The Dispatch Podcast - The Year of the Exhausted Majority

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

Sarah, Steve, Jonah, and David (who heroically dragged himself from bed at the crack of the Tennessee dawn) discuss some of the best and worst stories of 2022. What will make the list? The Russian invasion? The Artemis launch? Asteroid nudging? The Ye-Fuentes summit? The resurgence of COVID in China? The unveiling of Donald Trump’s NFT? Come for the review of a wild year, stay for the wild(?) predictions for 2023. Plus: a gut-check update on the Sarah-Steve bet. Show Notes: -The Morning Dispatch on Zelensky’s speech -Asteroid: nudged! -Jonah’s rant on the crazy and insane attempt to retire bad words Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

welcome to the dispatch podcast i'm your host sarah isgar i am joined by it's the fab for today guys it's david french steve hayes jona goldberg for a bit of year in review we weren't even actually supposed to have this podcast but all of us wanted to do it anyway instead of taking the day off i don't know what's wrong with us but here we all are and uh we're going to keep it light we're just going to talk about the year in review and see where it goes i honestly at this moment to have no idea. And we should say, I mean, it is a little bit like the Brady bunch where they,

it's like, we can put the show on right here. I don't have a huge amount of preparation for the year in review. But I was around for this year, so I assume something will come to me. and so we will review your year Jonah let's dive right in this is your life um it's interesting as we think about the year in review because perhaps one of the more consequential things that happened in 2022 happened this week with president zalinski in his first trip uh speaking to U.S. Congress, do you think that warrants top-tier year-in-review status? Was it consequential?

I mean, it does. I think it was a big moment. I think the speech was awfully compelling. But it's sort of the culmination of, what, 10 months of an important story in 2022, and that's the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It's amazing how much has happened. since that invasion and how much in some ways it's faded from our day-to-day news consumption. It was a story that dominated reporting and dominated coverage, certainly in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. But even as Ukraine has done, I think, surprisingly well by any measure, it's been. It's been a big story, I would argue that it's one of the, certainly one of the biggest

stories of the year, but it hasn't dominated American news as it might have given, I think it's, it's importance. Can I divide that also up into the foreign policy, obviously international implications of the news story and what it's highlighted of our domestic politics? I mean, even this week in the, in our U.S. Congress, you saw the divide within the Republican Party or the divide between Republicans and Democrats on foreign policy questions now in a way that 15 years ago in the post-9-11 world would have been very strange. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting.

I was reading, I was actually reading our morning dispatch coverage of the Zelensky speech this morning. And we had sort of at the end of the item that we wrote about the Zelensky speech was a big picture, look at the speech and what's been happening in Russia as well as a mention. of the domestic political angle here. And on the one hand, when I got to that part of the item,

I thought, ah, you know, it's really unfortunate that in a story about something as significant as an unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Zelensky's traveling to the United States to give this momentous address, we have to make reference to Donald Trump Jr.'s stupid-ass tweet about Zelensky. Like, it bothers me.

that that's part of the story, and I will acknowledge my first inclination was to cut it. Like, why do we care about what Donald Trump Jr. is saying about Voldemir Zelensky? Trump Jr. is, you know, sort of a sniveling near-do-well. And Zelensky is a war hero. And I left it in, and I think in retrospect, Price Sinclair, who's the reporter who wrote it up, was not only smart to include it, but it really had to be there. I mean, I do think part of the story is what's happening in the Republican Party and the rise of people like Donald Trump Jr.

And the arguments that they're making, actually, it's not even arguments. You can't even dignify them so much as to say that there are arguments being made about Zelensky and about Russia and Ukraine. It's just sort of taking shots. and, you know, you had 86 of, what, 214 Republicans show up for the speech. Most of them, I think, who showed up applauded or were at least polite. Some of them didn't. Some of them made a show performing as usual, not standing up.

But it is this divide in the Republican Party. And look, I think, and we've talked about it on this podcast before, they're strong, I don't find them persuasive, but there are strong principled non-interventionist arguments to be made. There are good arguments to be made about the lack of transparency on how some of this money is being spent. We're not getting those by and large from the Republicans who oppose this. It's just performative nonsense, and I think that's unfortunately.

It really is part of the story. Well, David, let's leave the Russia-Ukraine story for a moment. year in review, what is the second, let's say, largest international story? Is it China's COVID up and down? Is it Iran? Is it, what is it? Yeah, that's a good question. I think in terms of the actual consequence to human lives, ultimately,

Chinese bungling of COVID is going to be, the bigger story. And, you know, it's so hard to know what's happening there. It's so hard to know how many people have died there already, how many people are sick. But the reports that we're seeing are really bad. And it's not just that, okay, they just went from zero COVID to something approximating letter rip.

