The Dispatch Podcast - White House Battles Social Media Over Misinformation

Episode Date: July 21, 2021

The White House has announced that it will be flagging misinformation on Facebook in an attempt to diminish vaccine skepticism. But could politicizing this issue even further actually embolden anti-vaxxers? Our hosts consider how we can sway the unvaccinated, and whether the world would be better off without online comment sections. Afterward, Steve introduces a potpourri of topics for Jonah and Sarah to dig into. How concerned should we be about inflation? Do Republicans have any interest in fully uncovering what happened on January 6? And can Biden convince the Democrats to accept a bipartisan infrastructure agreement after promising unity in his inaugural address? The gang concludes by discussing Jeff Bezos’ voyage to outer space, and Jonah considers whether we should build nuclear reactors on the moon. Show Notes: -The Morning Dispatch breaks down Biden’s clash with Big Tech -Jonah’s column: “Biden Shows How Not to Improve Vaccine Rates” -A Forbes article on the myth of vaccine-induced magnetism -TMD explores whether inflation is a threat -Alex Tabarrok discusses inflation on The Remnant Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the Dispatch podcast. We have a special popery episode for you today. I'm your host, Sarah Isgird, joined by Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg. And we don't have David French. And that's really, we're going to let loose. We're going to talk about all the things that David likes to talk about most, including but not limited to space. We'll throw in some tech. I mean, we know how David feels about big tech. We'll talk some inflation, some vaccine hesitancy, not hesitancy. as well as infrastructure, because we always have to talk about infrastructure. I mean, it's a day ending and why. Let's dive right in.

Jonah, the first topic that David likes to talk about. Yes. So the White House last week and over the weekend essentially declared war on Facebook primarily, social media in general. And it caused everybody to go to their favorite talking points about their favorite subjects, about everything from Section 230 to free speech.

Let me put it this way. everyone to be their best, what they think are their best selves. So Ted Cruz went full Ted Cruz, J.D. Vance went full J.D. Vance. And my own take, which I'm going to throw to you guys, is that this is largely a pretty brilliant way for the Biden administration to change the subject from them falling short of the vaccination rates that they wanted to hit. and instead have it be an argument about how bad big tech is and basically troll the right into going berserk, which is not to say that the right has been entirely wrong about this. I don't think what the White House is doing is all that kosher,

but they would much rather have a debate about big tech censorship and the insinuation that they're falling down because of troglodytic misinformation from Fox News and backward red state voters rather than, say, the fact that blacks and Hispanics in Democratic-controlled states are also resisting the vaccine, which is a worst conversation for them. So am I right, Sarah? Is this just a brilliant comms trolling exercise? Or is this a, this goes to 11, DefCon 1,

free speech catastrophe, the likes of which we have not seen for literally hours. So this is Class A flailing. Okay, so Biden initially says that Facebook is, quote, killing people. Then he walks it back and says, no, I didn't mean to say that. What I met was that these 12 people spreading misinformation are killing people and that, you know, Facebook is the platform for it. And then the White House Communications Director this morning said, well, Facebook should do something and should be liable for misinformation on their platform. Here's my problem, aside from, again, that being a pretty flaily weekend for the White House, I would say.

I would say they were stepping on their message, but like you're kind of right that their message wasn't great. So they probably aren't too upset about the flailing, but I don't think it was intentional by any means. Okay, I don't understand why this isn't the first question to the White House. Who defines what is misinformation? Are you saying that Facebook is the definer of what's information? Do you think the government should be the definer of what's information? And on the heels of the COVID-19 absolutely could not have been manmade because we have the proof and the scientists all agree, oops, never mind. The Biden administration's investigating this because, in fact, very much we don't know.

It feels like maybe the whole who gets to define misinformation is kind of where this whole rubber meets the road is. I concur in the sense that, no, look, it's like I really, so not to push back on this, but just, I mean, I wrote my column about it yesterday, and the thing is, is like, according to every political doctrine I am aware of, every political philosophy, from classical liberalism to conservatism to monarchism to, you know, you come up with everything short of full-throated anarchism. One of the things that like is permitted in political theory is for the state to be aggressively involved in fighting pandemics. The only other

things that sort of are equally qualified are like repelling invasions you know and um and like uh and and having a monopoly over courts and violence i mean it's like it's one of these like really back to hobbs basic things that states are allowed to do and should do and to me like i could see in theory an argument for saying, look, we're fighting this pandemic. It's already killed 600,000 Americans. It's cost us trillions upon trillions of dollars, all of these drug odors, overdoses, and all the rest. And if you're out there saying,

don't take the vaccine because it will make you magnetic, it does not ping all of my civil liberties, like freak out mode to say, yeah, maybe someone can tell those guys that they can't say that right now, right? And I know time Z. Sullivan and all that, blah, blah, blah. But as a practical matter, I don't think this will work. I think starting this conversation is bad because it turns getting vaccinated into a political statement, which is really dumb. But the people freaking out, this is first order 1984 stuff, I just think keep forgetting that this is not a normal political issue.

