The Dispatch Podcast - The Tragedy in Buffalo

Episode Date: May 20, 2022

Following a man’s racist attack at a supermarket in Buffalo, in which he killed 10 people and wounded three more, our hosts are here to discuss what it means for our politics and culture. Sarah, Jonah, and Declan then discuss the baby formula shortage. How did the Biden administration drop the ball? And finally, reactions to the latest round of primaries around the country.   Show Notes: -The Dispatch: “A Look at the State of Red Flag Laws After Buffalo” -TMD: “Grappling With the Buffalo Mass Shooting” -Capitolism: “America’s Infant Formula Crisis and the ‘Resiliency’ Mirage” -The Sweep: “Headed Toward a Recount in Pennsylvania” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgher, joined by Jonah Goldberg and Declan Garvey, our editor for the morning dispatch. This week, we are going to start with the Buffalo shooting. What it means for our politics, for our culture, how to think about these shootings as they continue and as hate crimes increase in the country as well. Then we're going to move to the baby formula shortage and the politics of the Biden administration. a drop in the ball on babies having food in the country. Primaries. We had the Pennsylvania primary and what it means for Donald Trump, the Democrats, and really just primary elections in general. And then, of course, we will wrap with what wasn't worth your time this week. All three of us, different takes. let's dive right in jona the shooter in buffalo had a 180 page manifesto rant whatever you want to call it in it he describes um obviously racist motivations for what he did it was planned in doing so though he talks about the great replacement theory this idea that uh white people in

Western countries, specifically obviously here, the United States, are being replaced by non-white people. But perhaps more importantly to this theory is that it's being done by this cabal, mostly Jews, as I understand it. And this is a strategy to control white people. And again, apologies if I'm getting some of the details of this theory wrong, because I'm not sure how much the details matter, because also within our political conversation, there is Elise Staphotic, Tucker Carlson, people on the right who are talking about how Democrats want to replace voters. And on the left, a sort of demographics is destiny theory where they're saying they will be the governing majority because of the demographic changes in the country.

And then, of course, we have actual facts. The birth rate of the United States is plummeting. And so if you don't replace yourself with babies, someone will replace you, I suppose. That's just how math works. So, Jonah, my question to you, how are we supposed to think about the Buffalo shooting and frankly, the El Paso shooting and these other racist motivated hate crimes that seem to be picking up in pace around the country? Are they, do they, do they, fit onto our political spectrum? Do Fox News or Elise Stefonic or Tucker Carlson bear any responsibility for elevating that conversation? Or are we talking about totally different stuff here? Okay, well, the first thing I think we can all agree on when you ask, how should we think about things

like the Buffalo shooting is they're bad, right? They're very, very, very bad. And they're, in fact, evil. And there's no wiggle room or equivocation sort of permissible in decent society about that. There's no justification for mass murder or murder of any kind. I know we talked about John Brown at Great Lank to last week, but this is not that. But beyond that, look, I have a sort of a complicated view on this.

I think the hard version of replacement theory, which actually is an import from France, like most bad ideas, is just a... completely bananas, anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, that somehow the perfidious bagel-snarfing, Hebrews are pulling strings to replace white Americans. And even if you believe that, I mean, it's important to understand just the rank stupidity and permission structure that these kinds of theories give

to just loser racists. Is that, okay, so you think that whites are being replaced by blacks because of Jews. So you kill like a 78-year-old black grandmother? I mean, what was she doing in terms of like the fertility rate? This is just a lot of it is just a pretextual or post hoc rationalization to murder people because some people want to murder people. And that said, I think that Tucker Carlson and Lee Stephanic and a lot of Republicans,

and conservatives speak irresponsibly about these issues. And I also think that Democrats have spoken irresponsibly about these issues because both parties at a fundamental level have bought into a sort of racist identity politics argument that says that demography is destiny, that if you are a non-white person, you are bound for all eternity, generation upon generation to vote for progressives and Democrats. Democrats celebrated this, which triggers Republicans, and both sides, and I think the real separation between the two sides isn't necessarily the racism. It's the conspiracyism. If you think that the current immigration regime in the United States is the result of a pre-planned, careful conspiracy to orchestrate, to turn the dials on the demographic

distribution in this country, you just don't understand how Washington works. the immigration status quo is the direct result of dysfunction and partisan gridlock. And also our general immigration profile for the last 70, 60 years is the result of unintended consequences. Lyndon Johnson, when he signed the 1965 Immigration Act, did not intend for the family unification portion to drive immigration from Asia, South America, and Africa. And in fact, the family unification portion was put in there by people who wanted more European immigration because they made the bet that you would get more white people if you put that provision in there and they were wrong. And so I think the real problem in our culture and our politics is the conspiracy stuff where you create an environment where you think that sinister forces outside of democratic accountability and control are orchestrating society. and that encourages people to take matters into their own hands and be violent. And Tucker Carlson and a lot of people are wildly irresponsible when they float this idea

that if the Democrats keep doing this, people are going to need to take issues into their own hands. That's one of his lines. And so it's irresponsible, but I don't think Tucker believes that the Jews are orchestrating all of this. I think Tucker is entertaining people by feeding them the crap that they want to hear. And he's kind of clever about just coming up short of the line. of saying what a lot of people on the left take him to be saying. Okay, so, Declan, easy question to you. How do we stop future buffaloes and El Paso's?

