The Dispatch Podcast - The Third Attempt on Donald Trump’s Life

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

Steve Hayes is joined by Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, and Michael Warren to discuss the third attempt to assassinate Donald Trump and why the national mood is so bad in the 2020s.The Agenda:—The third assassination attempt—Trump’s ballroom—History of political violence—Why everyone leaves Congress—The national bad mood—NWYT: Iran war’s effect on supply chainsDispatch recommendations:—The Price of Crossing Crypto Could Be Higher in 2026—Shades of Color in Philipsburg—The Enduring Lessons of Fusionism—I Am a Free-Range Parent. I Probably Won’t Be When I Move to America.Show notes:—The shooter’s manifesto—White House correspondents’ dinner guests taking wine bottles—Erick Erickson: “This is not a both-sides issue.”—Capitol police threat assessment—Gallup poll on national mood—David French on “America’s Violent Heart” 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

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we'll discuss the third assassination attempt against Donald Trump, this one at the White House correspondence dinner in Washington, D.C., and we'll get into the rise of political violence. We'll also discuss Derek Thompson's essay on the quote-unquote tragic 20s and the national bad mood since the pandemic. And finally, not worth your time. One unexpected global industry that's in the news for product shortages, related to the Iran War. I'm joined today by my dispatch colleagues, Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, and Mike Warren. Let's dive right in. Welcome, gentlemen. There was a shooting over the weekend

at the White House Correspondence Dinner in Washington, D.C. And I think there's a lot to say about it. So we're going to discuss that today. Mike Warren, let me start with you. Can you give us sort of a big picture overview of what happened and what we know about the shooter and his motives. So the sort of moment by moment story seems to have been that at the White House Correspondents Association's

annual dinner, which was held at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C., in this ballroom that's at the sort of in the basement of this big giant hotel, people may remember it as the hotel where Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, outside the hotel. So this was happening inside the hotel. It's the big dinner with all of the members of the press. And traditionally the president shows up. The president Trump has not shown up at this dinner. I don't even know if he showed up in the first terminal now. I can't remember. It was his first time as president. He famously was at one in 2014, which of Barack Obama made fun of him, which was a part of his motivation for running for president in 2016. So this dinner is happening on Saturday night, people are starting to eat, and all of a sudden, from one of the feeds, you can hear shots ringing out from not within the ballroom, but somewhere outside the ballroom.

It takes a few seconds, and then the Secret Service sort of rushes the stage where the president is sitting with the First Lady, the vice president, some members of the White House Correspondents Association. And then pretty quickly, after that, they rush the president off the stage. they essentially locked down the ballroom. What we learned since then is that there was a shooter, a 31-year-old man from Torrance, California, who had tried to breach a security barrier that was set up in the hotel before the ballroom, actually up a level from where the ballroom was.

So before he was able to go down the stairs and access the ballroom, he was taken down by Secret Service or other security officials. He was armed. He had firearms. He had, I believe, a knife on him as well. And what we know about him and his motivation,

he seems to be a pretty anti-Trump guy. I think it's pretty clear from what we know about him. He was intending to harm and kill the president, members of his cabinet. His plan didn't really get far again because he was taken down before he was even in the room. But pretty scary situation, I think, for the people who are getting.

gather there. Again, in this room, a lot of journalists, a lot of members of the administration, members of Congress. Second in line for the presidency, House Speaker Mike Johnson was escorted out as well. There was some confusion about whether the event would go on, and then eventually they decided that it would end, and the president actually gave a brief to the press back at the White House later on Saturday evening. So here we are. This is the, depending on how you count these things, the third attempted assassination of Donald Trump. And so that's what we know about what happened. What we know about the shooter's motivations are that, again, he was an anti-Trump guy.

He traveled from California to Washington, D.C. on train. And he was actually staying at the hotel, the Washington Hilton Hotel, it's got like 1,100 rooms, and was able to be in the hotel and try to get past security. for that reason because he was staying in the hotel. So a lot of questions about the security at this event. And, of course, I think what we're going to talk about today is sort of culture or what is happening within the country that's causing people to try to do this. And so that's what we know at this point, pretty clear that he was trying to kill Donald Trump. And he failed.

Yeah, Jonah, there is a manifesto of sorts that was found in the hotel room opened with a sort of bizarre hello everybody from their. walked into his details about what he was trying to do, as Mike says, very clear that he was targeting the administration officials. He'd been motivated by his antipathy for Donald Trump. He had attended, I believe, one of the No King's rallies. He was a computer or is a computer scientist, engineer, 2017 graduate of Caltech. He described himself as a friendly, federal assassin and said that he was doing what he was doing because this was his opportunity and the time was now. You've been to these dinners before. What do you make of what you saw unfold on Saturday night? And are you surprised that this attacker was able to get as close as he

was able to get to the actual dinner? I'll start with the last part first. He was taking down trying to rush the first perimeter of metal detectors. Like, where do we want possible shooters to be taken down, if not at the first line of defense, right? When the first reports came through, you know, I was like, wow, if he really made it past metal detectors, that's a really big deal because it's not just the White House correspondent's dinner. Lots of events are done at what colloquially people call the Hinkley Hilton, because that's where

Reagan was shot. By John Hinkley. coincidentally enough by John Anglin. And I was in that ballroom for the AEI annual dinner when Alan Greenspan used the phrase of rational exuberance. I mean, like, it's just one of the few big enough spaces in D.C. Upwards of 2,000 attendees for this dinner, massive, massive room. Yeah, we're going to get to the dumb ballroom discourse in a bit.

But, like, my point is just simply, like, it's one of the few rooms that can do this. And so, like, Secret Service. DC police, the hotel staff itself. It is one of the most rehearsed places for securing, you know, dignitaries in Washington outside of like official government property and embassies and that kind of thing. And so if some guy had figured out a way to get past security, I was like, wow, that's a big deal, except he didn't. The way security works is like, yeah, I mean, I fully expect sort of like the, when Elliot Gould is

running through the three greatest most successful attempts to rob a casino in Ocean's 11. You know, one guy actually tasted fresh air. You know, like, it does not shock me that someone could sprint past the metal detectors, but then he was taken down, you know, a few paces afterwards. And so I don't get some of the freak out about the lack of security on this, unless I'm missing something. If we're going to live in a society where, I mean, like, let's say they had done, they broadened the perimeter out to another floor. Well, then you would have been caught rushing past that perimeter.

I mean, like, that wasn't the last line of defense. It was the first line of defense. And so I'm not an expert on this stuff, but I just think there's a lot of cheap shots being done about this. And I think the Secret Service is a really poorly run agency. It has a lot of real problems, a lot of corruption problems. And a terrible name. Yes, and it's a terrible name, you know, and terrible initials. But this is not part of that narrative as far as I can tell. More broadly, I have to say, look, I mean, I follow this because it's part of my job to follow a lot of this. But I am so done with these kinds of, you know, everyone waits for five minutes.

