The Dispatch Podcast - Trump vs. Agriculture | Roundtable

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, and Megan McArdle discuss the Trump administration’s planned bailout for farmers, ICE agents’ aggressive tactics, and Jonah’s fight against the cat lobby. The Agenda:—Steve Hayes’ farmer arc—Bailout on the way?—ICE, ICE, no baby—Trump is not Hitler, but he is Juan Perón—‘Hitler could have gotten rid of Obamacare.’—NWYT: The best pieces of their career Show Notes:—Jonah Goldberg: To Hell with You People—Kevin Williamson: Zombie Dick Gephardt—Megan McArdle: Out of Osama's Death, a Fake Quotation Is Born—Kevin Williamson: The Death of a F***ing Salesman—Steve Hayes: The Post’s Yucca Mountain Scare The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—click here. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss what Trump's tariffs mean for the economy and specifically for farmers. Is it on the way to compound this mess? Then a flood of videos shows U.S. troops deployed in cities across the country and federal law enforcement officers using increasingly aggressive tactics with protesters? Where is Trump's militarization of law enforcement going? And finally, stay tuned for a not worth your time where we discuss things we've written that we didn't expect to earn a large readership, but surprised us by their popularity. I'm joined today by my dispatch colleagues, Jonah Goldberg,

and Kevin Williamson, and by Megan McArdle from the Washington Post. Let's dive right in. Welcome, everyone. For our first topic today, I want to take a big picture look at Donald Trump's trade wars, sort of what they mean to do where we are today with a particular focus on agriculture. We've spent a lot of time over the past few weeks reading about, looking at reports about the status of America's agriculture sector, the challenges that are resulting from Donald Trump's trade wars and the potential bailout that the Trump administration has been promising. I want to start with a quote from Bob Bragg,

from Farm News and Views, who opened his podcast report the other day this way. Is it bad timing or bad karma as U.S. farmers have watched markets for both corn and soybeans tank? Last year, China purchased about 45% of all U.S. soybean exports and usually secures about 45% of its annual soybean needs by early October. But so far this fall, China has not yet purchased a single bean, end quote.

Corn and soybeans are currently costing more to produce per bushel than they can earn on the market, and soybean farmers are beginning to scramble to store their excess production. Megan, I'll start with you. Can you give us a big picture understanding of how we got here? Well, we got here because we are decoupling from China. and China is trying to use every lever it has in order to make it costly for the United States to do this and the rare earth span is part of this

and as is telling their people not to buy American soybeans, buy them from Brazil instead. I think that the rare earths is a lot more likely to be effective than saying don't buy U.S. soybeans. And that happened this past week. Can you give people just an understanding of what that was, what the announcement was? Yeah. So basically China is cutting off exports of really important rare earths minerals that the United States uses for everything from batteries in electric cars to, I mean, there's munitions.

There's all sorts of ways in which these things are really important. Now, it is important to note that these earths are not actually rare. what they are is disgusting to produce when you leach these things out of the soil you spew carcinogens into the air they're really bad for the environment if you look at what lithium mining looks like it's really nasty stuff

it's stuff that the United States has not wanted on its shores it's not that we couldn't do this it's that it's hard to persuade people that they want to live near it and so I think in the rare earth's case that's a real problem for the United States and look the soybeans are a problem for U.S. soybean farmers in the short term.

I think the issue with this strategy and let us spin back to the 1970s, jumping in our time machine, all of us here on this podcast, Alas, actually remember this decade, and alas, it is also 50 years ago, when the oil-producing countries in the Middle East decided that they had this really valuable thing, and they wanted to jack the price up, and they also as a result of Israel's Yom Kippur War wanted to put an embargo on selling oil to the United States and Israel. Didn't work. I mean, it actually did work.

These are actually two separate actions. Well, Arab oil embargo just failed. And the reason it failed is that commodities are fungible. And that is how you should think about the soybean issue, which is in the short term, not having the contracts you expected is a big issue. It is a huge disruption. My heart goes out.

to the soybean farmers who did their thing in the expectation that the usual would happen and are suffering a big blow right now. But in the long term, things just move, right? It's not like American soybeans are super special and only China can use them. When you don't sell them to China and they buy from somewhere else, you sell to the people that used to buy from somewhere else.

The other issue, though, is the supply of things that really are in short supply, when you crack down on that supply, which is what happened with OPEC, the formation of OPEC, you do jack the price up. The problem with that is that when you jack the price up and you cut off supply and people are freaking out,

which some of us may remember actually being in the car when our parents were waiting in line because the United States response, as part of our wage and price controls, was to control the price of gasoline, and then there wasn't enough gasoline. There were all these arcane rules where it was alternate days,

if you had an odd number on your license plate you could fill your tank on some days and if you had an even number you could fill it on other days there were long lines you would sit in the car with your parents and in my case read a book for hours while you waited to fill up

but in the long term what that did was people freaked out and they said well if they were Europe they said we need to jack up the price of energy and make our economy much more fuel efficient but if you're America with your good old American know-how, you say, we got to find some more oil. And that's what happened over the next 10 years. And by the mid-80s, the price had really gone down. And OPEC still had some pricing power

because Saudi Arabia, which has the largest and cheapest reserves, kind of acted as the central banker. They would absorb the extra oil on the market by lowering their own production to keep the price somewhat elevated. But they lost a huge amount of their pricing power because it's simply not possible in a world where this stuff is actually pretty common. to keep America from getting their hands on this in the long term. So, well, I do think that these are real issues. They're things that we should worry about. They're not issues that markets can't solve.

And I expect that markets will solve them in, depending on the product, the short to medium term. Kevin, one of the things that Megan's argument rests on is an assumption that the markets will be allowed to operate. The challenge, I think, in part, is that just at the time that these industries, or let's say, take soybean farmers, for example, look to adjust, the terms of the trade rules can change. I mean, Donald Trump has changed them many, many times since he took office. He announced on April 2nd's Liberation Day. He pulled some of those back. He seems to change his rules or his approach to take. from one day to the next. Doesn't that make it hard for market players to make the kinds of adjustments

that Megan says will be necessary? Yes and no. You know, what's interesting about this round of the trade war is how much it's been influenced by the last round of the trade war in the first Trump administration. And the dumb trade policies of 2017 did something interesting. They managed to provoke a change in the underlying physical capital of the soybean market. So one of the reasons why there's soybean production in Brazil and Argentina is because they're in a different hemisphere from the United States and they have harvested different times and soybeans don't store all that well. And the Chinese in 2017 didn't have a whole ton of soybean storage. And so over the next few years, they built 700 million tons worth of soybean storage to the extent that they now have

a third of the world's stored soybeans. Brazil added about 50 percent almost to its acreage dedicated to soybeans. Argentina's added quite a bit too. It's growing, a year. Argentina grew 7% this year. Brazil grew, I think, 2% this year. So not only your soybeans fungible, they're more fungible than they were a while back because there are other people who have the capacity to produce more of them and more important. The Chinese, who are the world's largest consumer of this stuff, have more capacity to store it. So in 2017, they were actually more dependent on U.S. exports than they wanted to be, and a lot more dependent than they are now. So, yeah, people can adapt to this, but it's a question of what kind of adaptation, and whether

it's a sort of adaptation that is actually going to be of any use to American producers. American producers could do various things to make themselves more efficient and to raise their output, but they don't really want to do that because their view is that their outputs too much already, and there's supposedly a glut in the market. I don't really believe in market gluts. I believe in, you know, prices going down, which is what happens when there's a lot of something. And, you know, the Chinese don't, there's not a lot of human consumption of soy in China. It's there for animal feed, and mainly for animal feed. So it's not. like there's a one-to-one, you know, dollar-per-dollar price input for some consumer good in China

