The Dispatch Podcast - The Tragedy in Highland Park

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

Sarah, Steve, Jonah, and David discuss two major events from the last week, including the chaos across the pond with the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s resignation on Thursday morning. Near Chicago, at least seven are dead and dozens injured after the July Fourth shooting at Highland Park, prompting questions about whether red flag laws really work. An update on Ukraine is also in order, as well as 2022 midterm implications for the House of Representatives and the Senate.   Show Notes: -TMD: Boris Johnson to Resign -Stirewaltisms: Boris Johnson and the Survival of the Silliest -TMD: Tragedy in Highland Park -Harvard Center for American Political Studies/Harris poll on Roe v. Wade Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isiger, joined by Jonah Goldberg, David French, and Steve Hayes. We have plenty to discuss today, breaking news overnight, the resignation of Boris Johnson from the UK prime ministership. We'll talk about Chicago and the tragedy unfolding on July 4th, the latest from Ukraine. And finally, how baked is the 2022 midterm election here? Let's dive right in. We don't need to spend that much time on this, perhaps. But Boris Johnson, scandal after scandal after scandal, finally overnight, he announced, well, overnight for us, announced that he was leaving.

Is this meaningful, politically, is it meaningful geopolitically, or is this just some other country's problem? And I should have put it at the end of the show. Jonah? I think it's significant. I think that I think what he was trying to do in the internal fights was actually very interesting. He was claiming that he had in effect what the Brits are calling a presidential mandate. They don't have a presidential system.

And so far as he got a lot of voters to vote for him and not for the party. and in the British system, the prime minister's power derives entirely from the delegated authority of the votes of the members of parliament and nobody else. And he tried to say, no, no, no, I have a different kind of mandate

and people were like, yeah, we don't buy that argument. And I watched his press conference this morning and he kind of hinted at those kinds of arguments and I think it's just, it's sort of interesting to me because I've been complaining for several years now but a lot of Americans, particularly progressives, act as if and think as if we have a parliamentary system when we don't.

You know, presidential candidates say on day one, I will do all of these things when our system doesn't let a president do any of those things on day one. And so I find it kind of ironic in Britain. It's the reverse happening is that Boris Johnson is sort of looking at the way Trump did things and trying to go over the heads of the institutions there. And it just doesn't, it doesn't work. And, but more broadly, look, I mean, England is still our closest ally, at least in Europe and or, or Europe adjacent as some of the, some of my English friends might say. And that matters. And typically, I mean, it used to be more true, but trends in the UK do tell us something about trends in America. It's not always obvious what they say. And sometimes it's only clear in retrospect, but the trends that work there do have. relevance to us here. And plus, I just like going to London.

There was a great line in the morning dispatch, David, the prime minister who served for roughly three years and also served roughly for three years. That's a great line. It was such a good line. You know, these scandals sort of ranged. There was the scandals that we had plenty of, this idea that you had COVID lockdowns for others, but not for the people in power. Boris Johnson attending slash throwing parties during those COVID lockdowns, I think got maybe the most attention. But in the end, this one felt almost mundane in comparison in the sense that it's so common. He promoted a member of parliament to a whipping position, despite what it turns out to be his direct knowledge of sexual misconduct allegations against that person led two of his

cabinet to resign, several hours later, a third, and that's what broke the dam, which is sort of surprising, given all of the other scandals, if we want to call them that, that didn't lead to his resignation. Also, I should say the sexual harasser's last name was Pinscher, and that's just awesome, you know, for onomatopoeia kind of reasons, but anyway. Well, and promoting him to a whipping position, not great. Oh, Steve with that joke. Oh.

David? Yeah, this strikes me as the classic straw that broke the camel's back kind of thing, that he undermined himself and undermined himself and undermined himself. And then finally, people had had enough. And, you know, I was intrigued about what Jonah said about how Britain sometimes can be a forecaster, in some ways of American politics. I mean, there were certainly a lot of conversations. about what Brexit said about populism, for example, and drawing a line between Brexit and

Donald Trump and sort of this international populist move. I wonder if we're in a different place than Britain on political scandal, where there is no such thing any longer as a straw that breaks the camel's back. I mean, you know, on the Trump movement, it's not just been straws aiming at the camel's back. It's been two by four after two by four. four after two by four and nothing seems to happen. But I will say this. I do think that the COVID hypocrisy point just matters a lot to people at a pretty visceral level because Britain went through a lockdown that made our,

it made, made us look like we were just going to like Disney World every day during COVID. Britain's lockdown was so strict at its height. And to have that level of relentless hypocrisy, and I know that's not what did him in, it was this latest scandal involving Mr. Pinscher, but that seems, it feels to me like that was just profoundly consequential in undermining him and made him extremely vulnerable that all that came before. You had a national crisis that he demanded an enormous sacrifice and did not share in

