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your listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the
1:00
Remnant Podcast, brought to you by The Dispatch and Dispatch
1:02
Media. So as some of you
1:04
know, I was in New York for a couple days
1:08
for a birthday trip for my lovely
1:10
wife through all sorts
1:12
of logistical snafus and
1:14
whatnot. We are
1:16
recording this. Normally we record the second episode
1:19
of the week on Wednesdays. But
1:21
instead we're doing this without a net on Thursday morning
1:23
and we pump it out same day. I just
1:25
thought I should give you that context so you know what's
1:28
going on. Also because
1:30
I don't know what I'm going to talk about
1:32
yet and want to give myself a chance to
1:35
think. And we figured we needed somebody
1:37
who could come in at a moment's notice and
1:39
talk about anything. I also
1:41
had an abiding interest in finding
1:44
someone more curmudgeonly and misanthropic than
1:46
myself. And that
1:48
is a very narrow crawlspace. But
1:51
we've managed to do it by bringing in
1:53
our own Kevin Williamson, a, you
1:57
know, Dispatch writer, long time friend, author of
1:59
many books. The Find Books and. Father
2:02
of what is going to what is shaping up to
2:05
be a very large dynasty. Kevin. Welcome
2:07
back to the remnant it two years
2:09
ago know gets ah. Now for. Has.
2:12
All that going. It's good, how
2:14
dare you to. Mostly cheerful, a
2:16
entertaining, amusing little bunch of. Gentleman.
2:21
They're loud. You know her ears I I tell
2:23
my wife sometimes it you. There's a reason I
2:25
lived alone till I was forty six years old.
2:28
And a part of that is is that I'm
2:31
I'm not good with them people. Have
2:34
been out there are they're they're They're great. They're
2:36
either fun, And my wife
2:38
request as as to the hard stuff at this point and
2:41
she's the one who's. Good. At three o'clock
2:43
in the morning to you or be triplets and
2:45
and whatnot and I just try to. Write
2:47
stuff and or earn a living in the.
2:51
And tribute in that way. But.
2:53
There are there other fun. Now I'm. You.
2:55
Know the older boy is just
2:57
under two and so he's. Falcon.
3:00
In playing with stuff and I
3:02
use building houses with his magna
3:04
tiles and blocks and. He's.
3:07
Very definite about what he wants. You know
3:09
when you know it is enter he he
3:11
says. As. Answer: We
3:13
take him off the bath and that. And
3:15
as you know when he does a months
3:17
of the he says no in a very
3:19
definitive kind of way and up visa know
3:21
he's a he's a good kid you've you've
3:23
met him any some and and I say
3:25
this. With. All the kindness
3:28
and generosity my heart imaginable.
3:30
You're. Really lucky how much he takes up. Takes
3:33
after his mother, Ah and that and
3:35
because he was he was just a cheery when i
3:37
met him and they were not using name's here but
3:39
like he was such an. Unbelievably.
3:41
Smiley. Cheerily Cheery. Hey.
3:44
How's it going kind of baby. And
3:46
I'm not. Opposed the describe
3:48
you like when someone asking what capitalism really like
3:50
Those are not the kinds of adjectives I would
3:52
use about you but they were article judges I
3:55
would use about your wife. Was. Really lovely
3:57
and charming and outgoing. And in in
3:59
it's it. It's good balance and
4:01
the little babies are very smiley at this point
4:03
too. They've just started the smiling thing, you know.
