The Dispatch Podcast - The Right’s Intellectual Thought Crisis | Roundtable

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

John McCormack and Michael Warren join Steve Hayes to discuss their reporting on how the Intercollegiate Studies Institute is downgrading traditional conservatism, and Charles Hilu reports on how lawmakers on Capitol Hill are really feeling about the changes on the right. The Agenda:—The state of the conservative intellectual movement—John and Mikes new reporting on ISI—Postliberalism and key figures on the intellectual right—Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and the future of conservative thought—Are Republicans getting bolder in criticizing Trump?—NWYT: Airplane travel attire The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—click here. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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And with that, today I'm joined by my dispatch colleagues Michael Warren, John McCormick, and Charles Hilloo for a discussion on the closing of the conservative mind and the reporting Mike and John have done about the turmoil inside the conservative intellectual movement. We'll follow that with a conversation about the growing divides on the political right and the surprisingly public frustration some elected Republicans are voicing about the Trump administration. And we'll also talk about the appropriate dress for air travel. Let's dive right in. Gentlemen, excited to have you join us for the first of these early week dispatch podcast roundtables. Mike, let me start with you. You and John have been doing this reporting about the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. building on some of the reporting that you've done on the Heritage Foundation and sort of

broadly the turmoil that we've seen inside the conservative intellectual movement, give us a sense of what people will get if, or I would like to say, when they read the piece that you and John have just published. Well, I would like to think that it's a continuation of a story that, as you suggested, that John and I have been covering now for several weeks, I guess guess if we want to put an origin point on that story, which is very difficult to do. We could put it at the interview that Tucker Carlson did. Really, interview is a loose term. It was a friendly conversation that Tucker Carlson did on his online show with Nick Fuentes, a well-known, anti-Semitic pro-Nazi podcaster and online broadcaster. They had this friendly conversation. It really kind of

kicked off a lot of these inter-conservative institutional fights and conversations. We could, you know, find that origin point somewhere way back in the distance. We've done some reporting on some of the ways in which this long-term fight between what you might call post-liberal nationalists on the right with traditional conservatives. You know, we could put that point all the way back to 2015 in Donald Trump's entry in into the presidential race. But for the purposes of this piece, I think it's important for people to know that what we're talking about is not just happening in one institution within the conservative

movement. It's happening across the institutions. And here is just one story. This is a story about the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. It is a – it's been around for almost 70 years. It is a student organization. It is designed really to be a kind of alternative resource for students. There's an academic side of this institute, which is on campuses across the country,

to have anything from sort of book study groups to lectures that any student on campus can go to and to sort of introduce more traditionally, classically, conservative or libertarian ideas on campus. A second part of what ISI does, an important part, one that I think we're more familiar with as journalists, is it student journalism program, sponsoring conservative and libertarian alternative newspapers, websites, and news outlets on those college campuses,

and that, you know, this has been an institution, a small institution, I want to emphasize, you know, we're not talking about a large student organization like, say, what Turning Point USA has become the Charlie Kirk organization, but an important one is sort of guiding where young conservative and conservative interested students are thinking. That this has always sort of been a redoubt for traditional conservatives. That has changed, and I think our reporting shows that that has changed within. ISI from some decisions that have been made in leadership to sort of change the direction to essentially say that, you know, these are ideas that we want to privilege. And when I say these ideas, I'm talking about sort of post-liberal, nationalistic ideas

about sort of the Constitution and the American system that are, what I would argue, pretty radical and a radical shift from the classical liberalism. that has really defined American conservatism for the past century or so. I think we demonstrate in this piece very clearly that in this small institution, this has been happening over the past few years. Some people are upset about it, but the leadership doesn't seem to be diverging from this path that they've gone on. John, let me follow up with you on a number of the points that Mike made.

And ISI has been around, as Mike says, for nearly 70 years. 75. 75. First president was William F. Buckley, shortly after he published his very famous God and man at Yale. It has been the training ground for prominent conservatives in journalism, in the legal world, sort of political world, have come through ISI's training programs or academic. academic conferences or what have you. Maybe you could mention a few of those and kind of the influence that ISI has had over its three quarters of a century existence. And then I just want to define our terms a little bit. Mike twice mentioned post-liberal. We're all talking about

post-liberalism and these things all the time. What does that mean to the average listener? And how else could we help people understand kind of this new direction that ISI seems to be heading in? Sure. I'll take a stab at your most difficult question first, which is to define post-liberalism. You know, Jonah has written about this. I think the simplest way we try to define post-liberalism is that they're not simply rejecting modern liberalism or progressivism. They find a critique with the founding father's classical liberalism. So this whole idea of individual rights, some of them are, some of them are religious, some of them are not.

For example, there is a neo-reactionary figure named Curtis Yarvin. He is not a, he's not pushing for religious state, but he has said things like, you know, Americans are going to need to get over their dictator phobia if they want to solve their problems. He appeared on an ISI program recently that caused a lot of controversy. And then there are some other post-liberals who are very religious in their views. We mentioned one professor in this article who supports the enactment of blasphemy laws in the United States. And what we found through our reporting is that really in both the academic side of things and the journalistic side of ISI, these are two different components. There's been a clear trend towards this either post-liberalism or maybe you call it national populism, you know, sort of the national populism of someone like Pap Buchanan, who founded the American conservative magazine. These are two different ideas. There's some overlap between people. It's difficult to, you know, exactly parse them. Ross Dowth, it recently had a good column on them. Joan has written about the post-liberals. So that's where things are. But back to what ISI was and is, you know, it's an important institution. As you said, it's sort of always been a self-selecting, for lack of a better word, elite. These are students who want to read more books than they're being assigned by their professors. These are students who want to go out and who want to go out and write newspaper articles beyond what their papers.

