The Dispatch Podcast - The Venomous Coalition | Roundtable

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

Steve Hayes is joined by Megan McArdle, Jonah Goldberg, and Mike Warren to discuss the level of Tucker Carlson-philia displayed by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and what it means for the right moving forward. The Agenda:—Democrats steal November 4 elections—Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts tries to clean up his mess—Groyper staffers are a problem—Jonah is not unc!—Dick Cheney: Misunderstood legacy—The curious case of Sean Dunn—NWYT: best sandwiches Show Notes: —No pain, no pleasure The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—click here. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Get no frills delivered. Shop the same in-store prices online and enjoy unlimited delivery with PC Express Pass. Get your first year for $2.50 a month. Learn more at pceexpress.ca.ca. to the dispatch podcast, I'm Steve Hayes. On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss a big night for the Democrats in Tuesday's elections, the mess at the Heritage Foundation, and a long look at Dick Cheney's 40 years at the top of the U.S. government. Finally, for not worth your time, we'll look at an assault with a hoagie and the best condiments in the opinion of the panel. I'm joined by my

dispatch colleagues Jonah Goldberg and Mike Warren, as well as dispatch contributor Megan McArdle of the Washington Post. Let's dive right in. So November 4th, fourth was a great night for the Democrats. Zoran Mandani, Democratic Socialists, became the mayor of New York City, winning 50 to 41 over erstwhile Democrat, new independent Andrew Cuomo. Mikey Sherrill won a decisive victory for governor in New Jersey, 13-point victory, and then Abigail Spanberger, won 5742 in Virginia. And Democrats won many important contests further down the ballot in these states. elsewhere. What does this all mean at this moment in the Trump administration and this moment in our politics, Megan? Well, I think it shows that governing matters, that the idea that you,

you know, that you just get in and you do a bunch of big, bold, crazy stuff, results in losing elections the next time around. And I also think more broadly for Republicans, it means that they have to think about what does their party look like after Trump because they have been coutowing to him for a decade because they're so terrified of his voters. Well, he's not going to be on the ballot anymore. He's not going to have any shirttails to drag other Republicans in. So you better start thinking about other voters who are not the Trump base

because he is not going to be around that much longer. Yeah, Mike, we saw some real erosion from the 2024 Republican vote totals in particular demographic groups, many of the groups that Donald Trump did especially well in, maybe surprisingly well in in 2024, including minority groups that caused some, I would say, over-enthusiastic Republican consultants and office holders to declare a realignment was upon us. We saw a lot of movement backwards among those groups in this first off of your election. Yeah, I've seen now too many realignments that get canceled after the first election that

suggested there was a realignment. So, I mean, I don't think I'm boasting too much to say I was very skeptical after 2024 that this was really true that, you know, we were going to see a sort of permanent or semi-permanent move of, say, Hispanic and Blanche. black voters, particularly males, but not entirely, toward the Republican Party. Donald Trump won more voters in those demographic groups than any Republican in a long time, and in places like New Jersey. New Jersey was closer than it normally is in a presidential election because of

Donald Trump's gains among sort of working class, black voters, Hispanic voters, and white voters as well. He's sort of maxing out on. on working class white voters. And then this kind of flip suggests exactly what you said, that they were not becoming immediately regular and committed Republican voters. You know, it's not complicated, actually. I think it may be complicated for people in Washington who cover this stuff very closely. You think that it's sort of a straight line of motivations for voters.

like this. But, you know, I think there's some coherence, actually, in, say, Hispanic voters across the country wanting tougher and tighter immigration enforcement and, of course, wanting, you know, better economic outcomes than what the Biden administration offered. And also not liking paying more at the grocery store due to tariffs and not liking seeing other people, including American citizens who maybe look like them, maybe people that they know sort of being rounded up or being targeted or having the fear that the federal government is coming after them. They want maybe tighter immigration enforcement, but not like this. And maybe that sounds incoherent, but I think it's entirely coherent.

And it suggests that, you know, when you win, you've got to keep winning. You've got to sort of keep winning over those low propensity voters who you've just won over. And Donald Trump and the Republicans haven't done that. We can read too much into these results off year. New Jersey, Virginia, New York City. It doesn't reflect a lot of what the country looks like. But I think it's maybe a canary in the coal mine ahead of the midterm elections next year. Yeah, Jonah, it's sort of exhausting when you see the partisans react to this.

I mean, the very same people who, you know, on Monday night were insisting that Republicans had a very good chance of winning these gubernatorial races, that we were on the verge of a big surprise in New Jersey, for instance, because there had been movement toward Republicans in 2024 in previous years, now saying, oh, none of this matters. This is really silly for people to pretend this matters. These are blue states with blue governors. There's nothing to be read into this. You made a point, I think it was you, earlier this week in response to the elections and in response to the results, that this doesn't give Democrats a clear answer to the question that affects them for much of the past year, because you'll have progressives pointing to Zoran Mondani's victory in New York City and saying, this is the future. We have to, you know, we have to embrace socialism. He talked about prices and cost of living. We need to sort of go back to our economic class warfare and the kinds of things that Mamdani was saying.

And you have others pointing to Spanberger and Mikey Sherrill saying, look, these were relatively moderate Democrats. They'd been moderates for most of their time in Congress. Spanberger certainly, I think, didn't stand up in the way that I think many of us thought she should have. in response to the texting scandal with Jay Jones, who had wished death upon the children of his political opponents. And, you know, she's been criticized by centrists and Republicans for not being stronger on trans bathroom issues. But broadly, I think, she can be described as a moderate. She's the one who said that she never wanted to hear Democrats talking about defunding the police after an election several years ago. who should democrats listen to is there is there an easy answer here yeah so that was me um

my ideal scenario would have been for mondami and j jones to lose and the the normie or normie adjacent democrats to win by big margins i think that would have been the best possible thing for the country maybe long term best possible thing for the democrats uh worst possible thing short term for the Republicans, best possible thing for the Republicans, too, because it'd be good for the country, because I've come to the conclusion, you cannot have only one sane party. Because if one party is insane, it gives permission to the other party to be just a hair less insane. And instead, every faction of the Democratic Party gets to say, we are the future, and that's a problem. And in this sense, I think what it does is it actually puts the lie to this refrain.

Washington Washington, Washington has made this point, a bunch of people made this point. But, you know, Trump says, oh, this was all because I wasn't on the ballot. We don't, Republicans can't win when I'm not on the ballot. Some people are hearing a dog whistle about him being on the ballot again in 2028 and all that. I'm not sure that's the case. But he likes to play those games. But the truth is, is the journal in a bunch of other places, it was that he was on the ballot. It just simply was on the ballot.

Like, pretty much everywhere, Democrats got, you know, 39 to 42%. It was basically 41% very, very. close to where Trump's approval rating is and Trump has a point because Trump can turn out a lot of low propensity voters who like him don't like voting think it's a hassle don't really follow the issues don't really follow politics but you know when Hulk Hogan and Alex Jones and whoever else says come out for Trump they come out and otherwise they don't and people confuse the electorate with the population with you know the presidential electorate with the midterm electorate and And these are all different populations at different moments, different snapshots in time.

But I think it's fair to say that among the politically engaged, to define that as you will, Trump, his net negatives are enormous. And so among the, so like only presidential elections can get the non-politically engaged reliably involved. And so it makes total sense that on an off-year election, during a government shutdown, Even though, again, how many times have we said this on here? Democratic government shutdown is technically and literally the Democrats' fault. But people think they put it as part of the general chaos and tumult of the Trump presidency. And they are not wrong to think that but for Donald Trump, we wouldn't have a lot of this chaos.

And so they're voting about the wrong direction feeling. They're voting about the government shutdown. And it shows that in places outside of New York City, like in New York City, you have, Democrats have to focus on affordability, not globalizing the intifada, and they'll be fine. Outside of New York City, if they focus on just sort of being normal and good schools and safety, and they don't give Republicans low-hanging fruit stupid reasons to beat up on Democrats, they'll be fine in the Trump era. And I love that.

