The Dispatch Podcast - The Politics of Stank

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

With Biden’s legislative agenda coming up against many roadblocks in Congress, Sarah, Steve, David, and Jonah debate which one of Biden’s main objectives will actually be made into law. Then, the gang explains even though Florida’s new “anti-Big Tech” law is likely to be unconstitutional, it could be a political win for DeSantis and anyone else who hitches their wagon to taking on Big Tech. Also in an extended, well-informed discussion about the violent crime spike, The Dispatch Podcast-ers talk about how we got in this situation, how to get out of it, and the politics of crime. Finally, Putin and leaders in Belarus have taken drastic measures to muzzle a journalist critical of the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, and the group discusses whether the threat of nuclear war is warranted to get the journalist back. Show Notes: The French Press on Florida’s anti-Big Tech law Could you beat a grizzly bear in unarmed combat? Violent crime spike No one wants to be a cop David’s French Press on the Columbus police shooting The Morning Dispatch on Belarus’ plane hijacking Taiwan is a country Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgir, joined by Steve Hayes, David French, and Jonah Goldberg. Today, we are talking about Biden's stalled legislative agenda, Florida's new tech bill, the rise in crime, and the airspace in Belarus. Let's dive right in. Big disappointment for the Biden White House this week. They wanted the leasing reform bill done on Tuesday, the one-year anniversary of George Floyd's death. They're not particularly close to a compromise on that over specifically qualified immunity, civil liability for police officers who violate someone's civil rights. The January 6th Commission, Republicans are moving further away from it, not closer, And then perhaps most importantly to the White House, the infrastructure bill, the Biden administration started out asking for $2.3 trillion. Republicans counted with $500 billion. There are more than a trillion dollars apart. Democrats have said if they can't get Republicans on board in the next week, they're going to go it alone, which is sort of how you don't end up with any incentive to compromise. So, David, my question to you is, does the Biden administration need Republicans?

Well, I mean, it needs Republicans so long as the Senate parliamentarian Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema say they need Republicans, at least as far as you're talking about kind of the raw power politics of it all, and so long as they say you need them, then you need them. And there's this interesting definition of bipartisanship that the Biden administration has adopted, which doesn't have much to do with bipartisanship. in Congress, it's essentially saying we're going to pursue legislative initiatives that have bipartisan support in the country. In other words, there are lots of Republicans in the country who like this. And there's a certain logic to that. I mean, there's a certain re-election logic

to that, that you can look and you can say, look, here's what we did with the tiny majority that we had as we pursued these initiatives that most of you guys liked. And, you know, the Republicans to the extent that we wanted to do more, the Republicans blocked us from doing more of the things that you like. But the reality is that Biden agenda is going to be limited and brief unless it can start to bring some Republicans on board for some things. And I have the most hope in the crime bill. I have the most hope in the crime bill.

I think there's some real opportunity. for compromise. It feels like it's just laying there. It just feels like it's right in front of them. And it's come to terms. Senator Scott has moved on qualified immunity. He is granting increasing the ability to hold municipalities liable. That's a big move. That will help people in the real world. So it feels like there's a compromise just right there, just right there. But outside of the crime bill, I'm not seeing a lot of potential. And I'm not seeing that, you know, cinema and mansion moving on the filibuster. So the Biden legislative agenda may be kind of short.

Jonah, the Democrats argument is that they will be judged on what they get done, not on whether there was bipartisan support for it in Congress heading into the midterms. Is that the correct political calculation? Yes and no, right? I mean, first of all, they'll be judged by Democrats about what they got done. But if what they get done is unpopular with all Republicans and a big chunk of, you know, moderates, independence, whatever label you want to put on it, but popular with the base, it's not clear to me that that helps them in 2022.

And, you know, I mean, I've been banging my spoon on my high chair about this for a while now. Every time a president comes in the office with unified control of both houses of Congress, they tend to overreach. The nature of Biden's overreach is even greater because the control, the margin of control they have in both houses is so tiny. And to swing for the fences like this almost demands that there's going to be a correction. sooner or later. I mean, all the historical forces, all the, all the historical wins are at the Republicans back for taking back the House anyway. And the, the theory of bipartisanship that David referenced before, which we heard a lot from Democrats saying, look, it's, it's, it's, it's bipartisan with voters. It doesn't have to be bipartisan with Congress. That's true. So long as

the legislation you're talking about is in fact bipartisan with voters. And that's not the case for most of the things on their agenda, and the idea that they were going to extrapolate from one very popular bill about COVID relief that was popular in part because it sent cash to human beings. And there's a well-established finding in the social science literature that people like free money. And the idea that that would therefore be replicable for all of these other, you know, pieces of legislation just always sort of seem fanciful to me. And there was a lot of believing the hype after his congressional address, you know, this idea that somehow the one-year anniversary of George Floyd's death would be this major serious deadline

rather than an entirely arbitrary deadline just seemed fanciful to me, but a lot of people in the press took it seriously and a lot of Democrats seem to think everyone else would and they wouldn't. And so I think the part of the flawed agenda, the flawed, I'm sorry, the stalled agenda for Biden is entirely explicable by the fact that they they had a theory that you could do this bipartisan thing with everything on their agenda when they couldn't. And it turns out that you actually need to get votes from the other side and they didn't have a very good strategy for doing that.

And now they're playing catch up trying to figure out actually how to get Republican votes for things. And given the level of polarization, that's hard. So Steve, the progressive left wants Biden. to move immediately faster. Memorial Day was the deadline. If you can't get it done in the week after Memorial Day,

do reconciliation, get the infrastructure passed, get $2.3 trillion, get $10 trillion, whatever. Joe Manchin is saying, this is the long game, we need more time, stop rushing things.

It doesn't matter whether it's in two weeks or 30 days. Who's right? That's a good question. Who's right politically? I'm more sympathetic to the Joe Manson mansion case than I am to the case being made by progressives. But there is, there is, there's some peril for Biden if he follows the root of the progressives. I mean, we could look back in six months or 12 months and say he was able to force through these things.

