The Dispatch Podcast - Why Scandals No Longer Matter | Roundtable

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

Mike Warren is joined by Megan McArdle, Sarah Isgur, and Jonah Goldberg to discuss the end of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, what we’ve learned from the latest Epstein files drop, and the debate over postliberalism currently raging in the conservative movement. The Agenda:—Who won the shutdown?—Donald Trump’s approval rating—The latest Epstein files—“The dog that hasn’t barked”—Do scandals matter?—The postliberal divide—Why you don't want a factory job—Not Worth Your Time: The penny? Show Notes:—Take our listener survey!—Jonah’s G-File on postliberalism The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—⁠click here⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You may have heard of the sex cult nexium and the famous actress who went to prison for her involvement, Alison Mack. But she's never told her side of the story until now. People assume that I'm like this pervert. My name is Natalie Robamed, and in my new podcast, I talked to Allison to try to understand how she went from TV actor to cult member. How do you feel about having been involved in bringing sexual trauma at other people? I don't even know how to answer that question. Alison After Nexium from CBC's Uncover is available now on Spotify.

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Mike Warren. On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss the end of the longest government shutdown in history. What will be the political ramifications for both Democrats and Donald Trump? We'll also discuss the latest iteration of the Jeffrey Epstein saga. New emails are out from Congress. Will there be more documents coming out next week? And why is Donald Trump trying to stop that from happening? We'll also discuss the internal debate going on in conservative egghead circles about post-liberalism and its role in the broader conservative movement. And finally, a little not worth your time. I'm joined today by my dispatch colleagues, Jonah Goldberg and Sarah Isger, as well as Megan McArdle of the Washington Post.

let's dive right in. All right. Well, our long national nightmare is over. The government shutdown. The longest in American history is over. This is my favorite time, by the way, to have a discussion about a government shutdown after the government shutdown has been solved and we can move on from the sort of petty legislative arcana and the discussions about what's going on behind the scenes. And the complaints from the members on the fringes of their conferences and caucuses. And we could just talk about what the political fallout is from this particular government shutdown.

So on Wednesday, the House voted on something that the Senate had voted on Monday. President Trump signed that resolution into law. The government is now reopened. The question here is, and Megan, let's start with you, who won, who lost? That's really all we care about. Will we be talking about this being the bane of the Democrats' 2026 midterm election hopes? Or is this going to hurt Republicans and Donald Trump?

What say you? The American people lost. I don't think anyone wins or loses a shutdown in any significant way. They don't really seem to make a difference to elections. I think Democrats won to the extent that they cut it off before it hit Thanksgiving because, you know, Democrats thought they were winning this.

Their base really wanted and their membership really wanted to see them fight. So they fought. And I guess that's a win. But if they'd gone into Thanksgiving, you know, Republicans were taking a lot of blame. They do control both houses of Congress as well as the presidency.

And the... I think that had they gone further, there was a risk that Democrats would start taking some blame because the thing is that no one was really feeling this. You know, like federal workers were. I don't want to say no one. But, you know, SNAP benefits hadn't yet been cut off. The things that were about to bite, I did spend some time last month sitting on the tarmac because there weren't enough air traffic controllers, there weren't enough TSA people.

But that's a pretty small group is like business travelers. who sit on the tarmac a lot. They were about to, if they had done that for the Thanksgiving travel season, I'm not sure Democrats would have kept winning. So to the extent that they stopped it, that's a win. It would have been a bigger win to not start it in the first place. You know, there's clearly been a lot of attempt at messaging this. You know, Democrats trying to blame Donald Trump.

Trump, even Wednesday night as he was signing this into law, said people were hurt so badly, I just want to tell the American people, you should not forget this. When we come up to midterms and other things, don't forget what they've done, they being Democrats, who did start this shutdown, what they've done to our country. I think that was obviously what the messaging is, but Sarah, this new poll from the Associated Press finds that Donald Trump's approval rating and the way he's managing the federal government is down significantly. Only 33 percent, according to this poll, of U.S. adults. That's U.S. adults, not voters, but U.S. adults approve of the way that Trump is managing the

government. In March, that was at 43 percent. People may not know the ins and outs of how, of who started the government shutdown. Like Megan was saying, Republicans are in charge of the government. So did this just ultimately, in the minds of your average voter or your average American, and just ultimately hurt Trump simply because he's in power? Or is this really going to come back and bite the Democrats, as Trump hopes? So I've got a few answers to this. One, you all remember Gryfter, Sarah, where I just, like, put on my most cynical political operative hat, regardless of morality? We love that, Sarah.

Yeah, so let's start with Gryfter, Sarah. Gryfter Sarah says that there are these off-cycle elections, and while the seats themselves maybe aren't that important. A, there's still seats. And B, they set a narrative going into the midterms. So it's really important to win these off-cycle elections by as much as you can. And Virginia is an off-cycle state. Northern Virginia decides how Virginia goes these days because the population is so large. And Northern Virginia is chock-a-block full of federal workers, like most of them. So if you would like to win an off-cycle election in Virginia, you know, when we think about, like, who the American people are going to blame, a really easy way to think about it is that most people who are partisans, even light partisans, let's say, will blame the other team, because why would they blame their own team? Sure.

Most people in Northern Virginia are Democrats or lean Democrats. So if you shut down the government, they are more likely to blame the other team. And Gryft or Sarah says that this was, whether intended or not, maybe Gryft or Sarah is it willing to go that far. It was an important turnout operation in northern Virginia. All of a sudden, people didn't have to go to work. They weren't getting paid. And they were already lean Democrats to Democrats.