that's going to go up when the price of soybeans goes up if they can't get their hands on supplies from the United States. It's, you know, it's one input of a whole bunch of factors to go into determining meat prices in China. And so it's not like consumer theirs are going to feel a whole huge pinch anyway, even with the reduction. One of the other things about this situation that's sometimes misunderstood is that Chinese consumption of U.S. soybeans hasn't gone down because of tariffs. There is notionally a 35% or 34% tariff on U.S. soybeans, but it went to zero, and it went to zero in 24 hours because Beijing said no more American soybeans, and they're a single-party police state, and you can do that sort of thing when you're a single-party

police state. They don't have to wait on prices to come into play to shape what that market looks like. They just say no more, and there's no more, and there'll be some more when they decide they've changed their mind about it. So they didn't pick soybeans out of a, you know, a magic hat. They understand that farmers in the United States tend to be an important Republican constituency, and they are specifically putting this pressure on that market because it's an easy one for them to lean on, and one that they can cause just a tremendous amount of physical pain to or economic pain to because they are, you know, they're a third of the world's market for this stuff. But if it wasn't directly because of tariffs, it was indirectly because of tariffs. I mean, this was sort of yet another move. Yeah. So what happens is the United States puts tariffs on stuff and prices.

up, and consumption goes to do it. In China, they put prices, they put a tariff on American soybeans of whatever the number is. It could be 3%. It could be ex-cazillion-e-cazillionity percent. And it wouldn't matter because there's just a policy that says no more American soybeans at any price. And that's how that works. So their tariff on American soybeans is symbolic because they simply don't allow them to be imported. Yeah.

I think I would point out, though, too, is that like the way that, that's one way that the parallel to oil breaks down is it's not very storable. but also like soybeans it's not like that's the only thing you can grow right farmers can move into other crops I do think that markets are going to adjust this I also think probably the U.S. government is going to do a bailout of the farmers

who are affected because that's how Trump has rolled historically as they did last time around yeah although there are some transaction costs there once a field is optimized for a particular crop it does cost you know some money in time absolutely to do something else and if I could just throw in one quick thing you know Megan my one of my earliest political memories also

is the gas lines, but you grew up on the Upper West Side. I grew up in West Texas, and it was particularly galling when there are pump jacks in the background, take an oil out of the ground to not be able to buy oil products. That was weird, and a lot of people took note of that. That's like when there are lines for H&H bagels on the Upper West Side, you know, it's like, what the hell is this? We were not members of the Lubbock Country Club, but there are pumps on the grounds of the Country Club in Lubbock. So, that's nicely symbolic. Jonah, one of the things I think Kevin alluded to this that I think the Chinese were hoping to do

by sort of in effect banning U.S. soybean purchases was create this political pressure. I mean, Donald Trump was elected overwhelmingly with votes or rural voters in the United States, including and especially farmers, supported Donald Trump overwhelmingly. And I think the understanding was that there would be political pressure brought to bear from those farmers and that's maybe true you're certainly hearing something about it you can read a news article read something in the new york times or watch something on ABC news read these or listen to these these farm podcasts and there's no question that um you know yes farmers are um in some frustrated at the effects of the trade war. But in surveying what I've heard from, you know,

Farm Bureau policy folks on their podcasts and, and talking to other people in the ag industry, they're sort of willing to give Donald Trump a long leash on this. They're willing to let him do this because he's telling them, and it's said many times, that what he's trying to do is create fairer trade, even if it's not immediately freer trade. Are you surprised that there hasn't been more public pressure or that Trump has been able to sort of diffuse whatever pressure there has been simply by announcing that he's willing to do another bailout? I'm more surprised that you're sitting around listening to Farm Bureau podcasts. That's the news of this podcast. So, so no joke, I think I've listened to probably eight to ten hours of farm podcasts in the

past couple weeks. And it's absolutely fascinating. And some of them are quite funny. There was a great little riff at the beginning of one of them about why bacon is God's Most Perfect Food. And these guys were talking about how they added bacon to some sort of chicken macaroni and cheese dish. And that made what was otherwise a pretty mediocre dish really good because they added bacon. And the guy said, The way you know that bacon is God's most perfect food is nobody ever talks about adding anything to bacon to make it better because it's bacon so you don't need to. Anyway, that's probably what I remember most about the podcasts, but they've been interesting and entertaining. And I do think, I mean, it's interesting. I listened to a podcast from the Louisiana Farm Bureau from April about a week after Trump announced Liberation Day.

And I was struck by the fact that this policy director for the Louisiana Farm Bureau kept talking about getting calls from sort of mainstream media types who wanted him to say that farmers were really pissed at Trump. And he almost mocked them and said, in effect, yeah, look, I can't really say that. Like, they're not. They think it is time to make these markets fairer. You know, other countries have had tariffs on the United States on our exports forever. Why shouldn't we do the same to even things out? Yeah, look, I mean, so that's one of the reasons why I was more surprised by your podcast choices. Because we've been here before.

Like, I remember New York Times had several pieces, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, about Trump's trade policies being bad for farmers and farmers being okay with it to one extent. I mean, not liking it, but sort of saying, it's time we got tough on China and all the usual talking points. And what's funny about this in some ways is it is so undermining this sort of the weak tea sort of Thomas Frank Marxist school of politics, which says, you know, the, you always used to say the problem with American voters is they get their interest wrong. And the problem with that is people get to decide their own interests. and often they'll decide it on economic terms but not always right i mean there's there are lots of things that go on in american politics that are not about economics that people are very passionate about um what strikes me about all of this is that it's just so damn wasteful right i mean it is a

mass scale um bastiott's broken window fallacy right is like we're just smashing a bunch of efficient systems in order to make it seem like we're creating new wealth and new opportunities, and I'm just not sold on any of it. The only arguments that have ever worked for me about curtailing trade with China are national security arguments. And if you can make a persuasive one on rare earths or wherever, then I'm with you. But the climate basically just now is being generated from The fact that Trump really thinks tariffs are cool, right? They're a dessert topping and a floor wax, and they're good for everything. And that's how he uses them, and it creates a climate of uncertainty.

And I take Kevin and Megan's points well, but, you know, like commodities aren't like, all commodities are fungible, but not all commodities are equally perishable. And you're going to have a situation where, like, By all means, soybean farmers can switch next year or the year after. They can also get stuck with a lot of rotten soybeans. And the idea that somehow this is part of some larger economic vision that's going to pay off. And what we haven't mentioned is, you know, Trump did it again in his Knesset speech. You know, it talks about how much richer we're getting because of the tariffs. And he thinks that, therefore, we can use some of the money from the tariffs to,

refund the farmers, which is just another way of saying the taxes I'm leveling on the American people in the name of protectionism, I'm going to use as my personal political slush fund to compensate the constituencies I don't want to be hurt by my hurtful policies. And at some point, there's going to be a reckoning in all of this, right? I mean, I don't know what it's going to be, but you cannot have a policy of personalist economic inefficiency indefinitely. You know, eventually the stupidity of the arrangement is going to bear fruit or reveal itself in ways that people aren't going to like. And I just don't know where, how or when that is going to be.

