has gotten. It's been stunningly ineffective. It has not moved the Democrats. It has certainly not moved the Republicans or the American public. And they are doing, I mean, even apart from the risk when you really do use violent rhetoric, and I also apply this, by the way, to Donald Trump's, you know, inciting the mob to march on Congress. Yes, he had plausible deniability, but yes, also he bore responsibility for what they did. And it is good to model respectability politics, both because it prevents some bad things from happening in the real world,

and not all bad things, but also because it makes your movement more politically effective. And I don't know why they insist on taking a tack that may feel cathartic, that may not result in having to have hard conversations with allies whose rage is uncontainable, but which might actually help the people of Gaza, which the current movement is, in my opinion, not doing.

Yeah, Mike, I mean, I'm very sympathetic to the point that Megan makes about not using what might be outliers or random nuts to represent entire groups or movements, as she said. On the other hand, I wonder if this isn't a little different. I mean, Hamas, which perpetrated the October 7th attacks, has in its charter that the state of Israel shouldn't exist. I mean, there's sort of violence embedded in what Hamas is doing. And while it's important to make distinctions between those who support Palestinians broadly and those who support Hamas, those distinctions have been blurred in part because of exactly what Megan says, the failure of the people in the movement to make those distinctions. And we have also seen a growing number of these, what we might call left-wing anti-Semitic attacks over the past year and a half. our friend Dave Mastio, who writes a column for McClatchie newspapers, reported that left-wing anti-Semitic attacks have grown 320% from 2023 to 2024.

So is it the case that these attacks are outliers or should we correctly see them as more representative of this growing movement? I think it is representative of the movement because, for the reasons Megha just laid out, because there has been no policing of their own side. You're only, I mean, it's a choice not to police your own side. It's a choice not to have that open big tent, which includes people who say things like Globalized Antifada from the river to the sea. I mean, there is an alternative reality where people who have serious,

objections to the way Israel is conducting the war against Hamas, the way Israel has sort of operated with respect to the Palestinian people to kind of draw some lines and for leaders to sort of step up and say this is what we stand for. This is not what we stand for. And if you're on our side on these things than you then you, we don't engage in this. We don't engage in violence. We don't engage in terrorism.

And nobody, nobody has done that in the United States. And I think it's a, it's a part of a bigger problem. I don't think it's necessarily new. I think this is a problem that constantly has to be addressed and dealt with.

But in, in politics, in sort of, and whether it's kind of radical or revolutionary movements or just normal, everyday political movements, the self-policing has gone away in favor of, if our enemies are the same, then I can't criticize you. I don't quite know what explains that. Is it the Internet? Is it the way that everything has sort of become coarsened, whether it's in the discourse or the way that sort of political movements, you know, organize themselves? I don't know.

I think I should underscore, too, and I think the very anti-Semitic, the mindset makes this, I think, a different issue than your normal everyday issue. the sort of the underlying kind of, as you said at the beginning of this, Steve, the fact that the people in this movement seem to believe that Israel has no right to exist and sort of ipso facto that Jews don't have the right to exist or don't have a right to sort of self-determination. I just think the underlying issue that's motivating Hamas, motivating these kinds of attacks and motivating the kinds of things we're seeing from the political right as well on this. It seems to me not just a difference of degree, but it's a difference in kind. It's sort of a deeper and more disturbing bigotry that concerns, I think it's concerning. Joan, is that right? Is this sort of an intensifying anti-Semitism of the kind that we've seen for decades, centuries, or is this something new? I think it's partly a new kind of anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism is really old. I want to go back to Megan's point, and I'll

answer your question in the process. I think one of the more fair forms of criticism and argumentation is to adopt, in good faith, the other side's mode of analysis and apply it to the thing that they're not applying it to, right? So, like, this is one of my things, I mean, Megan's written about this too, where, like, almost every charge of hypocrisy is a, is a hypocritical claim in and of itself, because to make the charge of hypocrisy in so many of these fights, you have to switch sides, right? So, like, filibuster is evil when it's good for my, when it's, when it's bad for my party, it's good. People switch sides and they just pick up the arguments that the other side left behind, like switching, you know, sides in a pickup football game at halftime.

So we heard a lot about stochastic terrorism for a long time. Can you define that? Yeah, stochastic terrorism is just basically a very fancy way of saying uncoordinated, unnetworked, non-conspiracy promotion of violence by using rhetoric that gives people a permission structure to commit violence. And the left loves this term when describing white nationalists, Donald Trump, and all that kind of stuff. and I will be very honest, and I agree with Megan. They have a point. I think they overstayed it from time to time, depending on who you're talking about, but they definitely have a point.

You cannot be out there pushing this charge of stochastic terrorism, of inciting people, maybe not in a legalistic sense, but in the psychological and political sense, inciting people to violence against the stuff that Donald Trump or any of his imitators and the like have done and have said, and then let off the hook the campus protesters at Columbia and elsewhere who openly say they're on the side of Hamas.

In fact, share funding sources with Hamas. Yes. Forget globalize the Intifada. I mean, like the actual charter of some of these groups, these Western groups, says that they see no distinction between the violence and Israel and violence here. They see no distinction between armed struggle and resistance

and political resistance. Those are their words. You're allowed to hold their words and their concepts against them. I often rant at the TV making particularly the peony thing. You know, like, who are you winning over?

