The Dispatch Podcast - Trump Indicted

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

Sarah, Jonah, and Kevin hit the recording studio when news of Trump's indictment broke Thursday evening. Join the three as they react to the hush money case and how the media covered the lead-up to the charges. Plus: -Covenant School tragedy -What the French protests portend for the U.S. -ChatGPT is coming for our jobs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When I found out my friend got a great deal on a wool coat from winners, I started wondering. Is every fabulous item I see from winners? Like that woman over there with the designer jeans. Are those from winners? Ooh, are those beautiful gold earrings? Did she pay full price? Or that leather tote?

Or that cashmere sweater? Or those knee-high boots? That dress, that jacket, those shoes. Is anyone paying full price for anything? Stop wondering. Start winning. Winners, find fabulous for less. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgird, joined by Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson. And, uh, okay, wow. So there's been some breaking news. We're going to start with a short little discussion on the Trump indictment. We'll go from there to talk more about the shooting in Nashville and what, if anything there is to say about gun control in the United States moving forward. And then we'll talk a little bit about France entitlement reform before we get to not worth your

time? Question mark? Let's dive right in. So in some ways there's not a whole lot to say Donald Trump becomes the first United States president, former president, indicted of a felony. But at the same time, the indictment's under seal. And so we, we don't know a whole lot more than we knew several hours ago in terms of what exactly he's being indicted for. We're making the same assumptions that we were making before that this is the felony aggravated falsification of business records under New York state law, which requires sort of this federal crime tie-in, and that it's related to the hush money payments that he made to Stormy Daniels. But I don't know, Kevin, are you feeling any differently than you were?

Yeah, in some ways, I like the idea of any ex-president being indicted in some ways, simply because we have this weird emerging, you know, presidential cult thing where we treat them as though they're, you know, this sort of special class of human beings because they used to hold a particular office for the rest of their life. So I like the idea that, you know, you're not the president anymore. You're just Joe Blow. You're subject to investigation and the law like anybody else is. And that being said, if it is the kind of creative and weak and troubled indictment that we're all expecting,

at least what I've been expecting from listening to you and David and other people talk about it, then that's going to end up, I think, being a really, really ugly mess. You know, I think that, particularly for someone like Donald Trump, a character who has already demonstrated his ability to turn people out to commit acts of political violence and social disturbances and that sort of thing. If you're going to indict him, obviously you want it to be a really, really tight and persuasive one rather than one that relies on very novel legal theory and that may be perceived as weak or hashed together or something like that. Although I suspect that if the other indictments come down as expected, you know, in toto, the effect

will be persuasive and credible, don't you think? I'm not sure because this one went first. And I feel like, you know, as people talk about, you know, I totally take your point, Kevin, for instance, on the sort of deification of former presidents. I'm not for it. You know, in fact, we had a conversation in the comments section a few weeks ago about whether even former should still be called

by their titles, right? you know, just because you were a senator, why are we still calling you senator and president? You know, these aren't titles of nobility. But I don't think they should be treated worse than normal people. And I'm not the first person to point this out. But if Donald Trump weren't Donald Trump, it's very hard to see this indictment moving forward. Both, it's seven years old. We're not aware of any new evidence that's been uncovered. And there's such shaky legal grounds the, you know, the reason to pursue this is because it's Donald Trump. So this whole, like, presidents aren't above the law thing.

That whole statement's really bothering me that I hear from, you know, political folks. Because surely they're also not below the law either. We shouldn't punish people for running for office. I mean, God knows it's punishment enough. Jonah, Kevin raises a point, though, politically, you know, now that it's actually happened, Donald Trump has put out a statement. political effects yeah let me just let me touch on one thing you said first

and then I'll do political effects I and you clipped out a little bit for me so I may have missed some really granular nuance that preempted my point here but I agree I got a lot of Trump trouble because the Trump war room retweeted a clip of me on CNN saying

if if this was John Smith this would never be charged and I still stand by that I just don't like being used by the Trump war room but that said Trump likes to say if they can do this to me

they can do this to you that's not true right it's not true in all sorts of ways because starting with just like no one would want to do it to John Smith right and so it cuts both ways in that, yeah, he's being treated separately.

And I, like, you and I have gone around the horn a little bit on this, and we're going to go round the horn more on it, about I think your stock devite defense of the rule of law is admirable and correct. And I'm glad that the lawyers are staying in that lane. That said, carmically, zero sympathy for Donald Trump. if i am capable of being outraged for the sake of the legal system i'm not capable of being outraged on behalf of donald trump okay but but so for instance one of the guys um from the

group of you know young men um who were charged in new york where donald trump then put out a full page ad calling for the death penalty um for them one of them put out a statement after the indictment and it just said karma he was falsely accused of a crime he didn't commit and and his response to someone else like I can't quite tell from his statement if he's saying it's karma that you two have are now being put through the legal system unfairly that's just not something good to wish asymmetrical karma yeah that's that's one of the great things about karma is it doesn't follow euclidean geometry right it doesn't have to be like you know uh perfectly rational the statement also said like he never

apologized for it so like you know that i think was part of the karma thing look my only point about about the karma thing is to tie it back we can we can we can argue about karma and law again another time but on the on the strictly political thing um are repercussions of this i think he'll get a sugar high like he did after mara lago um there will be people you know, already you've seen the statements coming out from Republicans that have the benefit of largely being true that this is a political thing, that this is not a great case to bring, um, pointing out that Bragg ran on prosecuting Trump, you know, so like all of the, all of the, like the arguments on the merits that Republicans are making actually have merit, unlike a lot

