The Dispatch Podcast - Working in Congress Sucks | Roundtable

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

Sarah, Steve, and Jonah take a break from the typical roundtable punditry to get a little more big picture. How do we fix Congress? What does the Israel-Hamas hostage swap mean for the future of the war? Should you lie to your kids for the sake of certain holiday traditions? Has feminism cost us Thanksgiving? All that and: —Congressional term limits —Expanding the House of Representatives —Repealing Citizens United —Easy answers to the Israel-Hamas War —Biden’s endorsement of a ceasefire —Elf on the shelf: literally 1984? Show notes: -Thursday's Morning Dispatch -George Will: Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy -Jonah: George Will Called Me An Idiot -Restoring the Guardrails of Democracy -Jay Cost on The Remnant -Jonathan Martin: To Departing House Members -Guido Sarducci - Pay For Your Sins Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to advisory opinions. I'm Sarah Isgher. Yeah, this is not advisory opinions. Where are your true loyalties lie, unbelievable. This is the dispatch podcast. And I'm here because I've been dragged into doing it. I'm just here so I don't get fined. Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isger.

That's Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes. We're going to try something a little different, maybe for this month. Rather than all news of the day, we're going to pop back out, do a little more high level, a little, what are the bigger picture topic? So, yeah, we're going to talk about congressional retirements, but then we're going to talk about how to fix Congress. And we're going to talk about the hostage prisoner swaps in Israel and Gaza, but we're going to talk a little bit more about what it says on war in general. And finally, the elf on the shelf thing comes back every season. I have concerns about teaching our kids about

government surveillance, but we're going to talk about traditions, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and what's staying, what's going away? Let's dive right in. A lot more congressional retirements this year. Look, in congressional retirements aren't anything new. Every season, there's going to be members of Congress who retire rather than face primary challenge. or general elections that they're not going to win. Why do you think that this feels different?

Or do you? Yeah, I definitely think it feels different because I think it is different. The level of frustration among members of Congress is something that has been apparent for a long time. I mean, I think the reasons people are retiring have changed. Pretty dramatically, just in the, you know, 25, 30 years I've been in Washington and covering Congress. I think to put it as simply as I possibly can, working in Congress today sucks.

People who come to Congress because they want to legislate, because they want to get things done, because they're responding to problems that they see because they have a sort of deep ideological worldview. They're less able to do the kinds of things as a member of Congress than they were in the past. we've talked many, many times before about how Congress has become this performative body and people who want to get stuff done don't want to be a part of it. I think there's also something else happening that's more unique to Republicans than Democrats. And again, I think it's a function of something that we've talked about on this podcast before. For the better part of eight years, many Republicans in Congress have been saying one thing in public,

and another thing in private. They're not articulating their own views. And this is true on policy issues, sometimes long-held policy issues like trade, immigration, taxes, what have you. And other times it's on the sort of issue of the day or the personalities involved, most especially Donald Trump. After a while, I think that just wears on people. it's hard to say something in public that you don't believe.

It's hard to go out and say that you think Donald Trump is great or endorse Donald Trump for election in 2024. When you're saying privately to people like me that you think Donald Trump is terrible and could mean the end of the republic. And you do have that level of disconnect between public and private statements. And I think for some people who still have a conscience or a soul,

that's just too much. They don't want to do it. Jonah, we've talked plenty about Congress being broken, would it matter if Congress were legislating again, i.e. like, sure, you'd have these other things you don't like, but if there were some group of people who were moving forward on immigration reform, even if it were hard and imperfect, like, or is that, is it impossible because the whole problem is all of these things together. Well, as you know, I'm a devoted fan of poetry, and I think it was Yates who said it best, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. I think that

you would lose people if Congress were working properly, but you'd lose the right people. The bad people would leave because there's too much homework, right? That's such a perfect analogy. And the good people would stay because they like staying in the dorm on Saturday nights doing homework. And those are the people, I mean, obviously, you don't want just all grinds in Congress. You want some people who actually have a touch of the common man and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, the Jonathan Martin piece in Politico a week ago or so about all the retirements, they talked to a bunch of people. And the problem was, is that the worst people love the place, right? If you were a performative clown, this is the golden.

age, right? This is, these are the, these, well, you will look back on these as the good old days. Um, and if you're someone who is a nose to the grindstone loves doing committee work and and really working out, um, legislation, these are, these are depressing days. So you're always going to have turnover. You're going to have people running for other things or looking to spend more time with their family. I think any attempt to do a monocausal explanation about all these retirements immediately falls apart because some. Some people are leaving because they have greater political ambitions, and some people are leaving because they hate the place. And, you know, and some people are, you know, I mean, let us at least say this about, you know, about Representative Santos.

He desperately wants to stay and do the work. And which sort of makes my point, right, is like the people who are desperate or white have a white knuckle grip on the place and love it. are people like Santos and Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Bobert and Matt Gates. And you can see why sort of Gresham's law would chase out the quality people. Okay. So let's fix Congress for them. Steve, what's your one neat trick that could make this all better?

So I agree with Jonah, just as this is not monocausal. I don't think there's a simple, easy one-step solution. And I want to echo Jonah's praise of Jonathan Martin's piece. We'll put it in the show notes. It really was terrific. The other, I think the other, one of the best pieces I've read on this question and the complications about it was in the Thursday morning's morning dispatch. So we have unlocked that and made it free for everybody.