Who is on the fence about the plight of Gaza? And now that you've decapitated 10,000 flowers in an arboretum saying, okay, now I'm for the Gazans. Or held you up in traffic for four hours by forming a human chain across the highway. Failed to let you get your wife to the emergency room because, you know, like that kind of stuff,

I just, baffling. Same thing with the stop oil people who throw a paint on paintings. Like, I agree with Megan's point, except I have these moments of profound doubt about it, about my own agreement about it, because there is hypocrite. No, there's another approach to politics that is remarkably effective, which is scream and whine and takes maximalist positions. and declare yourself a victim and the victim of bigotry and hatred at every, the care model of politics when it comes to a lot of things having to do with Muslims. And even if it doesn't work in America as well as you think it would to keep pursuing this, it works pretty well in Europe,

in part because the mass migration of a lot of Muslims and North Africans into those countries who have a lot of sympathy for stuff going on in Israel, but also I think it works at another level because persuasion is not the point. It's to make you fear saying anything that'll set off these people. And I think that kind of intimidation is much more effective than I would like it to be. But you know, you see the coverage of the, I don't want to get deep in the media bias stuff and all that kind of thing. And I, too, do not endorse everything, every government policy of Israel. But like the coverage of Israel's flawed effort to feed the Ghazan population being cast by

the BBC and other media outlets as genocide proves that some of these people are actually pretty effective, even if they're not inciting terrorism and people trying to burn Jews alive in the streets, the general. general sense is like it's a bad analogy in a lot of ways, but there's something to it. Trump's effectiveness of throwing an absolute hissy fit and getting the maga deplorable crowd to lose their minds anytime there's the slightest criticism. It intimidates a lot of people. And I agree with you entirely. It doesn't work as persuasion. I'm not sure it doesn't work as intimidation. Well, okay, but look, I am not going to Pollyanna and say this never works.

But Trump is most effective on issues where Democrats bullied the media into a, you know, taking the 20 side of an 80-20 position. I agree with that. That's true. And in that case, yes, it is effective to scream and get a lot of attention because every time you get attention, you end up in a conversation about something Democrats would rather not talk about. But I think when you look at the popularity of your movement and it is not popular, that blocking traffic, cutting heads off peonies, let me try to steal man, the guy who set a Holocaust survivor on fire, right? Let me try to tell the story the way he would tell it

is like, I am making these people afraid to support Zionism. Are you, are Jews who are being attacked with makeshift flamethrowers going to say, yeah, I guess I should side with those guys? No, right? Is the American population seeing someone from your side?

attacking people with a makeshift flamethrower and throwing Molotov cocktails. Is the American population going to say, yes, they're probably right about stuff? No. Yeah, but will that group of Jewish Americans do this walk in Boulder next week? Because it's been a weekly walk?

Probably not. And again, I think I hate the proliferation of the use of Overton window, but like when you create a discourse which says, look, I don't condone violence, necessarily, but you have to understand where these people are coming from and when they're setting Jews on fire, right? If that kind of discourse gets triggered for that, then the much subtler forms

of bigotry and intimidation have more oxygen to breathe. Like in New York, Jews have been getting punched in the face by kids, by jackasses for a long time. And the sort of progressive industrial complex doesn't want to treat these as hate crimes. doesn't want to treat them really much as anything other than maybe misdemeanors. And in this kind of environment, that's easier to do. And I just think, you know, like there are these stories that come out of the UK about, you know, doctors openly bragging on social media about not treating Jewish patients and fantasizing about killing Jewish patients. It's happening in the U.S. too. Yeah, that's easier to do in an environment where you get this sort of, you know, what's the old Emerson,

quote that a liberal is someone so broad-minded, they won't even take their own side in an argument. There's a lot of people on the left that just can't, and the same way that there are people on the right now who can't handle criticizing their whack jobs, the left has to come up with this fog of equivocation to say, you've got to hand it to Hamas a little bit. And I think that these tactics help with that. But anyway, it's a subtle point. I take the point. But I would also, I would ask whether there isn't a Streisand effect. Yeah, that's fair. Right?

Like, I certainly was not aware that Boulder was having this weekly March. Well, now I am. Yeah. And now everyone in the country is, right? And the stricand effect is when you mention something and it becomes better known because of your mention of it. Yeah. Famously, Barbara Streisand sued to suppress some archive of coastal photographs that included her house. no one had ever been aware that her house was in the archive, but once she had sued,

people started downloading the pictures because now they knew they were there. And so I take the point. I don't want to push it too far, but I do think... I don't want to push it too far either because I mostly agree with you, but I'm not as confident as I used to be that this is stupid. How much of this, I mean, when you track the rise in left-wing anti-sense? Semitic attacks or incidents in the United States over the past year and a half. It tracks with the post-October 7th time frame, obviously, pretty closely.

And I guess I'm wondering, Mike, and I'll go to you, how much of this has to do with a similar question to what I asked Jonah, just a sort of resurgence of old-school anti-Semitism, and how much of it is a reaction to what people are seeing unfolding in Gaza now. There's a new pew poll out June 3rd that found rising anti-Israeli sentiment across the globe. 20 of the 24 countries surveyed around half of the adults or more have an unfavorable view of Israel. In the U.S., the share of adults with a negative view of Israel rose 11 percentage points between March 22 and March 2025. How much this is just old school anti-Semitism and how much is a reaction to the current government of Israel and the way that it's prosecuting the war? It strikes me that those two, those two sources sort of feed themselves.

And there are a lot of people, particularly young people, who are, you know, sort of awakening to politics and world affairs sort of for the first time or sort of in fits and starts. for whom, you know, a lot of this stuff is new. They don't have a context for it. They don't have the history, the understanding of the history. And so they are easily influenced. And you have people that I believe are driven and sort of motivated by these old anti-Semitic ideas and sort of pro-Hamas ideas. who are in positions of influence, whether it's on TikTok. I mean, that's sort of, it can be overstated, um, the, the influence of social media,

but, um, I mean, I certainly recall, I'm, uh, you know, seeing on Instagram, which is like, you know, usually two to four weeks behind where TikTok is, um, you know, as sort of a proliferation of the, the watermelon emoji, which is sort of the symbol for, for pro Palestinian pro-Hamas, activism. And I think the bigotry of anti-Semitism and sort of broad anti-Zionism, whatever you want to call it, really feeds off of ignorance. And it's the sort of thing similar to the idea of, you know, small L liberalism and sort of democratic American values.

