The Dispatch Podcast - The Politics of Israel and Palestine

Episode Date: May 19, 2021

The Israel/Palestine conflict has yet to cool down, but the rhetoric around the ongoing skirmish is heating up in the U.S. The gang talks about the pressure on Biden to help with the situation abroad. Plus, it seems as though a commission to look at the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 might not be getting much GOP support, if any at all. Sarah, Steve, David, and Jonah try to figure out who is to blame for that. David educates everyone on the abortion case the Supreme Court will be hearing, and the gang discusses the debate over the origins of COVID-19. Show Notes: -DNC boos Israel language -January 6 was just a “normal tourist day” -Pictures of Rep. Clyde blocking the doors into the Capitol -Advisory Opinions on SCOTUS abortion case -Historic polling on abortion - Gallup -How Abortion Views Are Different - David Leonhardt -Origins of Covid - Following the Clues -Josh Rogin’s Twitter -Don McNeil’s Lab Leak Story Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, with a cold, if I sound a little nasally. It turns out the COVID vaccine does not prevent cold and flu. I am joined by the healthy and good-looking Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French. We've got plenty to cover today. We're going to talk about the latest out of Israel, the January 6th Commission, abortion politics at the Supreme Court, and what happened at that Wuhan lab? Let's dive in. I saw recently a Democrat say that it wasn't that the Democratic Party has changed its position on Israel, but that Israel has changed its positioning toward Hamas and Palestine. Steve, I'm wondering if you will just walk us through the very basics of how we got here and whether anything has changed with the Israeli conflict. Well, I think there are sort of two separate issues, and you brought them together, I think, aptly. The first is what's actually happening on the ground in Israel and Gaza,

and the second is what's happening here in the United States. On the first, we've seen a spike in violence over the past couple weeks rising from the decision of, I think really from internal political differences between Fatah and Hamas on the Gaza Strip and among Palestinians, there was a court case having to do with the potentially eviction of some Palestinian families from a neighborhood called Sheikh Jarrah that had Hamas in particular very upset. The Palestinian Authority and others were, I think, looking to establish their sort of toughness, bona fides, spoke out against this, organized protests. Hamas began firing rockets into Israel. Israel has responded with great force, and we have seen

sort of this continuing violence. That's a gross over simplification, but I think it gets us part of the way there, at least so that we can turn to talking about the domestic politics here in the United States. You saw initially, as we've seen from Republicans over the past several years, some strong vocal support for Israel in this battle with Republicans, again, likening what Israel's facing with Hamas to what the United States faced with al-Qaeda and making, I think, the rather common sense argument that if Hamas is firing rockets into Israel, Israel has the right to respond to respond pretty forcefully. That's what we've seen.

The split, the divide, I think, comes more on the Democratic side, where you've had an increasingly vocal minority of Democrats speaking out against the Israelis, against the pushback, and in favor of the Palestinian position sort of broadly, if not necessarily, a full embrace of Hamas. This is understandably causing some consternation among Joe Biden's political advisors. You've seen confrontations. There was a heated discussion on the tarmac yesterday in Michigan when Joe Biden de-plained Air Force One to test drive a Ford pickup truck, Rashida Talib, representative from Michigan and Biden engaged in a heated back and forth that Talib's people later said involved her telling Joe Biden that she thought he was being too

to pro-Israel. I think the question is, what is this mean for Democrats and how long is Joe Biden willing to give Israel the space that I think it needs, that he has suggested it needs, to push back on this. Jonah, the political change in the United States between the Democratic and Republican parties over Israel is something that has moved very slowly over time, but it's a pretty stark contrast

compared to the late 90s, for instance, in terms of Republicans' support for Israel overwhelming. Democratic support at this point, the plurality actually support the Palestinians in this conflict. It's not just today, it's not even just the Trump administration, what has been driving this change in the two parties? Yeah, so some of it is down, I think, just another example of the kind of polarization that we talk about all the time here. If one party says masks are great, the other party starts

saying masks are terrible. If one party says Israel is awesome, then the other party starts saying it's not. So some of it, I think, is just that. But there are other factors feeling it as well The Democrat you talk to, whoever this, I'm sure otherwise wonderful person who says that the party hasn't changed, Israel's behavior has changed, is talking nonsense. The base of the Democratic Party has become, you know, when you say woke, we can say intersectional, we can say whatever, it has just simply become part of this ideological school of thought that sees... Israel as a white colonizer nation, that the Palestinians are in effect indigenous like American Indians are and the Jews are essentially European settlers. And that ideology, which I think is absolutely ludicrous, given that Jews were there before Muslims and before Christians, and that given the actual history of the founding

of Israel and the way Palestinians and Arabs rejected all sorts of efforts to live in peace. But if you go back to what was it, David, was it the 2012 Democratic Convention where they basically booed God and Israel? Yeah, yeah. And on the Democratic floor, some of it has to do with the changing nature, the demographics of the Democratic coalition, right? When they've been betting on this coalition of the ascendant thing for so long, the idea that because Jews in the

American political contest, and you see this all over social media where people are just trying to say that like Israelis are at war with brown people, even though like something like half of Israelis are not white. I mean, I mean, Jewish Israelis are not white. It's,

they're trying to transpose American cultural campus conflicts onto the Israeli context, which I don't think it actually maps very well. And there's also just this deep-seated thing on the secular left that if the evangelical right like something, it must be suspect and dangerous. And so I mean, I think there's a rich stew going on here. And but the Democratic Party

has definitely clearly become more anti-Israel than it was when I was a kid. And the Republican parties become more pro-Israel. You know, when I started the National Review, I was a little nervous about its positions on Israel because historically in the 90s, it was much more of the even-handedness school. And there was still a vestigial sort of Buchananite thing about Israel. That's pretty much gone except on the alt-right. And those sentiments have all moved left. David, I've saved the hardest question for you. I want you to steal man the argument on the left that this is somewhat similar to apartheid and that the Israelis have created a culture where the past Palestinians feel that they don't have a choice, that the Israelis are the aggressors here.