And we'll put that in the show notes as well. So I'm actually old school in, in my preferred solution or first step to a solution. and it's term limits. And I'm a little surprised, given everything that we've seen so far the past few years, the kind of behavior that we've seen from members of Congress, that we don't hear more about term limits. My real sort of intellectual introduction to term limits came at a book that George Will wrote in the early 1990s called Restoration, Congress Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliverative Democracy.

and I read it as part of my college senior seminar. I had to write papers on it. I believed what Will wrote then and what he writes now. And, you know, there are many aspects to his argument, as you might imagine. But the idea that there would be sort of a permanent class of politicians and legislators was anathema to the founders. They wanted citizen legislatures. and they want to people who are in touch with the problems of what's happening in their in their local communities and the the the people who come to politics to stay in politics and get the most out of this particular environment this this world of performative politics are I think the worst people in politics and I've said this before but the thing that I'm most underestimated and it and it and it

makes me sound hopelessly naive. But the thing that I'm most underestimated as a driving force of the Trump era was the eagerness, maybe even the desperation of sitting members of Congress to stay in Congress. It never occurred to me. I mean, we all knew that members of Congress would do a lot to stay in Congress. It never occurred to me that they would totally flip their views and adopt the polar opposite views on what they've claimed to be their, their most strongly held issues. So I think term limits would be a great first step. Perm limits. Interesting. So the pushback on term limits is that you will empower staff who then can stay through different members. And in fact, you'll sort of have these puppets in members

of Congress with what amounts to sort of, I don't know, almost an administrative state in Congress. why aren't you concerned about that or not concerned, you know, to the point that it makes it not your one neat trick? So I am concerned about it. I mean, I think as, you know, if we had term limits in place right now, say a six term limit for members of the House of a two term limit for members of the Senate, you would then have to confront this question about the sort of permanent professional staff and people who sort of jump from one member to another.

They're not put before voters, and ultimately the senators and representatives are. So I think the solution is somewhat built in. I mean, if you have term limits, the members themselves have to be responsive to voters. And if they're being poorly served by staff or if staff can game the system, I think that would be, you know, evident at least. he's somewhat evident in the conduct of the members themselves. Jonah, what's your one neat trick? Or you can comment on Steve's one neat trick.

I've come, I've moved away from Terminlets. I basically just, I don't think they're the answer anymore. I think I read somewhere that George Will kind of doesn't either anymore, but I was just looking for it and can't find it. Partly for the reasons that you state Sarah, partly because, you're going to create this situation where basically no, like, good legislators, they take time to mature and to understand, have institutional knowledge.

You know, we have Mike Johnson, who was like the most inexperienced speaker since the, what, the 19th century? That's what I learned in the morning dispatch from Thursday. And so, anyway, we can debate term limits another time. I don't think it's on its face a preposterous idea, and I certainly get the impulse, but I'm just, I'm no longer there.

On the, on the, so I have so many things I'd like to do to Congress. It's really hard to pick just one. First of all, if I, if I could wave a magic wand and fix the most stuff in our politics, it would be to do something about primaries. Because I think that would not only do a lot to improve, Congress, but also a lot to improve the presidency and politics generally. Similarly, you know, strengthen the parties, do something about campaign finance. So there are these extra congressional outside of Congress kind of things that I think would

help a lot because, again, monocons explanations about why we're in a mess don't work. But if I were going to do something to Congress itself, other than change men's hearts, right, and actually make them wanting to do the job, which was difficult to do, which is why I want to change primaries to change the incentive structure about who goes in and why, I think it would be to expand Congress. And this is partly my white whale, which is a term I use advisedly, named Jonah. Insofar as the first piece I ever got published was an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on why we should expand the House of Representatives. And there is a quasi-secret society of nerds in

Washington who are really jazzed about this and exercised about it. And I think expanding Congress would do a lot of the things that term limit people want term limits to do. But it would also have the effect of fixing a lot of the problems with the Electoral College without actually having to do anything to the Electoral College, because the way we assign votes in the Electoral College is we add up numbers of representatives and senators. And so if you expanded that, that would more likely reflect the popular vote. And it would diminish the value of the Senate votes. Yeah, so be it. But that was the intent. No, no, I'm saying like, so that's how it would more accurately reflect the popular vote is because right now what's distorting it is that every state

regardless of population gets those two Senate votes in the Electoral College. Right. And there are all of these people who think that the Senate needs to be done away with, which whatever you're thinking on that is, it doesn't change the fact that it's incredibly stupid because you know who's not going to vote to get rid of the Senate? The Senate. And, um, But isn't that the problem with your idea? Do you know who's not going to vote to diminish their own power? The House. The members, the 435 members of the House of Representatives.

Yeah, but, like, if you get, that argument also works against term limits, too, right? So, like, you have to build up a political argument for it. There are some states that might agree to it, like California or New York, where if they could have, you know, another 25 members of the House or something like that or under, you know, some schemes. another 250, that would make California politically more powerful. It would, but would it percentage-wise, I mean, again, I guess to the extent you are diluting the Senate votes of Vermont, let's say, let's just pick on poor Vermont right now. California gets more powerful as you dilute Senate votes in Vermont, but it doesn't get more powerful just by adding more representatives to the House because it would still be

proportional to population. No, right. I'm not trying to make the argument for California that the reason why I want do this is make California more powerful, right? That is not what gets me out of bed in the morning. Okay, so what number are you thinking here, Jonah? We have 435 in the house right now. Right. And are we doubling? Are we adding a, I don't know. So, you know, the piece I wrote, which in, you know, is aged pretty well in 1992, uh, was that if we took the formula that George Washington preferred, the only time that George Washington spoke at the constitutional convention was to say that, I think it was that 40,000 constituents per congressman was too high.