It's the kind of thing that doesn't get passed down. genetically, you have to sort of teach and reteach generation. So that is an area of concern that I have, that this is, those two things. The events of what are happening, again, I should emphasize, like, it's not as if the government of Israel deserves to be free from criticism on this. I mean, you hear there's criticism all around that's deserved for how they've managed this war against Damas. But I think the way in which certainly like certain media outlets, I mean, we saw like the Washington Post, you mentioned the BBC having to sort of actually address coverage that had been straight up unfair and wrong and taking the Hamas line.

But you have that sort of arrayed against an ignorance and people who are very motivated to kind of play up those tropes. And what you end up with, I think, is an ignorant populace falling prey to those traps. So I know we need to move on, but just very quickly, because I meant to answer your question better. There's a famous sign at the Palestinian protest, at the pro-Hamas protests at Colombia, where a kid says, why teach me Edward Said if you're not going to let me use him? The point being that I think what's new about this anti-Semitism stuff is the colonial post-colonial oppressor narrative stuff feeds directly into a kind of structural anti-Semitism that holds Israel as a different nation than other nations, unfairly by a lot of standards.

But also, and our friend Cliffaznes get a good piece in commentary about this a while back, the whole idea of sort of anti-racism, the disparate results for different disparate groups are inherently unjust, feeds a kind of modern technocratic kind of anti-Semitism as well because Jews are overperformers in the modern democratic capitalist economy. And so it must be the system's rigged. They're exploiting the system. It's coming at the expense of somebody else. It's one of the reasons why Asians are increasingly being thrown out of the coalition of the oppressed. So that's sort of the new version of an old anti-Semitic argument that gives it this particular, Tina of seriousness for some people, but at the same time, there's almost no standard you can

hold against Israel and supporters of Israel, that if you, getting back to my point with Megan, that if you hold the other side's mode of analysis constant, where it doesn't really just look like they're signaling out Jews, right? Very few of the people who were like upset about Israel attacking hospitals, which were used to as command and control centers for Amaz, weren't angry at, say, the Saudis bombing the crap out of just plain old hospitals in Yemen. Right. Right. There's something about, you know, Palestinians being victims of Jews that freaks out a lot of Muslims and Arabs, that when Arabs and Muslims kill other Muslims and Arabs, it's, that's their business.

Joe, before we move on, I really want to expand the conversation rather than shift topics. But before I do that, you said earlier that, you know, one of the effects of these attacks in boulders, it makes it more likely that people will be reluctant to go to next week's walk. You have famously joked about your name being Jonah Goldberg. And I've read lots of commentary over the past several weeks, sort of heartbreaking commentary from American Jews who say that they've never felt less safe in America. Do you feel less safe? For the record, I haven't joked about my name being Jonah Goldberg, because it is, in fact, Jonah Goldberg. I've, I've joked about it being like the Jewish name short of Stromo Abramowitz that you can find. You can understand why I didn't put it that way.

Yeah, I understand. I understand. And so people assume, not just people, too, artificial intelligence is chat GPT thinks like I'm crazy Jewish. And because so many people accuse me of, accuse me, assume it. And, you know, I'm a pretty secular guy. I would be not I would I would I would feel it more if I wore a yarmica or a Kippa you know I would feel it more if I had if I presented more Jewish um but I have you know like I mean you can't go to a synagogue you can't drop past a synagogue in D.C. without seeing when during holidays without seeing a security presence yeah that has that you know we're all free market people when you tax things you get less of it you know when you subsidize things you get more of it the tax the sort of personal safety tax is a real thing. And I have so many friends who have kids in colleges who feel like Jews are second class being targeted. You can't be proud of being Jewish. You can be proud

of being almost anything else in the world. And look, if my kid was in that march, I'd be very nervous for obvious human reasons. And the intimidation factor, I just think at that level, Forget whether it's politically effective and all that other stuff we were talking about. It just seems transparently obvious that it's a real thing. I mean, would you want to walk into a crowd of Antifa people with a MAGA hat? No. Would you want to walk into various crowds in protests with a Star of David and a Yamac on? No.

And I think that those kinds of situations are proliferating in this country. All right. We're going to take a quick break, but we will be back soon with more from the Dispatch Roundtable. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden law. 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.

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at the dispatch this week on the Remnant podcast, Jonah Goldberg interviewed historian Brett Devereaux. They spoke about the historical significance of Alexander the Great. The challenges historians face due to the lack of contemporary sources from ancient times and in the aftermath of the extraordinary Ukrainian drone attack on Russian aircraft, the high-tech ways of modern war. Join them for those topics and a lot more. Mike, as you pointed out earlier alluded to as sort of in passing, anti-Semitism, obviously not a left-wing phenomenon alone. And in a piece this week for the free press, Rod Dreher, a conservative, I think we'd all describe him as a new right conservative, wrote about the growing right-wing radicalism, including and especially rising anti-Semitism among young men in a piece

headlined, or at least initially headlined, the woke right is coming for your sons. I believe that headline has been changed to the radical right is coming for your sons. Here's just a piece of what Dreher wrote. I am now witnessing the deep inroads in such a short period that right-wing totalitarianism expressed most often as anti-Semitism has made, especially a among a growing segment of right-wing males. And unlike so many who point this out, this community is not exotic or foreign to me.