4:06
I mean, they'll make random faces when they're real
4:08
little but they're
4:10
now, you know, where they'll smile and giggle in
4:12
response to things which is kind of fun. What
4:15
would you say your total volume
4:18
of diapers a week
4:20
or a month is like if you had
4:22
to guess? So, we're in two different sizes
4:24
of course. Right. So,
4:26
the smaller ones, I guess
4:28
we do a box a day
4:31
and the larger ones, I don't
4:33
know. I
4:36
can tell you that
4:38
the local municipal services
4:40
here will not haul off the
4:42
volume of recycling we produce. So,
4:45
I have to actually load stuff up in
4:47
the truck which I'll do today at some
4:49
point and take it to
4:51
dump and get rid of it. So,
4:53
that's just type of boxes and things
4:55
and you know, it's
4:58
a banal observation I guess in many ways
5:00
but I'll make it anyway that it's just
5:02
so much easier to do this right now than it would have
5:04
been 20 years ago because of things
5:07
like Amazon. Sure. But
5:09
also because of other things like we were talking about
5:11
this yesterday that there was some little thing
5:13
my wife was trying to figure out how to do,
5:15
I don't remember what it was, something she had to
5:18
put together and she's good at putting stuff together, you
5:20
know, she's an architect, right? And
5:22
she didn't know how to do it and she looked it up and
5:24
you know, some one minute and
5:26
30 second video on YouTube
5:28
and figured that stuff out. But
5:31
no, it's just so easy to have this stuff
5:33
delivered and you know, formula we go through just
5:35
massive amounts of formula. We
5:38
have more babysitters
5:40
than I can remember their names. So,
5:43
yeah, there's some logistical
5:46
issues there and some resource
5:49
investment I guess, you know. I'm not talking
5:51
about the recycling and I'm not taking all
5:53
of it, just staying on the theme of
5:57
dealing with giant bags
5:59
of crap. Let's talk about
6:01
the Biden administration's decision. I thought
6:03
we were talking about the Biden
6:57
administration's decision to the
8:00
guitar stuff is in the who, having
8:03
someone on stage, you know, doing the
8:05
full Pete Townsend kind of thing and
8:07
the windmill arm. I think given
8:09
how much nostalgia is built into going to
8:11
see Tommy in the first place, just, you
8:14
know, like, we brought down the
8:16
average age probably in that room, my wife and
8:18
I. And so I thought
8:20
I have questions about the production, but overall, I liked
8:23
it. Yeah, I saw a production
8:25
of a play when I was still doing theater criticism.
8:27
It's called Lissa
8:29
Strada Jones and it's kind of a like
8:31
a college musical thing. It's an adaptation of
8:33
Lissa Strada. And it's
8:36
really obviously supposed to be a high school musical, but it's
8:38
a bunch of sex stuff in it. So they put it
8:40
at a college instead to deal
8:42
with the age issues. But they had
8:44
the band on a kind of a catwalk above
8:46
the stage. And I thought that worked. I thought
8:49
that works pretty nicely. There's a little of that in
8:51
Hadestown, which I saw, which, you know, you see some,
8:54
the music's incorporated more into the
8:56
actual production. Bloody, bloody Andrew Jackson
8:58
was pretty good about. They had a
9:00
band on the stage and they just
9:03
sort of, you know, had them around where
9:05
the dramatic part of the action
9:07
was going on and they could kind
9:09
of, you know, fade into the background when they were doing
9:11
something and then kind of come into the foreground when they
9:13
were. I thought that worked pretty well. So I
9:15
like The Who in general. I'm kind
9:17
of a guitar player, you know, some,
9:19
I'm a fan of Pete Townsend's style
9:22
of guitar playing, that, you
9:25
know, kind of angular,
9:27
rhythmic way he has playing guitar.
9:30
Although he's an interesting guy
9:32
as a writer and as a composer.
9:34
I think he's done some other very
9:37
non-Who stuff over the course
9:39
of his career, particularly in the 80s when he was making,
9:41
you know, all the best cowboys have Chinese eyes and that
9:44
which I think is still pretty fun to
9:47
listen to, although maybe there's an element of
9:49
nostalgia there. Well, who do you think holds
9:52
up better today, The Who or The Rolling
9:54
Stones? Oh, I think The Rolling Stones probably
9:56
because I suppose the
9:59
youth slang, The word basic has gotten
10:01
a bad reputation but there's something basic about
10:03
the Rolling Stones music that it's... So
10:06
the Rolling Stones wander a lot... Who
10:10
wanders a lot further away from the blues than
10:12
the Rolling Stones do? And the
10:14
Rolling Stones, even when they're doing, you know, French
10:16
horns and stuff tend
10:19
to sit in that kind of, you
10:22
know, 1-4-5 pentatonic scale traditional
10:25
kind of world
10:27
and that stuff because it is sort
10:29
of elemental ends up having a more
10:32
timeless quality I think. So
10:34
I think that 100 years from now,
10:36
people want to know what the middle
10:38
of the 20th century sounded like. They'll
10:41
listen to things like hockey-tonk women more
10:44
than it would Bob O'Reilly. Yeah.
