The Dispatch Podcast - The Very Bad Midterms to Come for the GOP

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

Steve Hayes is joined by Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, and Michael Reneau to discuss our latest editorial on a post-Trump reality, comments by White House special envoy Steve Witkoff to Vladimir Putin as the U.S. pursues negotiations for an end to the Ukraine war, and finally, a Labor Day edition of Not Worth Your Time.  —Previewing The Dispatch’s editorial on what’s next for the GOP —Addressing the “Burn it all down” crowd —You don’t know what time is it —James Carville's checking the temperature —Let’s talk about followership —The un-American display of Steve Witkoff  —Not Worth Your Time: Employment Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we have a long discussion about the dispatch editorial and the coming post-Trump reality. Then we'll spend a moment on comments by Steve Whitkoff to Vladimir Putin as the U.S. pursues negotiations on an end to the Ukraine war. And finally, not worth your time, Labor Day edition. We talk about jobs that we've had, that we've learned. the most from and jobs that we've had that are the most fun. I'm joined today by my dispatch colleagues Kevin Williams and National Correspondent, Michael Renaud, our executive editor, and Jonah Goldberg, co-founder and editor-in-chief. Let's dive right in. Gentlemen, welcome the midterm elections are November 3rd, 2026, eight weeks from today. Early voting across the country starts soon within a matter of weeks. Last, week on our roundtable discussion at the end of the week, we discussed some of the races we'll be looking at between now and election day. And we'll be doing a lot more of that, of course, over the next

several weeks as we approach November. Today, however, we want to try to imagine what the world looks like on November 4th, the day after those midterm elections and in the days and weeks that follow. So let me offer a caveat that two months is a long time in politics and the conditions today could, of course, change ahead of those elections. But the patterns are pretty clear. The trends are all heading in the same direction. Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House. Historically, the President's party does poorly in the midterms.

This year, President Trump and the GOP are being blamed for high prices in a volatile economy, an unpopular war in Iran. Concerns about government corruption are in the headlines on a near daily basis, and by gallops counting at an all-time high. Nate Silver says the GOP has a, quote, low probability, unquote, of retaining the House of Representatives, and his snapshot of competitive Senate seats based on current polling averages has Democrats leading nine of 11 races, which would mean somewhere in the vicinity of a two-seat Democratic Senate majority leader. New York Times reported over the weekend, quote,

the share of Americans who associate themselves with the Democratic Party has grown significantly over the past year. The shift signals the party's largest advantage since 2008. The data shows Democrats with a 10-point advantage over Republicans. All that to say, I think it's pretty likely Republicans are going to have a very bad 2026 midterm. So bad, it will dramatically accelerate the discussion of Donald Trump as a lame duck president and the dawning of a post-Trump reality.

We at the dispatch are publishing an editorial tomorrow. We're recording this on Monday, Labor Day, and the editorial and this podcast will both be published Tuesday morning. The editorial looks at the coming post-Trump reality and what it means for the country and the conservative movement. So I want to spend the beginning part of our conversation today looking at that post-Trump reality and trying to understand with three gentlemen smarter than I about such matters, what that's likely to mean? Where's the country going? What are the kinds of discussions

and debates we should be having? And if any role can the dispatch play in that? Sorry, Jonah for that very long introduction. Oh, were you talking? I saw you playing your video games on your phone. Kevin, you took a big hand. We won't reveal the deal. deep, dark secrets of how we put together such an editorial. But I think anybody who reads you on a regular basis and anybody who sits down and reads this editorial will recognize that you had a significant role in crafting. You can disown any of the stuff that you don't want to take credit or blame for. But we talked about sort of what this would mean. Can you just lay out for us what the main argument was we made in the editorial and where you think this is going?

You know, before we started recording, we were talking about breakfast steaks, and I really, I was really enjoying that conversation more than thinking about the elections and what's going to happen thereafter. There's a lot of kind of stuff going on right now. The Republicans are likely to get wiped out pretty hard in the midterms. And irrespective of how bad or not bad that is, the Trump era is barring some unforeseeable, well, maybe not. unforeseeable. Unforeseal is not quite the right word, but not currently predicted by most of us development. He will be leaving the scene sometime soon, which means that the Republican Party as a political apparatus, the conservative movement as a kind of tribe and tendency to a lesser extent every day intellectual tradition, will be having an opportunity and necessity of doing some rethinking.

And that's going to have very large consequences for the country because the Republican Party is, of course, one of the two major political parties in the country. And the conservative movement remains the dominant ideological force, I think, in American political life, just if only by default, because its competitor is kind of a generally left-wing kind of view that still remains very much a minority tendency, I think, in a lot of ways. So I think that the question that Republicans are going to be asking themselves the morning after the election, is really going to depend on how bad the whipping turns out to be. And I think both people like me who kind of detest the Republican Party and we'd like to see it just go away as an apparatus and be replaced by something else, possibly a bucket of used tennis balls or something maybe a little more useful than the current Republican Party, but also people who care about the Republican Party in its future, I think should all be

hoping for the same thing, which is just an almighty ass whipping. because that's what it's going to take to get the Republicans to sober up. I write a lot about Texas, and so I think a lot about Texas, and I don't want to make this all about Texas, but I do kind of think Texas maybe plays a key psychological role this time around. If the Republicans actually have screwed things up badly enough, that they lose a Senate race in Texas, and Tala Rico ends up taking that seat,

then maybe that soberes up the Republican Party enough to think that, well, we've made some unpopular decisions. We're doing some things that not only are bad for the country, which, you know, hell with that, who cares really, but also bad for us politically. And that mean we have to go get jobs one of these days or something like that. So I'll be watching that race really closely. But what I really expect to happen for at least a couple of weeks is that you'll have Republicans saying, well, it wasn't that bad.

Here's some silver linings on the cloud. It wasn't as bad as we thought it was going to be. Maybe it was rigged. Maybe it wasn't fair in this sense or that sense. There will be a lot of cope, as the kids were saying a year or two ago. And I don't know what they're saying now, but I don't keep up with what the kids are saying, because I don't care, and I don't think they should be allowed to vote. But there is an opportunity here.

There are actually two opportunities. There's an opportunity on the Republican side. There's an opportunity on the Democratic side. And one of these parties can decide that it wants to act like a party that wants to be a majority party and stop being crazy and get on the right side of some issues that are actually policy-wise on the right side, but also popular, to, in the Republican Party's case, cease being a personality cult for a guy who recently posted 30. seven different AI generated images at three o'clock in the morning of him leading a giant robot army of some kind and having conversations with George Washington and things like that. A guy who's pretty clearly not all there, I think, and was not great when he was all there, in some ways was worse when he was all there and possibly more dangerous. I'm hoping to see the Republican Party

sober up on some issues related to limited government, to the fiscal situation in particular, to rediscovering its legs on national security and international relations, to remember that things like NATO used to matter a whole lot to the right and still should, probably, and generally sober up. On the Democratic Party side, there's actually a similar kind of opportunity of saying, do we want to do over the next 10 years what the Republicans have been doing over the last 10 years and go crazy and embrace a whole bunch of idiotic populist stuff that will make our angryest voters feel good about themselves? Or do we want to say, yes, we're a center-left party.

leave in X, Y, and Z. We're going to be to the left of Republicans on social issues like abortion and things related to that. But we are not going to be the party of the DSA Maoist caucus, the DSA-Lennonist Caucus, the Liberationist Caucus. We're not going to be a party whose center is defined by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and people like that. I don't have a huge amount of hope for them either. And I kind of worry a little bit that the thing the Republicans need, which is an almighty ass whipping will encourage the Democrats to go in the wrong direction to say, okay, the momentum's on our side now. It's time to run hard to the crazy side and be as bananas as we can be. That all being said, I think I had more to say about breakfast steaks and that my

views on those were a little more coherent this morning. And maybe we'll return to that part of the conversation. Breakfast steaks, really good. Ribbis especially. I mean, so mine was a beef tenderloin, but it was good. Not enough fat, but it was good. Let me ask you a question before I turn to Jonah on that. I can imagine some people listening would say this is, you know, an unexpected or strange thing to hear from someone like Kevin Williamson, who's a limited government conservative, however sort of distorted and warped the current Republican Party has become. And I think we can agree that it has become distorted and warped. it's still not as bad if you're a limited government conservative as the DSA-driven Democratic Party. And you're saying you would like to see an ass-wopin for the Republican Party,

but that inevitably means Democrats would be taking power. Why is it that you think it's desirable or maybe necessary for the Republicans to be beaten so badly, even with what you concede in your answer means more power for Democrats who are having their own DSA identity crisis. Yeah, I think that the claim that the Republican Party is better from a limited government point of view is just demonstrably empirically wrong at this point. And the Democrats may have a lot of socialists in the wings saying some crazy stuff, but the Republicans have a socialist president at the moment who has, taking large positions in corporations and trying to steer the economy in a traditionally socialist kind of way, who is seizing the means of production in many cases and who is just absolutely out of control. So I don't think that it actually is the case that the Democrats are in a meaningful way to the left of the Republicans on the major economic issues right now.