the suffering. And I think that just had real, real consequences. Okay, very quickly. One, I think you're, but for the COVID stuff, he would still be prime minister, I think is pretty obvious. And in the UK, where there is this sense that people, there's this sense that noblese oblige is like really strong and that it's fine to be rich and more powerful, but everyone plays by the rules, even the queen as a mechanic during World War II kind of thing, is like pretty powerful there. But then the second point, which you kind of only alluded to, which I hear all over the place, particularly on like, MSNBC, is why is it that British politicians and British conservatives have the willingness

to resign and protest over bad things, but Americans won't? And I think this is one of these things where people are just missing the point of the differences between our systems. I think there are several times in the Trump presidency where if you could persuade the entire cabinet that if they resign, Trump would leave office and go away and never run again, they might have done it. They certainly would have thought seriously about it. We don't have that system. The entire U.S. Cabinet could have resigned en masse several times,

and all that would happen is that Trump would still fill out his term. And so one of the advantage, I'm not a pro-parliamentary system guy, but one of the advantages of a parliamentary system is that it is more responsive in these kinds of moments to that kind of thing. One of the downsides of it is that it's more. responsive to sort of populist anger moments as well. So it's sort of a two sides of the coin kind of thing. So Steve, here's my hypothesis, which is that actually all of this is largely incorrect and that if if the economy were better, if inflation were lower, all the things that are

happening here, happening there more or less, Boris Johnson would still be in office. And that on the flip side, to Jonah's point, actually, if we had that system here, we had that system here, we already know what the answer would be with Biden because we've had recall elections and so far nobody's doing well if they're up for a recall election. The one counter, of course, being that Boris Johnson was actually up for a no confidence vote relatively recently and survived it. But I think this is, I think this is a difference in system and an overall economy that we're about to see play out here in the midterm elections. Yeah, I think I think that's a good point.

I think it's a fair observation. I tend to think, and I think there's no question that the poor economy is hurting him. I don't know whether there would have been such a high level of tolerance for his bad behavior that it wouldn't have mattered, that he would have been able to stay in office. I mean, the proverbial writing was on the wall here, I think, for a while, and whatever the next thing was going to be was going to be the thing that undid him. Um, he had very low levels of support in his party, both if you look at public opinion polls, but also if you look at, um, what his own government ministers have been saying,

own members of parliament had been saying conservatives in parliament were not enthusiastic about Boris Johnson. And I don't think anybody wanted to be out there defending him for any reason. And, you know, in light of what we've seen in light of, look, the other thing to note is he was just not honest about this stuff. And I do think at the end of the day that matters, if you're defending him, you don't want to be defending somebody who's been dishonest several times because you can look like an idiot. You can get caught. I think the Jonas distinction on the Trump point is an important one, I think, and a good one. I don't think it excuses the people here defending Donald Trump because they couldn't have affected his ouster, therefore they needn't have tried.

And it is a reminder, even though the mechanism for getting rid of a leader is so different in two different places that, you know, at some point, for some people, integrity matters. I mean, a couple of the resignation letters have pointed that out, have said, look, there was just a point where party loyalty clashed with integrity and I chose integrity. And I think we have seen that quite a bit. And with the exception of a few people on January 6th or in the aftermath of January 6th, we've seen the same party loyalty versus integrity dynamic and most people have chosen party loyalty. I don't think it probably has repercussions over here in political terms for the Republican Party. It will be interesting to see who's

chosen to replace him. You know, he's been pretty stalwart supporter of Ukraine. There's some question as to where conservatives will end up. I think some of the leading candidates are also supportive of Ukraine, but there will undoubtedly be policy implications depending on who's chosen to replace him. 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. you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance

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Let's talk about Chicago. We're still getting some news about the shooter in Highland Park over the weekend, at least seven dead, dozens injured in that shooting. Five guns, 80 rounds. He at one point contemplated a second shooting in a nearby neighborhood as he fled. David, you've talked about red flag laws being a potential solution, or at least health. helping potentially reduce the number of mass shootings. Here, he had these guns legally despite multiple metaphorical red flags and the red flag laws weren't used. Is this a case where more resources for red flag laws could have helped?

Or is it just that red flag laws depend on so many other people that it makes them very hard to be effective? Well, you know, one, you can pass red flag law. people can know about it and they can be widely used and then one of the problems of course is that the first time someone doesn't use it when they should be used somebody's going to slip through their cracks and so nothing is going to be foolproof right so this is a does this help or not help but i was really intrigued by this sarah because the red flags were really obvious and the more we learned i mean the police actually went to his home and seized knives and a sword earlier because of his threatening behavior.

There was just, it wasn't just sort of his videos that he was making that covered the internet for a day or two after he was captured. It was a lot of, there were a lot of other things where this guy was a classic example of where red flag law should have barred him from having a gun. And I went and I looked at Illinois and I went to the Illinois Justice, criminal justice information authority. And I'm much more familiar with the red flag regime in Florida, where since Parkland, they've been used 6,000 times, about 6,000 times.