It's just this long, pregnant pause, waiting to find out what the ideological flavor of the latest mass shooter or attempted mass shooter is. and then one side sides with relief because they get to be sanctimonious about how the other side's rhetoric caused this. And sometimes the shooter is a right-wing crackpot and sometimes they're a left-wing crackpot. But the pure hypocrisy of our side has no crackpots

and our rhetoric doesn't encourage crackpots, but your rhetoric does, is just exhausting to me and I want sort of no part of it. I think it is perfectly fair to say that this guy was motivated by some of the left- left-wing rhetoric out there the way crackbots are motivated by rhetoric. But that doesn't necessarily mean anybody is, that all those people are responsible for attempting to kill Trump.

And we can just go around this horn again and again, again. I mean, I've got columns about this kind of stuff. I've been writing for 25 years now. And it's just exhausting. And I just think it's a dumb waste of everybody's time to a certain extent. But everyone gets sucked into it. Yeah, Kevin. So Jonah just summed up my response.

to this. I mean, you know, I think that initially, as I'm watching this unfold, so we should say, we do not think any dispatch staffers were at the White House correspondent's dinner. I have been to many of them over the years, although I don't think I've been to one in like 20 years since Jonah and I had a really good time at one a long time ago that I think that was my very last one. That's where the tattoo came from. The matching tattoos. I have no tattoos. Let the record show. I have no tattoos. It was fun. We had a good time. So I haven't been to one. I don't think any dispatch people were in attendance here. We should tell people that the way that the dinner unfolds is there are lots of pre-parties or receptions that precede the dinner that would have been external,

outside of the security perimeter in this case. There are big reception rooms. I mean, this hotel is massive. They're big reception rooms. And you get invitations to different rooms, different parties. There was a Politico-CBS party. There was an Axios story this year about how a lot of the mainstream establishments, the media establishments that usually host parties, didn't host parties, or sort of toned down their parties. And all sorts of young upstart media companies had sort of the biggest and best attended, the creator economy. There was a substack party and Axios party. So there are pre-parties. Then there's the dinner. Everybody goes through the magnetometers and goes to the dinner. And then there are post parties and big, you know,

vanity fair. It's sort of this Hollywood meets Washington moment, a C&B scene affair, actors mingling with news anchors, really a collection of a lot of very annoying people. That's the other reason I don't go anymore. As it happens, my wife was there. She was at one of the early parties. Somebody did she. You're not trying to subtly imply your wife as a No, I'm definitely not. Speaking of. I did not make that transition, by the way. My lovely, wonderful wife was there with a colleague of hers, my wife works for a big global charity.

She was there with a colleague of hers who was in from Ukraine, you know, who has seen lots of this kind of violence in Ukraine, and then comes to a dinner in the United States. They had left before the party. They went to one of the pre-parties and then left and everybody went into the magnetometer. But Kevin, to Jonah's specific point, this is just exhausting. I've watched this unfold. I was following it on social media. You know, Twitter in the moments after the shooting was this bizarre combination that we've grown accustomed to of real-time actual video from the event.

So you could see what was happening mere seconds after it was happening. And it was also, as Jonas says, immediately this positioning and this sort of exchanging charges and both sides kind of hoping that it was the other side that was the perpetrator here. And, you know, all sorts of other sort of distasteful sort of late stage republic moments like a young conservative influencer doing a duck face. selfie, you know, Instagram. Yes, exactly like Kevin just did for people watching this on YouTube. But, you know, a host of misleading videos.

There was one video of some journalists or some attendees. We don't know that they were journalists scooping up bottles of wine and champagne from a table. You know they were journalists. Yeah, that sounds like journalist activity to me. I mean, they could well have been,

but the accusation from a guy with 2.3 million followers on Twitter was that they were journalists and they were stealing the wine, which not necessarily the case. Some people bring their own wines. Some people, you know, you pay for the wine that's at your table. Steve was not going to not talk about wine. I had to. I mean, it is, we are talking about an ugly shooting. But just basically everybody on many people on social media doing the kinds of things that we expect from social media's sort of lowest common denominator stuff. I think it's important to talk about events like this, moments like this as discrete acts by discrete actors with agency.

And we shouldn't get sort of swept up in discussion of cultural influences, what have you. I want to have that discussion, but I do want us to focus on this guy and the agency. Kevin, tell us for a moment about where were you? What did you see? Were you exhausted in the way that Joan and I were exhausted? When did you learn about the shooter? What did you come to understand in those moments? after or were you blissfully ignorant until the next morning?

I was asleep, of course, as I intend to be. Because what you never hear in these stories, and the one that would be interested is the shooter had just celebrated his 20th wedding anniversary with his wife after a trip to Hawaii and the two happily married and they have two kids who are in high school and ones in college. Because it's never that guy, right? It's always some, you know, person who's got some kind of personal problems who's socially isolated, irrespective of what the ideology is that the shooters all kind of look alike in a lot

of ways. And I suspect we'll find out that the same is largely true of this particular guy. I mean, one of the problems is that there is, because in ye old dark ages of media, there were like three television networks and five newspapers that mattered. And that's what had to be filled up. But now it's endless amounts of digital territory and endless number of people in the content creation business. It has to be filled up. And the problem is, in spite of the way you opened it, that there's a lot to say about this. There's not a lot to say about this. There's a lot not to say about it. The security worked, as Jonah said.

The guy never even got on the same floor as the people he wanted to kill. Everything worked. The Secret Services, body armor worked. The guy, I guess, got off around. It was buckshot, I think, and hit the guy in the body armor. The body armor worked. Everything worked the way it was supposed to. The hotel was ready for it.

They had the bulletproof panels on the table. Melania Trump ducks under the table, which you kind of know is where she wanted to be anyway. Everything worked. Everything worked. Everything with the way it was supposed to. The guy is exactly the kind of guy you have. expect him to be, at least from what we can tell so far, someone who is kind of flitted from one thing to the other who is at loose ends in his life. People find themselves attracted to things

like religious movements and political extremism and things like that because they're looking for meaning in their lives. They're looking for something to give them a sense of belonging and significance. And they write manifestos and do the kind of stuff this guy does. They get a lot of sort of joy out of the planning and all the aesthetics that go into. For some reason, he wanted to exclude Cash Patel. I really want to know about that. You know, there were, this is one of at least six shootings in D.C. that happened in 24 hours around that period. We are violent people, and our violence often takes the form of being directed at political obsessions. It's worth noting that Gerald Ford, probably the most inoffensive president of his century,

there were two very serious assassination attempts on Gerald Ford. One of them got off a shot. That was Carol Jane Moore, was that her name? The one with 38, who didn't bother to adjust her sides first. And then, I guess, Squeaky from the Manson Cooke's tried to kill him, too, and she forgot to put one in the chamber because she didn't know how an automatic worked. And, you know, Gerald Ford took to wearing a bulletproof trench coat around because people were trying to shoot him. And these are the attempts we know about on Trump, by the way.