And lo and behold, not only did Democrats win in Virginia, they won the race that was their weakest in the entire country, the Attorney General race, and they won. want it by a lot more than Harris did. So I would say, Gryft or Sarah at least, would say that was a wildly successful operation. Okay, let me give you my second answer, though, which is I was stunned by the lack of message from Republicans, Hill Republicans on this. They seem to defer to Trump to message it. I'm sure that Trump, the White House at least, told them to defer to the White House. Trump's message was very Trumpy, but not nearly as good as what I'm I understand the Republican Senate message to be, which is, let me put on my Republican senator voice here.

Whatever you think, I wish I could do a Mitch McConnell voice. So many people are so good at that. I bet Jonah could do a Mitch McConnell voice. You can try it out for the first time right here, Sarah. We're all on tenter hooks waiting to hear it. Live without a net. Imagine a turtle coming out of its shell. Okay, whatever you think of the politics, the exigency right now is to open the government so the people can get paid and can fly and go about their lives.

The idea that we will not do that in order to haggle over insurance company subsidies for a program Democrats created without Republican votes, that's Obamacare, and set to expire without Republican votes, that's these subsidies, is simply, out of touch with reality. There actually was, I think, a really clear message to blame Democrats. They weren't haggling over the budget. They were haggling over Obamacare, a thing that they insisted on doing without compromise and without Republican support. And then they have to go back to Republicans and beg them when they no longer control the government to get Republican support or else we're going to shut down the government. I think that's a really bad message for Democrats, except nobody ever heard it. Why is that?

I mean, you mentioned the White House sort of likely taking control of that messaging. But perhaps this is Donald Trump's sort of, I don't know, his instinct that what you just described, which makes sense to me as an argument, is maybe a little too complex, doesn't fit on a bumper sticker kind of argument. although I keep thinking what was Trump's argument was essentially anything you don't like because of this shut down. It's the Democrats' fault. And then it stopped, right? Jonah, thoughts. Yeah. So I generally agree with Gryfter Sarah.

I generally agree with Gryft or Sarah about a lot of this. I do think that it's part of the reason the messaging was all. weird on this was that the Democrat messaging was wildly incoherent as a matter of like a logic uh you know equation you know this is the Republican shutdown but we're furious at Democrats for ending the Republican shutdown is weird right and um and I agree that the I've been saying for a month now that Trump's body language is all wrong for this um this is part of my argument about why the destruction of the East Wing was a bigger deal politically than people were giving it credit for.

Just because Trump kept talking about how this shutdown was a great opportunity to kill democratic programs, to fire more people, to talk to Laura Ingram about how he can get 10 pounds of gold into a 5-pound oval office. And so just the vibes coming out of the White House were just wrong for the, smart argument for Republicans to make. I don't know which Sarah it was. I don't know if it was flirty Sarah or or sporty Sarah or sporty Sarah or ballerina Sarah but maybe it was just Twitter Sarah but on on Twitter I was like one of

the only people to seem to remember that she made this point which I'm not sure I agreed with at the time but I took it seriously and so did a bunch of other people. I just want to be clear. I have no idea what Jonah's about to say because I don't remember what I said yesterday. Yeah, so Sarah was throwing cold water and all the people talking about the no king's protests. Oh, oh, yes.

Yes, everyone hated me for this. Yeah, like shouldn't the question here be whether this is a test about turnout or the collecting name, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, for the upcoming off-year elections. And it turns out that by that metric, whether they collected names or not, I don't know, right? That's not my point.

My point is, it turns out that that no king thing actually for the people who said it was a barometer of the democratic mood in this country, they may still be wrong, but the facts support them and nobody else, right? That thing does suggest in hindsight that there was a major anti-Republican, anti-income mood in the country. And as we talked about last week, part of the problem with the off-year elections is every faction the Democratic Party won, so you can't do any kind of granular interpretation of any of it. I just think that all signs point to a real problem for Republicans, and the last point I'd just make is, because you did just ask me for open-ended thoughts. Why do people drive on

parkways and park on driveways? No, is the simple fact is that the filibuster worked, right? The filibuster, the point of the filibuster, is to force the minority to compromise with the majority. And so here we had the filibuster forcing eight not up for election or retiring Senate Democrats to take one for the team and come up with a compromise that extends SNAP benefits for a year and does a bunch of other things, but reopens the government, which is good for everybody, which is the right public policy. and the base of the Democratic Party is very angry about it, though I think now they are feasting on Jeffrey Epstein emails,

so this will all recede very quickly in the popular memory. And I think in a year, to make this sort of modest prediction, I think it will be agreed upon that the shutdown worked well for Democrats because it shaped a message climate, sort of a messaging thing about health care. It forces the Republicans, If the Republicans cave on Obamacare premiums, Democrats say, see, we were right to force this issue.

We moved the overdid window. And if Republicans don't vote for the premiums, they can say, see, you can't trust these guys on health care. We told you they would do this. This is why we shut down the government. The only real loser on the Democratic side is Chuck Schumer. And if I force my big toe down on the thumbtack in my shoe, I can conjure a tear for Chuck Schumer.

But otherwise, that's fine. It does feel like, however, what you're sort of talking about with the anger within the Democratic base, Chuck Schumer sort of losing a bit here feels like it's going to be the basis for some conversations in the near future about the internal fights within the Democratic Party that may be mirror what happened now. 15 years ago in the Republican Party with the rise of the Tea Party movement. But we will have those discussions when we need to have them. And I've sort of had my fill of shutdown talk just now in these a few minutes. So let's move on to something you mentioned, Jonah. Are we boring you? I'm sorry.