are acquiring. So, Mike and Charles and I are all alumni of the Collegian Network. Are you acknowledging being part of the elite? Wow. I mean, that's a big admission right here. I don't know. I don't know. Elite's the wrong words. Let's delineate the journalism side of things, maybe not as elite as the academic eggheady side. Yeah, Mike and I want to, there's always room for the grubby lower brow, not low brow, but lower brow scribblers like us, you know, that. But if I'll embrace the elite label, that's fine. But if you talk to anybody, Talk to any conservative in academia, who was a conservative in college. They've got a story about how they were touched by ISI. They met Russell Kirk. You know, so this story, it really, you know, might tell the origin story. Maybe, you know, you could trace it back to the Fuentes interview and what happened to Heritage. Not certainly part of it. But we looked into this really after a couple of ISI board members resigned. The traditional conservatives, they allege that ISI has undergone a quote unquote post-liberal hijacking, a pretty serious charge. From our reporting, you know, what I would say is that that's certainly, you know, that's debatable. Other people that we spoke to, long-time scholars who are involved, say

it's more that there's been a tipping of the scale. So there are still plenty of good traditional conservatives who are involved in some ISI programs or journalism conferences. But there's been a clear agenda. And that agenda's come from the top, the presidents of ISI. His name is Johnny Bertka. He's a former editorial director of the American conservative, which again, home to national populism, very much interested in post-liberal. founded by Pap Buchanan. And when Burka got... Very Trump friendly, I mean, in political terms.

In political terms, yep. And yeah, so back in 2020, back in 2020, when Burke was running the American conservative, he said basically that he wanted to, quote, speak to and for the, quote, Tucker Carlson wing of the GOP. When he was hired by the ISI board, he promised that he would maintain the big tent approach that ISI's had over the years where there's lots of different strains of thought in intellectual thought, political thought, policy thought. And let me just jump in there because I think this is an important point of clarification.

One of the things that ISI has done and has sort of the ground that it had chosen for itself was to convene debates among the different schools of conservatism. So you would have academic conferences that pitted traditionalists or paleo-con, social conservatives against neoconservatives and, you know, libertarians. I mean, it was a gathering for people who were interested in the intellectual ideas on the right, most of them having to do with the size and scope of government and traditional morality, basically how we govern ourselves. That had been a role that ISI had staked out in the broader conservative movement for years. They were the convener of these debates and it was very important to them and I think to the people who participated in these

debates that they were seen as you know if not an entirely neutral uh referee of of these things at least not of one group or another let me just jump in on that point certainly not tied too strictly to what was going on in the grubby world of like politics right this is a this was sort of a little more high-minded, a little more focused on political philosophy than on what was going on, you know, within electoral politics. I know that my exposure to ISI in college was during the George W. Bush administration when it would have been sort of trendy in kind of conservative political circles to be, to sort of be supportive of the kind of Bushism within the Republican Party. but ISI was not necessarily interested in sort of adhering and getting its speakers and, you know, aligned necessarily with the Bush administration.

It was, there were lots of paleocons who had lots of disagreements with the Bush administration who were involved in it. And it was, as you say, Steve, just very much more focused on giving students the tools and the information and the books and the reading to kind of be involved in the debates that would set the conservative movement on its course in the following years. It was not really concerned with what was happening in the Republican Party necessarily. So, John, let's go back to your narrative and maybe take us to that November 7th meeting that I think. you were leading up to where there was this big fight on the ISI board, including two of those folks that you had mentioned.

Yeah, so two of the trustees who resigned, you know, they had been concerned about both the ideological direction and the institutional purpose of ISI under its president, Johnny Berkow. And I think the way to really get to the core of the issue is you brought up to this idea of debate. There's been debate. There still is debate at ISI. But the way to tell the ideological direction is who are they elevating, who are they promoting his role models and who are they sort of marginalizing or even blacklisting.

And through our reporting, we found out that, you know, they are still promoting Tucker Carlson as a role model for students. We found out that in April this year, they took eight top student journalists, their top performing editors down to Florida, built this an exclusive retreat with Tucker Carlson, dinner at his private home. And we found out there was a special guest there that evening. Alex Jones, one of the leading conspiracy theorists in the United States, of America. He basically any conspiracy you can think of. He has endorsed it. He said that the

Sandy Hook Massacre of elementary school children was, quote, staged, unquote, with crisis actors. He was ordered to pay in 2022 a very hefty defamation fee for that. He has repeatedly said that the 9-11 terrorist attacks were a attack carried out by the U.S. government. And so the day after Johnny Berka brings these eight top student journalists to Tucker Carlson's home with Alex Jones, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson on their podcast talking about how 9-11 was an inside job. Alex Jones saying, yeah, I said the CIA was going to fly planes into the World Trade Center. And Tucker replies, you called 9-11. How come you were the only who got this right?

Now, first of all, if I may just digress a little bit, Alex Jones actually never predicted that there were going to be planes on into the World Trade Center. but he has consistently said that it was an inside job by the U.S. government. But this is just obviously totally insane. And what kind of example are you setting for students by teaching them these are the kind of people that you should admire? So it's not merely that, you know, it's not merely about a debate about, you know, neocons versus paleocons. It's about really what's, you know, everyone believes in gatekeeping is one lesson I take away from the story, right? So it's who's gate kept.

Anybody is it, you know, should Tucker Carlson who is promoting crazy, who is himself now a conspiracy theory? and promoting vicious anti-Semites and promoting Alex John. Something he's been doing for years now, this can't be a surprise. You know, ISI can't claim to be a surprise that Alex Jones showed up at dinner that night when Tucker Carlson had been saying all these things a year ago on a public stage. It's been reported widely. So that's who they're elevating and promoting as a role model for students. This year they had three student year-long fellowships at $75,000 annual fellowship

backed for each of these students. and one of the three went to Tucker Carlson. Now, one went to Fox News, one went to the free press. But that shows you the direction of where they want to go, where Johnny Burka, having said he's not going to be sectarian, you know, is still really wedded to Tucker Carlson. In response to our reporting, he didn't reply, he didn't comment, he hasn't said anything publicly in the wake of the Fuentes thing about Tucker Carlson's relationship with ISI. But given the fallout heritage, we thought this was worth some digging. and it really shows you where the organization is.