This is my world. He's describing sort of the radicalization of a group of young, he describes primarily white men, many of them with sort of significant online presence, or at least who spent a significant amount of time online, and is, in his own words, raising the alarm about them. What are we seeing here and to what extent is what Dreher describes something that you've seen in your reporting over the years? I mean, what's going on is the house is on fire and Rod is in the foyer as the flames are.

are coming out of all the rooms, and he's on the phone with 911 saying, I think there might be a problem here. It feels like, and I don't mean to dis, I don't want to dismiss the piece because I was, I was taken in by how sort of honest he was in this piece about a problem. We talked in the last segment about, you know, self-policing, and this is the kind of thing you want to see. I wish I had seen it a lot earlier. But to me, the damage has been done, at least for a certain generation, because you can see it, whether it's online in the way that for the past 10 years, young people becoming politically active and politically awoken, he might say,

in the Trump era on the right side, have so many of the hallmarks of, of just radical, whether it's anti-Semitic. I mean, at the heart of all sort of like bigotries, like I believe anti-Semitism is sort of at the bottom of it all. You can just like find anybody who's got a bigotry and that's deep-seated and dig far enough and you'll find that they, there's a, there's blame for the Jews at the bottom of it. But it's, it's not just that. it sort of manifests in this kind of gross white nationalistic or there's a Christian nationalistic kind of flavor to it as well. You know, you have people sort of kind of in your face, you know, Christ is king, which like I'm a, I may practicing Catholic. Like it's a phrase that I'm familiar with, but it seems to be used kind of as a weapon online.

And it's all happening online, by the way. It's all sort of out there where young people are sort of engaging with politics as a way to sort of signify their, the term of art is whether they're based. I don't quite know what the etymology of that slang term is, but based as somebody who says, says kind of the thing you're not supposed to say in polite company. but reveals to the in crowd that you're kind of, that you're with them, that you're willing to do and say and you think the things that, that, that, um, that, um, that you're not supposed to do. Um, so I, I, I, I just think it's, it's a real problem and it's a problem. We know it's a problem, not just online because a lot of these people are filling the ranks of, uh, the MAGA movement and the Trump administration. I mean, there are members of the Trump administration,

staff members, political appointees who have said things online, who are in positions of, you know, a lot of them are in communications, which people might think, oh, a person in communications, for instance, a press secretary at the Pentagon who has said some pretty awful things in her online past and not that recent, I mean, you know, a pretty recent past, not that long ago. She's 26. She's been doing this out very recently. And, like, people think, oh, she's a press secretary, she's communications. Like, people need to understand that communications is intimately involved in strategy, in policy, in a way. I just think it's something that we should have been taking more seriously. And people like Roderer should have been taking more seriously a while ago. And so good for him for pointing it out. It's a real disappointment that the free press changed the headline.

But I thought woke right was a real apt title for this group of people because there are things that you cannot say. And pointing out that the woke right has an anti-Semitic problem is one of those things you're apparently not supposed to say. But it's true. Yeah, Megan, I want to ask about where this leads in terms of our politics, Mike made a passing reference to the new Pentagon press secretary, Kingsley Wilson, who has. she has recycled this sort of great replacement theory, which has its origins in anti-Semitism. She's used various old-school anti-Semitic tropes when she was first chosen to be named to be deputy press secretary. Jewish groups from across the ideological spectrum spoke out and said this is really bad.

He most recently named Paul Ingracia to be the head of the office of special counsel. Gracia's downplayed October 7th, suggested it was a. Saip by the Israelis. Trump himself, of course, has had dinner with Holocaust denier, Nick Fuentes. Tucker Carlson sounds like the second coming of Pap Buchanan. Donald Trump himself is now cozying up with Qatar, a country that has funded the pro-Palestinian protests in the U.S. in which he criticized correctly in his first term as a supporter and sponsor of anti-Israeli and anti-American terror. Is the right in any position to point fingers? at the left on these things, how much of a problem is what Rod Dreher writes about?

I think it's a huge problem. And, you know, I think the left should hold off on pointing the fingers because they helped create this problem. They love to blame like, you know, Paul Ryan for leading to this. But ultimately, a lot of this is that so many things became verboten to say that you actually, the taboos lost their power. And I think this was something that was really not well understood in the left. So when I was working for Bloomberg's, this would have been maybe 2017, 2016, maybe even earlier.

I wrote about the rise of the use of the word white supremacy to describe like, you know, the fact that there are not as many black radiologists as there are a white radiologists. And I'm not saying that that's not a problem society should aim to fix. But like white supremacy meant something

quite specific, right? It meant, like, black people are not allowed to be radiologists, and if they try, the Ku Klux Klan will come and hurt them. And in trying to expand the usage of that word, and then trying to put other sorts of words off limits, what people were trying to do was take the moral stain that attached to being in the Ku Klux Klan and apply it to systemic racism, whatever you want to call it, unconscious bias, all of these things. And the point I made at the time was, like, you can't sustain that, right? Like, people are not going to apply the same social penalty to working in an apartment that doesn't have enough black radiologists that they do to being a Ku Klux Klan. We're not going to treat those things as morally equivalent because they're not morally equivalent, right? And rather than amping up the penalties for not having a system that's perfectly fair, what you're doing is tamping down the taboo on white supremacy because, If you make it include everything, people are going to be like, okay, well, that's not so bad.

And I was roundly excoriated for this, but I think that that is where we are. I mean, I, you know, I've heard prominent conservatives say, right? Their sons went off to college liberal, came back conservative because they were so tired of being told that they were the worst and they were the source of all of society's problems and that, like, you couldn't say this and you can't say that. And no, you're not saying that the right way. and you need a content, a content warning or whatever it was. And they came back really conservative. And then these conservative guys are like,

no, you can't say that, right? Is that like once you have started violating the rules, it's not clear, it's not immediately clear which rules you shouldn't violate, right? And that's why I think, you know, I am a pretty free speech appellutist. I do think that some taboos, every society has some things that are just taboo.

we don't have a free and open debate about whether pedophiles should be allowed to have sex with children. We've just decided, like, we're not talking about that and if you think that you're a bad person. And I think society can sustain some number of those taboos while still being a basically free, open society that has robust debate on topics that matter.