Infrastructure, I think, is the most likely. It's the one thing we know we can do on his. his own. Manchin has suggested he's not going to budge, even though he's disappointed that Mitch McConnell's not in favor of a January 6th commission. Manchin made it quite clear. That doesn't change his view on the filibuster. Police reform seems to me like something that actually could happen in a bipartisan fashion, but infrastructure strikes me as a thing that is most likely for Democrats to go it alone. Biden is getting pressure from Kirsten Gillibrand, others in the Senate, obviously progressives in the House to just go ahead and do it.

as you say. The risk there for Biden is he campaigned as a guy who could bridge these partisan differences, right? I mean, that was the main, that was one of his main selling points. He had, you know, a policy agenda. He vowed to return us back to normal. He said, in effect, I'm not Donald Trump. But one of the things was, you know, we have this broken politics in our country and I can be the guy to fix it. And remember his, his, uh, in office, uh, you know, was all about unity and he feels it in his soul. If he can't get a bipartisan infrastructure package, that's a failure. I mean, infrastructure, there are Republicans who want to do infrastructure and there are Republicans who want to do pretty big infrastructure, a lot bigger

than I would want to do. If he can't convince 10 of them to get on board and keep the progressives in the Democratic Party, not only along with him, but enthusiastic about it, I think it's a problem. The snags right now are, you know, there's this, there's a group that the Biden White House has been working with. Shelly Moore Capito from West Virginia has been leading that group. They have had a number of places where they don't see eye to eye. There's this second group, Mitt Romney and others are a part of that. They're coming up with sort of a backstop proposal if the official negotiations fail. But Republicans really don't want to get into paying for these things with tax hikes and have been pretty clear.

Mitch McConnell has said, without qualification, we're not doing that. We're not rolling back to 2017 taxes. Joe Biden has said also unequivocally, no, I'm not raising taxes on anybody making less than $400,000. It looks already, there are analyses already that his current tax proposals will have that effect on some people. But he's unlikely to go for a user fees or gas taxes or higher tolls because the White House views that as going back on that promise. So I think there's some risk for Biden if he doesn't find a way to do this because he sold himself as the guy who can find a way to do this.

All right. We're going to do a McLaughlin style question now. Biden has several legislative priorities, the January 6th Commission, the infrastructure. structure package, police reform, immigration, and voting rights. Which, if any of these, will have become law by the end of 2021, David. Police reform. Jonah. Infrastructure was in that list, right?

Yeah. Infrastructure. Steve. Police reform and infrastructure. Ooh, I think I got to give it to Steve here. Steve, you are correct. All right. Let's move topics.

Next up, David. Yeah, so the war against big tech entered a new phase yesterday with Governor Ron DeSantis signing into law a anti-Big Tech censorship law. Now, this has a few aspects to it that are interesting if you followed sort of the conservative legal movement and conservative arguments over the last. I don't know, 40 years. But one of them is it is going to require social media companies to platform or host candidates for office, statewide or local office.

And if a social media company de-platforms bans a candidate for statewide or local office, there are very large daily fines that accrue. It's also going to require platforms to host the content of that come from news media outlets that in other words it's going to require you cannot engage in any sort of content discrimination um it will not i'll quote any cannot take any action to censor deep platform or shadowblan a journalistic enterprise based on the content of its publication or broadcast and also puts the state looking over the shoulder of social media moderation um now this runs a foul

of the Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Most legal scholars say it's unconstitutional. This sounds more like an advisory opinions topic, Sarah. Do you think that this is a legitimate effort

to regulate social media? Or is this a political action by Governor DeSantis to put him on the right side of the GOP base, knowing this thing is likely to go down in flames in court. So we've talked about paid press releases in the sweep, in various parts of the dispatch,

and sometimes on this podcast, I think. This is the idea that campaigns spend a little bit of money, for instance, a moving billboard outside the GOP conference that costs, let's say, $10,000. And the reason to do that is to get a couple news stories that say, hey, look, the D-Triple-C put a moving billboard outside the GOP conference to troll them. It's a paid press release. This is like legislative press release. I absolutely think that they know full well that it gets struck down, but that's sort of the point. It'll get a lot of attention. DeSantis is building his platform for 2024. I think he's doing it very well. And by the way, I've gotten some slack for this

in the comments. That doesn't mean I agree with that. it just means that politically speaking, it's well executed. Interestingly, David, I don't know if you followed the Texas version of this that they're trying to pass before Sinai falls in Texas. Texas legislature is only in session for about six months every two years. We love our freedom. Their bill goes further. It's the same idea, but in fact, it applies to all viewpoint neutrality.

So if they were both to pass around the same time, actually think the Texas one makes a better lawsuit vehicle to get struck down than the Florida one. But the Florida one's getting all the attention right now, A, because it passed, and B, because it's first. So, Steve, is this, when you take this law, you would take the Texas law, and you combine it with some of the anti-woke laws that are circulating around the country. There seems to be a rush to pass laws that are really quite sweeping and dictating what teachers can say in class, some of them even extending to what professors can say in universities.

Is this concrete evidence that the GOP is taking the authoritarian turn that some folks have long warned about but has yet to have really materialized in policy? It's too early to say, I think. If you look at what Republicans are doing and what DeSantis did, the reason this is challenging for him is because he's trying to take, you know, this element, maybe the leading element of performative politics on the right right now is this fight against big tech. What he's trying to do, because Ron DeSantis has built a reputation as a guy who gets stuff done, is translate that into actual policy.

And as you pointed out here, and as you pointed out at greater length in, in, your newsletter from yesterday, there's massive problems with turning that into policy. And I don't know, I don't think that many of the rank-and-file Republicans who are clamoring for elected officials to do something about big tech are necessarily following the details of this proposed legislation or legislation like it. to know, to even know whether they favor it or oppose it. The worry from my perspective is that, you know, somebody reads a sober-minded critique like the one that you published in your newsletter

last night and might say, wow, okay, there are some real problems with this. Maybe we don't want to take these steps. This seems to go too far, even before it gets to the courts. You know, they might say legislative, this is something that we don't want to do. The problem is, I think you have a Republican electorate that is so eager for the fight about anything, just fight, just fight, that the actual policies come second. They don't matter as much. And that's what I worry is you'll find people going along with this because it's a fight, because it's taking on big tech, even if we get to the point where the ramifications are pretty obviously bad. yeah i mean one of the ramifications of these bills is that it would open up family platforms for example to porn you know i mean this is people haven't really thought this through uh jonah i i'm sure uh that you have to suffer from the same malady as i do which is an inbox overrun with

republican fundraising appeals and i i can't unsubscribe for fast enough to keep up with the new lists I become a part of. And I don't know about you, but my inbox is all about big tech tyranny, cancel culture, and wokeness. It's all about that. Is this where the beating heart of the base is? Is this where if you're really wanting to connect with the base, you're not talking infrastructure, you're not talking about police reform. You're talking about big tech, cancel culture, and wokeness. Yes, and voter and an election integrity, I think. Correct. Right. Right. With big air quotes, massive Thanksgiving Day parade balloon air quotes around

election integrity. But yeah, no, I think so. I mean, I think Steve is largely the right. I think that it's that, you know, the case of the party cares more about owning libs, about taking the fight, about the sort of the stuff I've been calling, you know, Olensky envy for a decade now, then it cares about public policy stuff. And I think I just, it feels like interest in actual

needy-gritty of policy stuff, which was always exaggerated on the right and on the left. You know, politics is, you know, people, whenever I would listen to people say, oh, that's just, you know, those are wedge issues or that's, Symbolism and blah, blah. I was like, yeah, that's called politics.