Can we dwell on that for a second? I mean, I just make sure that we're clear about what was happening. So, ISI routinely brings collegiate journalists from across the country to these meetings to conferences. I've spoken at some. I think you guys have probably some of you spoken at some. Joe and I know has. And, you know, as a general matter, you know, you talk about the, how you do journalism, you can give some advice about, you know, what to do to become a successful

journalist or, or at least get a job in journalism. But you're sort of held up as a role model. The purpose of this gathering in Florida was to teach these young journalists, campus journalists, It's journalism 101. I think that was in the title of the actual session there. So it's not just that they're choosing to expose these folks to people like Tucker and Alex Jones, is that they are explicitly and directly and unapologetically elevating them as mock. Do it like this if you want to be successful in journalism.

Yeah, they got career advice from Tucker Carlson at this events. And I think the other piece of reporting that I think this pairs well with is we obtained an email from 2021 from Johnny Berka in which he makes it very clear that he is very concerned about the ideological composition of his speakers. He said that matters just as much as their professional abilities because students assimilate the views of their mentors and their peers. And so he's clearly presented Tucker Carlson as a mentor as a role model. And the same email, he responds to the suggestion from a senior ISI staffer. So I'll just set this up a little bit. There was an editors conference where basically all the top, all the editors who are able to come show up to the editors conference every year. It's a big to do.

And the first night of the event, they wanted a keynote speaker who could speak about the issue of cancel culture in the mainstream media. And there had been some talk about an ex-liberal, like a Barry Weiss or an Andrew Sullivan. I don't know if Andrew Sullivan would accept that term, but that's how it was referred to in the email. And Berka liked that idea. But one senior staffer had suggested a conservative journalist who had experienced an unpleasant experience in the mainstream media, and that was our now colleague, Kevin Williamson, then of National Review, who had been hired and abruptly fired by the Atlantic in 2018. And in response to this suggestion from a senior ISI staffer, Johnny Berka, the president of ISI, said, I would never invite Kevin Williamson to speak at an ISI conference, regardless of the

price, his contempt for the working class is everything that's wrong with the conservative movement. So pretty clearly an ideological thing, that Kevin is too anti-populist. He can't be here. He's the one who's gate-kept out. Meanwhile, Tucker is elevated. Alex Jones is okay. And post-liberal cranks like Curtis Jarvin are welcome for a friendly discussion.

And so I think those two stories together pair very nicely and sort of telling the general direction of the story. Again, I think it's a trend or a tendency. see, it's not this sort of heavy-handed, well, you can debate how heavy-handed it is, but there's not a 100% litmus test for who can participate in these events. Plenty of mainstream conservative journalists, you know, someone like a Ross Stout that's still invited on, Tim Carney, but definitely there's sort of a trend or an ideological direction that ISI has been trending under Johnny Berka's watch.

Not to call out, John, for not answering your other question about some of the people who have gone through this program, but I've been waiting for him to answer that question, so I'll jump in and do it myself. You can always tell a sometime podcast host, right, comes in and he's actually concerned with the questions that are asked and providing answers. Well, no, hey, listen, it illustrates, I think, why this is important. And I think that is something to underscore here. Why is this small elitist organization kind of important?

And a lot of members of, you know, the media and, frankly, other aspects of public life have come through the Collegian Network specifically, which is, again, the network that ISI owns and backs. You know, John mentioned Ross Douthit, columnist in the New York Times, Jonathan Carl of ABC News. Both of those journalists spoke at ISI events that I went to when I was in college and I heard them and listened to them. you know, Matt Cottonenny at the Wall Street Journal. Laura Ingram and Anne Coulter, you know, two conservative commentators, one of whom is on Fox News every night. Even Justice Neil Gorsuch is a collegiate network alum, so somebody not in media necessarily, but influenced by this. So it's just important to remember that a lot of these people who go through these programs go on to have, you know, influence within our public discourse and in public life, that's from the past 40-something years

the number of people who have gone through. What will those people, who will those people be in the next 10, 20, 30 years? That's why this stuff really matters. I'm also curious about the question of gatekeeping that you guys found in your reporting because there's a difference between some of these more serious post-liberals who they're they are that these people might be post-liberal, they might be more populist, but they're not Nick Fuentes. They're not anti-Semites and they're not cranks. So I'm wondering like, is there an effort to sort of gatekeep and let in the more responsible types of these post-liberals and populists while trying to keep out the cranks? Is that possible? Was there an effort to do that? And has there been an

organization or an instance that have you found of people trying to or are successfully doing that. Well, when you spoke to these, so there are two ISI trustees who resigned, their names are Thomas Lynch, the former chairman, Chris Long, former ISI president. They're both more of the traditional conservatives. They brought up this fact that some of these more prominent post-liberals, people like Patrick Deneen and professor at Notre Dame, that he's getting sort of pride of place these academic conferences.

In our interviews with these gentlemen, the former trustees, they say, listen, there's a place for a Patrick Deneen to be there. He says, Dene himself says that he was sidelined for a period of time. These guys say we had nothing to do with it, but basically the idea is that there was always an ideological purpose to ISI, which was classic, which broadly was defending Western civilization as understood by the founding fathers. So if you're really taking aim at the classical liberalism of the founding fathers, they would say that, you know, they don't want these conferences to be totally dominated by the sort of integralist thought, which is a Catholic post-liberalism wanting a very powerful state, explicitly religious. And, yeah, what we found is basically there has been a tipping of the scales and sort of favor of the integralist direction at sort of this marquee conference of ISI academics and top students on the academic portion of things. So, again, that's not that there's, right, those two separate questions, gatekeeping and elevating exactly what the mix is. But I do think it's interesting.