It's also that they had done it. For two years, they had shut out, you know, American vaccines. They had shut out a lot of the treatments that we had developed and have decided to go it alone and now the human cost and the human toll that they're paying

is pretty staggering. But a lot of this stuff, both Iran and China, it feels to me like we could be talking in a few months and the stories could either be extremely consequential that are unfolding right now

or the, A blip. Does Iran get its protests under control? Is this been just yet another wave of protests that kinds of flows in the nebs? Or does China get its COVID outbreak under control or its vaccines and treatments effective enough to keep a true crisis from happening? These are all things that are sort of unfolding right now and we don't know. But if I had to guess what's happening in China, it's just in terms of purestance, human cost is going to be the next biggest thing and then the potential fallout from that,

the reaction to that of such bungling on just a colossal scale. I mean, what kind of fallout will there be? So it feels like we're on the front end of these things maybe and don't really know. But if I had to guess, I'm going to say China. Jonah, there were some other international headlines and I'm curious, trend line. Like, forget just this year. I want you to like spread out, give me like a 10-year vision. here. But it was since the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of Donald Trump in the United States

has been mirrored by similar type populist movements internationally. Right now in the United States, we seem to have maybe reached the peak of that. Maybe Donald Trump's popularity is waning. Maybe the overall vibes around nationalism, populism are receding. And I'm curious how we think of that with Italy's election, the, I don't know, would coup attempt in Germany, you know, do we think, or the head of lettuce in London, I mean, in the UK, what do we think is happening internationally on that larger scale? Yeah, and I mean, having just gotten back from Turkey, Turkey's. Oh, Israel? I forgot Israel, by the way. Yeah, that's right. So we talk about this a bunch of times.

There's this pretty well-established finding in social science that says that financial crises in particular that cause major, if not, depressions, then recessions and financial dislocations can have real long-tail populist effects. and I'm still of the belief that we are you mentioned the financial crisis 2007 2008 I still think a lot of the politics of the last decade and plus are that was the as they say in Latin the Fons et origio of much of the

nonsense that we have today and I think it's playing out in different parts of the globe in different ways and there's a social contagion thing that comes from populist movements at the same time picking up on on David's point about China and the question about Iran and all that

I think that I just wanted to comment about this I think this has been a very bad year for authoritarianism it's been a pretty good year for specific authoritarianes but that's a different thing the you know probably the smartest and only interesting thing that Osama bin Laden never said was that little disquisition on the strong horse versus the weak horse and how people are generally gravitate towards successful and strong models versus weak and unsuccessful ones.

And I don't think you can look at the events of the last year and the three major authoritarian regimes of Russia, China, and Iran, or even many of the lesser ones, and say if you don't live there, yeah, that's the kind of country. I want to live in. You know, like China, it's very interesting. China, Xi has gotten himself into this really bad cul-de-sac where he's at the loser's lunch table with his alliance with Putin. And he doesn't really want to be there, but he's got no choice.

And if you look at the sort of alliances of authoritarian regimes out there, it's really just, it's the crappy Hong Kong knockoff of countries. It's not the group that you want to hang out when. It's not the kind of place that you would want your children to grow up in. And I think that the popular protests in China over the COVID restrictions that were in large part, not entirely and maybe not mostly, but significantly inspired by images of people enjoying themselves at the World Cup tells you that there is still a real bourgeois small D Democrat.

desire to live normal lives in a normal country among the vast stretches of the middle class in China. And that is something that the West can work with. And so, yeah, bad things happen in Indonesia. Bad things are happening in lots of places. Putin isn't about to be kicked out of power or anything like that. But if examples of the School of Mankind and he will learn it no other, then I think that the West is looking much better on everything from COVID and economics on down, and that's really important because you have to actually show people sometimes that authoritarian sucks.

You can't just tell them. Last question on that, Steve, the Taliban and the story of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. And David, you're welcome to jump in on this too. But the last piece of major news for 2022 is that universities there will no longer be educating women. I don't think this is shocking to anyone. But it's both disappointing, obviously.

But this is a harbinger that we're just heading back to where we were, that we're going to, I don't know, repeat history, if you will, or at least rhyme it. It's the end of 2022 and you're still trying to get my Taliban piece for the much discussed. It's only been three years. I mean, I'm expecting it to be really great. Never yet written Taliban piece.

I apologize. Yeah, it's a really discouraging bit of news. Again, this week, it seems like a number of these stories that we've been following for the year or for longer than a year culminate in this week with additional bad news. None of this is surprising. Of course, this is what the Taliban was going to do.

This is who the Taliban are. I think it, in retrospect, makes some of the hopeful comments we heard from Zal Khalizad before. the withdrawal, Biden, and then Trump's envoy to the Taliban for these peace negotiations look ever more naive. I mean, I think they were pretty naive at the time, but they read even more naive now. Even some of the comments, the Biden administration didn't go too far in its rhetoric around the withdrawal, sort of holding out hope for a reformed Taliban, but left to the

possibility open in a way that I think also was naive. But no, it's a, look, it's a, tragedy. I mean, you'd seen school enrollment, I think higher education enrollment, if I'm remembering correctly, spiked to something like nine million Afghans and three plus million of those were women. That's quadruply in just a short amount of time. And now it's looking like that's not going to happen. There was a protest yesterday, I believe, in Kabul, where women were rounded up for protesting this, and some of them disappeared. It's a trend. I think it's where Afghanistan is going. We have seen some of the predictions come true about Afghanistan for growing, and it's a place as a safe harbor for al-Qaeda and like-minded jihadists, ISIS,

course on. So I think it's a bad news story. It's a bad development on a human rights level. I think it also could be a very bad development on a security level. All right, David. We're changing course entirely. And I'm coming to you for this question and not Jonah for reasons everyone listening to this will understand.