And he wanted it lowered to 30,000 or something like that. And if you had that formula, you'd have about, at least in 1992, about 7,000 congressmen. That strikes me too big. But I think you can start by like adding 50, right? I mean, there are more representative legislators in the New Hampshire legislature than there are in Congress. That's true, although not necessarily a virtue. you like every man a state house rep in new hampshire is pretty much the motto up there yeah but my point is is like a lot of the arguments about how it's just too unwieldy and you can't handle the

size and all that kind of stuff nasdaq handles 12 kittrillion interactions a day right i mean there are things that you can do um that would work and since there's very little floor debate anyway and it's all sort of performative the house of commons has standing room only who gives a rat's ass with the little fire marshal types are saying about about the capacity of the room. And what you're doing is you're breaking up a lot of things. Says Jonah, until there's a fire and he can't get out. I think you should be more respectful of the fire marshals.

Well, that's another solution. That's all my list of things to fix Congress. It's just a massive fire. I call it the 1812 option. And so, anyway, we can talk about it more, but that's mine, is Expandekar Congress. Those jokes aren't as funny as they use. Fair, fair, fair. Nothing in this podcast should be interpreted as actually endorsing

violence in any way. Okay. So I think those are two neat tricks. I'm curious what's on your list that doesn't make the cut, like just lightning round. For instance, I'll throw some out there myself. Well, you didn't give us yours, you know. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's because we've talked about mine before and I don't want to belabor it. But right. You're a co-equal branch of this podcast. Never stops Jonah. Because I think mine is like actually doable. And I think you're too or not. Fair. Steve,

yours isn't doable because it needs an amendment in my view and Jonah, yours isn't doable because it's stupid. So mine is really easy. Just repeal the bipartisan

campaign reform act, get rid of campaign finance as we have it now. With the technology we have and with the examples we have in states like Virginia, Pennsylvania, Texas of no limits,

full disclosure, campaign financing. You would reinvigorate the parties who would actually then have a say over their standard bearers. You wouldn't have George Santos anymore. You probably wouldn't have Donald Trumps anymore, though I think I don't want to promise that that was such a black swan ability of the, you know, billionaire with 100% name ID. I don't know whether even a strong party could have withstood that hurricane. Can you, can I just ask you to walk us through how this would reinvigrate the party? Yeah, so pre-2002, the parties could take unlimited money for party building type things.

And as a result, they were going to have just a lot more money than some of these individual low-level, like for instance, members of Congress who were running. And so they were basically funding. who they wanted in those races. Well, once Bickro was passed, it put pretty hard limits on how much the parties could take in and what they could spend that on. Like, for those who remember the 90s, you remember a lot of talk about hard dollars and soft dollars and soft money. That sort of morphed into dark money these days.

That's a different thing that they're talking about. Now they're sort of talking about dark money being super PACs. But right, the super PACs also innervate the political parties. because now the money is outside the parties with, like, God only knows who. And so as a result, the political parties still are there, but they have no actual power. They basically, like, have this little stamp of a brand, but no one cares about the brand either anymore. No one's like, woo-hoo, Republican. And, God, just look at the Democratic Party.

Like, literally nobody likes the brand of the Democratic Party. So you could try to bring that back. Maybe you couldn't even bring it back at this point. But regardless, we've also, I mean, I bought into the idea of campaign finance reform to lower the influence of big dollar donors in our politics. But I didn't think enough about what would replace it. And the small dollar donors, of course, like we've talked about, are turned on by outrage, anger.

They're not going to be particularly, you know, careful about their news consumption or anything like that. So they're going to see something that makes them angry and want to give 20 bucks or $5, whatever that is. And that's what's funding our politics right now, is that 2% or fewer. of Americans who actually then gives small dollar amounts to politicians. So if you have no limits full disclosure, with the technology we have right now, by the way,

it's insane that we only get campaign finance disclosures once a quarter. Quarterly reports, yeah, it's totally crazy. Now, I mean, look, when you get close to the election, it turns into once a month, when you get really close to the election, it gets even more frequent. But right now we get once a quarter reports from these campaigns. That's insane. We also, if someone gives under $200, roughly, you don't have to disclose their name.

No, no, no, no. We're enough of all of this. We have the technology and the literal bandwidth and server size that you can, if you get $5, we're going to get your name. If you give $100,000, we're going to get your name, and we're going to do it instantly. So you have a 24-hour disclosure rule basically for these campaigns to set up. And that sounds nuts, but all. All these other states do it, big states, and it's been fine, and it hasn't been a big deal.

But let me, can I push you on this? Yeah, of course. So what makes you think that this money would then flow to the parties? What's to keep, you know, a gaggle of 10 billionaires from setting up their own, you know, what would be the equivalent of a super PAC and funding outside of the party because they think the parties suck? Like, I don't see why this money naturally flows back to the. the parties, particularly if there's disclosure required there and there wouldn't be elsewhere.

You couldn't mandate disclosure for other big political efforts like this, I don't think. Okay. So the answer, Steve, is you might be right. But here's what I will do. I don't think you're going to see super PACs qua super PACs anymore. That's definitely going to end. The super PACs that we see now where it's just this outside campaign to help a specific candidate. All the money will at least flow through the campaigns again in that sense. And so the candidate themselves will have to control the money. Why? Why would you, if let's say you have $10 million and you want Ron DeSantis to get to win

the Republican primary, why would you not give the money to the Ron DeSantis campaign? Why would you want to spend it yourself and not be able to coordinate with them or talk to them about how to spend the money or where they think it would be most helpful? It's like an inefficient way to do it. Yeah, I think I could see some of that, but if disclosure is required and your funding, say, attack ads that have to be approved by the candidate, wouldn't you rather fund the really harsh attack ads in an outside entity for which no disclosure is required are less sort of directly tied to the candidate, therefore allowing much harsher political tax? So a lot of disclosures required for super PACs, but you're right. there's a way to hide certain super PAC donations. I mean, it gets sort of complicated in the FEC front.