of previous defenses of Trump. That said, I think as Kevin was alluding to, you add in a couple more indictments and people are like, really? And I don't think, even though it forces the dynamics are weird. And you know this stuff better than I do, Sarah, but like the Republican politicians who feel like they have to rally that Trump's defense are doing so to stay in the good graces of Trump's core supporters and nobody else. And the idea that Trump is adding real voters in significant numbers that are going to be sticky and the state. with them over time? I'm very, very, very skeptical of. Yeah, a lot of people put up a middle finger to pollsters to say Trump, you know, is being railroaded. Um, but will they actually say,

well, now that he's been indicted for paying off a porn star, I got to vote for the guy. And I'm just, I'm dubious that there are a lot of those voters out there. Okay, but Kevin, one of the lines that we've heard from Donald Trump and some of his, uh, supporters is that this amounts to election interference. You have a elected district attorney from the Democratic Party pursuing charges that, you know, it's not just right-wingers who say that a normal person wouldn't be charged with this. This is, you know, mainstream reporters, Dan Abrams said it on, you know, this week on ABC. Is this election interference? No, it's not election interference. I mean, not in principle anyway. I think that a couple of things. One is that obviously we should not

engage in legal shenanigans or tolerate legal shenanigans or shrug them off on a just-get-Trump, you know, sort of line of argument. That being said, I do think that people like former presidents and senators and such should be held to the very highest standard of legal behavior, not get any kind of, you know, deference because they were in politics. I think too often we lean toward the other side of saying, well, you know, that's kind of, you know, what campaigns are all about and these things happen. And he didn't win his reelection, so we'll just let it all go. I think that, and actually I'd like to ask you about one question related to this. You know, the idea that you can't prosecute someone for committing a crime because he's running for office, I think is a dangerous idea and a dangerous precedent to set.

I know that there is this idea in the Justice Department that they think they, not that they can't, but they won't indict a sitting president for, I guess it's not a statutory thing. It's an internal memo of some kind where they've decided it was back maybe in the 70s. You'll know this stuff and explain it to me better. I understand that there's, you know, some separation of powers issues that comes up when you do that, but at the same time, establishing a situation in which you have someone who essentially is above the law because he is a head of a branch of government, I think is, even temporarily, I think, is a really difficult place to be in something that's difficult to really defend on small law Republican grounds. That being said, I think it's- Oh, I'll defend it. I'll defend the shah out of that.

But I certainly don't think that any sort of ordinary crime should be treated in any different way because that person is a candidate for office or is likely to be a candidate for office. Interesting. So a couple things on that. And one, so A, of course, the federal executive branch, the Department of Justice indicting a president that it reports to just doesn't really work, you know, from any sort of unitary executive, like literally, don't know how that would function. But what I think you're talking about is the potential for a state indictment for a sitting president. And look, A, I think that's actually part of the problem with the Georgia one is there's even an issue with indicting a former president for Axi was

taking while president because, okay, so first of all, while you're president, the answer is impeachment. You impeach the president, you remove him from office, and then you can do whatever you want to him is sort of the theory behind that. Two, you know, the OLC opinion that you're referring to, there is one from the 70s. It's updated then in the 90s. It continues to this day and look at self-serving, right? Because it's the executive branch talking about how the head of the executive branch can't be indicted. Cool, cool. Nothing weird about that. So take it with a great of salt. But the theory is that while you're president, it would be so, um, so distracting. And there could be so many political motivations to try to distract the president to, you know,

force him to prepare for a trial, uh, sit for a trial, et cetera, to defend himself. And there could be hundreds of these trials throughout the country for each, you know, elected district attorney of the opposing party that that's not something we favor. I think the former president argument. It gets much stronger, even if it's for actions taken while president. But that's sort of the theory behind it. But, okay, Jonah, last question to you on this. Did we all make a mistake in the way we covered this indictment before it happened? Why Sarah? What an interesting question. It is an interesting question. It's almost like we taped a whole podcast on that question before 5 p.m.

And now we're redoing the segment after 5 p.m. It's almost like the podcast gods hate us. But we don't need to get into the weeds on all of that. Yes. And you were,

I will say, you were particularly hard on yourself in this ethereal episode segment that will never be heard. It will join the ranks of episode 11 of the remnant. but um uh kevin and i came to your defense i thought the way advisory opinions handled it was great i think the way you know kevin and his uh piece about it you know it was very clear that he thought the media was once again uh sidling up at the the the dispensary of the BS factory that is

the that is set up in mara lago or words to that effect and um At the same time, collectively, yeah, the media bought it, right? Because what we have here is this sort of Baptist and bootleggers problem in the American media where there are two groups that love Trump drama, people who really hate Trump and people who really love Trump. And I know I get accused all the time of like being addicted to Trump and he broke me and all this kind of stuff. I'd be so happy to have Trump go away. so unbelievably happy. I would be skipping through fields with daffodils

playing my liar. It would just be great. I'm going to be really impressed if you own a liar. No comment. So anyway, I think the media took the bait and we certainly should have known, if not when Trump moved his lips

or posted something on truth social, then at least when his own team said, actually President Trump has no access to inside information from the grand jury except it turned out he was right Jonah the Trump team wasn't the one

who sold us a bill of goods the brag team was they clearly had this indictment from the grand jury before Trump ever said that and then held on to it they sat on it for two weeks okay but all I'm saying is that the

look we had three Republican committees leap on saying they were going to investigate Bragg and local district attorneys and pursue legislation to strip them to the ability to blah blah blah blah blah blah blah all based on an indictment no one saw right I mean so like the entire conversation and that we still haven't the entire conversation spiraled out into the darkest recesses of the galaxy sort of like Darth Vader's ship at the end of the first Star Wars and I think we handled ourselves pretty well but not perfectly, but pretty well.