Surely there have been others. I mean, surely there were a lot during the other presidencies that we've visited they don't make publicity about because they don't get close enough that shots are fired. Do they have to go tackle a guy or something? but everyone seems to have done their job. Everything worked out the way it was supposed to. Trump did exactly what you expected him to, which he was halfway gracious for about 124 seconds,

and then he turned back into being Trump and started talking about this is why I need a ballroom, even though it's unlikely that the White House is going to run out its ballroom to the White House Correspondents Association. The people in the world, they like least for a private event. And everything went exactly the way it was supposed to. And now you've got, of course, conspiracy cooks saying,

Well, Trump stage this because he wants to make an argument for his ballroom or he's trying to change the argument from Iran or whatever. And that, too, is expected. But also, if you go back, we're a little more connected to the obsessiveness and ignorance of the public than we used to, thanks to social media. But if you go back and look at, you know, Ragged in Hinkley, Ford and Sarah Jane Moore, Ford and Squeaky Front, there are, you know, all sorts of conspiracy cooks that ideas that went around with that stuff to probably Carter and the rabbit, you know, generated some kind of a conspiracy. conspiracy theory, I'm sure at some point, it's just, it's everything is absolutely normal. It's actually an unremarkable episode in most ways, except for the fact that it happened to a room full of media people and political people, so we're all going to talk about it because we're media people and political people and we love to talk about this stuff. We're not going to talk

about the other six or seven shootings that happened over the weekend in D.C., but we weren't going to talk about those anyway because they happen to people nobody cares about. So I take your point on the context, and it's worth noting that there were these other incidents in Washington, DZ, that aren't going to get the kind of attention. But I don't agree with you that this is not worth talking about. I do, I guess, agree with you with your assessment that this is, quote, absolutely normal. I think it has become more normal over the years for the reasons you suggest historically, if you go back and look at Gerald Ford. But political violence today is, I would say, I mean, certainly we've had periods, I would afford assassination attempts, surely the 60s, with successful

assassinations of prominent leading political figures. But, well, I think this is different. In some respects, it's normal in that people are getting accustomed to it. What happened after the shooting on Saturday night, you know, there was talk of going back to the dinner. Secret Service didn't want that to happen. I kind of wish they would have, to be honest. I mean, there's something to be said for trying to proceed, go on with life as normal, not allow these things to be disrupted. And I love that guy from creative artists who were just sitting at the table, like just eating his barata salad, watching the whole thing going down. And then he said later, like, I'm not going to go to the schmutsi floor. Are you kidding me? I wanted to see what was happening. I don't hate that.

I don't hate that guy. Yeah, there was a video of sort of a super agent who was, as everybody else was kind of diving on the floor, remaining on the floor, was sitting upright at his table, finishing his salad. He also said he had a bad bag. Yeah, I had a bad back. Let me push back a little on this. You know, we had, you know, presidential assassinations the 19th century, not just Lincoln. And this kind of demonstrative theatrical violence has been a big part of American life for a long time. As I often point out when the subject comes up, which unfortunately it does too often, the worst school mass to occur in American history happened in 1920. We don't ever talk about it because it was so long ago and it didn't involve shootings. It involved bombs. They dynamite at the place, or the guy dynamite at the place. This kind of thing has been with us for a long time. I mean, yes, it's worth talking about in the sense that it is both dramatic and newsworthy, obviously, even if it is normal and predictable. It's like if a meteor falls some interesting place, we're going to talk about it, even though meteor is hitting the planet are just, you know, laws of physics playing themselves out in inevitable kinds of ways. It doesn't mean it's not interesting. Of course, it's kind of interesting.

The rhetoric policing stuff, like someone posted something I guess Eric Erickson wrote about, and I hope you all you people who are talking about how Trump's the threat to democracy and not going to lose, not going to leave office after the election. know how you contributed to this, which is just so ridiculous and embarrassing and shameful and hackish that he should be ashamed of himself. The people who have said that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy and may not leave office after the end of his term may have in mind the fact that he illegally tried to stay in office last time around. It's not like this stuff is without precedent. And the fact that some idiot, some bad person does something awful targeting people you like doesn't mean that the people you like suddenly have all. their sins forgiven, that there's suddenly these, you know, flawless, defectless public servants, which they aren't. And the way that people exploit these kinds of things to try to, you know, tone police or try to silence critics or things like that is just absolutely shameful. It happens

on both sides, as Jonah was saying. It's happening on the right side of the political spectrum right now. But we should just hold that stuff in contempt. We should laugh at it. We should make fun of it. We should highlight it when we get a chance to. And we should make people embarrassed to try to do this crap because it is embarrassing crap and they should be ashamed of themselves. So here's to you, Eric Erickson. You are the loser of the day.

All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the dispatch podcast. And we're back. You're listening to the dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. So I want to talk a little bit about both of the things that you just raised. One, this idea that this is a one-side phenomenon,

that people like you and Jonah who are saying this is both. sides are just missing the argument. This is really a one-way series of threats, series of attempted attacks flowing from the left to the right. So that's sort of topic number one. Jonah, on that, we saw, as Kevin mentioned, Eric Erickson sent a tweet to the effect that Kevin described. Eric also in his newsletter this morning basically made that case. Like, this is not a both sides thing. This is left-wing violence attacking right-wingers. It's more prevalent than the other way around. It's not the case that everybody has, every side has its cooks.

And look, if you look at Trump, he has been the subject of three assassination plots. They point to the attack on the Republican baseball game by the Bernie Sanders follower that injured Steve Scalise. I mean, there are lots of examples. Is this right wing a left to right phenomenon? And if not, what are the counter examples? We're going to pretend like January 6 doesn't count? literally left off of some of the long lists that we got from conservative friends,

including sensible sane conservatives like Guy Benson, had a long list of left-on-right political violence, and he announced at the top of it that it was incomplete, but didn't include January 6th, didn't include some of these others. Yeah, I mean, I think this was clearly all orchestrated by my friend Noah Rothman, who's got a book coming out on the prevalence of left-wing violence. Look, I think part of the problem here, like, I'll stipulate it. I think it's a both sides thing.

I think most of our problems have a both sides component to it. And as I'm a broken record on this, just because I say both sides, doesn't mean that the phenomenon are symmetric or mirror images of each other. Right. And so one of the problems that you run into is that mainstream media, for whatever we want to call that term, right, is largely dominated by partisans of a certain partisan narrative. And there are all sorts of institutions, Southern Poverty Law Center comes to mind, right? Organizations and foundation grants for the study of this, that, and the other thing,

where they're all looking rightward. And they're all looking for evidence of, you know, the dark curtain of fascism descending on America from the right. If you only look rightward, you will find evidence to support that fear. Because there are, you. are a bunch of jackasses out there. I mean, you know, the Nick Fuentes people, the things that they talk about, the proud boy types, even some of the more intellectual guys, they talk about things, about democracy being, you know, about the need for a red Caesar in this kind of garbage, right? There's all sorts of things that are coming from the far right that are deplorable. There's language that comes from members of this administration that is deplorable. And I'm using the word

deplorable deliberately because it triggers some people. But the problem is that those institutions do do not look leftward. And in fact, sometimes when they do look leftward, they go from these Kleege lights, you know, these search lights looking for villains on the, you know, getting under, coming in from the perimeter, these barbarian hordes. And instead, they turn it into mood lighting. And so they put a camera on friggin Hassan Piker, who's literally calling for the murder of people, who endorses murder and rate, and they turn him into some sort of, you know, this generation's Che Guevara, sex symbol, cool guy.