Does governance bore you, Mike? Yes, absolutely. Give me fireworks. Give me sensation. And that's why, yes, Sarah. Before we leave this topic, can we touch on like just one, sort of future facing question, which is, is this the new governance? Is this what we do now every year? Will the American voters ever sort of have a consistent group to hold accountable like

a cough, cough, Congress? Because I don't really see that we learned anything from this. Neither side learned anything. We certainly didn't learn anything about budgeting. And this is no way to run a railroad. We haven't done the complete budgeting process since the Clinton administration. So, you know, one suggestion was we stop having shutdowns because we just don't allow the government to shut down and we don't pass a budget. That seems like a terrible idea. So, like, what happens from here, Mike? I mean, it's a good question. Yeah, Mike.

Sorry, let me check the script of what happens later. I don't know. I mean, look, is this the normal? I mean, it is the normal, as you pointed out, Sarah. is there hasn't been normal budgeting process for this entire century. The main reason this ended is because Thanksgiving, what if Thanksgiving hadn't been a week away? Right. Well, and look, we're going to have to deal with this in a couple of months anyway. So I, at terms of, you know, coming back to this problem of continuing resolutions, budgeting on the, you know, on the sort of on the fly.

And I would be interested in what everybody else thinks. It does strike me that as long as our sort of political divide, which is pretty narrow and pretty, you know, dependent on a very small number of voters in the middle who swing from one part of the other, until there's a sort of break in that logjam in the way that people vote, there's not going to be a break in the way that we're doing this funding of the government because it really reflects a sort of divide within. and all of us about what to do, what to prioritize. Those tradeoffs you always talk about, Sarah. We are the government shutdown. Exactly. Be the government shutdown you want to see. The government shutdown was the friends we made along the way.

All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch Podcast. If you're still overpaying for wireless, it's time to say yes to say no. At Mitt 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. Ditch overpriced wireless and those jaw-dropping monthly bills,

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Seamintmobile for details. Before we return to the roundtable, I want to let you know what's going on elsewhere at the dispatch. This week, Jonah Goldberg invites naval historian Andrew Lambert aboard the HMS Remnant, the dispatch's other flagship podcast. They dive into 19th century British Grand Strategy, the liberal tendencies of sea powers, and the lessons British naval history holds for America today. Search for the Remnant in your podcast app and here. hit the follow button. Now, let's jump back into the conversation. I want to move on to the

fireworks, the craziness. So, of course, we're talking again about Jeffrey Epstein. And just as a summary of kind of where we are, Jeffrey Epstein was something like 20,000 emails released on Wednesday of this week by House Democrats and in some Republicans, I guess, on the House Oversight Committee, and we seem to be learning more about, I don't know, what Jeffrey Epstein said about Donald Trump over several years. Some of it pretty banal and uninteresting, at least to me, about sort of who, you know, whether Jeffrey Epstein's plane and Donald Trump's plane will sort of be in conflict at landing or taking off from an airport. But then some also some sort of more explosive stuff, Jeffrey Epstein talking a lot about Trump, but of course no emails to Trump or certainly no emails in which Trump's, you know, talking about his relationship or lack thereof with Jeffrey Epstein over the last, you know, several years of Jeffrey Epstein's life. But there's a lot of discussion about it. And, of course, there's this vote next week in Congress to release more of the Epstein files.

The White House really doesn't want to be having this conversation. CNN first reported. Others have followed up and confirmed the reporting that the administration actually held a meeting in the situation room this week, inviting some of the Republican House members, I guess Lauren Bobert, the Republican from Colorado, who's been sort of angling to get these files released and to get more transparency. They sort of, I don't know, had kind of a star chamber within the White House situation room to convince her not to do this. She seems to have not been convinced. What is going on?

Megan, can you explain where we are? Are we learning anything that's valuable and important to know? Is this just sort of fulfilling some kind of resistance liberal? you know, wish fulfillment of, we're finally going to get Trump on this Epstein issue, even though that doesn't seem to be what we've learned from these emails. What do you take away from this week's edition of this saga? Look, I think we knew that he knew about Epstein's proclivity for young women, very young women, not legal women, not even barely legal women.

I think we call those girls. Yeah. And to that extent, it's not new. There's like the implication that maybe he spent some time with one of these women, but it's not clear that spending time is a euphemism, right? It might just be like he talked to her by the pool. And overall, I don't think there is anything here that is going to bring Trump down. I also think scandals just matter less than they used to, like way less,

especially at the presidential level, right? Below that, people will pay attention to stuff, but now people are so partisan. They're so locked into, you know, my team right or wrong, that it's really hard to move the dial. I think it's not even clear to me, like, if there were photographs of Donald Trump misbehaving with a young woman, that that would make a difference. But definitely, this is not going to do it. Well, go ahead, Jonah. Yeah, I'm, I've basically been there for a long time. I think there's a perfectly defensible, probably Occam's Razory kind of position to take.

At the same time, I assume there would be less in these emails than we've already seen. Because I thought if, you know, I mean, I've been saying forever, I don't think anybody's, I'm not alone in this, that if there was criminally implicating stuff in, in these emails, it would have leaked, right? Maybe not at Biden's orders, maybe not at, you know, Merrick Garland's orders. But, I mean, Trump's tax returns, New York Times got those? Like, like, the number of bogusy bad cases that were brought against Trump, the idea that if there was this smoking gun out there of criminal activity in the Epstein record, which a lot of people had access to over a decade, I just feel like word would

have gotten out and it would elite. So I don't, I still kind of believe that. At the same time, this stuff is creepy enough that I'm surprised it hasn't leaked until now. I agree with that, but I would also add that I think part of the problem is actually all that other stuff. Yeah, no, for sure. Right? It's all the nothing burger stories. Yeah, I agree.