And, but yeah, collectively, we all got played for suckers. And with that, let's move on to our next awful topic, Nashville. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real people. peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of

financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months. Ethos keeps it simple. It's 100% online, no medical exam, just a few health questions. You can get a quote in as little as 10 minutes, same day coverage, and policies starting at about two bucks a day, build monthly, with options up to $3 million in coverage. With a 4.8 out of five-star rating on Trust Pilot and thousands of families already applying through Ethos, it builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ETHOS.com slash dispatch. Application times

may vary. Rates may vary. TD Bank knows that running a small business is a journey. from startup to growing and managing your business. That's why they have a dedicated small business advice hub on their website to provide tips and insights on business banking to entrepreneurs, no matter the stage of business you're in. Visit td.com slash small business advice to find out more or to match with a TD small business banking account manager.

Jonah, another school shooting. And it just feels exhausting. And it feels like there's nothing new to say. Oh, and so therefore you want me to say something. Yeah. So I think we all agree these things are horrific, demonic, you know, in a very sort of literal way, not just figurative way. And what makes them all the more preemptively exhausting is that their frequency now

makes it just really tiresome to have the same arguments all over again, right? And I did a podcast yesterday with Kevin's former podcast mate, Charlie Cook, about this. It's very easy to agree, and I think everybody,

every half remotely moral, decent, or rational person agrees that these things are terrible. The problem is that, there really are no easy solutions and I think that the people who say who pretend that there are are doing a really severe disservice and conflating all gun crimes as if they are one monolithic phenomenon with one monolithic all-purpose solution is a also very irresponsible. I mean, I talk a lot about how populism is terrible and it's sort of

telling a mob what it wants to hear, but there's an elite version of populism that poses this technocracy that says, oh, we know exactly what to do. And the problem is, is our democratic messy system won't let us do it. And the people who are these retrograde people who are holding us back are against democracy or against science or against reason or against decency and if we were just given the tools to do what we want to do we would be able to solve these problems and they're lying they're probably first of foremost they're lying to themselves and so anyway i just think the debates about the stuff have become so poisoned with bad faith that it's just it's it's very easy just to throw your hands up and say you don't want to get involved in it i think this case in particular got ugly

really, really quickly, first of all, because whenever you shoot children, it starts at a very high level of ugliness. But the mainstream media and big chunks of the right are both so irrationally obsessed with the transgender stuff that you, that it went to 11 almost instantaneously, where you have people on the right talking about how this is that mass shootings are a product of

transgenderism which is a logic that the right really should just run away from given that there are a lot of say Christian nationalists

who shoot people irresponspile you know immorally and whenever someone says oh we got to look at Christianity or we got to look at nationalism or we've got to look at conservatism or whatever. It's the right who screams,

how dare you do this guilt by association thing. Similarly, the left, which does that guilt of the association thing, all the friggin time is now saying, how dare you do that in this case? And I just saw this tweet from the Washington Post this morning. The attempts on the right to connect violence to transgender people come, even though transgender people are rarely the perpetrators of mass shootings, which are overwhelmingly carried out by cisgender men, according to criminal justice experts.

Fair enough. But when cisgender men shoot up places, they do like, oh, is there a problem with maleness? Is there a problem with heterosexuality? Is there a problem with toxic masculinity? Is there a problem with every isom that is associated with sort of right-of-centered stuff? you need to have a single standard about how you deal with these things. And you can see how ugly it's going to get with LGBT groups, screaming bloody murder, bad choice of word,

screaming like holy hell saying, do not release this person's manifesto. Whereas if this person was a anti-immigration type or a pro-life type, the manifesto would be released overnight on the front page of the New York Times. So it's just a hot mess and gross and I hate talking about. Kevin, I think my frustration is, is that both sides are so sure of their own, I don't want to call it moral superiority,

but sort of like Jonah said, that they know the answer to all of this. And that because the other side's answer isn't the same, there can be no compromise. And so, for instance, you know, one side wants to ban certain types of weapons, regardless of, you know, some of the problems with that theory, right? California already has bans and they still have mass shootings or, you know, that gun wasn't used in

this specific crime or whatever the case may be. They're like, yeah, but this will really help. These guns are bad. They're used in most of them. So like, let's try that. And the other side says, let's prosecute the gun crimes that we have on the books. And they point to all these cases of liberal prosecutors, you know, deprioritizing prosecuting as felonies, gun crimes or deprioritized prosecuting gun crimes at all. I think I've written that call on myself a few times. That's right. And yet, to me, what's, I think, so frustrating is,