What was the best moment of the year? Not personally, by the way. I know what your best moment of the year was. You put it on Instagram. Oh, true. What was the best moment of the year? Oh, so you're asking me that question. Yeah.

About specifically. Yeah, I want happiness. And when I want happiness, I come to David French and not Jonah Goldberg. What? Well, the best moment in the year in our family was Nancy French on the main stage of the Alice Tully Theater of the Lincoln Center telling a story for the moth, which is a storytelling group that'll, it's funny when you tell people, when you ask people, do you know what the moth is? people either say no or yes and love it. It's a storytelling group and she told the story of our early relationship and a almost terrible misunderstanding and case of mistaken identity

in where I was briefly confused for David Lee Roth. And so it's a great story. It was a great moment for us. And yes, I did put it on Instagram and because, yeah, it's not every day that you see your wife on the main stage of the Lincoln Center. All right.

So what was the best moment for the country then? The best moment for the country. That's, you know, it's going to be the best moment for the country. I've got two contenders and one of them, I think, is actually going to be far more historically. one is the jury is much more still out on it and the other one is I think much more likely to be relevant and it's going to be actually let's see okay

nope nope I'm definitely not picking yours it's actually going to be the defeat of the Russians outside of Kiev was actually the best moment for us as well that had Zelenskyy left had Ukraine fallen in the 24 to 48 hours that Putin anticipated the world would look, would be a very different and very much darker place right now. And I don't think we've even fully comprehended

and grasped how different and how darker it would be, how much darker it would be, how much it would impact our domestic politics, how much you would impact NATO. The victory that Putin anticipated he was going to have would have been catastrophic. The other thing is, look, every one of the Trump-endorsed MAGA candidates in the big statewide swing state elections

lost every one of them. And it was so clear and so obvious that only publications like the federalists could mistake the signs for what was happening. This was completely clearly a critical mass of Americans, not a majority of Republicans, but a critical mass of Republicans were saying no to all of the, you know, the MAGA craziness out there. And the reason why I'm contingent about it is, well, we're already kind of sort of in a presidential primary

where Donald Trump is still kind of sort of maybe a frontrunner. So all of that sort of taste of victory can turn into ashes soon enough. So I don't know how consequential. But for now, that was a very consequential development. Unfortunately, all of that turns out to be wrong. The best moments for the country is a three-way tie, though again, I think one of them will turn out to be more consequential than the other three.

The Artemis launch from NASA to return astronauts to the moon. The new images we had from the James Webb telescope were incredible. And obviously, the breakthrough we had. in fusion energy obviously I think will be the most impactful not just on our country but on humanity this is you know I think plenty of people have said the way forward on climate change and anything else is going to be through technology not through trying to tell everyone to stop doing what they're doing that was never going to be a sustainable strategy on climate change Paris Accords notwithstanding and this is this is actually the way forward and after

so much time and money and everything else, boy, it is incredibly inspiring when we have major scientific breakthroughs with teams of, you know, human primates paving the way. So congrats to that team. Can I just say, you're right, it's the crack of dawn when we record this in Nashville time. And so my head brain fog.

It's about 10 p.m. 10 a.m. Eastern. A crack of dawn, Nashville. I said Nashville time. Uh-huh. And so Artemis and Fusion, yes, okay, absolutely. I thought, I thought you to do with that. Right, sorry. Wow, Nashville really is the new California.

Steve, best moments? Actually, I was persuaded by the one that David just walked away from. I thought he made a very good argument about the non-fall of Kiev. Oh, I'm still including Kiev, but yeah, and adding Artemis infusion. Certainly, I think that was really an incredible moment and overall the strength of the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian resistance has been pretty amazing. I would say sort of piggybacks on what David argued about the midterms. I think you sort of set that begins earlier and it begins with the hearings of the January 6th committee, which I think were tremendously important for the

country. I think it mattered to have people who worked directly for Donald Trump, who had devoted their careers in many cases, to supporting and strengthening Donald Trump's career, testify either in transcribed interviews, in recorded depositions, or sometimes live in front of the country in these hearings, to tell the country what I think most everybody knew, but was important to hear from them, which was the election was not stolen. Donald Trump knew that the election was not stolen. He knew it very early in the process.

