The Dispatch Podcast - Vaccines and Visas | Roundtable

Episode Date: October 20, 2025

Steve Hayes is joined by John McCormack, Mike Warren, and Grayson Logue to discuss their recent reporting for The Dispatch on vaccine skepticism, immigration enforcement in Chicago, and Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice. The Agenda:—Pediatricians and vaccine refusal—2014 measles outbreak—ICE in Chicago—'Operation Midway Blitz'—Climate of fear—Pam Bondi at the DOJ—Young Republicans chat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. A new era of fitness is here. Introducing the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus, powered by Peloton IQ, built for breakthroughs

with personalized workout plans, real-time insights, and endless ways to move. Lift with confidence, while Peloton IQ counts reps, corrects form, and tracks your progress. Let yourself run, lift, flow, and go. Explore the new Peloton cross-training tread plus at OnePelaton.C.A. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. We're going to do something a little bit different for this Monday Dispac podcast. I had invited an all-star crew of Dispatch. writers to talk to us at somewhat greater length about pieces they've reported for the

dispatch. So with me today are Grayson Logue, John McCormick, and Mike Warren, each of whom authored, I think, a really terrific piece for us on different topics last week. And, you know, the course of the conversation with these guys about the pieces that they wrote, you know, some of them, Grayson mentioned to me that I asked him a question he mentioned to me that there was something he observed but didn't have a chance to get in the piece. There are always those kinds of things when we report out our pieces. So this is an opportunity to talk about what you've written, why it matters. And if you have things like that, let's talk about those things too. So I'm going to start by asking Grayson about his piece, then we'll move to John's piece,

then we'll move to Mike's piece. And the other panelists are free to join me in the questioning of our main author. Grayson, let's start with your piece. Terrific piece. I broke my I guess it was nearly like a three-month Twitter hiatus to tweet it out. I'm spending less time on Twitter these days, less time on social media these days. Steve, we're waiting for you to tweet out our pieces too, right? No, I know this is the problem. Well, this is, yes, this is one of the reasons why I haven't tweeted out anything. Because, Mike, you've written a number of pieces that could easily have earned that.

I love all my children equally. And John, you too. Good work, everybody. Okay, so we start with that premise. You've all done terrific work. Jonah does this with book authors. And I think it's actually very effective. Don't tell Jonah, I said that.

I don't ever want to be emulating Jonah in any way. But when he has book authors on, he asks them the question that he says he would always like to be asked, which is, what is your book about and why did you write it? So, Grayson, what is your piece about and why did you write it? Yeah. Well, first off, I feel a little confused about the fact that I'm the reason you're back on the bottle that is social media. The piece is about basically in a time of increasing vaccine skepticism where how you feel about vaccines or how the median person feels about vaccines is increasingly polarized and defined along ideological and political lines. How is your doctor? How is your pediatrician navigating that conflict and that skepticism showing up in the waiting room and with new patients out of practice. And I discovered, and I don't have kids yet, so I didn't have an experience this firsthand, but I'm sure a number of listeners have who do.

I discovered that a lot of pediatric practices across the country have policies of dismissal to deal with families that are refusing some, we're all vaccines. And what does a policy of dismissal mean? So it can be arranged. So at the high end, basically, if you are, a family and a practice, particularly if you're a new patient, but also if you're an existing patient, and you're refusing one vaccine on the childhood pediatric schedule, or maybe a few vaccines, or some that a practice considers, like, the most important of the most important

on the childhood schedule. If you're refusing those, then they can terminate their relationship with that family. And you've got to go find a doctor elsewhere. And there's tons of state rules and laws about how that process is done. You can't just, like, leave someone on the street if you're mid-medical care, like there's a transition process, but particularly when it comes to new families who are trying out a pediatrician or looking for a pediatrician for the first time, these policies will prevent them from joining the practice or becoming a patient if they're refusing to get these vaccines. Some of them are more harshly enforced than others, but according to a 2019 JAMA survey, 50% of like 51% of all pediatric practices have some type of dismissal

policy for families. why would a pediatric practice have a dismissal policy? Wouldn't you want to be seeing? I mean, aren't those kids in some ways more susceptible to disease, more vulnerable? Why would you want to dismiss them? Yeah, that's the crux of this debate. And something that I want to emphasize and try to get at in the article is that people of really good faith can come down on both sides at this issue. Like pediatricians, we were really trying, struggling with this as like a question of what's their duty as a doctor to provide like, the best care to children can come down for and against these policies. But they really started kind of in a different era of vaccine skepticism than when we are. Now they, like, became more popular starting about 10, 12 years ago. And they came in reaction to specific outbreaks that were happening. So a key turning point was like the 2014-2015 Disneyland measles outbreak and a pediatric office in Southern California that had kids who were part of that

operate come into their waiting room and have measles spread through their practice who were unvaccinated, those doctors felt really personally responsible for the spread of that illness because they had allowed a lot of kids into their practice to not get the measles vaccine. And they described it as kind of a complacency issue. If you don't think that measles is not circulating, you don't think it's that risky, like maybe I just won't get that extra shot. And so they viewed these policies as like a basically like a nudge, like a public policy nudge of their parents in our practice who aren't getting the measles shot. If we say we have this policy, you have to do it or else you have to go find a new doctor, most of them probably

just going to get the measles shot. And that's like the desired outcome, reduce the spread, protect the kids, like, that's all fine and dandy. But then that policy started cropping up at so many different practices across the country, including in places that didn't have any outbreaks of like vaccine preventable disease. And as vaccine hesitancy has moved, I think, this is painting with broad strokes, away from a complacency or maybe is this really necessary perspective to more one of like active distrust and fear and anger post the pandemic, the policy that might have nudged a parent in a good direction before really can like isolate and drive people away from sound medical institutions and more into like echo chambers of the

internet or more suspect naturopathic doctors that aren't engaged. in the best medicine, and certainly some of the board-certified pediatricians that I spoke to would agree that they are engaging in the best medicine. So that's kind of how the polls of this have swung. It started very understandably in reaction to outbreaks and doctors dealing with the real consequences of not having kids fully vaccinated, but it's really proliferated, I would argue, beyond the actual threat of individual outbreaks in some communities across the countries. And so how in your reporting, did you find that pediatricians are dealing with this? Like, what are the tradeoffs? I mean,

I thought to me that was one of the real strengths of your reporting was that you did treat this as a good faith argument and you allowed people to sort of walk through the tradeoffs. I mean, so much of the public policy debates in the country today pick your issue. It seems to me are flawed because they don't involve a candid and open discussion of tradeoffs. I mean, almost every public policy that we talk about has tradeoffs. There are good reasons to do it and bad reasons to do it. Your piece actually spent quite a bit of time on the tradeoffs and specifically what physicians themselves thought about the tradeoffs and academics who have studied this.