why can't we just try both? And basically, both sides will say, no, they have to try mine before I'm willing to try theirs. And so absolutely nobody's willing to move anywhere because there's almost this perverse, I don't know, this perverse incentive to stand still so as not to allow the other side to have any small buy-in into the solution to this problem. And I look at both sides. And I think, you know, for instance, I didn't talk

about the problems with the, you know, prosecuting more gun crimes. During the Trump administration at the Department of Justice, we moved many, many federal prosecutors off white-collar crime onto gun crimes and expanded something called Project Exile that had been used in Virginia, nationwide, basically, in order specifically to get illegal guns off the street. That didn't stop mass shootings either. To Jonah's point, it may have brought down violent crime overall, but it didn't stop school shootings. And so both sides have solutions that I think make some sense on paper, and they're not panaceas by any means. And I guess what I think so many Americans are frustrated by is the sense that like because you can't have your

solution, we're not going to try anything at all. We're going to blame the other side and we're going to sit here in the status quo and wait until it happens again because it will because we haven't changed a thing. Well, a couple things about that. One is that I think that we do have to keep in mind that there are problems that don't have solutions. There are problems that don't out policy solutions. There are problems that can be mitigated, but not solved, and those levels of mitigation can vary greatly from problem to problem. One of the things we get into with this particular issue is, I don't want to impute bad faith to people, but I think that the primary motive of the conversation isn't solving the problem. It's using the problem to try to discredit

politically and morally the opposing tribe in society. So this isn't about, you know, this particular kind of crime or this particular sort of social situation. It's, well, it's gun culture and those people who like this sort of thing, or it's those liberals who live in the cities and who won't do anything about it. So when it comes to deaths from firearms in the United States, I mean, there are really three, you know, kind of big separate categories that we have to talk about. One is the fact that the majority of deaths from firearms in the United States are suicides. Dealing with suicides is a very different set of problems from dealing with violent crime.

The second bucket of gun deaths in the United States are ordinary street crime, which tends to happen in a relatively predictable way in a relatively small number of neighborhoods. And these murders tend to be carried out by people who already have extensive arrest records and generally at least one felony conviction. That is what you get into when we're talking about, you know, enforce the laws we already have. And it is an enormous problem. You know, as I pointed out in my writing about this, I pick on Philadelphia. just because I spent a day sitting in gun court there cataloging this stuff. But, you know, they dismiss 60% of gun cases without prosecuting them. And that's up, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, less than 10 years ago, it was 30%.

So there's a reason that number has gone up to the extent that it has. And this is a policy decision. We do generally a pretty poor job of prosecuting crimes, including, violent crimes that involve firearms short of homicide. So just simple, you know, illegal possession of a firearm gets prosecuted very, very rarely. Your chances of actually doing jail time for that crime or something like one in 11, I want to say last time I looked. So it's not something that we seem to take very seriously. Straw buyers, you know, we famously do not really prosecute unless it's part of a larger gun trafficking or organized crime investigation. Part of that,

assume is a defensible manpower decision, but it still is the case that if you are straw buying a gun for somebody, you're very, very unlikely to get prosecuted for that, even if that gun subsequently ends up being used in a murder or another violent crime. In the third category of things, of course, are these terrorist spectaculars that, you know, target schools or theaters or other sorts of public places. these are not as easy to foresee in the same way other kinds of common violent crimes are because they aren't typically carried out by people who have extensive criminal records. They tend often to be carried out by people who are known to the authorities for mental health reasons

or for smaller criminal matters. You know, they've been involved in domestic altercations, things like that, or, you know, smaller infractions. and that seems to me largely a question of not being assertive enough about certain kinds of mental health intervention and oversight. If you've ever, you know, observed the process, you've been through the process of trying to have someone declared mentally incompetent or have them committed to a middle institution against their wishes is very, very difficult to do. I've already heard people saying, you know, in this Nashville case that, you know, that should have been done. I've covered a couple of these cases and observed a couple of these cases. I'm not sure actually it could have successfully been done in this case, although certainly

maybe it should have been tried. There is an argument for, you know, wider deployment of, you know, sort of short-term emergency measures in these sorts of cases where you can have rather than an open-ended commitment, you know, a, you know, five or ten-day emergency observation period. those those are available in some jurisdictions are not available in some jurisdictions they might do some good in some of these cases you know in this particular case there was a school with locked doors but it had glass doors in the front which the shooter just shot through and then walked through the open doors but you know having access points that are less easy to defeat probably would be helpful i understand why people are um hesitant about having armed personnel in in schools but certainly having uh chemical sprays and things like that, and teaching teachers and staff how to use them would probably be a very effective solution.

I have been pepper sprayed once in my life. A friend of mine just decided would be funny to pepper spraying me. And Richie Peterson, if you're out there listening, I haven't forgotten. Funny guy, psychiatrist. But it would certainly stop you from being an effective shooter for 10 or 11 minutes,

which often will be enough time for the police to get there and take over and intervene. So there are things that we could do. In terms of gun regulation, I tend to oppose this for the most part, at least the sort of thing that's put forward, because it's put forward on faulty premises, which is that AR-15s are some sort of, you know, special dangerous gun. They're not. They operate, much like every other gun on the market, every other semi-automatic rifle you can buy. They aren't especially powerful. They're a good deal less powerful than, you know, typical hunting rifles.