And I think about 2,000 red flag orders are active right now. In Illinois, in 2019, red flag laws were used 34 times. In 2020, they were used 19 times. And what that tells me is people don't know they're there. They don't know it exists. And if nobody, if people don't know it exists, then it's just as well that it's not, it's just like it's not even on the books. So that's a remarkable disparity.

And in Illinois for Context is a state of 13 million, almost 13 million people. And here you have a total of 53 reg flag uses in the two years that I see data available. And that's one of the reasons why I support the Cornyn-Murphy-Com. compromise that incentivizes red flag laws because it provides funding, people have to know these things are there. People know domestic violence restraining orders exist. But in a lot of states, I guarantee you there's people walking around knowing, not knowing these things are on the books at all. And if people don't have any idea they're there, including police, by the way, then it's just like the law's never been passed. Steve, I hear what David's saying. It makes some sense.

to me, but nevertheless, you're still depending on better PR for red flag laws, maybe some more resources. To me, when I see one of these shootings, and let's take it out of the mass shooting context in the just criminal violent crime context, oftentimes they're illegal guns. At which point, my reaction to that is, okay, well, more laws won't do more to prevent illegal guns if it was illegal already. That's a resource issue, a police issue, a prosecution issue. But recently we've seen a spate of legally owned guns, which to me takes away that response that we so often hear from the right, which is we don't need more gun laws. We need to enforce the gun laws we have.

If I'm looking at 21-year-olds who keep having these arsenals and are going to elementary schools, Fourth of July parades, I should perhaps mention, you know, a college roommate of Mine was at this parade with her children and is, you know, when you see those pictures of the strollers being left behind, like that's, you know, her stroller. So do we need more gun laws? Is this the end? Are we done with this argument now?

So let me take that carefully framed question and just set it aside for a moment. Because I think there's a bigger point. You can push me on it when I'm done. What seems clearer and clearer happened in this case is a failure of personal responsibility. I mean, if you look at what this young man had been doing to get attention, it had persisted for years, and he didn't get the attention. The reason he had a legally obtained firearm, in part, is because his father signed the teenager's application. to get those firearms and did so four months after police visited his house when he threatened to, quote, kill everyone.

His father insists that he didn't know that his son had threatened to kill everyone. Sluffs off responsibility for the knife and dagger confiscation, though he had to sign to get those weapons returned to his son. you had interviews from the shooter's uncle with CNN immediately after the shooting saying there were no signs. We had no idea. This is not consistent with what we thought. Look, it's all wrong. It's all BS. And at a certain point, people have to take responsibility for that. His family has a certain responsibility to help protect society from somebody like this. They didn't do it. They failed. And that's increasingly clear. I think that you can see a contrast with news reports about what we saw.

happened in Richmond this weekend. In Richmond, Virginia, there were reports that someone overheard a conversation about a potential mass shooting also on July 4th. The tipster went to the police. The police began an investigation. They visited the site where this planning was supposedly taking place. They confiscated the guns. They arrested one of the would-be perpetrators, followed the other through the weekend past July 4th and arrested the second person. And the authorities there say this tipster, the willingness of someone to speak out, stop what would have been carnage, more carnage on the 4th of July. At a certain point, personal responsibility matters.

We didn't see it in Chicago. We did see it in Richmond. I am not willing to put my life, my kids' lives, in the hands of people need to be more responsible at this point because all of these, I think there have been at least some indications that parents or relatives should have known, and they didn't call. And we can come up with all sorts of reasons, but it's not happening. And so is it the case, Jonah, that, you know, expanded background checks for those under 21 isn't enough? We just need to raise the age to buy guns because, frankly, setting aside Las Vegas, where we will never understand why that person did it,

sort of a late middle-aged man, the vast majority of these are very young men. Yeah, look, I mean, there have been other older, and like the congressional baseball game shooter was a older guy too, right? But that was more of a political thing. I think part of the... So, you know, one of the remarkable things

about this whole conversation, I mean, I don't mean just this podcast. I mean, nationally, is that if, like, you were a visitor from Mars, the idea that the wanton gun crime, guns deaths, gun deaths that happen on any given weekend in, say, Chicago, or Philadelphia, that don't really cause a lot of national attention. And then you have these other attacks,

which are sort of more akin to, like, shark attacks, there's something about the randomness of them and the lack of a normal criminal motive that makes them just so much more terrifying, right? But like as a policy matter, you have people on the right saying, do all this stuff about the gun crimes in inner cities, but you just got to kind of live with these want some murder sprees. And you have people on the left saying you got to do something, everything about these wanton murder sprees,

but we got to stop putting people in jail for these other kinds of crimes. There's a weird cognitive dissonance that's sort of running through this debate that at some point I think is going to reconcile itself in ways that will please neither side. I'm inclined these days to actually answer your question. You're inclined these days to answer my question?