I love your phrase. If they focus on being normal. Yeah. Like it's so, it's so simple and it's such good advice. Yeah. I mean, that's, but that's the challenge. I feel like a durable majority is available to any party that will just try to be normal for five minutes. And sadly, that party does not seem to exist in our.

country but i mean just don't be crazy i mean if if either party just had the attitude that you have when you go in for a bank loan they would be a majority party but they can not get their act together enough to sustain that sort of charming but sober and serious sanity long enough um to to hold on because the second they get from power they start doing stupid crap too well that's a that's a a good transition to our second issue. We'll have plenty of time to talk about the politics of this and to look forward to the 2026 midterms. But I don't want to spend too much time on the politics here

because I think Mike is right. It's possible to overread these results and a lot of people are doing it. But one prediction, just to key off of what Mike says, I know we've got to move on. But there are tea leaves here that suggest that the gerrymandering craze for the Republicans could wildly backfire on them.

And that will be fun to watch. And that too would be good for America. That would be great for America. Jumping off the Normy train, jumping off the Norms train and trying to rig the system for your benefit blows up in your face. We need more of those kinds of messages.

Yeah. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. You know what's better than the one big thing? Two big things. Exactly. The new iPhone 17 Pro on TELUS

his five-year rate plan price lock. Yep, it's the most powerful iPhone ever, plus more peace of mind with your bill over five years. This is big. Get the new iPhone 17 Pro at tellus.com slash iPhone 17 Pro on select plans. Conditions and exclusions apply. Before we return to the roundtable, I want to let you know what's going on elsewhere here at the dispatch. This week on advisory opinions, Sarah Isker and David French are joined by David Latt and Roman Martinez to break down the case challenging President Donald Trump's tariffs. Plus, SCOTUS blog's Amy Howe joins from the steps of the Supreme Court with insights straight from inside the courtroom.

Search for advisory opinions in your podcast app and hit the follow button or catch video of the discussion on our YouTube channel. Now let's jump back into our conversation. So speaking of crazy party bases, I want to turn the discussion to the Heritage Foundation. Full disclosure, where you got your start and you were... My first job, my first job out of college was really. writing speeches and editing newsletters for and answering mail for Ed Fulner, who was the founder and first president of the Heritage Foundation, just recently passed. Big hub-up about the Heritage Foundation over the past weekend. Mike, I'm going to let you give us kind of a big picture description of

what's happened. People who listened to my interview earlier this week with Tim Chapman got a sense of how another long-time heritage alum sees this. But I thought it was worth spending a little more time on this because I do think this debate that we're seeing play out in the context of the Heritage Foundation is about much more than the Heritage Foundation and its current leader. It's about the conservative movement. It's about the Republican Party. It's about the sanity of our politics today. Mike, can you just walk us through what happened here and why is everybody talking about

the Heritage Foundation? You know, it's tempting to begin farther back than I really should. In the beginning, there was the word. Exactly. I'm imagining, you know, young conservatives and, like, khakis, like, you know, drumming and, you know, some big monolith, like, from, you know, 2001 to Space Odyssey. No, I won't start there. But we'll start here. Last week, Tucker Carlson released an interview on his ex formerly known as Twitter interview podcast program with a young man named Nick Fuentes, who is best known for being a prominent online neo-Nazi troll who is not trolling, who believes, purports to believe all of the terrible things.

that you might expect a neo-Nazi to believe. He embraces the term. He's an apologist for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. He doesn't like Jews. He doesn't like non-white people. And he is prominent, maybe not as prominent as maybe the mainstream media and sort of far-right folks might want you to think. But he's prominent, and he's a prominent leader of a group of sort of online right-wing.

far right-wing neo-Nazi folks, young men mostly called Groybers. All right, Tucker Carlson has an interview with him that he publishes last week. It is two hours long. It is full of softball questions and playful back and forth. A little pushback here and there from Tucker that is perfunctory, I think, is the best and most accurate way to describe it. you know, he's, Tucker seemed a little appalled that Nick Fuentes also admires Joseph Stalin. That was a bridge, perhaps a little too far for Tucker.

But he has this interview with Nick Fuentes, and online, a sort of furor and anger at this happening begins to boil over. It begins to be directed at all kinds of people who have been associated with Tucker Carlson, including, and especially the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation under Kevin Roberts, its president, has had this sort of long, recent history, if that makes sense, with Tucker Carlson, embracing him, having him speak at their events, paying him as a part of a sort of media partnership,

essentially putting ads and other media partnership kind of things that happen on Tucker Carlson's show. People start demanding that the Heritage Foundation disassociate from a man who would platform a neo-Nazi. Not an unreasonable thing to request of a once august think tank. That's my opinion. Fast forward to last Thursday, this is October 30th, Kevin Roberts posts a video on X, two and a half minutes long. He's the current president of the Heritage Foundation. This is the current president of the Heritage Foundation, in which,

He claims that people are trying to get heritage to cancel Tucker Carlson. And that's something that he will not do. He referred to a venomous coalition of people trying to get heritage to distance himself from Tucker Carlson. He, again, says some sort of perfunctory, we don't like, we, we have a poor anti-Semitism type of language. But otherwise says, we're standing by our friend, Tucker Carlson. That is when the proverbial, you know, what hit the fan within Heritage and outside of Heritage, you had just kind of an explosion of outrage happening, lots of conversations happening between former and current Heritage staff members, certain Heritage staff members, some of whom

were Jewish and some of whom were not expressing this very, quaint idea that Nazis are bad on Twitter, sort of responding to this by saying, no, no, no, Tucker Carlson doing this was not a good thing and it's not something that heritage should be associated with. It's been sort of an ongoing struggle session for Kevin Roberts since then. He released a statement the following day after this video reiterating that Nick Fuentes is somebody he abhors and whose views he abhors, standing by Tucker Carlson. there is just, I mean, Steve, you and I are doing reporting all over the weekend, trying to figure out what's going on.

Is the board going to get rid of Kevin Roberts? They hadn't. Kevin Roberts is still out there speaking. He speaks at Hillsdale earlier this week on Monday. Again, not really distancing himself at all from Tucker Carlson. All of this culminates in a Wednesday all-hands meeting with Heritage staff in which the only way I can describe it is a large number of heritage staff members reading Kevin Roberts, the Riot Act, telling him they don't have confidence in his leadership, that he's been, he's had a lack of courage and leadership in dealing

with this. Kevin Roberts kind of took it. He admitted that he made a mistake making the video. He didn't really get specific about what that mistake was. And we can go into further of sort of what happened in that meeting. The audio of which was leaked to me and other reporters of the video of which was eventually published, even though it was supposed to be private. But suffice it to say there is a, there is that divide you talked about within the conservative movement between what I would say is sort of more traditional, small L liberal, freedom-focused conservatives and a growing and powerful far-right nationalist and what I would say is a bigoted side of kind of right-wing intellectual thought,

and if you can call it that, in politics. And that fight is happening right now within the Heritage Foundation. And I'm not convinced I know who's going to win. I will say after listening to that meeting in which Kevin Roberts had to listen to people tell him he was being a bad leader, I thought for the first time in a while

that perhaps the more small ill liberal freedom conservative side had a little more fight in it than I had previously thought. So that's that's long and short of. I probably missed something. It's a great summary. And there are even more details. We'll get to some of them. Megan, let me just start with the simplest question. If you're not paying attention to this and you don't care who Kevin Roberts is and you don't understand, And you didn't read the reporting about why he was brought into Heritage four years ago, why the previous administration was sort of shown the door. Why would the head of a conservative think tank stand up and defend Tucker Carlson's platforming, I would say, amplifying of a white supremacist?