The worst school shooting, of course, we had was at Virginia Tech, and that was carried out by a guy with a couple of handguns. no rifles at all. So this focus on the AR as a kind of cultural symbol, as a totem, I think, is a waste of time and leads us away from potentially more beneficial solutions. I mean, there are things you can do in terms of gun regulation, I think, that are consistent with the Second Amendment and that might be good policies. There are arguments for, you know, raising the minimum age at which you can buy any kind of firearm.

I think there's a pretty defensible case for that. There are certainly, you know, time and place exemptions, which makes sense, you know, for you can't carry a gun on 6th Street in Austin or on the Las Vegas trip or things like that. Those aren't current rules, but they probably should be rules. You know, you can't carry guns in, you know, certain kinds of nightlife and entertainment districts, that sort of thing. And you do get a lot of shootings in those places, too, some of which get reported as mass shootings. They're not really, you know, manifesto-type mass shootings, but they are, you know, disputes in which several people get shot. So there are things that can be done in terms of prohibiting certain classes of firearms. I don't think it's constitutional to do so, but I also don't think it would be a very useful or effective policy. We just don't have really much reason to think that it would. And it's based on myth, largely, and symbolism. Jonah, this brings up a couple things here. One, you know, the parents in Michigan, this was now several school shootings ago.

I am sad to say. So you may not even remember it. But those parents are being charged with manslaughter related to their kid killing people at his high school. Should we be taking the parents role in this more seriously?

And does it matter whether the kid's a minor or a 28-year-old living at home who, you know, stashed seven guns in the house? Yeah, so you know, I had to talk about this on CNN last week. And when I first saw it in the like the the prep material, I just assumed I was going to go in and be like, this is crazy,

parents' rights, you don't visit the sins of the child and the parents, you know, all the rest. And then you actually read the details of that case. And it's pretty close to bad, you know, to extreme cases make for bad law kind of stuff, because these were almost singularly craptacular parents. I mean, just really horrible, horrible parents who had all sorts of warning signs that this kid was a candidate for being a school shooter. Like writing on math tests, how he was going to kill people. At one point, he talks about how his first victim is going to be a popular girl who's got her whole life ahead of her. things are going grade for just so she knows what it's like to feel as hopeless as I do,

this kind of thing. And when the school told the parents, they laughed it off. The mom ignored texts warning about this. They told him to just sort of toughen up when he was begging for psychiatric help. And it's heartbreaking. You know, when you think about a teenager, it's hard for teenagers to ask for help. And he did. I'm not saying he was the, you know, whatever. It there were all sorts of red flags. And so at first, I'm still like, well, parents, it's different, you know, but they let him have access to a gun. And the way I kind of thought about it was,

what if it's a boarding school? And it's the headmaster or the head of the dorm that, with all the other facts being the same, knowing that this kid was that much of a mess, and did nothing and let him. have access to a gun. Man, would you sue the school? Would you hold that guy accountable? So why should parents get an exemption from that when they actually have better knowledge and more resources to deal with the kid? So I'm in favor of prosecuting those guys, you know, whether the sentence is matched

up right, you know, what level of, you know, manslaughter or homicide. I don't know. But I hate the idea of starting to do that. More generally, yeah, parents should care more. Parents should be more involved. It is harder because of all the social media stuff these days to really know what your kids are exposed to. My wife and I found out that our daughter is on TikTok and we're like, oh, let's go check out her TikTok thing. And my wife is still upstairs, hugging her knees, rocking back and forth from the experience. And so I have sympathy for parents trying to figure this stuff out. But whether the law as a matter of course

should be going after parents, I leave it to other people to figure out how that would work. It makes me really nervous. What I think is hard is, as you mentioned, the Michigan case is so extreme. I mean, the part,

as you said, I actually find the whole thing really heartbreaking because the kids seem to want help so much. The parents were at the school that day, hadn't bothered to check

whether he had brought the gun with him to school. They leave in an hour later. He's killing his five. I mean, not that that's the standard for the legal liability by any means, but it just goes to the heartbreaking aspect of how preventable this was and how many different chances, you know, God sent a helicopter, a boat, a scooter, like all the different things. A freaking Pegasus.

Right, everything. I think it matters where people get guns, you know, people who are prohibited from having them, whether they're minors or people who have some, you know, felony conviction or another legal prohibition. And I don't know what our criminal negligence statutes look like, but it might be worth considering the possibility of revising those in such a way as to bring some more heat into the situations where people are providing guns to people who shouldn't have. Yeah, but you've touched on something, Kevin, that I think is, to me, far more likely than the Michigan case, which is your kid has a problem and you do reach out for help. And there's actually not a lot

of help that can be provided to you because of how difficult in the last 60 or so years we've made involuntary commitment. In this case, of course, it's an adult child living with them. The law has really changed pretty dramatically since, let's say, the 40s, 50s, in terms of involuntary commitment, we thought that what was happening before was pretty cruel. Any family member that was just sort of a problem that you didn't want to deal with, you just commit them or your wife's being up and he committer. Wait, what, no? That's an option. Did you know that? So we change the laws to make that a lot harder for good reason. But now we see the problem, whether it's homelessness, you know, people with severe mental health problems who cannot maintain