I'm never really inclined to answer your question, But to answer your question, I am inclined these days to, first of all, I think, like, raising the age for guns does not bother me in the slightest. I don't know that 21 will do everything that we needed to do, but nothing will do everything that we needed to do. I got to say, and I don't want to start a huge fight with David on this, but I think the thing that's going to have to give in some ways is on the free speech side. And what I mean by that is, yeah, we also have free speech rights and all the rest. and I'm you know what has two thumbs and loves the First Amendment this guy but um in a country with 400 500 million guns um in a country where you like you cannot ban high capacity magazines because uh they're easy to sort of DIY in your garage or uh even make with 3D printing or just order

on the you know on the used market because they're not they don't have serial numbers on them so like the high capacity magazines are here the guns are here Given the Supreme Court rulings, the right to bear arms is here for a while. And it seems to me, following a point that David makes a lot, virtually all of these serial killer, all of these mass killers, I guess the term of art is leak. But they have tells. They let people know that they're thinking about this stuff, that they start posting in chat rooms about how awesome Columbine or Sandy Hook was. And I think you've got to start having algorithms that look less at Jordan Peterson and Dennis Brager's tweets or posts and more at like if if you're constantly talking about Columbine or Sandy Hook, if you're constantly talking about Parkland or the, you know, the Dana shooter guys or any of that kind of stuff, I'm not saying that alone should bring the power of the state or ban. you or anything like that.

But I think the AI can do the first pass on that stuff and let people look at it. Because it is out, I just can't get my head around how angry I would be if I were parent in one of these situations and or a spouse. And then you hear about all the things that this evil twerp was putting out there about mass killings or the Yuvaldi shooter was putting out there. celebrating the idea, doing this stuff. And the idea that somehow the system is, you know, going to obsess about, you know, high-profile transgender debates, but not be looking for that kind of thing is problematic.

And I think there are going to be people saying, well, look, it's just free expression. And it's going to be, it's going to catch a lot of false positives, as it were. but if I were in Congress, I would yell much more at the social media platforms for not looking at this stuff than for looking at the stuff that they are looking at. Yeah, a private entity like Facebook combing or Twitter or Instagram or tele...

You know, some of them, Discord. I mean, some of this stuff happens in platforms. Yeah, we really don't think about very much. But private entities combing through for evidence of suicidal ideation or mass shooting ideation, that's not a First Amendment issue. That's how a private platform is intending to use. It's at what kind of speech they want to host. So I do think there's a lot of room here for these platforms to do better in this regard. In fact, they'd done pretty well. And if you go all the way back to 2014, 2015, in the rise of ISIS,

that terrorists were using social media platforms pretty darn proficiently early in the rise of ISIS and the platforms did a pretty darn good job of removing terrorist content. And so they had to migrate elsewhere, which, you know, they migrated elsewhere,

but it definitely was an inconvenience. But a lot of these guys who are engaging in this behavior, these are not rocket scientists trying to, yeah, they're not, They're not rocking scientists. They're troubled, impulsive young kids. And that's one of the reasons why they're constantly leaking their plans.

So I am all for Facebook or Twitter or you name the social media platform doing what it can to highlight and amplify, or at least to highlight and it transmit to law enforcement, perhaps, for example, some of the evidence of this ideation. I think that that's a very useful concept. Look, on the gun point, I have, you know, after Parkland, Florida passed two laws, a red flag law, which unlike Illinois has been used thousands of times, and also raged the age limit on purchasing rifles to 21. I've got no problem with either one of those with the raising the age limit or the enhanced background check. The issue with mass shootings, it's just, there's just no evidence that gun restrictions are effective. The Rand Corporation looked at this and has looked at gun restrictions more broadly and especially looked at them in the mass shooting context and has found no evidence that any of the 18 policies they investigated had either increased or decreased mass shootings. And part of the reason is this is a very unique kind of crime. I recommend the Gladwell article all the time, the 2015 Gladwell article about school shootings that also applies to mass shootings.

And you read that and you begin to understand why the common gun control measures have been relatively ineffective, that there's no evidence that they have a real effect. And it's because of the incredible advance planning that many of these guys engage in. And, you know, Buffalo, for example, the guy bought a firearm that was compliant with the New York assault weapons ban and then promptly modified it. So, yeah, I hear you. I do not at all oppose an age limit increase. But the mass shooting problem is a different kind of problem than other gun violence problems. And that's why we're trying to grasp for creative policy solutions that, you know, frankly, had been under. tried and untested until now, and, you know, the red flag is one of them.

For what it's worth, I would support an enormous outlay of resources just on gun prosecutions that we have done somewhat. We've played with it back and forth in different administrations at the federal level. I would do huge push of grants to states to focus on gun crimes. A. B, I would raise the age to buy a gun real high. You probably can't come up. with a number that I would disagree with. And then I would have a carve out for military service. If you served in the military, then you get to have a legal weapon at a younger age based on that, which could also incentivize folks joining the military potentially. But at this point, I've said this before, let's just try some stuff. Let's do more. Let's try more. Let's experiment more.