This sort of story just reveals that everyone's a gatekeeper at some level, right, or wants to sort of shape the debate. ISI always had an ideological purpose. And so how big is the tent? What are the balances and compositions of things? And those are the sort of questions that we get into in this piece. On that point, Charles, you know, this is where it kind of bleeds into the bigger story of kind of what's going on in conservative institutions, which is, yes, you know, Patrick Deneen is a great example of a post-liberal who's done, you know, done sort of academic research and has a point of view that is quite literally debatable. Like, people could debate it and he could be there to debate on his behalf and his position. You add in, however, the sort of big elephant of the room is Tucker Carlson himself.

As I think John laid out, you know, Tucker Carlson has sort of gone deep into the conspiratorial rabbit hole and elevated people himself to the point where I would say he is essentially someone that, a respectable conservative institution should look askance at. But at the same time, he's not only sort of being elevated within ISI, the Heritage Foundation, which we've written about, John and I've written about, that's the sort of source of all of the tumult that's been going on at that institution over the last month or so. After that interview with Nick Fuentes and the video from Kevin Roberts, who's the president of the Heritage Foundation, also on the board of ISI, which should be noted. Kevin issued that video in which he defended Tucker Carlson and got a lot of pushback from staff, from board members, a prominent board member. Robert

George has resigned the Heritage Foundation. And so I think there's a problem here, which these institutions are finding, which is you sort of open the door to this particular sort of sect within conservative thought, and you mix it in with kind of a desire to remain relevant, which is a lot of a word I heard a lot in our reporting, and yet you open up the door for a kind of the cranks, the Tucker Carlson wing of the party, and this is where you end up. Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the questions. I mean, I've got about a million questions, and we're going to try to keep this conversation to just another few minutes.

We'd encourage people to go read the piece on the dispatches website. You'll get a lot more from reading the piece. Let me just, I guess, focus a little bit on that last point that you made there, Mike. I mean, it seems to me, John has made the observation that, you know, everybody believes in gatekeeping at some point. I think that's true kind of on its face, although I suppose we could argue about whether Tucker Carlson believes in gatekeeping. He just believes in it the other direction. But I wonder whether, as I. I've listening to this. I mean, I've read your piece. I've done some reporting on this on my own. And yet, as we're having this conversation, a new thought occurs to me. How much of this is about sort of ideological differences? And, you know, ISI choosing a different path from what has been sort of at the heart of its mission for years. Arguably, you could make an argument that they're allowed to do that. Organizations change missions all the time.

So what? If they want to go back, they think it's really important in this battle of right and left to attach themselves to, you know, one particular strain of conservatism? Fair enough. I wonder whether some of the discussion here, and this would be, you know, reflecting my own experience, speaking at ISI things. And, you know, I worked with them when I was running a, I ran a political journalism program at Georgetown University 20, 30 years ago. and worked with ISI then and ISI students back then were really prized. We wanted them to participate in the program that I ran, in part because of their reverence for truth and their eagerness to really seek truth in through the academic sense, but in this case, in the case of the students I worked with in the journalistic sense. And I wonder if that's not the big fault line here. I mean, does anybody think that Tucker Carlson is, as much as he proclaims his devotion to the truth and, you know, pretends that everybody else is lying to you, but he alone is a purveyor of truths these days? Part of what makes this offensive to me is Alex Jones and the truth.

I mean, nobody thinks that Alex Jones is devoted to telling the truth. I mean, there are literally billion-dollar, almost billion-dollar court judgments about the fact that he was, you know, not only indifferent to the truth, but propagated things that were knowingly and provingly untrue. I would say Tucker does this on a pretty routine basis. How much of this is about sort of the truth, as we understand it, and as the conservative movement has cared for it, and how much of this is just sort of ideological. in fighting. I'll go back to you, Mike. There's such a nihilism in Tucker's approach to the truth, right? He sort of says, um, he sets people up by saying, um, they have lied to you about something that is a widely accepted viewpoint or assumption as we're sort of, uh, moving forward to discuss whether it's

World War II or, um, you can even go farther back to the American Revolution. Um, and, And I do think that he preys on the tendency right now in our culture to essentially doubt what has been received. Any wisdom or knowledge or truth has been received. So I think it does, it sort of cuts a little deeper when it comes to ISI. Again, I think I mentioned earlier, it's really removed in the past. It has been removed from these kind of petty questions of who's winning. and losing in the grubby world of politics and sort of seeking higher truths.

I think the story of so many of these conservative institutions that are struggling in this space is that they are being outflanked in terms of donor dollars, in terms of interest and relevance. Again, I keep hearing that word of my reporting relevance among young people. They look at a organization like Turning Point U.S. USA, and they see these big giant campus events with pyrotechnics and giveaways of T-shirts, and maybe they're sort of managing decline by chasing after that kind of high. And I think it's what adds to the tragedy.

I don't know if this is a sufficient answer to your question, but it adds to the tragedy of what you're seeing with ISI where, you know, see. Speaking out the truth can be lonely, and it can be small, but it can also be very gratifying. And I sort of reap for young people on campus who are sort of being twisted into thinking that what Tucker Carlson does is seek truth when what he really does is seeks division and doubt and not the good kind of doubt where you question and you ask more, but doubt about everything you hear. It's kind of sickening. Yeah, John, let me end this part of the conversation with the question to you about that broader story. We had a lot of conversations, you, me and Mike, amongst ourselves as we were reporting this, trying to sort of get a sense of whether ISI was its own story and the way that it's the way that it's gone over the past several years,

whether it's really part of this bigger story of, you know, we could call it a shift. I would be more blunt and call it rot in the conservative intellectual movement broadly understood. And I think you and I ended up, at least in part of our conversations, in different places on this question to a certain extent. Some of the reporting that I had done really focused on the board members that overlap these two organizations, the Heritage Foundation and I. They share board members, Larry Arne, who's the president of Hillsdale College, who I had known for years. Kevin Roberts, now president of the Heritage Foundation, was given a spot on the ISI board, Michael Gleba, head of the Scape Foundation, who is a, you know, one of the biggest funders of conservative movement projects going back as long as I've been involved, been professionally. in this world. I'll just share with you in a sentence or do the way that this was described to me by several sources. And John, you tell me what your sources told you and some of those sources are