And so we shouldn't think that this is, you know, this is something truly new under the sun. It's just worse than it's been in a long time. And the thing that is most worrisome is that the gatekeepers of the right who are supposed to be the ones to say slow your role, by all means, come up with your bumper stickers, but just so you know, we're not going to throw out the Constitution, or just so you know, we're not going to become like, you know, status social engineers from the right, they're kind of like, well, maybe we should be, you know, and the, the, the corruption or the temptation to corruption, I don't mean like financial corruption, I mean intellectual corruption, for, that comes with thinking that the job, of intellectual conservatism and to some extent

legal conservatism is really just to be political consultants for a party has gotten worse and I think this is downstream of that and if you truly

don't care about policy why not pass a law that says you know we get to figure out how to run social media platforms because you don't care

what the consequences are of it unless it pisses off Disney right because that's the one great thing about this thing is that. I forgot to carve out for Disney, which you know. It just gives the game away, right? I mean, it's hilarious. I remember

talking about picking winners and losers being bad and crony capitalism being bad. But, you know, so I find the whole thing corrupt and depressing. And I think it's actually I agree with Sarah DeSantis has been

very effective so far about playing of threading this needle between Trumpism and serious governing. And I think this is the first real wrong-footed moment he's had in a while because it's not going to play out well. Maybe he'll be able to demagogue it being thrown out by the Supreme Court and saying, see, this is why we need real conservatives on there and all that kind of stuff. But it doesn't feel that that is a long ball play. And in the short term, he's dividing the people who normally are all, you know, rah-rah for them. But don't you think, so can I can I just push back on

that a little bit. I mean, if DeSantis wants to be the Republican nominee in 2024, I think it's pretty clear that he does, isn't this exactly the kind of fight that you pick? You pick a fight that's going to, that shows that you're taking it to, you know, Big Tech or the man, whoever has decided to, whoever you've decided to make the enemy. And you pick this massive fight and you make at your issue and even if it fails, it propels you to, you know, lots of TV time, lots of discussion. You can make a big argument here, sort of elide some of the details. It's sort of like what Ted Cruz did with Obamacare, right? Back in 2013, 2014, where he, there was never any chance that that was going to actually win. I thought it was a useful thing for Republicans to do just

to show differentiation with Democrats, and then they went, you know, way, way, way too far. But, you know, Ted Cruz was telling people at the time. I spoke to a member of the House of Representatives who described his long conversation with Cruz to me and said, you know, this member, this House member said to Cruz, like, this is never going to work. Like, we're never going to block Obama's, you know, signature package. named thing. This is his legacy. And Cruz just, matter of fact, he said, well, I know, of course. But it didn't matter because he was going to be the one to fight. And Ted Cruz sort of, you know,

this started out as a more of a Mike Lee endeavor to pick this fight. And Ted Cruz kind of moved in and took it over and gave a lot of interviews. And that was one of the reasons that he was a leading candidate until in 2016. I mean, that's the rub there is like the Cruz presidency is not going great so far. And it just seems to me DeSantis has so many opportunities to play these games. The Republican nomination.

But yeah, the Republican nomination. I take your point. I mean, it's a good vehicle. He, but like, was he missing opportunities to go on Fox News? I mean, it just seems to me he, the stuff he gets out of it, he could have gotten anyway without getting, um,

without giving reasons for some of his supporters that think, eh, isn't this a cute I agree? Because when an executive runs for president, they're sort of held to their record in a way that senators get to flim, flam around. So senators get to say, like Josh Holly gets to say, I introduced a bill that would

shoot Twitter to the moon. And Desantis, you know, I think one of, I think there's a couple lessons that every Republican potential presidential candidate learned from the Ted Cruz 2016 failure. One, it's not that Ted Cruz

over-promised and under-delivered, it's, if anything, that he under-promised and should have promised more because he got flanked from the right. And two, that he let the Republican Party sort of get out ahead of him in a lot of ways by constantly saying that they were going to repeal Obamacare and then not doing it

and sort of word got out about the tricksy bunnies that they were doing on the vote counting there. It looked like everyone in the Republican Republican Party was actually, you know, thinking their voters were stupid. And the voters were like, well, let's see who's stupid now. Um, so. Trixie bunnies. Is that like a serial reference? I just don't, okay. Okay. Cool. Cool. Saturday morning cartoons. No? Yeah. Trixie. Well, you know, this whole debate, it shows it's, it's a symbol of how dysfunctional things have become because if you go back and you look at, uh, some of the, when, when a lot of the really toxic elements

of cancel culture and extreme elements of wokeness began to burst out into public attention, you know, there are things that can be done about that in existing law. There's Title VI that prohibits race discrimination in

federally funded education, Title IX, with sex discrimination, title set. All of these things are going to stand in the way of a lot of the explicitly race-conscious wokeness that was coming into education, coming into the workplace. And you can sit there and say, not to mention the First Amendment, which has long been a bulwark against some of the most toxic elements of wokeness in higher education, for example. And you sit there and you say,

hey, here are these legal mechanisms that already exist to deal with the most extreme elements of this problem. And then the response is, that's weak. What I've got is this poorly drafted legislation that violates the First Amendment. And unless you're for that, you know, you're not really fighting. You're not really fighting. It's like you're looking at a military strategist and you say, hey, I've got this flanking a movement idea that's going to encircle the enemy and defeat it with minimal casualties. And they go, that's weak.