And the Republicans certainly are as destructive when it comes to spending debt deficits as they've ever been. Worse than the Democrats have ever been. I think that's just an empirical question that can be answered and measured. I also, you know, I do like to point out when the subject comes out to the Republican Party currently is an organization led by people who tried to overthrow the government of the United States in 2021, which probably ought to matter to everybody more than it seems to. But until they can figure out a way to have some sort of reckoning with that, I will never trust or support any of these people. There are people I like very much who are Republican office holders who want to be Republican office holders who have an R next to their name. And I will not support these people and I hope they all lose. I hope everyone. Every Republican running for office everywhere in the country loses every one of them. And this is a dangerous organization that is both to our national interests and to my views as a conservative. So it hell with them. Kiona, that's pretty close to what we once discussed as the burn it all down approach to the modern Republican Party.

I wonder if you're where Kevin is on that, and number one and number two. in my conversations with, yeah, I'd say Republican-leaning businessmen, small businessmen, folks who have interests in Washington, people who run large banks, they would say, yes, it's certainly true that this Republican Party is not this sort of default capitalist pro-markets Republican Party of the Reagan era or even the Gingrich era. But look, Republicans passed the Tax Cut and Jobs Act. there's been pretty significant reform of regulations in a way that's allowed the markets to flourish. You know, I think most businessmen and women would say better that Donald Trump, well, if you just isolate the discussion on the business environment, better that Donald Trump won for businesses and capital than Kamala Harris. winning in 2024.

Is it the case that Republicans are as sort of socialist or statist as Kevin suggests? So let me just first address the burn it all down thing, where the stated end state that Kevin would like is the same as the burn it all down thing. But Kevin is not making the methodological error that the burn it all down people did. Because the reason why I was vehemently,

on the other side of that argument was the notion that a couple writers at the bulwark and the dispatch and a few other places had the ability to burn it all down in the first place was ridiculous. So why are we debating this? I mean, it's like debating whether Superman could beat the Hulk.

I mean, it might be fun, but to talk about it as if it's like a real live proposition that if we decide, yes, we need to burn it all down, therefore we are going to have some sort of success was ridiculous, right? So that said, I think a couple things. One on the, was Trump better for business than Kamala Harris? I think you can make a very easy short-term case that that's the case. Sure, right?

Though a lot of the stuff that people were afraid Kamala Harris would do, that presupposes also that she would have Congress on her side, right? and that's not proven. So you start going down a long cascade of what-ifs and hypotheticals to make the case. I would argue that long-term, it is worse for American, we're not supposed to use the word capitalism,

worse for the free market that Trump was elected than it would have been if Kamala Harris was elected. The line I always, I had to look it up because I can never quote it accurately, comes from Alexander Hamilton, and I always think about it in the 700 elections we've had with Trump on the ticket,

Hamilton said, if we must have an enemy at the head of government, let it be one whom we can oppose and for whom we are not responsible, who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his foolish and bad measures. The problem with accepting Trump as the head of the Republican Party

is that you have corrupted a large number, Kevin and I can argue about the total number, but at the level of national impression, of branding, right, of institutional reputation, you do have a party that has embraced a level of stateism only imaginable for Democrats. It is now a bipartisan thing. And we can get into all sorts of arguments about whether it's corporatism

or state capitalism or socialism or thisism or thatism or whatever. But the simple fact is, is the President of the United States has taken out equity shares and I think it's 32 companies now, has set up essentially a rival, subsidized oil company to compete with a, the major oil companies in the United States. Right now, the new hotness is for a new entitlement or a rebranding of an old entitlement

or refocusing of an old entitlement for married women who stay at home to raise kids, which in theory, I have some sympathies for the problem that it's trying to address, but it's basically UBI for J.D. Vance's preferred constituency. And it's... Universal basic income, UBI, universal basic income. And part of the thinking behind it

is to basically troll free market conservatives into saying that they're against helping women with little kids and say, see, look, this is how stupid the libertarians are. We want to help you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's pretty clever politics, I think, even though there's very little evidence that it's good policy.

And I want to be clear, if there was evidence that it was good policy, I might be in favor of it, given all the givens, but there isn't. Instead, it's basically just warmed over urbanism. And again and again and again, you can look through the Trump presidency, particularly a second term, and any clear, bright lines about ideological differences between Republicans and Democrats have all been smudged.

Some have been erased. Even on things like, you know, abortion. Donald Trump has ushered in an era where the Republican Party is a pro-choice party. It's less pro-choice than the Democratic Party, but he's moved it in that direction in all sorts of ways. And not just because he put those guys on the Supreme Court and we got rid of Roe v. Wade, which I think was the right decision and a good thing. Most people would say that makes him a pro-life party, the most effective pro-life president in decades because he got rid of Robey Wade.

Well, some people would say that, both pro and con on the issue of abortion. At the same time, he staked out the rhetorical stance that he was against early time limits on abortion, said we just have to leave it up to the states. Now, I'm actually in favor of leaving it up to the state, so I'm willing to grant that. But if you are a sincere pro-lifer, you've watched as the ground beneath your feet has moved towards the pro-choice position, not towards the pro-life position. Like, there are many rooms in the mansion of pro-life. And some people will say, let's just look at the number of abortions.

Have they been reduced or not? That's a perfectly fair metric to look at. But he's also, you know, green-lit cross-state lines for the morning after pill, right? I mean, there's just lots of concrete policy things he's done to make the Republican party. Because he doesn't like the issue of abortion. I don't blame him. He thinks it's bad for Republicans. Okay, that's fine.

And those are all political arguments. All I'm saying is if you look at the big picture, if you think about the long game, what Donald Trump has done is he has forced from within the Republican Party a new consensus that is not in the long-term interests of institutions and ideas that heretofore we've considered to be sort of definitional of conservatism, whether it's on foreign policy and our alliances, whether it's on free market economics, whether it's on the life issue, whether it's on the notion of good character, you know, I mean, like, again, we used to think that politicians should have good character. We've completely defenestrated that idea because

there is no definition of good character that Donald Trump can meet. And so instead, we have redrawn and shrunk the definition and the importance of character to fit the man, rather than hold the man to the standard that we once upheld. And so one of my great frustrations with a lot of of people, including dear friends of mine, is they have internalized a lot of the catastrophization of the nut job right. And they think if we lose this election, they then do this straight line projection that says all will be lost. You know, like the other day I heard Donald Trump talking about how if we lose this election, if we lose the midterms, we'll never have another Republican president again. We'll get two new states in the form of, you know, Puerto Rico and

Washington, D.C. Your daughters will be wearing burkas. Yeah. Your daughters will be in all these kinds of things, right? And like, have some faith in the American system that some of the worst ideas of the DSA left, no matter how much they get incorporated into the Democratic Party, would actually be very difficult to pass in this country, would be very difficult to get across the line at the Supreme Court. Let the system actually work out some of these ideas. Instead, we have this thing where if we lose this election, all is lost.

So therefore we have to vote for Ken Paxton, or therefore we have to vote for Abdul-Sayed if you're a Democrat. That sort of thinking is anti-American in a really fundamental way because the whole system was set up so that there's always another election. Elections are arguments. You judge politicians that you elected by how well they did the job, and if they did it badly, you fire them and put somebody else in. And so the last point on this, I think it's really instructive.