That went out against Trump and it makes it harder to land things that are not nothing burgers on him. But the difference with the Epstein thing, as we're seeing, we're like Lauren Boebert, Lauren Bobert sees it in her political self-interest to defy Donald Trump and stick with this stuff, right? So does Marjorie Taylor Green, so do a bunch of these people. You know, Dan Bongino almost resigned because he was so sad that he had to eat a giant bowl of recriminations and go back on all his podcast glory about the Epstein stuff. and you know charlie kirk before his tragic and untimely death was a whole hog and then the white house came down on him like a ton of bricks and he said okay i'm not going to talk about it anymore so like the problem is is that the people who made this into a major thing are in trump's coalition

and the democrats in fact are late arrivals to caring about this and who among us can get angry to anybody for cynicism these days. And so I think it does matter, right? I think it does matter in a way that we haven't seen other things matter before because it's his team that built this up. And now he is so obviously going into overdrive, trying to keep it all from coming out. And again, I don't think there's anything criminal in there. But like the suspicion it's going to raise and the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

opportunities for grandstanding in Maga World on this, I think there's a reason why Trump is worried about it. That's not stupid. Sarah, can you explain to me why why Republicans played with this fire? I mean, there is a, there, there was some obvious short-term political upside for them to sort of, you know, cultivate this idea that that, that the government was high something about Jeffrey Epstein, and once it was released, you know, once they were in power, all would be released. But they had to have known that, like, that the dog would catch the car and that people would expect results, or did they not?

Did they think, well, once we're in power, those people will be happy that we're in power and they'll forget about all of this? Oh, Mike. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You sweet summer child. The Republicans who were pushing this, first of all, believe Trump that he had nothing to hide. And second of all, they genuinely believed that there would be Democrats on the list. And I'm using lists here in the looser term, meaning if they started digging, they would find Democrats.

I thought it was worth just reading two of the emails that I think are most relevant from this tranche. In 2011, because I think they're related. Yes. In 2011, Epstein writes to me. Maxwell. Remember, Maxwell's the one currently in prison? Jolene Maxwell, yes. Epstein's the one who killed himself. So this is 2011. I want you to realize that that dog that hasn't barked is Trump, victim redacted, spent hours at my house with him. Trump has never once been mentioned, including by the police chief. Maxwell responds, I have been thinking about that. Then, in 2014,

15, you have Michael Wolfe talking to Epstein over email. Michael Wolfe's a writer. Wolf, I hear CNN planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you, either on air or in scrum afterwards. Epstein, if we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be, Wolf? I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn't been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt. The only way to read those two emails in conjunction is that Trump absolutely has been on the plane,

absolutely has been on the island, absolutely not only knew about Epstein proclivities, as Megan said, but that he himself was at least around the shenanigans, and he wasn't like, well, this isn't right, guys. I don't approve of this at all. Like, that's not what was happening. Right. It does not prove that he did anything illegal. I want to be clear about that.

But to your first question, Mike, Republicans didn't think this existed because Trump had told them such and they believed him. And they, you know, I know this is like a little bit silly, but these guys really believe that like Bill and Hillary Clinton were part of a pedophile ring and that a lot of other Democrats were and that they were so close to proving it. It never occurred to them that Trump was, or at least was around it. And I will say, though, that Bill Clinton's lawyer, Kathy Rumler, being the executor of the estate and also being all over this, is strange. Which is all to say. This whole thing just continues to be strange. I have a lawyer person question for you.

I'm not a lawyer. I've seen some movies. I read. When what's his name, a deputy attorney general went and visited Galane Maxwell, right? Todd Blanche, yes. Todd Blanche to interviewer. I was listening to some chatter on the TV about that interview. And I got the impression that he did not bring a moment.

bunch of these emails and said things like, so it says here, you said that blah, blah, blah, about the plane and, you know, this kind of thing or whatever, like, if you were actually trying to truly interrogate her to get information, you would use these kinds of emails to catch her and lies, to cross-examine, to connect dots, right? Jonah, even if you wanted her to go out publicly and exonerate your boss, you would want to ask her about these emails because they had the risk of becoming public. And if she went out and said something like Trump was never on the plane, you would want to make sure that she'd seen this email where it seems to say Trump's been on the plane. So no matter which way you come at it,

you would always ask about these emails. So, but from the reporting I've seen, I've seen no indication that he did anything of the sort. Am I wrong about that? Do we just not know? Look, I will say this. Todd Blanche is a good attorney, and he's a good criminal defense attorney. We don't know whether he asked about these emails. It would seem quite surprising to me if he didn't ask about the dog that didn't bark email, which specifically involves her. I don't know that he would have asked about the Michael Wolf email because she's not party to it and whatever. But presumably he would have asked, did you ever see him on the plane? Did you ever see him in the house?

because at the end of the day the Michael Wolf email is Michael Wolf doesn't know anything Epstein told Michael Wolf something and Epstein is dead so again grifter Sarah says you can deny a lot there because there's no one to contradict you

Mm-hmm yeah Any other any other final thoughts from really from anybody about Yeah I've got a thought Yeah go ahead Sarah When y'all are saying that scandals don't matter in this day and age Scandals don't matter to Trump.