See that fortified hill right up there? We're going to charge it in a straight line. And if you don't want to do that, well, I mean, I mean, I don't know why you're even wearing a uniform. Now that I think about, you're right. I mean, there's this J.D. Vanceism, right, which says at least we're trying. Like, it's, it doesn't matter how stupid, how unconstitutional, how doomed, how fatalistic, how cynical, at least we're trying, right? You know, like those polls that we saw last week about Americans and whether they thought they could beat certain animals in unarmed combat, you know, it's like, at least I'm trying to defeat.

the grizzly bear. You know, like, but it's, anyway, it's just very depressing. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months. Ethos keeps it simple. It's 100% online, no medical exam, just a few health

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where area doctors were flummoxed by all these strange maladies that they were seeing um and it turned out that the the hippies of the summer of love by rejecting all western customs and accumulated knowledge that as that basically defined civilization that all sorts of weird diseases not seen in a century were cropping up. And doctors would have to resort to looking up these things in old 19th century medical textbooks, you know, with diseases like the rot and the stank and this and that, whatever. And the stank? There's crazy names, the drip. I mean, it's just horrible. I'm looking up the stank. I'm not going to Google it. I never want to suffer from the stank. And so Tom Wolfe makes this point that what happens is when you try to start over at year zero,

there's something, you know, nature reasserts itself and causes you to learn lessons all over again. We've talked recently about how we may be rediscovering the dangers of inflation because we're acting as if inflation is no longer a thing. And now it looks increasingly like enough people and enough places and enough cities have convince themselves that crime is no longer a thing to worry about, and crime is coming back with a vengeance. And so I'll start with Sarah. You know, David and I being the elder statesman on this podcast, we grew up at a time when there was a, where crime was a major political issue in American life, particularly in the city I grew up in New York City. Donald Trump weirdly

tried to make crime a huge issue in 2016 when crime actually was not a major problem in America. But in 2024, or even in 2022, arguably it really could be. What are the prospects for crime being a major salient issue in our politics and what does it do to the Democrats and the Republican? I think it has the potential to be a huge issue. I doubt it will become enough of one in time for 2022, but I have no doubt it will be for 2024. So what happened in the run up to the 2016 election is that crime actually was starting to creep up for the first time in a decade plus. It just, that creep was starting from such a low point that the vast majority of people weren't going to notice it, unless you lived in the city of D.C., for instance, in which case,

maybe the incredibly high murder rate would tip you off. Or you're glued to certain cable networks that made it seem like a bigger problem than I was. Sure. So I was at the Department of Justice at this time. They reinstituted some policies, for instance, to really go after anyone who was in possession of a gun. This had been a policy that had been used in the 80s, early 90s, that had shown some good effects.

Crime leveled off again. And what the sort of punditry said was, see, it was never really going up in the first place. this was all much ado about nothing, sort of not even really honestly grappling with the idea that maybe the reason that it had leveled off was because of things that were being done. The answer was, well, no, the markets of crime, so to speak, can't react that quickly. Therefore, it can't be the things that are being done on the ground by prosecutors and police. Those policies are now no longer in effect.

You have COVID. you have all of the things that we don't, we've never really been able to say what causes massive upticks and crime. David and I, you know, you and I talked about this, that there's all these theories, there's all these studies, it's really hard to do causation and not correlation when it comes to crime waves. Here's the problem. The things that the progressive left wants are pretty much the exact opposite of the things you would want to do if you wanted to lower crime. Because in order to lower crime at all, you know, the things that we know work, you need a police presence, for instance. Well, if you have a police presence,

there's going to be over-enforcement as well. Over-enforcement that none of us like, by the way. But in order to not have over-enforcement, you're going to need to have under-enforcement. And under enforcement certainly leads to crime. And this is just a sort of cold, hard reality that I don't think that either political party is going to want to grapple with the nuance because no one wants to be the party of over-enforcement and no one wants to be the party of under-enforcement. But that's exactly the debate we're going to have because that's the debate we've had every time there's been a spike in crime. And not surprisingly, the over-enforcement crowd tends to win because at least in over-enforcement, the murder rate goes down. The violent crime rate.

goes down. And humans are very susceptible to anecdotes. And it doesn't take too many anecdotes of, you know, mom walking her baby, six-year-old being shot, which by the way, I mean, those are just headlines from like the last 24 hours. And sadly, the 24 hours before that and the 24 hours before that, I don't know how many six-year-olds need to get shot in the head before we can have a real conversation about this without demagoguing it on both sides. maybe we have a real problem right now. So I find it incredibly frustrating. I think it's up there with education and schools reopening in terms of an issue that

actually affects people's lives, their ability to go to the grocery store at night to keep their children safe, to feel like they can engage in the economy. But instead, we're going to talk about how if you're for having police on the ground, you're for, you know, racial horribleness and systemic racism. But if you're not, then you're for defunding the police and abolishing prison. and letting Chapo out. I actually saw that ad yesterday. Let choppo out?

Yes, that the left wants to let choppo out. That is the messaging in the, is it New Mexico special election? I mean, we're not going to get anywhere if those are the messages. So, David, I know now that you're for getting rid of qualified immunity, you are pro-crime.

Objectively. Where do you draw the line? here, because as our resident, hardcore civil libertarian, who also is like Mr. Law and Order, where is the tradeoff? And do you have any confidence that our political leaders are going to be able to draw these fine distinctions and acknowledge these various tradeoffs? Yeah, I don't have much confidence right now with our current leader class on virtually any issue. You know, look, as Sarah said, this is super, super complicated stuff. And to say that if you do A or B or C, you're going to fix it or it's going to get, that you're going to fix it is just wrong.

But we do know that there are some things that are extremely counterproductive. And a dramatic decrease in policing at the same time that there's an increase in criminality is pretty counterproductive. And so, you know, one of the things, I'm going to go all old man, since I'm the oldest person, by far, by months and months on this podcast, people don't, if you're not like sort of my age, if you're younger than me, which is now most of America, you don't have a conscious memory of how bad it was in the, in the 1980s, in the early 1990s. I mean, you know, one of the ways you can tell how bad it was is you look at what was, what was a dystopian. movie at that time. Well, a dystopian movie at that time would be like escape from New York where the entire island of Manhattan had been relegated to become a penal colony or running man where you had Arnold Schwarzenegger was being prosecuted because one of the things that he did in the middle of urban combat with an attack helicopters he killed too many people. I mean, like this is this is sort of like the background of it was crime in the cities is

getting is horrible. It's getting worse. We don't know where it's going to end. And so, you know, can I just give another really important pop example from the 80s, early 90s? Sure. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Literally the whole premise of a children's franchise was that crime in New York was out of control and that you needed turtles to fight the crime. If you remember the movies, it was really dark and Shredder had this like gang of young, you know, thugs on skateboards that were. robbing little old ladies and taking their purses. And like, thank goodness, we had the mutant turtles and their mentor Splinter. Splinter, yeah, Splinter, the rat. And so one of the

things that, you know, when you're talking about public policy here, one thing that I think that that needs to be considered is smarter law enforcement with more resources and better training is imperative. It's imperative. I mean, some of the police tactics that were used that began to change the crime rate in America that were part of the picture, that were part of it, involved practices such as just putting people on street corners where there was crime, like presence,

having the presence of cops in a particular place where there was crime. I've written many times that the response isn't defund the police. It's to pay more, train more, expect more, which was sort of the way we climbed out of the militaries, the military decline post-Fietnam, pay more, train more, expect more. We got a much more elite force. So yeah, I have very little confidence, but here's one thing that I do know,