Look at the two senators who are defying their own state. trends in politics. Susan Collins in Maine and John Ossoff in Georgia. John Ossoff is popular in Georgia, particularly in lots of deep red rural places, which may not vote for him, but they're just not going to turn out in big numbers to vote against them, because he's really good at doing constituent services, because he actually does the job. Similarly, Susan Collins is in a very blue state, and she keeps winning elections because she's really good at constituent services, and she does the job. They govern as if they want to be,

first of all, senators for their whole states, not just one party, but they also govern as they would if they were part of a majority party. And that's the message that we should be sending to a lot of people is govern like you want to be part of a majority party,

and maybe you will be. Could I just, before we move on, just add just one little quick observation of exigential despair? Jonah, wait, no, Jonah ended on this note of profound optimism, and now you're just going to take us right back down? Oh, no, if you listen to what Jonah said, it's actually very despair-inducing because he starts off with Hamilton talking about if we must have an enemy. And if I recall Hamilton was talking

about Thomas Jefferson there in that. So, okay, that's maybe some decline from there. And then he says, President Donald Trump should have some faith in the American system. The words President Donald Trump and faith in the American system seem to me to be in tension. Well, if I said that, I misspoke. That's fair. I have no faith in Donald Trump's ability to have faith in the American citizens. But Republicans should. Yeah, voters, people. Well, I mean, you ended by saying that, you know, John Ossuff and Susan Collins have defied electoral trends because they're doing sort of the job. The job that they were elected to do and that they wanted to be in a majority party. And that is about as optimistic as we can be about anything these days. Yeah. Michael, I want to bring you into this conversation. You're our executive editor. run all this stuff in some ways we report to you you shape the way that we think about this stuff you

decide what we're going to publish what we're not going to publish we haven't done many editorials over the years this is i don't know that we've counted this is maybe our seventh total and we're about to enter our we're wrapping up our seventh year in existence so we do these roughly one a year this is obviously very forward-looking argument it's about the day after the election it's about this post-Trump reality that, you know, Joan and I were talking about in 2019, thinking that it was going to come in 2020. Why did you want us to publish an editorial now? And what do you think are the most important parts of the argument that we're making? Yeah, to answer the question about why now, I mean, you guys have already unpacked a lot of that

already in your comments. We are headed toward this midterm election in which everything, all the handwriting on the wall indicates, as you all have said, that Republicans are going to get clobbered and that's going to lead to a lot of questions and conversations changing. And, I mean, frankly, those conversations are starting to happen now,

conversations about what's next. Those are happening now. I mean, we are recording this on Labor Day. More Americans will be paying attention in earnest to the midterm election starting today or starting tomorrow. So Americans generally are going to be asking those questions, but Republicans are going to be asking those questions a lot come election

night and then come the morning after. So the reason we wanted to publish this now is because these conversations are taking place now and we'll begin in earnest now. And again, we're headed toward kind of the waning days of the Trump era. Donald Trump will be a lame duck. We should caveat that. We all remember January 6th. We all remember the BS of the days after the 2020 election. leading up into January 6th, though caveats be what they will. We're heading into the waning days of the Trump era, and he is growing in his unpopularity. More and more Republican voters dislike him,

more and more Americans who just see what's happening to their paychecks, dislike him and dislike his policies. And so I think, Kevin, you used the term opportunity before. This is an opportunity in terms of the timing to start having these conversations and start examining this. So that's the why now question. The other question you asked Steve about why even do this, it's real simple. Neither party, the Democratic Party, another Republican Party, seems to be at all serious about asking these, I mean, the phrase existential crisis or existential problems.

Those phrases get tossed around a lot. But when you look at the fiscal crisis that is coming, that in some ways has already begun, we just cross. $40 trillion in debt, and nobody from either of the two parties seems to want to take that on in a serious way, that is an existential problem that will result in an existential crisis if we don't get serious about that. We make a point in the editorial of talking about best standing in the world, and people are dying, people are living and dying right now, and we just kind of have our hands clasped behind our back, not showing any leadership, sucking up to a certain world, as we might talk about later in the conversation, I suppose.

But these are life and death situations. These are life and death circumstances that we're trying to address. And it just requires adults in the room. It requires people who are not going to listen to our colleague and friend Nick Katagio would say all these chuds. It requires people not to listen to the chuds, not to listen to all these online influencers who are just trying to stir up debate and trying to not even trying to strip debate.

They're trying to generate clicks and they're trying to generate views. So, I mean, we hope at the end of the day the editorial gets read by people who are in Washington, the actual quote-unquote leaders that we're talking about. We also just hope it gets read by people who just need to be reminded that there's an opportunity, there is a time now to actually put in place people who say they care about these things

and who want to approach this like adults and not the pedantic little kids that you see tweeting AI images and AI videos online. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the dispatch podcast. We're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast.

Let's jump in. I am struck in this conversation in putting together the editorial, but also just in day-to-day life. I mean, the contrast you highlight Michael between sort of what we're getting from Washington, what we're getting from the White House on a daily basis and the seriousness of our problems. I mean, it is just like, you know, on the one hand, you see these headlines about crossing the $40 trillion debt threshold. On the other hand, we spent a week discussing and debating Lake America versus Lake Ontario. And this is like what, how does it, how does it even work? How can a country possibly succeed when you've got that?

I want to go back to Jonah, to something that I think you said earlier about sort of being realistic here. I think some people will read this editorial, some people hear this conversation and think, like, you guys are totally. totally out of it. You don't know what time it is. You don't recognize that the kind of limited government conservatism, the advocacy of free markets, the prioritizing character in governance is anachronistic. Like, you guys are arguing for, you know, zombie Reaganism. This is something that's from the past. And if all you have to do is look around to understand that the kinds of arguments you're making and the kinds of people, you're suggesting. ought to, you know, cast serious votes, run for office.

They simply don't exist in numbers that can make any kind of an impact today. How do you respond to that? Well, all right. So there are two forms of the do you know what time it is claims, right? One is a structural argument about the nature of our society that says, you know, it's basically a souped up version of the Patrick DeNine argument that basically liberalism, as in the liberalism of the founding fathers, the constitutional order, the American project, the new birth of freedom that Lincoln talks about in the Gettysburg Address,

that has failed. It is no longer adequate to the material circumstances of society or of the global order, and therefore we should just move on from it, right? The second version of it is, shut up, you loser, the kids don't like this stuff anymore, so we're going to give them what they like, Right. I think both propositions are wrong and stupid, but for different reasons. Yeah. I think the first one, to me, is just materially wrong because whenever you look at the evidence that they try to provide for this case, it just falls flat. This is not to say that there are no problems with our society. You know, I don't like drag queen's story hour. I don't like wokeness. I don't like all sorts of that kind of thing.

but the illiberalism of the left is best responded to with liberalism, not an illiberalism of the right. And Patrick Deneen, just for context, he's a professor of political science at Notre Dame. He's one of the sort of leading post-liberal thinkers in America close to J.D. Vance and other post-liberals. And this is an argument that we should point out, J.D. Vance, you know, thought to be the presumptive heir to Donald Trump's MAGA coalition, embraces really without qualification. I mean, it is, in my view, a sort of fundamentally anti-American argument and worldview at its core. And J.D. Vance, when you accuse him of this or when he responds to this, he engages on these issues, doesn't try to dress it up. He doesn't run away from this. He basically says, yeah, they're right. These things fail. Yeah, I mean, one clarification that Deneen is kind of running away from it at this point. He doesn't want to talk about it anymore.

He wants to talk about his new book about The Odyssey. And he has told people, I think basically, Denine, who I know a little bit personally and kind of like personally, has basically realized he screwed up with this. That's my interpretation. I don't have evidence for it, except for the fact that he doesn't want to talk about it anymore. He doesn't want to peddle it anymore. But there are people who are far dumber than Danine and far more extreme who are still peddling it and pushing it and all the rest, which brings me to the second part of it. Maybe it's because I'm working on a book about all of this stuff. I'm a little deep in the weeds on it. But when you actually start looking at the nationalism of Yorm Hazzoni and the Natt-Com. or the post-liberals and the Michael Knowles and the Benny Johnson's, never mind the sort of, you know, tweety intellectuals who spend their days reading, you know,

pre-Vatican 2 notions about the integral moral, you know, integral order and all this kind of, or writing books in defense of serfdom as a happier, more content life. What comes across pretty quickly is that there are a few serious, sort of monastic, serious intellectuals who believe this stuff. but the people who the popularizers of it, the weaponizers of it, it doesn't matter whether they believe it or not. It is purely an organizational weaponized ideology for power. And so like you go through the speeches of Kevin Roberts,

where he talks about how he's in favor of tariffs because they're good for families and they're good for family formation and he'll be in favor of any policy that helps with the working family and all these kinds of stuff. And then you actually look at the policies and the politicians that he defends. And it turns out it's just all BS rhetoric. And it's the same thing with the NACONs. They talk all this stuff about the inviability of borders

and the importance of the nation state as this sacred and sovereign thing. And then they either go silent or celebratory about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, about the Don Roe doctrine in South America. It is all pretextual BS. And regardless, it seems to me that after, you know, two and a half centuries of just unbelievably remarkable

success with a few highs and lows and a few setbacks to say, well, well, it's run its course. Don't you know what time it is? Let's give up on all of it rather than, you know, like, redouble our efforts. If you actually know what time it is, then the time is to revisit these principles that you've abandoned. Yeah. To relearn the lessons. Yes. About why they were successful and to reapply yourself and recommit yourself to them. But that doesn't get you power. That doesn't, like, Look at the common good constitutionalists, people like Josh Hammer. It is obvious to me that a lot of these people basically embraced these ideas because it was a way to say, man, I got to climb the greasy pole inside the Federalist Society to get to the top. You know, I don't want to do it.