This whole thing was made up for weeks and weeks, culminating in the attacks on January 6th. And most Republicans, I think, came to believe that it was BS. That process, the fact that it came out, I think, sort of painstakingly through those hearings, again, that it was Republicans who were the ones who were offering not their theories, not their speculation, not conspiracies, but facts based on what they witnessed is important to begin

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I wanted rah-rah best for America moments. That's what I thought you were asking for. And I don't have any, but I just was kind of curious if that's what you're looking for. Good clarification, Jonah. Well, no, look, I agree with David that the nature is healing stuff is real about our politics. It's going to be a slow process with lots of fits and starts and, and, and, uh, and backslides and all that kind of stuff. But I will say, and this is, I was holding on to the fusion thing for a bunch of different categories

because I think it's a really, really big deal, but you covered that. Oh, no, we can cover it the whole podcast. I will do an entire podcast about how important this is. More important in the near term. well, in your term is the wrong term. Then like the telescope stuff and all of that is the fact that we had a successful test of an asteroid nudging rocket.

And as someone was... John is looking back to the 1997 set of blockbuster movies. Look, as someone who every now and then checks in on how we're doing on this issue, the chances of a we're getting much better like we're actually looking at more and more sky but when I first started reading and writing about this like 20 years ago we weren't looking for this stuff

and there was a non-trivial chance that a planet destroying asteroid could come and smack into us and the fact of that we are actually making significant progress both in spotting and in nudging. Because you can't, the planet killers, he can't really blow up. And maybe you don't want to

because then you just get a whole bunch of mini planet killers. But if you can just nudge them a little bit, and we successfully nudged an asteroid this year, which is a really, really big deal and deserves its attention. Two things on that.

One, we always have Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck, Billy Bob Thornton, I'm just not that concerned based on the documentary that I've seen on it. Have you ever seen Affleck talk about this, that movie? There's these great clips from the director's cut where they interview him or whatever. And he's like, I still don't understand why

we couldn't train astronauts to drill, but we could train drillers to be astronauts. It's a great movie. It is so amazing. Even our year in review episode gets like hijacked by the sci-fi dork squad. That is not a sci-fi movie. That is not a sci-fi.

Jerry Bruckheimer is not sci-fi. It is peak Michael Bayness. It's so good. You strap a sci-fi nerd into a chair and make him watch that movie. I'm not talking about just that movie. It's now we're off into all of this sci-fi becomes real. That's what you all think is the greatest thing this year.

Fine. Steve, sit it out for another three minutes because Jonah, the thing that I want to hear you talk about, I agree with you that nudging the asteroid is all well and good. But that was like a really small percentage chance all things considered. The space junk crisis that we are heading toward is not a small chance, it is inevitable, and I have not heard great plans for that.

So maybe we now transition into, you know, worst moments. Worst moment, like fusion is more important, but we still have to solve the space junk problem. Yeah, but the space junk wasn't a bad moment. The space junk thing, I think, is a near-term challenge, but long-term, we're going to fix that, right? We're going to come up with some giant robotic hockey goals. goalie that just smacks that stuff

into Earth's gravitational pull and then it blows, it burns up in the atmosphere. And like that's fixable. I don't know, worst moments of the year. I have to think about it for a second. Steve, who's always, his true superpower, is always looking

for the worst case scenario for things. Probably has a long list of worst moments ready to go. His hair was out of place one morning. You can see my hair right now. It's out of place again. The Hayes strategic cheese curd supply was down to 10%. This is the abuse I get. So, Steve? I don't have an obvious, um, obvious worst moment. I do think there have been lots of them, not surprisingly. The problem for me is that I, you know,

you constantly sort of have a proximity problem. So I'm thinking of things that are happening in the last you know, two minds or whatever. But I got to say, I think that the Kanye West Nick Flintes dinner with a former president was pretty bad. Not great. Not great.

And just sort of that, what that, you know, it wasn't by itself. It wasn't an isolation. You have this overall rise in anti-Semitism happening, along with a nationalist movement that is, I think it's waning in terms of its popularity, maybe gross numbers, but it's also increasing in terms of its strength

within decreasing number of Americans, if that makes sense. David, is that making any sense to you? Narrowing but intensifying. Yeah. And so we're, you know, not only are the raw numbers of anti-Semitic, you know, crimes, et cetera, going up, but then you're having these major U.S. figures embracing, cuddling with, footsie, you know, maybe anti-Semitism is great.

And you have that on the right, and it's a different type of anti-Semitism than you have on the left. But, of course, on the left, we've had increasing rising anti-Semitism at universities. And in speech stuff, I mean, you and I have talked on advisory opinions about some of the cases that are coming out of the, that and so when you have both the right and the left in different fashions embracing Jewish discrimination like man we already did that so maybe we should not make it moments but trends okay I mean like I have a moment I have a moment that's also a trend and I would say

the the Yuvaldi school shooting was oh god was I mean has to be if not the low points certainly one of the low points. And, you know, it was horrific for what it was, of course. And then the more you learned about it, it was just compounded day after day after day. And you worry that we're not learning lessons in all the finger pointing in the afternoon. I went to tour up preschool for the brisket recently. And the first thing that they started talking about on that tour was the school's hardening strategies, both pre and post-Eauvaldi. I mean, I am able at least to talk about it now without crying as listeners of this and other podcasts may remember.