I do know, going back to qualified immunity, the way to restore peace in our cities is not to grant greater ability to violate civil rights with impunity. I would say that that is not part of the formula. Let the record show. I grew up not far from the setting for Death Wish. I switched buses to get to high school where Panic and Needle Park was set. You can see vast swaths of my neighborhood, including my synagogue in Marathon Man,

where they have murder and mayhem. Steve, so Ezra Klein, you know, had this interesting take on Twitter and then I guess on his podcast where he points out, I think rightly, that there is nothing more corrosive to the liberal ambitions for government than crime. And yet it is so, this is, I have this common refrain on here where I say both parties are determined to be

minority parties it seems to me that there is there's nothing more obvious as an objective matter than that the idea that Democrats should take crime seriously if you look at polling

if you look at you know defund the police was unpopular with African Americans and Hispanics by orders of magnitude and yet

they listen to this constituency that tells them that they are speaking for these these groups that says that authentic black and Hispanic people want to get rid of cops which is just factually untrue do you think it Biden Mr. Police Bill you know Mr. 100,000 cops has it in him to actually take on the base of his own party on this issue given that he probably knows in his heart it's the right politics well look during the campaign, when the defund the police questions arose, Biden didn't embrace them, right? He said, and you know, you're in some criticism from critics on the right that he wasn't forceful enough or he tried to play cute with language, but ultimately I think his position was pretty clear that he was

not for defunding the police. Now, you know, he didn't make a show of it. He didn't sort of run around saying this in every speech. He didn't give a speech that was pushing back on the progressives in his party. But I think he ended up not embracing this position that was it really wasn't a fringe position in the Democratic Party. I mean, I take the points that we don't want to oversimplify and it's important not to pretend that

the two arguments, the two sort of far-out arguments on either side are actually speaking for where most people are. On the other hand, you didn't have a ton of real active pushback on the defund the police arguments. I mean, Joe Biden, as I say, he made his position relatively he didn't take him on. He didn't say, that's a desire. What are you talking about defund the police? That's crazy. We can't defund the police. He didn't sister soldier it. At all.

At all. I mean, he said it, which was enough to sort of take it out of the news, but he didn't make it a big issue. I think, you know, we've certainly seen since that it has pretty serious political ramifications. I agree with the Ezra Klein argument that this could do real long-term damage to Democrats, in part because so many people do associate the party with defund the police. And, you know, you had, you had prominent Democrats, you had, you know, activists embracing defund the police. And then when others on the left would try to talk them down or talk them out of it or say, well, you don't really mean defund the police. They would say, what the hell we don't?

We do mean defund the police. Let's get rid of the police. That, I think, is a problem for Democrats. And people are going to associate Democrats with that position. But we also can't, I mean, just to take a step back on the broader issue of crime, you can't, you know, as we've talked about before, I think some of the, the national conversation that we've had on policing and aggressive policing needed to happen, needed to happen now, and is helpful and hopefully we will produce some necessary reforms. But you also have to stop and think about the effect of this conversation on the police, on the good cops. Because who in their right mind would want to be a cop right now? You know, it's a position which society seems to assume that you're a bad guy, that you're going to do things that violate the rules.

your you know the qualified immunity debate um i think is a is a reasonable debate to have but if you're a cop and you're following it you say hey i'm a good cop i'm not going after anybody i'm not going to you know i'm not violating the rules i'm not violating the laws i want that protection um and it's and it's now going to be gone i mean there's a reason that you're seeing record retirements in some police forces around the country country. And I think they're having difficulty recruiting. So on the one hand, you don't have as many people who are going into policing as you once did. And also just in terms of the practical effects of day-to-day policing, how likely are you going to be to take a risk to, you know,

in a confrontation? You know, think about the young woman in Ohio who was shot the 16-year-old who David wrote about. And, you know, David made the case, I thought, totally persuasive case. This was actually really good police work. You know, that within the nine seconds or whatever it was, the cop assessed the situation, saw a threat and eliminated the threat and didn't really have any other choice. But that person, you know, for half of the country is now an enemy and is being made a cause. He could have not done anything and let the stabbing happen.

happen. Right. He could have. Right. And that's the Ferguson effect. That's what Jim Comey, by the way, been in trouble. Yeah. Well, I don't think he would have been in trouble. It would have been like, well, it was just happening so fast. It took me 12 seconds. And by that point, she had already stabbed her. And I think that that's what you'll see more often, second guessing reaction times. And this is what, you know, when you go back to 2014 and what Jim Comey again coined the Ferguson effect, that's exactly what it is. It's this idea that cops will stay in their car. And and think through a situation before getting out instinctually and that that's why you were seeing the uptick in crime heading into the 2016 election. Now, again, do I think that is the sole cause

of crime going up? Absolutely not. But we know that if police officers stay in their car and don't get out in that exact situation, we at least have one example where almost certainly a young woman would have been stabbed. So there's one. I mean, under policing and go ahead, John, I'm sorry. Well, I'm just going to say, you know, I understand and I think it's entirely defensible and right that everyone focuses so much on things like murder, because murder is really bad. I think we can all, whenever it comes up for a vote, we all vote against murder. But one of the things that we, you forget is that petty crime is really bad for poor people. right um and um the way to think about it not maybe not all the time but to sort of change your

perspective is to think of the way economists do about crime is a tax and if you're talking about things like access to good groceries you know food deserts and that kind of thing if you're talking about access to health care and that kind of thing um the more crime there is more crime first well, more crime is going to be in poor communities. And the more crime there is in poor communities, the fewer businesses there are going to be. And the businesses that are there are going to charge a lot more for the things that they sell. In San Francisco, we're having a controlled experiment on this where basically companies are basically stopped enforcing and police have stopped enforcing laws against shoplifting.