I don't know that we have definitively proven that scandals don't matter to anyone else. Now, I will say that Virginia AG's race is sure interesting on the scandals don't matter side of the ledger. But see, butsy, as lawyers would say, but see Maine, where in their primary, they have the guy with the Totenkov tattoo

who's like, Totenkov, I just thought it was a cool symbol. Skull. Right? And then he's like, you know, years ago. saying, how do you like my toten cough, ladies? We'll see how he does in the primary or the general election to see whether scandals don't matter. We had certainly got to a point where certain types of scandals didn't matter as much. Sort of your personal piccadillo scandals, affairs and whatnot, didn't seem to matter very much. But I will just say, Republicans should beware, as they

I think are, when Trump is not on the ballot, all the rules that they keep learning from Trump don't apply. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that also leads me to question, and Megan, I don't know if you have any final thoughts on this. Question, what happens when Trump is sort of on his way out? Does, is there some sort of reassessment people feel in the Lauren Bobert wing of this party

in this movement, that they can speak more forthrightly about how disappointed they were in Trump's, you know. Yeah, like Democrats do about Bill Clinton. Oh, my gosh, that was so inappropriate what he did to Monica Lewinsky 20 years later. Yeah, they realized that just as soon as Hillary Clinton was no longer a viable political candidate. That's amazing. It's just like, what a coincidence, stunning. You know, I think it is a very interesting question.

in general, what happens as Trump leaves the party, and people realize, like, he's never again going to be able to win them elections because he's not good at getting other people elected. He has some coattails when he's running, but he's not going to be running anymore. Right. And so at what point do people say, hey, wait a minute, what am I willing to give up to maintain the approval of this guy who is not going to help me in my future. Probably not even going to hurt me that much. I mean, I think we saw that

a bunch of times where he was like, I'm going to destroy this person. And then the person was manifestly undistored, including Brian Camp of Georgia. And I would also, I would also say, though, that I think, you know, we don't know that there aren't Democrats in there. I mean, Larry Summers apparently had, no, it was not, like, is not, to be very clear, not implicated in the teenage girls is implicated in maintaining a relationship with Epstein. A very friendly relationship.

Very friendly relationship, which I actually randomly discovered because Larry Summers is married to my old college English professor. So I actually saw her name and it was like, ooh, and then I was like, oh, Larry Summers, right. We should also just bear in mind,

just real quick, there's a good argument that Donald Trump was a Democrat when he was doing all this stuff with Epstein. Yes. And I think that, I don't want to say the real scandal here,

but a scandal here is the extent to which no one really cared. Right? I mean, this appears to have been widely known about in Palm Beach. The number of people who, even when the evidence was becoming pretty clear, were still cozying up to this guy, I don't think anyone who spent a lot of time around Jeffrey Epstein was unaware of what his proclivities were. And the fact that no one said anything, no one called the cops, no one, I mean, not only didn't call the cops, like went to parties at his house, solicited money from him, all of these things.

This is that no one really thought this was a big deal. And that suggests something pretty disturbing about our power elites. And I also think means that there are maybe some other shoes to drop. Yeah. Well, apparently, apparently that has been the story of this story, which is, feels like every two, three months, we get some new wrinkle, some new trench of emails. Which, by the way, can I just say from Gryft or Sarah, like this isn't even, you don't have to be good at this job to know this is the last way you want to do things. Drip, trip, drip, dump it all. Big, big dump. Take a big dump. Why would you ever let this come out in tranches. Disaster.

Absolutely. We are going to take a break, but we'll be back shortly. We're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. Let's elevate the conversation a little bit from the sort of petty and gross story of Jeffrey Epstein to the question that I think has been dominating a lot of the kind of conservative online and intellectual conversation over the last, well, gosh, now it's been almost three weeks. And we can talk about the Heritage Foundation. We can talk about the sort of question of where nationalists and populists fit into the, you know, firmament of the conservative movement. But I want to start with, Jonah, with your G-file, in which you sort of wrestle with this question of post-liberalism. What is it? Does it even exist?

And how does it relate to sort of all of these ideological gestures and, and kind of movements that are swirling around now in the conversation? I'm talking about Nat cons, Groyper's, I don't know quite where to start, but maybe what is, what is this debate that's happening that I'm not explaining very well? What is it really about? Yeah, so it gets really complicated unnecessarily because the smartest people out there on that side of it want to turn it into a very refined college faculty lounge kind of conversation. So we'll do it very quickly. Post, like post-war, right, means after. So post-liberalism means after liberalism. What is liberalism?

Liberalism is not, you know, what George Stephanopals and the Michael Dukakai of the world believe. Liberalism is like liberal Democratic capital, the rule of law, democracy, limited government, free markets to a certain extent, property rights, all that kind of stuff. Liberalism starting, you know, you can pick your starting date wherever you want. But it's the liberal and liberal democratic capitalism, the liberal and liberal arts we're talking about here, not ideological, progressive, big government. stuff. Free markets, free minds, free movement, free individuals, all that. So after that liberalism means getting beyond that kind of liberalism. And Patrick Deneen, this guy, Adrian Firmule, who Sarah knows a bit about a bunch of people at the magazine First Things. And the vice president of the United States, all to one extent or another, have been playing footsie

or promoting this idea of post-liberalism. And like, Patrick Deneen, a professor at Notre Dame University, is a very smart guy, profoundly wrong, thinks that basically the last 250 years have been a mistake. Like, we took a wrong turn when we embraced liberalism. And the reason why these guys are making this argument is they like power. They want power. They want power to do things, and they are different factions who want to do different things.