But yeah, I mean, that was like, it was too worst a moment of the year for me to even bring up. David? Yeah, as Steve said, it was the Uvalde shooting. And then all of the fallout, you know, it just, it was one of these stories that from the first moments is horrific and you didn't think it could get worse and it just kept getting worse and it still does by the way I mean like there's literally nothing you learn uh as we as the law enforcement response is being explored and investigated there's like nothing that you learn

that makes it any better it's it's one of the most staggering failure law enforcement failures in the history of the United States unfolded. And it's just, it's simply stunning. And then the other thing is, worst moment, if one of the best moments was the defensive Kiv, one of the worst moment, the worst moment, the attack on Ukraine. I mean, this is a humanitarian tragedy.

And we talk about, you know, and we rightly credit Ukraine for incredible courage. and they have demonstrated incredible courage and we rightly credit Ukraine for an incredible military an incredible defense and counteroffensive against the Russian attack.

But when you really dive into what Ukraine has lost, it's staggering. I mean, the amount of civilian deaths, the amount of military deaths, the total demolition of their economy, the refugees both displaced outside of their borders and internally displaced,

it's just a cataclysm and it's a cataclysm that's unfolding right in front of our eyes and the only thing that sort of turns it into a bright spot is that we didn't expect the level of conviction and the level of courage that was demonstrated but it's still horror piled upon horror. Can I give a version of that actually also which is that were, you know, at basically a thousand people this year who have died crossing the border, the southern border. And yet, both sides of our political spectrum use the immigration issue for basically talking points only.

And at the same time, just the amount of human suffering going on, the cartels that are being enriched through their human smuggling operations, the number of repeat crossers. And I'm not laying any blame, because that's the whole problem, is that we want to spend so much more time talking about whose fault it is that we haven't fixed that problem. And I don't think we spend nearly enough time talking about, frankly,

what the problem is aside from, oh, look, we have a record number of people crossing into the country illegally. There's a cost to that as well, more than just a list of grievances. So, yeah, what made me want to change it to trends rather than moments was the border crisis. It was like how many record-breaking days do we have where the border crisis got worse?

All of them. I mean, every single month broke records and not just records from the previous year or previous couple years, like since we've started keeping track. Right, right. Yeah. And but sort of going back to the anti-Semitism thing,

which I'm not going to talk specifically about anti-Semitism, it seems to be if we're looking for like bad trends that were really on display, throughout this year and really throughout those last decade but more to the point for the last year is it's a hard thing to figure out the right term for it but it's basically that the

seems to me that the binding power the binding power of moral dogma is going out the window right there was this there is this society sort of depend on you know I've been writing about this for 20 years people claim that they don't like dogmatic

people that don't like dogma you know you shouldn't be dogmatic don't be open-minded and my typical response to that is screw you because um dogma is actually hugely important uh dogma is this basic concept that says there are certain things that just don't need to be debated don't even need to be questioned we just take them as a given comes from the greek meaning like seems good you know just appears to be the good thing um i'm dogmatically opposed to torture or puppies. I'm dogmatically opposed to pedophilia. We can list, I'm dogmatically opposed to premeditated murder, right? We are all dogmatic about these kinds of things, and it's good that we are.

And that's why it's always so exhausting when people say, oh, you know, they're just asking questions. Let's talk about whether Jews have so much power or whether the Holocaust actually happened, right? We're just asking questions. It's like, yeah, but some questions shouldn't be asked, right? It's like, we shouldn't revisit the question of slavery. You should be dogmatically opposed to slavery and move on from the question. And when you look at our politics today, so much of it is, well, there's no, there's nothing stopping me from being a jackass. There's nothing stopping me from violating the constitution in principle, right? I mean, like whether it's the student loan thing or all the stuff that Trump did.

And it's like it's as if people realize there's no police. Leaseman standing nearby that will enforce proper behavior and proper, you know, discourse. And so you get, and social media, I think, is the thing that accelerates it, where you get everybody just feeling like, why not say this? Why not throw it out there? That idiot fashion company that had toddlers in bondage, right? Because everyone is so addicted to this idea that I. I have to be questioning, I have to be testing norms and testing taboos and going there.

And that's the problem with our culture today and our politics and our culture generally is that everybody wants to be a rebel and a maverick when the most rebellious and maverick-like thing you could do is actually behave like a responsible, decent person who does their job appropriately in and out of office. All right. Let's see what else we have. What did we learn this year, David? What did we learn this year? Man, not enough, not enough would be the short answer.

You know, I'm going to stick to go back to a previous theme about the maybe some of the positive thawing in American politics is that one of the things that we might have learned is that that exhausted majority still votes. And I think it was learned a little bit on the left and the right, to be frank. We had some pretty important developments earlier in the year with the San Francisco school board recalls. With the recall of the DA in San Francisco, we had, you know, where you had, no one could say this was a conservative backlash in San Francisco, right? You could get all of the conservatives in San Francisco and you wouldn't fill a phone booth. This was progressives backlashing against hyper-progressives and trying to restore some sanity to their city politics.