Make your best case. Well, I think it essentially rests on a fundamental reality, and that is that Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza by force in 1967 and is, with modifications, let me put it this way, seized by force West Bank and Gaza in 1967 and is largely not surrendered control of the territories that it seized and continues to hold those territories against the or control in important ways

those territories against the will of the individuals of the occupants of those territories seized in a defense of war we should point out right right right right it was a so yeah there was and especially the West Bank because Jordan attacked Israel in the middle of the 1967 war believing false propaganda that Egypt was winning. And so it was thinking that it was piling on in a winning war

and instead it was entering a losing cause and lost the West Bank, lost Gaza. And so since that time, Israel, especially before the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, Israel was had seized territory, was in control of that territory over the objections of the citizens and residents of that territory. And so that circumstance is something that is not, it has been common throughout world history, not terribly common in recent world history, and is one that typically results in a long-term settlement, a treaty of some kind that results. in a permanent settlement that allocates permanent authority between competing sovereigns. And so that has not happened in this circumstance. It has not happened, in part because there aren't competing sovereigns really to negotiate with.

But there are, so there's no permanent settlement. And then Israel has over the course or, and Israelis have over the course of many, many, many years, especially in the West Bank, created a variety of settlements that if you're going to have, if a Palestinian state is going to exist, it would either have to exist with half a million or so Jewish residents that it doesn't want. And we can talk a long time about, is it right for a state to want to exist without an ethnicity in it? But just, just, just, you know, just, Just setting aside that for a moment, about half a million people that it doesn't want, and if they are not going to be under the sovereign control of a Palestinian state,

that Palestinian state is simply decreasingly geographically viable. In other words, if you were going to create a Palestinian state that was comprised only of Palestinians in a geographically contiguous area of the West Bank, that is decreasingly viable because of settlement activity and because of the location of settlements. So what that ends up what the reality then is that there is a, a, what looks to be a permanent occupation with no end in sight. And that that leads to frustration, that leads to anger, that leads to what we're looking at today. That would be, I would say, sort of the best case as to why, you you know, why we're seeing violence flaring within the West Bank and within parts of Israel.

The Hamas story is different. Okay, the Hamas story is different. Hamas story is, you know, they came to power. It came to power in a civil war in the Gaza Strip shortly after the Israeli withdrawal. And it just, there isn't a, there isn't really a steel manning of Hamas. Because, correct, that's true. I mean, let's just be honest here, because Hamas wants to wipe out Israel. period, end of discussion.

And if you're going to do long explainers about Jewish landlord-tenant, landlords' disputes between Jewish landlords and Palestinian tenants, that's really irrelevant. Hamas sits on a pile of rockets and wants to, and looks for excuses to fire off those rockets.

And it is constantly courting brinksmanship, and is constantly courting violence, and is constantly seeking to inflict casualties on Israel. That is a reason for being. That's why it exists. Sort of saying, I want to steal a man Hamas is like saying, steal man al-Qaeda for me for a minute, or steel man ISIS.

Yeah. I mean, it is what it says it is. It's a entity that is designed from the ground up for jihad against the state of Israel, the very existence of the state of Israel. And so we have to be real careful when we're talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's not all the same. It's not all the same. And one of the things that I think that the, you know, seeing folks on the left, it's one thing to say, wow, this is some really troubling rioting we're seeing in Israel between Arab and Jewish populations.

We need to really figure out this landlord-tenant issue because this is something that goes back to the Ottoman Empire. And look, I've read all the Wall Street Journal explainers about how this is such a simple real estate. dispute. When your chain of title is going back to the Ottoman Empire and depends on the quirks of the various ways in which sovereigns have responded to war, it isn't as simple as a landlord-tenant

dispute in the United States. So, yeah, let's set that aside. The Hamas situation is just different. It is just different. It's different, but it's also the same. It's different in that Hamas is just a pure terrorist, jihadist entity.

It's the same in that what watching right now unfold is the same cycle that we have seen time and time and time again when violence flares against Israel, when Hamas lobs rockets. Israel tries and sort of races against the clock to achieve certain military objectives before sort of the weight of American pressure and the weight of international opinion kind of forces an uneasy ceasefire. And then we press pause and then it happens all again. And the frequency with which it happens and the severe with the which it happens often depends on how effective the military, Israeli military operations were before the ceasefire. All right. Steve, January 6th commission. So for a few days after the

January 6th attack on the Capitol, as we've discussed before, there was something sort of vanishingly rare in modern American politics, and that was consensus. The attacks were awful. Democrats and Republicans agreed on that, and Donald Trump's election lies played a role in fomenting them. His inaction during the afternoon was a problem. And basically, with some outliers, there were some sort of close to the White House, some supporters of Donald Trump who didn't buy into that. But basically, everybody understood this is something that can't happen again. Since then, we've seen lots of revisionism, and we've seen more Republicans downplaying those events culminating in comments last week from Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia, who sort of now

famously suggested that the mob of attackers who did substantial damage to the Capitol and injured scores of Capitol police officers were really nothing more than normal tourists out for a stroll in the Capitol that day. His case, of course, was later undermined by photos that emerged of him barricading a door on the House floor to keep those... tourists from further vandalizing the building or attacking his colleagues. So in those early days, there were, I think, serious, if quiet, bipartisan discussions about a January 6th commission. Nancy Pelosi dampened the enthusiasm, particularly among Republicans, for such a body, when she proposed a partisan makeup of the commission of seven Democrats to four Republicans,

and Republicans who had been having these, who had been engaging these quiet discussions, about a commission certainly felt undermined. Now, four months later, House is going to vote on the establishment of the commission, Senate, which would need 10 votes to pass it, 10 Republicans votes to pass it. We'll take it up after the House. House leaders initially said they weren't going to whip either way.