Oh, yeah. I'm not defending the tariff policies that led us here. I am merely saying that like that this is, I think not, it's, bad. But the tariffs are bad because they're bad. They're not bad because China's not buying our soybeans, right? They're bad for other reasons. It would be my only argument. Well, if you look at what you mentioned right at the outset, Megan, was this effort to decouple from China. I mean, I do think a lot of people on national security grounds, to Jonah's point, would say, yeah, well, you know, this is long overdue, should have happened a while ago.

This might not be the right way to do it, but it's necessary to a certain extent. And I think the argument you'd get from Trump supporters, if you sort of take a step back and look at the way that he's approached issues like this over his now one term and one year is that, yeah, the guy does things that are unconventional all the time. He gets people in Washington, D.C. and New York to squeal about his unconventional ways and the manner in which he does things. But sometimes they turn out pretty effective. You could say Trump came in and confronted NATO members on. on their insufficient defense budgets. And they've nearly all made significant increases. He demanded that Europe do more to support Ukraine.

Europe is doing more to support Ukraine. He disregarded nearly everything counsel on foreign relations types said he should do in the Middle East. And it produced the Abraham Accords. And now this peace deal last week or ceasefire that may lead to a peace deal last week. Don't they have a point that, like, yeah, he's unconventional. yes, he doesn't do things this sort of traditional way.

And, you know, while you all frett about the implications of tariffs, this was something that was necessary and he's doing it. Look, I will actually also argue that we need to decouple from China on stuff that is national security stuff. And that you can construe that broadly in some ways, right? What do we do about the fact that China manufactures most of the chemical precursors that go into pharmaceuticals, right? That's a big deal.

And that's something that we need to think about. And it is actually, and one of the arguments that the Trump people make, when you say, well, then, okay, but why tariffs on Vietnam? We should be friend-shoring stuff from China. If you want to move stuff out of China, you should be moving it to allies and who want to take some of China's business. Let's help them do that. And they will say, because Chinese companies will just go and operate in those countries and then sell us stuff. and I think that that's actually a problem with trying to get these chemical precursors

is like you say get them from India well is India just going to turn around and buy the precursors from China and sell them to us it's a real issue but you know what India also quite worried about China these are issues that are solvable with

by building alliances instead of just throwing your weight around right and that's a real problem with Trump's approach is that he doesn't just want to ring fence China. That is a project I will work with him on because, like, in fact, our chief geostrategic rival should not be supplying stuff we need to put into weapons

we might need to use to go fight our chief geostrategic rival. Nor do we want them to have enough economic power over us that we have to give them stuff because we can't afford the economic dislocations of, say, losing all our rare earth. I will also discuss that. But the way that you fix that problem is that you build a rival alliance of people

who are trading within those blocks who are committed to security and by really getting those people on the same page, you think about Europe and Russian gas. There are ways to fix that problem. And Trump didn't do that because he really likes He likes the optics of being seen to be able to just trash everyone,

to just tell them this is the way it is, to bully and berate. And that is a good way for Donald Trump to feel like he's really kicking some ass and taking names. It is not a good way to solve our China problem. Jonah, we're about 10 months in to Trump's second term. and what, six, seven months into these new tariff policies. Do we have, are we able to make a determination on the economic effects of this so far? You know, less than I would have thought. And I think that's, fairness requires me to say that.

I thought, I remember, I keep remembering how when the first episode of this podcast, when Sarah of Blessed Memory was still the moderator, she asked okay what's your prediction how is this going to go and we basically all said hard to predict because we don't know if this is all going to stick around or something like that but if these whole prices will go up now there are a whole bunch of people bill mar and others who've said that didn't happen you know the economy wasn't wrecked like they said and that's because trump chickened out of a lot of the liberation day tariffs and then he started setting deadlines for other tariffs that gave time for the economy to pre-buy

a ton of stuff, right? So they front-loaded a whole bunch of inventory that, when I say they, I mean, businesses, you know, large and small, front-loaded a huge amount of inventory and have been working that down since. That has kept the inflationary pressures or the price-hiking pressures.

I mean, Megan and Kevin are so much better qualified to get into this, but one of the real dorky debates is whether or not tariffs are inflationary or they just cause prices to rise, which is the kind of distinction that gets you really dirty looks from normal people and voters.

Try to go to a town hall and say, it's not inflationary. Prices are just going to go up. And so anyway, the point is that the resiliency of the economy to the tariffs has been greater than I would have anticipated, in part because they got fair warning in a part because Trump backed off of a bunch of things, all the rest. At the same time,

it is with the job revisions and everything else that we've seen, prices are going up, inflation is not going down. It is, and, you know, I listen to the marketplace podcast quite often, and all they do is interview different mid-sized business owners about the chaos this has thrown their lives in. I think the general climate of uncertainty has obviously been a wet blanket on more economic growth that we would have had, but it's going to be a little while before economists have anything like a consensus, even one-armed economists, have anything like a real consensus about where the pressure points were, where the damage was.

So much of this stuff is being sort of clouded over by the, you know, stock market rise basically because of seven tech companies and you can imagine that when that punch bowl goes away people start looking at the you know the under the sea ballroom of the high school gym where they were drinking the punch and saying good god this place looks terrible um so uh i think it's been bad but it hasn't been as bad as i would have expected Kevin um last word on this topic to you feel for you to adjust anything that Jonah just said there about the economics of this. But I'm also interested in getting your thoughts on the politics of this. You had a piece for us a couple weeks ago looking at Democrats and their inability to make political hay out of this for Donald

Trump. What are your, what's your understanding of how the politics of this play? Is it possible for Democrats if they were to make better arguments than they're making to peel away some of these rural voters that have been loyal to Donald Trump? I think that rural voters are a hard get for a lot of cultural reasons, although rural voters aren't as Republican as people think they are. You know, the last three presidential elections, it's been about one out of three rural voters voted for the Democrat, two out of three for the Republican. It's not as as lopsided as people expected to be.

I think that the voters that they're able to get from these sort of things are voters who are already pretty well inclined to vote for Democrats, which are middleish income, suburban voters with some education who are dealing with things right now like record beef prices and other persistent inflation in food prices and prices of other things they actually buy. We have a big, complicated economy that's resilient, and price shocks don't play out the way people expect them to, and we have an economy that also is able just to weather a lot of stuff, like 50 years of really bad governance, which we've had, and the American economy just seems to keep trucking right along in various kinds of ways.

And there's also enormous global demand for American stocks right now. You've seen a lot of money from overseas flowing into the U.S. stock market for all the obvious reasons, which has buoyed the wealth position of a lot of upper income and middle income Americans. So I think that if the Democrats knew how to talk about trade, there are a lot of smart things they could say, but they don't know how to talk about trade. And the reason for that is because they had Donald Trump's dumb views about trade as long as Donald Trump has had. And there's a reason Joe Biden kept almost all of Trump's idiotic trade policies in place. You have Democrats who are essentially anti-corporate and anti-business, who don't like globalization for the same reasons that Republicans who don't like it talk about it the same way. And then you've got this sort of the general kind of New Deal class warfare aspect of internal democratic politics. So you've got a few Democrats out there saying, hey, this trade stuff is really hurting some particular constituency in my district or in my state.