And it is amazing to me how utterly irresponsible and tone death these supposedly serious people are when they're talking about the threat from the right, when they don't understand how the hypocrisy of this can drive reasonable people, crazy on the Normie right, on the mainstream center right. If all you're hearing from people is your side is full of racist, your side is full of violent

people, your side is full of murderers, your side condones, you know, hates democracy. And by the way, you really got to get the handbag that this influencer from the left uses when she talks about shoplifting at Whole Foods and how great it is to blow up friggin pipelines. You know, like you can't have it both ways. And the way the sort of cultural elite, if you want to call it, lionizes a certain kind of transgressive romantic, sort of Marxist-adjacent, you know, assaults on the system and threats to the system and says, you know,

like when there's violence that comes from left-wing people, there's this impulse that says, well, of course Trump's rhetoric is what invites this kind of. This is what you get when you talk this way. Now, I'm okay with a certain amount of that analysis. because the way Donald Trump talks is irresponsible, un-Republicans, small R, un-statesman-like, undemocratic, unhinged. And, like, I think it's true that you will get unhinged people

who will respond to some of that crap. At the same time, you can't say, well, the people that he aroused, they have a point. They don't have a point. The guy who shot the CEO of United Healthcare is just a murderer. He's not a martyr. He's not a hero. And so I think the way we talk about this stuff causes a lot of people including, you know, Eric Erickson. I haven't seen his stuff on this, but I'll take you guys face value about it.

It says when all you're doing is watching how the mainstream media describes your side, the urge for what aboutism becomes irresistible. And I kind of understand that as a human thing. But the idea that it's all one-sided, I just. find, first of all, it's a ludicrous argument to make because you know that whatever set of facts you're stringing together in the here and now to sustain it aren't going to last because somebody on the other side, you know, somebody on your side is going to do something hideous like January 6th, right? So you might as well just... Or shoot up a black church somewhere. Yeah. I mean,

there's a lot of terrible things that have been done by a lot of terrible people and some of them score higher on a right wing index than on the left wing index. And some of them don't really score ideologically at all. I mean, the main, I'm old enough for remember, everyone here is older than for remember how desperate everyone was to make Tim McVeigh into like, the guy from the Oklahoma City body into, you know, a run-of-the-mill Christian fundamentalist. He was not that. They wanted to make Jared Loeffner, the guy who shot up Gabby Giffords and all those people, into a tea partier. He was a deranged schizophrenic who was getting instructions about grammar from his TV. And this is the point I'm getting at is that sometimes just this desire to run around while the

metal is still warm enough that you can bend it and make your impressions on it. Create some false idol, some frigging golden calf of your narrative to parade around as a new icon or idol. I find grotesque. Just give it up already. This country is huge problems. Some of them are right wing flavored and some of them are left wing flavored. But it's not one side. It's not Manichaean with good guys on one side and bad guys on the other, at least not scored on ideological terms. They're all American flavored like craft singles. Three of the four of us are old enough to remember

when eco-terrorism was sort of a thing, right? And I can remember a lot of those conversations, people saying, well, I don't really, you know, I don't endorse letter bombs, but, you know, Kaczynski kind of had a point. Yeah. And that was just a thing. There was just the way people talked about this stuff.

And, you know, it's not going to change 20 years from now. It wasn't any different 20 years ago. And I do like the continued age, shame. of Mike Warren and eat shaming. I'm young. I take your point. Yes, we've had political violence in the past. We've got it today. It comes in different flavors, perpetrated by folks on the left and the right. But there is more of it today. There are more threats, I think, today than there have been in the past. There are more attacks of a purely political nature today than there have been in the past. I think you have more copycats. There's a report out by the Capitol Police.

that showed a pretty dramatic spike, not quite doubling, of threats against sitting members of Congress from 2024 to 2025. Steve, I don't know if that's really, I don't know if that's really true. I mean, the threats certainly are true because the price of communication is way down. You know, you don't have to write a letter, put a stamp on it, or even make a telephone call. You know, all of us, I'm sure, get crazy threats via email or social media, other stuff pretty regularly. I know I do to the point where I already even notice them anymore. But you think about how many people.

political lynchings there were in the late 19th century in the early 20th century, you know, attacks on partisan newspapers and things like that. Political violence was very deeply written into the fabric of American public life and it almost always has been. And that's partly, I don't want to go off in my whole lecture about this, but it is worth keeping in mind that violence of all kinds is much more common in the United States than it is in lots of other comparable countries. We have much higher homicide rights, not only by firearms, but by stabbings. We have higher rates of automobile accidents

and other things related to high-risk behavior, drug overdoses, health problems related to excessive alcohol consumption. It's weirdly a Western Hemisphere stuff. We have more in common with like Brazil than we do England when it comes to a lot of the stuff Kevin's talking about. Yeah, there was a really interesting David French piece

several years ago when he was still a full-time colleague of ours that got into this. We can link that in the show notes. But it's also the case. I mean, look, if you know and you talk to members of Congress, particularly over the past decade, you have had many members of Congress leave the body because of fears about physical safety. Republicans and Democrats alike, Jared Golden cited physical safety when he left. Our friend Mike Gallagher, his family had been subject to an ugly

swatting. And when he voted the wrong way on a couple of subsequent controversial issues, massive increase in threats that were, I think, real threats. Mike Gallagher is a Marine. This is not a guy who's likely to just bow out because he's a wimp. There are, I mean, just in my own interactions, I can point to probably a handful of other members of Congress who have said, who have had incidents, many of them not reported publicly of physical violence. One member of Congress was picked up by a big guy at a local.

town hall meeting, sort of both lapels thrust against a car and held there until the police came. These stories are sort of more and more common. While I don't want to rely on the prevalence of anecdotes, it is supported by this data compiled by the U.S. Capitol Police. Although being picked up by your lapels by a big guy, if you've ever read Harry Truman's accounts of his conversations with Lyndon Johnson. Right. Apparently about that. Yeah. I mean, I think there, I don't know that he was worried that Lyndon Johnson was going to actually bring long-term physical violence in the way that this was. Johnson apparently actually went into the White House and, like, grabbed him by the lapels and picked him up. But, like, that Truman apparently had to, like, instruct people not to, like, let him be alone in a room Johnson anymore.

Mike, is this just my recency by, am I just like, I'm seeing all of these headlines? Kevin's right. We do see more because everybody's got a blind. Every incident is written up. Is it just my misperception that this is happening so much more? And political violence really isn't any worse than it was before? Because it sure doesn't feel that way. And that is why I'm, like Jonah said at the outset, just exhausted by this. At the risk of sound like I'm sort of dodging this debate, I kind of wonder if you guys are both right about this.