Is this a gun control question? Is it that we need to pass a domestic terrorism statute into effect? What's not getting done at Congress that should be or could be? I think you were being facetious when you said easy question to you, Declan, because um i i i don't did you sleuth that one out it's early in the morning i i i don't know and i don't i don't really think that i like in this specific instance it looks like new york had a a red flag law on the books that you know could have and and now that we in hindsight know should have uh been enacted you know this was a a student who you know having unfortunately

read large chunks of the of the document that he published you know he he detailed uh his own kind of dissent into uh this ideology and and this uh evil you know he he said i during the early days of the covid lockdowns i out of boredom stumbled into four chan and uh all these online forums and you know they so some of the stuff that we've seen um you know, come out post the shooting, you know, he showed up to school one day entirely in a hazmat suit. And his classmates and teachers were put off by that. He, in a, there was a senior year, there was a, what are you going to do post-graduation question that he was asked and he said murder suicide. And that's what triggered kind of a mental health evaluation and ultimately

ultimately, these red flag laws were not put into effect. He was allowed to buy a gun. And I know reading stories about the gun store that sold him that firearm, they're absolutely distraught. They closed, at least for a couple days. I don't know if permanently, but, you know, that's the kind of thing that theoretically should have stopped this from happening. I don't know that doubling down on even more restriction.

I think, unfortunately, it's just the reality of, I mean, there's a huge mental health aspect to this. He was very adamant in his document that I am not mentally ill. I am fully cognizant of what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, you know, that you don't do something like this if you're not unstable and mentally ill. And so, you know, and to Jonah's point about the irresponsibility of the people that are talking about this, I mean, it's just an incredibly incredibly cynical view of not only America, but of yourselves, for Elise DeFonic to be talking about the watered down version of this as, you know, undocumented immigrants are going to give Democrats a permanent insurrection over elections. Like, have a little bit of faith in your own ability

to persuade people, have, like, just to accept, I know Democrats accept this that they think, but I don't, I don't think that it's true. I mean, just this week. Yeah, but Declan, how is this, at least, just to jump in, how is this Elise Stefanic when the New York Times has been publishing this idea that demographic changes in the United States will hand Democrats a permanent majority? Isn't that just the other side of that coin? It is, but... Why is one racist in a watered down racist theory and the other one's, you know, thoughtful commentary on the electorate? I don't think either are thoughtful, but I think in the New York

Times' case, they're being optimistic about their own side, and Elise DeFonik is accepting that own pessimism of her own views and her own inability to persuade these voters. Just this week, a Quinnipiac poll had Joe Biden's approval rating among Hispanics at 26%. This is not, you know, Donald Trump won more Hispanics in 2020 than any Republican nominee since George Bush in 2004. this is a rapidly shifting situation that I just think like accepting the premise from the coalition of the ascendant and the new Democratic majority is is short-sighted it's like internalizing so and and maybe you know if whichever whichever party does end up being in power when some sort of amnesty immigration reform passes maybe in the short term that will

be a boon for for a couple years but people change people uh evolve and i just think that it's really uh gross and sad to to assume i mean we see the same thing with uh voter ID laws and and i've talked to a lot of republican strategists about this since kind of things have tightened up post 2020 in states around the country the republican electorate is shifting to be a more rural a more working class party and the stricter voter IDs laws which you know i think are passed with the intent of clamping down on inner cities and making it more difficult to vote uh in in certain ways i know it hasn't had that effect but that's kind of the intent behind a lot of this stuff uh it's it's it's hurting their own ability to turn out their own voters that's a lot of republican campaign strategies

have expressed concern to me about that that you know it we have these kind of frozen ideas from 20 years ago about what each party's electorate looks like and it's not what it looks like right now and it's going to continue to be changing in the in the coming years and so i i just it's it's it's all really disheartening and to the first question no i don't think there's any quick fix to this i think it's a uh it's a part of one of the worst parts of living in a very messy divided uh society with you know, there's hundreds of millions of guns floating out there. Even if he wasn't able to buy this legally, he would find another way to do it if he was this committed on what he was doing.

All right. So the least correct thing that Declan just said during that whole time was when he said that Congress would eventually pass a bill on immigration. There's just no evidence that that will ever, ever happen. Rewind the tape. Did I ever say that? Yes, you said whichever party passes. Amnesty.

It could be talking about 2,400. I could be talking about the year 306. And I'm saying that that is actually unrealistic. There's one possible way in which it could happen, and it'll be wild, which is that if immigrants, if immigrant communities, people, immigrant and the descendants of immigrant communities start voting Republican in significant numbers, you could see a point where the GOP hangs on to its vestigial immigration restriction position long enough for the Democrats to realize, oh, we got to close the spigot, and a sort of pod de de de dee of rank cynicism, they meet in the middle for a brief moment to actually impose a coherent immigration policy.