I think your best example is in Texas where they have no limits full disclosure. The Republican Party of Texas was kind of taken over by wackadoos. And so then someone started the Associated Republicans of Texas, and you did end up with dueling, quote, unquote, party systems for exactly what you're talking about. So, yeah, I mean, right, none of our one neat tricks are perfect. But this that we have now is,

bad. The small dollar donors is bad and I just want to fix that and then let's see what we need to fix next. Sort of my approach to term limits. There might be other problems. There may be unintended consequences, but like let's start somewhere. Yeah, just so very quickly, as I think I alluded to before

I got to my expand Congress thing is like fixing the party system, which includes a lot of the campaign finance stuff is I think a big part of doing a lot of this. And for listeners who are interested, Sarah, David French, and I were the co-authors of the conservative proposals to help the Constitution, fix the Constitution,

improve the Constitution. Improved democracy? Was that what it was? For the National Constitution Center. I knew the word Constitution was in there somewhere. And we'll put a link to the report in the show notes. Obviously, ours was the best. And we got into a lot of that stuff in there because there's also stuff like having a congressional override of presidential vetoes would be really good.

and there's a lot of that kind of thing. The question I have... Amending the Constitution easier? Like, I'm curious if you think that would help Congress at all. Like, if people, you know, if the American voters, sort of if we had national ballot measures, if you will, would that, like, juice Congress to be better? Or would it actually just make them less likely to do stuff?

Because you could always do it through amendment. So it's funny you mentioned this because I had Jay Cost on The Remnant recently and he made a point about this stuff. I'm less jazzed about making it easier to amend the Constitution. And I was talking to Jay about it, who's got a new book about the Constitution. And he was saying, look, there's a lot of things you could do legislatively that would put insulation or muscle around the bone of the Constitution so that you don't actually have to change the Constitution. And one of them is expanding the House.

If you hate the Electoral College or if you think the Senate is too undemocratic, do something legislatively to reinforce the Constitution. constitutional principle to make it more robust to restore its proper role in things. And so I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, is, is making it easier to amend the Constitution. Yeah, and, and accountability. I mean, if, if, if you believe that part of the problem with Congress is that Congress is throwing off its responsibility to legislate and removing itself, uh, placing itself at a greater distance from voter voter, voting these other ways that Congress can sort of step back from its duties, I think, is problematic.

But so, Sarah, the question I have for you is we are 100% on the same page. We've been doing this mind-mail thing on the campaign finance stuff for a very long time. But the Supreme Court ruled, you know, in Citizens United about a lot of this stuff. And so I sometimes feel, and there's truly a question from my own ignorance. It's like how much of the old, the status quo ante can be restored in the wake of citizens, that would pass constitutional muster. I honestly think it's one of my worky ideas that if we made voting mandatory in this country,

it would solve an enormous number of our problems in our politics. But I'm against it because I think it's unconstitutional. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't fix a lot of our problems. Are the things that you want to do, do you think the things that you want to do with campaign finance reform all clear the hurdles set by Citizens United and the other campaign donation, you know, precedents?

I'm so glad you asked this, Jonah Goldberg, because the misunderstandings about what Citizens United actually said it's so much worse than shouting fire in a crowded theater level stuff. Now, can you do that, by the way? I hate you so much. The shouting fire in a crowded theater is used more often, but barely than people who just like say Citizens United like it is an incantation for things. bad in campaign money land. So Citizens United was an organization in corporate form. So a bunch of

people who wanted to put their money together with limited liability, basically, in corporate form to make a movie about Hillary Clinton that was within, I'm going to get the number of days wrong, 120 days of the election in 2008. They were barred from doing that under Bikra. And so they sued and said that's a violation of the First Amendment. because there's no quid pro quo or appearance of quid pro quo impropriety when it comes to candidate corruption. And so what the Supreme Court said is basically, yeah, the same First Amendment rights that you would have as an individual to make that movie. You also have if you do it in corporate form with other individuals to make that movie. It is insane for people who are like, if only we repealed

Citizens United, I don't, it's like, it's like that old meme, like repeal citizens. United, dot, dot, dot, politics is fixed. Like, what? Repealing Citizens United would mean that you couldn't have movies like bringing the house down, which was about AOC's election. You couldn't have the Mitt Romney movie, like any movie, TV show, any television ad, anything you put online that you didn't do as an individual that any company put together, you wouldn't be able to do if it talked about candidates at all.

done that's insane of course you can talk about candidates what um so yeah citizens united what the supreme court has said in buckley and citizens united as other it is ruling on the constitutionality of legislation it's already out there so if you get rid of that legislation the supreme court like they're telling you what the floor is not what the ceiling is so if you got rid of bickra the spring court would be like fine yeah you can spend all the money you want you're You can have only billionaires donate, like, whatever. That's fine. So, yeah, getting rid of Citizens United would just mean that Congress could ban political speech

that comes in a form of things that we do in corporations like movies, ads, stuff like that. Right. But there's no controlling Supreme Court thing that says you couldn't go back to the days of giving unlimited money to parties. No, absolutely not. Okay. The Constitution doesn't bar that at all. Yeah. I didn't think it did.

I just, but for clarity sake, because when I have this conversation with people, they start throwing out this constitutional stuff at me sometimes. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure you're wrong, but you're so confident that I got to go home and- I totally agree. It is mind-blowing.

And like Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, has said that now it's on his list to repeal Citizens United. Like, again, first of all, you couldn't do it legislatively because the whole point is that, The Supreme Court said that the bicker legislation, that piece of it, was unconstitutional.