There's some people called integralists who want to make us all subservient to the Pope and Rome. There are people who are nationalists who want to sort of kind of go authoritarian or get rid of all sorts of international institutions and be isolationist or whatever. Lots of people want to do different things. And this idea has caught on in a lot of egghead circles because for the same reason that Marxism catches on in left wing circles, the underlying assumption is that the experts that are promoting these ideas will be the ones in charge. And part of the problem with this approach

is it's idiotic. You know who the most, you know, the most prominent post-liberals are that we're talking about. The whole reason we have this segment here are people like Nick Fuentes. Team Hitler, Nick Fuentes, right? It is once you get, once you put forward the idea

that the rule of law, that, you know, the right to a fair trial, the right to free speed, beach, all these things. Once you say, all that crap has run its course, we don't need that anymore. You know who really loves to hear that? Barbarian thugs, neo-Nazis, goobers, groipers, losers, the kind of bullies, right? These are the kinds of people who want to live in that world, because that's what the state of nature was like prior to liberalism, where it was a bunch of the leviathens that basically imposed order through the state.

And so, like, you know, Nick Fuentes wants an authoritarian regime. He wants to be ruled, in his words, by a Catholic Taliban in the United States. You have Paul Ongrazia, this guy who's nominated to be the head of the special counsel's office. He once said Trump is the Constitution, right? These are, whether it's post-liberal or anti-liberal, it doesn't really matter. All of this is gilded, cage, or not. flowery rhetoric around the idea that our team should be in power forever and anything that gets in our way we can encant various phrases like common good constitutionalism or whatever it doesn't

really matter um the simple point is is that our team should have power and any of those pesky old 19th century liberal rules that say we have to give up power just because we lost an election well, that's all BS too. And a lot of these people have been playing with fire with these ideas, and now they're getting burned because the people who benefit the most from the permission structures that have been unleashed are gargoyles like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carson. Okay, I think that's sort of a good survey of what this kind of somewhat esoteric conversation is about. One thing that has always interested me or sort of befuddled me about,

out what's happening sort of on, used to be called the alt-right, right, in the first Trump term, and now it's sort of called the new right, is what you described, Jonah, of, of, of sort of ideas kind of being in the mix here and, and, and then the people who are kind of coming up with those ideas don't end up being in charge, right? It ends up, you end up getting sort of, you know, the barbarians or, or, or, what's word I'm looking for. Someone like Trump comes along and kind of takes those ideas and uses them to advance himself and his power. The order of things seems to almost kind of be backward here, where Trump kind of wins this surprise win. He kind of comes out of nowhere in the 2016 primary,

wins the Republican nomination, then wins the presidency kind of against all odds, surprising even himself. And the exercise that the sort of intellectuals who are willing to abide Trump has been since that moment is just kind of backfill at all and explain what Trump's kind of flukish victory really meant, really meant where the country was and kind of what should, where our sort of national ideology should go. I think one of the things you said, you mentioned J.D. Vance. Vance doesn't just play footsie with post-liberalism. He has said, I am a post-liberal, or us,

the post-liberals. I'm curious, Megan, what does this kind of collection of gestures look like when the potential standard bearer for the Republican Party in a couple of years is going to be one of them shaped by all of this that's been going on in the egghead circles? Look, the essence of post-liberalism is that if you give people freedom, you find out what they want. And often that's unattractive. Now, you can argue that there are like meta preferences that don't get captured by markets or free speech or whatever where, you know, like I have a preference for doing a lot of exercise and being really fit and thin. But in the moment, my preference is to lie on my couch and eat popcorn. And so you can argue that like the market rewards the second kind of preference and not the larger preferences for the good life and virtue and so forth. And they look at this and they think, I don't like it. And I don't like what it's telling me about what people want, about how they want to live their lives. So I want a different order that will do

a different thing. And in particular, I think what J.D. Vance wants. is for the market to lie to people about the economic value that people, other people place on their labor. You can say we should redistribute every human being has inherent worth. We have an obligation as a society to take care of people and make sure that they don't go hungry, that they have whatever we think is the minimum decent standard of life, which evolves over time, and that's a totally reasonable thing to believe. But what J.D. Vance wants is not to do redistribution from the luckier to the unlucky.

What he wants is for us to have an economy where we overpay for factory labor so that those people are under the impression that their work is more valuable to other people than it is. Because that makes them feel dignity. That makes them feel like they're really valuable contributors to society. Hey, Megan, just for context, I like your point a lot, but for people who don't, may not get it, this is sort of gets it. J.D. Vance had said, a million cheap knockoff toasters aren't worth the price of a single American manufacturing job. Right. So she wants everyone to overpay for a toaster to save one job because manufacturing jobs are inherently noble and glorious or whatever. I'm sorry to drop. Go ahead. Yeah. Thank you, Jonah, for bringing our listeners in.

Nice assist. I'm interested in your point, but I don't think I agree with it in that I think that there is something far more valuable to a society when people believe that their work has purpose and value than simply the universal basic income. And we have seen that borne out in data, especially among men. A sense of purpose and value is very important. And if you simply have a check that provides your basic needs, you don't solve much of the problem at all. So J.D. Vance has a really good point. I, in fact, before I was interrupted, I was going to say... Shots fired.

That's actually, like, I understand that. I resonate with it, right? I do. I look at the market is valuing journalism somewhat less than it used to. I don't like that. And I don't just not like it because I worry about paying my mortgage. I don't like it because it means that my future is less stable. It means that I'm less part of the less central to the national conversation or whatever. People really don't like those things. That's totally valid. And the problem is that none of the things, things that they propose are going to get people back to a place where both that is true and people are happy. Yeah, this is where we agree. I think the mistake of kind of the libertarian and the liberal movement of which I was a member, and I think I made this mistake, is to not understand that people really value their identity as workers, not just as consumers. We don't just want to be like amoeba sitting around waiting for the little protein to float by so that we