Again, no. No, because that would require any incentive. to pass legislation, even if they agree on what needs to be passed, there's still an ineptitude to actually literally doing the legislating part. Okay, I want to give my thoughts on this topic briefly. What? I know. One, every time a tragedy like this happens, the first people to the microphone are the ones who want to put it into our current political debates. They are almost always, just so wrong. This person, and Declan, you read far more of it than I did, this person doesn't map on very easily to a linear left, right political debate at all.

Not surprising at all to me. You go to El Paso, you go to the congressional baseball shooting, you go to the Christmas parade in Wisconsin, and time and again, you'll see people, motivated by hate who don't, who aren't just MSNBC viewers or Fox viewers and just one of them picks up a gun and go shoot and shoots a lot of people. That's just not accurate. And the more that happens, the less we get to have a real conversation about how to prevent these things, the less that our elected representatives can engage in it. And I find that frustrating, sad and stupid. On the gun conversation, there are a gazillion illegal guns out there and legal guns, gun laws clearly alone are not preventing anything

because we have illegal guns on the street. It would be one thing, I think, if all of the guns on the street were currently legal, because then it would mean we're enforcing our gun laws to the maximum amount possible. And therefore, additional gun laws would allow us to take more guns away from dangerous people. That's the opposite of what we have. We have an enormous number of illegal guns. We have an enormous number of people who illegally possess firearms, and we have an enormous number of legal guns. So clearly the answer of more gun laws doesn't help a whole lot if we're not taking away the guns from the people who shouldn't have them right now. Sorry, Declan. You wanted to interrupt me. I'm sorry. I haven't seen this spoken about as much,

but again, because I read large chunks of the document, he explicitly said in there that the reason he was doing this in New York is because of the tight gun control laws and he assumed that there wouldn't be anybody having or carrying. Yes, although that's the reverse side. That's not how he got the gun. We're not talking about gun laws to arm the people in the grocery store. We're talking about gun laws so that he doesn't get a gun that he legally bought. Right. And my point being, again, I don't understand. I don't think we're enforcing current gun laws to the effect that we can say that nobody who shouldn't have a gun isn't getting one. Of course they are. again, illegal guns, people who are illegally possessing guns, and then legal guns, all of which

are a problem right now. And that doesn't mean I don't support additional gun control measures. It's just that I don't think it's going to stop this. Of course, it's worth mentioning that the Christmas parade in Wisconsin that killed six people, no gun involved, it was a car. And lastly, I think that these hate crimes, which are picking up undoubtedly, picking up in frequency and deadliness to a large extent can be traced as something far more obvious, alienation in our society, church attendance going down, community organizations, no longer tying people to one another, a sense of duty to your community not happening. He talks about alienation. He talks about looking for a community. And he found one. He found one

on 4chan and they believe that Jews are trying to replace white people with non-white people. Guns don't change that. It might change how many people are killed. It might change the ease at which he can kill them. I will grant you that. And I think there's a nuanced conversation to be had there. But at the end of the day, in our current culture and you add the pandemic into it, that's the problem that we have to solve. And I'm not sure Congress is capable of solving it as much as I like mocking them for not passing legislation that's not an easy congressional fix yeah i want to i want to pick up on a couple things you said there first of all i i think you basically hit at the basic problem is that this is a problem you know what was it um um what's the old line uh problems

without solutions um aren't problems and um i don't want to say i don't want to be like complacent oh this is just part of life we have to accept it i think there are lots of things we can do in the margins to shrink the tumor. But the tumor is not going away. And that's in part because of the problem with the dynamics of large numbers. You know, people want to say, blame things on video games. Well, you know, like the number of people who've become mass shooters who also play video games is like 0.000%, right? Video games do not, for the most part, create mass shooters. Social media doesn't per se create statistically large numbers of mass shooters, right? At the end of the day, in a country of 330 million people, you're going to have people,

you're going to have anecdotal numbers of people who switches get flipped for one reason or another and want to be murderers. And as a percentage term, it's infinitesimal. But the way our brains work, the way society works is, you know, the leap from five mass murderers, a year to 10 is enormous in the sort of sense of panic and discomfort it creates. But statistically, you're talking about adding five

more murderers on top of five other murderers. That is a tiny, tiny percentage of things. And how you can fine tune our public policies to catch those grains of sand statistically that fall through the cracks is

just, it's really, really hard to do. And how do you do it without going after the bill of rights? How do you do it without like, having mass forms of bureaucratic censorship. This guy wasn't on Twitter. This guy wasn't on Facebook. He was on 4chan. And I hate saying that some things don't have a solution,

but I'm not sure they have a direct or obvious policy solution that wouldn't be, wouldn't have all sorts of adverse political consequences for anybody who tried to impose them. And I hate it because I hate the situation. And I, the one last thing is, I'm the only one here is in the manifesto. And so it has a point of personal privilege. When this thing first broke, talking about how everybody leapt to their political priors, everyone wanted to say this was Tucker Carlson's fault and this was Fox's fault.