When it became clear that a growing number of Republicans might support the bill, House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy came out against the proposal, and his deputy GOP whip Steve Scalia said he would whip against the establishment of a commission. And in the Senate, Mitch McConnell said, told reporters he wasn't against the commission, but behind closed doors moments earlier before he spoke to reporters, had told colleagues that he was inclined to oppose it. So my question is a simple one, and I'll start with you, Sarah. Why the change? Why have Republicans sort of changed their tune?

and what accounts for the opposition of Republican leaders to the establishment of this kind of a commission? So let me start with a point that you made, which is that Nancy Pelosi, I think, fired the first shots in this. I think this looks very similar to the impeachment situation that we talked about at length, where she did not include any Republicans in the drafting of the article of impeachment,

intentionally wrote it in sort of the most partisan way without, you know, making it too too partisan. She wants it to look not partisan while making sure that if you agree with this, you are basically saying that if you supported Donald Trump in 2020, you like already knew because the article of impeachment went back sort of pre-election day. And then she appointed only Democrats as House managers

to try the article of impeachment in the Senate, again, basically guaranteeing that no Republican senator could go along with it. And even if that wasn't purely partisan motivations, which actually I think that it was, Democrats, and through no fault of their own, same with Republicans, speak a slightly different language than Republicans. And so when you have Democratic House managers making that argument in Senate, I thought Jamie Raskin, and again, we talked about this, did a nice job, a pretty nonpartisan job. He just speaks a different language than Republican senators when it comes

to persuasion and Nancy Pelosi didn't set him up for failure so much as that wasn't failure, that was success. The point was to have as few Republicans as possible join the impeachment because it didn't do the Democratic Party any good to actually remove Donald Trump from office or to ensure that he couldn't run again. They benefit from, they think, the chaos in the Republican Party, or, if not chaos, the sort of Trumpification of the Republican Party. It reminds me a little bit of 2016 when Hillary Clinton's team wanted so badly for Donald Trump to win the nomination because he'd be so easy to beat. I'm not saying it's smart of her, but that is the tactic. Okay. So fast forward to now, you have the January 6th Commission,

something that like you said, Steve, everyone was kind of in favor of until Nancy Pelosi made it a political issue where now if you vote for it, you're handing a win to the Democratic Party. So yeah, the Republicans have to be against it. I don't even particularly blame them. I don't think that this commission would do the things that it, in theory, could have done if it were set up to be an actual January 6th commission. Nancy Pelosi is setting this up to be a Democratic report on why Republicans are bad commission, again, could have had a different commission. But at that point, yeah, that's why Republicans are against it now. It's a little hard to blame them, given just how partisan she has made an event that really, I think, could have brought the country together

in a meaningful way because she sees a political benefit. And I think it's a real shame. So, David, Sarah is, I think, certainly right that Nancy Pelosi got this off on bad footing with a partisan proposal like that. Kevin McCarthy tapped John Katko, representative from New York, to engage in these negotiations to see if there could be some common ground on the makeup of the commission. Democrats, by all accounts, have come around. So we're now talking about what would be a bipartisan commission. Five Republicans, five Democrats is one of the latest. proposals. There's still some haggling over staffing partisan affiliations. But it looks like Democrats are now on board with what Democrats and Republicans were talking about quietly before

Nancy Pelosi dropped her stink bomb in all of this. So I guess the question is, why are Republicans still opposing it? Is Sarah Wright that that just so poisoned the process that you really can't get beyond it? Or is there something more going on here? I mean, are Republicans opposing it because they don't want to have Democrats and Republicans and a commission look at the actions of the Republican president, his conversations with Kevin McCarthy, who would undoubtedly be called as a witness? What's the real story? I hate to disagree with my esteemed advisory opinions co-host. But I don't think this January 6th was ever going to have even the remotest possibility of bringing us together because of the president of the United States at the time and the leader

of the GOP, the now, if there was ever any question now that Liz Cheney has been deposed from her seat for reminding people about the truth of the election publicly and repeatedly when they continue to acknowledge leader of the party is publicly and repeatedly lying to the American people. Look, I mean, you have this giant distortion effect here and Donald Trump. And until that distortion effect is removed from its influence over the Republican Party,

I don't think there was ever a chance for this January 6th commission to be constructed in a way that was ultimately going to satisfy Republicans. if it was going to be taking a rigorous look. You could agree with multiple demands made by Republicans, and if it's still going to take a very, very hard look, all-encompassing look at what happened on 1-6, it's going to create a partisan issue

because this is something that Donald Trump does not want. And if Donald Trump does not want it, then Republicans are going to rally to him. It's just that simple. Not all of them. there will be always a few, a few who won't. But if he doesn't want it, they're going to rally to him. And then it's all reasoning backwards from there.

And Nancy Pelosi, it's absolutely true. We'll often give some Republicans some freebies, but we shouldn't distract ourselves from the fundamental fact that once Trump is against something, it's all rationalization from that point forward. Jonah, Sarah suggested that Nancy Pelosi might want the issue here more than the commission. But if what David suggests is true, the commission itself, even if it's constructed in a bipartisan manner, might cause real problems. I mean, the more that's known about Donald Trump and his actions on January 6th, I think it's fair to say the worst for the Republican Party.

I mean, the things that we've learned about what Donald Trump was doing, you had Trump, White House staffers telling reporters that he was delighted by what he was witnessing. You had Kevin McCarthy's famous phone call where he talked to the president and asked the president to get the protesters to stand down. And the president said, in effect, they care about the election more than you do. Kevin, you know, the more we've learned about this, there were the gap. in sending reinforcements to help block further results on the Capitol. The more we've learned about this, the worse it's looked for Donald Trump and Republicans.

Isn't that why they oppose this? It's one of them. I mean, I reject monocausal explanations for why we can't have nice things. This thing, I agree with Sarah entirely that Nancy Pelosi is not interested in being the leader of an institution called the House of Representatives. She's interested in being the leader of an institution called the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, and she acts accordingly. I think the analogy to the impeachment stuff is perfectly legit in the sense that if Kevin McCarthy and Nancy Pelosi took their job seriously as leaders of a political institution and shrined in the Constitution, rather than leaders of their parties, they would have responded to impeachment. they would have responded to January 6th with impeachment hearings, if not that day, then the next morning.