and I'll sure wish we could do something about that. But you don't have any Democrats out there saying, well, what we need really is, you know, more open and more liberal trade. And we need to deal with foreign policy issues and national security issues that are involved with trade from a foreign policy and national security point of view,

not trying to deal with China by enacting a national sales tax on Americans who want to buy flip-flops, which is just a really dumb and indirect way to get to those problems. So, yeah, be nice if I keep telling Democratic politicians that I will buy all of them a subscription to the economist, if they'll just make that essentially their program. You know, that's socially not

where I want it to be. It's a bit to the left of where I am on a lot of issues, but that is pretty decent on, you know, trade and fiscal probity and the rule of law and things like that. You can be that party if you want to. And for me, it seems like that's a natural place for them to land because those upper-income college-educated suburban and urban professionals who that kind of politics appeal to already either are Democrats or a training Democratic, and that's where a lot of the low-hanging fruit is for them. The idea that they're going to go out and, you know, build a coalition based on farm voters is unlikely, although there's room for some progress there, I think, too. and it's worth keeping in mind the Democratic Party

was the rural and farmers party until really, really recently. I grew up not far from New Deal, Texas. There's a reason that town has that name. But they just don't know how to talk about this stuff because they're so stuck in this 1960s, 1970s, campus politics, class war, identity politics stuff that they don't know how to come out there

and do the thing they always talk about, which is this, you know, I hate the cliche kitchen table issues, but Bill Clinton made a lot of hay out of that stuff. He made a whole political career out of that stuff. It worked for them really, really well. And there's certainly room for some improvement there. And even though Trump had a really good year in the last election, there's a lot of close districts and states out there still. And even with all the gerrymandering and all that, you know, you start adding three, four percent here or there.

You're flipping some states. You're changing the way things play out in the electoral college. But Democrats, fortunately for Republicans, are almost in. dumb as the Republicans are. Well, Trump has, I think, still in their thunder on a lot of these issues. I had a conversation about just this a week or two ago with a very smart, long-time Republican consultant who said, if you want to understand sort of Donald Trump's policy agenda, go look at Dick Gephardt's run for president in 1988, and you'll find tremendous overlap, but I think there's a lot of truth to that. I believe I actually wrote that essay in the,

in the dispatch, by the way, that Trump has Dick Gephardt. The Gebbhart, I should read the stuff we publish at the dispatch. Yeah, you should try it out for time to time. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the dispatch podcast. If you're still overpaying for wireless, it's time to say yes to saying no. At Mint Mobile, their favorite word is no, no contracts, no monthly bills, no overages, no hidden fees, no BS. Here's why saying yes to making the switch and getting premium wireless for $15 a month is a great step. With Mint Mobile plans start at just $15 a month, all with high-speed data, plus unlimited talk and text on the nation's largest 5G network.

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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 in 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. Before we return to the roundtable, I want to let you know what's going on elsewhere here at the dispatch. This week, I joined Jonah Goldberg on his remnant podcast for the annual State of the Dispatch episode. We discussed our SCOTUS blog acquisition, what the free press CBS buyout means for us and the impact of cultural and political shifts on institutions. There were also, as

usual, a few insults thrown about. Search for the remnant in your podcast app and hit the follow button. Now let's jump back into the conversation here. Jonah, I want to move to our second topic and sort of a big one. And it's looking at the increased militarization of law enforcement across the country, or at least the increased perceptions of that. And we're recording this Thursday morning, and as luck would have it, we had a terrific morning dispatch this morning on exactly these issues, and I want to start by just reading the first paragraph of that. During the first 10 months of Donald Trump's presidency, the National Guard has been deployed

or ordered to five U.S. cities. This started with Los Angeles in Washington, D.C., in June and August, respectively. At the start of October, National Guard troops deployed to three. new cities, Memphis, Chicago, and Portland. And the long, very well-reported item goes on to detail. It's a legal case that Donald Trump is making for this, the cultural argument that Trump is making for this, and sort of walking through what experts, national security experts, experts in civil military failures are saying about this. But I want to just start by taking a sort of a big step back and looking at perceptions of this. If you pay attention,

attention to the news. Not that many people watch nightly news anymore, the evening network news, but if you do, you see these images of often masked U.S. troops, ICE agents, sometimes the troops are in camos with big guns, walking through cities, throwing people on the ground, dodging bricks or things that are being thrown at them by protesters. And this, feels like something that's very different than what we've seen in the recent past. I wonder if you think it is different? Is this dramatically different than what we've seen? And what's the Trump administration's long game here?

What is Donald Trump trying to do by doing these things? So I think it is different. And I think it's very frustrating to talk about. It's very frustrating to debate because you have so many different tracks of bad faith. and one of the only places where you get, to me it is very reminiscent of the effort to steal the election in 2020. Insofar as the things the Goober's say at four seasons landscaping or on Jesse Waters' show are at complete odds with the things lawyers will say in court.

And thank God for courts because they actually have this rule that if you lie to a judge or you make bad faith arguments, you can get in a lot of trouble. And so it tends to make lawyers in court, not on TV, but in court kind of honest, because they don't want to lose their license and they don't want to get sanctioned and they want to protect their reputation. And so there's not a lot of insurrection talk inside courtrooms. There's a lot of insurrection talk on TV. There's a lot of insurrection talk from the Oval Office, which is wildly irresponsible. You know, Pam Bondi now is, you know, saying that Antifa is no different than MS-13, that the No King's Rally thing is, you know, wink, wink, nod, maybe a terrorist network, you know, there's an incredible amount of irresponsible rhetoric out there that I think we have not seen before, not at this level. And if we have seen it before, we didn't have the kind of communication infrastructure.

that would make it as bad, right? Who knows what Andrew Jackson said to a room full of 50 people? But Andrew Jackson with social media is a different thing. So in terms of the motives, to borrow the title of Nick Catogeo's newsletter, I think a lot of it is a boiling frog thing. Explain that. What do you mean by that? Well, so first of all, in real life, this is not true,

but apocryphly, the idea is if you throw a frog into a bot-up, boiling water, it'll jump out to save itself. But if you put a frog in a cold pot of water and you slowly turn up the heat, it will notice and it'll boil to death. Again, not true, but figuratively, the idea, what I mean by that is Trump talks about so much stuff. There's so many things that Trump would talk about a lot to normalize the idea, to intercept it into people's heads.

He did this with the election stuff. Well, if it's, you know, I won't question. the outcome if I win, but if I lose, it's probably going to be because they stole it. Because there's no way I can lose without them stealing. And he would say that over and over again, he would get his useful people, you know, his surrogates to say the same thing over and over and over again. They would build up this permission structure, this environment, all those kind of stuff so that when he finally did it, everyone was like, well, he said he would do it and you

weren't as outraged by it. I think by the time he actually invokes the Insurrection Act, and there are very few lawyer, very few Trump watchers I know left who don't think he eventually will, I think a lot of people are going to be like, wait, didn't he do that already? Right? Because that was the point of sending the troops into D.C. That's the point of getting them to go into Memphis. That's why he didn't initially send them into Chicago's because he couldn't get the court. He couldn't hit the legal threshold. But he keeps talking about it. He keeps dipping his toe and then his ankle. And eventually he's going to call for the insurrection act where i'm cloudier in my own opinion about

this is what the end game is to get to your question um there are people of good faith who think it's all you know the road to autocracy and all of that stuff and we talked about this on the remnant steve this week you know even if i don't believe that at a hundred percent what percentage am i supposed to believe that until i have to take it seriously right if it's a 10 percent chance that's true? Should I be freaking out? Is there a 20% chance to that true? I don't know. But one of the reasons why it's murky is Trump likes the appearance of being a strong man so much more than the actual work that goes into being a strong man. And so if he can get the headlines, if he can get the praise, if he can get the credit for something, I don't think

he cares that much about the substance. He just wants people to think it. And so he didn't end crime for all time in Washington, D.C., but he likes that people think that. He likes to think that. And so it's entirely possible that a lot of this is performative and atmospheric rather than with some really nefarious endgame. The opposite scenario, which again is short of autocracy, is he's going to, he's looking for pretext to send troops into major urban areas. in advance of the midterm elections to intimidate voting and to claim certain votes were invalid and seize the voting machines or who knows what else.