Then all Foxes and Tucker's knee-jerk defenders said, you guys are all idiots and hacks. The guy actually attacks Fox News. I that's what made me you know and then they posted this poster which has me as one of the star of david you know evil jews at fox news and i was like oh i better find out what else it says about me so i found the thing and i looked at it he doesn't attack fox news he attacks the media and he has similar posters for msnbc cnbc all these places and he just counts no counts noses as they say at all these different places and he counts them badly uh rupert murdock as a jewish star on He's not Jewish.

I don't think Greg Gutfeld's Jewish. There are a bunch of people in this thing that are labeled as Jews who aren't. And the reason why I sort of, I bring this up is I really do think the conspiracy part is the more dangerous thing. We've made massive racial progress in this country. Racial attitudes are vastly improved,

something like one in five marriages are interracial in this country. This country does not have the race problem with the left thinks it does. It does have a conspiracy problem. And when you believe in conspiracy, You believe that the rules of the game cannot save you. The democracy doesn't work.

The courts don't work. And it encourages people to take things into our own hands. And that's how you get more murderers by creating a climate of conspiracy. And everyone is grotesquely irresponsible about this on the left and even worse on the right. So I have a chicken and egg thing on this, which is, I think, again, in the current conversation that we're having, a lot of it is white supremacy and white supremacist extremist groups. are a problem in this country. They are. I'm not going to dispute that. But there's this assumption in how we talk about it that somehow they are recruiting people when I actually think there's a little bit of the opposite going on. These people are searching for something to belong to. And there

are groups out there who welcome them. And those groups tend to be extremist, hateful. And again, I think that's how you draw together, the synagogue shooting, the congressional baseball, shooting that targeted Republicans, the Wisconsin black supremacist, the El Paso white supremacist, and then now the Buffalo white supremacist. All of these have in common men who felt alienated from their communities, from their cultures, one way or another, and found a group. They went out looking for it and found a group that they could feel belonging to. And, Jonah, to your point, not all social media or video game users or anything else become mass murders, not even a infinitesimal percentage.

At the same time, I think it's going to obviously be the case that someone who is feeling that alienated with a violent tendency is going to find themselves a group and an ideology to justify what they're feeling. And that's the problem. He wrote about these previous shooters that he mentioned, or that he cited as inspiration for this, as if they were his friends. and that I think was incredibly it's just hard to read and hard to but like the the Christ Church shooter in New Zealand a couple years ago he he viewed that person as essentially a Messiah in his warped worldview of and repeatedly mentioned how much he learned from this person and how he opened his eyes to all of this like I think that's exactly right Sarah that these these are people who are looking to believe something and in the past that's religion and it's you know family and

these closer communal ties that just aren't there anymore and especially over the past two years of the pandemic when they're really not there even whatever's left you people who are predestined to be a little bit more on the fringe on some of this stuff are going to find find it in the worst possible place. Sarah, can I ask you a quick law question? Yeah. So there are reports today and yesterday, I guess, that the, that this, the shooter, right before he went in, invited like 15 friends onto Discord to watch the whole thing.

And again, early reports, none of them called the cops or did anything. Now, obviously, these guys are worth investigating for investigatory purposes. right? I mean, that I got no problem with whatsoever. But there are people talking about how they should be considered accomplices after the fact or whatever. Nope. Dicey, right? So only if they provided any material support beforehand or after to obstruct the investigation,

simply clicking on a link would not achieve. How long can you watch someone committing mass murder before not calling the police? like yeah i want to i want to give you an example from like law school because i don't i obviously don't want to use this as an example just because it's so sad um not that this example from law school is great but it it's almost more just extreme and how we think about it if you walk by a baby face down in two inches of water you have no duty to help that baby no legal duty because you don't owe a duty to the baby uh now if it's your baby you do if you did anything that caused the baby, you know, you shoved the baby or tripped the baby, and that caused the baby

to fall down into the water face down. Then you have a duty. But if you simply are walking by, you don't have a legal duty. You have a moral duty, but not a legal duty. And in this case, I mean, that's the same idea, right? At no point, I think, in watching what was going on, would they have a legal duty to call the police actually in terms of their own legal liability? Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be

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who make the vast, vast majority of baby formula. And by the way, if you're interested in getting your baby formula from overseas, there's a 17.5% tariff on that baby formula. So you're pretty much stuck unless you want to pay an enormous amount with the American baby formula manufacturers. Fine. However, half of all formulas sold in the United States is actually bought by the Department of Agriculture

through the special supplemental nutrition program for women, infants, and children. known as WIC. Okay. Now, how this actually works is that each state signs an exclusive contract with one of those formula manufacturers to supply the subsidized product for low-income families. That comes with all sorts of other things within the state. They get preferential treatment on grocery store aisles, that specific baby formula product. The result being that they basically have state-sponsored monopolies once they are selected for the WIC contract. Abbott, the company in question here, has a WIC monopoly in two-thirds of the states in the United States. So, Jonah, when the FDA shows up at the Abbott plant and shuts it down, there is a 17.5%

tariff on getting formula from outside the country, and two-thirds of the states, Abbott has a monopoly on the formula that you're able to get in your own state. This is a government run problem on the front end, then the government shuts down the formula plant without any plan for how people are going to get formula and slowly but surely the demand outstripped supply. And now we're left with a crisis where two babies have been hospitalized in Nashville for an inability to get their specialty formula, the amino-based formula. I will tell listeners for what it's worth in case you didn't notice from my Twitter feed, although I didn't share this on there.