Yeah. So before I answer that, I just have to say, I also, in addition to, sort of winking at anti-Semitism. I blame Kevin Roberts for the fact that all of my group chats are now called the Venomous Coalition. Venomous Coalition 1. Venomous Coalition 2.

It is very confusing. I don't know at any given time. I have to keep checking which venomous coalition I'm in. I mean, I have belonged to many over my lifetime, obviously. But, you know, I think the cover story is his chief of staff handed him a speech. and he read it. And like there may be some truth to this story, by the way. I'm not saying it's necessarily false. But the official story, let us say, is that he was handed a speech. He didn't

read it and didn't really know who Nick Fuentes was or what he was defending. You know, even that explanation doesn't really fly because there are so many anti-Semitic dog whistles in that speech quite beyond knowing who Nick Fuentes is, right? I mean, and this is kind of like the Grant Platner story where I can actually see myself, I can't see myself deciding to get a tattoo, much less a skull and crossbones, but I can see that if I had made that series of extremely rash and ill-advised decisions, that I might end up with a tot and cough because I would have had no idea what that was. This is the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, who's on the left.

Yeah, sorry. But the problem is you then... Soon to be supported by Heritage Action. Sorry, go on. Indeed. And so I think the deeper problem, and apologies for recycling a line I used on another podcast, but to me, it's like Kevin Roberts looked around and saw that this faction is growing on the right. And it's like he was told he had stage two cancer and he was like, chemotherapy sounds really hard. I think I'm just going to try to make friends with my tumors.

And that's about it. Don't make friends with your tumors. It's not, that does not work. you have to actually attack the tumors and cut them out and take care of them. Unfortunately, like, it is really unpleasant. Chemotherapy is terrible, as anyone who has had cancer can tell you, and people don't want to do it. And so instead, what's happening is that this faction is growing on the right.

You know, Rod Dreher, I don't know if this is accurate. But he said on his substack that he's told by someone in the position to know that, like, 40% of the young staffers are functionally grippers, which is the Nick Fuentes follow, the term for Nick Fuentes followers. And, like, that is a bad situation. You need to think about your hiring. You need to be more active. And look, this can happen where one or two people slip under the wire, right?

I was actually, if people remember, John Elliott, who for a long time ran outreach for communications, media stuff for the Institute for Humane Studies. I had lunch with him a long time ago, and it turns out that those lunches were a way that he filtered people who were secret racists, and he would kind of test them. And he built up a little cadre of secret racists. And when it came out, it was terrible. And I guess I was glad I had passed the test. I had no idea.

Passed the test that you were not. Passed or failed? That I was not, yes. You failed the test. We need to make these distinct. is clear, unfortunately. Yeah, I'm sorry. Sorry. Whatever dog whistles

he was sending out were subtle enough that they floated right over my head and I never, you know, he never went any further. It never got to a point where I could see it, but it was there. So when he put the eye holes in the linen napkin and put it over his head, you're

like, oh, that's a cool costume. I was like, oh, you're going as a ghost for Halloween. I love Casper. But the point is that no one else in the movement knew. There were this very small group of people who knew, and they belonged to his little ugly tribe. And then no one else did. And that is just an unfortunate reality that there might be one or two.

But when you're looking, when you were looking at your staff and saying, do I really dare to take on Tucker Carlson after Tucker Carlson has platformed this venomous neo-Nazi, you have created a problem. And if you don't take care of it real soon, that problem is going to get worse. Yeah, Jonah, I mean, so much of this controversy, the debate here has been about heritage defending a guy who was platforming a bigot. Isn't the problem that Tucker Carlson is a bigot? I mean, Tucker hosts, Darrell hosted a historian, I guess we would call him, named Daryl Cooper, who's a Holocaust revisionist, suggested that Winston Churchill was the villain in World War II.

And Tucker called him the most important popular historian in the United States. You know, we've talked before about your texts to Tucker, identifying somebody that he'd had on his show who had a problematic history with neo-nobacco. season, Tucker doing and saying nothing about it. I mean, Tucker's been doing this for a long time. Why is so much of the focus now on Tucker making nice with Nick Fuentes when we've had all of this evidence about all of Tucker's bigotry for a long time to say nothing of his conspiracy theories and all of these other things that one might find problematic? Yeah. So, and this is like, I agree with everything Megan said about

the problem of heritage i mean the there have been problems with um there was always the sort of the the ron paul conduits as well that were problematic and certain parts of the right and libertarian right these things have happened from the time national review dealt with these kind of problems forever um going back to william f buckley kicking out the birchers the the key point here though um is that I think the focus on Tucker is the right one insofar as I think Roberts just really, really wants, he wants to go on a road trip with Tucker. He just likes Tucker. He wants to be Tucker's buddy.

He's, and I've texted with a couple different people who are pretty close to that universe, and they're like, it's the explanation is like six words long. it's Kevin Kevin Hart's Tucker Carlson and he's got a theory about why he should and he's good for him and that's why we're going to take out ads on his stupid podcast and all this kind of stuff and I think everything else is kind of secondary to that

but like when you're that close to Tucker Carlson whatever Tucker Carlson does and says seems awesome to you and seems like the right approach and so that was one of the when I wrote about this last Friday one of the amazing things about the initial statement um should we just call it the venomous coalition speech um uh where you know the dog whistle was

much stronger than just venomous coalition because he says dedicated to um the interests of others than you know someone someone else's self interest right you know like basically it was it was the jews um you know it was like the only reason you would ever criticize heritage for being buddies with tucker is because b b bnettnjoo wants you to but in the the the most of the most of the um you the Amazing thing about that is if you strip away all the dog wistly stuff, his basic position was indistinguishable on the substance from the position of Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, and the other university presidents when they were defending themselves against the charge that they were too tolerant of anti-Semitism at Harvard and MIT and elsewhere. It's like, you know, will police speech for people who say men can't get pregnant, but gas the Jews, we need, you know, this is a free speech. area this is you have to have you know time place in manner tests and you have to have tolerance for different points of view that's that was Kevin Roberts position about Tucker is that you debate

you know when it comes to this kind of stuff you you challenge bad ideas with good ideas and you have forthright debate and the thing that annoys me the most about that argument in the context of Tucker and this stuff is Tucker didn't do any of that yeah Tucker just basically said you know tell me more for two hours to a neo-Nazi, to a guy who says he's on team Hitler and says women want to be raped. And so I think that, you know, it's funny. There's this long history and intellectual history of minor figures getting the stuffing kicked out of them for taking the same position as major figures that nobody wants to attack. Right. So like there was a guy in the 70s who wrote a book about how we should get out of NATO and he was like a neo-connish kind of guy

And he said, we should get out of NATO, give up on it. And everyone on the sort of foreign policy hawk right went ballistic against this guy. But all he was doing was basically taking the same position as Irving Crystal. But no one's going to attack Earth in Crystal, right? Similarly, it's really easy to go after Nick Flint is, but none of these guys have the courage to go after Tucker Carlson. And similarly, all these guys love to talk about how, and even the anti-Semites are chicken shit. because they love to talk about how terrible the Jews are

and how terrible Israel is and how America has been bought and sold by the A-PAC and all this kind of stuff but they won't criticize Donald Trump who happens to be like arguably the best friend the state of Israel's had since Harry Truman in the Oval Office because that would actually take courage

and so much of this argument so much of this debate stuff is people scapegoating easy targets or straw man targets rather than actually saying no look Tucker is poisonous to the right he is not a courageous journalist who asks hard questions he's fundamentally forget anti-Semitic he's anti-American

he has done kiss-ass interviews with several world leaders who are implacable foes to the United States of America he is taking the side essentially of the access powers against the allies in World War II with his interview choice and the way he pushes back on some things

and says, tell me more to other things. He has bought into Buchananism on steroids. And Buchanan, look, I have a soft spot in my heart. I've always had a soft spot on my heart for Buchanan. I've known him since I was a baby. He was friends with my parents. But Buchanan became anti-American. 30 years ago.