17 Walgreens have closed down as a result of just wild shoplifting. Now, where do you think those Walgreens are going to be closed? They're not going to be closed in the Ritziest neighborhoods. They're going to be closed in the places that probably don't have a lot of other drugstores to go to, a lot of other pharmacies to go to. That's Jonah, by the way. So Steve and I interviewed Liz Cheney. What was that? Two weeks ago, three weeks ago, Steve.

Notorious shoplifter, Liz Cheney. We interviewed her at 9.15 a.m. We probably wrapped up at, you know, I was probably out the door by 11, Steve. I needed to go pick up some ibuprofen for the baby. So there's a CVS right across from our office. and there's two entrances to the CVS on each side of the block because it spans the whole width of the block. So I wanted, obviously, to go in the entrance

that's right across from the door to our office. And it was locked. I was very annoyed, like irrationally annoyed, as one gets sometimes when one's wearing heels and then has to walk, you know, two blocks, basically, to get to the other side of the store. And I walked in. I bought the thing that I needed.

And I, you know, made some smart-allicky remark. is like, well, I guess I have to go out this way since that way is closed. And the woman behind the counter said, no, no, no, you can go out that way. It's just that we shut that because we're only two women here manning the front desk, you know, the cash register today. And like we just can't fight off everyone by ourselves. Goodness. And I was, A, incredibly struck by what a jerk I had been to be mad that I had to walk two blocks. to get to the other entrance.

But also, at 11 a.m. in the morning, these women had to shut an entrance to the CVS in the middle of downtown D.C. because they were so worried about crime and their own ability and the resources that they had been given, no mention that, of course, like, there were any police anywhere.

There weren't. That's exactly the point, Jonah. Like, will that CBS be around in six months? No, and our neighborhood for our office is kind of a businessy kind of neighborhood. What about a neighborhood five blocks, you know, over where it's a residential neighborhood? And this just sort of gets to my point about like how crime is so corrosive to the sort of everything that like decent liberals want government to be able to do is undermine not just because of faith and trust in government institutions, but undermined in faith and trust of other human beings. and it is it has creates huge barriers to entry for opportunity for for poor and disadvantaged people

and all you have to do is talk to you know most non-activist African Americans from these kinds of communities and they'll just say things like yeah we'd like to see more cops here you know like we'd like them to be good cops we don't want them to be like you know you know, brutes and bigots or anything like that, but most aren't. You know, and in D.C., a big chunk of the cops are African-American. And the quality of life issues, I think, are so poisonous when you have high levels of crime. And for people who didn't grow up with this stuff, I mean, people forget, from 1957 to 1993, crime in America went up sixfold. Yeah.

And with corresponding numbers for things like murder, rape, and homicides. homicide and that kind of stuff. And that was as dangerous, that was as poisonous to any of the ideals of the great society as any arguments from the neo-conservative egghead journals that I love so dearly. You know, two quick things on this. One is on the tactics of combating crime, again, under-policing in the face or pulling back in the face of increasing criminalization is the worst thing to do. And we learned this in the 1990. Remember, back before Rudy Giuliani became what he is today, you know, he came in and it was so effective in fighting crime in New York City that the decrease in New York's crime rate was, at one point, accounted for a massively disproportionate part of the total decrease in the American crime rate. Yeah, something like 10% drop in New York was a 1% drop nationwide or something like that.

It was huge. Yeah, it was amazing. And one of the things they did, and some listeners will remember this, is CompStat policing, and that was where they would put these pins in maps as to where crime was occurring, and they would flood police resources into this area. And it made a huge difference. I mean, some of the statistics are just mind-boggling. So on the tactical standpoint, this idea that says, oh, what we need to do when things are becoming more lawless is have less policing, no, no.

smart policing and smart presence is indispensable. The other thing is, if you're on the Democratic side of the House, is, look, people forget there was a period of time in which Republicans controlled the White House for 20 out of 24 years. From 1968 to 1992, Republicans controlled the White House for all but four years. And for a lot of that time, even though Republicans didn't control the House, they had working majorities in the House because, there were different factions in the Democratic Party that they could work with. And so Republicans controlled for 20 out of 24 years. And Republicans had a pretty simple message back then. We're against the bad guys. The bad guys are communists and criminals. And we're against those. And had a very effective argument to the social justice left, which was the social justice left, was saying, well, no,

you're missing out in this whole area of social justice and inequality. And the Republican response was, wait, why don't we stop people from dying at scale in the streets, and then we can start to rebuild communities, which is a pretty darn good argument, actually. And so if the Democratic Party thinks that weakness, for example, in the face of rising criminality, or even weakness abroad when confronting like the People's Republic of China, isn't going to give the Republican Party a sane or smart Republican Party ability to step in and say, we're against the bad guys, that's who we are, they're fooling themselves. During the Volvo Fall Experience event,

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Conditions supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to Explorevolvo.com. All right. And we've got Belarus. Speaking of communists and criminals. Segway. This past Sunday, there was really an extraordinary moment in our geopolitics. A plane, Ryan Air. plane. An Irish company, plane was actually based in Poland. It's basically the southwest airlines

of Europe, right? It's cheap oil airline. Yeah. Right. Flew from Athens to Vilnius, Lithuania. And in the middle of the flight, there was a fake bomb scare. The pilots were forced to land in Belarus. A young journalist, 26-year-old journalist named Roman Protasevich was taken by Belarusian authorities, along with his girlfriend, which I think is an important part of the story, and in effect,

taken political captive. This young man, Roman Protacevich, organized rallies in opposition to Alexander Lukashenko, the strongman dictator in Belarus, been in power even longer than Vladimir Putin. and they subsequently two days later released a video in which he it was you know classic hostage video he looked like he'd been bruised up a bit he confessed to

his crimes quote unquote crimes his Russian girlfriend also was featured in a video in which she confessed to her crimes and they are still being held to this day. As this young man was taken off the plane, he told fellow passengers that this was a death sentence, that he was going to be killed because he'd been so active in organizing these rallies against Lukashenko when Lukashenko stole an election last year, basically everybody who watched the election, observed the election internationally believes that the election was stolen. Lukashenko remained in power and used strong-arm tactics to quash these rallies, these rallies against his regime.