Nate was on a specialty formula, and it had to be shipped. And I just remember those like couple days where like the shipping was delayed because this was in the middle of the pandemic, right? And how stressed I was not knowing if it would get here before we ran out of what we already had and kicking myself for not just ordering more sooner or going out, I don't know, and driving a FedEx truck. And now the Biden administration. has saying that they will have the Abbott plant back up and running in about two weeks

and that they've triggered the Defense Production Act, which means that formula makers get priority in terms of the ingredients that they need and that there will be military flights flying in overseas formula. We are literally using military planes to go get formula from other countries. My question to you, Jonah, is, isn't this the stupidest thing that's ever happened? I kind of feel like Rodney Dangerfield and back to school where the guy says I only have one question in 17 parts. It's up there, right? I mean, it is, this was. This is the most self-owned crisis where moms across the country are losing sleep and it was so preventable. It was preventable 10 years ago.

It was preventable four months ago, and it was preventable one month ago, every step of the way. The White House did not say anything about this until last week when they were asked about it by a reporter, even though they knew they shut this down in February. Right. And then they were like, well, this isn't the first time it's come up on our radar. They didn't do anything until this week. Yeah, no, look, I mean, like, this is a classic example of how, like, you know why voters

are skeptical about the about letting the Democrats have a new new deal or a new green deal it's because they can't figure out how if you close down like the only baby formula factory in the country it's going to be a problem you know I mean like this is

it is you're right it's a completely foreseeable problem and the and you know I mean I joke about this last week but like new moms and the husbands who are in complete thrall and service to them are not particularly interested in complicated explanations, right?

You know, I mean, forget the fact that Americans in general don't like to wait for stuff. Waiting for baby formula, particularly especially brand of baby formula, creates, and I don't want to say irrational voters, because I think it's a perfectly rational thing to get pissed off about, but voters who are not going to be inclined to want to hear a lot of, oh, this is Putin's fault or whatever kind of stuff. And this just gets to the core incompetence of government itself. But also, you know, I remember I did a big piece for National Review like 20 years ago about the Northeast Dairy Compact. There are, and I'm sure some of the bells and whistles have changed over the last 20 years.

I'm actually, I know they have, but like at the end of the day, the level of corporatist protectionist corruption that is sort of built into a lot of these commodity, um, arrangements in the United States is, is literally morally unjustified, but I don't want to sound, I don't want to go full Scott Linsicum here, but like, um, it is purely a sort of, uh, padding constituencies, old school 1930-style economic planning and protectionism racket that's bad for consumers. And you would just think that there would be somebody in the general White House area saying, you know, we've got this massive supply chain crisis, which is causing inflation.

And oh, by the way, this baby Thorium factory is shutting down. Maybe we should play this scenario out for a couple months and see what we could do right now. but they don't they they're so reactive in this white house and i think this is the larger problem this white house has is um it's it's fundamental incompetence um i i i don't want to you know there's a weird irony that because so many people who work for trump were terrified of of being tarred with working for trump or terrified that his bad ideas would get into policy They seem to be more awake at the wheel than they are under Biden, which is a weird thing I never thought I would sort of say.

But the inability of this White House to deal with the reality at hand and sort of want to deal with the politics it wants rather than the politics it has, I think is just a huge source of its problems, particularly when married to the sense that just when Biden, comes out before the cameras he's not a reassuring presence and you put in inflation or

food shortages, baby food shortages um and if it weren't for the idiocy of Republicans this would be like a situation designed by God for the worst midterms in American history

but you know for anyway I could ramble on you got me work up you said you want to get me work up I know. I did. Good. Good. People should be worked up about this. But Declan, this is my question to you. On the one hand, you have the leaked draft of the Dobbs opinion motivating, at least to some extent, female Democratic voters more than any other group. And then you have this baby formula thing, which in theory should actually overlap with at least some of those same voters in terms of what we're looking at for whether it's a wave election. in the midterms or not, is the baby formula shortage motivating anyone? Because it, you know, I've written obviously about how I don't think that the abortion issue will motivate people, not because they don't care about the issue, but because they've already sorted into their camps about it. Baby formula shortage maybe hasn't been sorted, but maybe it has because if you thought

government was incompetent before, you were already with the team that says all the time that they hate government. Yeah. You know, if this was happening in October, I think absolutely. You know, I mean, this is the problem with punditry this early out is that everything that we're very worked up about right now, we will be 30 times as mad about something we can't even possibly foresee. To be clear, I won't.