But I think people always forget that one of the things Trump, Trump does not have concrete plans all the time. What he likes is the idea of having his options. And so to the extent he is a plan to be an autocrat, it's a plan to have that be an option if and when he needs it. rather than a hard like this is and then i will seize the radio stations and rule for a thousand years kind of thing i've always said that the the best everyone wants to do the whole is he hitler thing he's not hitler right but um one perone is sort of my choice in so far as one perone

really liked the pageantry and aesthetics of fascism he just didn't want to do all the have all the drama of killing a lot of people and like like in like and like and like and like and pissing all all the oligarchs and all that kind of stuff. He just wanted everyone to praise him and say he was a strong man. He didn't want to do the work. And I think there's something of that in Trump as well. And what bothers me is when I say this, people say, oh, you're defending him. And I'm saying, no, I think he could be doing 80% less of what he's doing.

And people should be more freaked out and more pissed off than they are. But at the same time, I don't think people should lose their minds quite yet. And so it's very murky for me to figure out. exactly what the end goal is, because I don't think he has one. So, Megan, if, I mean, I'm not sure I'm as reassured as Jonah maybe wants me to be by the Juan Perron comparison. Melania would look great on some balconies saying, don't cry for me, Washington, D.C., by the way. Megan, if we don't know, if we can't determine whether Donald Trump has these plans,

and I do think, I point, I've done this before, I'll do it again now, I point to the period between the November 2020 election and when he finally left office as a good indication of what he's willing to do. That period took us from theoretical to very practical. And, you know, according to Mark Esper, he wanted to shoot protesters in the legs, he wanted to seize ballot boxes, he wanted the military deployed in the streets across the country. So again, I don't think this was, this is any longer theoretical. But let's assume that, um, we can't assign a big plan, that Donald Trump doesn't have a long-term strategy on this. It seems to me that Stephen Miller does, that other people around him probably do.

And Donald Trump often does what Stephen Miller wants him to do. And if you look at just the rhetoric that Stephen Miller has been using to describe what I would consider to be, and I say this as somebody with a 30-year history of criticizing lefty nonprofit groups, But not terribly violent left-wing groups. They're reorganizing the IRS to go after left-wing groups. They're talking about George Soros as a terrorist. If it's Stephen Miller and others who have these plans, should we be reassured that Donald Trump himself doesn't want to do this

or doesn't yet know if he wants to do this? A little bit, I think, yes, because Donald Trump is whimsical. You can be a Donald Trump advisor. you can have his ear and then 10 minutes later you do something that makes him feel embarrassed and you're gone right now do I think

that this should already have happened to Stephen Miller long air these days we now find ourselves in yes but I actually then I do think that it matters that Trump has authoritarian instincts does not have a plan

does not have the self-discipline and this is why like I've now spent 10 years yelling and being yelled at by lefties who are like, why won't you point out the parallels to Hitler? Why are you dismissing these? And it's like, look, first of all, we're now, depending on how you want to count 10 or 5 years into Trump's reign.

At this point, on the most conservative estimate, Hitler was, had full control of the German government, had made the Hitler youth compulsory, had, you know, he had militias that he was well underway with his campaign of persecuting the Jews and he was preparing to an ex-Austria. at, you know, at a similar point in his career,

Trump is wrestling with the district court for control of the Oregon National Guard, right? And I think that that, it's not just what are his instincts, it's also that our institutions are a lot stronger. That said, saying, and I think the reason not to say that Trump is Hitler, is that then, or he might be Hitler, or we're getting close to Hitler, is that then a year in people look around

and they're like, it still doesn't look a lot, like Nazi Germany, and you are losing your ability to make the arguments about the things that are terrible and that matter and that are much worse in his second term than they were in the first. And look, I have friends who were never Trump in 2016, voted for him in 2024 for a bunch of reasons and figured it would be like his first term. And I was like, where his first term was going, not a good direction, right? But they thought he would be more constrained than he was. And the answer is that the people around him spent four years building and executing a plan. I think it is what he's doing is terrible on a number of levels and does

actually reflect the tendency of his first term, right, is to push, push, push, push, push. Just try a little bit, try a little bit, see how far you can go. I think at the moment, though, he really is still stopped by the Supreme Court in ways that are he could try to pack his own court I guess but the Supreme Court's not going to let him invoke the Insurrection Act and start collecting ballot boxes from cities

they are not going to allow that now he could just say they have made their order let them enforce it but that's a constitutional crisis of a different time and I think there are probably some voters who would get off the bus at that

point, right, who would be more suspicious. Right now, he is legitimizing these things by fighting crime, which people really hate and which Democrats really did let get out of control, and which Democrats also just more broadly got on the wrong side of, right? It's not just that progressive cities could have run their police departments better. It's that you had a bunch that progressives did not, Democrats did not shut down fast and hard enough that people people who were saying defund the police and associate institutions that are heavily associated in the public mind with the Democratic Party, like the mainstream media did not do that. And instead, like, NPR is running a kind of fawning interview with a woman who wrote a book

in defense of looting, right? Bad look, guys. And so I think people are pretty suspicious of Democrats on this issue. And so when Trump sends troops in a city, a lot of people who don't really have like a strong sense of democratic institutions as being more than I get to vote for president or I get to vote for my congressman, right?

That's how most people think about democracy. All of the kind of complicated norms and institution stuff, most people don't think that hard about it. But I do think that if he really tries to go in and interfere with elections in a blatant way, like, that's the part of democracy that Americans really understand.

It's like, I get to vote for president. And I think that the Supreme Court will slap it down, and I think he will not have as much freedom to move as they hope if he tries something like that. That said, all of this is really bad. It is worrying in its own right.

We are legitimizing things that should not be legitimized. We are breaking institutions that we need. And, like, these things are bad enough in themselves we are in a bad bad place we have masked agents running around like their frigging you know western banditos um throwing people to the ground treating them like they're hardened terrorists when they're like trying to sell their landscaping services in the walmart parking lot um that is and and legitimizing that kind of use of real abuse of law enforcement power one of the

it is most disturbing to me is the way the ICE agents act against people who are not really resisting them, right? Like, they're yelling at them. And I'm sorry you don't like being yelled at. I don't like being yelled at either. And, like, my job is to get yelled at on the internet all day. But that's not an excuse for some of the stuff I've seen. Similarly, the masks, look, the DA agents,

I actually get why they wear masks. The cartels will put hit. It's on DEA agents. The landscapers in the Walmart parking lot don't have those kinds of connections. You do not need to dress up like a bank robber to arrest those people. And that legitimization of a force of people

who are above the law who have no accountability, that's super worrying. You want to mask them, you got to put their names, their badge numbers, whatever it is, like right front and center, I want it on the mask.

right if that's your excuse that you need to avoid and i think that that there needs to be the idea that they're creating this state that has less and less accountability is it self-worrying and i think unfortunately something that is hard to explain how these tiny incremental things to an ordinary voter who's just got other stuff to do and is not deep in the history of authoritarian regimes and never will be so just very two quick points on that um I, on the, just because the nerd of me, will not let it go without pointing out that not only was Hitler trying to annex Austria, but Austria wanted to be annexed. Fair enough. And so did Greenland.