housing or jobs living on the street and they can't be committed or, you know, a 28-year-old child. I think it's really hard to blame the parents when this, you know, you could call 911 tomorrow and they'd be like, did they commit a crime? No, I think they will commit a crime. Well, have they done it? You know, like, what is, what are the police supposed to do? What are the parents supposed to do? And that's what I think makes it hard. The last thing I want to talk about this, though, was something Jonah brought up briefly, Kevin, which is, I don't know how it's been covered in the media. Obviously, the transgender aspect, which we don't even have the full details on, by the way. There just was this whole rush to like,

definitely make this a transgender thing on both sides, frankly, that we don't know this person. We don't have a lot of facts over what the details of any of this were. And their gender identity seems frankly like the least important thing compared to three nine-year-olds being killed. But to Jonah's point, what do we do about the name of the shooter, the manifesto of the shooter, these things that we know can encourage copycats, but that also people have a right to know sometimes, et cetera. How are we supposed to balance all that? And how do we standardize it so that we don't have the Jonah beef,

which is when it's one group that does the attack, you release the manifesto and blame the group. But when it's a different, quote unquote, group that does the attack, again, I don't even think we know a lot about this person to say that they're a member of anything, but we'll see, I suppose. How do we deal with all of that? Should we be releasing names, manifestos, et cetera?

You know, when it comes to the manifestos and stuff, I just have a really hard time getting my head around the vision of someone wagging their finger at someone and saying, you shot nine-year-olds for a really, really bad reason, you know, as opposed to one of the good reasons to shoot nine-year-olds. I think all of that stuff is sort of secondary. I tend to want to err on the side of openness and transparency and to demystify some of this stuff.

I think that, you know, one of the ways to dispel the aura of, you know, power and potency that survives these sort of things is to demystify them to make the details as public as possible. I think that's true of a lot of other kinds of crimes as well. I'm not always a popular opinion. So, yeah, in general, I'm in favor of doing that. I don't know how strong the evidence is for these contributing to copycat, effects. I mean, it's not as though the stories aren't going to be out there. We all are going to know about Columbine, irrespective of how many of the details actually came out. And the facts that are

going to be inevitably in the news are probably going to be sufficient for copycats, I would think. Although maybe there are some stylistic things that are not going to be, if they're not out there. In this particular case, people with serious mental health problems have a habit of sort of picking up on things that are sort of culturally in the air around them. You know, if you're not in a Christian society, you don't find people saying they're the second coming of Jesus. They pick something else. So to that extent, you know, the fact that this person identified as trans

and preferred masculine pronouns and that sort of thing, who even knows if that if this person were, you know, clinically evaluated, that she would have actually been found to be genuinely a transgender person as opposed to a person who's got some profound mental disturbances that are attached to this, that, and the other thing. It tends to happen with people like that. So making this the central issue of the case, I think, is foolish. Not that it shouldn't be explored and considered.

I mean, I think that all aspects of situations like this should be studied by the people with the relevant expertise and authority to do so. But it doesn't seem to me like it's a top ten issue. I generally agree with all that. I do think waiting a standardized period of time before releasing the manifestos makes sense. When everyone's blood is up and everyone is doing this, no, it's your side, I know it's your side, which I find the whole thing so frigging grotesque, releasing it in that context is like just giving one side ammo. and I could see that and that's amplifying the manifesto right and that is amplifying the motivations to do this

kind of thing if you if you're this kind of person who says when people read my words they'll understand why I did this kind of thing there's no reason to reward that feeling on their timetable wait a month when people moved on to something else and then say oh it turns out that that mass shooter because it's not the public has a right to know it doesn't have the right to know right now. And anything, you know, like, I think the media is finally figured out about not releasing the names and not using the names of these mass killers, which I think is clearly not stop them, but it helps at the margins. Do we know that it helps at the margins? I don't, well, we know, I don't think it hurts at the margins. I mean, and I don't know. You're right. We don't

know, but intuitively, I think it probably is until proven otherwise, until proven that it hurts, it's probably the right way to go. Just knowing how particularly young men, and again, most of these things are still young men, want their names to ring out. They want to be like one of the drone warriors in Mad Max, witness me, right? They want to have the status of doing these kinds of things, in denying them that, even if it doesn't deter them, just denying it as a punishment, it seems to me worthwhile. I think it started, by the way, because there were mass shooters who were mimicking Columbine and had read that manifesto, et cetera.

So we knew that there had, but to your point, Kevin, if not Columbine manifesto, maybe they would have latched on to some other thing, right? The causation versus correlation, I think, is impossible to prove. And I do find it really, really upsetting that the conversation seems now so focused on, you know, the misgendering or the transgender aspect of this. When, again, I don't think we actually know a whole lot about this person. I think both sides are sort of jumping to put this person in the bucket that most fits their framework of what the transgender culture war is about instead of this actual person. And so I find that all pretty frustrating when there's three families who's, you know,

kids aren't getting tucked in tonight. And instead of focusing on them. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, you're writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style. It's quick, intuitive, and requires zero coding experience. You can also tap into built-in analytics and see who's engaging

with your site and email campaigns to stay connected with subscribers or clients. And Squarespace goes beyond design. You can offer services, book appointments, and receive payments directly through your site. It's a single hub for managing your work and reaching your audience without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. During the Volvo Fall Experience event, Discover exceptional offers and thoughtful design that leaves plenty of room

for autumn adventures and see for yourself how Volvo's legendary safety brings peace of mind to every crisp morning commute this September leaves a 2026 XE90 plug-in hybrid

from $599 biweekly at 3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event Conditions apply visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explore Volvo.com All right, I want to move to France, Jonah. Who doesn't?