So you're talking about a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United so that we can't make movies, which is what that – it's bewildering to me. Again, it's repeal Citizens United, yada, yada, yada, yada, we fixed politics. 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. The truth is, the consequences of not having life insurance, can be serious. That kind of financial strain, on top of everything else, is why life insurance indeed matters.

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Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ethos.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. All right. I'm sure we'll talk about that topic more on how to fix everything with one neat trick. But Steve, I want to move on to the hostage prisoner swap. There appears to be an extension in the works now that we've reached the end of the initially agreed upon hostages for prisoners exchange ceasefire or pause, whatever you want to call it. I'm curious if you have any sort of tactical news of the day thoughts on this extension. But I also want to talk big picture about, doesn't, like, so A, I feel like this locks in Israel and, frankly, where the world should be. If you're going to exchange anything, do anything to negotiate with terrorists and incentivize, frankly, hostage taking, then you can't stop this war until the people who might take your hostages are no more.

So doesn't this just lock in actually maybe a worse outcome overall? I think it does, actually. And it's that part of the debate has largely disappeared. I mean, it's been a very interesting sort of change from the first few days after October 7th, after the massacre, when I think the barbarity of the attacks, the numbers, the numbers. just the pure numbers, had many people, including leaders in Israel, saying, in effect, I mean, this will sound harsh and it's obviously a paraphrase, but it's awful that there are hostages, we are going to get Hamas.

And that was sort of the message being broadcast in those first few days from, not everybody certainly, but many in Israeli leadership. And it quickly, I think, gave way to what we've seen with respect to hostages. I think there are a bunch of complicated reasons for that. Some of them moral, some of them PR, some of them encouragement from allies, certainly the United States, when the Biden administration shifted its position to favor a ceasefire associated with hostage-freeing.

You know, I think there was certainly a lot of reporting that the Israeli leadership was saying, look, we're going to make our own decisions regardless of what the Biden administration is telling us to do. But you can't ignore the fact that having the Biden administration effectively say this publicly weighed heavily on that decision-making. Yeah, look, I mean, this is such a hard.

Anybody who pretends that there's an easy and obvious answer on a question like this is sort of being silly. It's a really, really hard question when you're talking about the lives of people, potentially saving these lives of people who have been taken hostage. So it's been encouraging to see these releases, to read the stories about the reunification of these families.

You know, it's been in its own way, uplifting. You've also had, on the flip side of that, more details, including a big story in the New York Times today about what the captivity was like. And I think it's a necessary corrective from what we've seen from many in the media who've been covering this, who have kind of, if some of them shrugged their shoulders at what the experiences for those in captivity were or might have been. There was a tweet from the international editor at Sky News, the other day that got a fair amount of attention pushing back on some Twitter commentary

describing the captives said they were held in reasonable conditions reportedly, though those held above ground lived with the fear of being killed in Israel's bombardment. I would suggest that is a bit morally obtuse and, you know, really just, just inaccurate. This is somebody talking about something he obviously didn't know, and now there's abundant reporting that his first claim is absolutely wrong. But I do think, just to finish the thought, I do think, to your original question, there can't be any question that this incentivizes hostage taking. And there's now abundant evidence that this, and again, some of this reported in the New York Times story today,

abundant evidence that this was always part of Hamas' plan for strategic reasons. They understood what the power of having hostages would get them. And I think they are seeing it play out right now. Jonah, big picture. Should nation states negotiate with terrorists? Should rocks be so hard, right? I mean, it's like, it's one of these things that's going to happen. And so it's, you can make a very good argument that it shouldn't happen because you set,

create incentives to have it happen again and again and again. And the future kidnap should count for something in the calculations weighing the value of the currently kidnap, but it's just a really- And even if you wipe Hamas off the map, by the way, you've still taught other terrorist groups who may be thinking about other nations, not even Israel, right? that hostage-taking as a general matter is pretty successful. Yeah, and look, and, you know, America has got its own issues on this. We just gave a bunch of money, you know, was it $6 billion?

I mean, again, through cutouts and whatever, but to Iran for a bunch, for five hostages, you know, and they were hostages. They were, you know, call them criminals if you are remotely deferential to the Mullah's criminal code. but um and it's just very hard France suffers from this every every major country um I'm aware of at least major western country it's just the internal political pressures the psychological pressures to bring your people home and then you factor in that you're not talking about you know oil contractor consultants or businessman or dual citizen you know uh people visiting their, you know, grown-ups, visiting their relatives or doing consulting work, whatever. You're talking about babies, you know? You're talking about Holocaust survivors.

You talk about, and in a country as small as Israel, the idea of the amount of political pressure, the psychological pressure, that literally thousands of moms, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, who all know somebody who knows somebody, you know, if they don't know the person themselves, it's just, It's a totally human, understandable thing to see how Israel will do this.

I do think, though, that one of the, and there's been some good reporting on this, but the main reason why we've seen this pause is that the IDF said they've been so successful in the first stage that they thought it was worth getting a bunch of these hostages because they weren't losing that much militarily. You're now hearing from people saying, okay, that period is kind of coming at an end. This resupply to Gaza is problematic. And I just want to make one other point about this. All of this sort of fog of, I hate calling it fog of war.