It was, it was consenting. Yeah. And on the people who voted, who the anti-Trump people who voted for Trump in 2024, I had the, it's one of the very few things I've been right about, which was that I kept saying to these people and I said it all. on various podcasts that if your best case scenario is also your most likely scenario, your analysis is probably wrong, right? And they thought the best case scenario was that Trump was going to be just like the first term, and that was the most likely one. And it turned out that they were absolutely wrong about that.

Where I was wrong on this stuff is, like, I really didn't think Trump would have it in him logistically political will-wise. I didn't think the American people would tolerate it, the idea of dragging people off the street and throwing them in vans the way they are tolerating it. I'm not saying everyone likes it, but they don't dislike it so much that it's causing the kind of outrage

that is causing Republicans to back off or anything. And that's kind of shameful. In some cases, it's extremely shameful. But I think part of it is to get to Megan's point, but people are tuning out politics to a massive degree. They resent the way Trump tries to occupy their headspace, whether they like them or policies or not. They're just tuning it out, right?

And I think that's, we're not here, thank God, talking about the government shutdown. But that's one of the reasons I think why Republicans are getting more blame than Republicans that thought they would for the government shutdown. It is obviously Chuck Schumer's fault. It is obviously the Democrats who have started the shutdown. But the body language of this administration for the shutdown is pro shutdown. And the body language of this administration for nine months is pro-shutdown. chaos and, and, and disorder and all the rest.

And so when you tell normies who have tuned out politics that this latest dysfunction in Washington is actually not Trump's fault, they're like, yeah, right. You know, and I think that that's sort of one of the things that I think people were very plugged into politics, cannot comprehend normal people not being very plugged into politics. And it really blows up their analysis from time to time. So, Kevin, I don't, I don't necessarily. agree with Jonah that Republicans are sort of losing the PR fight over the shutdown. I think actually they're doing pretty well.

But like Jonah, I agree with... I'm just saying that the polling shows that people blame Republicans slightly more than Democrats, which they shouldn't if you're just paying attention to the actual details. They do. I think it's, yeah, I think it's even depending on how the polling questions asked. I think Republicans are doing well, in part because Trump was able to do things like go to the Middle East and get a lot of attention that shows him being president, shows him at least you know, he's functioning if the government more broadly isn't.

But like Jonah, I don't want to get involved in a deep discussion about the shutdown. But Kevin, I guess my question is a little bit slightly different view than the one that Megan and Joan are describing with Normies. I think it is true that part of the reason that this is not more alarming to people is because there are people who have just checked out. They're living their lives. They're not paying attention to this. But isn't it also partly a problem of our science? I load media. I mean, some people just aren't being confronted with the facts of what's happening with

ice. I mean, if you watch Fox News, you see video of protesters throwing things at ICE agents, and you hear stories about the threats to ICE agents. And I think some of those threats are real. I mean, as Megan said, I mean, I think the cartel stuff is real. If you, on the other hand, consume a different kind of media, you're seeing all sorts of videos of these masked agents throwing people to the ground, some of whom, many of whom, turn out to be U.S. citizens.

They haven't committed any violations. And it's basically a competition of differing realities or differing perceptions. Does that contribute to this? And if people could see sort of what's happening, would they be more alarmed? No. In fact, I completely reject the premise.

of your question. It's not that people don't know what's going on. It's easy to find out what's going on in the world. If you're curious about what's going on in the world, it's a golden age of consumption of raw data and media and such. The problem is people like it. Americans like this authoritarian stuff. They like the displays of mass men walking around in the streets

as long as the perception is it's hurting their enemies and the people they hate. This isn't something that's being done to the American people. something that a substantial number of the American people celebrate and embrace and love. This guy tried to overthrow the government in the United States in 2021, and the same people who elected him the last time elected him this time. I don't have any hair to pull out, but sometimes my colleagues here, I very rarely strongly have very strong disagreements within you. But when I hear Jonas saying, like, well, there's X percent that he's going to be, you know, an authoritarian or an autocrat or something. There's 100 percent because he's already that guy.

He's already using every aspect of the federal government that he can to punish his enemies, reward his friends, and engage in open corruption. And it's not true that he doesn't have a plan. That is his plan. It's to take every opportunity to hurt the people he hates on behalf of the people who want to see those people hurt and to reward his friends and cronies. That's the whole plan. The question isn't whether he's going to be an autocrat.

The question really is when he starts giving illegal orders to law enforcement in the military, how many elements of those organizations are going to obey and go along with him? And then what do we do? What do we do when there's a mob of 100,000 people surrounding the Capitol of the White House? Donald Trump's saying I'm still the president and some elements of law enforcement and the military backing him. We may just have a definitional crisis here. Like when I hear people say he's going to be an autocrat, I hear them saying he's going to be like Putin and he's going to have his political enemies thrown off, the run out windows and, you know, and things other than defenestration. that there, you know, that it's going to be the selective use of violence to maintain control

and to work his will, right? I agree with you that he tried to steal an election on January 6th. He has not done any, if the definition of autocrat is extrajudicial, extra constitutional violence and appropriation, he has not done that. Of course he has. I thought a Presbyterian minister gets shot in the face with a pepper ball by an ice agent. just the other day for protesting, guy in a collar. Fair enough.

Okay, look, fair enough. Like, he did not say, go get that Presbyterian minister. The emergency is here. We're not waiting for the emergency to get here. The emergency's already here. My point was less about, my point was not that he wouldn't want to be, or that he doesn't, would not see,

my point would have nothing to do with his good character. Sure, I know. Right. It has to do with the fact of that the work required to defy courts, the risk reward for him is it's just not worth the effort at least not yet right if the stakes get down to another January 6th type moment

where he thinks what do I have to lose I do not put it past them and then I do worry about the things that you're talking about one of my favorite Jonah Goldberg lines is that of course Trump isn't Hitler Hitler could have got rid of Obamacare but the fact that we have a lazy and stupid autocrat

doesn't mean that we don't have an autocrat it means we have a lazy and stupid autocrat fair i would just simply say that he he can only actually be i'm not talking about autocrat in his heart right he i'm talking about he cannot operate like the kind of autocrat that people are when they compare him to putin never mind hitler right that kind of stuff that requires the things that you're talking about will will people follow his orders and part of the problem with trump is he's a coward and so he'll say things like i saw him he was saying in the oval office yesterday uh I hope they look at Shifty Shift and all these other people.

I hope they do this. I hope they do that, right? He doesn't want to be seen in public actually ordering the things that he wants done. He's passive aggressive about it. And that's bad enough. And we were saying earlier, like, if it's 10% of one perone, people should be freaking out. I was just writing yesterday about, you know, Edmund Burke used to say this wonderful thing about Americans, about how they would spot the whiff of threats to freedom, you know, far on the distant

horizon and they would snuff them out in their infancy, we're not those people anymore. And it pisses me off. And that doesn't mean that necessarily were totalitarian or authoritarian state yet. But it used to be that if we were one toe over the line towards that, people would lose their minds. I would much rather live in that country than the country we were in now where you and I are arguing about like, well, it depends. what you mean by authoritarian. And that's messed up. I think maybe we can embrace the healing pair of and here

that we can square this circle, bring us all back into harmony by saying Trump has autocratic instincts and is attempting to do autocratic things, I think often at the behest of people in his administration who have a much clearer idea of wishing of what they would like their autocracy to look like, he does not yet have autocratic powers

where he can just act without fear of constraint. No, look, even autocrats are a little bit constrained. I love Bruce Buenos de Mistquita talking about how, you know, even Hitler was afraid of the Junckerfrau, right? You still had to be making kitchenware at the height of World War II because you couldn't

couldn't let those German housewives not have the cooking pots they needed but that he doesn't he is still constrained in a way now would he like to get rid of those constraints there's kind of an empirical question can he and I think I am still on the side

of he can't I'm still on the side of like really going for the gusto and deploying troops against American citizens in a which I mean there is a reason that they mostly have used these troop deployments as a cover for ice operations because the sad truth is people don't care as much if you violate the rights of non-American citizens

and people who are here illegally. I'm still on the side of probably he can't, but I don't want to be guessing. I shouldn't have to guess. I'm not even sure you're right about that, though, in the sense that take the TikTok thing. Seems like a minor thing. But there is a law that says this company has to go away.