Partly, I think this, because I don't think, and we're ever going to come to the conclusion that it's okay for pedophiles to have sex with children. But if you try to multiply those taboos, If it becomes that you can't say anything except a very narrow set, what results is, first of all, the fact that you no longer know what people actually believe because they're no longer saying what they believe in public, which is bad, and makes your apparent consensus really fragile.

This is the subject of Timmer Kron's great book, Public Lies, Private Truths. The second thing that happens, though, is people feel kind of like angry and shamed by being forced to say things they don't believe, by being not allowed to say things that they do believe. And that this breeds an incredible backlash. Yes. But it also erodes this, like, the taboos you could have sustained. We could sustain a taboo against saying the N-word. That was a very, I think, indefinitely sustainable taboo

as evidence from the fact that I will still not say and will never say that word. What we couldn't sustain was a taboo, against being against affirmative action, right? That was not a sustainable taboo. What we could not sustain was a taboo against suggesting that biological sex has some reality, and there are two of them.

That was not a sustainable taboo. And so what you have is this generation of young men in rebellion. So now that I've excorated the left, let me say the right bears plenty of blame. Donald Trump has absolutely fanned this flame. Tucker Carlson has absolutely fan this flame. And also, you yourself,

are morally responsible for adopting noxious and false and horrible and hateful ideas. Now, the younger you are, the less responsibility you have. Young men love, and one of the reasons that I think anti-Semitism keeps coming back and back and back, there are a lot of reasons for it. But one reason it comes back is that young kids are looking for a systematic grant the vision of the world. And so they notice a regularity, which is there are a lot of successful Jewish people. And the rational thing to conclude from that is Jewish people are doing something right,

figure out what it is and copy them. That is not, in fact, but the conspiracy theory, if you don't know much about the world, seems somewhat plausible. And, like, if you flirted with anti-Semitism at 15 and you got out of it at 17 when you, or someone, like, I am more sympathetic to, you than if you decided at the age of 45 that for the purposes of stoking your ratings, it would be great to have someone on your podcast who suggests that maybe the Holocaust

didn't really happen and or that Winston Churchill was the real person at fault in this conflict. But I think that it is an enormous problem. And the problem is there are no, I'm glad to see Rod writing this. But I agree that it should have been written. much earlier because this problem has been apparent for years. Years ago, I, Yeyer Rosenberg, asked Gentiles to put three parentheses around their name on Twitter because anti-Semites had started doing this to the names of Jewish people on Twitter. And so in solidarity, I put three parentheses around my name.

And people who could see that my name is Megan McArdle immediately concluded, like, secret Jew and started bombarding me with things. And look, I grew up on the Upper West Side. I am probably the closest thing that... Some of us who love you think you're a secret Jew. Well, it's like, I am the closest thing that a practice in Catholic can come to being a... I have very strong opinions about Knessh. And, like, I was, I would never...

My high school was mostly Jewish. We had Holocaust stuff every year. I knew Holocaust survivors. I knew a lot of them. All of the old people, when I was growing up, I thought that old people just all had European accents, and that was normal because, you know, lots of us are from Europe. And it was only later, obviously, that I realized how many of them had fled the Holocaust. And I could not, I can't tell you, and obviously I understand this is much worse for my Jewish friends and for Jewish people who are not my friends. And I'm not trying to like stolen valor this.

But the horror of discovering that there was anyone in the world who thought that a Holocaust joke was. was funny, much less how many people were sending me disgusting, vicious memes about ovens. I can't go on. And like, this has been a problem, and that was before the pandemic. This has been a problem, a noticeable problem for a long time. And people should have spoken out. Leaders who might have had some influence over these people should have spoken out way earlier. and what they were focused on was the threat from the left. And I get that. Like, I lived through the Great Awakening within a legacy media institution.

I understand why they were afraid and unsettled by what was happening. But it can't just be that the only thing that matters is, like, your personal threat. It's not true. You don't take any ally in a fight. And the right was willing to take anti-Semites as an ally against the woke, and they deserve the blame they're getting for this, and now they need to clean up their damn house, both for moral reasons and for political ones, mostly for moral reasons. But if that doesn't move you for some reason, because there's something wrong with you, then for political ones.

So it's funny, you know, the period Megan's talking about is basically part of my origin story as a anti-Trump person, right? I was never going to be like all in for Donald Trump, But in 2015, early 2016, I was subjected to a torrent of anti-Semitism. And being an NR for 20 years, I got anti-Semitic stuff a lot from people. Up until about 2015, it was mostly from people on the left, and then it flipped. And anyway, this is when people use the phrase all right. I think it's very interesting that we don't really hear the phrase all right anymore, in part because they have been incorporated into.

the broader new right in a lot of ways, in part because I think they get less Russian funding, but whatever the reason is, you don't hear the phrase alt-right anymore, instead you hear new right, because the alt-right, to some extent, succeeded in becoming part of the new right. And during this period, this was when our friend and colleague David French was getting constant memes of his adopted black daughter in an oven. with Donald Trump in an SS uniform about to hit the button to start the oven, right? And I got this with me in the oven. I got this all the kinds of.