And he's written over and over again, anti-American books saying that we've gotten it wrong since the end of World War II, or actually since the beginning of World War II. And Tucker, people love to play this game. Is he serious or is he being cynical? And I'll stop here, but my theory about Tucker is it's not either or it's both hand.

I can give you six or seven maybe examples of how he does something initially for cynical reasons, for transgressive reasons, to like target opponents, to make, you know, to cause an uproar and a controversy that's good for him and then he gets attack for it and then he gets defensive

and he convinces himself no no I'm actually right on the merits and he doubles and triples down on a cynical entertainment strategy that becomes an ideological conviction I've seen him do it time and time again it's in part what happened to Pat Buchanan is that when you when your friends all say

go Pat Go or your super fans say oh go pat go you start listening to your super fans when your critics and your friends say oh pat maybe you've gone too far and you start to become a caricature and that's what's happened to Tucker is like how dare you stay i'm making up this thing about you know being visited by a demon in my sleep and say it was just my dog scratching me so i'm going to triple down on my new demonology BS right he does this over and over and over again And because people like him and he's charming and because he panders to the intellectual vanity of really uninformed people, which is the essence of conspiracy theory mongering in the first place. The beauty of being a conspiracy theorist is that you give people who don't know anything a chance to feel like an intellectual. That's what Candace Owen does. That's what Tucker does. And it works and it's popular. And Kevin Roberts loves that kind of popular.

The history of the conservative movement falling in love with people who have an appeal to youthful energy is a very old one, and he's no different in that regard. I just don't think he has any friggin, I'm talking about Kevin Roberts, he has no frigging idea about how to run an actual intellectual institution for the betterment of the conservative movement and the American people. So there's a lot to chew on there, Mike, but I think maybe the most interesting thing, TBH, is that Jonah is texting with Gen Ziers. You're getting lots of texts that says Kevin Hart's Tucker Carlson? I was translating it. I mean, that's so... For the language of you guys.

You are doing your best to prove that you are not unk. That's for sure. Steve, can I say something about what Jonah said about? Kevin Roberts doing this because he hearts, Tucker. And because I think you can see a through line here throughout the sort of the Trump era and the takeover of the conservative movement, whether it's Kevin Roberts at the Heritage Foundation or Tucker Carlson or other folks in the sort of Fox News conservative media space or Trump himself or a lot of the people within the Republican Party and the conservative movement who sort of who we all know, who we have all talked with. who don't like Trump. They don't like what he's done. They say that privately and do something different publicly.

It's sort of a theme of this podcast of talking about that phenomenon. Saying different things publicly from what we say. I'm bringing up that phenomenon. But I think there's a throughline here where you have people in power and influence and influential positions who do things for cynical reasons or for personal reasons or for things that they think will advance them and achieve their own personal ends. And what happens is you have, whether it's sort of a general public or I think what is most concerning with this heritage episode is a sort of young people who don't see the cynicism,

who don't see the self-dealing or the self-promotion that's going on with all of this decision-making to embrace more radical or more extreme sort of positions, rhetoric, those sort of things. That youthful energy is that those people are trying to sort of play up and take a part of and sort of maybe suck up so that they still have some relevance and youthful. energy themselves. It's extremely damaging to those young people and to a movement that is built on the next generation coming up and sort of building on the institutions that have come before them. And you can just see this in this debate over Tucker Carlson and, you know, support for Israel and whether anti-Semitism, whether it's anti-Semitic to say those sort of dog whistle

things, a lot of the young conservatives, those maybe 40% of heritage who are groopers, they are taking it seriously. They are taking the cynicism seriously, taking it to heart and letting it form how they view the world and how they view their place in it. That's the cancer. That's the poison. And I think it's worth just underscoring how much of the conservative world has been infected because people in positions of power and influence who should know better, who ought to know better, have taken that cynical route and have taken the young people along with them who just frankly don't know any better. Megan, I want to get your reaction to that. And also looking at those leaders, those conservative movement leaders, I think you really can take this back five years before where Mike started us as he gave us the description of what it unfolded.

You go back to 2019, 2020, I guess it was the summer of 2020. Tucker Carlson used his TV show on Fox News to really go after Kay Cole James, who was the black former president of the Heritage Foundation. She was the president of the Heritage Foundation at the time. She had put out, I think, unobjectionable statement about the death of George Floyd and sort of rule of law questions. And Tucker went on his show and claimed, without evidence, I mean, was just false, just made up a, put words in her mouths, claimed that she said things she didn't say, claimed that she said that America was, quote, irredeemably racist, unquote, and urged his viewers, 3 million strong, to stop donating to the Heritage Foundation.

That's when this starts. The Heritage Board freaks out. They're worried about a loss of donations. They're worried about being on Tucker's bad side. Tucker had gone after other sort of conservative establishment institutions, and it was very clearly he was making heritage, the new target of his animosity. They essentially cashiered K. Cole James

and brought in Kevin Roberts, in part because they thought he would appeal to Tucker Carlson. He could put them on the right side of, you know, this populist moment. And one of the things that really struck me as I watched this, sort of remarkable staff meeting at Heritage yesterday, where these staffers, young staffers, many of them, confronted Kevin Roberts about what he'd done with Heritage was a claim from one young woman who said, in effect, the reason I came to work at the Heritage Foundation was because of certain principles. And in watching you operate, she said to Kevin Roberts, it seems as though

you don't care, there are no principles. You don't care about principles. It's all about getting on the right side of this one guy. And I thought that moment, maybe better than just about anything we've seen, captured sort of what's happened on the center right over the past decade, better than just about anything, because it's conservative institutions, it's conservative politicians, it's classical liberal intellectuals, it's, you know, pro-free market economists who are now for tariffs. I mean, there is this incredibly disorienting, um, I don't even know what to call it, disorienting trend where you have people

who once stood for certain things, represent certain principles, made arguments based on those principles who have just capitulated across the board. Absolutely. And I think one of the things that this illustrates is that once you pay the Dane Guild, you never get rid of the Dane, right?

You make a little concession to these guys just to keep them on side, And then they just keep coming back. And they're like, but what if you said you liked Taylor? And that is a good reason not to start. And I think it goes back to, look, I think all of us in 2015 had a very different expectation for what our future looked like, what our career looked like. Then, yeah, I was excited for the next Republican administration because I was going to be well-sourced. I was going to have the kind of access that I was watching my liberal friends.

and joy in the Obama administration. Oh, Megan. And then everything blew up. And this is more true for you guys than for me, because I'm a libertarian. I've always at least been on the fringe. And then people had to decide what sorts of accommodations

they were going to make and how they were going to handle it. And the movement split into the Never Trump side and the Hold Your Nose side and the I Love Trump side. And then the Never Trump side split into the like, well, what if we just became Democrats and the, no, what if we just,

what if we just stayed like we are and huddled, became conservatism in abeyance? All five of us huddled together for warmth in the cold, bleak light of what was happening to American politics. Say our names, Megan. Say our names. Mike, Jonah, steves. And that the people at Heritage made. like the worst of all of those choices, right,

is that they decided to lean into it. And they decided to lean into it because they thought that that was going to get them power. That was going to keep them closest to all the expectations that many of us had about what our futures were going to look like as part of a movement that had power. And when the movement became toxic, you could either decide to leave it

or you could just decide to lean into it. And the problem is you lean, You're going to tip over into some extremely noxious stuff, which is where a lot of conservative institutions, not just heritage, now find themselves. We're going to take a break, but we'll be back shortly. Using the internet without ExpressVPN is kind of like taking a phone call on a crowded train with the speaker on. Everyone around you can hear more than you'd probably like, and some things are just better kept private. These days, most of what we do is online, streaming, shopping, emailing, banking, and without any online protection, your internet or mobile provider can still see which sites you visit.