I'd rather be a big fish in a much smaller pond. I'd rather be orange cast and set up this new, you know, state capitalism, socialist, nationalist, whatever the hell they, whatever label they want thing and get a whole. bunch of left-wing money to sort of support the idea that the real conservative position is to have economic policies that look like Elizabeth Warren's. And it's worked for a lot of these people, but it's a way of, it's basically a form of power worship. It's basically no different than a lot of what the DSA types are doing, which is basically saying a lot of young, uninformed people want something new and exciting and cool. We'll give them this, they'll put us in power, and then we'll claim that we're representing these new ideas whose time has come

when none of these friggin ideas are new. Well, I mean, it also, I mean, if you take their rhetoric seriously, it requires you to think hard about what they mean by Make America Great Again. I think the built-in assumption when Trump arrived on the scene was, you know, something closer to the Reagan era, maybe the 1950s or the founding era. If you look at the policies today, you wonder if Make America Great Again hasn't come to represent the great society or the New Deal. I mean, that's what they're arguing. Yeah. We're the 1890s. Or the 1890s. Yes, fair. Kevin, I want to play a clip from James Carville,

Democratic strategist, who's talking, this is one of the things as I've had, I've gone out of my way over the past several months to have conversations primarily with Republicans, rank and file voters, Republican office holders, senators, representatives. I've talked to a number of of state house, state senate members in various states, some of them competitive, some of them battleground states, and ask them about sort of this coming midterm election and what I think is likely to be, you know, however many numbers of seats, Republicans lose, whoever ultimately has control, this is not likely to be a very good day for Republicans. And I ask them to imagine what it's going to be like on November 4th and what this will feel like.

And the interesting thing, and I could be wrong about this, but in most of the responses, even folks who say, look, this is going to be catastrophic from the perspective of a Republican party, from the perspective of a Republican office holder, if you just look at the numbers, they still can't. I say, okay, what changes as a result? Does this diminish Donald Trump's power? Does it get people to rethink their full-throated embrace of MAGA policies, despite the fact that, as we've discussed many times before on this podcast, many of the podcast, many of the

them still are closer to Reaganites than they are to Magaites. And it seems hard to get people to appreciate what a sea change, what a dramatic difference it will be on November 4th, potentially if there's this wipeout. And the person I've heard articulate the change, what it will feel like. The best is James Carvel. So can we play this clip? He was James Carvel on a podcast with former Wall Street Journal columnist Al Hunt. So let's take a lapse and let's imagine what it's going to be like on the Wednesday after the election. All right, he's going to try everything. He's going to try to do that.

And let's say you're a Republican. You hung on, you're from a plus 11 district. Or you're a Republican senator or anything or an opinion maker. And you see how bad the parties be. And you just want to get this behind you and get on with the next election. And he's going to keep dragging you. By the way, people are like, I don't want to refight this matter. We've already decided this.

And he's messy. He's going in with a 30. I don't know. Let's just have been generous. He has a 34% approval now. One of the great Paula games is the date that you have two polls and have him below 30. I don't know. But some people say, well, it can't happen.

It just can't go that low. Other people say so we will dutifully report when we see two polls and have a more 30 approved. But it's going to be so hard to do that. And it's going to be really hard to do that under what the political conditions are going to be in mid-November of 2026. I know what happened on January 6th traumatized people. It traumatized me. We all thought it was going to be consequential. They'll never come back from this.

Lo and behold, they came back. And then he gets the events in Bucklew and he thinks he's divine. And the only people I think more that Trump is more divine than Trump himself are the Democrats. He's going to get the living shit kicked out of him. And it is going to change. everything. It's going to change everything. It's going to change room temperature.

It's going to change just the way people look at, the way people look at the United States. The way to feel about themselves, this fist is coming and is headed right by his jaw. Kevin, is it going to change everything? Is it going to change the room temperature? I feel like I should put on some sunglasses to respond to

cargo here. For those of you who are listening and not watching, he's wearing sunglasses in this. You need somebody walking behind you in the sad thing. And I need a really impressive home bar. Yeah. Apparently.

Yeah. Pretty good looking. That was a serious, serious battery. And not for show. Carville and I have a lot in common. We have the same hairstylist, obviously. We were both in the South. I was at an event with him early in the first Trump administration, actually.

And he brought up that he thought we had a lot in common in that we both belong to political tribes that have lost their minds. Carville is maybe not quite as despairing about the situation of the Democratic Party as I have been about the situation of the Republican Party. That said, I think he's got a little more attachment to the party than I have for the GOPIA party, which I'm not a member of and haven't been a member of for a very, very long time. Yeah, I think he's essentially right on this, and I think he's essentially making the same point that we're making in the editorial,

which is that this is not going to be a moment of complete discontinuity from what came before. I mean, the Republican Party is not just going to have a Paul on the road to Damascus moment and change its ways. after this. And the Democratic Party is not going to just suddenly sober up after this. And even as much of a lame, as lame a duck as he will be, Trump will still be president in the United States of America, which gives you a great big bullhorn and a great big position and makes you a consequential figure, irrespective of how badly you've been politically wounded in the midterm elections. But it is an opportunity for both of them to start to find their way a little bit. And I think

that the Democrats need to hear from people like Carville who are not just going to tell them what they want to hear. You know, they've got their, as Jonah would say, their gibrony problem as well, right? You know, the right has these people who are selling erection pills or whatever it is, doggy vitamins on their influencer sites. And they've got their world of Hassan Pikers and people like that. And they feel the need for whatever reason to stay in good with this constituency. And maybe I should just hand this back up with Jonah here. for a second because I really do think a lot of this is cult of youth politics stuff that well the you know these people who are under 40 or what counts as youth in politics now

under 50 I guess maybe something like that in American politics I like that definition yeah so Michael then he is the representative of youth here and the rest of us are not yeah it's a vegan diet right no steak sandwiches for breakfast no steak sandwiches for breakfast we can go back to talking about breakfast steaks no yeah I think that I I hope that you'll see people on the other side, listen to the Carvilles and the Alsop's and people in their world who are a little more sensible. But I have my doubts that as necessary as I see these dual reckonings to be, that the midterms will be quite as loud a clarion call as they need to be to get everyone to start paying attention. But they may be, not to grow all church hilly and honest here,

but they may be the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning, one of those things. so one can hope, I suppose. Michael, what your sense, I mean, you sort of walked this editorial through our long process, applied the spackle, gave it some good edits. You know the arguments well. What is it where are? What's the point? What is it? What's the case we're making?

So what? So Trump's going to get shellacked. The situation is going to be very different on November 4th looking forward. He will be a lame duck. as Jonah likes to say, at some point either actuarially or constitutionally, the Trump era will come to an end. I guess the question is so, so what? He's going to be so disappointed on the third day when he doesn't. I think, so it's easy in a piece like this to get sort of lofty.

And, I mean, I think we poke fun at ourselves a little bit or pointed out a little bit, that this is not, in the same way that the manifesto, Steve and Jonah that you guys wrote in 2019, in the same way that the manifestos does a call for some big, huge reawakening. This editorial, you know, we didn't write it, edit it, we're not publishing it under any kind of visions of grandeur about the day after the election becoming some kind of great awakening, you know, politically speaking.