This isn't like arguing about the Green New Deal. It's arguing about a public health one. 101 national emergency, and that gets lost in a lot of this, you know, J.D. Vance, Ted Cruz talk. Steve, am I wrong? No, I think you're exactly right. I mean, look, part of why this was the perfect weekend news kerfuffle is because it allowed everybody on all sides to put their outrage hats on, right? So you had Jen Socky at the briefing on Thursday, talk about, you know, as Sarah notes, the White House is beating up these, these platforms. president Biden said they're they're killing people. He later clarified that to say that he

meant the people on the platforms who are are propagating misinformation rather than the platforms themselves. But for quite some time, it was thought that he was basically accusing Facebook of killing people. So you had the left and sort of Democrats, Biden supporters, going after Facebook for being this vehicle for the spreading of misinformation. On the other hand, you had at the briefing on Thursday, Jen, Saki, saying that they have really doubled down their efforts to fight this misinformation and that they are working with Facebook to do this. Quote, we are flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.

So you have the people on the ride who have been saying all along, look, Facebook and Twitter and Google and all these folks are 80. agents of the left, they're censoring information, and we get to put our outrage hats on. So everybody could spend the weekend yelling at one another without actually making much sense of the situation. Look, I would say that, you know, as a participant, we should always include a disclosure. The dispatch is a participant in Facebook's third-party fact-checking program. We're proud to be a part of the program.

We think we've done a great job with that. We've had a good relationship with Facebook from that. we said in our initial disclosure and the announcement that we were joining that, that that would never keep us from criticizing Facebook, and we have criticized Facebook, both in that context and in other contexts. Having said all that, you know, I will say that when I heard what Jen Saki said, it made me sit up a little bit. You know, we are flagging problematic posts for Facebook. I thought, well, in what context? How does that work exactly? Our Republicans afforded the same opportunity to flag posts, potentially problematic posts.

Because you can imagine a scenario in which the White House is, the White House has a broader definition of misinformation, I would say not just in the vaccine context, but then you might or Sarah might or I might. And they have accused Republicans of using misinformation, of lying, of propagating false claims in context where I don't think that the White House has been accurate. So I certainly wouldn't want anyone to rely on the White House's definition of misinformation in this context. Having said that, Facebook has made very clear in its public postings, both in the context of vaccines and more broadly about how it goes about identifying misinformation, flagging it to fact checkers, that they will take advice, that they want people to surface these kinds of things,

whether it's individual Facebook users, whether it's fact checking partners, whether it's government agencies, whether it's NGOs. They sort of have a, you know, will work with anybody to help us identify misinformation. So what Saki said, I would still like more clarity on that. We have reached out to Facebook to understand better what the process looks like. I would like the White House. I think she's taken three or four attempts at restating that position. I still think there's some blurriness on what exactly it looks like. But on the surface of it, I don't think it's likely to be more problematic today than it was the middle of the week last Wednesday before this whole fight took place. Okay, so something that people have been emailing me about is this idea

that if the White House is flagging problematic posts for Facebook, doesn't this actually make Trump's lawsuit in Florida where he sued Facebook claiming that they were state actors who violated his First Amendment rights, Twitter, Facebook, some others, because the government had coerced these companies, thereby basically what the government couldn't accomplish constitutionally on its own, it did through a private actor, thereby transforming the private actor into a state actor for First Amendment purposes. And David and I talked about this at length on the podcast and said, yeah, but like it can't just be, you criticized Facebook one time. It has to be really pervasive. Like the government has to have basically done it, just

happened to have like puppeteered this third party private actor. I have to have. I have to have to say, you know, so all these people email me were like, Jen Saki, quote, you know, we're flagging things for Facebook. Does this help Trump's lawsuit? Yeah, it helps it. Do I think it's pervasive enough? You know, you'd have to show that Facebook felt like

they didn't have much of a choice, but to take down those posts. I think you would want to look and see what percentage of the things that the White House is flagging then Facebook took action on to sort of have a data analysis as well. But I do find it real, that right after this whole thing goes down with Trump

and everyone's talking about these private actors in coercion and state action that Jensaki literally just handed him like a really pretty compelling piece of evidence for that case. So can I ask you a question about this law stuff? Yeah. And so you worked at the DOJ, right?

You were like, um, uh, and I'm going, Having known people in that job or similar jobs in the past, my impression from years of experience in journalism and also like reading newspapers is that people in those kinds of jobs will often call up a reporter or an editor and say, hey, you got that story wrong and here's why. Or, hey, you're missing the more important story and here's why. I suspect you have done that in the past. I have.