I think the perception that there is more political violence, it may. just be a perception if we're looking at things historically and looking at in the way that Kevin lays out here. But, you know, to use a cliche, perception can be reality. And the fact is that the fact that this is in general, meaning the 21st century is sort of a less violent time than it was, you know, 150 years ago where everyone was walking around with a revolver and, you know, people were still, you know, solving disputes with duels and that sort of thing. The fact that we live in a generally less violent society than we previously did makes these incursions into our cushy little perception that we live, you know, nice and easy here in the United States in

2026 makes those more stark. So perhaps that's what's going on. That's my attempt to split the baby on this question. I do think the perception is important because we live in such sort of media saturated times. We've got, again, Saturday night, I was watching all of this unfold on my phone sitting at home. We had a canceled little league game. So nothing was really going on on a Saturday night. By the way, I've never been to a White House correspondence dinner. I have no desire to. And what happened on Saturday doesn't change that one bit. But, you know, I'm seeing at the time multiple videos from different perspectives is a bunch of journalists in there. So they've whip out their phones and start taping this sort of thing. And so it creates a perception that this is happening. It's happening now.

it's happening all of the time from every single angle, even though it was just one incident, and even though ultimately what happened, as we've discussed here, is that nothing happened. That is I think an important thing to underscore here, is that ultimately nothing happened, yet it feels like, and I'm sure it felt that way,

and I know people who were in the room, it felt stressful, it felt scary. You figure I'm with the president of the United States, you know, this has to be one of the safest places, and for a moment, for a time, it did not feel that way. So look, I do think the broader things that seem to be going on where, which Kevin has talked about, right, the need to find meaning and purpose when you feel alone, when you feel your life is not going well. Again, these are not, you know, married with two

kids and gainfully employed people who are going around shooting up places or attempting to, you know, I think you, the concentration of that toward politicians, we have a hyper-celebrity focus in our culture. And we have ultimately, in the president of the United States, kind of the ultimate avatar for that, right? This is like hyper-partisanship, hyper-celebrity, everything is sort of always about him. I'm not claiming here that like he brings this on himself. But I do think it is a reflection of the time that we live in, that everything, if you are sitting there in, in Torrance, California, things aren't working out well. I think that's what we're going to find is People have talked with his members of his family,

and he was sort of ranting about politics and his frustrations and all this. A lot was writing things down. If ranting about politics and writing things down are signs of... The four of us are in trouble. Exactly. We're not crazy. He wasn't getting paid for it. I just think this is increasingly happening because it feels as if, you know,

if you have no agency in your own life, you're going to take agency in other ways. You combine that with this particular political obsession. I mean, there's a sense that it makes in our sort of senseless moment that you're seeing more of this and that you're seeing it directed at the ubiquitous celebrity president that we have. And it's terrible. It's certainly not everybody. It's not even, it's not 99.99% of people who are sort of obsessed. with politics at the moment, but it stands out because it's so remarkable when it does happen,

and we're all watching it happen in real time. That just changes everybody's perception, and I think it's what's driving a lot of our big picture concern about what's happening in the country right now. On the resignations from Congress stuff, I'm open to the idea that there are more security threats on Congress than there have been, maybe not ever. like I'm sure there were quite a few death threats in the lead up to the Civil War, you know, including on the floor from other members of Congress. But I think part of that is you're only looking at one variable here,

which is the crap these guys have to go through. And again, that might be getting worse. It's certainly gotten worse for specific people we know, right? at the same time, the payoff has gotten worse, right? So, like, the garbage that you have to put up with if you're a member of Congress has gone through the roof, and the return for decent people has gone through the floor, for sure. And so, like, it be one thing if these guys were, you know, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster crafting legislation to, you know, usher in a new American century and yada, yada, yada.

But if instead it's just constant fundraising and being drowned out by morons who have figured out that the reason you go to Congress is to get on TV and you can't get anything done. And meanwhile, your wife is getting really creepy phone calls or your husband's getting really creepy phone calls or your children are getting really creepy phone calls or letters or emails. And you could make 10x in the private sector. For sure. When you want to give people an explanation for why you're leaving Congress, you don't want to necessarily live. lead with the I could make 10 times more. You want to lead with, I get all these death threats and my wife hates it and it's terrible. And those are all defensible reasons to get the hell out of there. But I just think like this is one of the things you get when you have institutions coming apart

and failing to do their job. And so I mean, I take Kevin's broader perspective very seriously and I think it's a point I'll often make in various contexts. But like the Supreme Court is getting a lot more death threats than it used to. There's just a lot of people who are visible now that didn't used to be visible. And visibility brings with it unwanted attention in ways that anonymity doesn't. Yeah, I take your point, Jonah, no monocausal explanation from me. I think you're right to add that additional context. But United States Capitol Police threat assessment cases for 2025, 14,938 concerning statements, behaviors, and communications directed against members of Congress, their family, staff, and the Capitol Complex.

For the last five years, in 2024, that was 9,474. In 2023, that was 8,08. In 22, it was 7,500-ish. There had been more in 2021, up to 9600. And these are not, by the way, the way that they count these, these are not sort of one-off, throwaway. I really hate my member of Congress type thing. These are, you know, much more considered things that the intelligence, the professionals who work on these issues have determined constitute actual threats.

And I guess while I think you're right, the payoff, the upside of being a member of Congress is certainly lower. They don't do any legislating. If you care about ideas, why would you be in Congress? You're much better doing a lot of other things. The kinds of people that are attracted to serving in the Congress that we have right now are not the kind of people who were attracted to serving in Congress, even 10 years ago, even 15 years ago. They're very different, I think, in terms of quality. And it's something that's, it's hard to

describe to people who didn't, you know, who haven't spent hours and hours with these members of Congress and the ones in the past and sort of understanding the differences. But I also think that we have seen this increase. And you talk to some of those people about these threats. And sure, maybe some of them would rather go make 10 times more money as a lobbyist. But I think that many of them are very serious about the level of threats against them and their families. This includes, by the way, people who were serving 20 years ago and are serving today. And what they thought they could tolerate 20 years ago is very different than what they

think they can tolerate today. I think you've both hit up on something in that this is really driven by visibility, by, particularly members of Congress, by the fact that they are on television and they're prominent on social media, because Congress, we go over and over and over here, doesn't really do anything. Like, if you were really driven by a desire

to use violence to create political change, why would you bother wasting ammunition on Mike Johnson, you know, or any other member of the House of Representatives? With all due respect for a taxi driver, why would you bother shooting a senator? They just don't do very much, but you see them because they're famous. and I don't know that we have data on this,

but there's a anecdotal reason to believe that it's not the very powerful members of Congress who get the most of this stuff, it's the most famous ones. Like Marjorie Taylor Green got a lot of this kind of stuff, apparently, from people. She was really a focus of a lot of people because she was this very high profile.