Really, it's, I mean, again, we hope elected officials will read it. We hope people who lost elections will read it. We hope people who won elections will read it. But just as much a call to just the everyday, you know, if you're a school teacher or if you are a stay-at-home mom, or if you are a guy running your own insurance agency or whatever, just to be reminded of certain principles that we think are consistent with the American founding and how, again, nobody in either major party really is talking about these things, seems to be calling us back to those things. So reminding readers of that, but also reminding readers that even though it may be hard to imagine somebody on the other side of the political divide operating a good faith and wanting to address these things in an adult way, there are people like that. And there may be more of us out there who are willing to do that and engage in those conversations than we might think. There are certainly

more of us out there than the Hassan Pikers or the Tucker Carlson's or whoever would have us believe. So it's really just a reminder to heed that, but we make a couple points in there to say that we're the ones who elect leaders. We're the ones who push politicians to go this way or that way. And so we all have a responsibility. So I suppose you could say it has some lofty goals or ideals, but trying to couch those in reality. The thing, Kevin, I kind of share your appraisal of everything the day after the election. I mean, I live in a very red part of the country. and I have these conversations a lot with parents on my kids' sports teams and people of my church and family members.

And I really worry, I fear that the negative partisanship, just the inability to see that anybody on the other side, whatever that other side might be, I just, that's what keeps me up at night in terms of these matters, is it's so hard to see through that. It's so hard to see through that negative partisanship. So this editorial, I mean, glory hallelujah, if it does something grandiose on that scale, but it's really just a reminder. It's just an attempt to try to call people to remember that, again, these are very serious problems. These are very serious challenges. It just takes grownups. It just takes grownups to talk through these things and to remember what the founders gave us in the system that they gave us.

I think that one of the points we do make in the editorial also that maybe is something that's more true of the dispatch more broadly, is that we describe ourselves as being a center-right publication. And a lot of us here at the dispatcher people who are known as conservative writers and and activists and such. Not everyone who works at the dispatch is that. But there's essentially two different ways of thinking about conservatism. There's a conservatism that's an ideology that's a set of principles and prejudices, a philosophy, you know, policy views that we've come to over time.

But there's also another sense of conservatism that is a description of reality. You know, what we're trying to do is describe the way the world actually is and deal with the actual facts of the world. And that is the kind of conservatism, I think, that in many ways is central to our voice at the dispatch. And that's also the kind of conservatism that gives us the best operative. to reach out to people who are not already predisposed to agree with us on policy questions or ideological questions or as a matter of, you know, kind of the political heritage of, you know,

from Buckley to Reagan, through Goldwater, that we think of ourselves as being a part of. And if there's an upside to our current, you know, moment of being on the precipice of several different discrete crises that will eventually probably come together as a kind of larger, or more general crisis, it forces people to deal in a more realistic way with reality, with no longer saying, well, that these things are just matters of opinion or matters of point of view or that my tribe likes things this way. And so that's how we're going to go about it. When you are in a national fiscal crisis, when the checks start to bounce, when you cannot get your military goals accomplished in Iran or in Russia and Ukraine, your diplomatic goals, that's reality reasserting itself. And I think

that there are a number of people who maybe are traditionally affiliated with the Democratic Party, who don't see maybe some of the social issues the way we do, who agree with us that the budget needs to be put into something closer to balance, but, you know, favor a more, again, kind of progressive tax approach to it than probably we would. But we can agree on the reality of these problems that some of these things are mathematical matters and arithmetic matters. Some of them are matters of economics and history that we can all kind of generally agree on, even if we disagree about some of the ideological underpinnings of how we look at it. And start from that, which is one of the reasons, of course, why we emphasize reporting in this sort of fact-based approach to things at the dispatch.

It's not just a matter of opinion. We have opinions about stuff. But the opinions that's based on things. And I guess where we've really gone wrong in the last 10 years where the conversation that becomes so difficult is that we've stopped having a disagreement about opinions that are based on things and started disagreeing about the underlying things that they're supposed to be based on. And we're trying to get back to a point where we can agree about the facts on the ground and then have. have a more productive discussion about what to do about them. Yeah. So I agree with all that.

Picking up on something that Michael was saying, like, look, we're an influential publication, but not wildly influential. Yet. Yet. We have impact on people who are in the game to a certain extent, but we actually write for people who are not in the game to a certain extent. And part of the point, I don't know, I don't want to say part of the point of the editorial, part of my point vis-a-vis the editorial,

or part of my thinking on all this is we spent an enormous amount of time in this country, talking about leadership and the lack of it. We don't talk about followership very much. And followership is hugely important. If the market demanded better politicians, we'd have them. Right. Right. But we reward people who give us what we want and what we want to a large extent is garbage. And the problem, as punditry, I agree with what Carville was saying. If Democrats have a huge wave, right? It will change the room temperature. But he also said it'll change everything. Well, changing the room temperature and changing everything are not synonymous concepts, right? The room is still the room if you change the room temperature, right? He's talking about it'll change

a lot of the vibes, and it will, and it should. Whether changes them the right way or not remains to be seen, because as we keep alluding to here, we've now gone through a quarter century of elections. where people overread their mandates after getting elected. They swing for the moon because they think they're going to be in power forever. That invites a backlash. So then they start panicking

about how they have to do all these things to please their base because they're going to lose power and it's the cycle of dysfunction. You know, people say, oh, you shouldn't follow politics like sports. Well, maybe it'd be better if they did a little bit

because I don't care how great the game is on Sunday and how awesome it is to stick it to the other guys and like and cheer and high five and tailgate and all that kind of crap Monday you're going to work right and if you if you realize that about our elections is that Democrats could have a massive night huge night fantastic night right the only mandate they have according to the constitution is to start doing the job but instead they get caught up in all of this Russoian general will horse crap about how oh we have the tides of history on our

side and we have the, you know, we're going to do all these fantastic things. It's like, no, like, figure out how to shave two percent of the debt off in any given year. That's true. I was ranting to Steve about this yesterday. There's this clip of Abdul Syed. And it's incredibly demagogic. It's consistent with a lot of things that he said, but it just bothered me enormously, where he says, you know, I'll put forward a proposal. to provide health care for everybody, or Medicare for a health care program, whatever, and people will say, how are you going to pay for that?

And he's like, my problem is that no one asks the general who wants to start a new war, how are you going to pay for the war? And the thing is, well, first of all, generals actually, well, I'm sure many do, in fact, ask, how are we going to pay for this, right? Because they're grownups.

That's not the job of a general. It's the politicians who send, you know, generals to war. But moreover, it is literally the, job of senators to ask, how are we going to pay for this? It is like, it's not like a peripheral part of the job. It is the central part of the job. It is the constitutional requirement of the job is to figure out how to pay for things. And when he says this crap about how, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's no more sophisticated than the stuff, remember the old, all that crap from the 1980s about I want to I want to live in a world where the Pentagon has to run a bake sale to pay

for its weapons and you know all this kind of stuff it's that kind of thinking it's so utterly completely unsurious and that's that's all I think the gist of the editorial really is is that we don't have a lot of time to be screwing around with these ridiculous arguments about whether or not you know, we should have a monarch or a Red Caesar or whether we should have socialism or whatever. It's just these are not serious things. These are not serious people. They're not serious arguments. They're not addressed to the very real problems that we have.

And until we have politicians who, and voters who want grownups to make, to have, I'm not saying grown up decisions. I'm saying grown up arguments. Serious arguments about the facts, about the data. this problem is going to continue. That's what time it is. No matter how the football game turns out, we're going to work on Monday, says Jonah Goldberg,

who never lived in Philadelphia. Upper West Side elitist. I mean, I think there is some sort of optimism behind the argument that we're trying to make in some ways, because it presupposes that we can at some point get back to the kinds of arguments that you're talking about, Jodah. Like, we've had, you know, 10 years where we really haven't had debates about ideas in a

serious way. And, you know, what Trump has done, I think, is sort of lead by assertion. There are these sort of knee-jerk, often personal whims that he follows. And then the next day, they're policy. And we haven't had the debates about this. And I think, you know, Trump's obviously become come to be seen as the avatar of the Republican Party, but in some ways he's come to be seen as the avatar of capitalism. And that's one of the reasons why we see capitalism polling so poorly.

I mean, I think from people on the left who've been critics of capitalism, or skeptic of capitalism for decades, they look at Trump and they say, see, this is exactly what I told you capitalism was. And for those of us who are eager and enthusiastic free marketeers, we say this is the corruption of capitalism that we warned about. But it's almost like there aren't, nobody wants to have those debates. Nobody wants to have those arguments. So one of the problems with that is that the left-wing crazies and Trump actually mean the

same thing by capitalism. Like they look at the sort of your 19th century railroad tycoons and this, you know, oligarchic model of capitalism and say, that's capitalism and isn't it horrible? And Trump looks at that and says, that's capitalism. And isn't it awesome? Isn't it great? Yeah, for me. But they agree about the facts.