Baby formula will be the thing that I am most angry about. I'm going to set a calendar reminder to ask you. in November. But I mean, one, this isn't going away immediately. So when the Abbott plant is allowed to reopen in two weeks, they have said that it will take another six to eight weeks for them to get back up and running so that the formula that they're producing is back on grocery store settled. So we still are not through this by any means. I think the Biden administration is hoping to bridge that that divide with these military planes and whatnot. But I think to Jonah's point, I mean, the kind of trying to fit a square peg into a round

hole, you know, the democratic response to this shortage in Congress was to pass more funding for the FDA, like another $30 million in funding. And, you know, I don't know that that's like the FDA caused this problem in large degree. And maybe if they have more funding and they can do inspections faster, I think that's what the supposed rationale is that they could get. But I don't think that's really the issue here. I think that, you know, it's a general cautiousness. We've seen this throughout the pandemic, you know, opting for. absolute certainty over, you know, not taking into account the risks of inaction.

And so I think that's more of a institutional, fundamental kind of worldview that's pervasive at the FDA and probably has been for some time now that giving them another $28 million in funding is not going to necessarily fix. And so, you know, it's to like, I, I am not the target audience for being riled. The baby formula shortage has not affected me in any real way. It would if it happened in probably three or four years. Oh, that's some news dropping on the podcast. It's, I mean, it'd be very weird if it affected me now.

let's just say that I was still eating baby for drinking baby formula at 26 but um no so like I'm sure that there are people you are you being one of them that this will be a motivating factor they will remember this in November uh it's hard for me to get in their heads but um you know it's it's just a general this is one of a line of you know it was baby formula this month it was you know, it's gas, it's, you know, it was... Bacon prices. Literally bringing home to bacon has gotten harder. Yes. If this was a one-off thing, like, we could get everything we want for the price we want it, except for baby formula. Maybe you would give people some slack, but that is very much not the

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All right. Let's talk about voting. We had the Pennsylvania primaries on Tuesday night, as well as some others, North Carolina, Oregon. I want to talk about what's going to happen now in Pennsylvania, the two Republican Senate candidates finishing at the top, separated by about 1,000 votes. Out of 1.3 million, that will be well within the margin to trigger an automatic recount under Pennsylvania law, which only requires a 0.5 percent difference. I've gotten lots of questions about how recounts work. This is my

little weird specialty because I worked in the legal department. for presidential campaigns or oversaw them. And in 2012, actually did a pre-recount for a couple weeks in Palm Beach County. What that looks like, by the way, is when you have misprinted ballots, like what happened in Oregon, for instance, election workers have to take the ballots that were marked on misprinted ballots and mark them on correct ballots so that they can run through the machine.

And we can have a machine count them versus people, if anyone's ever tried to count to a large number, sometimes you mess it up. And so what that means is that you have the worker, the election worker, sit there with the two ballots, look at the marked ballot and say, vote for Barack Obama. And then you have a Romney election person behind them and an Obama election person behind them. And the Romney person says agreed. The Obama person says agreed. And the election worker then marks the ballot for Obama. how can votes change? Well, obviously there could be ballots that weren't read by the machine. Maybe the person didn't mark it right. Think a Scantron, right? You didn't mark it dark enough. You colored outside the lines. But everyone can agree on what your intention is, things like that.

There will be numbers that were definitely just transposed at various points. This is why I'm so confident that it's very hard to steal elections. Because when we talk about numbers that are transposed. We're not talking 1.3 million number. It's because of all of these little precincts and the number of times they report a day, you know, 17 gets transposed into 71. And so you'll have a change. And it's usually not then, again, large-scale changes from one candidate to another. They're going to be these tiny little incremental changes. All that being said, we still have 17,000 ballots outstanding in this race that haven't even been counted the first time. Military ballots coming in from overseas or just mail-in ballots that haven't been opened and counted yet. Remember, in Pennsylvania,

you have a security envelope for a mail-in ballot that must be intact, then an outer envelope. Signatures abound through all of those things. So they have to check all of those to make sure they're valid before opening them and running them through the machine. It just takes some time. That's all to say, we got a ways to go. And we still haven't had Georgia. So we've had Ohio. We've had an Ohio, the Trump endorsed candidate won handily. In Pennsylvania, it will go to a recount between the Trump endorsed candidate and a candidate who also fought for Donald Trump's endorsement, by the way.

And then Georgia, where it looks like Trump's endorsed candidate will not succeed. Declan, what did we learn in this last round of primaries and feel free? to add in Biden's failed endorsement in Oregon. Yeah, I think that the recount in Pennsylvania shows in some ways kind of the challenges with viewing all Republican primaries through the Trump lens, at least from a narrative perspective. Like, because it's so close, if McCormick ends up winning. by 600 votes or Oz ends up winning by 600 votes. Does that dramatically change, you know, Trump's hold on the party in one way or another? Like, there's not a ton of fundamental difference

there. It's just kind of some flukiness on the margins. I mean, I think in Ohio, you mentioned J.D. Vance's victory. That is a very strong showing for Trump, one, because Vance was in single digits around the time that that Trump endorsed you ended up with about 30% of the vote. But this is, I mean, this is something that we've seen like, so Vance, I think, got around 31% of the vote. Oz is around 31% of the vote. The guy or the lieutenant governor that Trump endorsed in Idaho over the current governor got 29% of the vote.