How is that materially legally different than the White House saying, hey, you guys, you have a post on there saying that if you take the vaccine, you will urinate fire, and you should not have that up there. Is that a completely bad analogy? Or is it different? Is it fine, but needs explication? I mean, because, I mean, again, I don't. I don't think the White House should be doing this, but it seems to me that people went to 11

thinking that this was proof that the White House and Facebook were in bed together. And I think the funny irony in all this is that Zuckerberg really wants to get in bed with government. He's literally running at Facebook runs ads. I see them every morning at home asking for more regulations from Congress. So, I mean, anyway, on my analogy, how is it, how is that different from that? this. Because I've made many of those calls. Dozens, hundreds, many hundreds of those calls, probably. And the percentage of corrections I've gotten based on those calls is like, I don't know,

maybe 5%. Now, maybe I'm just not very good at my job, you'll argue. But the fact is it's, that's a pretty, the idea that a reporter would hear that and say, okay, well, I really need to do this correction because she works for the government is not a, at all what's happening. And if you see email traffic and then look at the percentage of times, they've taken down a story because I said it was misleading, you would see that that's clearly not coercive, anything that I'm doing. The question is whether what the White House is doing that Facebook believes that's coercive, that there's something more than just the White House raising their hand and saying, this guy's saying that the earth is flat, just so you know the

Earth isn't flat, to something more like, you need to take down the post that we flag or dot, dot, dot, that's an awfully nice tech company you've got there. That's why I think that, by the way, this isn't enough. I don't think you will find the evidence for that if you go look for it. But it's weird to me that Saki would hand them a fact question, because this whole thing, not to get too into the weeds, this whole lawsuit was going to get tossed out on a motion to dismiss just on the law, that they hadn't pleaded legally sufficient anything like state action. And the only way that you would not be dismissed is if the judge is persuaded that there are questions of fact that have to be sort of, you have to have discovery and you have to let

the Trump side like dig into their emails and stuff like that. And something like this is a fact question. Does face it believe that when Jen Saki flagged something, they really do need to take it down. Okay, but I mean, I don't want to belabor this, but when Trump was taken off Twitter and Facebook and all these sites, he was the presidents of the United States at the time still. Correct. How is the Biden administration pressuring them when they weren't under the administration yet? Well, this is why it was somewhat clever for him to say this is a class action lawsuit.

I'm still very confused on how it's a class action lawsuit and who the class is. But in theory, you know, if Trump had just sued them, the clock would have stopped on January 8th or whatever day they took him off. In a class action lawsuit in theory, you're representing members of a class of sort of this ongoing harm. And so you would have the Biden administration to beat up on a little. Again, I still think this gets tossed on the motion to dismiss most likely. But Saki would be better off if she would like to see that lawsuit get dismissed to be a little more thoughtful about what she's. saying from the podium. And I realize people are like, no, she should say that because how else would we know? Fair enough. I'm just saying from a political comm standpoint,

that was a stupid thing to say out loud. Yeah. And I would say if she's interested, I mean, look, I think Jen Saki's probably really interested in getting, having more people get vaccinated. But announcing from the White House podium that the White House is working with big tech companies to, to, you know, object to things that it believes are misinformation is probably not on net a good thing to do. Like, there's no upside. It's not like people are going to become vaccinated because the White House is suddenly doing this.

But there are people, I would say mostly on the Senate right, who will have been skeptical because of what they view as the politicization of this, aged on by a bunch of deeply irresponsible right-wing commentators, and, you know, point to what she said there and say, see, see? And the more that you give people those excuses, I think, the worse off we all are in terms of getting vaccinated. Okay, I've got a question for you guys on all of this. So we're having this whole conversation. The Biden administration and the left want tech companies to take more things down. The right wants tech companies to take fewer things down, broadly speaking. Section 230 has nothing to do with either of those potential outcomes,

really? It has to do. So if I say that Jonah is married to Zoe, his dog, and he can prove that's false, which I think is a high bar. But let's say he could. prove it's false. He, if we got rid of Section 230, all it would allow is that Jonah, in addition to suing me for defamation, though who wouldn't want to be married to Zoe, could also sue Facebook for defamation. That's good for Jonah because Facebook has way deeper pockets than I have. Good for Jonah. For now. But if Facebook takes down Jonah's post about how great Zoe is because Zoe votes Republican or something

and Jonah feels particularly aggrieved and believes that it was taken down because of his political views and we've gotten rid of Section 230. Do you know what Jonah's recourse is? Absolutely nothing. So I'm confused and can y'all explain to me

why Section 230 ever comes up in these conversations? I... No, look, I've asked, it's a perfectly good question. I ask experts on this every, like, six months or so, I'm like, wait, I don't get. I feel like Tom Hanks, when they're in big, when they're explaining the building toys that turn into robots, and he raises his hand and says, I don't get it because it is, it's one of the things that's made me even more cynical. is that people talk about

getting rid of Section 230 like it will do the things that they think it will do and Ted Cruz must know otherwise, right? J.D. Vans must know otherwise. And so it's just sort of become a talisman as far as I can tell.