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I've used VPNs off and on for several years, and a tool like ExpressVPN is an easy way to take a bit more control over your privacy. Secure your online data today by visiting ExpressVPN.com slash the dispatch. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-V-P-N.com slash the dispatch. To find out how you can get up to four extra months, expressvPN.com slash the dispatch. We're back. You're listening to The Dispatch podcast. Let's jump right in. Well, I want to move to a third topic.

On Tuesday, we learned of the passing of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who I think by sort of consensus at this point is regarded as the most powerful Vice President of American history, certainly a controversial vice president. Jonah, I'll start with you. What do you see when you look back at Dick Cheney's legacy, not just as vice president, but his sort of influence on American politics. Over the 40 years, he operated sort of at the highest levels of U.S. government. What's Dick Cheney's legacy? in terms of his legacy i mean the greatest accomplishment or anything like that i i honestly i don't know i still think the final assessment of the iraq war remains to be seen um i also think that there's um a lot of things that can happen in the national security space that could eventually lead to some revisionism about dick cheney um i will say what for me the way i think about him is he's a reminder not a singular reminder

but probably among the best possible reminders that there was a time in this country where you could have someone who was a serious policy intellectual and he was a serious policy intellectual who was also a politician who was also pretty seriously partisan but also profoundly patriotic

right like these things don't need to be intention. And I know, look, I give Mike Pence a lot of grief over the years. But I think he's in some ways, as a vice president as well, in that tradition more than a lot of people want to allow for. But Cheney was sort of a special case because he was really amazingly smart, accomplished, serious person who was also a partisan. But as JFK once said, you know, parties can sometimes they can ask too much. And he was a man of limiting principles. I guess is a way to put it, is that he believed in a lot of things that can be intention at the at the far end of the distribution of, you know, concerns, but he could

hold them all together in a way that I think was something of, for great admiration. I, we can continue the round, Robin, but like, well, I want to ask you a couple questions when we get a chance, because I've found that a lot of the reporting and discussion of him is in some ways feels a little bit like, you know how you can have relapses with malaria for decades after you have it? There was a little bit of a Bush-era leftism relapse that kind of broke out

in some fevers in parts of the media over the last week. And there was also some really nasty stuff from the MAGAS side as well, which I just think was interesting. But anyway, that's sort of how I think about it. Yeah. Megan, you know, one of the interesting things. So I wrote a biography of Dick Cheney published in 2007, spent a ton of time with him, did a bunch of research on him. And one of the most interesting and surprising things I learned while I was doing that work was that, you know, for somebody who had come to be thought of as Jonas as a partisan because he was a partisan and as a sort of deeply ideological conservative. Cheney kind of didn't come to Washington that way.

He was a Republican by accident. He got a fellowship to do some work at the U.S. Capitol and lucked into, you know, one of the people getting the fellowship wanted to work for a Democrat. So Cheney sort of shrugged his shoulders said he would work for a Republican. He eventually worked in the Nixon White House on the cost of. Living Council on wages and price controls. And the stories he tells about that experience are fascinating because he was working with people like Alan Greenspan, who was on the stand. I mean, all of these Milton Friedman, I think later was a speech writer.

But Cheney talks about being the typist in this room with these mostly free market types who were coming up willy-nilly with what the cost of hamburger meat would be next week. and, you know, we're going to, you know, restrict the, we're going to restrict the cost of popcorn, unpopped popcorn was going to be subject to these price controls, and pop popcorn was not going to be subject. You know, it's totally random. And Cheney told me that moved him pretty dramatically in the direction of free market economics. When you look back on the Bush administration, though, you know, Bush presided over a pretty

significant expansion of government. Cheney was obviously focused more on national security issues than on domestic policy issues. But do you, how do you, when you look back on Dick Cheney's legacy in his time in office, how do you reconcile what was a pretty strongly small government conservative with the time he spent in the Bush administration? I mean, one way to reconcile it is to say that national security has always been different, right? Another is to say that it's always harder to be small government in practice than in theory, right? In theory, I can tell you about all the great things we could do. We could replace Social Security with a series of private savings accounts and so forth.

The voters don't like those things. And that has made it, I mean, I think that that has made it really difficult for Republicans to come up with an agenda that fits the principles. You know, the libertarians can just hang out there and be like, nope, just get rid of Social Security and Medicare. And that's all very well, but that's not going to happen because the voters would freak out. And conservatives who hope to wield power have to make compromises. They always do. I mean, one of my favorite stories from the Bush presidency, actually, was not about Cheney, alas. But it is that his advisors, they knew they had to do the farm bill.

in order to get fast-track authorities so that they could go to Doha and negotiate the next round of WTO, tariff lowering, trade barrier-lowering stuff. That did not work. Sadly, Doha failed, not because of the U.S. It failed because other countries sort of rebelled. And that was the end of the ever-expanding free trade of decades before. But so the farm bill is just larded up with all sorts of protectionist garbage that in no way fit into any kind of conservative theory. But, like, his economic team just says, well, we got to do this. That's the tradeoff.

We got to do this. We get the farm state senators to vote for fast track. And then we go to Doha and we get really serious liberalization. And they all just kind of assumed Bush knew this because, like, the, you know, farm subsidies, so bad. And they go into a meeting. And as they're wrapping up, someone offhandedly jokes about all of the stuff in the farm bill being bad. And Bush looks at me and he's like, what do you mean this isn't a good idea? And like no one had ever gotten around telling the president that this farm bill was full of crap because they just assumed.

And I think that that is, you know, especially for someone who's not a domestic policy guy, right, who ultimately was his heart, I think. You know better than I, but I think his heart was in foreign policy, not domestic. Undoubtedly, yeah. The domestic stuff, there's always going to be trade-offs like that because it's so easy to not pay attention to. The other thing is that with domestic policy, unlike with foreign policy, or I should say, even more than with foreign policy, so many moving parts. So many, like, tiny little things you're doing, and it's hard to keep. track of all of it. And eventually, I think that gets overwhelming and people just kind of stop.

You know, Paul Ryan kept to the faith till the end, but it's really difficult. Well, I mean, your story actually is very illustrative, Megan, because I think that is what Dick Cheney did. I mean, he was certainly an ideological conservative during his time in Congress as Secretary of Defense as vice president. But he was also very pragmatic. and had been from the beginning of his career. And I remember, I think it was the first interview I did with him for the book, was it the vice president's residence in 2004, shortly before the reelect, maybe the summer before the reelect.

And I had a, you know, I was, I had not, I don't think I'd interviewed him one-on-one before. I had a long, long list of questions. I was nervous about how to fit it all in. spent most of the time on the war on terror, what was happening in Iraq, and those issues. But I wanted to turn to domestic policy because I was worried about debt and deficits. And I asked him at one point, sort of, you know, Mr. Vice President, if you and President Bush win a second term, what will you do to sort of rein in the profligate spending that we're seeing continue under your administration, and will you contemplate closing any cabinet agencies? And I remember he looked at me

like I was totally crazy. What are you talking about? Why would you ask that question? And went on to explain that this was not a time, they needed Democrats support on a wide variety of war on terror issues. And this was not a time to antagonize them with sort of radical proposals about dramatically shrinking the size and scope of government. Not that he thought these departments should necessarily exist. And he voted against the creation of the Department of Education. You know, he opposed a lot of what the government was doing. But he wasn't at that moment with what he saw his higher priorities going to take that shot.