probably overlapping and how people should think about this. The way that it was pitched to me was this is sort of of a piece. This is no accident. This has happened at the Heritage Foundation, this shift to the right. This cozying up to Tucker Carlson, Heritage has a financial relationship with Tucker Carlson Hillsdale College, had a financial relationship with Tucker Carlson. They used him to raise money. ISI featured Tucker Carlson in these areas. And then none of this was a mistake. You have these board members who live on both places, sort of taking control of boards, pushed them in this direction. And that is part of what made it difficult. I think people sympathetic to Kevin Roberts would argue for him to distance himself from

Tucker Carlson because there had been such an institutional embrace of Tucker Carlson at the Heritage Foundation by its board and also at ISI. How much of this, in your view, John, after continuing to do a lot more reporting on this than I did, is this one story? Is this two stories? Do they converge at a certain point? How do you end up after putting in the time that you've put in? Yeah, obviously not the same story, but there are overlapping stories, as you said. I think that, you know, Kevin Roberts in particular, we spoke to a former ISI board chairman, Thomas Lynch. He says that Kevin Roberts was essentially this shadow chairman running behind him, going to Burka, trying to get things done, that Lynch himself is not sure to the extent to which Roberts is behind some of the moves

that have happened at ISI. Lynch said, for example, that it was Roberts personally who tried to get the Heritage Foundation to purchase the American conservative. this former magazine that Johnny Berka ran. It was only after he ran into opposition at Heritage to purchasing the American conservative that Johnny Berkka came back to the ISI board saying, hey, ISI should buy the American conservative. This is two years after, again, according to Lynch, saying that Johnny Berka pledged he wouldn't remake ISI in the image of the American

conservative. He'd maintained the big tent approach, such as one example of the same characters being involved in both stories. There's a similar story of both institutions having this, weirdly undue excessive love for Tucker Carlson long after it should have expired. I think by October 24, you know, anyone in the right month, I think long before that, you know, that love should have expired or at least the institutional affiliation should have ended. But by October 24, Tucker was saying Alex Jones, the vindicated and everything, he's hosting a revisionist

historian who says Churchill is the great villain, the true villain of World War II. The Holocaust happened almost by accident. He likens the Holocaust. to Israel's defensive war in Gaza, you know, he'd gone to Moscow for a softball interview with Vladimir Putin in early 2024. He went into a Russian grocery store. Again, to Mike's point about just being about the truth, not about ideology. He goes into a Russian grocery store and just propaganda video pretending as though like life is a housecape in America and it's wonderful in Russia, just completely at odds with the actual statistics and facts about how much food cost relative to salaries in both countries. So yeah, I mean, there's definitely

similarities with Carlson, Roberts. And I think that it's a similar trend. I don't know, we report, our listeners decide. So. Very good. Well, I hope people will take the time to go and read the piece. We'll link it in the show notes. It really is a terrific piece of reporting. And I do think it tells an important story about the state, current state of the conservative movement and our politics. I mean, I think that this is really what's happening inside the right, both on the intellectual level and in the political level, which we'll get to here in a moment, is the story of American politics in the past decade. And going deeper on stories like this, I think, help provide additional insight into what's happening and why it's

happening. And I think the piece succeeds tremendously in that regard. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the dispatch podcasts. every holiday there's one gift that quietly steals the show this year as in past years i'm confident that will be an aura frame the hidden gem that becomes a favorite long after the wrapping paper is gone if you've listened to this podcast before you've heard me talk about the aura frame that i got my parents it allows them to see pictures of all of the things that their kids and grandkids are doing as the kids and grandkids upload pictures from every aspect of their lives from dance recitals and basketball games to hockey matches, school dances, what have you.

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Let's jump in. Let's turn now for a few minutes to the politics on the right. And what we've seen over the past six weeks in Charles, I'll start with you. You spend a ton of time on Capitol Hill. You are talking to members of Congress all the time, talking to their staff, sometimes even social. with their staff, getting insights about how people are really feeling on Capitol Hill. And let me just lay out my view of what's happened over the past six or eight weeks and tell me if you think I'm right, if you think I'm crazy, but be gentle if you think I'm crazy,

but you're welcome to disagree with me. Well, I think you're crazy generally, but you can still be right. Okay, that's good. Let's get that out of the way. Fair enough. we have seen, and others have noticed this, there have been a series of articles commenting on this, reporting on this, an increasing willingness from elected Republicans, by elected Republicans, to at least challenge the Trump administration rhetorically or criticize in areas where these Republicans might have been reluctant to criticize in the early parts of the Trump administration. We've had moments of this in the past. And we discussed this on our editorial call Monday morning. You look back at quote unquote liberation day. I believe it was April 2nd, early April. Trump announces these new tariffs. They're sort of all over the place. They feel very ad hoc. They have immediate consequences for the markets, both equity and bonds. And Republicans are freaked out and say, I'm not sure this is really the way to go. So we had that. We've had that. We've had isolated, maybe steady but understated criticism of the Trump administration's approach to

Russia and Ukraine. On occasion, you'll have somebody on a Sunday show. Don Bacon is representative Don Bacon from Nebraska. Pretty critical of what they've done there. But in general, I would argue that until the last six or eight weeks, we've had a tremendous amount of restraint from elected Republicans and the criticism of Donald Trump, given what I think are still some pretty significant ideological differences between many elected Republicans and what Trump is doing to say nothing of their concerns about corruption, their concerns about, you know, his basic handling of the job and the way that he carries himself. But in the past six or eight weeks, we've seen an increasing willingness some of these people to speak out. Some of them, some of it's a one-off here,

there, different policy issues. Some of it's more consistent. You had sort of a steady drumbeat of criticism or inquiries about the Epstein files and Donald Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. We've seen, I'd say more recently, additional criticism on these strikes in the Caribbean against alleged narco-terrorists. We've seen more criticism on Russia and Ukraine. We've seen criticism on the economy, on the affordability issues.