And it'd be cool for defamation. Like, again, people are getting defamed all the time on social media. But I guess I would point to like the UK's libel laws and stuff. Like they have, first of all, they don't have a First Amendment. They have a much lower standard for bringing defamation and libel lawsuits there. Look at their tabloids.

They're not better off. And my God, it's not like they don't have disinformation over there. And it's not like they don't have censorship. So like we have a country that's kind of done this. And I remain pretty confused. Yeah. So I'm in my more puckish moments. I am actually intrigued by the idea of getting rid of Section 230.

solely because I think the immediate consequence of that would be the total removal from public life of comment sections. And that's not a terrible world to live in. Except ours. Except ours, that's true. But also, 4chan goes away. And is that such a terrible place?

So that's why I think people want to get rid of Section 230. It's just the thing they don't want to say. It will do nothing for disinformation. it will do nothing for political viewpoint discrimination, but it will potentially end Twitter. And so like, oh, well, we just want to get rid of Twitter. And the way we're going to do that is by making them so, you know, liable for so many different defamation lawsuits at the same time

that they can't function and their legal department grows to the size of, you know, Los Angeles. The people want to get rid of Section 230. I mean, take Donald Trump. He wants to get rid of Section 230. and he wants back on Twitter. Yeah, that doesn't work. It doesn't work.

Anyway, I agree. It's a very weird thing. And, you know, many of them who complain loudest about Section 230 then try to launch alternative social media programs or websites or whatever

and want the same moderation privileges that they're trying to take away from everybody else. I mean, there's just hypocrisy and bad faith that seems to me all around. It's real weird to me. And look, I understand, like, the argument, Well, they have this special carve-out that, you know, NBC and the dispatch doesn't have or whatever.

Yeah, yeah. There may be policy reasons to get rid of Section 230. I'm open to having those discussions. None of them have to do with viewpoint discrimination and none of them have to do with misinformation. It's defamation. That's different. If you say vaccines don't work, they give you gills, you didn't defame anyone. It won't solve that.

And if you get taken down because you say abortion is murder. just asking questions about gills, not actually making affirmative statements. You don't know that they don't have gills. There have been reports out of other countries that vaccines do, in fact, give you gills. And if you haven't seen it, you can't say authoritatively that they don't. That's so true. And frankly, I would like to have gills. Well, that's another good point.

Would be pretty awesome. It'd be pretty cool. Now I'm pissed off that the vaccines don't give us gills. There was that the Flat Earth Society guy who was a real proponent and trying to prove that the earth was flat, and he died, what, a year ago, two years ago, trying to prove that the earth was flat, by the way. And like, I thought to myself, boy, if someone said, you right now need to prove to me that the earth is round, you know, I don't know that I could do that on a piece of scratch paper right now. And so, like,

it gets back to my very original question. Who gets to define misinformation? And are we better off if we do have some grand Wizard of Oz who can tell us what is misinformation, you know, is it really so, are we better off having the flat earth guy and then having other people who can say, no, and here's the proof that the earth isn't flat that I've heard from and believe even if I can't prove it myself? Or, like, that's the sort of marketplace of ideas concept. But we also have data showing that it doesn't work quite like that, that misinformation travels further, gets shared more than the truth ever will, right? If Jonah writes something crazy on Twitter, it gets a lot more retweets that when I'm like,

you know, I kind of like the color blue. Like, no one cares. Oh, I will say, I like the way you pronounce misinformation because it sounds like the title for the worst beauty pageant idea ever. Misinformation. There she is. Misinformation. That being said, Jonah, there is one thing you said that I just want to like raise my hand in

disagreement. The idea that because we're in a national emergency, that somehow should give the government more power or anyone like an excuse to take down information that we would otherwise allow up, that I think is a dangerous argument. No, I said I think in theory you could make that case in the same way like one of the one of the prior restraint carve outs is you can't announce when troop ships are leaving, right? That's the famous thing. Let's put it this way. Imagine if this pandemic weren't killing mostly overweight older people with a lot of

comorbidities, but was instead killing, heaven forbid, little kids, healthy little kids. This country would lose its mind trying to do everything it could to fight this. But because it's like, you know, in some, and I don't believe this personally, but like because the victims don't arouse the kind of sympathy that little kids would, we allow it to be a subject for a political debate in ways that I don't think culturally we would if it were a different situation. And under those kinds of situations, let's say the Upsilon variant comes along and does start, wiping people out, like, I think, and wiping kids out and all of that. I can see this country

get being in favor of forced vaccinations pretty damn fast and having much less tolerance for a lot of these things. So in theory, I think it makes sense. In practice, I think it's an incredibly dumb, dangerous idea because of the implementation problems and all the rest. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind.