Mike, when you look back on the Bush administration and Dick Cheney's role, what do you see as his legacy? I think about Dick Cheney more holistically about his entire career, you know, starting from, you know, a young staffer in Washington to becoming deputy and then and then actual chief of staff to Ford and then his time in Congress and his time as defense secretary and then his time as vice president. And it all looks to me like perhaps Dick Cheney was the last of a breed. maybe there weren't a lot of them to begin with. I think of George H.W. Bush as another of these figures. People who knew and understood because they had been there and worked there and seen so many different aspects of our system of self-government. You know, Dick Cheney was in line to be the Republican leader in the House before he was picked to be the Secretary of

defense, so he understood leadership in the House. There was a moment that was going around after Cheney's death this week that of his 2004 vice presidential debate with John Edwards, the Democratic nominee, and it was a bit of a reminder of him as a politician, as a partisan, as people have said, but it was a great reminder, too, that he had a foot in the Senate as well, because he sort of uncorked this real zinger about being the president of the Senate in his duties as vice president and his having met John Edwards, a United States senator from North Carolina for the first time that evening on the debate stage. It was a great sort of political moment, but just a reminder as well. He saw so much and I think appreciated. I would love to hear,

Steve, you talk a little more about this aspect if you picked up on it. But it, seemed to me from afar that he appreciated these various parts of our system, and it made him a better whatever, it ultimately made him a better vice president, you know, whatever position he was in, because he appreciated that this is a system that requires, you know, compromise, as you just suggested with the story about, well, we can't, we can't lose any Democrats on this national security thing. It requires sort of pragmatism. It requires knowledge of that system, knowledge of how this particular bureaucracy works or how this particular part of the government works. It's something that's really out of vogue now, right? Drain the swamp. And, you know,

Cheney is the swamp. And there are a lot of bad aspects of the swamp and the sort of permanence of the federal government. But I think Dick Cheney represented the the positive side, the good side. And I think it's ultimately what drove him to oppose what Donald Trump is doing. It's sort of antithetical to everything that he was about. It's how I remember it. But I would love to hear you talk a little more about that, Steve. I mean, I think that's right.

The contrast with Donald Trump is so striking. Cheney initially, I think out of partisan instincts, went along with Trump's nomination, gave him a perfunctory, endorsement in 2016 because it's what good Republicans do. And then I think came very quickly to think that that was a bad decision and that Donald Trump would be a horrible president. The contrast between the two, I think, couldn't be any more striking in so many ways. Because, Mike, I mean, as you say, Cheney really was a master of subject matter. We ran a piece this week from Shannon Coffin, who was his lawyers for late in the Bush administration.

vice president counsel laid in the Bush administration. And he said something that I heard, I can't even tell you dozens of times as I was interviewing Cheney's staffers for the book. And that was he's the most impossible person to brief on anything. Because inevitably, you find that you're telling him about some, you know, legislation on energy policy. And he will talk about the debate that he participated in as Gerald Ford's chief of staff. in 1975 when this, you know, new technology was just happening. And he could do that all the time.

And it became difficult for especially younger staffers to inform Cheney about anything. And he took, I think, great pride in his mastery of the subject matter. And, you know, Donald Trump is somebody who thinks that asylum in the immigration context means that foreign countries are emptying their mental institutions. And he thinks trade deficits are foreign countries stealing money from the United States, taking money from the till. He doesn't care about policy. He cares about wins and he cares about being a showman. Trump, you know, does these rallies and it will speak for, for two hours. And, you know, there will be an occasional sort of glancing touch on policy. But it's not at all about policy. It's not why Donald Trump got into politics.

Donald Trump got into politics for the show, and because he found it amusing, and he thought he could be an entertainer, and because he wanted to be admired, adored, Cheney sort of throughout his career, one of the more interesting aspects of his career was that he often took the opportunity not to put himself in the spotlight. He would take the more boring job. It saved his career, perhaps, in a couple of different moments. He had done. good work in the Nixon administration early and was rewarded with a position on the president's reelect campaign and was told he could go actually from the administration into the campaign proper and work for the committee to reelect the president creep and Cheney turned that down in favor of a boring policy position on on wages and prices and two of the people who worked most closely with before he turned down the offer went on to spend time in jail for their role in Watergate and things like that so Cheney made a made a good decision there but he often chose sort of less power and less exposure less of the spotlight when he was named chief of staff under

Gerald Ford he replaced Don Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld had the had sort of cabinet level status as chief of staff. And Cheney, when he accepted the job, turned down cabinet level status and said, I'm a chief of staff. I work on the staff. I should sit in the back row of this room. I should not sit at the table of this room because I'm doing staff duties. And you heard stories like that again and again and again. And I wrote a little piece for the dispatches website and talked about sort of, you know, one of the things that Cheney told a commencement gathering at his high school in Casper, Wyoming in 2006, was do the work in front of you.

And that's what he did. That sort of characterized his career probably more than anything. And when he was giving that advice, he gave a series of advice to the graduates. And what they probably couldn't know, but could perhaps infer, was he was telling them to do all of the things that he had done over his career to have the success that. that he had had. But I think just to wrap up on this, the, you know, one of the things that stands out about Cheney and looking back on his career was just how much time he spent talking about character and how much character mattered to him. It was one of the reasons that

he chose to work with George W. Bush. He thought George W. Bush was a man of good character. It defined his friendship with Donald Rumsfeld, who he stuck by over all of these years, having first worked with Rumsfeld when Rumsfeld was in Congress and then into the Nixon administration. And it mattered a lot to him. And when Cheney put out a video opposing Donald Trump's re-election, really taking after Trump a lot of his arguments and a lot of the views that informed the arguments he made in the ad were about Donald Trump's character. And I think Cheney was, in many respects, just offended that somebody like Trump would be leading the country with such a display of a lack of character.

Anyway, RIP. I talked about this a little bit with Yuval, Levin, on the run in earlier this week, who had to brief, he was one of those young staffers who had to brief Cheney and found it really intimidating. And I, first of all, I just think we all love the image of a 28-year-old intimidated Yuval then. right you've all being intimidated by anyone right i mean yes because you've all is now that person exactly who you start talking to and explaining something and he's like ah yes yeah exactly i remember when i was talking to the president about that but um there's a thing in your book uh you talk about it where about a debate that basically new a younger new kingerich and a younger dick cheney had

in the like late 70s early 80s and um sarah Asger, our colleagues, Harrier often will make the point that you have to look at when a Supreme Court justice was nominated to sort of understand their philosophy because they're put on the bench to deal with certain controversies and issues of that time. And as those issues get resolved, they become kind of disjointed from the future controversies, right? And so Cheney grew up in the universe. This is partly channeling you've all here, but Cheney grew up in a universe that just sort of assumed that Tip O'Neill was going to be the Speaker of the House forever, right? That the Democrats were going to be, that the House of Representatives and really Congress, but truly the House of Representatives, was simply a Democratic Party institution forever. And I think that informed a lot of Cheney's views about giving more power to the executive, because he saw the Democrats hamstringing Republican president. who had the better policies for almost all of his life.

The irony is that the newt back then was right, at least for the context of today, that the House is more important than the executive, that the legislative branch is more important than the executive branch. And what is one of the ironies, I think, of Cheney's tenure is that I said at the beginning that he was a man who had limiting principles,

and I think the overarching limiting principle for him was character. he just had never occurred to him in all those arguments about Congress being too strong that you could have a president of such low character that maybe giving the presidency the power it's supposed to have under the Constitution would be a bad idea and um and so the weird thing is if you look at like Cheney was cute when you know this stuff far better than I do but he was hugely instrumental on the Panama stuff with Noriega um that is the legal that is the legal that is best precedent that the Trump administration has about intervention in in the Caribbean right now with Venezuela is that using the military for a police action, right? That's sort of what

they did. And Cheney, you know, Shannon Coffin, the guy you mentioned earlier was Cheney's lawyer. Dear friend of mine, going back 20 years now, he was part of Cheney's brain on the unitary executive theory. They were very hardcore on unitary executive. Trump is now using unitary executive in ways that, you know, Cheney, never mind Shannon, would never dream a Republican or any president doing. And I just think it's an interesting thing, is that he was making arguments that it's almost like in a novel, is that the arguments that Cheney was making were right in the moment, or certainly very defensible and serious, in the moment that he was in, but it shows you that in sort of in democracies, the times change.

and these emphases on one institution that are really important in one moment, come back to bite you in the ass in another moment. And I think it's one of the more interesting aspects of his legacy. Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating to look back at that. And I wish I'd had the opportunity to ask Cheney today what he thought about his arguments, about a strong executive in the context of the Trump presidency. But I think I'd point to another reason that he was such a proponent of strong executive back in these early days when he was in Congress in the late 70s and early 80s.