Right, right, right, exactly. But I think there is this moment. Michael, you alluded to it a while back. There's a sort of built-in irony about this political moment that a country that was built on, that imagined constraints on government and freedom for individuals built with that architecture in mind to limit government. now has two major political parties that aren't much interested in limiting government at all. So part of what I'm hoping, I mean, again, we're, I think, sufficiently humble about what we can do to shape this debate, but we'd like to at least make our argument.

What I'm hoping is we can have a return to a discussion about limited government. It's important. I mean, I think, Kevin, your distinction was a good one. One of the things that I've changed the most about how I see politics over the past decade is I had a line. myself overwhelmingly for years with people based on policy preferences and where they are. And then I think as policy preferences with other conservatives and Republicans, they didn't share my policy preferences increasingly over the past decade. But also, they were just bad people. The extent to which I've come to prefer dealing with, supporting in like an electoral way, but I prefer people in a political debate who are good people.

and are willing to have good faith arguments, good faith debates, even if I disagree with them on policy grounds, and I feel like they're making good faith debates, give me that 100 times out of 100 versus somebody who's ostensibly or allegedly on my side, who's a hack and isn't making good faith arguments. And I think that's one of the differences between how we see this and how pure partisans, the partisans who are saying you have to vote for Ken Paxton. Yeah. Because it's so important Republicans keep them shorty. I need to move. us on because I want to touch on one thing quickly before we get to not worth your time, because I don't think we're not going to address this on the late week roundtable, and I think

it needs addressing. There was a moment over the weekend we've had some, I don't know, I'm not even going to call it diplomacy because I think that dignifies it in a way that it doesn't deserve dignity. But Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner went to Moscow and went to Kiev over the weekend to hold conversations with Vladimir Putin and Moldemir Zelensky. theoretically with an eye toward bringing this conflict to an end. But there was a moment that I want to play for you where Steve Whitkoff is sitting down at this table across from Vladimir Putin. This is the same Vladimir Putin who launched this war of aggression, who's responsible for the death of literally hundreds of thousands of innocent Ukrainians, a slaughter that has killed hundreds of

thousands of innocent Russians as well, a butcher. and Steve Wittkoff starts the conversation this way. So, first of all, President Putin, thank you so much for having us. We were sitting outside just now, me, Jared, and Carol, and then Yuri joined us, and we were all talking about when we retire, we'll have all these incredible stories and incredible memories, and yours will be right at the top of it all. the reason they are having this meeting is because of the war that Vladimir Putin launched. And when he refers to Kiro, what Steve Wikoff refers to Kiro, he's referring to Kiro Dmitriov,

who's a top advisor to Putin. And the American representative in a public forum expresses enthusiasm and excitement sitting across the table from Vladimir Putin because they're going to, when they retire, share great memories. Kevin, I will refrain from sharing my thoughts. Can I ask you to respond to what we've just seen? Going to me first. Okay, wow, that's a bold move.

I should try not to get bleeped by our producers here, so I'm going to think about it for just a second. Okay, he's a disgusting sycophant, and I'm embarrassed to be a member of the same species, just to start with. But other than that, think if there's a political point to be made here, it's that, do you know why these bleep-bleeps talk this way? It's because they're used to having to talk this way around Trump, right?

Everything is this, you know, sycophantic, oh, aren't you great, aren't these wonderful times? This is the best of everything sort of thing. And one of these days, we're all going to look back on this and laugh, because we're all basically on the same team. They didn't pick up that mode of speech out of nowhere. They didn't pick up that habit out of nowhere. This is just how life is done in this, you know, court, essentially as it is that developed at the White House. And it is profoundly un-American and embarrassing and distasteful and a whole bunch of other adjectives that I could use. But we'll save the bleeping muscles of our bleeper pressing fingers producers.

Michael. First thing I thought was what Kevin said that Steve Woodcock talks like that to Vladimir Putin because he has to talk like that all the time to his boss. There is another clip that was making. in the rounds from later in the weekend when Kushner and Whitkoff were in Kiev. And I think they were taking questions from reporters. And Jared Kushner was talking about how Donald Trump is a businessman. And when you're negotiating business deals, you have to figure out a way to get the deal structure so that everybody gets something. So you're happy with this deal and you're happy with this deal. And it just dawned on me, the Whitkoff clip that we just played as much of the same

thing. It just dawned on me that that's the cost of just not having moral clarity, of not being an adult. When I came up in journalism, I got taught a lot about objectivity and kind of the associated press style of objectivity. One side says this. One side says that. And sometimes the job of a reporter is just if one side says it's raining and one side says it's not, sometimes the job of reporters just to stick your head out of the window and say, oh, it's raining or oh, it's not. And that just, this just seems like such a simple thing to me of having the moral clarity to say, you know what, sometimes not both sides shouldn't get a win out of this. Yeah.

Jonah. Yeah. So I agree with all that. And, you know, the mother bleeping, bleeping bleepers be damned. No, look, I think this is a really good example of the fundamental problem with so-called foreign policy realism. At the heart of foreign policy realism, and I'm not talking about the stuff from Thucydides, right? I'm talking about the way it's sort of talked about in Trump world and the way it's talked about by a lot of people these days

is that it's basically a warmed over version of Marxism that basically says there is no ideological, ideological, aspirational, ideological, ideational, theological differences between nation states and societies that basically it's all your simple self-interest and you can appeal and motivate nation states purely through a fairly material understanding of what national self-interest is. And this view has been beclowned over and over and over again throughout history,

because it's just simply not true. Like national honor means a lot, notions of religion mean a lot. If Iran was operating purely on the sort of conventional definitions of national self-interest, they would have cried uncle a long time ago. In fact, they wouldn't have been blown up Jewish community centers in South America 50 years ago, or Marine Barrett's in Beirut. Like, they got other things on their mind. They have other priorities. And the Trump people, the Lutniks of the world, they have, not only is it that Lutnik talks to Putin like this because he talks to Trump like this, what we're seeing here is a, not a completely novel, but kind of unprecedented in our lifetimes.

form of foreign policy mirroring where they see everything like a business deal. And so they assume everyone that they're talking to sees things like a business deal. And one of the sort of the false signals that we got about Kushner's great foreign policy chops was that the place where he had real success, and we shouldn't take that away from him, was in the Middle East. Right, for sure. where people do think the way he thinks about everything that way. It is cynical and mercenary and profit motive. And you say, you know, the Emirates will say that one thing in Pumelik, but it's just, you know, cut me a check in private and bachshish and that kind of stuff.

And they actually can make some progress in that world. The idea that Ukraine, you know, like we have all these people who are insisting that they're real nationalists and stuff. Ukraine wants to be an independent free sovereign nation. And the supposed nationalists in and around Trump and the foreign policy intellectuals around Trump and the Yoramazones who talk a big game about how intellectual they are and then actually when push comes to shove, it's all about maintaining coalitional interests. They think that, well, let's just cut a deal here. Like this is what this is what real foreign policy is about. Well, the Ukrainians have been dying because they actually want to be a nation. Like they could have cut a deal in 2014.

They could have got a deal at any single point, but they actually are literally, in the old style, 19th century sense of it, freedom fires because they want a free and independent nation. And I think a lot of them actually do want democracy. There was a lot of corruption, there's a lot of other stuff going on in Ukraine. And the people who float these kinds of arguments

simply cannot fathom that they're actually people who are evil, who have ulterior motives other than pure national self-interest, and there are people who are good who have motives that are other than sort of pure mercenary national self-interest. And so they come to every single problem with the hammer of deal-making, and they think every single problem is a nail. Amen. This is one of the reasons, obviously, for us to publish an editorial, like the one we published tonight, makes very clear in sort of an immediate and urgent way why I can't wait till assholes like Steve Woodcock have, can't,

speak on behalf of the United States and don't embarrass us. So, Steve, Mr. Language Police here, the one he's always giving us grief about it, is the one who actually breaks down. Hey, f*** holes, they can bleep this stuff. You know what, fuck that, Steve. I'm hearing of bleep. They actually, that's the whole point of bleeping. They can bleep this.

Peter's a good mother bleeper. All right. Renaud will not. Renauds. I repressed a lot of stuff there. That's some bullshit. That's bullshit. I know.