Me too. I saw a great photo of two Parisians at a, you know, local coffee shop or whatever, sipping coffee while there was a fire in the street behind them. And it was, you know, just the best photo ever, right? Like it perfectly encapsulates the French experience, or at least the French stereotype that we all have. But... we think of sort of the quasi-socialist Western democracy states in Europe having these perpetual problems when they try to, you know, realize that they don't have enough money to do everything

for all the people at the rate that they were doing it. And then it leads to these protests and strikes, et cetera. And this sort of convulsion happens every now and again. It seems like Paris is a very popular place for it to happen. I'll note. But I want to tie it back to a we're experiencing, which is basically both parties saying no to entitlement reform on their watch. And so, I mean, are they right in a sense? If you're just going to have fires in the street and protest and you're not going to get it done anyway, to quote one dean at a popular law school, is the juice worth the squeeze, Jonah? I could go a long time without hearing that expression. I know. I am going to

issue a, I'm going to consult with Steve and issue an internal memorandum that no one has allowed to use that phrase at the dispatch for six weeks. Unless they're actually talking about juicing. So

you know some people might remember one of my favorite insights comes from Seymour Martin Lipsit where he once said or actually said it a lot. But if you only know one country, you don't know any countries in the sense that you can't really understand anything about America unless you understand something about some other countries to see why we're different. And that's true, Canada versus Costa Rica or France versus Belize or whatever.

And I keep thinking about the pension fund crisis in France in the context of if you only followed American politics and you only listen to say AOC and Bernie Sanders and that crowd or Joy Reed, you would think that the people who pay attention to this obscure topic called math just, want to hurt old people and and that that that that that people who think we need to reform entitlements know in their hearts that we have all the money in the world and we could be much more generous with old people and poor people and we just refuse to because we don't like them and that's the way um a lot of people on the left talk about this stuff and they seem to think that the math in america works differently maybe it's a form of american exceptionalism we should celebrate that math in America works differently than in other Western industrialized countries. And it turns out, no, it turns out that almost every country, to one extent or another,

is undergoing a similar problem, which is that the amount of money that we have to give to people when they get old and are no longer part of the labor force is diminished because we have fewer workers to pay for it. And this was always a bit of a Ponzi scheme. And you have to ask a question, is progressive France full of these, you know, these anti-old people people who hate, you know, the poor and the needy? Or is it just simply a math problem? And so I like all the coverage of this. I don't really love France's... Insta protest culture, which has a very long and deep tradition. I mean, there's, you know, I worked on a, I wrote and produced a documentary about the

Cathedral of Notre Dame. And one of the things that people don't know is that the Plaste, Notre Dame, the big space out front, it didn't used to be like that. You used to have to like, uh, walk through these little medieval alleys and streets. And then you would turn a corner and all of a sudden you would see this giant cathedral. And part of the idea was that it would draw your eyes to God by making you have to look up. because you suddenly saw it. And Baron Hausman, the great sort of the Robert Moses of Paris,

who did a lot of urban redesign in Paris, said, yeah, we can't have that anymore. And he created this giant plaza in front of it because he wanted to be able to have snipers at the top of the church for when the mob traditionally would storm the cathedral and kill all the priests. And so there's a tradition in France going back a long way of trying to settle public policy differences through mass

violence, and I don't really like that. But it is an interesting cautionary. Kevin, what about our pension? I mean, what about our social safety net reforms? What of it? Yeah, well, a couple of things. You know, in France, it is fun to watch socialists learn. And, you know, Macron originally was elected as a socialist. He has evolved over the years into a more sensible kind of politician. And Joni used the phrase, all the money in the world. I actually added it up a few years. ago and the numbers may have changed some, but at the time, our public debt at the federal, state and local level, along with our unfunded liabilities for the various pensions and entitlement programs, was actually a little bit more than all the money in the world, meaning all the cash

in circulation and all the money in depository accounts and CDs and things like that. So all the money in the world is not going to solve even our problem, much less problems to the rest of the Western welfare states. I suppose it's a, you know, it's a bit of belling the cat issue for us. There are things we could do right now and things we could have done over the last 20 years that would make this a radically easier problem to solve. You know, small changes in our entitlement system, which is in some ways more tractable than your typical European model, particularly the French model,

would have made it much more sustainable and easy to manage for a long time by, you know, raising the tax rates going into it raising the age of retirement slightly, changing some of the formulas, and particularly reforming some of the irresponsible oversight mechanisms in Medicare and Medicaid, which can be just shocking. I'll be the first person to shake my fist at someone who says, we're going to fix this by taking care of waste fraud and abuse. But the fraud in some of these programs is just remarkable.

Just, I think there was one estimate from an economist a few years ago that 20% of Medicaid money is misspent, either, you know, through fraud or improperly approved payments. So that's a big number. Obviously, there's no political benefit right now in it for anybody to be the person who's going to step up and deal with these things. The Republican Party seems to have given up on it entirely. That's one of the many, many wonderful legacies of the Trump years is a Republican Party that doesn't care about these things anymore and has stopped even pretending to care about them. I mean, and the terrible part is, of course, that the longer we wait to start doing something, the fewer options we have and the more it's going to hurt. So we've got a lot of options still right now. You know, we're not in a fiscal crisis.