But everyone is staying in their lanes. But I also think, yes, this all reflects very poorly on Donald Trump. I think that is obvious, and they don't want to do that, and it will make Donald Trump mad. And if McCarthy agreed to do it, I mean, we've got to remember McCarthy has his motives, too. And McCarthy wants to be Speaker of the House. I am kind of actually hoping he become that Republicans take back the House just so that we can watch what he does

when Trump betrays him and doesn't endorse him for Speaker. But that's a conversation for another day. McCarthy would have a hard time being Speaker if he agreed to doing this commission in any way, because it would piss off Trump, it would also conceivably put him under oath to say things that got Trump in a lot of trouble or got McCarthy in a lot of trouble for perjuring himself.

Or, you know, I don't know, can you take the fifth? Can you plead the fifth in an inquiry like that? I have no idea. But, um, uh, so I, look, I think it is so transparently obvious that, uh, that the January 6th has now just simply become, you know, a constitutional version of the access Hollywood tape. If you condemn it, it means you're anti-Trump. and the real tell that this is, again,

I always go to the psychological on the Trump stuff because I don't think the political is as explanatory. It reminds me a lot of the first impeachment. Remember during the first impeachment? I remember having this conversation with people at the Fox Green Room all over the place where people would say, you know, what Trump is being accused of,

pressuring a foreign leader to do, to find dirt, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. that's actually what Biden did with the Ukraine. It's, it's, you know, what, what they're accusing Trump of is what Biden actually did. And I'd be like, well, okay, it's not. But let's say it is. Do you think what Biden did was bad? And they say, yes, of course not.

Of course it is. It's outrageous. And I say, okay, do you think if it were true, what Trump is accused of is bad? And they would say, no, no, it's fine. Politicians do that kind of thing all the time. If you look at Trump's statement, you know, his latest, you know, word salad fired out of a T-shirt gun at the American people, he says, uses this talking point that McCarthy is used, right? This red herring thing about how if we don't look at the violence of the softball, of the baseball practice against, you know, Congressman, Republican Congressman, if we don't look at Portland, then why should we look at January 6? Well, a couple things.

One, January, the baseball game happened when Republicans were controlling Congress. If they wanted to hold hearings investigating that, they could have. But more importantly, why are you comparing what you think was no big deal in terms of January 6th to things that you think are moral outrages of the first order, right? You can't have it both ways. If, you know, they thought what happened in Portland in anti-fob violence and BLM violence, you know, real and alleged. Portland and Seattle and where else justified martial law and now they're saying we can't talk

about January 6 unless we talk about those things too well are you conceding that January 6 was comparable to these things that you thought were so outrageous they required martial law no no no because what January 6 was was absolutely fine we just want to bring up stuff that's inconvenient for Democrats it's all psychological projection deflection and other things that end in shun. And it's all nonsense. And it's just, again, why monocausal theories of why we can't have bad things are not sufficient. So not a normal tourist day on January 6th. So I think you're right. And I think you're wise to reject monocausal explanations for things. I will say, I think in this case, there is an overriding driving cause for why Republicans have behaved.

the way that they have. On the one hand, House Republicans, Republicans in general, do not want this commission established. Even if it's a bipartisan commission, I think it's highly likely that it will reflect poorly on Donald Trump and on the behavior of House Republicans and the leadership. At the very same time, House Republican leadership does not want to be seen as opposing a January 6th commission, because after what we saw on January 6th, why would they oppose an inquiry to tell us exactly what happened. Who's opposed to more information? So what we saw, I think, from Kevin McCarthy was this sort of non-leadership for which he's become famous. He didn't really come out and oppose it. He didn't come out for it. What happened was it became clear

and clearer that a growing number, a substantial minority of House Republicans, were likely to vote in favor of the establishment of a commission. That occurred to Kevin McCarthy and Steve Glees after they said that they weren't going to whip for or against it. And then Kevin McCarthy came out and opposed it. Steve Glees said he was going to whip to oppose it to make it the official Republican position to oppose it so that he could keep a growing number of those Republicans from actually voting in favor of it. They did this because in the Senate, Republicans only need to produce 10 votes in order to make this thing happen. And if you take the seven Republicans who voted to impeach. Marker Rubio told our Haley Bird the other day that he was leading in favor of such a

commission. You had Senator Mike Rounds suggest that he would vote in favor of such a commission. You're now at the point where you've got nine potential votes in favor of this thing. And the more votes there are for it in the House, the greater the pressure on Republicans in the Senate to go along with the establishment of the commission. I think that's what's happening in the politics here. It's a toss-up as to whether it actually happens. But I think those are the politics. And I for one think it would be great to have a commission. I think we need to know what happened. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss. And it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take

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Protect your family with life insurance from ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ethos.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. David, speaking of things that bring us together, let's talk about abortion politics. Oh, man. Speaking of things that bring us together, that is a, that's a great segue. That's not even true in the dispatch comments section, Sarah. Yeah, yeah. So here is, I'm going to start with you, and here's the preface for those who don't know and who unforgivably did not listen to yesterday's advisory opinions podcast, which was excellent,

by the way, because not only did we discuss this case that I'm about to talk about, we also discussed cicada butt fungus at length. You talked about my college band? Wow. One of our better podcasts. But anyway, Supreme Court has taken review in a case called Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. It's a case that challenges Mississippi's ban on abortions after 15 weeks, except in cases of medical emergency or severe fetal abnormality. Ed Wayland from the Ethics and Public Policy Center says this might be one of the best opportunities.

the Supreme Court will ever have to end the Roe regime. And he's got a few reasons. Scotus can overrule Roe by a supermajority. Because the judges are relatively young, the ruling could be durable. A ruling this early in the Biden's presidency would grant state's time to react to the decision before the next presidential election. And the Mississippi law is relatively popular. Only about 29% of Americans think that abortion should be generally allowed after the first

three months of pregnancy. So let's imagine for a moment, Sarah, put on your imaginary future hat as a close observer and participant in American politics. If this happened, if in fact the Supreme Court said, yeah, this is and this is the time to overrule row politically, just thinking of this politically, would the GOP be like the dog that caught the car? Yeah. So when you look at the politics of this, Republicans tend to be court voters, about 10 points ahead of Democrats. So if the court is on the ballot, that is good news for Republicans. You combine that with midterms, generally favoring Republicans and combine that with the historical advantage that the opposition party to the president has in that first midterm. And you'd be painting a pretty rosy picture for Republicans in 2022. The problem is that this isn't the court on the ballot as much as we've seen in the past where, for instance, in 2016 with the death of Antonin Scalia, it was truly a Supreme Court seat. Who's going to fill it? A Republican or a Democrat? No question that that motivated some real percentage of Republicans.