And it was, I think, less about the partisan makeup of Congress, although I'm certain that that was a factor. And far more about the fact that in the post-Watergate years, Ford presidency and beyond, you had seen Congress work hard to restrict the ability of the executive to operate, particularly in intelligence matters for reasons that are understandable. but Cheney certainly thought were regrettable. And he thought that what Congress was doing at the time really hamstrung the president in a way that made the president less effective, particularly in moments of potential national emergency. And so he made that argument. The debate with Newt Gingrich, as it happened, was at AEI and took place, I believe,

the day after Dick Cheney was elected to congressional leadership, he went to AEI and made an argument that Congress should have less power. and that it was encroaching on executive power. One of the reasons I thought that was so interesting in the context of Cheney in the Bush administration was because so many people who, you know, in effect, thought history started in 2000 with the beginning of the Bush administration, and I include in that many of the journalists, most of the journalists who covered the Bush administration, thought that what Cheney was doing was an obvious attempt to accumulate more power himself and for George W. Bush, because he,

He was obsessed with power and he wanted to do this. And in fact, he was making this argument for decades and was making it at a time, began making it at a time, when it would have meant obviously less power for Dick Cheney. And it was just one of the ways you made this point in passing earlier, Jonah, one of the ways in which I think he remains one of the most misunderstood public figures of our lifetimes. You know, he, because he didn't enjoy the spotlight, he hated campaigning. He didn't like the spotlight. He would look for opportunities not to give, he didn't give any floor speeches. He didn't give any TV interviews. He operated in the back.

He liked operating in the shadows. At one point, he actually said that. Am I the evil guy who operates in the shadows? Yeah, I am, and I kind of like that. Was he playing a giant harpsichord or something at the time or Oregon? He was, I mean, he didn't always operate that. When he was chief of staff for Ford, Ford asked him to be sort of the main backgrounder for the media. And Cheney explained policies to the media all the time, and Ron Nesson, Ford's press secretary, said to Cheney when the administration ended, Gerald Ford would not have had the good relations he had with the media.

Were it not for you, Dick Cheney and your, you know, management of media relations for the Ford White House, which is, you know, deeply ironic in the bush administration he didn't want to spend time with journalists he didn't think that was part of his job and he thought importantly that if he spent time with journalists uh it would make george w bush trust him less he would begin you begin to read stories about dick cheney feels this way bush feels this way and when i talked to bush about this he said that one of the reasons that he trusted cheney as much as he did and that he gave cheney the power that he did was because Cheney didn't spend time pushing his own agenda in the media. He didn't spend time talking to journalists.

He didn't have political ambitions. He wasn't going to run for president. And the reason that Dick Cheney ended up having so much power was because George W. Bush wanted Dick Cheney to have so much power. But it came at a cost because I think too many journalists, this happened back then, certainly happens today. In the absence of information, fill that vacuum with their own speculation. And they did that about Dick Cheney, and the speculation was largely that he was up to no good. And I think that shaped his legacy. It was one of the reasons that he was, you know, his popularity ratings were low, which was something that he and Bush loved to joke about the entire time they were in office together.

Well, thanks for indulging me on Dick Cheney. I think at a time when the country could use more examples of leaders of character, he was. will be missed on a personal level anyway, certainly by Lynn, his wife, Liz, and Mary, his daughters, but also on a broader level. We could use more men and women of character in our politics and in leadership positions. Last point, I want to get to not worth your time today. There was a court case that unfolded in Washington, D.C. this week. I'm not sure if you followed it or how closely you followed it. But it's the curious case of Sean Dunn.

Sean Dunn was a Department of Justice career official who happened to stop in a subway for some nourishment on August 10s. The sandwich chain, not what Megan and I call the best mode of transportation in New York City. Not the subway in New York City, the sandwich shop. And after he picked up his sub, He saw custom and border patrol officials in the neighborhood, became quite frustrated,

shouting at them, confronted them, and eventually got so exercised that he threw his subway sub at an officer. The Justice Department tried to charge him with felonies. That didn't take the grand jury. So they are going after him with a misdemeanor, and his court case unfolded this week. and it led to some sort of interesting testimony. Greg Lairmore, who was the officer on the receiving end of the throne sub, testified that Dunn became really irritated and started yelling obscenities before throwing, quote, a subway-style sandwich that struck me in the chest.

Leromore testified, it smelled of onions and mustard, which exploded all over my chest. A lawyer for Dunn disputed this claim, showing the officer a photograph of the sandwich on the ground still in its wrapper and asked him, can you tell if it's a turkey sandwich, lettuce, tomatoes? Laramore testified that he couldn't really tell, but he had mustard stains on his uniform and noted from the photo, it looks bent and out of shape. Before I get to my questions to you, let me say that nobody should initiate a physical confrontation with law enforcement officials, even if it's just throwing a sandwich. I do have to point out the irony that's a bit rich that the Trump Justice Department working under a president who pardoned more than 1,500 participants in the January 6th attacks, including people who hit police officers with flagpoles and bludgeon them with fire extinguishers are going after this.

subway attacker but i'm tempted to ask you if you think done is in any way a hero yeah yeah for throwing the sub yeah good um my my actual question to you is whether any of you get mustard on your subs if you get a sub and what your favorite condiment is what is what is the best condiment you can possibly get. I'll start with you, Mike. I do enjoy mustard on a cold cut sandwich, any kind of sub or cold gut. I've, you know, I, there was a moment where I was really, you know, I grown up and I had gotten into Dijon mustard. I've, I've come around back around to. Happens to so many of our young men. I know, I know. But I've actually come back around on yellow mustard, which feels like a childish condiment. But it's actually fantastic on,

like, it's the only thing I put on hamburger. It's the only thing I put on a hot dog besides besides pickle relish. So maybe pickle relish. I love, I love so many condiments. It's, you know, variety is the spice of life. And, but I'm at this moment in time, it's going to be yellow mustard. Megan? For a sub? I have, um, very strong tastes and subs, and it starts with never getting them from Subway. For sure. There goes our sponsorship. Sorry about that, guys. Look, my favorite sub sandwich, my favorite deli sandwich is a roast beef on rye with butter

and salt and pepper, which is if the roast beef is really nice and rare, only if it's rare. If that is brown or gray, not happening. when it's like really nice and red but if I'm going to get a sub it's either a meatball or an Italian and if you're going to get a meatball sub you should definitely not put condiments on it unless the condiment is mozzarella.

Right. And if you're going to get an Italian, it is oregano, mayonnaise, and oil and vinegar because I grew up I grew up in New York but I went to school in Philly. And the thing to do was

Italian hoagie with the mayonnaise and the oil and vinegar. Now that I'm old, I can have this like once every time the comet Cahutec is in the solar system, but it is exceptionally delicious when I do. I agree with that. That is for people who are curious. That is the correct order. It's not really a matter of preference. That is exactly the right order if you're going to get an Italian. And I think the Italian is almost always the thing to get.

far more than a meatball. I mean, the meatball has its charms. I had a meatball sub for dinner last night, or half of one, and it was pretty ace. Before we move on from Philly Hogi's, chips on the Hogi? How do you feel about that? That could be a condiment. I think that's more of an ingredient. Okay.

But I was never a potato chip on sandwich person. I'm not against it, right? I will not, like, kick that sandwich off my plate, but... Or throw it at a cop. Or throw it at a cop. And, like, but I'm kind of a purist, really, on the, you know. Yeah, I would say, we're getting pariously close to the kind of Jesuitical fights about our hot dog sandwiches here.