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Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. I don't want to end on that note. We are recording this, as I mentioned, on Labor Day, and I thought it would be fun to spend just a moment at the end of this conversation asking you all about what job you've had, and you can understand job as broadly as you choose, that has taught you the most about life.

question number one and then question number two what's the most fun you've ever had on a job either on a daily basis or at a particular moment, a particular incident, a particular day? And for the purpose of this discussion,

we will stipulate that, of course, the correct answer from all of you is working at the dispatch has taught me the most about life and it's the most fun I can ever imagine having. But since we're taking that off the table. What other job have you had that's taught you about life? And that has had either moments of fun or has been fun all along. Michael, I'll start with you. It's the same job for me. And starting out in journalism as a reporter at a small local paper, I mean, it teaches you about life

just because you're encountering people on their best days. You're encountering people on their worst days, the very first assignment I got as a paid journalist was to contact the parents of a volunteer firefighter who was responding to a call and got in a car accident on the way to that call and died. That was my very first assignment as a paid journalist, and it sucked. And not every day was like that in that job, but through moments like that, you see a lot, you see, again, you see people at their worst, you see people at the best, depending on the circumstances. And you, you, you just do what people I really like in certain circumstances. It was the most fun job because I got to do everything. I mean, I had to write up wedding announcements and Boy Scout troops doing this,

that, and the other, and Eagle Scout projects, which are actually inspiring. But then I got to go on ride-alongs covering drug busts and shown up at people's doors to ask them about the murder next door, which is not a good thing. But for a 23-year-old guy who wants to be a reporter and a journalist, it's kind of what it was about and covering these important things. consequential things, but then also riding in a helicopter with cops who are looking for marijuana grows or things like that. It was a ton of fun. I think I made like $18,000 a year. It was my starting salary, so it couldn't be very fun for very long, but it was a ton of fun. And yeah, it was a blast when I got to do that kind of stuff.

Kevin, you have a terrific podcast that covers some of these very same issues. You're welcome to name that as the job you have learned the most about in life. But, What's your, how do you respond to these questions? Well, I do this podcast for the competitive enterprise, too, called How the World Works, where I just talk to people about their jobs, and it is tremendously fun. We get all sorts of different people on there. I've had Jonah on as a guest, in fact, but also some more outside the Beltway types. One of the reasons I wanted to do that podcast is, well, I've always been interested in work

in the role that jobs play in our lives besides just getting paid, which, by the way, my first journalism job paid more than Renault got. It must have been 10 or 12 years at least before for that. So just for inflation, that job sucked. You need to be a better negotiator, my man. But we'll get around it. You know, when I was a youngster and I worked at Burger King, and it actually was a pretty fun job in a lot of ways, because among other things, we were right across the street

from this giant cowboy bar in Lubbock, Texas. And I worked the overnight shift, so the bar would close, you know, at 2 o'clock. And the people who showed up at Burger King after that were usually, they weren't having their best night. or they were having their very best night. No, because if they were having their very best night, they were going elsewhere. They weren't looking to spend 2.30 with me, not where they wanted to be.

But it was a pretty fun job. But also, it taught me a lot about how the world of work actually works in some ways in that, you know, we think of these jobs as being kind of low-status jobs and the people who work there as being essentially, you know, replaceable, commodity labor, but they're really, really not. and fast food restaurants will go to some length to keep people around who are halfway competent and reliable. And if you've been there for six weeks and you haven't, you know, stolen anything, shown up drunk, cause an industrial accident or punched anyone in the face, you're a veteran at that point. You know, you're a pretty valuable employee. So you left it like five weeks?

Right. No, this is the younger, more sensible version of me. So a couple of things I could say about that job that were of interest. One is, and this actually, my first piece of journalism doing the kind of stuff that people know me for actually was a piece I wrote on Labor Day or for Labor Day for National Review about the fact that I've never had minimum wage job and never even been offered minimum wage. A lot of these jobs weren't much more than minimum wage, but they, but they were never actually minimum wage. Burger King didn't do that either. But when I worked for Burger King, among other things, for a while, they were going to build some of those playscape things, you know, like you have outside McDonald's and Burger Kings. and they asked me if I would be interested in helping to build some of those.

And so they clocked me in for my regular shift and then paid me an additional 10 bucks an hour on top of that to go around various restaurants in Lubbock and put together these giant Lincoln log kind of things, build these playscapes. And then they gave me like a coupon book for like a thousand free meals at Burger King or something like that. Amazing. Which I distributed among my friends. That was, you know, I was 15, I guess, or something like that. That was, you know, $10 an hour plus my whatever I was getting $3.85, that's more than Michael was getting paid.

And literally it is. That's like $14 an hour, right? That's $28,000 a year. So that aspect of it was really quite good. And I've had jobs that I liked a lot less. You know, people ask me, well, my worst job ever was telemarketing by a long shot. And I wasn't even marketing. I was just doing research. I was getting people to fill out this survey about car brands. and just soul-killing, terrible, terrible job. But a lot of those kind of, you know, low-level jobs have been. They're not nearly as bad as you expect them to be. You know, I worked overnight shifts at 7-Eleven for a while when I was in high school

and a fairly boring job because, again, there's not much happening at 4 o'clock in the morning, usually on a Thursday night in Lubbock. But when there is, it ain't good. And that can be kind of fun. And I saw a lot of those people later in the police reports when I was working in the Lubbock newspaper. I'm pretty sure that some of the people that I was dealing with then were once we were covering their arrests later. Also, journalism jobs, though, when I was at the mainline Times,

you know, this very fancy, last kind of, you know, old money, polo playing, blue blood communities. We got these just... In Philly, outside of Philly. Yeah, outside of Philadelphia, Lower Marion. And we'd get these just crazy stories from time to time. Like, it turns out that the guy who was the national head of the Warlock's motorcycle gang owned a mansion on the main line,

and he was living in this, you know, kind of quiet suburban place. and he and a couple of his buddies got like real drunk and high one night and decided they were going to kill his wife and they tape her up and they put her in the bathtub and they have a harpoon gun because of course, right? And why wouldn't you have a harpoon gun? And they decided they're going to harpoon her and then cut her up in a little pieces and dump her in the Schuylkill River, which is a time-honored Philadelphia tradition of cutting people up in little pieces and dumping them in the Schuylkill River. But they're bikers and they're high and so they kind of forget to do it and they just pass out. So this lady is running through this, you know, very fancy suburban neighborhood, duct taped up, screaming naked at the top of her lungs other than the duct tape,

that she's about to be harpooned. And people notice in a neighborhood like that when something like that happens. And we got just a lot of stories like that. There were super weird, fun stories that not at all what you're expecting from that kind of neighborhood. So you could have written a couple of pretty good movies based on some of the shenanigans that we got to report there. And the nice thing about those tiny little local papers like that is there's nobody else covering. You know, nobody's doing that except you. Nobody's covering that story?

I would think that would have been like a national date line story, that one. And also that is not what I would have. I think the Philadelphia of Inquired didn't end up curving that story. But they get it after you've already published your story. Yeah. Often. Yeah. Yeah.

But I think it's very interesting. Just so we're clear, the second question here was, what's the most fun you've ever had on a job either on a daily basis or in a moment? I'm going to say this is on a daily basis. and this was just one example. Journalism is the occupation that invented the phrase a good murder, right? And so we're often doing things that are fun for us professionally

that are freaking horrible for the people they're happening to. Fair. Like, you know, I was in Ukraine a couple years ago to write about the war for the dispatch. And for me, that's a fun week. That's that.

Now, it's horrible. It's horrible. And you know it's horrible, and there's mass graves and stuff. I'm not overlooking the horror of what's going on there and what has gone on there. but you know, you're a journalist, you want to go out and kind of do your thing.

It's like, I mean, one of the people I've recently had on how the world works is a guy who was a homicide captain in Las Vegas for a long time. And the jobs are similar in a sense that, you know, cops want to go out there and do their cop thing. And that means something bad is happening for somebody somewhere. Right. And they know that, but you still want to do your job and you think that your job leaves the world better off ideally than it would be otherwise. But, yeah, when you're doing something fun in journalism, it usually, usually means, some horrible stuff is happening to somebody. I was in Waco for the Branch Davidian thing,

bred around a lot of that kind of stuff. And, you know, it's all terrible, terrible stuff, but it's a lot of fun to do the work. I was just watching a 9-11 documentary. This was released, I think, before the 20th anniversary of 9-11. And it was a long interview with a fighter fighter who was seen in footage

in the lobby of the South Tower preparing to go up and try to save people. And he was being interviewed, I don't know, 15, 20 years later. And he was giving actually a remarkably similar answer to the one that you just gave, Kevin, and really struggling to explain it to people. He's like, look, I love going into fires. I love going up and trying to save people from burning buildings.