So how would you describe those tradeoffs and what did the physicians you spoke to, pediatricians you spoke to, decide to do in these cases? Yeah, absolutely. One big tradeoff is simply just time. and resources. So if you are accepting a large portion of families who are questioning or outright skeptical or even hostile towards vaccines, but you need to have those conversations through intro visits and follow-up visits as a child goes from birth to getting older of like, hey, like the risk profile has increased with this particular area. And I know you

didn't want to do this last year, but we need to have this conversation again. That takes up a lot of time. And I don't know if you've been to a doctor's office recently, but they're always press for time. They're always stacked up trying to get to the next patient. And so if they have to spend 45 minutes discussing something with one patient that wouldn't even be a discussion with another patient, it's a big drain. It takes away from other patients that they can see throughout the day. And let me pause you right there because I think that's a really important point. The business of medicine is built on time. If you're spending 45 minutes with one patient, because you care about the patient in question and you want to, for instance, convince them about the hepatitis,

B vaccine, to discuss the importance of that, to take them from being, you know, skeptical or refusing to take the vaccine to get them to consider it, that does often take time. And time is money. I wrote a piece back in our old days at the Weekly Standard about medical coding and how much time it took for physicians to code each interaction and with each visitor, with each patient, And just that time it took to write down the codes and assign the codes to the patients for the discussions about the different maladies that they were treating took forever and was a tremendous cost drain on these doctors who, after all, are in business for a reason. So your point, if you're spending 45 minutes, if you're a doctor and you see, you know, fill in the blank patients, 30 patients in a day or that's your goal, and you spend 45 minutes, not actually doing stuff that's, billable, but just having a long conversation is good for you and for the patient because

you may make progress in convincing that patient or those parents to do something that you think is in both their interests and in the interest of public health. However, it costs time. I mean, it takes time and time is money. Yeah. And vaccines are often like a break-even or a money loser for practices even with high uptick just because it's really expensive to store this and make sure that all of the doses are safe and held under the proper conditions. But yeah, you're reimbursed often less for those conversations than just delivering the vaccine from insurance companies, right? And so not only does it take less time to just give a vaccine for someone who's already down with taking it, you're getting reimbursed for a lengthier, a less for a

lengthier time conversation with someone. And another wrinkle to that, too, that just is, again, some of these practical things is stuff that could have been done by a nurse practitioner or other technicians in your practice. They aren't always equipped to have the in-depth conversations that a doctor is equipped to. So that's your, not only is it something that takes you more time, it's something you wouldn't necessarily even have to do someone else and you could spread that across different, different folks on your staff. So that's one of the big things. The other question, too, of is how much increased exposure do you actually have at an individual clinic level by having a big portion of voluntarily unvaccinated kids.

Are you putting at risk younger children who can't receive a vaccine yet or an immunocompromised children? The folks that I spoke to, the researchers who work on this, don't think that that's a very strong argument in the aggregate. But again, at an individual clinic level, that could be true. Like, whooping cough cases could be going around in your community. So it's the type of thing that once it proliferates and the aggregate, it might not be having the effect that you you think it has, but in an individual clinic level, that's a hard call, that's a hard call to make. Literally just by sharing a waiting room is what you're talking about. That's right. That's right. That kind of cross exposure. Hey, Grayson, I wanted to ask about the kind of conversation

that is going on within the medical community about what the right thing to do is for these pediatricians because it strikes me that there is a feeling. I know it's a feeling in the public health community and it's a feeling in a lot of parts of the medical community. A lot of these conversations were supposed to have been settled a long time ago, and now everyone's having to sort of have these conversations again. And there's a kind of frustration in general with almost having to sort of reteach lessons that past generations had learned on this. I'm curious kind of what you picked up on, on how doctors are, you know,

who meet together and have conversations and conventions and how they are speaking to each other about what the right thing to do is and how to have more productive conversations with patients who are skeptical of vaccinations. Yeah. I think that your average doctor, things have gotten, for the segment of the population that is tuned in and is like on the vaccine skeptical to hard anti-vaccine spectrum, the conversations have just gotten so much more combative for a lot of those people. So I think your average pediatrician would be totally fine if someone was just, I just have a few

questions. And like, I'm sure, like, this painting with very broad strokes, like, I'm sure there are bad experiences people have had in like a bad day with a bad doctor. I totally understand that. But if that's where the conversation was, I think they'd be okay with that would be annoying. It's something costly. But one of the doctors I spoke with at this practice in North Carolina, Dr. Anna Rutterman, she told a story from just the other day when I was speaking to her about a patient coming in and saying, you're only giving me these, you're only recommending these because you're getting kickbacks from big pharma. That's the only reason you're doing this. And like, that's just a level of distress that, like, it's hard to even

have a productive conversation on front. And so on that front. And so that's the flip side of Dr. Miller, who does just a fantastic job of meeting patients where they are and showing compassion and developing a relationship for folks who have to receive no vaccines, and a lot of them eventually do receive some or all vaccines later down the road. But if you're dealing with some person who can't even get to the point of having that first conversation, I do, like a lot of pediatricians are stuck at that point where even if you do have this relationship, you're not going to overcome how strong that distrust is for some people. And I think that population has just increased, but also increased in the type of ambativeness

they bring to an average, an average vision. And that's just a really challenging thing to do. Pediatricians are kind of just downstream of all this breakdown and consensus about those settled questions that we had before and even public policy changes. That's another element, too, is these offices are feeling like they need to make policies that I would argue are rightly understood public health policies. These should be state public health decisions. These should be school mandates where you can hash that out with your state legislature

or hash that out at a school board meeting, like it shouldn't be a pediatrician's job to try and figure out the best policy to like have uptick of vaccinations in their community. It's really kind of a sad state that that's where they're having to have those conversations. Well, I'm not your assignment editor, Grayson,

but if I were, I would say maybe look out for the next convention and conference that pediatricians are having and sort of be a fly on the wall there because I would just be fascinated to know what those internal conversations are really like. I will note just one brief thing on that front. The American Academy of Pediatrics has kind of come 180 on this issue. So back in the mid-2000s, it was actively discouraged dismissal policies.