can wrap our protoplasm around it and absorb it. On the other hand, people also, as Joe Biden discovered, really care about their ability to consume. They really do. They get very mad if their consumption falls. And so, you know, I think the post-liberals and also Democrats who thought we can spend infinite amounts of money doing all of this stuff made, you know, parapherals. Whereas the market liberals did not understand that, you know, you, people do care about their identity as workers that is really going to matter politically. It matters for our society. When people don't feel like they have a good future and they're rewarded and they have respect and status in their community, like bad things happen. But I think the mistake in the other direction is like, oh, well, they'll be so happy about their new factory job. And by the way, can I just say, if you think that factory jobs,

are the awesome. I invite you to take a Saturday, go into your garage, and I want you to just take a bolt. I want you to put it on a screw. And then I just want you to tighten that bolt over and over and over and over again for eight hours on Saturday and see how you feel about factory jobs. I mean, please also like ideally get a YouTube video of like a garbage truck or something really noisy so that you can enjoy the full factory experience. But my kids won't be there while I'm doing it, right? That is true. Okay. Okay. Tell me more. Go on.

There is no way back because people will absolutely freak out if you try to restore these factory jobs by forcing them to cut their consumption by 20%. They're not into that, or 10%, or 5%. Right? Five percent is a pretty good recession. And I think both that people are going to be really disappointed in what an actual factory job looks like. I mean, and also the fact that a lot of what's happening isn't trade. It's automation. You know, like Bridgeport, Connecticut just is having a little bit of a manufacturing boom right now. But the problem is that the manufacturing boom has created like 1,700 jobs

because factories now are not a lot of brawny men who just go and tighten the same bolts over and over again. they're automated, they have, you know, all sorts of expensive, complicated equipment. And that just means there is no way back to the thing that they want, which is the kind of 1950s vision of my life is getting better every year. I have a job, it's stable, it's, you know, my wages are going up, I'm getting pension and security, I can plan my future. The whole sunny vista lies out before me. I can see the entire path. That leads to the grave and then to the beautiful sunset beyond. And that's not going to come back.

It's just not. So this brings up, Sarah, a question that I have about the political viability of post-liberalism or any of these sort of offshoots or related ideologies, which is that it's something that's somewhat old in our politics, right? It's like selling more than what you can actually deliver in order. to win elections, but I question whether what the sort of most eggheady of these post-liberals think people want is really what they want, let alone whether or not it's possible or not. I mean, the sort of way in which they describe, you can see it in the AI-generated memes that

a lot of these folks post-online, you know, of these kind of idyllic, you know, ripped from Aussie and Harriet pictures of, you know, the working dad, the stay-at-home mom, the two kids, the two-car garage, wasn't this such a wonderful time? I don't, I mean, I just question whether or not anybody who's out there voting and making decisions about who their champions will be even really buys that that's what they want. Isn't what people want just, you know, they want affordability, they want things to be cheaper, they want things to be, they want that value that they get from their job. Nothing that the post-liberals seem to be offering says anything realistic about what can be done, what government can do about that. Is there a political future for this

kind of ideology? Yes. So, Mike, I think what you're describing and what Megan's describing and maybe what Jonah's describing is for people who are over 30 years old in the United States. I think all of what you said is a hundred, whatever, very true for people. people who are over 30. I think we have a different problem for the people who are under 30 that we haven't talked about at all yet. You know, I know Jonah hates monocausal explanations, and I'm not really offering this as one, but it sure ain't a small part of the problem. And that's porn. I think pornography has had a huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge effect on this country. No. nobody's willing to talk about it. It's a reason that the, and I'm using 30, it's not exact,

but boy, it is stark. It is sort of this almost KT boundary in American life right now where, yes, over 30s are, you know, men are moving further and further toward Trump. We've seen that realignment. The under 30s aren't just doing that, though. They're the ones who are furthering the true the bad stuff. And I just don't think you can separate it from pornography and the 2008 financial crisis. In that sense, J.D. Vance's solution won't work either. They don't want manufacturing jobs. They want a society where they are fulfilled and they don't understand why they're not finding that. And my argument would be it is because they are constantly bombarded with pornography that we know changes adolescent brains. And this is, of course, on top of social media. It creates

distance between men and women in a literal sense, but also a metaphorical sense. And these young men don't know how to interact with women. And when they do, they find a disappointment. Because the interaction that their brain has been fed to get that dopamine hit from the porn is not happening in real life. So they come of age when they finally can like, you know, hang out with women by themselves. It provides no rush. It provides nothing. And so what you're seeing then is an under 30 nihilism that I don't feel like nearly enough people are talking about because they're so focused on this FDR coalition because that's still the voting block. Right.

That's interesting. I don't care that much. That is a problem we've had in America over and over and over again at various points. This under 30 problem is new and you're damn right that the post liberals, whatever you want to call them, the Nick Fuentes's, are speaking to it in a way that nobody seems to actually want to talk about. Well, that's a frightening thought. Maybe something that we should sort of discuss and dive into because there's been a lot of good, I think, journalistic coverage of what Sarah was talking about there. note, by the way, that it's international. That's, you know, Trump is international. This under 30 male disaffection is international. That is a very dangerous thing. But it also is a

helpful thing in this, for explaining at least, because it means like, no, Nick Fuentes didn't create this. No, there isn't some like, well, American public schools were teaching, you know, wokeism. I think post-liberalism has become quite international in Western democracies, but you have to come up with explanations that span other countries. And again, not monocausal, but boy, I think pornography and what that represents explains a whole, whole lot more than we want to talk about. Yeah. Well, why don't we do a little not worth your time? And I want to read a, at the beginning of, well, an obituary, if you will. This is from the New York Times. the American penny died on Wednesday in Philadelphia.