We had backlashes in Georgia, in Arizona, in state after state, where people had no business running for public office. lost races that, frankly, was going to be hard to lose, and they lost anyway. I mean, the Kerry Lake loss was really particularly interesting to me because her opponent barely campaigned. The election was a referendum on Kerry Lake, and she lost a race that, you know, four years earlier, Doug Ducey had won in a Democratic wave year, by about, what, 14 or 15 points? And so this was, I think,

one of the things that we learned was that that exhausted majority of Americans that have been found in research to be people on both sides of the political spectrum who are kind of fed up, but don't really participate in the day-to-day, toxic give and take of American politics, they still show up at the voting booth. And while politicians may orient their day-to-day

to the extremely toxic voices they hear from, that's a mistake. that's a mistake over the long term and that exhausted majority might just be more, get more active yet. So that's something that I think we've learned. David, always the optimist. I want to give the flip side of that coin of what we learned that I'm concerned about and that I think we'll have potentially medium term consequences in our politics, which is that the Chuck Schumer Super PAC strategy of pumping money into your opponent's primaries in order to get the worst opponent so that your team can win was incredibly effective.

So of the, you know, he spent about $53 million, six of those candidates moved on to the general election and his record was 100%. All of those candidates were then defeated in the general election by Democrats. And so while on the one hand, plenty of Democrats across the ideological spectrum, criticize this strategy. You know, you had the January 6th committee and every national Democrat talking about democracy being on the ballot in 2022 at the same time that you had Chuck Schumer's Super PAC explicitly funding the very people they said were the biggest threats. The argument being they would be easier to beat, but it was a hell of a gamble.

and to have that work, I think is pretty damaging. And obviously, we knew it had worked before. Claire McCaskill did this with Todd Aiken back in the day. She spent more money to get Todd Aiken as her opponent in the general election than Todd Aiken spent on Todd Aiken. Interestingly, Chuck Schumer spent more money in several of these races than the candidate themselves had to spend as well. so it's not that it was the first time it was tried but to do it at scale to do it nationally

and to do it in so many races I fear that the lesson learned is that this is effective it's relatively easy there's money to do it and there was no voter backlash because how could there be even if you don't like the tactic your option is to vote for the crazy person And so what you could end up have happening is that both parties spend now hundreds of millions of dollars in the other parties primary so that general election voters are left with not the lesser of two evils, but the lesser of two totally unacceptable options. And, you know, it's not the Republican primary voters. Don't play a role in that. They obviously did. But it's important to realize Chuck Schumer wasn't running ads.

hey, this person denies that the 2020 election was fair. Instead, what the ads say is this person's very, very conservative. And so I think it's important to realize that the information that Republican primary voters were getting wasn't the information that the rest of the voters were going to get during the general election when they did pour money into saying what their actual record is. So that's a lesson that I think we learned that was bad. Steve? Yeah, I mean, so jumping on that, I think, in terms of media coverage of politics, I think politicians have learned that they really don't need the media in the way that they did running, you know, statewide campaigns 10 years ago, certainly not 20 years ago.

And the result is sort of the further irrelevance of gatekeepers. So you have all of these elected officials or would-be-elected officials building their own brands, launching their own media products, reaching voters directly without interference from journalists. In some respects, as somebody who's railed on media ideological media bias, left-wing media bias for 30 years, you'd think that this might be a good thing. I'm afraid it's not that much of a good thing. Because so many of these politicians are not subject to having their ideas tested, having their claims measured, challenging the accuracy of the things that they're saying in a way that I think is really distorting our political debates. If you look at the audience for podcasts that are hosted by politicians these days, where, again, they can say whatever they want. there's no fear or concern on their part that they're going to be challenged on these podcasts. It's just this platform. And I think the net result, at least in the short term,

has been that our discussions and debates are the worse off for it because there's so little corrective. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca. slash Y-Anex.

So it's interesting to bring this up because just this morning, I had this weird epiphany. So maybe this is a thing I learned this year. I was watching Morning Joe for reasons having to do with original sin. And they had some Democratic congressman. I can't remember his name. He was fine. and whatever, talking about Zelensky's speech. And I just sort of asked us

why are they having any Republican congressman come on this thing. And then I realized something that was probably obvious to Sarah while back, but like, you know, we've all heard from politicians in private about how they, you know, of course they don't like Trump,

but they don't like to jump to the mainstream media's, you know, call every single time, you know, Chuck Todd says, will you denounce what Trump said yesterday? They don't want to have to do it every single time, right? You know, and that kind of thing. And it just dawned on me that this problem, this small thing probably has a big thing to do with the polarization of media, where if you're a moderate Republican, and you'd love to come on and talk about Postal Service Reform or Zelensky's speech or a thousand other things,

but you're not going to go on MSNBC or CNN if you have if you know the first question is going to be Donald Trump tweeted last night like an escape monkey from a cocaine study and said X and so you just don't go on right and so the that's sort of big sort that we've seen in media for a long time now was actually really accelerated I think

by this dynamic by the by the mainstream press asking, I think, legitimate, but still kind of gotcha questions, you know, like, you know, why won't you, you denounce this when you said it six months ago, but you didn't denounce it this time as your opinion changed, right? It's just like, it's not worth it because it's not satisfying to the audience that is watching and this clip is going to piss off the audience that isn't watching, so you just don't go on. And so what you get are networks that have, that catered to one party or the other party, and it confirms this work.