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Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's eth-h-o-s-com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. rates may vary. All right, Steve, it's full-on potpourri time. Let's zoom through some fun topics. So I want to frame this in terms of politics, because there is a lot, especially for mid-July, there's a lot going on, on a day-to-day basis, on actual issues, discussions and debates

that I think could well have political implications for the elections in. November of 2022. So I want to start from that point, November of 2022, and consider a handful of issues in that context and then ask you, who do these issues, and you'd welcome to take whichever one I mention, where do they go and who do these, which political party of these issues ultimately benefit in that context? The first is infrastructure. We have seen yet another week of back and forthing on infrastructure with Republicans and Democrats, trading charges, is that each is acting in bad faith. You've had Chuck Schumer suggest that he's going to expedite a bipartisan effort

to which Republicans have objected, Senator Rob Portman, who's usually pretty mild-mandered on these things, condemning Schumer, accusing him of asking Republicans to vote for something they haven't even finally agreed on. You've had this kind of maneuvering on infrastructure for weeks and weeks. interested to know where you think it goes and if there is no bipartisan infrastructure agreement and everything is forced through on reconciliation or as much as possible for Democrats is forced through on reconciliation. Who does that benefit politically? Number two, the vaccine question.

We have seen, obviously, with the rise of the Delta, variant and increasing the number of both infections and fatalities, pretty clear political divide on vaccinations. Not as clear, I think Jonah referred to this earlier, as some of the reporting might lead you to believe, but there is widespread vaccine skepticism on the Republican side and less vaccine skepticism on the Democratic side. You've seen that change over the past 48 hours, I think, with some prominent Fox News personalities urging Fox News viewers to get vaccinated. Chris Ruddy, the CEO of Newsmax, wrote an op-ed in which he said he trusts the vaccines and thinks people should get vaccinated. You had Steve Scalese who had been hesitant to get the

vaccine, get the vaccine over the weekend. You had Mitch McConnell open a press conference today with strong words about the importance of getting vaccinated. There seems to be a push. I think we'll learn more about how coordinated, in fact, it was to get, in particular, Republicans to get vaccinated. Do they get vaccinated? And does that have any longer-term political effects. Three, inflation. We're seeing now more data backing up the idea that inflation is real and that it could be persistent. Is that a problem, a longer-term problem for the Biden administration? And finally, the January 6th special committee, the Nancy Pelosi, January 6th committee. We've talked at length here before about how both sides have politicized this. Nancy Pelosi politicized it

earlier by proposing a seven to four split on the special committee, which I think had the effect of discouraging Republicans who would have been, would have gone along, would have supported such a committee. And then you had Republicans grossly politicize it when it came time to support that committee. We had now had Kevin McCarthy announced the Republican members of the committee and Jim Banks, one of those members, in effect announced that he sees his role as widening the investigation so that it include Democrats' pet issues and said directly that he's going to take on the media and Democrats on this. Does January 6th matter in the long term and does this politicized committee, is there any chance that we learn anything valuable

from it? So I just teed you guys up for about a 45-minute discussion, which I'm going to sit back and listen. I want to hear Jonas take on inflation. I was driving in the car today thinking, I wonder what Jonah thinks of this inflation business. Thanks, Sarah. A, I don't believe you. No, no, no. I'll prove it. I went to lunch.

I took one of your interns out to lunch today, and she has to give a presentation on Friday to her whole team on inflation. And I thought, huh, I wonder what Jonah thinks about inflation. So boom. Wow. All right. I take it back. Thank you. My baseless charge of deceit.

If only we didn't have Section 230, then I could sue Zencastr? Zoom? Totally. So, look, I was, like, Steve did a great piece about inflation and looking at Ohio and all that kind of stuff. And I was pretty much on team. We're looking at inflation. And then I had Dave Bonson on my podcast, who was part of the school that says that deflation is a bigger threat and that most of this money from quantitative easing on down is basically just sitting in banks and it's not circulating through the economy. And so the velocity of money, as those people say, is not as high as it should be. and that most of the inflation that we have seen has more to do with the ramping up

from the shutdowns of the pandemic. And the lumber is the best example of that, right? Lumber went through the roof because coming out of the pandemic, people wanted to buy houses, wanted to build houses, wanted to add on to their houses, and the mills had shut down during the pandemic,

creating not an artificial shortage, but a shortage that had nothing to do about the scarcity of the resource, but had to do with the scarcity of a product. And you can look at things like, you know, used cars. All of these things are, I think, better explained by that phenomenon than by sort of systemic inflation of the 1970s variety. That said, my view on monetary policy has always been not to write or talk about monetary

positive policy because I don't understand it very well. And I think all pundits do this to one extent or another. We have people that we rely on as experts that help explain things to us. And you know, you can call them up and say, hey, what's going on here, whether it's Section 230 or something else? And my problem is, is I have very close friends who are very passionately into monetary policy on both sides of these questions. And it leaves me, having to adjudicate between them what I think. I think that we are seeing real inflation. I think Larry Summers is no fool.