The ADL did a report and found that I was either the sixth or the eighth biggest target of online anti-Semitism in America that year. Ben Shapiro was number one, I think. And my problem wasn't that there were a lot of anti-Semites. I mean, I have a problem with that, but like I'm used to that. I was shocked by the extent of it. and in some ways the sophistication of it, what I was shocked, truly shocked by was the degree to which other people on the right were telling me not to make a big deal about this, that the alt-right,

it's part of our coalition. To his credit, I had an argument with Hugh Hewitt on air. People can go find the transcript. He basically at the beginning was defending the alt-right as basically like disenchanted former Tea Party people. And I was like, no, Hugh, that's just factually wrong. These are the people from Chronicles, from American Renaissance. These are the people from V-Dare. They have a long history of this stuff. The alt-right has a meaning and it's full of anti-Semitism and racism and white supremacy and they own it and they're proud of it. And you trying to say that there's something

else going on here is just wrong. And just because Steve Bannon likes these people and says he wants to make Breitbart, the platform for the alt-right, that was his phrase, doesn't mean it should be defended. And by the end of it, he was convicted. He just truly didn't know, right? And came around on it. But the point being, there were a lot of people who did know and just didn't care. That was Milo Eunopoulos's argument was like, oh, you're making too big about it. Some of this is just for the fun because it gets a rise out of people, right? It's for the lulls, it was this thing. And the thing is, like, I wrote about this big thing, don't call this conservatism, you know for the Monday essay a couple weeks ago at the dispatch. And part of my point was that popular frontism

is bad, this idea that you can have no enemies to your right, right, which used to be the phrase no enemies to your left with the original popular front stuff, is bad because some of the people to your right are your enemies. And like for me, I mean, again, Jonah Goldberg, it's really easy for me to spot my enemies when they tell me how much better the world would be if my entire family was in the ashtray of a Volkswagen. And I mean, I got so much of the Holocaust stuff about how ha ha ha, I bet your grandmother screamed as she went to the oven, this like that kind of stuff constantly. And then I'm hearing from people saying, oh, no, we have to have a big tent. You know, Reagan's 11th commandment. I'm like, screw you. I do not want to hang out with these people

and I don't want to be associated with them. And just because they're supporting Donald Trump doesn't make them one iota less evil. And you see less of that stuff now. In part because these people have gotten a taste of power, and it turns out that really virulent anti-Semitism is still a little politically inconvenient. Like, you can't go full Fuentes necessarily, but again, an overdid window point. What is defined as unacceptable anti-Semitism is really serious anti-Semitism in parts of the online right and the MAGA right. And we've been dancing around the term horseshoe theory for most of all these topics.

The reason why horseshoe theory now makes sense to me, and it didn't before, is that I think the mainstream American right, which had a healthy dose of libertarians in it and also classical liberals, was liberal. And liberalism, extreme free market capitalism, extreme individualism, you can't get so extreme on that spectrum that you end up being totalitarian. The only way you can get right-wing extremism and left-wing extremism to look remarkably similar where you can talk about the woke right and the woke left being similar is when they both become illiberal because then once you're illiberal, once you want to just use state power

for your own ends and for your own team and for your people, then it's just an argument about which team you, which tribe you want to win and you both have the same methods. And that's what I see going on on big chunks of the right and left. Jonah, I want to get back to you specifically on Megan's point about language and breaking taboos because I think that's a really important part of this conversation. In December of 2023, Jonah, you wrote, the left and right may see huge differences between left-wing identity politics and right-wing identity politics. And there are huge differences, but it's still identity politics. And the notion that individuals should be judged by what groups they belong to is profoundly illiberal.

That was not the first time you made that point. You have been making that point four years. And it is, I think, striking that Rod Dreher is writing this piece now. as someone, as he writes in the piece, who is on the new right. I mean, this is, that's part of the problem here, is that the new right has embraced these profoundly illiberal practices, identity politics and, and beyond. But to get back to Megan's point, I think there's a really important sort of cultural point about our language, because it's become so cool in, particularly among young conservatives,

to break these taboos, to say the things that you're not supposed to say, because they haven't been able to say them for years. And you see this constantly in the language of Tucker Carlson. How many times have we heard a clip from Tucker Carlson, or if you subject yourself to his podcasts, heard him say, nobody will say this. You never hear anybody say this. He says this all of the time to introduce, sometimes they're just banal observations, but sometimes he really is going beyond what people say. And I think that's such an appeal, particularly among young conservatives described in this Rod Rear piece, that they haven't been able to say, you know, you were challenged if, now this is going back a long time when I was on college campuses. This is back in the 1990.

Wow, that long ago. If you argued against racial preferences and quotas, you were likely to be called a white supremacist, to use Megan's example. And so for years, You know, I know a lot of people who believed, who argued against racial preferences, but didn't make those arguments public. And now, I think you have young alt-right, new right, white conservatives who say, we haven't been able to say this for so long. We've been blamed for society's ills for all of these years, you know, sort of screw it. I'm saying it. How important is the language part of this, Jonah? Yeah, so look, I agree entirely with Megan's point about the test.

taboo stuff. I'm a conservative in, you know, sort of the Chestertonian sense. I like dogma. I want some things to be removed from conversation, right? I don't think we need a robust national conversation on whether we should have slavery again, right? Fought a civil war, amended the Constitution a couple of times, settled issue. Doesn't need a robust liberal debate. Why are you trying to censor me, Jenna? Right, exactly. So I like, some things are taboo and some things are just, should be settled moral dogma. And that's, you know, slavery, pedophilia, we can come up with a list of them. I think if you're going to do this, you have to do it sort of pre-social media, post-social media.

Pre-social media, I think one of the ways in which the left helped create these circumstances is that they drew down the moral capital on a whole bunch of concepts and topics to advance pretty picky-un narrow agendas. And so, like, one of the reasons why I wrote liberal fascism, you know, which I still get a lot of grief for, was I was so sick of people constantly calling conservative Nazis for just random things that were just normal, right? It was like, listen to, you know, like something would be called, you know, fascist or Nazi that my dad believed in. And I was pretty sure, you know, Sid Goldberg wasn't a Nazi. And so one of my favorite examples of this was during the contract with America. stuff, Charlie Rangel said of the 10 points of the contract with America that, quote, this is a quote, Hitler wasn't even talking about doing stuff like this, which is technically true.