Like, you should not, this should not be the reason to terminate a patient-doctor relationship. Around 2016, they changed that to say, this is an acceptable option, but we think you should try other things. But this is an acceptable option if you, like, reach a certain point with the patient. And then in 2024, they've even backed away from that saying it's still an acceptable option, but really it should be the last resort. You should try all these other things and consider what the effect is on your patient from terminating this relationship. So that's kind of like a soft indication. But I think more people who are like ardently pro-vaccine in the medical community are reconsidering the actual on the ground effects of these policies. Grayson, I thought it was very interesting Dr. Miller's approach on the happy vaccine because when you're a new parent,

your first encounter with the vaccine schedule, you're in the hospital. It's with Hep B. Well, vitamin K is to prevent a blood bleeding disorder, but then Hep B. He had a nuance, and I thought entirely reasonable approach of that, insisting on when it's really necessary and when, well, hey, you know, eventually you should get it, but it's not really necessary right now. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, so he was kind of, I'm glad you brought that up, because a lot of it, again, goes on the policy setting. So a lot of, you can see senators, Republican senators, Senator Rand Paul and Senator Cassidy and others go back and forth over Twitter, over the Hep B vaccine issue specifically. But what Dr. Miller was saying that he sees it as like a valid purview of a parental decision in a certain context.

So if you're a family where the mother and the father have been tested negative for hepatitis B, they're in an environment where there's no drug use or any of the additional risk factors, like he sees that as something that like he would still probably recommend it, but it's just, totally like up to you as a parent. And I don't think you're like harming your child by not doing this. But again, that question still goes back to how people make different risk calculations. And everything about vaccines is a risk calculation. So from folks who believe in the full schedule kind of regardless of context is like really important, the question for them is the Heppe vaccine is an incredibly safe vaccine. It's like we've had so much history with it.

And there's so few reports of adverse offense. So even if you have such a small chance of being exposed to this in a home environment or for your parents and everybody's tested negative, the question is like, why don't get it if the risk of any like an adverse effect and your infant is so low. And then you're just judging different metrics of risks. And that's why this can be such a complex conversation for people. And we're not perfectly rational creatures. We judge risks differently based on each day of the week or even if you saw a crazy TikTok video about. the happy vaccine that you know is totally wild and crazy.

It's like planted something in your head that's still in the back of your of your mind. So I think that's this information environment can really scramble how people assess risk. Well, thank you, Grayson. You did a good job on writing a nuance piece on a very complex topic. We appreciate it. We'll put all of these pieces in the show notes. Grayson's is headlined how a pediatrician earns trust in a time of vaccine doubt. 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.

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it can be trying to access care. We're working to build a future where the path to support is clear, and every step forward feels like progress, not another wrong turn. Visit camh.ca to help us forge a better path for mental health care. John, let's move to your piece. You are just back from Chicago, and those of us in Wisconsin often think of Chicago, those of us from Milwaukee often think of Chicago as one of our nicer suburbs,

but we choose not to spend a lot of time there. Why did you, Wisconsinite that you are, choose to go to Wisconsin and what was your piece about, I mean, to Chicago. And what was, let me start that again.

Why did you a rugged, upstanding Wisconsinite, choose to go to Chicago and what was your piece about? Well, I chose, my editors encouraged me to go get on the ground and actually talk to people. That sounds like you might not have actually chosen.

It sounds like you might have been pushed or forced. I mean, I, I, I'm glad I was encouraged. Yeah, so I, I wanted to go see on the ground, this stepped up campaign of immigration enforcement that the Trump administration has dubbed Operation Midway Blitz began on September 8th. I'm sure we've all seen the videos, the photos, the headlines, the protests that are going on at the ice facility. So I went down there. I talked to people in a community, a predominantly,

Mexican-American community called Little Village, just about, you know, what what it's been like, what the climate's been like, what they've experienced themselves. And I also went down to the ice facility, and I talked to some local politicians as well. And, you know, the story I got overwhelmingly from people on the ground was that, you know, it's just sort of this climate of fear. People are scared, even though the overall numbers, you know, a huge number of people haven't actually been detained so far. In the context of the entire undocumented or illegal immigrant population of the state of Illinois. There are 425,000 people, according to one estimate, who are illegal immigrants in the state of Illinois. Fifteen hundred have been detained by ICE so far,

and it's been very hard to get accurate information from the Department of Homeland Security. I spent a bunch of time in an email exchange back and forth with their spokespeople. No one would take my phone call, and it was very telling when they would give replies and when they wouldn't. And, you know, one question I asked them was, well, how many of these 1,500 people, they said they were going to target the worst of the worst. So criminal, illegal aliens, they were launching this in response to a woman was killed in Urbana, Urbana, Illinois, earlier this year by a drunk driver who was an illegal immigrant. And so I asked, well, how many of this 1,500 are criminals and no reply whatsoever? So they would say they'd detained 1,500. They would tell me in about a particular raid.

You know, they did this Black Hawk helicopter raid, mostly for show. They picked up allegedly, they claim, again, we have no way to verify this. Two people who are allegedly, two or one people who are allegedly connected with a gang, Trendaaragua. Again, unverified because we're just waiting, we're relying on the say-so of very unreliable narrators in the federal government. So, yeah, when they, when they released a press release a week ago, when they said they only had a thousand detainees, they only highlighted 10 people. 10 out of 1,000 were these worst the worst criminals, you know, who have committed violent crimes or thefts or something like that. So, yeah, I just got on the ground and wanted to talk people themselves about what it's like. You know, I've heard people who said, even though we're U.S. citizens, our friends don't want to come to lunch today because they're scared to come down here.

They're scared they're going to get pulled over. You know, there has been reporting multiple instances of U.S. citizens being detained. The Chicago Tribune recently had a report on October 13th saying a woman named Maria Greeley, who is of, Latina heritage, Mexican-American heritage, I believe, but adopted. She was detained by ICE for a few hours. She was zip-tied, and the DHS agents, allegedly, again, according to Maria Greeley, said, you don't look like a Greeley, and she's adopted. So I really kind of outrageous accusations, Stuggis accusation, I said to DHS,

sent them an email, and I'm getting lots of replies on some things, no replies another, I said, do you dispute anything she said? I mean, you would think they would have a record. They would write down the name of every person. and they had detainer. We have no record of detaining in Maria Greeley, but again, no replies. So what does that tell you? And I also realize, too, that a lot of people, I mean, you know, Chicago, it's a big place. There are, you know, three million people in the city, 10 million in the greater area. So people on the ground, you know, they're trying to suss out what's true and what's false, the same way a lot of us are. You know, they see a clip on the online. They see this context as crazy video. And then it kind of depends on the local media, really. They're the ones getting the local surveillance. surveillance video and, you know, and again, giving DHS, well, can you tell us something that's, that can put this in context? And a lot of times they couldn't. I thought the most, the craziest one, again, this is the DHS assistant secretary, Trisha McLaughlin. There was this

video of a young woman who was 18. She was detained in a suburban Chicago in a place called Hoffman Estates. And, you know, these ice vehicles come up behind her. They pull out of the car, a very large guy looks like a federal agent. kneels on her back as he puts her into handcuffs. And Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, says, well, this is just crazy. You're posting a video from a year ago that was a burglary. This isn't even ice. Well, it turns out that the woman's parents then go talk to local news, the police department puts out a statement, all sort of corroborating this.