I think it was still relatively small, but with an election that was as narrow as that one was, we call them the butt gorsuch voters based on who ended up with that seat but the but gorsuch voters were probably a but for cause of Donald Trump becoming president among others but fungus but gorses but four I mean it's it's I need a chart

too easy but David you're right this is actually then with a win and the biggest win that the pro life movement will have ever had since its inception in 1973, really, do they sit back on their laurels or does the wind motivate them? I think actually the more apt comparison then is the Amy Coney-Barrant seat in 2020,

where if that seat had been left open, you would have had a repeat of 2016, you have an open seat, who's going to fill it? And we know that Republicans are more motivated by that than Democrats. but with the seat already filled and no more seats really on the horizon do people sit back or just vote on certain other issues. I think abortion politics is just so, so different, David.

And you've talked about the abortion distortion. I think that is absolutely true on how it would affect the midterm elections as well. That all being said, I think it's very unlikely that we would have an opinion that said,

Dear America, Roe v. Wade is overturned, X-O-X-XO, Sam Alito. What about XOXO Clarence Thomas? I don't, well, more likely. I don't think that's going to happen. I think what you're mostly going to have is a redefining of the Casey undue burden standard that basically just allows for some pre-viability restrictions, particularly in the second

trimester, after heartbeat, something to that effect, in which case, I think both sides will then message it. But I think it is almost impossible to overestimate just how cataclysmic that will be on the left, whatever the decision is, aside from striking down the Mississippi ban, which I think is also very unlikely. Right. So Jonah, one thing that I think is incredibly predictable, we cannot predict the outcome. But one thing that is incredibly predictable is that we're going to have two waves of sort of convulsive political rhetoric and protest, and that's going to be right around the time of the oral argument and right around the time of the decision. How bad is it going to get? I think it's going to get really bad. You know, I mean,

the conventional wisdom, you guys correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I think we talked about this before, is that cultural issues like abortion are good for Democrats in terms of fundraising and good for Republicans in terms of turnout. And I think that you're going to see so much catastrophization on the left about this because they've spent an enormous amount of time telling people that if you get rid of Roe, that means abortion is illegal in all 50 states. And they're just, I'm always astounded at how many people I meet. We're very well-educated serious people who believe that, that like if Roe goes tomorrow, that New York State or California will then ban abortion tomorrow. And I'm pretty sure that's not true. Um, and,

but a lot of those very educated, well-meaning, sincere people who believe that kind of thing happen to have these jobs called news anchors on cable television. And they are going to hype this. They're going to raise the Nairout crowd is going to raise an enormous amount of money at this. And that's what makes it so fascinating. If we take out all the moral and philosophical and spiritual issues out of this and just look at it as pure politics, it's so fascinating to figure how you gain this out in terms of the old conventional wisdom about turnout for Republicans and money raising for Democrats could go out the window

and you could have massive turnout from Democrats in midterms because of this but where they would turn out may not matter that much in the midterms and and so I think it's you mean 95% turnout in Brooklyn would not change the balance of power exactly The AOC's district is just going to go on fire because of all of this. And at the same time, look, I mean, I think if the Supreme Court actually threw out Roe in whole or in part and said that these kinds of restrictions were permissible under some new standard or revised Casey or whatever you legal types with belts say, the, you could see some on the right. being stuck in this very strange place of well wait a second we were told we've been you know we locked into this idea that these fed fed sock type judges were pointless and we haven't won anything and now how do we explain this and then you could also see other like the the sincere and

decent sort of shock troops of the pro-life movement turning to state politics because that's where the fight will be sent right if all of a sudden you can you can have uh abortion restructs of one kind or another, they'll stop camping out in front of the Supreme Court and start camping out in front of the State House, which I think, as even you were noting in the, I shouldn't say even you, as you were noting in the French press, you know, that's kind of where even Ruth Bader Ginsburg kind of was. And so I think that would be salutary, even if it brought a lot of drama, to turn political passions away from Washington and towards local politics would be a net positive, but I also could see Nancy Pelosi mobilizing tomorrow to

create the Restore Roe Act of 2022 or whatever, and then we have nationalized politics all over again. So, Steve, Jonah was sort of heading exactly in the direction that I was going to head with the question to you, and that is, I've always thought of Roe as committing a double wrong. It was wrong on the merits. It was just the idea that the Constitution of the United States of America protects the right to an abortion is just, in my view, wrong on the merits. But it also committed a very serious process wrong. And what it essentially did is it said and was part of this whole process of ending the primacy of the legislature in American national politics. because what it sent a message to America was elect the right presidents, get the right judges,

and you get the outcome you want. And am I hopelessly idealistic to say that after an initial convulsive sort of raging controversy of a reversal of row, that over time it could actually have a positive effect on American democracy, and then it would start to restore the primacy of the legislature? Or would the convulsive effect be so dramatic that essentially the court-packing argument wouldn't just become and wouldn't be an argument anymore, it would be a demand, and then we'd be in a cycle of escalation that would end, that would have an unpredictable end.