He wasn't talking about like zero based budgeting and term limits for committee chairs, right? Say what you want about Hitler, but he wasn't talking about that. Also, you get this in reverse where there's this, I mean, there's this whole genre of essays that's like, you know, corporations use accounting. You know who else use double-entry bookkeeping and like, okay, also wore shoes. Are we now getting rid of those? And so I think that practice is exactly what Megan was getting at, is it denuded, it depleted the moral stature of these things.

I used to say that, like, look, if you compare losing your car keys to being worse than the Holocaust, it's not only exaggerating how bad it is to lose your car keys. It is dethroning the Holocaust as a profound moral evil to a triviality. It's a kind of moral Holocaust denial. And I think the left did an enormous amount of that kind of stuff. It soaked in. And then the post-social media, post-Trump era, or in the social media and Trump era, the right has picked up that there are so few things left that can get engagement, that can get a reaction from people. And the engagement becomes the point.

Yes. Right? The fact that it pisses people off and offends people is the justification for doing it regardless for content. And that is something that I think the left helped us get here, but it does not in the slightest excuse the right for doing it. Well, can I say about the age issue or the maturity issue here, right? I mean, like, I was a young conservative on a campus.

I sort of understood the milieu of, you know, it's, it is exciting to sort of say something that gets a lot of your, you know, liberal fellow students or your professors sort of can't believe they said that. And there's a, there's a thrill to it that I sort of understand. understandable, and we're not even getting into the realm of things that I would consider bigoted or beyond the pale. It's the grown-ups in the situation. I'm thinking primarily of Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, although we can name several others, for whom they're the people in positions of power and influence who in the past have been the moderating

influences. And instead, they are, they are the encouraging influences. They are the ones who sort of say, no, no, no, the sort of youthful idiocy is actually, like, what is, it's actually something you should embrace. It's actually something that is good, which I find, at the, at the heart of all of these problems, it's ultimately a leadership problem. It's a leadership problem. in the pro-Palestinian movement. It's a leadership problem on the woke right. People who are in positions of power influence who should know better, who ought to know better for political or financial, you know, for their own sort of business reasons, do the wrong thing. And that's what is so painful to me is to see sort of young people carried along by people who are old enough to

better. We're going to take a quick break for some more ads, but we'll be back shortly. And we're back. Let's move to Not Worth Your Time. Zoran Mamdani is a candidate for mayor of New York City. He is 33 years old. And among his policy proposals is making grocery stores in New York City, or at least on an experimental basis, some grocery stores in New York City. City-run grocery stores. stores. The way that the New York Times characterized it was municipal grocery stores could lower costs by using city land or buildings, buying food wholesale and being exempt from property taxes, supporters say. The approach is part of a broader push by progressive groups to offer public options for banking, broadband, and housing. The story notes, and Mamdani himself is fond of telling

people that this has seen some traction. There have been some experiments in Chicago, some in Kansas. Given concerns about rising prices and inflation, is this the right solution, Megan? My first thought when I heard this proposal, after I closed the gape of disbelief, got my jaw back in order, was, you know, tell me that you don't understand what opportunity costs are without telling me you don't understand what opportunity costs are. It is extraordinary that you would think, yes, I want my groceries provided by the same people who brought me the DMV and, you know, the Joint Strike Fighter, which is how many years delayed and over budget. I mean, these are... The Cross Town subway. The Cross Town, the Second Avenue Subway, which took, you know, some amazing multiple, cost some amazing multiple of what it was supposed to and took much longer. In fact, like, the Second Avenue Subway was proposed in the 1920s was the, was the...

It was supposed to be built out. The Great Depression intervened, and they couldn't get it together. But look, the government is not an efficient provider of services. That doesn't mean that the government should never provide services. Sometimes there are goods such as police and courts and border patrol and all sorts of things. We can argue about whether health care is included in this bundle. I don't think it is. We can argue about it.

Groceries are not on that list unless you were like, in a war zone and they're handing them out for free. The government is not good at setting prices. It does not get, it's not going to get substantially, they can buy groceries wholesale. What do they think Safeway does? Just like goes

out and goes to the giant and gathers up. Maybe they go down to Costco and fill up a little cart. It's just totally ridiculous. It is a way to potentially to

solve some other problems that the government has created, for example, what are often called food deserts, where there aren't conveniently located grocery stores, which are generally results of the government failing to provide enough order to police shoplifting to allow grocery stores to operate profitably in those neighborhoods or jacking up the property taxes too high for them to operate profitably in those neighborhoods, or not providing adequately paved streets and convenient transportation for grocery stores or not

zoning enough density. I will now stop with the litany. But like food deserts do not arise naturally. If you look at old cities from the 1900s, there are corner stores everywhere. Food deserts are a result of government decisions. You are very

unlikely to fix that problem by getting government into the grocery business, especially because what's going to happen is going to be political pressure to underpriced certain goods to not run it at a profit, right? Theoretically, you could run it and break even. But if you're not collecting property taxes, you could be collecting property taxes on that property.