This did, in fact, happened. The woman just spoke to the local press. And then I, so I emailed, I said, hey, you know, I emailed Trisha McLaughlin. I said, hey, were you mistaken? Just everybody makes mistakes. This is a pretty big mistake. But did you make a mistake? Again, no reply.

So what does that tell you? And so, again, there's a lot of fear on the ground. And again, things, the rhetoric of the administration really doesn't match, you know, this idea we're just scooping up criminal legal aliens. And again, I asked, well, why do you use a helicopter? What was the necessity? I mean, there's lots of police officers who go and arrest drug dealers. And you picked up one or two alleged, again, we don't know,

alleged trend of Iraqer members. Like, why was that necessary? Again, no response of why the ATF and the FBI and Customs and Board Patrol agents who conducted this raid, which again, there was, there were a lot of legal immigrants there. There were squatters there. There had been a murder in the building. That's not to say that there isn't a problem with illegal immigration in Chicago. Hey, John, I wanted to ask about Tricia McLaughlin because she's such a kind of an important character in your story for all the ways you just described her as being responsive on some things, non-responsive. on other things. She's very active on social media as well for, again, an assistant secretary for public affairs, top spokesperson, essentially, for DHS. She seems to be sort of personally involved in responding to different claims, you know, swatting down other claims, you know, that were and weren't mentioned in your story and claiming they were, they're not true. I mean, my takeaway from reading your piece and from sort of watching her over the last several months is you can't

trust what she says about these things, that there are too many mistakes that she makes. I'm just curious if you could talk a little more about the sort of combative nature of the public affairs or the public facing side of what is happening, not just in Chicago, but across the country with this stepped up immigration enforcement. They're sort of going toe to toe with the media, and it seems like it creates what you describe in the piece is just a climate of uncertainty about what's real and what isn't. It's hard to understand how to understand what's going on. Yeah, I mean, Tricia McLaughlin, you know, she developed her reputation as a pugnacious comms person back when she was working for Vivek, Ramoswamy,

during the presidential campaign. Again, what I found most frustrating, again, I appreciate any reply I can get by email, but I just couldn't get them on the phone. Just talk to me. You know, if you want to spin me, spin me, but let me ask you my questions and respond. Tell me what the truth is here. And I couldn't get that out of her. So I do think that that is a real, a real shortcoming of the administration. And sometimes they do have, there is mitigating context.

I mean, there are aggressive responses of people. I mean, there's this whole response from people in the community is now trying to warn other people about ICE agents coming in. they're honking their horn sometimes they're following ice vehicles and there have been instances of cars ramming ice agent vehicles and there have been people who have called and people throwing projectiles or things you know attacking the ice agents that's not a it's not an inconsequential problem or not a trivial part of this this whole story yeah no and so I mean I talk one piece of you talked about things that didn't make it in there I talked to Aaron Reischlin

Melnik, who is an immigration expert. He definitely has a view. He is a pro-migrant, regardless of their legal status. But he also cares about the facts and the truth. And he's sort of been following this very closely. He's in Washington, D.C. But, you know, he's pointing out then one instance, yes, there is a video of this woman, you know, ramming the vehicle. In other instance, we don't have the exact angle. There was a gentleman who was, you know, he drove away and the ice agent was being dragged a little bit, and the ice agent shot the driver who died. And I asked Aaron, what do we have here?

Is there any mitigating context? He's like, well, we don't have the video from this particular angle that would really show best how much danger the guy was in. We do have the body camera image of an ice agent saying it was nothing major, but he was being dragged, and so you don't know for sure exactly how that all played out in the ground. But again, it's so frustrating when these, you know, for example, there was an instance on Tuesday. So ICE, again, they were chasing a car through a residential neighborhood, and they admit that they did this maneuver of deliberately ramming the vehicle of an illegal immigrant, an alleged illegal immigrant. I'm not sure if this person actually was, I think they were, to immobilize the vehicle.

Now, they claim that their vehicles ran first. The Chicago Sun Times got a hold of surveillance video and said, hey, we have no, if they were ram first, it didn't happen. on this video. So again, it's this difficulty of just trying to suss out exactly what happened. A big crowd formed, someone threw an egg. This resulted in there was a hundred people standing around, and this resulted in tear gas being deployed in the neighborhood. Civilians and police officers were tear gassed as a result of this. And this was a maneuver that is banned by Chicago Police. So Chicago Police don't have the ability to ram the back, rear end of a car to make it to spin out and to immobilize it. But that's the kind of aggressive

tactics, that and repelling off of black cock helicopters, which just truly seems to be performative to make a big impression, to scare people. It's not clear to what extent any of this scaring people is actually encouraging self-deportation. I mean, these are all people who are either here for many decades or who recently traversed the Darien Gap to get here and the idea that they're going to immediately just turn around because of some fear. I don't necessarily know that's true. But you do hear a lot of people say that people are staying indoors more often. I heard one woman say, you know, that she's a, I talked to a woman in, um, downtown Chicago, she says, she's, uh, she does Uber delivery, basically. And she said, business is way up.

She's delivering a lot more. She thinks people are staying indoors. Um, you know, I talked to another, uh, gentleman and he said, you know, yeah, the local Home Depot, the day laborers have vanished, you know, whether they're hiding out or have been detained is unclear. Um, but yeah, so that's, uh, uh, John, I want to ask you a question about the information environment. I was really glad that your piece got into the information environment because it is virtually impossible, I would say. If you are, I mean, even for me, I work in the news industry. I've been, you know, making these judgments about what's true and what's not true, who's credible, who's not credible, professionally for 30 years. And it's really hard for me to determine what's actually happening.

And, you know, certainly you have interested parties, I would say, you know, the Trump administration has every incentive in hyping, the alleged. misdeeds of illegal immigrants, of immigrants, of the people they round up, even if they're U.S. citizens, they seem to be leaning into this idea that there's chaos and that the chaos is caused by sort of one side of this. And I think you have to say there are media outlets that are contributing to that. I would say pro-Trump media outlets are contributing to that. I posted in our internal Slack message this morning, a video that Fox News was putting out on its Twitter feed that talked about the quote-unquote chaos in Broadview. And it was, you know, the still picture showed police on one side, protesters on the other side. And you click the video and it was 35, 40 seconds of not chaos.