the candidate in Nebraska that he endorsed for governor got 29% of the vote. I know that in some of these primaries it's all Trumpy people vying for the Trump endorsement and it's not a Trump anti-Trump dichotomy. But I think we're kind of starting to see a little bit that in some of these contested races there is somewhat of a cap on how far you can get with Donald Trump's endorsement alone. And so, you know, I think that whether Oz or McCormick ends up coming out ahead, and I know, Sarah, we've talked about the McCormick team might have a better operation or recount operation that could end up pulling this out, which, I mean, Trump has already been telling Dr. Oz to declare victory and, go along with his day so it'll be that's not how recounts work i you're you're preaching to the choir uh but the um so i i think it will be interesting to see how the magaverse reacts to uh to that

if mccormick ends up pulling this out in the uh in the in the in the recount um but i i think to a broader perspective that these past couple weeks have shown that candidates in individual candidates matter um and uh i'm getting the i'm getting the hook um jona my question to you is whether this primary season has proven that we should move to something more like rank choice voting or mandatory majority voting so that we don't have pluralities that uh actually don't represent the majority of voters preferences winning primaries where then it's a two person race and so the person who ends up being in office only ever had a very small portion of the electorate behind them well as you know i want to get rid of primaries altogether um so i'm

open to the idea of switching to rank choice voting i still want to i want to see a couple more states kick the tires on it before we just say let's everybody into the pool go that way um but uh i'm more and more sympathetic to it i i do that i want to take a step back right so like The typical establishment politician of yesteryear, right, pre-Trump, call them a Mitch McConnell or a John Boehner type, right? Even though they were much more conservative than the typical establishment person of even 10 years earlier or 100 years earlier, this notion that the establishment is super squishy and liberal

is one of these fantasies that fuels a lot of jackassery around. The Republican leadership for the last 10 years, starting with Ryan and Boehner has been more conservative than any time in the previous 50 years. But put that aside, your typical establishment, you know, smoke-filled room kind of guy, how does he look at primaries? He's like, I want to get first and foremost the candidate most electable in the general election to get the nomination. And then after that, you know, are they a responsible politician?

Do they generally agree with Republicans? Are they someone we can play ball with? you know, we national review types would argue, like, in the past, you know, best to get the most conservative candidate electable, which is a slightly different criteria, blah, blah, blah, blah. And but establishment types, like Mitch McConnell today, they see it as a bunch of tradeoffs, but that's sort of the calculation that they bring into it. This notion, you know, that, that Ted Cruz, Madison Cawthorne, everybody in between pedals, that there is some establishment in the Republican Party out to get real conservatives is a total fantasy

because the reality is the establishment is Donald Trump. And the weird thing about this moment is that Donald Trump is trying to figure out how to get the candidates that he wants to get the nominations and to win. But his criteria is nothing like the old establishments, right. His criteria is almost entirely narcissistic and selfish. And it's only after you meet all of his narcissistic, selfish criteria, that he then says, oh, and they should be electable. So that's why Kathy Barnett, he was like, Kathy Barnett can never get elected in the general election, as if, like, that is his biggest priority, when in fact it was just the nearest weapon to hand sort of criticism to get people to vote for Oz. And so the, I think the big takeaway out of these primaries,

is that the, is this good for Trump's endorsement record, bad for Trump's endorsement record, is the wrong way to think about this. And the right way to think about this is that the GOP has become functionally a MAGA party, at least in the primaries. And, um, but a Trump endorsement is not the sinecure or determinant of whether or not you are the MAGA candidate anymore, right? Kathy Barnett was more MAGA than either of the guys. who make are going into this runoff um j d vance you could argue was not more maga than mandel um the maga thing

and then in barnett's comments about how maga is bigger than trump and how um uh we didn't move we didn't transition to his values he transitioned to ours all of this stuff is it puts Trump in this weird version of where McConnell types have been for the last 15 years of why can't these people just fall in line and do what I want? I know what's best. But it turns out that politicians have their own ambitions and their own agendas. And the great and glorious irony in all of this is that many of these people who won't do what Trump wants are running as Trump mini-mease. And so he's getting his own taste of his own medicine. I mean, you had Kathy Barnett talking about

how like, how Sean Hannity is the swamp. That's fantastic. I love that. And I want more of this. I want, we are in, you know, the revolution eats its own phase of MAGA, where Trump cannot control it anymore because the establishment is now MAGA, at least DeFonic, you know, is, you know, Trump is either going to be working for her or dead by her hand within the next 10 years because she has totally gone MAGA out of purely cynical, I would argue, largely evil reasons. And Trump is incapable of containing what he created. And since there's no ideological content to any of this garbage and there's no serious policy content to any of this garbage, I have a suspicion that it's going to burn really

bright for the next couple of years and then just kind of go away. That's my hope. All right. We're moving to our final segment. What wasn't worth your time this week? Declan, I'm starting with you. Everyone's asked to pick their own what wasn't worth our listeners'

time. What was a topic that you definitely didn't want to talk about this week? It was the creation of the short life of and the disbanding of the Department of Homeland Security's disinformation Board. Long may it prosper. It was launched, I think, in late April. It was mocked mercilessly

by partisans of all sides for about three weeks, and then it was shooed away, and I think that will be, it won't be the last we've heard of it, because it plays incredibly into Republicans' midterm campaign strategy. So there will be plenty of ads that remind us of it. But for all intents and purposes, it will go away and have no impact on our lives anymore. Jonah? There are just so many things that aren't worth my time.