It's sort of fog of terrorism stuff where families are finding out that their kid isn't dead but is a hostage or they're finding out their kid isn't a hostage but he's dead. This is part of a strategy by Hamas because that uncertainty, that, you know, the reports of these kids, who have been released who were like really hungry because they hadn't been fed properly, kids who were still whispering because they had guns put at their heads and told that if they make a sound, they're going to get shot. That is psychological torture for the parents

and the family members who still have hostas. It is psychological torture for the state of Israel generally, and that's part of the point. And what I cannot stand in the way the media has, and including to a certain extent, rhetorically, the Biden administration, it's fallen to like this fantasy football scorecard thing. Oh, this many Osage is released for this many. Oh, that's a fair trade or, you know, Israel is releasing people who tried to blow up people

and stab people and murder people in exchange for babies and old ladies. And like the idea that somehow there's a scorekeeping element to that is grotesque to me. Similarly, I am sick and tired of hearing, you know, Biden had to apologize for criticizing or showing skepticism about Hamas' casualty numbers. Now, we know that Hamas has lied in the past about its casualty numbers. We know that Hamas includes dead terrorists in its civilian casualty number. We know that it tells journalists, you know, what to say and what not to say about about casualties, lest they want to either be killed or not be allowed to report in Gaza anymore.

And you have, you've seen a little bit of, you've seen enough pushback on the press so that you get, you know, the times will now say, according to the Gaza health ministry, which is run by Hamas, X number of people have been killed, X number of Palestinians have been killed. And then they just merely go along as if that's true, right? They just, like they feel like they have to perform us say that. And it really does feel like a lot of people are losing the plot here about why Israel is in there. You know, Biden had to walk back this really idiotic tweet that basically, you know, fed this narrative that somehow Israel was the problem by continuing a cycle of violence kind of thing. The thing that offended me probably the most about the walkback was the insinuation that Joe Biden himself had tweeted it.

but they can't give up that subterfuge, right, that cover story. And so the only thing I'm, I have to give the Biden administration credit because I think Biden on the important things has held the line. And most of the stuff, the stupid stuff he is saying is actually not intended to be pressure on Israel. It is intended to be essentially gaslighting for the insane left of his own party to make it sound like he is, you know, doing the right thing by them. I just think that over the long time, he's encouraging those people, say, we're making progress. We've convinced Biden. And that's a bad

approach. There should be more John Kirby like, what the hell is wrong with you? You know, there are good guys and bad guys and no, we're not saying the Palestinians are bad guys. But we are saying Hamas are bad guys and have a little more moral clarity here. Yeah, whatever the intent, I mean, I think you describe the effect exactly right. And I think we're watching the original, I mean, I think that, you know, you may have said it, Jonah, in the early days after the attacks, you know, Biden had this sort of instinctive response to support Israel and to decry what we had just seen. And there were predictions that that would soon melt away in the face of outcry from the left.

of the Democratic Party, I will admit, I thought Biden's resolve would last longer than it did. I don't think it's lasted very long. And I think what he's saying in doing, you know, there's been some downplaying of this controversy over the tweet as, you know, sort of a mistaken tweet, you know, not that big a deal. It's a big deal. Like, these are messages that whatever he intended to do, they're boxing Israel in. and making it more and more difficult. So even if he's just appeasing the sort of fringe of the Democratic Party or trying to position himself well

with young voters, young prospective Democratic voters, where he's bleeding support and needs support in order to win, the effects, the international effects of this, I think are significant and not likely to dissipate any time soon. And just quickly to the point about whether this incentivizes more hostage taking, you know, we talked about it as if that's somewhat speculative, but we don't have to talk about it that way. We know that that's the plan. We know that that's what happens here. There's a senior official in the Iranian Economic Ministry who talked about what Iran was doing and said, motion reside, said, we'll take 1,000 Americans hostage. America will have to pay several billions to get everyone freed. This is how we can solve our economic problems. It's a tool that terrorist regimes, terrorist supporting regimes, use and I think used to great effect. And of course, we know that Iran has been a long sponsor of

Hamas. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, you're writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style. It's quick, intuitive, and requires zero coding experience.

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All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Okay, we're just going to switch this right around, although as people online have noted, we're heading into a season to celebrate a Jewish man who was born in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago, while a whole bunch of

Americans are saying that Jews only showed up in Israel in 1948. But yeah, let's talk about Christmas. Steve, when we were on the phone chit-chatting about what we should talk about on this episode. We got way off topic and started talking about elf on the shelf and then decided, no, it's not off topic because we control what's off topic. And by God, this is going to be on topic. So sell me on elf on the shelf. So I think, I mean, the origin started to give people a little bit more of the background. This was your good idea, I think, to talk about this. And I was the one who was guilty of a long digression that I think was probably boring for you. But you found a way to sort of put it in context and make it interesting.

No, the story I was telling, I mean, your kids are a little bit younger than my youngest. And I don't know exactly how we got into the elf on the shelf phenomenon, but we have been doing it in our household for 12, 13 years. We were early adopters. The hazes are usually late on big cultural things like this. But we were early adopters and my wife somehow got her hands on one of the, these elves on the shelf, like, within days or weeks of this becoming a thing. And, you know, let me actually give a warning to any parents who are listening in the car with young children. Yeah, really the rest of this episode. You might want to pause here so as to not give away

trade secrets. I think one of our kids learned something important about the holiday season because we were listening to something that kind of gave it away. Anyway, I hope that was enough time. So we used to hide the elf on the shelf every night. That's what this is. And then the kids get up in the morning and look for it. And our elf was named Neck. I think it was an attempt to name it Nick,

but now our oldest child, Grace, spelled it Neck. And our elf on the shelf has ever since been Neck. And look, I mean, there's a lot of hate directed. to elves on the shelf and the whole phenomenon. And I will say that I'm somewhat perplexed by it. I think it's pretty harmless. And at least in our experience, it has been so fun to watch the kids get up every morning and race around the house and look for this silly little elf.