Different states experimenting more would be good. This is the 50 state experiment thing. And David, like you said, nobody has come up with the answer to this, obviously. So let's keep trying. Let's not just throw up our hands. Red flag laws, all of it. Steve, I'm hoping you can give us an update on Ukraine, something that has certainly fallen out of the news in light of so much domestic news. Yeah, I can.

And it's not a good one. We are seeing Russia in what appears to be an operational, pause, at least according to the Institute for the Study of War here in the United States. They're not doing the things that they had been doing for months and months, both with respect to kinetic military action and also with respect to the kinds of things that they're announcing and are not announcing. The ISW notes that there were no claimed or assessed Russian territory. gains in Ukraine on the 6th of July for the first time in 133 days of war. So the Russians

weren't saying, here's what we got. Beyond that, if you look at what the Russian government has been doing back in Moscow, they've been both consolidating power and laying the groundwork for a really, really long war, continuing to grab power that will allow the Russian government more control over the economy, to take the kind of measures that one might expect in a sort of an ongoing prolonged emergency. So that's all not good. The question I think as it relates to the United States and our policy here is, what do we do? Do we care? The Biden administration has been continuing to send money and weapons. But I would say, again, without tremendous urgency. Is there more that the United States can do? There is more that the United States can

do. And in my view, we ought to be doing it. We do not want this to be a long war of attrition where Russia battles Ukraine because Ukraine will continue to be outgunned and Russia is sort of staking its future existence on this war. Those are not good terms for us or for the Ukrainians. David? I agree with all that Steve said. This operational pause has been, to the extent that it's going to be enduring as one that's been predicted for some time.

In fact, a lot of experts have been kind of surprised that it hasn't occurred yet because the pace of combat operations with the same troops, by the way, just moving many of these same units that were shattered outside of Kiev, moving them to the Donbos. So a lot of these guys have been in combat continually for week after week, now month after month, and there's just a limit, there's a limit of human exhaustion that a lot of folks thought the Russians would have reached for some time. And that doesn't mean that when the Russians reach a limit of exhaustion, the war stops. It means that there's a pause. And this happens in all sustained conflicts, in every sustained conflict, the intensity of combat on the front ebbs and flows. and you have periodic offensives

and times to regroup and re-gather your forces. And so as Steve said, like the indication here is Russia's digging in for the long haul, it's trying to do a lot of really creative things to bolster the size of its forces without going towards sort of universal mobilization. On the Ukrainian side, Western weapons, Ukraine, a lot of folks have called this,

I believe the phrase that I've heard a couple of times is Valley of Vulnerability and that Ukraine is beginning to sort of run out of its initial Soviet-era munitions and weapons, yet not all of the Western replacements are coming online. They have ammunition shortages. So they're in a state of exhaustion. So you'll have the Ukrainians in a state of exhaustion. The Russians who are perhaps in a regrouping phase.

But the bottom line is the Russians have advanced. They have chewed up what now? 20% of Ukrainian territory totally. The blockade on Ukrainian grain holds. And I would say a grim reality is setting in that people need, if the thought is that Ukraine will eventually not just hold off the Russians and keep them from taking the country, but that they can somehow push the Russians back, then there has got to be a lot of really creative thinking as to how that is going to be possible. Because right now, the Ukrainians are taking shocking losses to lose slowly. How are they going to turn that around and actually prevail in this conflict? That's the plan

that I haven't heard. Right now, it's been all about making sure Russia doesn't take the country or Russia doesn't break through in the Donbos. And all of that is incredibly important and necessary. what's the next step? What's the next step? Because if there is no next step, then you're looking at a grinding war of attrition that would likely end up with a partition of the country. Jonah, the slowness to some extent

seems to very much be helping Vladimir Putin because the attention of the world, the outrage of the world can't withstand that grind. Yeah, that's right. I mean, there's a real problem. of short attention spans um in the west and you see this and sort of germany's uh we're with you well we're not with you well we're sort of with you we're with you again kind of response to all of this and i think this is one of the concerns they have about boris johnson stepping down is

that he had really hitched his prime ministership towards supporting ukraine to the hilt and you could see still a popular cause in the UK, but you could see someone having a little more maneuvering room just because it would be impossible to be more supportive of the effort than Yeltsin already was. I mean, than Boris already was,

where's Johnson already was. I, you know, I I'm long-term kind of optimistic for Ukraine because it's going to join the EU, at least the part of it that's not occupied by Russia. It's going to, you know, the

the main reason why Putin wanted to decapitate Ukraine in the first place was the threat of having a viable, fairly democratic, prosperous, western-oriented, historically part of the Russian Empire country on his border was just too much of a bad example for his regime and his political economic model. And it looks like Ukraine is going to move into the part that it's not occupied is going to move in that model sooner rather than later. And that's, I think, long term, a really big problem for Putin and could fuel internal weaknesses for his regime. But in the short and medium term, and the short and medium term could be years. It's really bad for Ukraine. And it's really outrageous what Putin appears to be getting away with right now. I mean, so it's a very