There are about a million questions about the response, about what Europe should do, about what the United States should do. But before I get to those, I want to talk about Russia. Lukashenko and Vladimir Putin have this sort of hot and cold relationship. They're not buddies, but they've, they have sort of a. mutually exploitative relationship and it is widely believed at the time in part because there were reportedly four Russians who were on the same flight who also got off when the flight was forced down in in Belarus. The speculation is that they were Russian intelligence

officials, KGB officials. Vladimir Putin's reaction, the reaction of the government is not what you would expect, particularly given the fact that Roman Protisievich's girlfriend is a Russian. If you are the Russian president or the Russian government and one of your citizens is, in effect, kidnapped by a neighboring country, you would think that the Russian government would speak out against this. And in fact, what the Russian government has done in many ways is signal its approval. of this. So, David, I'll start with you. What do we make of this sort of stunning, aggressive, reckless act of state-backed terrorism and kidnapping? And should we be more concerned about Lukashenko and Belarus or what this might mean in terms of Vladimir Putin?

So one is, things have changed a lot. I'm going to pull out a reference that I think has never been used in dispatch history. The War of Jenkins' Ear. Yeah, the War of Jenkins' ear. Yeah. I don't know where Jenkins' ear is now. But it was involved, this was a Spanish, 18th century war, Spanish sailors boarded a British ship and cut off the ear of one of the captain of the British merchant ship.

eventually was played up and turned into war. I'm thinking about the impressment problems that led to, for example, conflict with the war of 1812. I mean, these kinds of things where you interfere with navigation, international navigation, haul people off for perhaps, you know, who are under the protection of international treaty or international norms and customary international law, haul people off planes. What it tells you, along with, you know, when you put it in the context of things like the Crimean invasion and everything else, is Vladimir Putin. And the fact that, again, I'm just, this could be wrong, but, you know, the presence of Russians, the dominant position of Russia in this relationship between Belarus and Russia, unlikely this occurred

without Putin's approval. What it shows is that Putin will press to the red line. He will go to the red line and in provoking conflict with the full knowledge that the response will be largely ineffective. And here's what worries me about this kind of course of conduct. And that is, if history teaches us anything, it teaches us that once a dictator starts pushing, it's unlikely that the dictator will stop pushing. because every single act of sort of international consent teaches him that he can take the next step

and take the next step. And so what ends up happening is at some point, international peace and safety starts to rest almost entirely on whether or not there's going to be self-restraint, eventually on the part of the dictator. And that is what makes me feel very nervous about the future. Do I think that this is something that would or should, should lead to armed conflict?

No, should it lead to a rather strong, a strong international response, muscular international response? Absolutely it should. Will it? I'm very, very skeptical. And then what that will teach Putin is he can do the next thing that he wants to do.

And history also teaches us that eventually people say too far and things can turn very dangerous and deadly. I was listening to an interview. Go ahead, sir. I feel like my hawk talons are showing and that David is just like folding up his little dove wings here. You're telling me, David, that you,

like, I don't understand. We go get the guy. They don't get to keep the guy. Like, they have to release the guy or there are consequences, the end. They do not keep him. You do not kidnap someone off a plane with a bomb threat that was fake

so that you could down a commercial airliner to kidnap someone. And then they keep the guy? Or what? So here's the thing. You have to think this through. Or what? And who doesn't? I have an idea. Or what? To be clear, David, very much or what? Like, I'm, yes. And NATO. Yeah. How about this? Send NATO, mobilize the U.S. military, get a formal declaration of war through the U.S. Congress. Yes. Invade Russia's near abroad into the teeth of its defenses into its nuclear defense umbrella. Yep.

to get this guy. Yep. Nope. Nope. I just don't see how you can let this stand. Well, how about something short of that? Look, what has two thumbs and would love to see NATO saber rattle? Do anything?

Yeah. But basically, certainly for Belarus and maybe for Russia too, just simply say you've lost all privileges to land your planes in any EU or NATO-aligned country until this guy is released. Oh, I'm for all the things short of doing what David said. But David said, or what? And, like, I agree that at the back end, after you've tried all of those things, there does have to be an or what. And I'm just saying, yes, after we say, like, no more flights and we don't fly in your airspace and your people can't fly. Like, totally isolate them until you turn over this guy that even then, they're still an or what. And I'm just saying, David, yep, and I'm for the or what at the back end.

I would say he's not worth flirting with nuclear war. That would be my contention. But I do agree with Jonah that there are ways to isolate Belarus dramatically that should be explored. If we just said, look, we're not honoring, forget sanctions on leaders of regimes and stuff, which we aren't really is the way we do this. We're just simply not honoring Russian or Belarus passports until this guy's released, period. You know, and that means you want to cripple someone's economy. Don't let any elite business people, I mean, leave Belarus or Russia indefinitely. Yeah, there be some retaliation, okay, but like I think the West can outlast Russia and Belarus on lack of transport, you know, lack of travel to their countries.

I will say there, but you have to keep the borders open, right? I mean, there are people living under the Lukashenko regime who want out. They're regular Belarusians that want to be able to get out. People can leave. They just can't go back in. You know, I mean, you can figure out something. But I'm with Sarah in that there is no way the international order can. And people forget, it wasn't just that they fake the bomb scars. They sent a mig to escort this plane. And just in case the bomb scare didn't work.

And the thing is, like, you can't have civil aviation, you know, peaceful aviation in the world if governments think they can get away with this kind of thing. And I have no faith in the EU won't just completely whimp out on this, but they should take it really, really seriously. But I got to say, there's something, I mean, it's sort of like the dark side thing with the colonial pipeline attack. There's just something in the water about bad guys. is being willing to sort of own their bad guyness in ways that they didn't before. I mean, it's like, you know, in bad action movies, the villains are like, we are the champions of villainy. You know, they own their bad guyness.

And more and more of the world, we're seeing groups and in dictators just saying, yeah, what of it? We're the bad guys and I'm going to own it. And there's something a little refreshing about that. the problem is that it should elicit a good guy response from good governments. If they're going to be so naked in how they're bad guys, then it shouldn't be politically complicated to be good guys. There's a very, yeah, it seems like there are. There's a very clear cause and effect in my view on this.