She wasn't someone who was particularly influential in Congress in some way she was not influential, in some way she was the opposite of that. Supreme Court justices, because there's only nine of them. It's easier to pay attention to them. I just don't think people are doing that kind of rational calculus necessarily. I mean, some people undoubtedly are. There was a spike in threats to members of the Supreme Court in the lead-up to the Dobbs decision, for instance. So some people are doing that.

But I think with a lot of them, you know, if it's a Marjorie Taylor Green, you're right. She's absolutely more visible than the average member of Congress. She also says things that are more provocative that will piss off exactly the kind of unhinged people that would be most likely to do something about the space laser lobby you're talking about. I mean, any of a number of things that she said, again, not justifying it, but just she's high profile because she says controversial and provocative things, which raises her profile among the people who oppose her most, which is this cyclical phenomenon that I think has, in part, led us to where we are. I think this is all sort of of a piece. I want to talk, I want to spend the last few minutes here talking about sort of the broader environment. that our politics are taking place in, that through the American people are living in these days.

And there was a really outstanding essay from Derek Thompson, former writer for the Atlantic, now has a substack. And he goes into all sorts of explanations basically for why the United States, why the U.S. populace is basically just in a bad mood. It's a state of Malays. Kyla Scanlan, who's an author for Dispatch Markets, called it a vibe session. People are just down. People are discouraged. And Thompson walks through in great detail a number of different reasons, the increasing prevalence of social media, the ability to sort of tap into other people who are down,

the economic changes we've seen. The most prominent one, I would say, where he kind of settles, and again, not a monocausal explanation, is sort of the hangover from the pandemic. and what we've seen both in terms of economics, in terms of sort of sustained inflation, even though there are other economic indicators that point in the other direction that suggest we should be happier

or have more confidence in the U.S. economy, but also the social and societal implications of this post-pandemic word. And I want to just read one where he sums it up, one paragraph here. He writes, And so this is as close as I can get to a unified theory of the tragic 20s.

American sadness this decade, has been forged by the fact of and the feeling of a permanent, unrelenting economic crisis, amplified by a uniquely negative news and media environment, and exacerbated by the rise of solitude and the declining centrality of trusted institutions. Inflation has made today's life harder to afford, while the ambient awareness of other people's triumphs on social media had made tomorrow's success feel harder to achieve, the ongoing collapse of confidence in the establishment,

has made Americans feel unusually adrift and dissatisfied with institutions outside of their control, while the chosen self-isolation of modern life has demolished communal trust as we increasingly experience other people's minds through the toxic surreality of our screens rather than through the embodied reality of strangers who are, for the most part, just as nice as we are. Mike, your reaction to the Derek Thompson essay in that selection in particular? It certainly spoke to a lot of the things I've been thinking about and had not sort of organized into thoughts and put them down into any kind of unified theory. And I don't think he, Derek attempts to say it's the end all be all. As you said, he's not making him totally monocausal argument. And even his sort of unified theory has lots of different, you know, it is economics and society and technology all sort of coming together. in that way it is not unusual or even remarkable because that's always what kind of defines how

society is doing at any moment. It's all those kind of factors coming in. And so in some ways, it's maybe is not as revelatory as I would have hoped. But I do think the pandemic is something that we remain just stuck in. And the things that were happening, the technological changes, the political upheaval, the economic uncertainty that was all happening. before the pandemic has is this moment of it's like all these conditions were at work here and then sort of an atomic bomb blew up and all of the problems that we had were this is a really poor metaphor but all the problems we had were sort of mutated and got a lot worse and yes people are not dying of COVID the way they were six years ago the restrictions that we had placed on ourselves or that

our governments have placed on us are lifted, but that hangover from everything of sort of losing the little platoons of democracy that we were sort of engaged in, it's not entirely the case. I mean, we are still doing things like Little League and Boy Scouts, and I'm just talking about my own neighborhood, you know, swim in tennis and the elementary school PTA, like all those things still exist and are still vibrant in my neck of the woods. And I think that's true for a lot of Americans. But again, it comes back to the perception. The perception is that it's not that way everywhere else. And we can see that. We can be told that. We can see it. And the version of that story that we want to be told, we can be told that it's because of the breakdown of organized

religion. But of course, like that was going on long before the pandemic. We can be told that it's about, you know, economic inequality and that sort of thing, which is happening. But also, like, people are richer than they have ever been in the United States, and that includes poor people in the United States are richer than they have been in decades past. So I think so much of it comes from perception and relative perception. Everybody else seems happy, and I'm not for all these various reasons, and that kind of gets exacerbated. It's concerning. I don't know where, I don't think Derek comes up with a way out of it, but I think it all seems to have been exacerbated and amplified by the pandemic, and we just haven't gotten it. We haven't gotten

out of it yet. Who's the president of the United States? The guy who was president at the beginning of the pandemic. Donald Trump. We're just, we're just stuck in that way. And I don't know how we get out. Jonah, how do we get out? Muddling through? I mean, like, I'm, I'm very reluctant to give in to, like, silver bullet solutions to these kinds of things. Look, I agree, like, all of these things in rich, marbled, complicated phenomenon. Like, I often use, when I try to explain, what an overdetermined phenomenon is. I'll, you know, I'll explain why Jews are liberal. And because I used to get asked that all the time.

And I can give you 10 different reasons. And for some Jewish people, eight of them apply really strongly. And two, have no bearing. And for other people, three apply really strongly. And seven, you know, like, it depends. And so there's some people for whom the pandemic really screwed them up. And then for other people, for whom the pandemic only did minor damage, right? but in a society where other people are screwed up,

your mood is in some ways pegged to the mean or the median. And when other people are reacting so negatively to so much of life, it brings you down. I mean, this is sort of at scale, kind of like you're only as happy as your least happy child. A society with a critical mass of really cranky, upset people, is just going to be a bummer of society. Even if things are going okay for you,

for all sorts of different reasons. And, you know, we made this point a lot. I remember, you know, we recorded a lot of podcasts during the pandemic. And I used to make the point all the time. There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of reason to think that pandemics in particular mess with people. Yeah.

Like their brains. It's just like unseen enemy, fear of contagion. Yeah. You know, all sorts of, you know, like Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind talks about how the fear of contagion or disgust at germans. and obscenity and all these kinds of things are very close to the parts of the brain

that deal with more like high-minded things of religion and shame and approval in all sorts of ways. And I think that has a very long tail to it and you combine it with the social media stuff, which I really do think is destructive to, on net, is more destructive to people's psyches than it is beneficial.

You know, I've used this quote from Montesquieu a bunch of times, but I think it's a very helpful way of thinking about this stuff and as pretentious as it is, to quote Montesquieu, he once said, if we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy. But we want to be happier than other people, which is difficult since we think them happier than they really are. And the whole functioning of social media is to make happy people seem much happier than they are and also to get a lot of people to pretend to be happy when they're in fact friggin' miserable.