short and medium term. I'm pretty pessimistic and sad about this, but I think at the end of the day, no historian is going to look back on this and say, wow, what a master's stroke by Putin. Steve, I want you to pick up on that thread. How will historians look back on this? I don't know that we know yet. I mean, I think, you know, certainly I think Vladimir Putin will be looked at a, looked at as a monster because he's a monster. And the, you know, the historical reckoning for the kinds of things that we've seen over the first five months of the war will be absolutely brutal and should be absolutely brutal. The question is, does this result in some kind of victory for Russia? Number one and number two, does the United States

begin to treat this war as our own war. I mean, you've heard rhetoric from both the Biden administration and from top Republicans that what happens in Ukraine matters not only because of Ukraine and because of the Ukrainian people, because of what it would mean for that country in its territory, but also for what it would mean for the region generally, for the signals it would send to have somebody like Vladimir Putin triumph in this kind of naked aggression If the United States doesn't step up, I think that this could have pretty profound implications the way that history records our willingness to protect this post-World War II rules-based liberal order.

And it should if we don't step up. Did you lock the front door? Check. Close the garage door? Yep. Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision. No. And you set up credit card transaction alerts at secure VPN for a private connection and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web.

I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit tellus.com slash total security to learn more. Conditions apply. Let's talk about 2022. Jonah, oil has fallen below $100 a barrel for the first time in quite a while. immigration surging at the southern border, is there anything that can change between now and

November, or is the midterm election baked? Well, first of all, just as a side note, I very much am expecting any moment now, Joe Biden to appear before the podium and thank the oil companies for their generosity and altruism in agreeing to lower oil prices, right? I mean, because if they're being greedy when they're going up, then when the prices go down, it must be because they're being altruistic and generous. And I am being facetious. But I think the sort of the 800-pound gorilla in your question that was not mentioned is the post-Dob's political environment.

and it does not look like the abortion ruling overturning Roe has had the effect that certainly activists wanted it to have. You just don't see a big move in the numbers anywhere. You don't see a big move in attitudes. Yeah, so like this fascinating Harvard poll that just came out says 55% of Americans want to, think Roe should be the law, but then something like 70-something say that we should also have a 15-week ban on abortions. And so you would figure in this sort of climate, the pro-Roe side would be greater than 55-45. More broadly, I think that it is unlikely that the Democrats are going to be able to move the needle significantly, at least on House rate, on the House. I think it

is baked in that the Democrats lose the House. I don't see how Biden's approval numbers can improve that much between now and November. And in part because one of the biggest misgivings, it seems that voters have about Biden is he just seems physically not up to the job. And I don't know, unless he gets a lot of vitamin B12 shots, you know, starting in the fall. I don't know how that changes. And it does appear that inflation is, in fact, peaking or has peaked and is starting to go down. A economist friend of mine who was sending me some stuff on this yesterday. I just don't know that the lag time for people to feel that will be sufficiently short for it to change anything. I do think the Senate's in play, but I think it's baked into the cake.

Democrats lose the House, and the only question is by how many seats, is that above or below the historic average of, what, 22 seats? That's the only real question. David, is 2022 baked, or are any of these things going to move in one direction or another? Yeah, I mean, I'm tempted to say baked, but there are too many of these Senate races where there are eccentric candidates running on. the Republican side. I don't think the Senate is baked at all at this point. I don't think the Senate is baked at all. To extent the House is baked, I'm much more convinced of that. But, you know, I'm mainly, I'm mainly convinced of that, Sarah, by the least favorite kind of polling, the kind of polling you hate the most. And we all hate the most, which is issue polling. Because the issue polling seems really bad for Democrats. But then you look at like the

generic party voting, and it seems to be getting better for Democrats. So what gives on that, I'm very interested to see that in the long term. I'm also really puzzled by a lot of their polling on abortion because there was some recent data, I believe, from Pew showing that a lot of the Republican moves now on abortion are really unpopular, like really unpopular. And at the same time, abortion is a very low priority. So what matters? Really unpopular or low priority? I mean, I default towards sort of saying low priority is the thing that will ultimately matter the most. And people, of course, will vote on higher priority issues, even if they don't like some of the Republicans' moves on abortion.

But there seems to be some conflicting data out there, some really eccentric Senate candidates. And so, you know, how many loved children does Herschel Walker have to have to matter? in Georgia, for example. Like, the questions like that are front of mind. I can't remember the last time I heard the plural of Love Child, just so casually put out there. But it's good. I like it.

Or I think the phrase being used in the race is secret sons. So how many secret sons? So there's, I keep thinking baked. I keep thinking baked. And then every now and then something crosses, the screen that says, is it, though, is it, though? But I'm so much less interested in my opinion on this than you're, Sarah, to be honest. Me too.