So my question to you, Charles, is something fundamental changing here. Do you expect that this criticism based on what you're hearing in conversations on Capitol Hill with these elected Republicans and the people who work for them, you expect it will continue? And what's caused this thing? And again, you're free to challenge my premise if you don't agree with the premise. I think that there have been some ramped up criticism, at least anonymously, in the past six or eight weeks or however long you want. But I think that in, say, January, February of 2025, when President Trump was at his height, he was at his most popular, there was very little criticism from elected Republicans. There was hardly any. Then I think that as that popularity started to subside and he gets into.

governing, then the criticism publicly, you know, attributable to their names, does actually start happening. But I think that that's all we've gotten thus far mostly. I think we've mostly gotten people saying that they are, they kind of find things that Trump has done unsavory, whether it's the Venezuelan boat strikes or Liberation Day, Signalgate was another one. You know, rarely do we find substantive action from the concerns that they're expressing publicly. And even when there is substantive action, I think it was Amy Walter who brought this point up

a little while ago when one of the anti-tariff resolutions passed in the Senate, you had, I can't remember the exact vote breakdown, but you had people like, I think it was Tom Tillis and Mitch McConnell who voted for this tariff resolution, and they were some of the people who helped push it over the edge. And Tillis and McConnell are two people who are going to be retiring. at the end of this term. So, you know, they're willing to sort of put their neck on the line, but we're not seeing this from the people who will need to deal with Trump in the 120th Congress and the 121st Congress, you know, two years and four years or two years down the line.

So it's kind of a question of when is it going to become something substantive? And they have given him some substantive rebukes in the sense that they've been able to hide behind some of these long-time Senate traditions. For example, President Trump asked them to, or pressured them, I should say, to get rid of the blue slip, which is this way that home state senators can effectively veto a judicial nominee for a lower court or for an attorney in their state. And he also sold them that they should get rid of the filibuster in order to end the shutdown. And on both instances, they said no. Senate Republicans said, no, we're going to stick with these long time, 100-year-old or so Senate traditions, we're not going to get rid of them.

So, but I think that's different from hiding behind a long-time tradition than actively inhibiting Trump from doing something as they perhaps maybe want to do but won't do with the, or at least have not shown that they want to do with tariffs and boat strikes and Signalgate, etc., etc. John, Donald Trump's approval in the latest Gallup poll is, 36%, which I believe is the second lowest of his time in public life in Gallup polling. You have congressional Republicans worried about Donald Trump as a potential drag on the ticket. They're worried about those polling numbers. That's not an outlier.

There have been many other polls that have shown Trump similarly disliked by majority. growing majorities, it seems, of the population. And in particular, Republicans, you've seen some people who are part of the 24-24 Republican coalition that elected Donald Trump increasingly losing their enthusiasm and some of them not supporting them at all. Is this just about Trump being unpopular and Republicans worrying about their own political future that we've seen this? And to Charles' point, do you expect that we'll see any follow up on any of this? Do you expect that they will do anything? Or is this just talk? I think mostly just talk. And I would assume, I mean, it's basically following the trajectory of Trump's first term. I mean, you said this is one

of his lowest approval ratings, but we're a year in. I would say people are still unhappy with the economy, particularly, you know, the cost of living that, you know, inflation is something that even as it slows down, it's cumulative. So people are thinking not how much more did I pay in last year, how much did I pay five years ago? Interest rates still too high. Housing supply was still way too low. Questions of housing, you know, I mean, that's such a huge part of someone's budget and how they're going to live in the way they can see with their lives.

And it affects, it's not just people who want to buy a house in the next year. It's everyone thinking of buying a house in the next, I don't know, five or ten years. People just think about that. Where am I? Am I trapped? So I think all these things add up. And then you've got just sort of general dislike of, you know, the sort of the recklessness, the callousness of the Trump administration, people sure are happy that, you know, the border

crisis is basically solved. But I think that a lot of people see these videos of, you know, overly aggressive enforcement measures on the streets and, you know, all these viral clips don't like that. So, yeah, I don't know that Republicans are actually going to stand up to Trump on anything. I think the most interesting question, you know, is this issue now of potential war, the existing, quote-unquote, war on alleged. suspected drug traffickers on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and now potentially a war with Venezuela, whether Republicans will do anything to actually uncover what's actually going

on there, which over the weekend we had this report that there was an order that on the first one of these strikes back on September 2nd that everyone in the boat should be killed. And in fact, there were two survivors on that first boat. And a follow-on strike was ordered. Now, basically, according to every legal expert you talk to, that's completely indefensible. Even if you accept the premise that this is a legitimate use of military force, which many, many, many people would say that the whole, the initial strike is unlawful or a violation of the principles of just war. The second one certainly is these are shipwrecked people clinging to wreckage, no plausible

way that they are fighters on the battlefield. Republicans over the weekend did say some things like, yes, if this happened, this would be a war crime and we need to investigate. this. Now, will there be any follow-through on that? That's the real question. Yeah, Mike, let's take that point specifically. You did have chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, other prominent Republicans, former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, saying, in effect, if the facts as reported are the facts here, this is a war crime. And calling for an investigation, do you expect to see a robust investigation into these things?

Let me put it this way. If the trend continues, which it may not, but if the trend continues of more drip, drip, drip of information like this, of members of Congress for whom, you know, the armed services and foreign policy is within their sort of committee purview have to find things out from news reports, then yes. I mean, all of that could change. But I don't think these are good conditions for things going the same way when it comes to the relationship between, you know, Republican members of Congress and Donald Trump. And it's because the facts and the details matter. These, it's not going to be every single member of Congress. It's probably not going to come from the House. It's more likely to come from the Senate.