But I still, if I had to bet that is secondary and the primary thing is still this ramping up thing, you know, and the wage inflation stuff probably has more to do still with unemployment benefits. and the fact that for really, I think, fascinating cultural reasons that we have not begun to really process, lots of people don't want to go back to work, which, you know, with something that matters where decisions at the margins determine things is hugely influential on what's going on. And so this is a very long-winded way of me saying, I don't know, but I think everybody has a good

point. Fair enough. Fair enough. All right, Sarah, that was a clever dodge. It was really interesting how you turned that out of Jonah and pushed him to answer your long curiosity about Jonah and vaccines. Or Jonah in inflation. But I want to ask you about vaccines. Am I right to have identified these developments in the last 48 hours where you have these prominent Republican and conservative voices seeming to get more serious about?

getting people vaccinated or am I over interpreting a series of five data points to identify a trend that actually doesn't exist? So I definitely thought you were wanting to see zebras when in fact there were horsies. But there's something a little weird going on. So for instance, you've pointed out people who are like super on the vaccine hesitancy side who are coming around. I don't, I just don't know. I don't follow those people very closely. But, like, Guy Benson, who has never been vaccine hesitant. He's pro-vaccine. But, like, weirdly just tweeted, the period, vaccines, period, work three hearts. Like, why, why now, except if there were maybe something going on behind the scenes? Like, again, someone who's not been vaccine hesitant. So this isn't like, oh, he changed

his mind. It's more like to your point that maybe, maybe the last, you know, the uptick that's been going on has really gone to heart for a lot of people that this is costing lives. And the more we can get the message out there, the better. I hope that's the case. I don't really understand what else it would be. I hope it works. Let me ask you a question. What else it could be? Because I kind of have two theories. One is some memo went out at Fox News. And There's some evidence for that. Maybe. But two, is it possible that one of Mitch McConnell's, you know,

pollsters came to him and said, look, this anti-vax crap is killing us in the suburbs. And we can't get tarred with that kind of messaging. And because we could take back the Senate if we can get some of these suburbs. And so let's lean into it. particularly since it looks like, and we'll talk about this in a second, the house is going to lean into heavy what-aboutism on January 6th. And so doubling the impression that the GOPs, the crazy party is not a good idea going into the midterms.

Is that out of left field? Not crazy. Not crazy at all. You know, there's also been a lot of people, I think, on Twitter trying to, quote, unquote, persuade people to take the vaccine by calling them stupid. and belittling them and name-calling. And so perhaps all of these people at the same time saw an opportunity to show how persuasion is done

by listening to people, by positive messaging. Maybe they were just inspired by all of the really bad actors on this, on, you know, on social media who would truly rather have the issue than actually see people vaccinated as far as I can tell. Yeah, or are they blessed you remember Or they remember that not very many people are on Twitter. And the way to persuade people is not to actually do stuff on Twitter.

Good point. Hey, Steve, your turn. The January 6th commission, we don't actually have the names, but McCarthy has put out little feeler names, if you will. Liz Cheney is on the Democrats list. But on McCarthy's list, I saw it and I thought, huh, and I sort of shrugged my shoulders. But you didn't.

And what's your thought? Yeah, I mean, I think the most important, thing to recognize is that Republicans have decided, it's not terribly surprising given their position against the special committee and the fact that this is, that they are going

to try to make this look like the Nancy Pelosi Committee, but they have decided to take an aggressive fighting position on this. As I say, Jim Banks, who sort of the lead, Jim Jordan is on the commission. Jordan was a prominent member of the Benghazi Special Committee, did a lot of

the sort of tougher questioning of Obama administration officials, I thought sometimes effective questioning, sometimes he went a little far. I think he lost credibility when he defended President Trump in his two impeachments. But on this, you know, Jim Banks, who's sort of the lead Republican on this, the head of the Republican Study Committee, came out and issued this statement. Again, incredibly partisan statement, in effect saying the commission or the committee itself is is invalid that you know this is they're doing nancy Pelosi's political bidding um he's going to take on the media and the democrats and their false narratives about uh about january 6th and it just signaled that

republicans have have no interest in actually trying to participate in some kind of a fact-finding effort here on on the question of january sixth which really is the question here you know i i think it's a slightly harder argument for them to make because liz cheney is on the committee and because she's determined she says she's determined to find out what actually happened um and she's you know you can't very well portray liz cheney as a puppet of nancy Pelosi i mean nobody would believe that as much as I think Republicans are going to try. But it was a pretty pugnacious response and a pretty pugnacious pose going into the committee. I think to the extent that this matters, to answer my own question in the long term,

to the extent that this matters, I do think there's a real risk for Republicans in seeming more and more to be defenders or explainers or minimizers of the insurrectionists. of the bad guys. And you're seeing this a lot on Fox News primetime. You're seeing this a lot from prominent Republicans. You're seeing, you know, the former president of the United States in effect minimizing what happened. I think if they allow themselves by articulating these views to be portrayed as or perceived as, you know, defenders or minimizers of what happened, I do think that's a problem, not just because of what happened on January 6th, but because it what it says, what it's further says about the modern Republican Party. All right.