10:46
I will say that like I prefer the who
10:49
over the Rolling Stones in that if
10:52
you're just doing greatest hits, I
10:54
enjoy listening to the whose
10:57
greatest hits probably more than I do the Rolling
10:59
Stones greatest hits but I'm not sure that makes the
11:02
who a better band but this is
11:04
way outside of my comfort zone. I
11:07
probably prefer listening to the who but the Stones are
11:09
a lot more fun to play. I can see
11:11
that. If you were in
11:13
a band and you had to do like a 90-minute
11:15
show, it would be a lot more
11:17
fun to play a bunch of Rolling Stones
11:19
songs. Since we're just sort of indulging casual
11:21
two middle-aged men sitting around, let's go
11:24
to that Cleena Mitchell thing that you mentioned. So I
11:26
sent you this thing this morning. There's
11:29
a piece in the New York Times by
11:32
David Farronthold who I generally trust.
11:35
The headline is pro-Trump nonprofit paid
11:37
millions to companies tied to its
11:39
own leaders. The subhead
11:41
is the conservative partnership Institute's three
11:43
highest paid contractors had connections to
11:45
the group's leaders or
11:47
their relatives raising concerns about
11:49
self-dealing. One of
11:52
the characters in the story is this
11:54
woman, Cleena Mitchell, that we have strong
11:57
views about. We can get to that in a second. level
12:00
set, I've had this view for a
12:02
little while now because I've heard similar stories about other
12:05
conservative institutions that have gone Trumpy. And
12:08
when they move in Trumpy people, they
12:11
tend... CPAC is an obvious example. They
12:13
loot the places. Yeah, they loot the
12:15
places. I know
12:17
of one organization, I won't name it because I don't want
12:19
to get into legal stuff, but they very
12:22
deliberately refused to put
12:24
something out for a bid because
12:26
they wanted it to
12:28
go to the wife of one
12:31
of the people on the board. And
12:34
the thing about it is, you
12:36
were one of the few people out there that I will
12:38
concede you know this better than I do. This is a
12:41
very old tale, this kind of thing. But
12:44
it is
12:46
a weird intellectual consistency to devotees
12:50
of industrial policy and
12:54
sort of corporatist economics
12:58
doing this because the whole idea about
13:00
sort of industrial policy is
13:03
basically machine politics. Let's give stuff
13:05
to our friends. They
13:08
just announced in New York State, I think
13:11
it's going to get thrown out in the courts,
13:13
but they just know that this massive multi-billion dollar
13:16
infrastructure thing to upgrade JFK Airport
13:18
that is apparently going to go
13:20
only to minority groups, that's
13:22
industrial policy. If you
13:25
want to do that at scale with the whole country, why
13:27
wouldn't you do that with your little right-wing organization
13:30
that is trying to get the guy
13:32
who wants to do that for the whole country elected
13:35
president? No, not little though. I think
13:37
the Times said their fundraising was at something just
13:39
short of $50 million a year. So
13:42
that's real money. They bought
13:44
some 2200-acre property in Maryland where
13:46
land is not cheap. I'm
13:50
stealing from Jonah Goldberg here who I've heard
13:52
talk about this on many speeches and podcasts
13:54
that the kind
13:57
of above-board rule of law, western liberal way of
13:59
doing things of you know, putting things out to
14:01
bed, bid and all that is
14:03
really the exception. You
14:06
know, what we're seeing with the kind of self-dealing
14:08
and tribalism and brother-in-law log-rolling
14:11
stuff in the Trump world
14:14
is really a return to normal. It's not a good return
14:16
to normal. Normal is not necessarily a good thing and
14:18
the normal state of the human being
14:21
is not great. Yeah,
14:24
this stuff is so, it
14:27
can be so brazen, you know. I mean, actually, I