And the dissonance of behaving as if you're happy when you're in fact miserable is kind of a cancer on your soul. And I think it's contagious in a lot of ways. So I have no great solution here except for the usual ones, which is as Kevin began this conversation by pointing out, you very rarely hear about the mass shooter getting a good solid eight hours of sleep every night because he's got a bunch of kids and a good, rewarding job and a loving marriage. right like the things that give you meaning and satisfaction and fill up the holes in your soul are always going to be closer to home they're always going to be those traditional sort of bourgeois things and it doesn't mean everybody who's quote unquote trapped in the suburbs is going to be happy

but the myth that being quote unquote trapped in the suburbs makes you miserable is a romantic myth that is a hundred and fifty two hundred year old pedigree by a bunch of miserable friggin' romantic poets and writers who hate the bourgeois and want to live in a time of excitement and thrill and sacrifice and violence. And screw those people. Get a good job. Meet a nice girl.

Meet a nice boy. Whatever it is. Settle down. Have a decent life. Live with decency. And a lot of this other stuff will roll off of you whether or not you're making as much money as you'd like to. I mean, if getting eight hours of sleep is a key component here,

I'm prouder of myself than I ever have been, that I have not become a mass shooter because I don't know the last time that I've done that. Before we take an ad break, please consider becoming a member of the dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up at the dispatch.com slash join, and if you use the promo code Roundtable, you'll get them on free.

Speaking of ads, if they aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, two free gift memberships to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders, and much, much more. Okay, we'll be right back. And welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. Kevin, a couple things just again, speaking from my own experience, I went out on Friday to my favorite butcher. It's about 45 minutes south of my house, Knicks of Calvert, phenomenal butcher shop.

Used to have this like crazy prices, you know, 50, 70% cheaper than Safeway, 90% cheaper than Whole Foods for a variety of fantastic meats. I went there the other day because my wife was having some work colleagues over and I got the typical 10 pound bag of ground round. And I haven't paid careful attention to that. I get it pretty regularly. That is the best burger meat you can possibly have. It was $57. And I think five years ago, six years ago, it was 35 maybe. And you just look around and everything.

Jonah and I went out for a dinner and a drink with some of our colleagues middle of last week. And again, I don't eat out. I don't eat out that much downtown. of DC, $19 plate of chicken nachos, $20 for two street tacos, $16,

$17 a drink? Like, this is crazy. So that's sort of one. And Thompson really makes the point that this, the sort of omnipresence of inflation, yes, it's gone up and down, ebbs and flows, but collectively,

we don't think about it on a month-to-month basis based on the CPI, we think about going out and, as he put it, excuse my language, holy shit, these groceries are expensive. That is true. Then the other question, you know, just in terms of interacting. And again, this is way more personal than I usually am on these podcasts. But I think people, in this polarized political environment, even if you're not a terribly political person, maybe especially if you're not a terribly political person, with all of this conflict, confrontational politics everywhere, certainly on television, definitely on social media.

But increasingly in our personal spaces, you go somewhere and you're afraid to say something because you don't know if somebody's going to get in your face, whether you're talking about, you know, the super lefties. And my experience growing up was what they were the most obvious. They were the ones who usually were wanted to get in my face about things because I disagree to them. Or now sort of super mega. And, you know, I think people are concluding like, is it even worth it to go to the local, you know, social or the block party or the probably less the church function than other things? Because it's just not worth it. You just could find yourself on a conversation that'll be unpleasant. You don't want to deal with it. It's too much.

It's easier to stay home and watch another, you know, binge another Netflix series. One data point on this. I think I told you about this at the time. My wife and I did this fantastic trip for our anniversary in Europe, and it was a group biking trip, and they said that they saw a huge drop-off in bookings from America, because people were terrified that they would go and have to do a vacation where you do a lot of group meals with people where you have to disagree with about politics,

and they were just like, it's not worth it. I think it's a real thing. I do. Well, so many thoughts about this. So Jonah mentioned a critical mass of cranky, people. Steve talked about the usual selection of terrific meats. One of those needs to be the title of this episode. And Derek Thompson wants me to believe that the world is full of people who are, quote, just as nice as I am. If that's the case, I'm going to jump off a bridge because I'm going to need a

much nicer world than that. That's not a great thing to think about. Yeah, I think that the disconnect between our material prosperity and our national mood is worth thinking about and meditating on for a bit. in the sense that it shows not only that we are not homo-economics, that there are lots of things in life that are not going to be fixed by higher GDP, higher wages, even higher real wages, in reference to the inflation problem. And that while economic prosperity certainly is something that enables some of these other things, like it's a lot easier to have a happy marriage and family if you're economically stable

and, you know, do it all right that way. it's easier to be involved in your community or your church if you're not desperately thinking about the next $25 and how am I going to cover milk and eggs and bread from my family. But that stuff in and of itself not only doesn't suffice to get you past the other things in life that you may need to feel healthier, more attached, more happy, more secure, more meaningful. But in some ways they make it worse because, you know, the nature of our work has changed in such a way that we've got more time to dawdle on our phones and look at social media and do those sorts of things. We have some, you know, luxury problems in the United States, things that we worry about that you only worry

about when you're a pretty wealthy and prosperous country that, you know, poor people who really are desperately trying to make ends meet don't think about as much. I think those things all kind of come together. But it is also worth thinking about, as you alluded to earlier, Steve, how much of this stuff really is self-chosen. You know, you have a lot of this kind of enemy among the upper middle classes, you know, relatively affluent, educated professionals who could live their lives in different ways if they chose to, but they really, really like being on that phone or they really, as you say, want to stay home and binge a Netflix series rather than, you know, go to the church potluck or whatever. And these are choices people make. And I think that they make them in the same

way that people make choices that lead to bad health outcomes, right? Like nobody wants to get lung cancer and nobody wants to weigh 400 pounds, nobody wants to be an alcoholic, but you make that individual choice in the moment, not for, am I going to be an alcoholic or a lifelong smoker, but am I going to have this drink? Am I going to smoke this cigarette? Am I going to do this thing?

And so we're making these choices on an hour by hour, minute by minute, you know, maybe day by day, week by week basis, not thinking about what does my life look like in five years from now if this is the kind of choice that I consistently make. And it's difficult in the best of times to get ahead of you, yourself that way and really lead your life in that kind of long-term way. But when you've got these little, you know, short-term, instant feedback doses of hubris and happiness from, you know, social

media or whatever, or watching, you know, in my case, if I still had a television, you know, watching some season of Justified for the 65th time or whatever, because I really liked watching that show. And watching Apocalypse Now for the 90th time or whatever it is. By the way, a clip of Apocalypse Now came up the other day. And I was really thinking about it in terms of parenthood, which I think about a lot right now for obvious reasons. But, you know, Willard has come into Kurtz's camp and passed all these decapitated corpses and a pile of skulls and all this stuff

and people who are painting their faces and worshipping as a god. And Kurt says, I worry sometimes that my son will not understand what it is I've tried to do here. Story of my life, Colonel Kurtz, I kind of get that. And, yeah, so not to get in everyone's, like, you know, business about, you know, religion and family life

and that kind of stuff. things really do help. Having those kinds of connections really do make a difference in life. And I wrote this piece many years ago for National Review that made a lot of people angry. He was about in-cells when that first kind of became part of the conversation. And my advice for them was just go join a church. I don't really care what you believe in. And chances are, neither does the church. Most churches are open to people who are, you know, people of good intention who maybe have some doubts about the theological claims of any particular religion. but, you know, particularly kind of mainline, you know, evangelical Protestant churches are full of young women who want to get married.