And our youngest, who's six, she gets up every morning. First of all, it makes it a lot easier to wake kids who have to go to school early because they wake with some purpose. And for the month of December, they get up, sort of bolt up right out of bed and look for the elf. But if you were to try to encapsulate the pure joy of the Christmas season, that little kids experience, sort of extend and multiply those moments from, you know, Christmas. morning or opening presents, what have you, this is a way to do it. She absolutely loves it and you see her racing around with this huge smile on her face. And I love it. I'm four elves on the shelf. So Jonah, I have a couple questions for you on this. One, big picture. Is it okay to lie to children for the sake of a tradition? Two, is it okay to teach children about surveillance at such a young

age. Because the theory of Elf on the shelf, right, is that the elf has been sent by Santa Claus to watch you to determine whether you are naughty or nice for present purposes. I mean, the whole thing I got to tell you, like, if you were just trying to teach first principles to children, this would not be the way you inculcate character, despite it being delightful. So, first of all, yes, it's okay to lie to kids about something. Um, and... Is it? Like, I want to spend a couple seconds on that. So why is it okay to lie to kids? Because then when they find out that you've been lying to them for years about things that they believed were sort of fundamental to their life, isn't it going to make them question a whole bunch of other things that you told them

that are true but unprovable? Maybe. But let's take it out of the, first of all, we'll get to the surveillance thing in a second. But just on the principle of lying to kids, right? Yeah, because we tell lots of lies to kids. Yes. So like all the time. Let's just say as a hypothetical Steve is a catastrophizer who thinks that we're going to be attacked by terrorists any minute that COVID could kill everybody or whatever, just purely hypothetical. You don't necessarily want to tell your little kids that, right? There are lots of bad things in the world that you want to protect them from so they sleep well at night, so they feel secure, so they become well adjusted, so they ease into the world on a timetable

more of your choosing that is healthier for them. And sometimes that is going to require telling kids things that aren't true. And I'm not going to get into a whole Plato-Nobo-Nobal-I thing, but like giving all of the truth on a premature timetable to little kids, I think, can be bad parenting. So at the very least, diplomacy in the art of talking to your kids about some things is, called for. I mean, certainly, if a four-year-old kid asks you where, how do you make babies, right? You don't give the full explanation, right? So that's, there's a slow. No, but you don't lie. I don't say the babies are dropped off by the stork either. That's fine. You know, so, you know, to each their own. Like, the tooth fairy isn't a necessary lie. Yeah. So my mom, when I was little,

told me that we got our belly buttons because there was a giant conveyor belt in heaven and God poked each one in the belly and said, you're done, you're done. You're done. I love that so much. It did not make me anti-science when I got older, okay? How did she explain outies? It was because like the dough got stuck to his finger a little bit. And so, like, again, parents can make their own decisions at the margins. They can make all their decisions about this.

But like the kind of parent who loves giving unadulterated, harsh, scary truths to little kids, I find really creepy, right? I find that a really creepy form of parenting. You know, it's adjacent to. It's not the same thing. Some people are perfectly nice, decent people who like insist that their kids call them by their first names.

But it feels it's like in that ballpark to me. I just don't like it. On the surveillance thing, well, first of all, are you just going to not talk about Santa? Because Santa knows when you've been sleeping. He knows when you're awake. He knows when you've been bad or good.

So be good for goodness sake. And so all the elf on the shelf is is his eyes on the ground, right? His man on the scene collecting intel to report back to Santa. So like, like, you know, are you going to... There's layers of this. There's the government surveillance aspect that we're getting kids accustomed to feeling like they're being watched all the time. But even like that's like the like specific ha-ha one maybe.

But on like the less ha-ha side, you're sort of teaching kids that you're, I don't know, you're only rewarded for being good and that there's like a scorecard up there and that your presence are directly related to your acts. There's weirdly something very anti-Christian about this, right? The idea that like good acts get you into heaven, like that's, unless I'm missing some flavors of Christianity.

But like the whole point is that faith, faith alone, is what your reward comes from. So I don't know, just the whole thing seems kind of weird to me that like, I don't know, the present things is a little weird to me. the whole thing is. I am not going to get hardcore into the theological niceties of various kinds of Christianity. But I thought the faith alone thing was more of a Lutheran thing than a Catholic thing or a Protestant thing. But I could be wrong about that. And I don't want to get deep in the weeds on that. Certainly God thinks you should do good things. And the people

But as evidence of your faith, not as like a tit for tat. Sure. No, that's fine. But like if you don't remember father guido sarducci's explanation about how you get into heaven i think we should probably put it in the show notes because basically you get billed like three dollars and forty eight cents for every lie you tell and you get billed like and it goes this this whole gradation of what the costs are for every sin and if you have any money left at the end of your life you get into heaven um it's a great bit i mean if there's ever if there's ever been a moment when we've really missed that one guy who used to be on the podcast and went to a different place. This is it.

Like not, not, you know, not some sophisticated thoughtful explanation from David about. But David has Santa for his kids. So, you know. All right. So let's put the theology aside. I like living. I like teaching kids that it's kind of a magical world and that there are cool things going on. And, um, and I think kids process this stuff pretty well.