view that the audiences for both have that the other party is exactly as bad and as unreasonable as we think is they won't even come on. And I think that like one of the things, one of the signs that nature has actually healed is when you start getting, because there is always used to be Republican Democratic politicians who were, I think this is the technical term in the comms world, Sarah can correct me, TV whores. And they would just go on TV. They would take any invitation to be on TV. And they're fewer of them because they don't, because both networks, both sides have this institutional incentive to ask these sort of Wolfsbane silver bullet, you know, poison question that their own side wants to hear. That's just not

worth addressing. And so it sort of, it's a centrifugal force in this, in this larger process. Anyway, it just was in my head this morning. That reminds me of a, there was this joke that we'd tell in law school that the most dangerous place on campus was anywhere between Alan Dershowitz and a television camera. Right. There have been some politicians like that.

Well, and the same sort of theory really applies to who's running for office in the first place, of course. If you're a person who wants to talk about your serious solutions for our serious problems, why would you throw your hat in the ring at this point when any person would tell you like, well, you're not going to get to talk about those things. That's not what a campaign looks like right now. And that's not who's getting elected right now. Do you want to, you know, go on social media and tape a video in which you, you know, stoke outrage about whatever thing that just happened in the news and blame the other side? Like that would, that's who should run for office. And indeed, that's exactly who we have running for office. I have a much longer rant on that. but I'm going to save it.

All right, let's do a little wrap here. Do you need a beat? Yeah, yeah. Oh, you've been a different kind of rap. I'm sorry with it. Because Steve can give you a beat. I hate predictions, but if anyone has predictions for 2023, I'm all ears. Any takers?

I will, well, it's not for 2023, but it's, I officially think that neither Desantis nor Trump will be the nominee. for the Republican. I like where your head's at, Jonah. Is a prediction. Wow. I predict that a big conversation for next year, related to that, Jonah, will be what the media learned covering Trump,

both in 2015, 2016, and then through his presidency, but almost to a lesser extent through the presidency, really campaign-focused coverage and how different the 2024 cycle will look from a media and coverage perspective, across the ideological spectrum. Steve? I agree with that.

In part because of what I mentioned earlier, I think the dynamic is just going to be so different. You're going to just have campaigns that don't choose to participate in a lot of the old media campaign conventions that we've all grown accustomed to. I just had one, and I totally forgot. I predict that my memory will not get better in 2023. That's amazing.

David, you go first. I'm going to, I used to be skeptical about this. I'm not as skeptical. I think Donald Trump's going to be indicted. And I think that it will not rally Republicans around him. That we actually learned something from the Mar-a-Lago raid, that the burst in indignation surrounding the Mar-a-Lago raid was really pretty brief overall.

And when the details kept coming out, it actually made Trump look worse and not the FBI, unlike some other scandals. But this, I predict, I think Trump will be indicted in 2023. And that will be the end of him as a political frontrunner. What will that do to the value of Steve's Trump NFT trading cards? I'm just going to do them with you instead in a Superman outfit. No, I remember mine. I was actually just going to re-up an earlier prediction related to our bet, Sarah. I don't think Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee in 2024.

I don't think Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee in 2024. Even though I do, I think it's more likely that he's going to run now than I did when I originally said that. But I don't think he'll be, either one of them will be the nominee. We'll see a big scrum on both sides. So I still am committed to our bet because I'm a woman of my word. I will agree with you that it is certainly trending your direction. But if the Republican primaries were happening this January, and they're not, and I understand that. But if, you know, Iowa was in just a few weeks, Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee.

They're trending your way, but they're not there yet. So, all right. Do you want to, do you want to go, should we quadruple now? I mean, we doubled right now. I got two stakes coming my way. No, no, because I'm agreeing. You've got two stakes. I know, but it's trending your way.

I'm nothing but pleased with that. But no, so I don't want to quadruple down at all. Although we might want to, we could quadruple on the Biden side. We haven't done the Democratic side. I think you're wrong on that. Okay. I'll do that. We're going to end up just going out and getting like three stakes each.

Yeah, I mean, Stephen and are going to be dining together for months, one way or the other. So if you win on Biden and lose on Trump, does that cancel out or do you have to go on separate? Okay. Yeah. Yeah, we just go to that. I hope that's not a Dutch slur, Jonah. I need a ruling on that. You're not supposed to say it anymore.

No, you're not. Yeah, but I mean, like, I would say it. There's no problem saying it, but there are a bunch of, like, usage guides from, like, newspapers and stuff saying that it's, uh, Oh, that it's actually a negative. It's offensive. So it's actually about the people. I'm sorry.