But most people will think that that's weird, that I love that. But it's why I chose to do what I do. Anyway, very interesting argument. Jonah, what's your best job or what job have you had where you've learned the most about life and what's the most fun you've had in a job? So I had, I don't think I had as many as Kevin, but I had a bunch of grubby, like I was a foot messenger, ran a mail room. I was a mobile food vendor in New York City, did a bunch of that kind of stuff. But I got to say, look, I had a good. 1990s. I'm not going to lie.

Came back from Prague after teaching English, got a lot out of that over there, got my first job at AEI, kind of was sort of my version of grad school, filled in a lot of blanks for me. And then I segued from that while still staying in the sort of AEI orbit to becoming a television producer. And while I love all you guys dearly, you know, except for Steve, you know, my closest friends that I've had since college are the guys that I work with. back then. And we made some poor decisions. Don't get me wrong, but that was part of the fun. We, I got to go to Japan and make TV shows and they were egg-headed, but they were also exciting and

interesting. I went to, you know, the Scripps Ocean Air Africa place in California. I did stuff in New York. I did a lot of stuff in London. I wrote and produced a documentary all on my own on the history and significance of gargoyles. And so long as you never actually watch it, it was pretty good. And I learned a lot from that and it was just a lot of fun. You know, telling attractive women in Washington that you're a think tank dork doesn't get you very far. Saying you're a TV producer, as most of your stuff goes on PBS is just a better conversation starter. And so I just, I had a really great time and worked hard, learned a lot of things. And some of the stories are probably not worth getting into the details on about the fun part, but it was a lot of fun,

both because the people I work with and the things I got to do. And it was also, I think, the job I learned the most from because I realized that as cool and as interesting as it was, once my learning curve leveled off, I decided I didn't want to do it anymore. And this is advice. People listen to the advice episodes of The Remnant. I heard me talk about this a bunch of times.

If you're doing interesting things in your 20s, you're not wasting time. right it is like really really important i mean like if you're home playing video games you're wasting time if you're doing stuff even if it's menial even if it's or it's the peace core or it's or or something in between if it's generating good stories if it's generating good experiences and good relationships it's worthwhile and we have so many people who think the second they get out of college they have to have this tunnel vision sort of thing this is where i need to be in my career and i have to do everything to build my resume towards this single goal and all that kind of stuff.

And I can just say that's true for some people. If you know for a fact you want to be a lawyer, there's a lot of truth to that. You know for a fact you want to be a knee surgeon, there's a lot truth to that. Most of us don't have that. And the great thing about the lesson I learned from that was, I realized I want to be a writer. Like, that's what I wanted to be. I wanted to be, I didn't like the management parts of being a television producer insofar as the final product you didn't have that much ownership of. You had the on-air talent who had a much bigger impact. You had a producer boss who was telling you how to do things.

You had cameramen telling you what was possible and what wasn't. You had editors. You had all these other people. And it could still be fun and exciting for that esprit of core to put it all together. But I was just never going to be really, really good at it. And I never was going to have a feeling of ownership of it that I decided I wanted. And the realization that I wanted to be a writer and have ownership of what ended up on the page was a really important realization to me. And I wouldn't have had it had I not done something else first.

Yeah. And so, like, I don't regret for a minute doing that stuff, and I don't regret it for a minute quitting because it put me on the path that I wanted to be on. I mean, I feel like a lot of those jobs that we had in our earlier years were valuable, maybe in and of themselves. were valuable for the money that you made at the time, more valuable for the lessons that you learned, but are especially valuable because it made it clearer what you didn't want to be doing for the long term. And that was certainly the case with mine.

I mean, in high school, I was a receptionist at the local supercuts, and my job was to sweep the hair on the floor and put it into a big garbage bag. I served often as the sort of the source of experimentation for the hair cutters. Some of those experiments went well. Some of those experiments did not go well. And I walked around with... You still haven't recovered. Goofy haircuts.

Thank you very much. But it was also, you know, it was interesting to be that, you know, I was the first person that people dealt with as they came in the front of the shop. And the extent to which some people were just complete jerks. Like, they looked past you. They didn't care about you. where they demeaned you. I had one guy who walked in.

The first thing I did, in addition to the sweeping, was I stood at the front desk, and I had a little notepad, and I wrote down people's names and who they wanted to get their haircut with. And I had a guy who walked in and said, the first thing, I said, can I get your name? And he said, my name is Ed, E.D.

As if I couldn't spell, Ed. And I thought he was doing it to mess with me, and then he did it the next time he came in, and he did it the next time. he came in and this is just sort of who he was. Did you tell him there's, there's help for ED? I did not tell him there was help for ED, but that would have been a good comeback had I thought of it. So that, I learned a lot from that job. I also had a job where I worked for Milwaukee County doing sort of landscaping, lawn mowing, various sort of odd jobs. And I think maybe one of the most

fun things I've ever done on a job. And this was sort of technically, we just had gotten off the clock but the headquarters of this place where we kept all the riding mowers and all of the things was back in some woods and there was a young woman who was the boss's niece who liked to work the night shifts so she was there alone in the woods and she was a she was super tough girl like you know every other word was an f-bomb she was aggressive and in your face and everything but we all got along with and I was driving around sort of up to no good with a couple of buddies of mine and we ran into a high school friend of ours at a gas station and he had in his back seat a gorilla, a full body full gorilla costume.

It was unbelievably realistic and I saw in the back of his car and I had an idea that I could put on the gorilla costume and go and mess with this young woman whose name was Rina. the garage where we stored this stuff was close enough to the zoo that one could have thought like, oh, maybe this is a grill. Anyway, so I put it on and it was so realistic that, you know, we're driving in the car over to this thing to pull this prank and I would look down occasionally at my own hands and be spooked. Like, oh, oh, oh, that's right. I'm wearing this costume. Anyway, we got there and I climbed on top of the garage and I would hang down. off of the side of the garage and try to catch her attention. We couldn't get her attention, couldn't get her attention.

And finally got her attention, scared the fatigis out of her. She went running out the door and it came after me with a shovel because I think she thought it was a real gorilla. But it was a great prank. It was the talk of the Milwaukee County sort of landscaping set for weeks on end. The one thing I did afterwards that was very, very stupid. was we drove over to the zoo. Milwaukee has one of the most highly regarded zoos in the country,

the Milwaukee County Zoo. And we drove over to the zoo and there was a bus shelter right outside the gates of the zoo and I climbed on top of the bus shelter and acted like you would expect a gorilla to act just so that we could see the reaction of the drivers going by who thought that a real gorilla, had actually escaped from the zoo.

We thought it was hilarious. It did not occur to us that I could have been shot with a tranquilizer gone or something like that. Had we done this for any longer. Grange benefits. It was a great, a great night. In Flannery O'Connor's first novel, Wiseblood, a character has an encounter with somebody dressed in a gorilla suit.

And hearing you describe that, I just never thought that it would be a dude from Wisconsin who would be the closest to meeting a Flannery O'Connor character in my life. But here we are. Who's now a colleague? You know, I used to, I used to work for this vice president who, he affected this gruff corporate demeanor. And every time there would be some project that wasn't going right, he would say, if we can't do this, we ought to be selling hot dogs from a hot dog cart. And now to find out that Jonah Goldberg apparently operated a hot dog cart, which I guess is what mobile food vendor in New York means. I feel like he should have us all over to

his house for hot dogs. Jonah got up and left in the middle of the conversation here, so he's not here. We can talk trash about him. But I want to, I want to see footage. of Jonah Goldberg hot dog man. It'll be pretty great. Somebody's got to have pictures. I'm sure there are. We can make that a project. Let's not tell him,

but let's make that a project. I'll see if I can reach back and get in touch with some of his high school friends. We could put that in the show notes in an upcoming episode. Well, thank you both for this, I think, is actually the longest dispatch podcast we've ever done.

So I appreciate you putting an extra time here on Labor Day. No overtime for you, but much gratitude. And I hope you'll all join us for our next dispatch podcast at the end of the week. Finally, if you want to support what we're doing here, you can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice

to help new listeners find us. Speaking of support, here's a shout-out to a few folks who recently joined as founding lifetime members, Stephanie Crosby, Greg Mattson, and Harold White. We're glad to have you aboard. All, 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 Jonah Goldberg, were hot dog vendors.

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