Trump ignored the law with it. impunity continues to because he's got a buddy who's an investor in TikTok and because he cares about social media and because he wanted to hold it out there as a plum to use his reward for people to potentially support him and he got away with it right he just said well it's the law sure but i'm the president so screw it i am against this but i put that in the bucket of actually pretty normal politics shall we go through the ways in which joe biden was like yeah i mean sure i can't legally forgive all the student loans. But here is my 80th legal argument for doing something that I can't. Or Obama's DACA order. I can't do this. But now I guess I can. Sure. And we can find

presidents breaking the law and ignoring it all the way back to, you know, Andrew Jackson and before. Yeah. But whatever Joe Biden did, whatever Barack Obama did, we have a guy who's already once tried to overthrow the government with troops in the street ignoring the law. This is a bad combination. And this doesn't really leave a lot of room, I think, a wiggle room for, you know, well, what are the chances he turns out really bad? You know, it's it also doesn't buy a lot of goodwill for Trump, right? I mean, that's part of the problem where I'm more on Team Kevin on this. I get really, really frustrated listening to some conservatives who I generally agree with on an issue-to-issue kind of basis, but who will cabin different things that Trump's doing as if they're not part of a broader, most. You have to look at the whole thing.

Yes, exactly. Like, you know, oh, well, you know, he has every right to get rid of the inspectors general at the Pentagon, right? But I'm not, I'm just saying the TikTok deal well bad is actually a very normal kind of bad. And I think that you do have to think about, you know, the, you know who else liked dogs kind of accusation of like, yes, he is doing a, when he is doing normal bad president stuff, I am inclined to not try to weave that in because I think then you very quickly get bogged down in arguments about, well, what about Joe Biden? He's doing a bunch of stuff that Joe Biden didn't do. Let's focus on that, right? We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back shortly.

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We're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump right in. Not worth your time today. I was looking for something that would cause Jonah to wince as he has in the past when he doesn't like my not worth your time. You mean when you're not worth your time, suggestions are bad when I wins. But anyway, go on. I mean, in your view. I'm not sure that this one fits. today, but I want to start with Megan because she's got to run. As I look at this group here, we're all pretty old. As Megan pointed out, we're all around in the 1970s. We have memories that maybe some of our listeners don't, and we've been writing for more

than 100 years collectively. That's a lot of pieces, blog posts, what have you. Sometimes you know long before publication when something, you've written is going to hit. People are going to pay attention to it. People are going to share it with friends. It's going to be a thing. It'll generate discussion, whether it's a reported piece or what have you.

Other times, you just crank something out to finish it, and you're surprised that it has the life that it has. And my question to you all over the course of these long careers that we've each had, what piece have you written where the reaction to it has surprised you most? Maybe it was something you just dashed off in an hour and it got a lot of pickup. Maybe it was something that you reported that you thought people wouldn't find interesting. Anyway, Megan, I start with you. The most red thing I have ever written was written in 10 minutes while squatting on the floor of a train station.

And it was a bomb threat. my confession to the murder up it was actually when Osama bin Laden was killed this post went via this Martin Luther King quote went viral and I was looking at this a weird thing about me is that I'm pretty good at spotting fakes and I don't know how I do it I just look at fake quotes and like I somehow know that they're fake I'm not 100% I don't want to say but like I have a much higher

than normal batting average on this stuff. And I looked at this quote and I was like, that does not sound right. There is something wrong with that quote. It was a little too on the nose. It was like, I will not, like, I like hate evil, but I will not mourn the death of anyone,

not even like an enemy. And I was like, this is just a little too on the nose. Like he's writing from the CNN Green Room. And so I very quickly looked through his speeches, tried to find it. Didn't, the quote was nowhere. And so I wrote a really quick blog post saying this looks like it's fake. And it had already gone viral because Penn Gillette had tweeted it.

And so basically what happened was people kept pasting the fake quote to Facebook or Twitter or some other social media. And then people would immediately post a reply that was my thing. And so I got like millions of viewers. on this 10-minute blog post. And that, I guess, is going to be my legacy to history. That qualifies. Kevin? Yeah, it's maddening.

I will sometimes go and work really, really hard on a piece that'll just kind of sink under the way. It's barely a ripple. When I was at National Review, by far the most red thing I wrote was a little piece that I wrote probably in 10 minutes, like Megan was saying, maybe less, about how people like Anthony Scaramucci all talk like they just watched Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross for the 60th time. That was a great piece.

Well, it was a little dashed off thing. And something like 2 million people read that in the course of a few days, which is not normal for my stuff. You know, I find that the tragedy of my writing career is that I want to be Tom Wolfe, but I'm Don Rickles, and I'm good in insults. It's not just the haircut, you know, it's the whole Rickles thing. And so people really respond to you pieces I write. are, you know, insulting.

I wrote this, you know, kind of these bookends of the first Trump administration. The first one was Whitless Ape Rides Escalator. And then the last one was Wittless Ape Rides Helicopter. And those were both super, super popular. In fact, they had me on Morning Joe for the second one. And it was the weirdest television appearance I've ever done because I came on and Mika started just reading the piece.

And then she just read the whole piece. And then that was the end of the segment. And I didn't say anything. thank you they just wanted you there for eye candy yeah i mean obviously i'm the guy you get for for that and um yeah so it's um it it's actually a little bit depressing i'm i'm i'm sure you guys are running this too where you you actually go out and do your reporting and interviews and stuff and do all the hard kind of journalism and sometimes those pieces have a long tail you know people still read them and talk about them a long time later and i've had some of those too but um

in terms of the stuff that really just snaps and crackles and pops um yeah it's me saying that uh step Miller is a mayonnaise-addictiveness for Ratu. Jonah, you haven't done a lot of actual reporting. I have not. But undoubtedly, you've had these experiences. Oh, for sure. I mean, the one that fits sort of what Megan and Kevin have been talking about would be a dashed-off blog post title.

You can still find it called To Hell With You People. And it was, I want to say it was in the middle of, like, I could be misremembering, but it was like the 2013 government shutdown or something like that. And we had just been through the Jared Loeffner, Gabby Gifford shooting. Yeah. Where everybody and their sister insisted that violent rhetoric, I mean, some of these arguments are not new, right? That's why the Charlie Kirk debate was kind of fresh, where one of the reasons why I was frustrating. But everyone, you know, Paul Krugman talking about eliminationist rhetoric and Sarah Palin was responsible.

because she had put target symbols on a congressional map and I had written a bunch about it, a lot of people written a bunch about it. And the sanctimony and the basically blood libel that people were using had really pissed me off,

but I thought the debate was over. And then I start watching this thing on Today Show about how Republicans are hostage takers and they're like Hamas because they're holding the government they're terrorists and all those kinds of stuff.

And I just banged out this thing about, you know, to hell with you people. You've been telling me all this time about how dangerous, violent rhetoric is. And the second it's useful to you, you're using it. And it was one of those just like hypocrisy policing things. And I remember talking to Rich Lowry about it. They'd never seen, we used to have that software with Chartbeat, where you could watch as you got the link. And it just went nuts on social media.