How in the world is that offensive? Well, that's the thing. It's like, I don't think it is. I keep asking Dutch people every now and, you know, when I run into Dutch people, I pick them up after running into them and then I ask, well, they're dusting off. I ask, you know, are you offended if someone says, you know, are you offended if someone says let's go Dutch and they're like no because it's it's a they may not know the expression but like it's just a dumb invented thing to make it seem like any ethnic stereotyping is is beyond the pale

but it's supposed to it's supposed to suggest that you know Dutch people are frugal so so funny beyond the pale think about how think about how really pale people feel about that I mean that's right seriously I wouldn't say that gosh perhaps growing up in Texas I have zero understanding of any stereotypes about Dutch people. I have no picture of a Dutch person in my mind. Nothing. Me neither. Didn't reach Kentucky either.

Although I do remember the Nigel Powers played by what Michael Kane and Austin Powers gold member. There are two kinds of people that I hate in this world. Those who are intolerant of others' cultures and the Dutch. That's like my dad's favorite quote from Russia was if you see a Bulgarian in the street beat him

he will know why it's just so odd I wasn't even sure if it was about Dutch people could have been like Reagan's you know nickname was Dutch maybe it was about I don't know nicknames or something but also I wasn't even sure that it was about frugality

because one could also imagine it being about fairness equity sure yeah right is to be really fair. So I didn't know if it was negative or positive or about Dutch people. But I will consider that, Jonah, before I say it next time. I don't know which way it's going to cut, though, to be honest. You just had that great newsletter on speech and banning words that are, not banning, pooh-poohing phrases and words that are silly. And I'm going to take some of that to heart.

But again, not sure which way it's going to cut. All right. Very last thing, lightning round. favorite holiday tradition, it can be an item of food, it can be the thing that's always in your stocking or the dreidel you spin. But David, we're starting with you. Yeah, what's your favorite dreidel to spin? Yeah, that's a really good question. Christmas Eve service is always awesome. Christmas Eve, Candleite, Christmas Eve, Candleite service. and then follow the spiritual with the comedic because we usually go to Christmas Eve candlelight service and then go to or go back home and watch elf

by Will Ferrell, which just improves with age. So, yeah, so we go to the spiritual route and then we go the laugh route and it's a great tradition. Jonah? I'm going to look out for my own best interests here and say my wife's cooking. She doesn't listen to this podcast. No, but she'll get word.

Word will go out. She, like my mom is a big believer in the big traditional spreads, Christmas spread kind of thing. And she does things like Yorkshire pudding and amazing popovers and various baked goods we're going to do with standing rib bros and I like to eat.

I know that defies most of the the stereotypes about me but so I would say the food I like food, Christmas food, holiday food, that's my favorite part of it other than getting all the cool stuff. I'm going to revive a Christmas tradition that we used to do growing up in Wisconsin

and I only know about it because a friend sent me a note that there has been this health warning sent out to Wisconsinites about doing this tradition again, and I didn't realize it was such a Wisconsin tradition, and that is steak tar-tar. Big thing at all of our holiday gatherings in Wisconsin, all the aunts and uncles. I was fortunate enough to live in close proximity to my mom's siblings, and so all of the cousins got together and we would just wolf down huge plates of steak tartar

and I haven't done it for a long time. I have a rule that if I go to a restaurant that serves steak tartar, I have to order it just to encourage them to continue serving steak tartar but I had some the other night and it just had forgotten how great it is. So I'm going to reinstate that tradition

and bring it to my own kids. We watch a Christmas story at our house every year I love doing that we do a gift on on Christmas Eve after church every year I love doing that and then recently we started going out

I don't even know how this one happened we go to Magianos for a late Christmas Eve dinner with three groups of friends that you know some years you see them a lot some years you see them infrequently

but you always see them then and it's a new tradition that I love. So excited about that. Well, this year, we're excited to kind of start our Christmas traditions because Nate is two and a half years old. It's going to be the first Christmas. He understands any of this stuff. We don't really know how much, but he does keep saying that Santa is coming. Santa comes at night. Santa wears a red hat. He doesn't quite understand the reindeer yet. He calls Rudolph Red nose, but we'll see. So I'm excited for whatever traditions might pop up this year. And with that, thank you all for all of your support during the year, for listening.

We hope that you had an incredible and wonderful 2022, but we hope 2023 is even better. And that's when we're going to talk to you again. So until then, enjoy your holidays. Enjoy time with family, time just reading a great book curled up somewhere, whatever it looks like for you and yours. and 2023. We'll see you then. The real, the bad news of 2022 was canceling Man of Steel 2 and the end of Henry Cavill is Superman. And then the news that Dwayne the Rock Johnson is not coming back as Black Adam anytime soon.

Pretty devastating for a certain kind of nerd in the United States of America. I hope you make it through. I really do. I'm pulling for you. It's an open question. It's an open question. Oh, excellent.

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