There was no chaos in the video. that they depict, there were people talking to one another, sort of milling about. You could imagine a scenario in which this devolved into chaos, but it wasn't chaos. Maybe there was chaos later, but what, I mean, I have my own answer to this. I'll give it after you give yours, but if you're listening to us have this conversation, you've just spent time on the ground in Chicago, look at this stuff with your own two eyes. You have a much better sense of sort of what's true or not. what would you recommend someone listening at home who's really determined to figure out what's actually happening?

What's the best way to do that, absent going and observing like you did? Yeah, well, I mean, on a day-to-day basis, subscribe to the dispatch. On a day-to-day basis, I would say, I mean, the people to watch, if you really want to follow this stuff, I would, I really, hats off to the Chicago Tribune and the Sun Times and some other local outlets that are really getting in there. And they have the networks, they know the community better, they can get the surveillance video right away. I mean, as this dramatic event was unfolding a couple miles south of me, I was getting, you know, Mexican lunch up in Little Village. Well, you know, I didn't have the police scanner on and know this was happening. So the local press are, I think, are doing quite a good job of this. And then there are some straight shooters, like I would say, I would say follow Aaron Reichland-Melnick on Twitter if you want to follow this really closely.

again, he's a person with a view, I'd say a kindred spirit, a person with a view who cares about the facts. And I think he's worth following too. But yeah, I mean, I think also, you know, don't immediately jump to a conclusion about any particular video you see. I mean, maybe give it 24 hours to see if there's another video from another angle that comes up. Ask yourself, how do we know this?

Even when you see some reporting in the press, I mean, I don't know for sure. This is one person who claims that something. happen. Now, that's a type of evidence. I'm willing to go on the record, put my name out there saying the federal government did something to me, and the federal government isn't willing to dispute that. I think that I'm inclined to believe that. If they want to dispute that, then they can dispute it, but they haven't. But again, it's hard. How do we know what we know? How do we know what we don't know? You mentioned that the situation with the ICE facility. I mean, there have been some confrontations there, but the video you showed recently,

the supposed drama was nothing. There were some state police officers telling people to stand back. didn't see any, no altercation of people touching. I was there. When I was there on Tuesday, there were fewer than 12 people there. It was sleepy. There were, there were more video cameras than protesters. One of the protesters just said, well, it depends. You know, we're not paid to do this. So, you know, things are busier in the nighttime and then the weekends and during the day. I talked to some people in an inflatable yellow ducky costume and an inflatable dinosaur costume. They said the whole purpose of the costumes, if you're wondering, is they want to prove how peaceful they are. Things were more confrontational a month ago, I would

say, you know, there's this video of a Presbyterian pastor getting shot in the head with pepper balls. That happened on September 19th. Again, Trisha McLaughlin has a statement on that, says, well, there's video that's not, or not a video, which is the video doesn't show that they crossed federal property lines. They were told to remove back repeatedly. And I was like, well, could you point me to a video of this? I mean, I would think, and again, no video. So I don't know. I'm not saying that that's not true. It's plausible that these people stepped past a line or something. And whether whether getting pepperballed in the head was excessive force, I'm inclined to think it was based in the videos I've seen.

But again, I saw no, no dramatic, you know, protest, no violence. And again, September 19th was five days before that ice facility in Dallas was shot up by an anti-ice person who ended up killing migrants. And so that was a third shooting targeting immigration officials in Texas this year. So it's not to downplay that there are that there is real anger and a real danger to some of these. ICE agents. And that's also not to deny that ice agents have made mistakes and appear to you. And many would argue are using and have used excessive force. These things are all true. Yeah, my answer to that question is sort of in parallel with yours. What I've done, I don't think you can take any video at face value unless it's a long video and it sort of

captures the lead up to an event or confrontation and the confrontation itself. But what I've been doing is waiting, as you suggest. Are there other angles that depict other things that have happened in these videos? And then also looking to the local press, primarily the Sun-Times and the Trib in Chicago, and not necessarily taking what they say as gospel truth, but if they are describing a series of events that seem to back up what we've seen in the video and then have individual secondary corroboration of those events or more reporting on what led to those events. I generally find those to be more credible. And that's, I mean, the average citizen is probably not going to take all of the time that it requires to do that. But for people who are

really interested, I get this question a lot. How do we know what to pay attention to and what not to? and, you know, I think a lot of people are just inclined to dismiss it all because it's way too hard to figure it out. I think if you are interested in learning more, those are at least some of the things that I do that are useful for me. Just to add to that, like, a helpful cuteristic, because again, so much of this is just going based up of anecdotes. And if you get a two or three anecdotes, does that say something about it? And I would just point out that in a place as big as Chicago, seeing a couple anecdotes about 40 people in a crowd doing something tells you very little about the city of Chicago overall. But if you have half a dozen

verified, again, doing what you just described examples of ICE officers in different parts of the city doing aggressive, poorly thought out maneuvers, that does tell you a little bit something about ICE's response or how they're conducting this operation, simply because it's so much smaller a population of people than the entire city of Chicago. So this is the same thing going back to 2020, I, like, lived in New York during those protests. Like, you should be more skeptical the bigger the claim is apprying to a wider segment of people, just as a general rule when it comes to unrest in cities. And that doesn't downplay at all the people who are organizing violently and agitating and doing vigilantism. Like, those are real and those examples are real,

but that does not mean they saw two anecdotes that that says something about all of Chicago or even a single neighborhood within Chicago or New York. So that's one way to, I think, to keep a front of mind when you're thinking through this stuff. Yeah, I think that's good advice. John, thanks for describing your piece. It's called Fear and Loathing in Chicago. I'm glad to have you back.