But that's not the one I wanted to talk about. The one I would that I, when you ask the question that came to mind very quickly was, because I often talk about this when I talk to people about the dangers that one of the things that people don't appreciate is how much a lot of writers are afraid of their audiences and don't want to piss off their audiences. And that's like the gateway drug to audience capture. And I once wrote a piece, I saw some amazing statistic that feral cats, you know, basically just street cats. are responsible, directionally right about these numbers, are responsible for something like 500 million bird deaths in Minnesota alone. I mean, like the amount of birds that, I mean, it's just a staggering amount of birds

that feral cats kill, just staggering. And I sort of wrote a kung and cheeky kind of column where I used the Shakespeare quote about first kill all the lawyers in the headlines like first kill all the cats. I'm actually not in favor of killing all the cats, but I do think, you know, like spayed and neutering these things makes a lot of sense. And I thought it was just sort of like, I thought the statistics alone would be, were enough for a 750-word newspaper column because it was a syndicated column. And just baking the point that, you know, these things are not just cute and fuzzy things that they have consequences for the environment or whatever. And I can't even remember what my larger argument was. I got buried with outrage from the cat.

The cat lobby, like, guys were like... They can be intense. Well, like, one, like, I remember one guy saying... Guys? The cat lobby is guys, you're saying? Yeah, that was the thing that shocked me. It was, like, also dudes. And there's this one guy who, like, literally said,

with lots of MFers and all that kind of stuff in it, um, all right, if you feel so strong about cats, the next time the birds shit all over my truck, you better come out here and clean it for me, right? he wanted to kill all the cats because he didn't want to kill all the birds because they crapped on his car and like but like people just lost their minds and like and and to this day like whenever I talk about this or write about this or reference it I'm always like um and my cat loving readers I have nothing but deep respect for you and I love all cats and I wish them no harm because I'm

terrified of these people I've I've written things about Islamic terrorism where the response didn't scare me as much as this thing about cats. So there you have it. Are you comparing cat owners to pro jihadis? Yeah, you're going to get so much, so much feedback from this conversation. I do not want to kill all the cats. Just want to be clear about that. So I have one mine, I think, Jonah, I'm pretty sure you've heard the story. I don't think I've told it here before, but it's very much along the lines of what Kevin was saying. I think I had just, if I'm remembering this correctly, I had just come off a long, months-long reporting effort on Yucca Mountain, which was this place in rural Nevada where they

store were going to store. For the record, I did reporting from Yucca Manna as well. So I did do some reporting. But anyway, go on. It's good. There and Anwar, your two reported pieces ever. That's like 50% of them. But I'd learned the science. I spent, I spent endless hours reporting on this Yucca Mountain piece. We went and wrote a big cover story for the Weekly Standard on Yucca Mountain and the risks and talked to risk analysts, scientists went and toured the place. I even, to sort of sexy up the piece, visited a local brothel outside of Yucca Mountain that was sort of my attempt at making this a YIMBY story.

Yes, in my backyard story, because the local. That costs that shirt at the brothel. The local prostitutes wanted the business. So while a lot of people in Nevada were saying no, they were saying, yes, please do this. So I did all this reporting. I thought this was going to be a huge, you know, like a definitive Yucca Mountain story. And, you know, I don't know. I got like some letter from a Ph.D. at Yale who was a specialist in nuclear waste.

and like no other discernible response at all. And then a short time later, I got an email from my friend Matt Labash also at the weekly standard at the time. We used to have a column at the beginning of the weekly standard called The Casual, and you could use it to write about whatever you wanted to write about. It didn't matter. It's just sort of observations about culture or something in your life or color for characters, what have you.

And Matt was assigned to the casual for that week. the due date was Wednesday and he sent me an email. I think it was, you know, Tuesday afternoon saying, hey, I'm really, really sick. I'm not going to be able to do the casual. Can you write it for me? And so I had, you know, less than 24 hours to come up with an idea, execute it and crank it out. I didn't know what I was going to write. So I sent a note to some of my buddies in the area I was living in Northern Virginia at the time and said, hey, I need to come up with an idea for this column, if you guys will go out and get some beers with me and help me brainstorm, I'll buy the beers. So we went out in, you know, like the Ballston area, Roslyn area of northern Virginia. This is in

Arlington. And we walked around to various bars. We sort of had a beer. One went to another, had a beer at that place, went to another. And we talked about the things I could write about it. Over the course of that evening, the thing that I observed was that all of these places, had signs advertising old school Wisconsin beers, but none of them at the time served the old school Wisconsin beers. So they'd have signs advertising Paps Blue Ribbon or Schlitz or hams or what have you. And none of them actually sold the beer. So I actually got home that night and started a rant about how frustrating this was

that they had these signs and were advertising on the coolness of old school Wisconsin. beers, but didn't actually sell the old school Wisconsin beers. And this was before sort of PAPS made its big comeback. Schlitz made its big comeback. You could potentially tie those later comebacks to my writing this article. But I proposed at the end of the thing. I'm like, look, go to a grocery store, buy a case of Pabst, sell each one for a buck, and you will have doubled your money, something like that.

And it really was sort of the definition of a throwaway. piece like we had to fill the space in the magazine so i i did this and and we got i mean i can't remember exactly how many um actual letters but we got letters and emails everybody wrote and they all wanted to talk about their favorite beer that they drank growing up they can't get anymore and it became this sensation it was certainly the most uh i think it had to have been the the most widely good piece i wrote when i was at the weekly standard um which is a little sad. I mean, makes me think we shouldn't do all of the big slog reporting pieces and just publish rants.

Now, that would be sort of the opposite of what the dispatch does. And your piece, Kevin, your reported piece on Springfield got 800 billion views or something. I mean, it is the case that sometimes these deeply reported pieces also do well. In my head, I'm playing back, Steve Hayes, talking about how to sexy up a story. after talking about listening to, after talking about listening to six-month-old podcasts from the Louisiana Farm Bureau. I wanted, sometimes you just have to lead with a topic like that to demonstrate that we're very serious about our non-clickbait approach to news and analysis. I found, I found those podcasts very entertaining. I may actually continue to listen to some of those podcasts because I found them entertaining.

Interesting. I did a speech for the Illinois Farm Bureau a couple of years. ago. And talking to those guys was fascinating. Fantastic. Absolutely. And like one of the things I really took away from it was the way, the degree to which you just don't want to have a single megapolis city in your state. Like if you have a couple fine or you have a couple medium size ones fine, but Chicago is so dominant in the state that the farmers feel permanently aggrieved because they just do not have the pitiful clout and they gave me a stat i i don't know if it's entirely true but they said something like on a clear day something like 60% of the population of

illinois can see the sears tower just to show you how dense the population is around chicago um and so like by dense you mean population density i know you got this Wisconsin thing going on here but uh anyway that's neither here or there yeah i know i i spoke to a farm group last spring, I think, and it was fantastic, including a number of longtime dispatch members. So it was great, very rewarding. Thank you all for joining us on this episode of The Dispatch podcast. Please join us again next week. If you like what we're doing here, there are a few easy ways to support us.

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Shout out to a few folks who joined us as premium members this week. Tom, Peter, and John, we're glad to have you aboard. And as always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at Roundtable at the Dispatch.com. We read everything, even the ones from people who like Jonah don't like cats. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in, and a big thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Max Miller, Victoria Holmes, and Noah Hickney. We couldn't do it

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