It was 232. The cause was irrelevance and expensiveness, the Treasury Department said. This is a story that I'm sure everybody here has seen the Philadelphia Mint has stopped, has done its last production of the penny, of the mighty penny. And so my question is,

and there's a lot of reasons that. It costs basically four cents. to produce a one-cent coin. You know, we're increasingly a cash-less society. The New York Times reported that the final pennies were minted on Wednesday afternoon and that top treasury officials were on hand for its final journey. No last words were recorded. So the penny is sort of going out with a whimper.

And my question, I guess, is not only is the penny worth our time, but was the penny really ever worth our time? time in our lifetimes. Do you guys remember a time in which a penny had some kind of value, even if you were a child, is the penny worth our time? Sarah, let me start with you. I had a penny collection with my dad. I also had a penny collection. Yeah. Yeah, we're total losers. I had those books, you know, they're like blue and you like stick the pennies, whatever. Yeah. So, A, that was worth my time. B, I grew up in a very small town of about 2,000 people called Richmond, Texas, which is now much, much, much larger.

But at the time, it had like a downtown where the noon bell would still sound, you know? And there was a sort of general store in the downtown, and they had a penny gumball machine. And that was absolutely worth my time coming out of preschool as my mother would take me to the, you know, soda shop counter where I would say, want my usual and then turned to her one day and said, what's a usual? So yes, in my lifetime pennies had value. But part of the issue is so many places now, I'm sure you guys have seen it when you walk in, say cash not accepted. We've moved, I don't carry cash. We've moved to a cashless society so that it's not just a penny that's not valuable. I would argue probably no coins really are valuable to the extent. Quarter's still

have a value, don't get me wrong. Like, I don't, you know, if I see a quarter, I'm sure picking it up. But in terms of carrying them around to pay for things, no, not so much. And we're actually getting pretty close to the point that dollar bills are going to not be accepted at most places. We're not there yet. And I don't, I'm a little nervous about what happens when everything is cashless. Yeah. Megan. I basically want to just co-sign everything Sarah said. I not only had a penny collection, I found one of the rare 1943, I believe, steel pennies.

That was like the highlight of my penny collection. Look, I don't... In Manhattan, there were not a lot of uses for pennies other than my... You know, I used to sit there with my dad and roll them. He would roll up all his change. You'd take it to the bank. You'd exchange it for actual money that was useful. But it's a little sad, you know, Lincoln, one of our greatest presidents, gone forever.

We've got to find somewhere else to put Lincoln. We can't just leave him, leave him hanging there. But other than that, no, yeah, it was more than time. But I will say that as a libertarian, I get a little grouped out when I think of what could happen when cash is no longer a thing. I mean, we have seen what the left did with debanking over the last 10 years of conservative groups they didn't like. You think about what the government could do or what conservative groups who want to cancel people could do in a different climate. I don't like it. Just don't like it.

That's my two cents anyway. Jonah, Penny for your thoughts? Rarely have I been so torn by an issue that matters so little. I like the penny I used to make fun of people who got really passionate about the demonetization of the penny which was a big deal

for some reason when I was in college and I still don't understand why you know Megan keeps telling me how AI is going to transform anything well why couldn't AI figure out a way to produce pennies more cost effectively huh? Why? Give it time Jonah

well it's too late And at the same time, I think the issue of a truly cashless society is really dangerous and profound for some of the reasons that Megan brings up. I still like cash. I still carry cash. And I think that cash, like a digital dollar, which is what a lot of people want would be a very bad thing for our politics for, and I would argue ultimately for. for the economy. But we're not there yet. All right. Well, just Megan stole my joke here, but my two cents on this whole question is I was also, by the way, Sarah and Megan into numismatics, although I preferred like foreign coins, but I love collecting coins and the sort of...

You're not even an American? Ew. Oh, I got plenty of... Oh, I had the... Are you kidding? I had the quarter. Remember, though, when they did the state quarters and they were racing them? I had the giant map that you could stick the quarters. into um no that's lame no uh well you know to each his own um but also we we left out another use for pennies like first of all we used to put them on train tracks train tracks and and they'll get all stretched out and five it was really really cool um and they have those machines like at fairs and tourist traps where you put a penny in and you grunt put then you pay a dollar but now jonah you pay for it with um credit card you don't bring the penny they already have the penny stocked you

pay $4 with your credit card at the National Air and Space Museum, which is, by the way, Udvar Hasey, if you are ever coming to D.C., it is my number one place to send you. But, yeah, it's expensive. Yeah. Well, I mean, I always thought it was ridiculous. The ones that don't have the credit card, where you still have to put in 50, it's 51 cents, right? It's like 50 cents, and then you put the penny in to, uh, to squenchant it in to get some sort of

embossment. Um, I will, I will miss the penny. I still use pennies when I use cash. You know, if I'm out with my kids, you know, and look, when you have kids who are like earning money around the, around the neighborhood doing sort of odd jobs, a lot of older people still pay in cash. So we actually have quite a bit of cash floating around in our house, probably more than the average house. So I will miss the penny. I, and I always liked about the penny how it looked different, different color made of copper, you know. not silver in color, and as Megan suggested, having one of our greatest, one of my favorite

presidents on it, you know, pour one out for the penny. But that is all the time we are going to give this podcast and join us over at The Dispatch. We'll talk to you next time. Do you have thoughts about the podcasts we're making at The Dispatch? Now's your chance to tell us. We're running a listener survey, which you can find at The Dispatch. Dispatch. Typeform.com slash podcast. We'll put a link in the show notes, and we look forward to hearing from you. And we hope you'll consider becoming a member of the dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up at the dispatch.com slash join. And if you use the promo code roundtable, you'll get one month free. And if ads aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes.

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