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That's incogny.com slash dispatch. Mike, I want to talk about a piece that you wrote earlier in the week. You wrote a couple different pieces for us this week. The second one was about these no kings rallies that are scheduled to take place across the country this weekend. We're not going to talk about that piece because by the time we publish this, those rallies will have taken place. but you also wrote a terrific piece and you've written about this a number of times

you sort of developed this into your own we don't usually describe what people do at the dispatch as having beats but I would say an area of earned expertise because you've done a fair amount of reporting on the Department of Justice and Attorney General Pam Bondi specifically this dates back

I mean you did the co-wrote the newsletter with Sarah looking at the collision of politics and law enforcement and justice backing the campaign time. But you have a piece about Pam Bondi and, in effect, the extent to which Donald Trump is using her as his kind of personal lawyer, can you tell us a little bit about your piece and why you chose to write it? So I'm not today and not in the piece. in the prediction game of what is going to happen, will Pam Bondi resign from her position

anytime soon? But it did strike me that it would not surprise me if, for instance, Pam Bondi resigned from this job by, say, I don't know, the end of the year or sometime next year. And I'm also willing to be proven wrong on that, ready to be proven wrong on that. but I see a pattern here of the only thing I can describe it is as humiliation of the attorney general decisions that are being made where she is either having to play catch up or is being overruled by people outside of the chain of command and really at the direction of the president. So what prompted this latest piece on Bondi and the Justice Department was

The news reports now this would have been probably about 10 days ago that Bondi and Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, were caught off guard by the indictment of New York Attorney General Lettisha James. She was indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia by this brand new acting U.S. Attorney Linsie Halligan. the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General were caught off guard and we're not expecting the indictment of the Attorney General of New York, a prominent opponent, a political opponent of Donald Trump. The top two people of the Justice Department were unaware it was coming. Now, that's not to say that. Yeah, that is one of those moments. I'm glad you, I'm glad you're talking about it this way because it's one of those moments where if you're just consuming the sort of regular flow of news, it, it's, It might just kind of pass by you, but you have to stop and think about it for a second and say, wait a second. The top two, you know, Justice Department officials in the Trump administration didn't know that this was coming.

That is extraordinary. And in a different news environment, in the different administration, this would be the kind of thing that would spawn thousands of follow-ups. It would displace other news on the evening network newscasts. we would have four reporters following it and trying to understand of it. And yet, you know, until you stopped and sort of wrote it the way that you wrote it, even I didn't stop and say, wait a second, this is crazy. Not only would it be sort of a kind of a five alarm fire story, everybody would be talking about it. I would not be surprised at a normal news environment if the AG and the Deputy AG would resign over something like that.

I mean, it is that level of sort of, you might call it, in another world, you'd call it insubordination, right? A U.S. attorney, an acting U.S. attorney sort of doing this and what, forgetting to send the email to let our bosses know this was coming. But, of course, what's really going on here is Lindsay Halligan, who has never been a prosecutor before she was installed a few weeks ago into this job, a job in which she's succeeding. the former acting U.S. attorney who was pushed out of this role because he would not assent to pursuing a case against Letitia James. She is, was on Donald Trump's legal team. She is working here at the direction, if not the direct direction, the indirect direction of the president. This is what the president wants. The president wants his political opponents. That's Letitia James. That's former FBI director James Comey. He wants them to suffer legally. And

Lindsay Halligan is the tool to do it. Now, this is not to let Pambani and Todd Blanche and others in the Department of Justice, who he has appointed off the hook. I'm not suggesting that they are sort of standing up, standing a thwart Donald Trump's lawlessness and yelling stop. They're not, But I do think that both of these figures in the Department of Justice do retain some level of professionalism and sense of order. And if you believe the reporting, which I think the reporting from other outlets, whether it's the New York Times, the AP of the Washington Post, I think it's pretty solid on this, that people like Todd Blanche, who reports directly to Pam Bondi, were resistant to pursuing these things. without enough evidence pursuing these cases without enough evidence. And I think that I guess there's a certain level of which the headline for the piece is how much humiliation will Pam Bondi endure. And the answer is like quite a bit, I think. I think that we know that she's willing to do this

because she's MAGA. She's pro-Trump. She's the attorney general of the United States. But at a certain point, when you look at all of what's happened and we can go through the other things that have taken place, there is a pressure here. here that I think is going to come to bear at some point where her authority within the Department of Justice is being undermined, where people who work at the Department of Justice are going to be resigning. They already have and being resisting this. At the end of the day, this is a department of the federal government, and she's either in charge of it or she isn't. And right now, it seems like she's not.

Yeah, there was the famous truth social post where Donald Trump sent it and then unsent it. I think subsequent reporting has suggested that he didn't intend to send this, but it was addressed to Pam. Quite literally addressed Pam. And I have it in part here. We can we can't delay any longer. It's killing our reputation and credibility. they impeached me twice and indicted me five times all caps over nothing justice must be served now that's part of what the I mean you just think in the past look two quick points one it's not unprecedented that a president

would use government agencies report to him to go after his political opponents we have seen this before we saw it in the Obama administration with the IRS as I've mentioned in other contexts there's There's terrific reporting from Paul Matzko, who's the historian who's written a book about the rise of the radio right, he calls it, about John F. Kennedy, giving orders in the Oval Office to his brother and to others to go after, use the FCC and the Department of Justice to go after these evangelical Christian radio broadcasters who were seen, I think, correctly, as sort of a precursor to what would become conservative talk radio in the 80s and 90s, just direct orders. So I don't want to pretend that this kind of thing hasn't happened for. This kind of thing

has happened before. But I can't, I mean, I can't imagine another scenario that's analogous to a memo that's made public, whether accidentally or not, instructing the Attorney General to go after your political opponents with the express purpose of exacting political revenge. I mean, that's what he's what the president says they went after me go after them is there am i missing something is my study of political history incomplete are there gaps in my knowledge that you can fill here i i don't think you're wrong in in the broad sense i mean if we want to sort of put the beginning of this period sort of post nixon um and and some of the reforms that were made in the Department of Justice after Watergate, then truly the answer is no. It's never been

this direct. And it's interesting you bring up, for instance, Barack Obama and the IRS and the sort of effort that went, that Lois Lerner, who was in charge of the IRS to sort of find ways to go after conservative activist groups through their tax filings in order to sort of target them. And that was a situation where we will never know exactly or maybe we will one of these days. But we don't know at this point sort of kind of how far up it went. But I think it's reasonable to kind of based on the evidence that we know that Lois Lerner was sort of acting in a way that she thought,

was was going to be beneficial to her within this administration. If there had been some kind of memo or email or tweet from Barack Obama, you know, telling Lois Lerner, hey, do this, I mean, again, just think of the way that heads would have exploded and rightfully so over the president directing and directing that kind of punitive action against his political opponents. The fact that it's happening out in the open and kind of in public is what is so different now. And I think in a lot of ways, it obscures how abnormal and unusual and alarming it is. Yeah, I'll just say before I like Grayson, ask a question here, I will just say, it's also the case, as the Wall Street Journal reported this week, that Donald Trump's IRS is sort of reimagining

itself to go after George Soros and other left-wing nonprofits that they can. claim and have claimed in public repeatedly have been funding the activities of Antifa and violent sort of left-wing protests. You know, if, excuse me, if you can prove that certain groups are fomenting violence are directly responsible for violence, there are already laws on the books that you could use to go after them. One suspects that they might be using this reimagining of the IRS to go after the left in a much more expansive way that I think is akin to what the Obama IRS and Lois Lerner did. Grace, you know, a question?