They know, I don't think they all turn into. you know, Nietzschean nihilists who only care about the will of power when they find out certain things about Santa or the Easter Bunny. But having these... I just don't think I like the threats. Like, if you do something bad,

you're not going to get a Christmas present. Well, I know someone who gave his kids coal one year because they were bad. Oh, see, actually, weirdly that I'm fine with. If you're going to carry through on the threat, great. But the, like, constant threats that you're never going to carry through on, don't like. But you could also just do, you can just skip the threat side of things, right? Like,

if you don't like the threats or you feel like you have to carry through on threats that, that exist, just skip the threat side. Okay, I want to talk about another piece of tradition also, which is the holiday that we just had, Thanksgiving. I feel like Thanksgiving, which is my favorite holiday, and it's not even close. Number one, Fourth of July is number two, but it's really far down the list. I'll be honest. Sorry, there's a big gap between number one. one and number two. I feel like it's slipping through my fingers. And I want to see if Jonah, my feminist ally, feels any of this. Because all things are tradeoffs, right? Good things are trade. Everything has tradeoffs. As women have moved out of the domestic sphere into the economic sphere

and the work sphere, the idea of a family with their day off spending all day cooking in the kitchen, it seems like it's less attractive to a lot of people. And I felt like I was the only one of my friends who cooked a traditional Thanksgiving and everyone else went out to eat, you know, bought some pre-made sides, for instance, things of this nature, like cheating, what I would call Thanksgiving cheating. And I'm concerned that when you have a holiday that is solely around spending time with family over a meal that as the meal preparation becomes less central, that we're going to lose the holiday itself. And it makes me really, really sad. So I think there's something to that. Are we, did I trade? Is my feminism costing me Thanksgiving?

No. I mean, this is so that it's funny you put it this way because I didn't think this is where we were going. But this is, this is a big part of the decline of institutions generally. And it has to do with technology, right? Where people used to form institutions to accomplish. things. Institutions to a certain extent were a form of technology and many hands make like light work kind of thing. And the example I always used was when I was the editor of my school paper, I transitioned us off of the old Xacto knife cutting boards, literally pasting things onto a page to make a newspaper page and switch it to a desktop computing, the future, you know, whatever. The problem was it completely ruined the culture of the newspaper because

it used to be that at least once every other week, the entire staff got together over pizza and did all this custom painting together. Now it was a bottleneck with one person at a computer doing everything and everyone else just dropped off their copy and went back to their rooms and had fun. And you lost the esprit of core. I think this is a phenomenon across vast numbers of areas of our lives

and it requires, you know, so Tim Carney's written a lot about this. It's one of the reasons why he launched a T-ball league where he brought a keg so that the parents come to. You need to come up with ways to incentivize people to be together. So maybe all hands helping with the cooking is one way to do it. Or you have the whole thing catered or something and then you, but you all do something together. But it should be things together. There should be some buy-in to the communityality of it. But I think it's a, it's a legit, it's a legit issue. And I think that part

of a problem also is like, I think it's, look, I'm all in favor as your feminist ally of women having full participation in the market economy, that there should not be consigned to the Gemine chef. They can be in the cassel shaft too. But I do think it's sad how few women like to cook these days. And I think it's, there is something lost in all of that that is worth appreciating, and I don't know what you do about it. You know, my wife loves to cook, my mom loved to cook. We've taught my daughter, you know, I love to cook. I think it's an important, valuable thing in life, and some people don't.

And I just think, you know, they're wrong, but there you have it. So Steve, in my family, I just, maybe this is a Texas thing, right? In Texas, men make the meat and women do the not. meat items. But we were having some discussion that perhaps that's not normal for everyone else. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I hadn't really given much thought about this trend that you've observed until we chatted about it. And it occurs me that anecdotally, I think that it strikes me as correct. We talked about the possibility of getting some numbers to back it up. Like, are there fewer turkeys being cooked in homes?

you know, each Thanksgiving than there used to be. And I didn't come up with any numbers, but I haven't given up looking for that because I think it would actually be, it'd be really interesting if this turns out to be true. Yeah, I was, I was having a conversation with a friend the other night. And she pulled out a picture of this beautiful turkey that, and it was sort of her and her husband standing behind the turkey and I made this assumption that she had cooked it and she said no no my husband cooked it he deep fried it and it was phenomenal and what have you um I do think there's something to the to the men handled meat tradition um I maybe it's that men handle fire

yeah it could be I did a I did a I smoked a turkey on my grill a few years ago with sort of a bourbon glaze, bourbon-bacon turkey. And it was, if I can be this immodest, it was really, really good. But my wife got a recipe that requires dry buying a turkey starting Sunday night and working toward Thursday. And it is so unbelievably tasty that we've sort of shelved my learnings on smoking a turkey. And I was lucky to grow up in a house where my mom was sort of this master of, you know, not only all of the sides of Thanksgiving. We've shared the, her spinach recipe with you, Shara, and with our dispatch members, but also was incredible at the turkey itself.

I don't know. I'm sort of mixed on this. I love the tradition. I love the all-day cooking. I think it's fun. I'm happy to participate in it. I'm not sure that that makes me your feminist ally, Sarah, but I'm not. and not try to crowd out Jonah on that.

So on the one hand, I lament these changes, if they are, in fact, changes. On the other hand, like, I'm sort of sympathetic. People are busy. It's crazy. You know, the times that we spend trying to do this, sometimes we have the time, whether it's turkey or whether it's other big wheels, sometimes we don't. And while I hate eating out as a family on a regular basis because it's so expensive, it's necessary sometimes. And we go back and forth with our family on this all the time where we look at credit card receipts and say, oh, my gosh, we've eaten out so often this month.

We've got to cut that back for financial reasons. It's also the case that, you know, if you're driving kids to hockey and dance and things get a little crazy, it's just easier. And so I think that's part of the explanation. All right. With that, very curious what you dispatch members think in the comments section. And if you're not a member of the dispatch, you can join and hop in the comment section. And I'll be there, you know, commenting on your comments. Otherwise, from this new mother of two, the holiday season is exhausting.

And I hope that you are all getting lots of rest and happiness and joy to buoy the exhaustion. Because, you know, that does make it. kind of worth it. And with that, we'll talk to you next week. Thank you.