Yeah, hopelessly idealistic. It is, I mean, I would love to be to be with you. in sharing that idealism, sharing that optimism. But if I'm being honest and blunt about it, I don't at all. I mean, we've seen that this kind of outrage politics sort of ratchets in one direction and it's up. And it's just hard for me to believe that. I mean, for a couple reasons.

One, most of our debates in politics don't actually... involve the substantive merits of the policies. So I think we're unlikely to see that. But to the extent that we discuss and debate process, it's a small part of the broader discussion of these issues, the process anymore. I mean, I would say 15, 20 years ago, you would have a good chunk of the right-making process arguments

and trying to establish the importance of the process, by which decisions get made. And you'd have, I would argue, the left, making the arguments that what matters is really outcomes. We've seen that, as we've discussed here before. It hasn't flipped, but I would say you've had many people on the right now sort of throwing the process arguments away and saying, no, no, no, it's just all about outcomes.

It's all about power, it's all about outcomes all of the time. And so the likelihood that, we would, in the aftermath of such a decision, return to either a substantive discussion of the merits of the policies or, more unlikely, a substantive and healthy discussion of the process that led to those outcomes strikes me as something out of the science fiction that you love so much. Can I ask a quick question before we move on, and this will be a very quick question. David Leonhardt, the New York Times, has an interesting piece on the public opinion polling on these issues. And David, you've written about this and spoken about it before. But, you know, he notes that there is opposition to repealing Roe in a broad sense between 60 and 70 percent, depending on the polls. But there are also majorities that favor additional restrictions.

What's your sense, having studied this as much as you have, of where public opinion actually resides on this, or is it just mixed because people aren't as focused on the actual substance or the merits of the competing cases? You know, I would say a couple of things on this. One is a lot of abortion polling is essentially useless because it is heavily outcome-dependent based on question phrasing. And as you said, like people who are opposed to overruling Roe, a lot of them think, well, that bans abortion. And so if you ask, should Roe be overturned, a lot of people hear that is should abortion be banned, both on the pro-life side and the pro-choice side, by the way.

so a lot of a polling is useless but i do think there's a a couple of truisms here one is that it's just simply a fact that the the longer the pregnancy progresses the less support there is i mean almost you know so past first trimester if you start to ask people then just time and time and time again 15 weeks 13 weeks 20 weeks whatever you're going to start to have a diminishing amount of support for abortion. However, first trimester abortions, I haven't seen any reliable, consistent national polling that says that a strong majority or a majority at all of Americans would ban abortions early in the pregnancy.

Now, I think that's true, and I think it's also true at the same time that even amongst people who are pro-choice, there is a background level of discomfort with abortion, period. I've written about this, some Notre Dame professors did a fascinating study where they brought in several hundred people, demographically representative, and talked to them about abortion at length. And what they found was even those people were most committed to abortion rights, even the people most committed had a personal discomfort with abortion. So I think that's what those two things at the same time help explain why it is that abortion rights are still broadly protected in the United States of America, and abortion has fallen to a rate below the rate that existed before Roe was decided. And I think that that sort of helps us make sense of it, that there's still a broad consensus, at least in favor of legality for abortion at the time when the vast majority of abortions occur, which is in the first, you know, three months of pregnancy.

but at the same time and also a very widespread discomfort with the practice. And so add those things together. And that's, it gets to a legal abortions with declining abortion rate. 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. Apply. Learn more at mx.ca slash yMex. All right, Jonah. It's not too late to change your topic to cicada butt fungus. I am so talked out of cicada butt fungus, I got to tell you.

It's all I talk about when I'm not doing dispatch stuff. Right. Yeah, so instead of cicada butt fungus, let's talk about bat guanoviruses. And that brings us to this very strange development in the last 10 days or so, where at the beginning of the pandemic, it was seen as almost paranoia of a doctor-strange-lovian level to talk about the coronavirus being a lab leak of some kind. and it was it was seen as akin to arguing that this was a bioweapon attack from the Chinese and you were trafficking in cliches of yellow peril you had the UN and the World Health Organization saying that one of the most important things we need to fight is bigotry against Chinese people for these kinds of ideas um and you had all sorts of and it just the whole conversation was

shut down Tom Cotton who raised these possibilities was shut down or at least they tried to and then all of the last 10 days there have been these really good interesting pieces from across the intellect across the spectrum saying we really got to look at this there's a non-trivial chance that this actually was a lab accident

of some kind whether it was a gain of function research or not we don't know that caused this and this is a serious thing and most scientists think it's a serious thing so I'm going to go to Sarah first do you think it's a serious thing?

And by which I mean, let's say, just for a hypothetical, I talked to Jim Garrity about this on my podcast yesterday, let's say for the sake of argument, we could prove that China was responsible for this in terms of a lab leak of some kind. I'm not saying that doesn't matter, but why does it matter and what would we then do about it? So let's back up to last year

where it was, you know, sort of, that March, April, when that theory really started to get out in front and people were like, no, that's crazy conspiracy. I think at that point, it didn't matter at all how the virus had gotten to us. At that point, we needed to figure out how it was transmitted, how to prevent transmission, whether a vaccine was possible. Like, there were so many other things to prioritize. I think where we are now, it is pretty smart to try to figure out how this happened and do some after action, if you will. You know, will China pay all of us for spending our 16 or so months in lockdown in our houses?