And it goes back to both the point that you're making there, Jonah, and a point that David made earlier. They're testing and probing. They've been doing this for years. I mean, both Lukashenko and Vladimir Putin have been. pushing, and they push to see how far they can get. And when there's nothing really stopping them or no serious consequences, then they push some more. I heard an interview with the China is the same thing. China does the same thing. And China's, you know, more difficult to push back

on for a variety of reasons. By the way, Taiwan is a country. The leader of the opposition in Belarus made exactly the point that David made. in an interview that I heard her give, I believe it was the BBC. She said, this is what Lukashenko's been doing for years. He pushes and pushes and pushes and nobody stops him. So he pushes further. And this is what we're seeing with Vladimir Putin. We have not yet established concretely that Putin was involved, but I agree with David that it's hard to believe that he wasn't. Dominic Robb, the Foreign Secretary of in Britain, said, I'll be careful what I say at this point, it's very difficult to believe that this kind of action could be taken

without at least the acquiescence of the authorities in Moscow. I think that is understating things for probably for good reason. But it's hard to believe that it wasn't Vladimir Putin. But think about what Putin did. Think about his aggression in Georgia, which didn't get much of a serious long-term response. Think about what he did in Ukraine. You slapped some sanctions on him. But the U.S. response at that time was we're giving you an off ramp. That was the, that was the diplomatic phrase that the alarm administration repeatedly. Here's your off ramp. Please take this off. He didn't want to take an off ramp. He was on the highway. He was doing this on purpose. And because that was allowed in effect to stand, it's no surprise that he's going further and he's going further and he's

going further. I don't know. I mean, I guess I'm probably, I did not come into this conversation thinking that I would be maybe the most doveish of the group. I'm, I'm not where Sarah is on threat of nuclear war and going in and grabbing him. I don't, I just don't know how that happens on a practical way, but I am. Give Sarah the launch for everything. For everything. My point is you have to say that there is nothing we won't do. I am not actually saying that that's what you do do, but you can't take things off the table to say, like, if this doesn't work, this is all we'll try? Like, no, no, of course not. Nothing's off the table. But I'm not sure, I'm not sure, again, for the reasons I just suggested, that people are going to believe that Joe Biden would

be willing to do, you know, that would be willing to go that far. I mean, the Obama administration certainly didn't. You know, for all the problems I had with Donald Trump's ad hoc foreign policy, he would have at least instilled some sense of fear that he would have been, you know, that maybe he would have really gone after them. But I would say that the statement that we got from the Biden administration to me was very disappointing. It was a passive statement saying in effect, we're looking at our European friends. We're glad that they're taking these steps. It'd be great to close off the airspace and we'll look to follow their lead in effect. And that's just not the right position.

certainly with respect to the United States. Maybe they will step it up if there are deeper indications of Russian involvement, but it was a bad, in my view, a bad start. Well, also, if you can't take on Russia, fine. Russia is using Belarus as a testing,

as a probing mechanism, right? They're using it as essentially like an away team for Russia interests. So put, just triple the punishment on Belarus. Say, hey, look, we don't have any evidence Russia had anything to do with this, but this is what happens to small crappy countries that we actually can, you know, throw up against the wall. And the signal still gets to Russia

that, you know, I mean, who cares if we're being, quote unquote, unfair to Belarus? They're the ones who took the guy. They're the ones who did it. If Russia lets them do it, you know, that's on Russia. And if Belarus thinks that Russia is going to come to its aid and say, you know, okay, well, we'll take those sanctions on two. do. Let it. But, you know, just say, pretend as if Russia had nothing to do with it. And this pip squeak country thinks it can get away with this. Screw that noise and go after them. And then leave it to Russia to figure out whether they want to get Belarus's back. A couple of things real fast. One, I had a long conversation with a Rand expert on Russian military power not long ago

and asked him bluntly, does do, does NATO have the ability to beat Russia on its doorstep? right now with the forces that are available in Europe, and he said, no, no, that Russia is stronger on its doorstep than NATO. It would require mobilization from the United States to beat Russia on its doorstep. Number two, let's put this in context of recent events. He just, Putin just massed troops on the Ukraine border. Now, there was a lot of condemnation for that. A lot of condemnation. Nobody liked it in Europe. But if you're a military, strategist. If you're a cold-eyed realist, what are you looking at? Are you looking at words? Are you looking at actions? And here's the action that would matter if I'm Putin. It isn't Biden saying this and

Merkel saying this and all of that. It's not that at all. It's disposition of forces. Was there a concrete change in the disposition of NATO forces in response to a mass of Russian troops on the Ukraine border. Now, maybe that occurred privately, but I saw no evidence of a large-scale change in disposition of forces, which meant that what you're dealing with was words. Okay, so he pulls back from there, and then what? Like two, three weeks later, you've got an airliner essentially downed on its way to, you know, transversing international airspace. and he's kind of already got his answer from the Ukraine test as to where he can go next

and so I'm completely it's so funny the last thing I thought I'd be accused of was being a dove just because I don't think we're ready to put the first armored division in eastern Poland quite yet I'm tired of this stuff

Khashogi I know the Khashoggi situation is so wildly different in some ways But it's this idea that you can, you know, grab people that don't belong to you, kill them, and we're all going to send out our condemnation statements. Got to stop. No, but one thing I will say is all of this, as Jonah just said, bad guys showing their bad guyness, it all feels kind of pre-war. It does.

And let me, can I provide further context, David? I mean, I think the context is really important here. If Russians are shown to have been involved, and it's worth noting, like, it wasn't just that four Russians got off the plane, that they didn't make any claim to return the journalist's girlfriend. You had Russian state actors, top state journalists, in effect, saying this was great, top parliamentarians in Russia, saying, hey, this is great. saying, hey, this is great and no condemnation. You have to look at what else Putin's been doing. I mean, Putin has been trying to assassinate people around the world well beyond Russia's borders. He's holding Alexander Navalny, Alexei Navalny, in prison on trumped up charges, leader of the Russian opposition. He has sort of stepped up what he's doing. And I think that

the concern I have in terms of the U.S. response is we seem to be not only not confronting him in the way that we need to be confronting him, we're kind of doing in favors. So the U.S. waives these sanctions on the Russian pipeline, whether you think it was going to be completed or not. It was 95% there. There's some argument that was going to happen regardless. But the message that that sends was, I think, a counterproductive message. The white, House, the Biden White House has been talking about a summit with Putin for quite some time and then officially announced it after all of this. Now, the summit is scheduled for June, a Biden-Pooten summit. Why would we reward Vladimir Putin with a summit right now? This guy is, this is

totally counterproductive and an aggressive, reckless behavior. And the president of the United States is going to sit down with him now. Putin has just invited Lukashenko to meet with him in Sochi later this week. That, in effect, is a tacit blessing on what's happened. And Joe Biden's still going to meet with Vladimir Putin? At the very least, that summit should be canceled. And I would say if we can attribute Russian involvement to any of this, we have to be very serious steps for this.

Or we will, I think, invite similar behavior in the future to Jonas. And to imagine we know so little about Robert Jenkins and his ear's career. Thank you all. This is a feisty conversation. I enjoyed it. We'll do it again soon. Taiwan is a country. Stank.

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