No, just more of a comment what I think is so interesting about like Pam Bondi, apparently getting squeezed from below, from, from Halligan, just going ahead and doing this, is that you have high-level MAGA loyalists within the administration, having end runs run around them. Like, this is emanating from mid and low-level officials who are trying to show value to Trump over and against, like, high-level, cabinet-level, loyalist in the administration is just such an interesting dynamic and shows how far along and how it's successful Trump has been at kind of turning so much of the government towards his personalist direction.

And just a reminder, and Mike gets at this in the piece, the source of the James, like the pretext, which I think we can safely say pretext of this case, is coming from this guy, Bill Pulte, or Pulte, I don't know how to say his name. Colty from the federal housing finance agency. And if you just want, I would encourage someone just to go look at his Twitter fee. He is just like a total hack. He is like a civil servant directing an agency that has a real job. But his job is basically just to surface stuff to the president.

And he's had this whole long campaign against Jerome Powell, even though his job really has nothing to do with the Federal Reserve. And it's just the fact that this is coming from low level or mid-level officials over and against their bosses who are still on the same MAGA team is just. remarkable to me. I think it's it is not just sort of notable. I think it is the is the norm in Donald Trump's administration and the norm in sort of how Donald Trump, uh, operates his operations. I again, I may have mentioned this on the dispatch podcast before, but I have this image with Donald Trump. It's like the scene, um, Steve from it's from this movie called the Dark Night. It was a,

it was a big movie several, several years ago. You may be familiar with it, um, in which the Joker Was it one of these kid movies that should be made for kids, but for some reason, immature adults are taking in in record numbers? Like, it's about superheroes or something? You know, I'm going to try to move forward with what I'm trying to say without your start. Is it a cartoon? Is it animated or is this a real life? It's about Batman, correct?

It's about Batman. So the scene that I wanted to make sure clear that you are watching Batman movies. Okay. Are we done? Okay. The scene that I have imagined, I think about when it comes to Donald Trump in the way, his operation operates, is when the Joker sort of takes over one of the mobsters' crews, he's got three of these guys who he takes a pool cue in this back room, breaks it in half,

throws the two broken halves among the three, and basically says, all right, we have room for two of you, we're going to have tryouts, go at it, and then leaves the room. the implication is fight it out and whoever wins you get to work for me that is really how I think Donald Trump operates and you mentioned Bill Pulte Grayson there's also the other the other figure in this who's sort of lower level is to Pulte is at the federal housing finance administration this is this is not a part of the Department of Justice the other figure here is Ed Martin who I've written about before who is at the Department of Justice he He's the pardon attorney, and he's also running this sort of against weaponization of government

operation, kind of standing up this office as well. The two of them are the ones who are sort of driving these vindictive prosecutions. And I mean, as somebody said to me, it's as if Bill Pulte and Ed Martin are the Attorney General right now, not Pam Bondi. It's not that different than what was happening at the end of the first Trump administration, if we remember when Bill Barr, the attorney general, essentially threw up his hands and said, I'm not going to be a part of this. And you had a lower level attorney

at the Department of Justice, Jeffrey Clark, who came up with this sort of novel theory and was suddenly catapled to kind of the top and Trump even wanted him to be his acting attorney general. So I think this is just the way you get ahead in Trump world. Yeah, the ones who are willing to actually do the corruption are the ones who often get promoted, get push forward. And to do it by getting attention.

As much as I'm tempted to ask about Robin and where Robin was in that scene that you described, I'm going to move on. We don't have a lot of time. So uncultured. I wanted to end with a quick, just round the horn on a story that Politico broke this week. It seems to me it's gotten attention in Washington and in our siloed media world in certain areas of our politics. but not attention in sort of more broadly. And that was a story that Politico broke earlier this week

about a series of group chats that included personnel leadership from the young Republican groups throughout the country. And in particular, there was a New York young Republican group that included, you know, language that was beyond, you know, all of the euphemisms that we now use to describe people who say racist stuff, spicy, or controversial or salty or whatever. No, this was the stuff. Like,

these text messages between these young Republicans said crazy, crazy stuff, wishing political opponents would be raped, praising Adolf Hitler, using the N-word. I mean, just sort of on and on and on. And I wonder, I mean, I like, we're all colleagues. I like to think of the four of us as kind of roughly the same age. I think of us as sort of young professionals, early stage journalists. But I will admit, in the interest of candor to our listeners, you all are a little bit younger than I am. So you might better grok what these young What these youths were saying and doing, just question for each of you and go around and give your thoughts on this. How surprised were you to see this story about the kind of language that was used by these groups in particular?

I'll start with you, Grayson. Not particularly surprised, but that's, I think I'm, I pay too much attention to this subculture. And I've followed a lot of these stories and the folks who report on a lot of this. these weird subredits or discords or just group chats in this case. I will say I was a little surprised by just how universal the covering for them from Republican and MAGA media personalities was. It really reinforces the idea that everything is friend, enemy distinction now. Give us an example.

Give us an example of that. First of all, why weren't you surprised? So you weren't surprised. I mean, I guess I wasn't surprised either in that I think this stuff is happening. But I think most of us when we think of this, and again, maybe my sort of views on this, my understanding of this is somewhat anachronistic. But like, you know, every once in a while, as long as I've been doing this, you'll read about some kid. And they often are kids, college age, high school age, you know, chest beater, trying to impress friends by, being sort of an, what do they call it, edge lord, keyboard warrior extreme, or, you know,

somebody who once posted 10 years ago anonymously on some neo-Nazi website, you'll hear about I think what surprised me, and I'm interested in your sort of thoughts on this, because you do pay attention to this more than I do. This was not that. I mean, these were sort of sanctioned regular Republican youth groups, right? I mean, that's, it used to be that if you went into these Republican groups, you were not participating in the crazy, fringy stuff, you know, and Republican people who participated in those Republican groups, many of them wanted to go on and hold elective office. And there were certain things you didn't do. I mean, I knew people at high school, I'm never going to smoke pot. I might want to run for Congress one day.