But it has been a hallmark of this second Trump term that there has been very little to no communication with members of Congress about these issues and about a whole host of other issues. There's essentially no robust legislative affairs operation going on from the White House. And you hear this all the time. Republican members, particularly in the Senate, complain all the time about how they really don't hear. from the White House and they don't have information. I think if the Trump White House were smart and savvy, they might throw Congress a bone or two here. And maybe that's what creates, you know, doing so would create the conditions where

Republicans who are crowing about this now back off these claims. But I think that there is a problem when the Trump administration does not provide this information. Because Republicans even on, say, Senate Armed Services, they're not just, you know, concerned about their voters back home. They're talking with members of the military. The Pentagon, by the way, has tried to shut down those kind of conversations, which happen all the time between, you know, members of the Armed Services Committee and top generals and commanders and those kinds of conversations, which, by the way, are good for. civil military relations. The Pentagon is trying to shut those down. All of that sort of

constricting of information is, I think, creating an issue that on this particular topic is going to make it hard for the Trump administration to just expect Republicans to fall in line. I could be wrong, but I think this is different. Well, it certainly doesn't seem, if judging from Secretary of Defense Pete Higg-Seth's personal Twitter account, it doesn't seem that they have yet figured out, if you're right, Mike, that this is a pretty serious issue. Pete Hagseth tweeted on Sunday a mockup of a classic Franklin story, sort of an animated cartoon leaning out of a helicopter with an RPG on his shoulder and shooting at these alleged narco terrorists in the water.

and it is attributed, at least on the, or it's tagged to U.S. Southern Command. So if there is going to be seriousness, we have not seen it yet. All right, we're going to take a break, but we'll be back shortly. At the National Post, we don't just report the news. We dive into the stories that shape Canada and the world. From politics to pop culture, we question, we investigate, and we bring you insights with a fresh perspective. This Black Friday, get our best deal of the year, just $12 for an entire year of unlimited digital access.

Subscribe now at nationalpost.com slash Spotify. That's national post.com slash Spotify. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. So let's turn, speaking of seriousness, to another very serious issue. We're coming, we're recording this on Monday, December 1st. after a nice and lengthy Thanksgiving break. It wasn't that nice for Charles because his beloved Michigan Wolverines got smoked by the Ohio State. Buckeyes returning to a tradition of the Buckeyes crushing the Wolverines going back really a long period of time, with the exception of the last several years. So Charles probably didn't have a great Thanksgiving, but I did.

And I think Mike and John told that you guys did. I'm interested in your travel and the way you travel. And if it doesn't apply to you, I don't know that any of us were on airplanes this weekend. Then I'm just interested in your general reactions. And, Mike, I'll start with you because you are a well-known wearer of track suits when you get on airplanes. That's me. Gold tracksuits. Otherwise, sometimes sweat pants looking generally slovenly.

Before the Thanksgiving break, Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, former star of the real world and former Wisconsin Congressman, former also Fox News personality, issued a statement and a video about what he called the golden age of travel. And the civility campaign launched by the Secretary of Transportation says the golden age of travel starts with you. There are many components to this campaign, and many of them I agree with, actually. It points to the number of disruptions and physical altercations on airplanes, people generally being rude, flight attendants, people basically being jerks as they travel and provides some detail about the frequency of that. And then poses a series of questions. Are you helping a pregnant woman or the elderly with placing their bags in the overhead bin? in? Are you keeping control of your children and helping them through the airport? Are you saying thank you to your flight attendants? Are you saying please and thank you in general? But one of these

questions that he posed has gotten the most attention, and that is, are you dressing with respect? And I will admit before I ask a question of you all to having mixed feelings about this. I don't think we want to go back to the days when it was a virtual requirement to wear a coat and tie on airplanes. But at the same time, if you look at some of the ways that people dress like Mike, it's really almost offensive. So I ask you, Charles, I'll start with you, do you dress up when you fly? And if you were going to be on a flight later this afternoon, what would you be wearing? Well, first, I would just like to respond to the egregious misstatement. Answer the question.

Don't skirt the issue. Answer the question. Of the OSU Michigan rivalry, which I'll point that Michigan holds the all-time series lead over OSU. Now I'll answer your questions, Steve. This is what happens when you tell me to talk to members of Congress. I become really good at skirting questions and getting in what I want to say before actually answering your question.

I learned it from you, Congressman. So I actually, I'm not a necessary. I never wear a tie on airplanes, but I do usually wear jeans and then a sweater, you know, particularly if it's if it's in the fall. So I am a proponent not necessarily of wearing a coat and tie when you're on airplanes, but I am a proponent of dressing like, you know, people will see you when you walk outside of the door. And I think that one of the points, if I remember correctly, I saw a clip from Sean Duffy

saying essentially that when we dress up it he was kind of making this point that when we dress up it kind of inspires us to you know put take take care to treat others with respect that when you kind of dress for success you are more motivated and you are a little more confident and I think that's true so you know I am very much a proponent of not necessarily looking like you're going to a ball but I do think that we should at least look presentable and I'll say like I actually was on a plane for Thanksgiving weekend. I flew back home to Michigan on Tuesday, and then last night I flew back into D.C. And, you know, I didn't see anyone that looked necessarily offensive. Nobody was wearing, you know, coats and ties, but again, nothing, nothing offensive. And the traveler actually

sitting next to me when my flight landed in D.C., he asked me if I had a connection that I had to make. And he was willing to let me out and let me go first if I did. So I think that it was Maybe the golden age of travel is here. Perhaps. That's all it took. It was a rather pleasant travel experience for me this Thanksgiving weekend. I will say that. I like it.