We're missing a topic. What did we miss here? Infrastructure. All you. Tell us what's going to. You should be able to predict what's going to happen, right? I mean, we all have new accusations, new information. It should be very clear.

I think the Democrats are in a pretty precarious position here. If they really push through a huge infrastructure, in quote, soft infrastructure, is that what they've been calling it or something like that? Human infrastructure. I feel like I heard soft. Anyway, I think you're right. Soft human infrastructure. Like babies, like buggy little babies.

Squishy infrastructure. I think that risk really becoming far more of a talking point for the right than any accomplishment for the left. especially when you have Republicans like Mitt Romney who would otherwise be so alienated from their party who are willing to come out and say, like, nope, they didn't negotiate in good faith. My vote was on the table.

They could have gotten it. They chose not to. Instead, they went, you know, the Bernie Sanders AOC route. This is crazy. It's not infrastructure. It's way too much spending. P.S. inflation. I think it's a weird position for them to be in.

You know, there was a, there's been a bunch of these. lately about, you know, the culture war started on the left type thing and that the left has moved much further left than their median voter. Like, this is one of those moments where you wonder how many Democratic voters are like, yeah, but guys, I mean, seriously. And I haven't seen the Democrats do a particularly good job talking about what you get for that. And that's going to be the problem. If you're going to spend that much money, you better come up with a real good, short narrative on what you get for squishy infrastructure. And I haven't seen that yet.

Yeah. And I think there's a secondary and related risk if they can't get this bipartisan package done. You know, I think if you're if you're sort of a casual news consumer and you're not obsessed with what's happening in Washington, but you hear that 10 Republicans have been working with 10 Democrats for now, what, six weeks plus on crafting this thing, that there seems to be some real bipartisan push, that people like Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema have resisted the sort of the partisan moves proposed by some of their fellow Democrats. And you think, well, they can't even get this done. You know, ultimately, you do have to blame the president, the White House for this. And I think particularly given the fact that

Joe Biden ran in large part as a guy who was going to return us to politics as normal. Now, maybe this is just the new normal and we're always going to be this polarized. But that's not what he promised, right? I mean, he accused Donald Trump of further dividing the country. I think he was accurate in that accusation, certainly, but said he was going to be the one to bring it together. He talked about unity being in his soul. I mean, think back to his inaugural address.

I mean, this was what he said it was going to be all about. And you can't get your party to go along with a bipartisan infrastructure deal that includes, you know, a dozen Republicans, maybe a few more, willing to spend a ton of money, that would be a pretty significant failure, I think, on the part of Joe Biden. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and vary by race.

Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at MX.ca. all right space the last frontier but not anymore it's now just the frontier so jeff bezos went up to space today in his own spaceship he uh set you know several several records actually but perhaps the best is that wally funk became the oldest person to go into space and she seems awesome and i'm so pleased that her name is Wally Funk because that's just something we can read in history books

from now on and I'm for it. So there's a few areas here. One, the shape of the spaceship was somewhat mockable. Let's just say it was mockable on Twitter. So I feel like Jonah was probably giggling like a little schoolgirl. But Jeff Bezos has said

that Earth should be zoned residential and that we should move all of our pollution, heavy industry, all move it into space. Do we think this is real? Is this a good idea? Is this talk? Does it matter? And set aside whether I guess it actually happens. But I mean more as like a political thing for us to be talking about down here in our lifetime. Is this going to move anyone? Jonah? I like the idea of moving stuff into space. I think it's a great long-term goal. The question is how do you get the stuff back efficiently,

which is complicated? I think if we could figure out a way to put huge nuclear reactors on the moon, everyone's afraid of nuclear power but nuclear power is first of all much safer than people think it is and second of all it's the only solution to climate change I mean it's not a silver bullet

but there's no approach to climate change that could actually work without some version of nuclear power and if you're afraid of radiation leaks having a radiation leak on a lifeless body in space where there's no atmosphere is not so scary the problem is how do you run the extension cord from the moon to the surface right and that that we haven't figured out yet some people think you could beam microwave energy down