It's difficult. I assume you're holding on to the one that you discussed beforehand, so I don't want to steal yours. No, you can see. steal that one. Okay. Because I have another one now. Okay. I'm going to do a transition between the first and the second. I'm with Declan. I think that the disinformation board is very much part of this larger Biden incompetence story that they just didn't foresee all of these foreseeable things. And I'm tempted

to rant about someone who I generally think is not worth my time because it's such a Twitter obsession of right-wingers is this Taylor Lawrence reporter, who is essentially the official Republicans pounce reporter of social media. Every story, every major story that she makes news on is a one-sided story about how the actual substance of the story isn't the story. It is the Republican or right-wing reaction to the story that is the story. She did this with the libs of TikTok thing. Now she's doing it with this disinformation board. It can't be that this thing was incredibly ill-conceived and that even left-wing civil liberties groups were deeply disturbed by it and that the messaging on it was disastrous and you don't want someone taking over an Orwellian industry

who's actually supported a whole bunch of, you know, like peddled some disinformation stuff and is best known for doing showtune TikTok videos making light of all of these issues. Like that just doesn't seem like the grown-ups were planning the thing. And then on the flip side, or my own one is The Amber Hurd, Johnny Depp trial. I'm not saying it is not a purient interest. I understand why soap opera like people, people who like soap operas are into it. I have no doubt.

I know many of my friends are into it. But I think this is a great example of how, like, I spent 25 years banging my spoon on my high chair about liberal media bias. I think liberal media bias is a thing. I just went into that thing about Taylor Lawrence. I think it's real. I can give you chapter and verse on it.

There are other forms of bias, right? There's a reason why car chases get so much airtime, even though statistically they are meaningless. I once went on on Howie Kurtz's Reliable Sources Show on CNN, and we were going to talk about some liberal media bias story, and we were preempted by live video of a purse snatching in a supermarket in Indiana because it's good video, right? I mean, like, there's a good video bias that, you know, wins out. the Amber Heard Johnny Depp thing has nowhere close to the news value of actual news like Eat Your Spinnish news value that is commensurate with the amount of coverage that it's gotten. And since I don't like either of the people, I would like them both to win their lawsuits against each other and bankrupt each other by giving all of their money to their lawyers. And I don't like lawyers either, but no offense.

But then that means Johnny Depp has to make like 12 more Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Which he said he will not do for, what was it, $100 million and a million alpacas? Regardless, Jonah, I totally agree because this will not change the law of defamation. It will not change the culture around domestic violence and relationships. It is two clearly very broken people. And what amounts to almost more of a divorce proceeding than a defamation proceeding, it's been weird and gross and I agree that it is not worth our time

despite the fact that we definitely covered it on advisory opinions because everyone's watching it and so we felt the need to explain our take on a trial that everyone was watching. Okay, my not worth your time, Madison Cawthorne. So a guy with a gazillion weird thing, some scandals thrown in,

lost his primary, when everyone was against him in his own state. I get that that's newsworthy at the moment because those people somehow tend to still come out if their names are Donald Trump. But none of the other ones do. And this guy's name wasn't Donald Trump. This is very much a dog bites man story

that Madison Cawthorne lost his primary. And I think it's not worth our time to spend much time talking. about why is it he lost by like one and a half percent does that make it a little bit more man bites dog despite all of those factors no because he was an incumbent with a high name ID but sarah sarah sarah you've clearly missed the story about madison cauthoran is that last night he announced quote it's time for dark maga to truly take command um And, like, dark MAGA is the movie I have been waiting for.

It was so funny. Our colleague, Andrew Eger, tweeted, because Cawthorne, when he lost, was very magnanimous. It was like, I will support Chuck Edwards in his primary and the best is yet to come. And Andrew goes, oh, this is a new side of Cawthorne that we've seen. And kind of, and then, like, 20 minutes later, it's the post about Dark Maga coming to the four and rising again. It's, yeah, don't meet your heroes. And Dark Maga for listeners is the idea that within MAGA, there's people who aren't sufficiently geared up for the battle to come.

And that Donald Trump, maybe even one of those people, dark MAGA are the people within MAGA who really, really believe it and are willing to do what it takes to have MAGA ascendancy. Is that like a good explanation? I think that's good. Also, but you forgot that Dark Maga also has the bow staff lightsabers. It's not just the sword ones. It's the ones that spin.

Yeah. And with that, and all the things that weren't worth your time, we hope that this podcast was worth your time. And if you want to comment on it, fight with us, anything else, become a member of the dispatch, and hop in those comments section. It's actually a wonderful place where I do chat with members. members pretty often. And if you don't, that's fine too. We appreciate you. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next week. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online.

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