you know, that kind of forethought seems to either be absent among the people who do this or more worrisome. I think probably more like the true. This advances them because they're willing to be so provocative. Anyway, just had kind of a deeper question on that for you since you pay attention to that. I think you're onto something on the like edge lord provocation front of when you've divorced kind of pushing the envelope politically from any type of policy or real coherent ideological program and you're just more in like the Trumpist category. The things in which you can be edgy about get fringier and weirder because it's just got to be totally divorced from traditional political agenda and policy discussions because none of that matters. You can

flip-flop on that and Trump has done it any which way. So just a structure of things as like a sociological observation that you can try and be the cool, edgy person about, they're just a weird, they're in a weird place than they used to be for this type of discussion. Yeah. John? Yeah, I mean, I thought that I was not surprised at all. I mean, they've been swimming in this toxic sewage for a decade now, and it really was, you know, Trump making this possible. I thought, yeah, obviously, a lot of the language was totally, you know, beyond the pale racist, calling African-Americans, monkeys worse than that. I did think that there were places in that article where I might not lead with a particular example where, you know, don't give

them, where there's some plausibility, I think, was something like, you know, if people who don't vote for me, they're all going to be dead or they're going to be, I mean, it was bad, but it was, it could be this, sorry, hey, if you don't vote for me, you're dead sort of joke. So, but yeah, I mean, there was plenty of it in there that was totally inexcusable and beyond the pale. And, yeah, no, I'm not, I'm not surprised by it. You know, this is a generation younger than me, But I do think that, you know, if you are turned off by this, have you already left the young Republican Party in the first place? I mean, obviously, there are a lot of people who are young. I mean, I didn't think that is one of the tragedies of Trump is that, I don't know, if I were, if I were 17, would I, you know, still be on gung-ho for, you know, I'm a pro-life conservative, you know, and then sort of like these people who for very normal and even.

and good philosophical or ideological reasons are coming to the Republican Party. They feel the need to sort of defend all these inexcusable things. And, I mean, we could go through the litany of the, you know, Trump's statements that were beyond the pale, right? And that sort of opened the door for this kind of language and behavior. And I do think it's sort of a tragedy that. I mean, again, I'm not excusing them. I'm not calling these people young boys.

I know that some of them were, you know, were adults when they said all this, right? even though they were in the Young Republicans Club. I'm not going down the J.D. Vance Road here. Yeah, what did J.D. Vance say? I think that's actually highly relevant. You called them young boys. You know, boys will be boy. I don't know the exact quotes. Maybe Mike does. But it's something of the fact that these are young boys, you know, they'll say things. You shouldn't. I mean, which is a total contradiction of like they're going after college students who are saying inappropriate things about Charlie Hirk, not merely with not merely praising murder, which I think is a whole other thing, but simply saying, means. things about a person who was killed. So on one hand, it's okay to cancel college kids. And the other

hand, it's not okay to fire people who are racist in their 20s. And the same thing happened again with a Doge staffer who again said deeply racist things. And J.D. Vancey had the exact same statement. Again, oh, this is a young man, young boy. Basically, I think that excuse ends at 21, maybe 22. I mean, Mike, do you know exactly what he said? Well, he was, I mean, you summed that that part of it up. criticized pearl clutching. That was the phrase that he used pearl clutching over it, as if being offended or doing what actually the young Republicans did, which was denounce it before J.D. Vance had weighed in. The Young Republican National Federation, I think, is called, it's called sort of umbrella group with which these young Republicans, but not that young

Republicans were saying this stuff where they were affiliated with, denounced it, said it was, quote, unbecoming of any Republican. And then what happens, J.D. Vance, the vice president of the United States, the sort of however you slice it, the leading candidate for the 2008 presidential nomination, the future of the Republican Party. I mean, like, if we could debate for another hour about who is the future of the Republican Party, but you could see Vance being a future of the Republican Party. Criticizing anybody for pearl clutching.

It's like Grayson said, I mean, this is a real sort of tribalist, you know, on our team, we don't go after our people. He also, you know, J.D. Vance also sort of pointed out, you know, the terrible texts that Jay Jones, the AG candidate for in Virginia, the Attorney General candidate, Virginia, You know, the Democrat who said some awful things and some text messages, and Democrats have had a really difficult time coming around to denounce and denounce him. They've not done it, essentially. It gets to this point where everybody's sort of defining decency down.

And, well, if you can't call out your own people, we won't call out our own people. I think that's going on, but I think there's something a little more sinister too, which is J.D. Vance sees these guys. as his people, as his base, that the people who edge lord stuff about Hitler, like, that's his people. And if J.D. Vance is the future of the Republican Party and those are his people, we're in trouble. Just another distinction there. When you look at what's going on with the Dem A.G, you can understand as a matter of just like naked partisan interest. They can't put forward another Democrat. It's too. late in the race. Like, I can understand politically why Democrats don't want to, like, denounce this guy. Like, they'd rather just roll the dice at the ballot block at this point. This is, let me just, wait, before you make a point, let me just jump in. This is Jay Jones,

who's the Democratic nominee to be Attorney General in the state of Virginia, who sent some text messages to Republican colleagues several years ago, effectively wishing death upon the Republican Speaker of the House. And then, and I, and I, I think this is a crucial point about him and why his conduct is more outrageous than Democrats are pretending it is repeatedly doubled and tripled down and refused to sort of walk it back and said, you know, basically, yeah, damn right, I meant what I said. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead. Grace. Yeah. And I think Democrats, so a lot of Democrats' response to that has been like pretty, pretty shameful, but I can understand the electoral reason

behind it. The people in this young Republicans group chat, they're not elected officials. they're not running in any races. I think one or two of them are staffers for a state legislature. There is no Republican electoral issue here. And you can even make the argument that keeping these guys on the news and not denouncing them is somewhat of a liability for the close Republican House races in New York. So you're actually prioritizing this deeper tribalism, friend-enemy distinction that Vance and others are putting forward over like an argument for an electoral interest.

You're just getting into talking about these guys in New York State Republican politics and moving beyond this. And I think that goes to the fact that his theory of the future of the Republican Party is what might basically describe. Real quick fact check on that, Grayson. One of the participants in the group chat who said some of these things is actually an elected member of the Vermont state legislature. But that underscores exactly what you just said. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the good thing is at the dispatch, we have the good use. Grace and John, Mike, happy to have you.

Yes, it's true that you are way younger than I am. Not that young. But you wouldn't know it, by the way, that you report your pieces and talk about it. You write with wisdom and expertise. So thank you for joining, walking us through your pieces. We appreciate it. And thank you all for listening. Join us again for the dispatcherante.

Have a way to this piece. I'm going to be able to be.