but that would scare people because every time like the seagull flew through the beam it would just burst into flames and disappear um and we have the wind turbines that's basically what's happening to then yeah true so uh i think just more big picture i think all of this is fantastic And, you know, in your attempt to make me into the Peerian Freudian about the shape of the rocket, Sarah, sometimes a rocket is just a rocket, to paraphrase Sigmund Freud. And I say this as I'm smoking a cigar, so the irony is even more intense. As someone said, I wish Georgia O'Keefe had been around to design a rocket. I think, you know, what I find so infuriating and hilarious,

hilarious at the same time is, you know, how angry all of this billionaires in space makes Bernie Sanders. And the Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders, who thinks that billionaires should not exist and says, you know, we're having all of these issues here and billionaires are going to space. This is why we need to tax billionaires. This is one of the great things about rich people is that they, as early adopters, make everything cheap for the rest of us. If you didn't have Gordon Gecko on the beach and Wall Street with that phone that looked like a portable pacemaker, you wouldn't have cheap mobile phones today. And the move towards space, I think, is in every conceivable way a good thing for humanity. And it's a good thing economically.

If we could figure out how to just mine a couple of the asteroids and, like, what is it, the Van Allen belt or whatever, that have trillions of dollars of various heavy metals and minerals and all of these kinds of things, that would be fantastic. Why mess up our own planet when you can, you know, exploit resources from lifeless hucks beyond our orbit? So anyway, I just think it's all cool. And I just wanted to get this in to say how cool it was, well, David's not here because it makes him very sad. And also talking about Section 230 while he's not here makes him very sad. And I think we should wrap up with a long discussion of Aquaman, just to really just twist the knife. So Steve, here's my space question to you. There was also the youngest person on that spacecraft

ever go into space, Oliver Damon. He was also the first commercial passenger on for Blue Origin. He's 18. basically he came in, he was a participant in this auction and he secured a seat on the second flight. The first person, by the way, it was $28 million. His family paid a lot of money to send him to space for a total of a 10 minute-ish flight. I think they had like two minutes in space. I'm just curious, would you allow your 18-year-old to go if it were free? And how much would you be willing to pay to send your 18 year old to space? So I wouldn't pay anything. I think given the fact that the age you suggest is 18, which would make my oldest in this theoretical construct an adult. True. She would be in a position to make her own decision. I don't know that I would

encourage her. I probably wouldn't discourage her. I mean, I think it was something that she felt strongly about I before it. I mean, so I come to this this discussion with a pretty significant handicap. I don't follow this as closely as you do. Certainly I don't follow it as closely as as David does. I guess I find myself mostly in Jonah's camp. I think this is probably a net good. You see this kind of innovation. You saw this kind of innovation before flight. You've seen this kind of innovation at various stages of lots of major advances. This feels like we could be in that stage here. I do think, and this Sarah goes back to a comment you made in passing earlier, but it's something that we talk about here a fair amount. As somebody who doesn't feel

terribly passionately about this, one way or the other, I'm sort of surprised at how many people do have really strong views on this. And particularly the haters who are, I mean, if you go on Twitter at any time today, and again, with the stipulation that Twitter is a bad way to kind of survey public opinion, people are just outraged about this. They're so angry. They're yelling and screaming in the Twitter equivalent of a meltdown. I guess I just can't get that bothered about it.

I think it's probably a net good. I hope it's a net good. do we have to be, do we have to have an opinion about everything? Isn't it okay to say, you know what, I don't know that much about this. I think it's okay. I don't have a strong view, but everybody's got strong views about everything these days. Steve, this is the life we have chosen. I mean, I guess I think I'm going to, I think I'm going to try to, maybe this will be my, like,

self-improvement task that I assigned myself for 22. I'm going to limit my strong opinions to like 12 issues. And that's it. And I'm not going to worry about all this other stuff. It's not important to have strong opinions on every single little thing that comes up and take hot takes or bold stance. And I think you're right, Sarah, I mean, you know, particularly on social media, a ton of that is just because that's what will get you the likes and the retweets and everything.

The bolder and more aggressive you are, you get that kind of feedback. And if I were to, nobody cares about what I think about this. But if I were to tweet that I don't have a particularly strong view about what's happened with the space race. Nobody cares. Nobody's going to tweet it. Nobody's going to engage with it. Anyway, social media bad.

I mean, David is just so listeners know, David is actually upset with us that we're covering this without him today, which does, I think, I mean, it brings me joy. I don't know about you guys. So that's a main reason to cover it. But also, I was watching today just to make sure since David's gone

that that was coincidental and not actually causal, that there wasn't some string hanging off the blue origin phallus that, you know, had a little David French holding on at the bottom. Thankfully, it appears not. So I think David will be back for advisory opinions on Thursday and joining us next week. All right, guys. I think that was fun. I think we should do our little like popery David free. Steve is, Steve's laughing. Steve's out. Let's do this again soon. Good times. Had by all except Steve.

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