We're a country with a pretty healthy economy and carrying too much public debt, but it's not, you know, it's not an unfixable. problem. It's only an unfixable problem if you refuse to do what's necessary to fix it, which I'm afraid is where we're going to be for a while still. Let's go to our not worth your time here. Not worth your time, question mark. Do you all use chat GPT yet? No. I poke around with it. I find it not as scary as people find it, although I haven't used the souped up version of it yet. It gets a lot of things wrong, for sure. It's worth poking around with. I think it really is. It's kind of interesting and fun. Should we think of this like calculators in the sense that, you know, when we were growing up, there was still some emphasis on knowing how to do the math without a

calculator. And that's really not the case anymore for kids. I don't mean they don't learn their multiplication tables. They do. But by and large, after, After that, it's generally teaching them how to use a calculator or how to use a computer, you know, similar to then we have the internet revolution. And it's really not about memorizing things anymore. It's about how to form your searches on a search engine. That's actually the skill set that's going to be more helpful. And I wonder whether we will look back and think of this as the next, you know,

big change in how we teach kids how to learn. I think it's going to be hugely transformative. You know, we were both at a thing where someone who's talking about this said that within 10 years, no one, no high school kid is going to write a first draft of their papers anymore. And the fact that AI programs cannot detect whether something was written by an AI program means. should they? Where's their incentive to do that? No, exactly. And it's just let's just take a step backwards

here. I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords and can be of great use and service to them in managing their silicon minds. No, I think this is, I'm not sure I'm in favor of this pause. We're recording this on Thursday morning. A bunch of tech super bros

have said that we should have a pause on AI research. I'm not there. A, it's not going to happen. And B, I'm not sure it's a good idea if it could. But I do think this is a, it's worth your time to pay attention to. Okay, so Kevin, here's my question to you. One of the benefits of chat, GPT, and the AI writing stuff seems to be that while many technologies

were most beneficial to the people who were already the elite, that may not be true for this. And so the, you know, to the extent that our competitive advantage in the marketplace was being smart or being a good writer, that delta is about to shrink. Other people are about to be great writers with the help of AI. So should we be worried? Should we be sad that we spent all this time learning how to write only for that to then be taken over by someone else? I'm not sure they are going to be great writers. I think bad writers are. going to be better writers, but great writers are not going to be replaced anything. It must be more grammatical and possibly more idiomatic. I used to teach college writing, so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out whether things were actually written by human beings or not.

And I've often had my doubts. I have in my mind a Paul Krugman column from the 1990s. And, you know, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, winner of the John Bates Clark Medal and all that, wrote this column about how the internet was this really overblown thing and that 50 years from now we'd look back on it and think it wasn't any more of a cultural milestone than the invention of the fax machine. And he has subsequently revisited that and has confessed his error. So I don't want to put myself in that position, but I do have some skepticism about the effectiveness of the various applications to which this

technology will be put. I think it'll be pretty useful for, you know, customer service things and stuff like that. You know, being able to deal with a, with a digital system and natural language, I think is going to be really, really helpful to people. That's a tough nut to crack that people have been working on for a long, long time. I think that the domination of the superficial levels of communication by AI-enabled modes of communication is probably something that'll be a fact of life, you know, for things like Twitter and social media. I tend to think that that actually will add to the value of the more careful, creative, thorough forms of human output like books and long essays and things like that,

because those things aren't really about can I make sentences. It's about what conceptual things can I put together in a way that is useful. So anyone who's ever been an editor knows that one of the main challenges for particularly beginning writers isn't that they don't know how to put sentences together, is that they don't have anything interesting to say or they don't have any, you know, particularly useful ideas or, or insights. Jonah once described in one of his pieces about youth politics is people at the bottom end of the learning curve. And I don't think that giving them a tool to make them, you know, more effective producers of meaningless and banal prose is going to necessarily

reshape the world. Doesn't Kevin sound like a fun editor to have? He does, yeah. A friend of mine owns her own business and texted me last night that ChatGBT, BT is writing all of her marketing emails, just developed an onboarding plan for her, and it helped plan the theme for her one-year-old's birthday party. It saved her so much time yesterday. You know, for again, you think of a small business owner

and all these things that just like, ugh, suck time that aren't actually doing your job. I don't know. It sounds pretty good. You know who's, it's interesting. This is one of the first technological breakthroughs that, that I, to my knowledge, the porn industry isn't an early adopter of. And, but those aren't really hard scripts to write, Jonah.

It's the dialogue, man. It's important. No. But this is going to be a massive, massive boon to spammers, to scammers, you know, Nigerian princes, because you've got a lot of these guys in Russia, Nigeria, and wherever, who don't speak idiomatic American English. And now they can say, Chatsi, you can tell me, tell me a story about how I need to get $500,000 to get someone $5 million. And that'll write it much better. That's a really good point. Man, it's going to help

everyone, the small business owners for scammers in Nigeria and the small business owners here at home. Chat GPT. Sounds like it's worth your time to learn the skills to work with chat GPT for now at least. Then we can fight them later in the drone wars. Until then, thanks for tuning in. Thanks Kevin and Jonah. And we will talk to you next week. You know, I'm going to be. I'm going to be.