If you're not, that's a cost to you. If you're not selling or renting out the land, you could be getting money for that. That is a cost to the government. It doesn't show up on the books in the same way. But it actually, the ultimate effect on revenue is the same. And it's just, like, his whole platform is this kind of amazing, fuzzy like third grade level what if the government was just nice to everyone and made things good kind of thinking the rent freezes another we know exactly what happens when you freeze

rents people landlords disinvest in housing stock they take marginal units out of the rental market and you people end up frozen in place you end up with lower housing and actually fewer people getting a warm, safe abode to stay in. But if you're a third grader, it sounds great. And honestly, look, frankly, I think we all feel a little bit of third grader when confronted with New York City rents. I certainly, you know, have had the thought. Can't someone do something about this right now when out looking for Manhattan apartments in my salad days? So, Mike, you are known to be a regular customer of Virginia's ABC stores, state-run ABC stores. It isn't that convenient for you they're everywhere they're easy uh i actually much prefer when i'm in the

office in dc to go to the liquor store around the corner uh that the selection is so much right i mean it's there is no better demonstration of that than the fact that like i scope out wait this is making me sound like a lush um i was you say sometimes when we read your copy we can tell that you sometimes three four times a day you go around the corner of the liquor's the selection is just so good um yeah i look i i i want to associate myself with the remarks of uh of my colleague miss mcmartle over here i i i don't know what more there is to say except um you know trump was right like he's bringing the word groceries back and uh it's sort of expanding it's an old It's this old-fashioned word. And look, you know, Donald Trump Republican, this guy, Democrat, he's really uniting the country on this idea of groceries. And we should commend him for that.

I actually, can I just jump in on the Virginia liquor? As it happens, I am married to a fine fellow who operates an excellent cocktail newsletter. And whichever one should subscribe to. But he actually, a thing about the Virginia liquor stores is, is that they, all sorts of, you know, like, so in the market for liquor, there is certain stuff that people really want to get their hands on. And the wholesalers tend to sell it at roughly the same price to everyone. But then the price goes up at the retail level, because there's not enough of it to satiate the demand. Tell me about it. It does not do this. Virginia prices at, like, it just prices on a standard cost plus or however they do their price modeling. And so the thing to do is to have like an end.

with one of your local Virginia liquor stores so that you can get for many times less than the market price some particularly like choice item, but then no one else can get that thing because they're they're not pricing it to the market. And that's what such a good example because that is what state run stores look like. New Yorkers, get your banana guy. The Soviet jokes, the Soviet jokes make themselves. Indeed. So I'm going to dissent in that the liquor, the ABC stores are the best example of this, and I'm a little surprised that Megan didn't bring this up. There's a phrase you may have heard

called the House Always Wins, right, which is that gambling establishments by definition make money because they set the odds that they don't lose no matter what happens, right? That's the whole point. New York used to, when I was growing up, had these things called OTB, off-track betting, which were gambling partners for horse racing. They went bankrupt. They could not run a banking establishment at a profit. I am shamed, Jonah, because we had an OTB place a block from us. Yeah, they did attract the best people.

Oh, my mother was my mom was like pretty chill with 1970s and 1980s Manhattan. But even then, she would just kind of pull me a little closer when we walked past the OTP. They were some skeevy, skeevy people. So it's funny, there was this show on Apple TV about this famous serial killer guy who they changed a lot of the circumstances to make them much more sympathetic, that Tom Holland guy was in it, bad show, but my wife and I watched it. And the thing that had me burst out laughing is there's this scene, it's supposed to be said in the 1970s, and there's this scene where they basically, I think they took like a Starbucks

or like something like that and painted on a fake OTB sign to make it seem like he was coming out of an OTB, and it looked really nice. It was like glass and steel and all the stuff, and I was like, you don't understand. The OTBs had a carpet of cigarette butts. No, yeah, you, the only place that would replicate a check, check cashing place, pawn shop, that was the vibe. Yeah, I mean, like, and so anyway, but they managed to run that into the ground. And so other than that, I want to associate my, my possession with, with, with, with, it's so stupid and so it's such magical thinking right um and the the place where i really agree the most with megan is like food deserts arise when governments don't do the basic things

that everybody agrees government should do right neck glazer has this famous line from uh you know famous uh social scientists who studied urban politics and urban public policy and And he said the left kind of got itself into trouble in cities in the late 60s when they stopped doing the things they knew how to do to do the things they didn't know how to do. And like, we know how to like stop crime, you know, it takes some will and all the rest, but we know how to do that. We know how to fix roads and sewers and all that kind of stuff. But that's not glamorous. That's not aspirational. And cities get themselves into all sorts of trouble when they want to create fantasy shangri-laws

where food is cheaper and nobody's ever arrested regardless of what they do. And that's a big reason why the left is in such trouble today. One thing I would add also, sorry, I'm like very committed to this top. I would actually add two things. And one is that, you know, I love fresh new ideas. but there are some things you shouldn't say and the fact that you couldn't say it before was not a problem because it's a dumb thing to say

and then the second thing is like some fresh new ideas, many fresh new ideas are new because they're bad and people thought about them and we're like and particularly with grocery stores, grocery stores are actually a really hard business to run. It doesn't sound that hard, right? Like you just get some stuff and put it on the shelves.

You have to deal with spoilage. You have to deal with shoplifting. How's the city going to deal with shoplifting? Actually, I remember talking to someone at P-Pod 10 years ago about Amazon entering into the business. It was a giant delivery service. It was a giant delivery service about Amazon entering to the business. And she was just like, you know, I'm not that worried.

This business is so hard. Spoilage and shrinkage will wreck you because the margins are like 1%. And so even if the city gave people something that they were happy with about which color me skeptical, what they're likely to do is lose a lot of money on it, getting it there. It is really, really hard to run a good grocery store. I'm not in favor of exempting grocery stores from property taxes, but that makes a lot more sense. Exactly. Right? Because that lowers their marginal costs to the point where they can, you know, lower their prices, you know. And government run grocery stores, let's be honest, it's not that new of an idea. This is an experiment that's

been tried at scale many, many times before and hasn't succeeded. But, I mean, I guess this is sort of a theme of this episode. Yeah, we got people on the new right who have a new idea called Monarchy. Because no one thought of having a king before. Price controls. I mean, you have the White House actively contemplating price controls. Well, fair to say that this group at least thought that that topic was, in fact, worth our time. I think it was worth our time. Thank you all for joining us on this episode of the Dispatch podcast. We'll talk to you next week. I'm going to be able to be.