No, I don't think they will. But I think it's actually sometimes just important to know how a catastrophic world event happened just because it's important to know, even if there's not some because to come after that. Do I think it's likely? I have no scientific background in this whatsoever. But I have always said that I don't think we know nearly as much as we should about the virus itself, meaning I don't think we fully even know how it's transmitted. You have, again, this is anecdotal, but you have plenty of stories of some family members

getting it, living with their other family members, those family members not getting it, particularly if they are not related by blood. So people who are married to someone, you know, the spouse doesn't get it, but then the children and the parent gets it, including, by the way, on some of these deaths, we don't even quite know why COVID works the way that it does. This isn't like the flu. The flu doesn't cause strokes and blood clots. So I still think we have a lot of questions about the virus itself. I think how it got to us is a very relevant part of that and may explain why this thing behaves so differently than anything else we've really experienced so far. I wish that these conversations in general didn't turn into some sort of food fight every

single time. And by the way, that's not to say that the people poo-pooing the conspiracy, you know, they're like, oh, it came out of the lab where the bad guys here. I think both sides are very capable of turning this into a food fight because it benefits them. It came out of the lab people were throwing food as well. So, I mean, David, the reason I'm asking it this way is that I think for sure scientists need to figure out

all these things that Sarah is talking about and I would assume, you know, despite my rigorous training in epidemiology, I'm not positive about this, but I would assume finding out that it came from a lab, never mind if it was tweaked with this gain of function thing and for listeners who don't know what gain of function research means basically what this means is you tweak genetically tweak a germ thingy squishy thing to be more contagious more viral because that's how you figure out how to combat it and and there are people who think this is the most unethical thing in the world it's frankenstein's monster stuff and then there are other people who say yeah it's you got to be really good careful, but it's actually really important if you're going to figure out how to combat these things. I'm agnostic on those questions for the moment. But I was talking to our former colleague

Jim Garrity about all this, who's written a lot, who wrote a lot about this last year and got a lot of grief for writing about it, and I thought his stuff was actually pretty persuasive. He's of the mind, and I hear this from other people, that if you could prove that China was responsible for this, and what would then be the single most expensive example of human error, probably in human history. I mean, Gavrillo-Princip intended to shoot the Archduke that set off World War I, right? So this is like some lab jockey not sealing the anal swab of the bat properly. And the last estimate I saw for the United States alone was $16 trillion is what coronavirus is going to Not to mention the nearly 600,000 dead people.

But do you actually think, I'm not convinced that it changes the, it would change the geopolitics that profoundly if it turned out it was China's, you know, fault, as it were. Where do you come down on that? I mean, I think it's an interesting question, but I just don't have it good at my answer in my head. I mean, on the margins, it should change geopolitics in the sense that, it's not so much that if there was a lab leak and it was a true accident and all of this that therefore that should create some sort of cold war because there was a lab leak

but China has a lot to answer for in its transparency from the very beginning moments in very beginning days and that lack of transparency only becomes more egregious if the evidence emerges that they're responsible for this leak, that this, you know, this accidental leak touched off this horrific pandemic that has claimed, you know, millions of lives and will claim many, many more. And so, but at the same time, it's not as if this leak and then the lack of transparency and in some cases outright deception came from a nation that we were otherwise thinking was that we were otherwise what I am shocked I am shocked that China is engaged in misconduct I mean this is a this is a nation that is engaged in

genocidal ethnic cleansing tactics against the Uyghurs that is an unquestioned bad actor in world affairs and is deeply oppressive of its own people so in in a in a real way its conduct since the coronavirus emerged is consistent with what we know who, you know, what the People's Republic of China is, is consistent with that. Now, that then should allow us to go to the world in this sort of contest of ideas and between, you know, the United States and the PRC and the sort of trying to convince others to be, you know, to the extent that there's some sort of new Cold War emerging to be aligned with us, that this. is another data point, another strike against the People's Republic of China. Yeah, absolutely.

But we've known the nature of the People's Republic of China for a long time. It's just an additional data point. But unquestionably, it is still an additional data point. Their conducts since the virus emerged has been egregious, quite frankly. And if this is something that If you're talking about a functioning, a nation that is a functioning and responsible member of the world community, and they knew they had a leak on their hands, the absolute first thing that they would do is they would say, we have a leak on our hands, here's everything we know about this virus that has been in our lap. Here's all of it. Here's everything that we know. Instead, you have this, you know, if it did come from the lab, instead you have this whole, you know,

bat wet market theory that turns into a giant misdirection and that should be held against the Chinese government if that turns out to be the case. Now does it fundamentally change how we view the Communist Party of China and the People's Republic of China? No, I don't think so, but it is certainly an additional data element. Yeah. So I agree with that at the same time, you know, convincing the world to be you got to be really angry at China now for this but not for like the genocide you know it's I don't I it feels like it's pushing a wet noodle on a carpet kind of thing right I mean if you're not upset about the Uyghurs and all of that but now now you should I mean right yeah I mean so and also I mean I mean Steve you can take this any direction you want but it seems to

me that other than the the science the need for the scientific inquiry which I think is real Um, the ability to ever make this a significant political talking point on the geopolitical level or on the local level, um, is almost impossible because the Chinese, you know, the Chinese will say any evidence that the scientists come up with is fabricated. This is an anti-Chinese thing. Um, and it will probably sort of like we were talking about before with the January 6 commission and abortion, this will be another thing that is just massaged into competing worldviews, you know, and like Israel, like everything we talk about, ever. And so, you know, where do you come down on this? What is, like, what is the, you know, first of all,

Why do you think all of a sudden it's okay to talk about this in ways that it wasn't a year ago? Let's start with the most important thing to say at this point. We don't know. We don't know what's happened here. It's still the case that there's sort of deep inquiry that needs to take place and that we're really just on the front end of that for the reasons that I think all three of you have suggested. Having said that, I think I disagree pretty profoundly with each of you in different ways. I think this is hugely important. I think it was something, I think it was an investigation that should have taken place immediately without any delay in a more serious way, particularly by global health bodies who seem to be running cover for communist China rather than actually helping aid in.