And they're also full of the kind of young women that you might actually want to marry if you're a sort of desperately unhappy 22-year-old guy, 25-year-old guy who obviously is not like good to go into bars and picking up checks and stuff. And people got really mad about that because they thought it was, you know, a counsel of insincerity. But there really is something very important in life to be said for going through the motions. Like I've done a lot of stuff related to family with my parents and things that I didn't want to do. But I went through the motions and certain kinds of things and it was worth going through the motions. It was worth keeping up relationships that otherwise weren't going to be kept up. It was worth doing some of the things that one just has to do because they're the things that one does. And we have a much more kind of libertarian ethos in many ways right now when it comes to our personal lives, our social lives, our families, and that kind of thing.

And we have these choices. you really can get away with not seeing your parents for Christmas or sending that card or having that conversation or being a member of a church or if you are a member of a church getting involved in things. But just because you can get away with it isn't necessarily an indicator that you should get away with it or that it's going to be good for you,

that this thing that feels like the convenient thing for you to do, which it is right now in this moment, is in the long term, something that's going to contribute to your unhappiness. Well said. Yeah, very well said. Well, thank you. We are way over time.

but I want to get in a quick round of dispatch recommends and an even quicker not worth your time. So the dispatch article that I want to recommend actually goes to some of this, particularly sort of the ways in which the United States are different than our neighbors and our neighbors in the West. There's a terrific essay that we ran about a week ago, April 20th, by Stephanie Murray. And the title is, I am a free-range parent. I probably won't be when I move to America. And she talks of living in England, letting her five-year-old walk to the corner market,

and not having to worry about it very much and allowing their kids about freedom there that she likely won't when she moves back here. And I have to say, mirrored my experience living in Spain in 2018, 2019, where we would let our kids walk several blocks to the corned market at 10.30 at night to get fresh squeezed orange juice. A really terrific essay.

A lot of food for thought, we will include it in the show notes. Mike Warren, what do you recommend? As a matter of sort of understanding our politics at the moment, particularly the mechanics of our politics, I recommend Alex Deemis' piece, the price of crossing crypto could be higher in 2026. Just a great look at sort of the money that the crypto lobby is spending on our politics.

It's interesting. I learned a lot reading it. And so I highly recommend it if you're like me and don't really understand the industry or sort of the political valence of its big donors. You'll learn a lot. Kevin. You know, on that free-range parenting story,

it reminded me of something that I think I have I think I have this in common with Jonah, if I'm remembering, which is the experience of being sent by your mother to the store to buy cigarettes when you're a little kid. And, you know, in Lubbock, Texas, my mother would give me a check. And I would walk to the grocery store, you know, six, seven years old, buy a cart in a smokes, give the guy check. And it was like nothing had happened. But the story I wanted to recommend was the one on Phillipsburg, Montana by Lawson Chapman.

And about this, you know, town of Montana that was famous. written by a poet some years ago and was kind of in decline and what it's like now. And Montana is an inherently interesting place, I think, and I like stories about Montana, and I hope we have more Montana coverage in the dispatch. Jonah. I guess it's just so in my wheelhouse these days. We had a very good piece. I think it was part of the 250, the next 250 series, yeah, by an academic George Hawley called

the Enduring Lessons of Fusionism. Yeah. And one of the points he just simply makes is that, you know, it's funny. It's contrary to the point I'm often making because a lot of people want to say that fusionism was just a coalitional device for like the Reagan three-legged stool kind of thing. And it wasn't that. It was an actual philosophical orientation. But he also makes a very good point that at a very high level, it was a coalition building

thing because the nature of fusionism was such. that you had to look askance at populism and crack pottery and these other sort of, I don't want to use the word demonic, but like these passions that can corrupt clear thinking. And so it's very well done. It's a good correction to a lot of the way people, both anti-fusionism and pro-fusionism, have talked about it in recent years. Before we get to today's not worth your time,

we went a little off color today. I warned the panel that we were going to head in this direction, even though I had some misgivings. We did it anyway, so if you've got kids in the car, please give it a pause and come back and listen to it later. Jonah, straight back to you on this not worthier time. I am only going to read the first two sentences of this New York Times article, and I'm going to leave it to you. Three, to React. The world's largest condom maker is raising prices of its products by up to 30. percent, warning that shortages of raw materials and chemicals because of the Iran work could

disrupt production. The Malaysian condom company Carricks, which produces about five billion condoms a year, blamed a surge in raw material prices, global shipping distributions, and higher freight costs for the price increases Jonah. So the problem here is we talked about this very briefly before we started and you said that you were afraid. about what people were going to do with this topic and whether it was going to be inappropriate or not. So, of course, that's where I was primed to go. So when you talked about the world's largest condom maker,

I thought you're about the person who made the largest condom. Don't, don't. Already regretting the topic. I'm going to go back and we are going to edit in a warning before we do not or at your time. You just need a little verbal option comma in there. For any parents who are listening to us with children in the back of the car. I think, look at me, all jokes aside, I think this is just a good example of, I mean,

there are people talking about how this is pro-natalist because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, we can have that conversation. But I think this is a good example of how it illustrates how the stuff that comes out of the petrochemical wider complex, something Kevin and I haven't talked about a bunch of times, isn't just oil and gas. It is a vast array. of products that when you make them more expensive or more scarce, which, as Kevin will probably say, is the same thing, there are knock-on effects all over the place. And it's why this is much more inflationary than I think people are appreciating. Mike? All I'll say about this is I got a real kick out of the kicker quote in that New York Times story, which is from the CEO of this condom company.

Quote, everyone hopes that this ends fast and swiftly. And I don't feel like I need to add any other commentary to that. I just think it's one of those things. It's perfect. Now just say it and get out. Kevin, so to speak. So to speak. You know, Jonah making magnum condom jokes. I think that's beneath a man of my caliber. And he ended with the word inflationary. So, you know, I'm going to blank there. You asked for the Steve. You asked for it. Yeah, I'm regretting this already. To the more serious point about, you know, petrochemicals and polymers and things like that, they are. in every damn thing, stuff you don't even think about, you know, every plastic, pharmaceuticals, clothing, artificial fibers, all this kind of stuff.

And, yeah, you're going to feel that throughout the supply chain for a long time in various unpleasant ways that probably haven't yet manifested themselves. And with that, deep regret for having opened that up. Selection of terrific meats, Steve was saying. I'm also glad that we let this run along a little bit. And I didn't mean that. God, you guys, you guys. Geez.

All right, I just said it. End it. Done. Thanks. See ya. Talk to you next time. Bye. Finally, if you like what we're doing here,

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Tauner. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible, Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.