Let's get Steve in here. Because Steve, Steve's been sharing some interesting stuff in Slack. Steve always has interesting thoughts on this stuff. Steve, you think that Democrats, or at least that there's a case to be made that Democrats could fare better than people think, that the narrative has gone so far the other direction, that it's also probably a little inaccurate. it that way. I definitely think there's a case to be made. I just happen to think the case is wrong. There's a pretty smart Democratic strategist named Simon Rosenberg, who's putting out some

numbers on Twitter over the last couple days and has been holding some briefings, showing, as David hinted, that if you look at the generic ballot numbers, when you ask people, are you going to, Are you likely to vote for Democrat or Republican in the fall? The Democrats have improved in recent days in that measurement, which can be an interesting indication of what's likely to happen in the fall. But I do think when you just look at the atmosphere that we've talked about here, we've talked about it on dispatch lives, we've written about it quite a bit, Sarah, you've written about it in sweep.

You know, this is a horrible environment for Democrats. The right track, wrong track numbers are awful for, Democrats and Joe Biden. Joe Biden's approval numbers are awful. The overall trends are awful. The historical indicators are awful. I mean, there's just not a lot, I think, Democrats can do to turn this around. I will say the one saving grace, if you're a partisan Democrat, you look at the candidates, particularly in the Senate, you look at the candidates that Republicans either have, nominated or are set to nominate in Senate races to some extent in governor's races and in House races as well. But Senate races in particular, if you think that that's sort of where the

battle for control of Congress is likely to lie. And Republicans have nominated a lot of really bad candidates. I'm tempted to say really bad people, but really bad candidates who are not are likely to have won because they appeal to a small but powerful and vocal group of base Republicans, not based, but base Republicans, they are not likely to have great crossover appeal, crossover party appeal. And, you know, you go and you look at the, a lot of the states that are most likely to be contested, hotly contested. And those are the candidates that Republicans are going to have to line up behind. I think it's entirely possible that Republicans sweep to victory in the House in a commanding

way and don't pick up the Senate precisely because in those races we will learn, as we have known for a long time, that candidates really do matter. And at that moment, Mitch McConnell puts his fist through a plate glass window. And feels nothing. I think there's a big argument, and it's better probably done in an after-the-fact review. But there's a pretty good argument that the people who didn't want the kind of candidates to prevail in these Republican primaries should have been doing a lot more than they were doing to keep those Republicans from prevailing in these Republican primary contests. You know, you go back and you look at the kind of shoulder shrug, I think, that we saw in the aftermath of Georgia when Donald Trump and to cost Republicans the Senate majority by doing everything that he did in the days leading up to January 6th. And the lack of willingness to say after that, boy, we maybe ought not line up behind this guy.

and we maybe ought not nominate the candidates that he prefers us to nominate. And I think you saw many Republicans kind of slink back to the posture that they had had for most of the Trump years, which was, eh, I don't want to get in a big ugly fight about it. We can't have a big ugly fight with Donald Trump because we'll lose. And here we are. Okay, so I have thoughts that are not meant to form a cohesive whole, but I'll just start throwing out brain thoughts. That would be great if Jonah would offer that sort of disclaimer before he detox. I'm right here, you know.

One is the amount of money that some of these Democratic campaign committees are spending in Republican primaries is stunning. I hesitate to use the word outrageous because it would also imply sort of a newness. But I do think that this is new. I get that it's been done before. But the level, the consistency, the amount, the ubiquity of it is new. And to have, for instance, the executive director of the Democratic Governors Association come out and say like, yeah, damn right, that's what we're doing. You know, in the most recent iteration in a governor's race, you know, they're running ads

that give this like veneer of plausible deniability. where they say this person is extreme. They're pro-life, pro-second amendment, and they love Donald Trump. They know what they're doing. It's very intentional. And I think it tells you the mindset of where the smartest operative minds

in the Democratic Party think this is going at the Senate level, at the governor's level, and what they're willing to stake at the table, if you will, to try to change what they feel like is already baked. And it's gross and terrifying and deeply disturbing. Another thought. I've talked about how I just don't see the data out there of abortion making a difference as a policy issue in 2022.

I want to give the slight alternative version because none of that has changed. There is simply no data to say that this will turn out people or have people change their vote. It's not to say it won't happen. I just haven't seen any data for it. But a lot of people have reached out to say like, okay, but what about the enthusiasm of the Democratic base?

So fine, they were already voting and they were already voting Democratic, but a lot of enthusiasm. What about the money? Okay, so I have a couple answers to that. One, we've reached a tipping point on the money. Something raising money for one party or the other is not meaningful to me anymore,

unless that specific race wasn't going to have real money behind it. Very few of these House races aren't going to have more money than they know what to do with. None of the Senate races will be under that tipping point of not just diminishing returns on what to do with the money. Like, they're setting the money on fire because they don't know what to do with the money. And if you end up with money in the bank at the end and you've lost, people blame you and won't give you money next time. They won't hire you to be campaign manager, et cetera. So, no, I don't think the money matters. However, here's what I think does matter.