John, do you wear a coat and tie when you travel? You always look pretty nice in general. Do you wear a coat and tie when you travel? And if you were traveling this afternoon, what would you be wearing? Coat usually never a tie. I basically dress like a cartoon character. Like a sport coat, like a jacket. Just like the jacket.

from my Twitter profile picture, I basically wear that everywhere. Not your puffy coat, right? Not your big puffy coat. No, I puffy coat. Yeah. I dress basically the same way every day. I don't really do it consciously. I wear, you know, maybe a polo shirt or a long sleeve, Brooks Brothers shirt, you know, Gap Outlet polo. I don't want to be too fancy. And, you know, I don't think that fancy clothes are any really less comfortable than really comfortable clothes. Now, if we're an overnight flight, I think you've got a case in favor of wearing a t-shirt. shirt and some pajama pants, you know, that's eight, ten hours on a flight. Then I'd consider it. But really, I do, and I don't do it consciously, but, you know, basically I get my fashion

sense from my father, who basically was just, you know, Walmart khakis and a, you know, button-down short-sleeved blue shirt in the summer and then, like, flannels in the winter. And life is just much more simple when you have to think about one less thing about what you're going to wear. So you just wake up and wear the same thing every day. And I would say that when you dress nicely, when you travel, you know, people are a little nicer to you. I mean, I've noticed this just, I've never had a bad experience. I've, you know, I don't know, over the course of a decade, my wife and I, you know, probably went to, got to take some, I don't know, four or five trips overseas and never really

were treated poorly. But I would attribute that more to being next to a beautiful blonde woman than, uh, dressing nicely. And how did your wife feel about that? Be, you being next to a beautiful, Mike, uh, you know, as I said, you're, you're, you're famous for wearing track suits. How long have you been wearing track suits? And is it important that they always match? I've seen you wearing the matching ones with the stripes down the side. How long have you been doing that? You know, we talked about truth on this podcast earlier.

And I mean, track suits, Steve, really? I mean, my uniform of choice for going on on flights is I I always wear my baggy cookie monster pajama pants, my monster energy drink t-shirt, and my camo crocs. Like, that's what I always wear. And you know that. So, no, look, I think there's two things going on here. One is the general degradation of sort of what's acceptable to wear out in public that's been going on. That has really nothing to do with air traffic. specifically. It's just you see it everywhere. I saw it yesterday at a grocery store. Again,

what I just described, jokingly, of course, of what is my airline uniform. I actually saw on a couple of, you know, 30-something presumably gamefully employed, you know, adults, you know, sort of wearing pajama pants in public. And I think that's just, that's the public. That's what people wear. This idea that we're going to go back to this golden age of travel, there's the other problem here, which is that travel has become democratized and air travel in particular has become democratized. I will say it's become democratized to a point, something like only 40 to 45 percent of U.S. adults fly on a plane per year. That's a majority of people in America, adults in America, do not fly in a given calendar year. So I think it's important to note that this is something that doesn't necessarily apply to every American. But look, I think that this is what you get when you have sort of a degradation of what's acceptable in public and more people flying, which I think is a good thing, by the way.

It shouldn't be the sort of the way that only the elites get around the country. But that's what you're going to end up with. and I say just just dress again like Charles is exactly right dress like people are going to see you outside and might even you know God forbid make a judgment about you from what you're wearing I know we're supposed to be sort of judgment free and you know I got to be my authentic self well you could be your authentic self on your couch while you're watching college football over the weekend but dress up a little nicer on a plane at the ground. grocery store at the restaurant. It just seems decent. I also, well, to say, well, last thing, I don't know if Sean Duffy and the federal government is really the right messenger for this. It just does, I mean, I don't feel like people pay attention to what the government tells them to do on all sorts of things. Why are we going to start? Why should we expect them to start doing that when it comes to clothing? I mean, if it's the case that people behave better and

people perform better when they're dressed up, which all of you, to one degree or another, seem to embrace, I wonder if we should go back to having some code of dress for the office. Maybe we'd go back to suits and ties for the office. We think we can, you know. And who would be keeping us accountable, Steve? You, all those trips to the office? Squeeze out better performance and behavior? I mean, I think that's natural, something that I should take up with Jonah.

You first. Just a slight counterpoint, Steve. You know, I'm on Capitol Hill pretty much every day. And everybody there is wearing a coat and tie, a suit or a blazer. Are they performing at their optimal functions? I don't think so. So maybe that's a counterpoint. Charles, no, I need to interrupt Charles.

I'm sorry. But all the guys on, so how many men on Capitol Hill are wearing those sneakers with suits? I mean, that is, I'm not judgmental about many things. The fake dress shoes? The fake dress shoes? I'm like, come on. I mean, and that dagger, and it's societal poison. Watching that happen, I stopped wearing a tie last year.

So if you want to talk about the decline of Western civilization, you know, for a good 16, 17 years, I always wore a tie in the Capitol building. And then all of a sudden a year ago, I'm like, you know, if these guys don't, if these guys can't be cared to wear more than, you know, sneakers in here, I don't have to wear a tie. So it just, you know, the decline of standards. Decline is a choice. Fred Barnes used to say D.C. was the last tie town, and I think it's not, we can't even say that anymore. Well, that's a good place to leave it. We will update you on my conversations with Jonah about reinstituting address code for the dispatch offices. But thanks to Mike, John, and Charles for joining me on this inaugural early week dispatch roundtable. I hope people listening got as much out of it as I did. I think it's going to be fun and interesting to go deeper on some of these stories.

that we're reporting ourselves. So hope you'll join us on the Friday roundtable this week and then early again next week. If you like what we're doing here, there are a few easy ways to support us. You can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us.

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Shout out to a few folks who recently joined as premium members, John, Dan, and Lou. glad to have you aboard. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at Roundtable at the dispatch.com. We read everything, even the ones from people like Mike Warren, who wear track seats when they fly. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And a big thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Max Miller, Victoria Holmes, and Noah Hickey. We couldn't do it without you. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time. Thank you.