inquiry. And I think if it's shown that the Chinese are responsible for a lab leak and then covered it up, it will have profound geopolitical implications. To the point you were making about the Uyghurs, I just think it's very difficult to get countries around the world to carry about, even though I think it is now an established fact that the Chinese have Uyghurs in these work camps, these concentration camps, upwards of millions of them, that it's tremendous human rights abuse. It's easier for the leaders of countries to say, in effect, without actually having to say it out loud, our economic interests override human rights concerns about what may or may not be happening in China. That's an argument that, again, if they don't

have to say it out loud, it's easy for them to convince their own populations of the merits of that case. I think it's altogether different to say to your own population, a lot of our people may be dead because the Chinese lied about this thing because they were sloppy in the lab and because they lied about it and they covered it up. And, you know, basically what we've seen, you know, over the last 10 days, but I would really argue over the last several months is the world catching up to Josh Rogan. Josh Rogan is a columnist with the Washington Post who's been on this for months and months and months, not with idle and irresponsible speculation, but with reporting. He uncovered State Department cables from 2017 and 2018 suggesting that U.S. diplomats in China had profound concerns about

the irresponsible handling of this research. in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And to the extent that you can do this in diplomatic cables were sounding the alarms about the possibility of a lab leak. I think what happened was you had this embrace of the lab leak theory. Tom Cotton made, I think, a rather restrained

and reasonable case when he made it, but it took off on the right. You had President Trump, who had repeatedly in his public statements, vouched for the good faith in the transparency of the Chinese regime, oddly enough. Go back and look at it. There are more than a dozen examples of President Trump praising President Xi for his handling of this and saying that they had been transparent.

But at some point that flips. And on the right, this theory, these theories, or actually not the Lab League theory, but the engineered bioweapon theory, takes off in the fever swamps of the right. And I think what happened is that caused, there was substantial scientific skepticism of the lab leak theory from the beginning. You layer on top of that the growth of the theory itself and then all of these theories that were less plausible and, you know, were propagated by people like the people who were pushing QAnon theories and Pizagate theories and sort of. elite American reporting world and political world decided to just shelve the lab league theory, didn't pursue it very carefully. I'm not speculating about this. There's a very interesting and important piece written by Don McNeil, who was the lead reporter on this for

the New York Times, wrote a post on medium, and walked people through his own evolution. This is somebody who I think is regarded in the world as one of the leading experts on viruses, on public health. In general, he's been covering this for a couple decades. Very well thought of in that. He was dismissed for the time for unrelated reasons. But McNeil writes a story. It's a narrative, 2,000 words. This is why I've come to take seriously this lab league theory. And he walks through this. And he says, this was being pushed by the pizza gators. All the scientists I knew were dismissing it. The WHO wasn't taking it seriously. But as he has followed this and investigated it more and followed the reporting of people like Josh Rogan,

it's become clearer and clearer that this is, in fact, plausible. It may be more plausible than the market theories. And what's indisputable at this point is that the Chinese Communist Party has covered this up. Whatever the actual explanation is, the Chinese Communist Party does not want the world to know it. And that's been clear from the very beginning. I think that's why it was imperative that that, investigation, Sarah, I take your point. I mean, obviously the most important thing in those early

days was figuring out how to stem the growth of the virus. But those, every day that we weren't spending, looking at where the virus came from, not just for geopolitical reasons, but for public health reasons, was a day that we were getting further and further away from actually getting the most accurate explanation of what happened. I do think it's important. Final point, I'm sorry for the long rant. If we find out that the Chinese, that this was a lab leak and that the Chinese covered it up, I do think there will be profound geopolitical implications because people won't be able, leaders of other countries won't be able to say to their own populations, no big deal.

You know, we still need to trade with the Chinese for these five reasons. They will say, this is a profound breach of faith with. the world and a rogue nation acting like a rogue nation. All right, let me, let me, let's, let's suppose that it was, in fact, a lab leak, and you're exactly right to say, we don't know, we don't know, but let's suppose that it is. Steve, it's never going to be, you know, the Chinese are not going to go our bad. Yeah, you caught us. You caught us. They're always going to say that's completely wrong, that's completely fake.

They're always going to provide a pretext for, and because the issue, you know, The issue with China is not that is there sufficient evidence that the PRC is a bad actor. The core issue with China is it's really stinking powerful. It's very powerful. It's very powerful economically. It's incredibly powerful economically. It is growing in power militarily. And there are going to be enormous incentives because of China's power to not put the emphasis on this.

China's going to give all the pretext that you could want to not impose the consequences that you would think would flow from a discovery like this. Absolutely. I agree with everything you're saying there. My assumption is there will never come a point where the Chinese say, you know what? Holy cow, our bad. I think that's why pencils have erasers. I think that's almost certain to be the outcome.

think a rigorous investigation that gets to the bottom is demanded by global health authorities. This goes back to whether we're better off working within the WHO to take on the Chinese or getting out of the WHO and fighting separately. I think would establish that. I mean, I think there are going to be scientific indicators about what's happened here that I think will likely give us an answer whether the Chinese want us to have it or not. Well, I mean, I also, but I also wonder, you know, if you're China and you run Wuhan and you still run the lab and people outside of China are calling for a rigorous investigation, they're also not going to go, well, come on. Here you know, here's our stuff. So, and they'll throw up all the smoke screens. This is ridiculous. This is anti-Asian bias. This is et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so, you know, I feel like this. idea, I think over time and maybe over years, it may emerge, just sort of the full truth of

this might emerge. But I think the idea that we're going to have a eureka moment on this, especially any way that's definitive enough and timely enough to create the geopolitical response that you're anticipating or thinking might occur. I just don't know with what the mechanism for that is. Yeah, I mean, like the HBO Chernobyl series probably tells you all you need to know about how the Chinese government has if it is a lab leak, how it responded to all this. And I think that time frame is an

optimistic time frame. What, Chernobyl was what? 88, something like that. We got a, we got the truth of it. We had to wait for the end of the Soviet Union to get even a little truth to it. And I think similarly you're going to need to see the end of the rule of the Chinese Communist Party. And even

then you may not get it because what replaces the Chinese Communist Party will probably be a nationalistic regime. But I just don't think we're going to get a, we're probably never going to get a dispositive answer unless there is some genetic marker that can be proved in all of this. And since it mutates so much, I doubt that that will be dispositive. And if we do get proof, it is going to be a generation away. All right. I'm sad we didn't have enough time for the butt fungus. But maybe next time, the cicadas will be with us for another four to six weeks, I'm told. So until then, thanks for listening. Go rate us, Apple Podcasts, or

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