But I would not say that chips on a sandwich are an ingredient, they're closer, but they're not a condiment either. They're closer to a garnish. But we will have to send. I think it depends on how many chips. I'm agreeing with Jonah way too often in these podcasts. This doesn't happen. That's exactly the right way to look at it.

By the way, in the north of England, they make French fry sandwiches. That's a thing. It's called a chip buddy. Yeah. Yeah, no. And that's, yeah. So why can't we have a real chip sandwich, just chips? Maybe with some condiment to hold it together.

Because condiments, the liquidity would make the, take the one thing that recommends a chip, which is the crunch, right? So it's a real dilemma. I mean, maybe Mayo could, I don't know. Yeah, I feel like Mayo might do it. We need to find a sponsor and really have, do this debate, right? But, you know how, like, look, whether it's trans bathrooms or 10 commitments, you know, there's a certain issues that are symbolically so resident that they cause some people. to think it's the end of civilization and start to catastrophize and apocalypticize and all kinds of stuff one of the closest times i ever came to going into that mode was visiting arthur avenue in the bronx which is really the last real little italy in new york is the one in manhattan is essentially an epcot center kind of thing and um the chinese allow it to still exist um but there's a real little italy or least there was to 10 years ago on Arthur Avenue,

some of the greatest serious Italian subs you can get anywhere in the world. And I go there and what do I see, a subway sandwich franchise on Arthur Avenue. And I don't believe in hate crimes. I don't believe in violence or anything, but I wanted to club every person who left the subway. Like, there was a subway literally next door

to this 90-year-old Italian subplace. And people were going into that one and getting Italian, you know, like getting the with the translucent gray rainbow rainbow prism oil turkey that Subway has. You know, anyway, I think there's a problem, there's a small problem with the question insofar as when you say can mustard be on a subway or on a sub or, you know, first of all we have to get an argument. Is there a difference between a sub and a hoagie and just a very large, you know, like a grinder? Yeah, grinder. it's sort of like asking of course and the answer is of course like if you're doing a ham and swiss kind of deal of some kind I argue that ham requires some kind of mustard but but it's sort of like asking what's the best eating utensil and it depends on what you're eating right like a fork is

great for some pastas but it's terrible for soup and vice versa with the spoon in the knife and whatnot. And so I think having blanket categorical positions about certain condiments can lead you astray. It's a form of Jacobin thinking. So my favorite condiment, you know, I don't use it all that often, certainly not on subs, but I will tell you, I make a fantastic horseradish cream sauce. And when horseradish cream is called for, horse radish cream is like on a steak sandwich is a truly glorious thing. And so that's what I'm going with. I feel like I have to actually intervene for a moment because something has occurred to me, which is that I have not evangelized yet for tartar sauce, which is a wildly underused condiment. People think of it as

just a simple fish sauce. But in fact, it's delicious on a roast beef sandwich. It is delicious in many applications. And you should be going into the back of the fridge, getting out that old bottle of tartar sauce, and seeing what applications could take you to new sandwich heights. Do you use it on things other than roast beef and fish? Well, so I prefer it on French fries. I don't actually eat fish, so I do eat it on fried shrimp, which I do eat. But, yeah, I've put it on a ham sandwich.

It was pretty tasty. Yeah, no. No, that sounds disgusting. Very good with the turkey, the turkey and cheddar. Wow. Because, like, you know, the pickles and vinegar in the sandwich kind of pick up. So basically, you think of it as a souped up mayo. Yeah, it's like, it is basically kind of like, you know, how some people will sub in aoli. Yeah.

For mayo, I will often sub in tartar sauce if I have it. I don't always have it, but when I do. And I will also say picking up on Jonah with a ham and Swiss, I think the real thing, theological discussion we need to have, is the Parisian sandwich, which is a baguette with ham and cheese, is that a sub? I mean, it's like kind of shaped like a sub. I think it is. I think it is. Well, I've got to, I've got to say, I think Jonah is becoming the Newt Gingrich of the Dispatch Podcasts Roundtable crew, because he often starts his answer, particularly in this section, by attacking the moderator, which I find a cheap and easy ploy.

And nobody's here to applaud you, Jonah. You don't get points for this like Newt Gingrich did. I think the question was actually phrased perfectly. I asked first about mustard on subs and then allowed you to go broader to include other condiments, which the first two respondents did without really a problem. You were the only one who had difficulty doing this. The, I have, so I'm very pro condiment of virtually all kinds. I went and looked at my refrigerator before we started recording today.

And I think we are well into double digits in the number of different kinds of condiments we have in the Hayes family refrigerator. They range from sort of standard mayo mustard, several different kinds of mustard. We've got a number of the kinder dipping sauces. I don't know if you know kinder, but they make a bunch of really great sauces, actually, of a number of different varieties. One of them is the creamy horseradish sauce, which Jonah mentioned, better made from scratch.

I do love a good creamy horseradish. Yeah, creamy horseradish sauce was pretty great. There's, of course, Siracha. And Saracha gets you into, a whole other category of condiments, which I think is actually the right answer, at least for me, is sort of any kind of hot sauces.

I'm very pro aoli with hot sauces mixed in, whether it's, you know, like the tapatio Mexican hot sauce mixed with an aoli, or it's syracha, some kind of syracia, a jalapeno sauce, aoli is always... I said this, again, I don't want to get too Jesuitical here, but like, I'm open to the idea that hot sauces are condiments, but at the same time, in the context of a sub, like, a condiment is something that provides a certain sufficiency of liquidity, and that's not how we use hot sauces, right? So you definitely do want to get Jesuitical here. I love the fake protest. I don't want to get, but let me.

But I also say that I will be heartbroken if Megan disagrees with me. I'm not sure about you, Philistines. But by far, the most important ingredient for a really good, particularly an Italian stub, is the quality of the bread. And I think crappy bread ruins. Most of those, I mean, like, good cold cuts are better than bad cold cuts. I agree with that entirely. And particularly for things like roast beef, because the rareness thing is a real old. issue. But, like, the whole reason they're coal cuts is because Italian peasants 500 years ago

needed to figure out a way to store meat through winter. And so they can stand up to a lot. They're pretty sturdy things. If you have bad bread, I just think it's all wasted calories. So I agree. It's a good point. But you're wrong about hot sauces. Hot sauces are absolutely a condiment. Pickle relish is a condiment. They're a wide variety of condiments. Potato chips, not a condiment, but hot sauces are a condiment. They're not only a condiment, they are the best condiment. I wrote one of my first freelance pieces after graduating from journalism school was visiting the Fiery Foods Festival in Reno, Nevada, and covering what was then an industry

in its infancy with just a couple billion dollars in total sales. Now it's obviously taken off. But hot sauces are not only a condiment, but the best condiment. condiment and I rest my case. And the best hot sauce that people have, uh, want to experiment a little bit is something called Valentina, which is, uh, a Mexican hot sauce. They make it both in just typical straight, um, hot sauce variety. And then they've got an extra hot with a black label. And if you go into Hispanic food stores, you can get a big bottle of it for like 250. And I would like it if it were 1050, but the fact that it's 250 does a lot of good, too.

Thanks all for listening. You can weigh in on the hot sauce conversation, if you like. Crystal, crystal hot sauce. Tell me why I'm right and Jonah is wrong on all these things. See you next week. Do you have thoughts about the podcasts we're making here at the dispatch? Now is your chance to tell us. We're running a listener's survey, which you can find at the dispatch.

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to all episodes, exclusive town halls with me and Jonah, and more. Shout out to a few folks who joined as premium members this week, Susan, Rachel, and Patrick. We're glad to have you aboard. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at roundtable at the dispatch.com. We read everything, even the ones from people who like tartar sauce on their roast beef. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in.

And a big thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible, Max Miller, Victoria Holmes, and Noah Hecky. We couldn't do it without you. Thanks for listening. Please join us next week. You know,