In 2020, in those Senate races, so bleeding slightly into 2021 in Georgia, the Democrats tried out something new. And I think they'll do it again in 2022, and I think it's very smart. And that is paying volunteers to talk to their friends. So if you're one of those people who is turned on by the abortion issue, you know, you've already been voting perhaps. You're an energized Democrat who instead of, you know, maybe you don't like door knocking or you door knock for a couple weekends and you're like, all right, it's hot.

Instead, what they're going to do is pay you a relatively small amount of that enormous amount of money that they don't know what to do with that they would otherwise be setting on fire and giving to consultants. they're going to pay it to their volunteers to reach out to their five friends. Because the one thing we know is actually the most effective is person-to-person contact, like door knocking. But what's even more effective than that is person-to-person contact with someone you know. So, you know, Jonah calling me and saying who he's going to vote for is in every academic study,

by far, the highest change that you're going to see of any potential tactic. Democrats are putting money behind that. Specifically, we should say, me telling you who I'm going to vote for has almost no effect. But I take your point figuratively. Yeah, it's a little hard to argue with that. Yeah, yeah. It seems fair. So I think that could have a real effect.

You know, maybe we're talking two points in some of these Senate races and that two points could be really significant as we saw it was in the Georgia Senate races in 2020. And then last thought, I think the price of oil actually does have a chance to make a real change in some of these races. Gas prices go down significantly. People will feel that instantly and it will simply change the anger level. And so when we talk about it being baked and what could possibly change, abortion, immigration, guns, those sort of issue polling things that David keeps mentioning in order to see if I will throw something through the wall here. I don't see any issue changing 2022, but inflation can't just like magically go down. That's just something that can't happen quickly enough, but the price of gas can happen pretty

quickly. I'm not saying it will, but if it did, that will have ripple effects through the economy and it will certainly hit in people's lives where some of those people who were otherwise going to show up and vote Republican, just maybe less motivated to do so. So that could be something where I'm like, maybe it's not totally baked on that front. I wasn't expecting the price of oil to fall below $100 a barrel.

Now, if a recession happens, then the opposite could happen. It's unbaked the other way where some of these Senate races, the wave goes from an eight-point wave to a 12-point rave, and it swamps the other way. All right, now it's time for not worth your time. Jonah, we were talking about this a little in the green room ahead of time. One of the producers for Friends, the show from the 90s, has said that she regrets an episode where they misgendered Chandler's dad,

who was played by Kathleen Turner, trans character, so they should have called it Chandler's mom. And the episode is really is literally called, I think, the one about Chandler's dad. And she has given this interview about how much she regrets that. On the one hand, okay. On the other hand, this is a show from the 90s and we're going to revisit episodes. This isn't just like not worth our time on the podcast. It feels like, why is anyone, why is this person able to get attention for this? Yeah, I think it's really a dumb form of sort of

I don't even know what you call it of sort of inside a certain bubble sort of marketing for one of a better term like maybe I was thinking maybe Kauffman has a new

product coming online and like the places that she wants to sell it to are invested in this kind of stuff or the executives are invested in this kind of stuff but like I mean I honestly think

that like the NAACP should probably drop the phrase colored people because they're actively working today and it's like a weird thing, you know, and I get it. But like, if we're going to go back and say that we use the wrong terms for things in popular culture 30 years ago, 40 years ago, there's really no end to it. And there's something sort of vaguely sort of Soviet-era airbrushy about history that kind of bothers me

because they're pulling they're pulling episodes of various things that are problematic. There was a there's a blackface episode of community that they pulled once

in a recently. It's just all so silly and it's such a waste of time. But David, how am I supposed to think of this vis-a-vis for instance,

Confederate monuments or the naming of bases where I actually do think that the bases should all be renamed. I think there's a difference in importance and magnitude. What?

We're supposed to have a monitor for how important something is. On the worth your time segment? What? Yeah. Let me point out it's the not worth your time segment. Yeah, I know. I know. Continuing the long tradition of saying something's not worth our time

and then spending a fair amount of time talking about it. But, you know, the really interesting thing is there seems, to be, that might be worth our time at some point, a shift in the wind on sort of what you might call radical gender ideology, that there have been a number of mainstream publications, New York Times, for example, recently, Washington Post, that have really started to call into question the complete remaking of language, the complete rethinking of gender, and also the wisdom of a lot of early interventions. And so there is sort of not to use a trendy term,

but there does seem to be kind of a vibe shift out there that is, that is, might be worth paying attention to. It might be worth a deeper dive also at some point that you and Jonah both have late teenage slash very early 20s children. And yet David seems to be the one to use things like vibe shift. And Jonah doesn't. And Jonah should be as attuned to this as David. And why is that?

Steve, you also have teenagers, but I guess I just assume that you would actively shun adopting their language. I try not to do it. I try not to speak their language. I'm an adult. They're teenagers. Oh, my gosh. It's so bougie of you. And with that, thank you so much for joining us.

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