14:29
don't think I know this better than you because you've
14:31
been sort of in the world of you know,
14:33
political activism and such a lot longer than I have
14:35
and you probably had a chance to see some of
14:37
this stuff. But the case
14:39
that I always, I
14:42
cherish because it's so wonderful. You
14:46
couldn't make it up if you were writing a novel. I
14:48
was working in Philadelphia, I was editing Bulletin
14:51
there and one of my reporters
14:53
came in and he said I want to
14:55
show you something. This is really interesting. There's
14:58
this contract going to a firm that no
15:00
one's ever heard of called Notlam Enterprises and
15:03
it's for like two and a half million dollars or two
15:05
million dollars and it's to
15:08
provide consulting services for
15:10
airport baggage handling services at
15:12
Philadelphia Airport. And he said
15:14
no one's ever heard of this company but the mayor
15:16
at the time is a guy named John Street and he has
15:18
a brother named Milton and if you spell Milton
15:20
back where it's Notlin, he said surely they're
15:22
not being so obvious. It's
15:25
just to spell the mayor's
15:27
brother's name backward and invent a company and give
15:30
it a multi-million dollar contract which is exactly what
15:32
they did. And
15:34
not only was Notlin Enterprises just
15:37
the mayor's brother, it had no employees or anything
15:39
like that. Of
15:41
course, it had no history in airports or baggage handling
15:43
services or anything like that or no reason to think
15:46
they would be good at it. But
15:48
Milton Street at the time
15:50
was employed as a hot dog
15:53
vendor on the street
15:55
of Philadelphia And
15:57
so they awarded this hot dog vendor a multi-million dollar contract.
16:00
The million dollar contract to you Abdel Brand the
16:02
airport. If you ever been to the Philadelphia airport
16:04
you can see that they got him a place
16:06
for it on at certain. I'd say
16:08
it's a bit of a mess of an airport, but
16:10
the interesting thing about that? I mean other than just
16:12
kind of funny Philadelphia corruption stories. Is as
16:15
a we broke at story I believe we would
16:17
first ones abbott. He. Was
16:19
as you embarrassing, shameful thing. Everyone
16:21
knew it, but it took years.
16:24
Ah, but effort to get them to
16:26
rescind his contract. He. Was a
16:28
thing. They went on for months and months and
16:30
months. And an Ips litigation is all sorts of
16:32
stuff. And. Even it was all out there in
16:34
the open. Everyone could see how corrupt it was. It's
16:37
when honor on on on and like I was to
16:40
sell. Things. Normally happen which.
16:42
He. Is how things normally happened in in a lot
16:44
of the world. When I
16:46
was working the Indian Express I remember
16:49
when this wonderful wonderful expos a. What?
16:51
What became known as Fodder Scam. I'm. Basically.
16:54
Their Version: The Secretary of Agriculture was stealing
16:56
money from this program that was supposed to
16:58
be used to buy fertilizer for poor farmers
17:00
in kind of remote and rural areas. And.
17:03
Someone had be. Genius
17:05
idea of going to the paperwork
17:07
of this program and looking at
17:09
expenditures. And. Running down the
17:12
vehicle said was purchased vagina do that, birch
17:14
trucks and stuff to drag fertilizer around there
17:16
were getting people checks are actually delivering the
17:18
stuff. And. He knows that
17:20
what they were buying to transport fertilizer and
17:22
was like a yard and a Rolls Royce
17:24
Phantom the most. So
17:27
when they finally raided this guy's
17:29
house. Ah he had. I
17:31
wanna say thirty five million dollars in
17:33
cash. It's house The equivalent Thirty Five
17:35
million dollars. But. This is course
17:37
in Indian movies when me I'm. When.
17:40
The largest note in circulation was five hundred
17:42
rupees, which was about. Four. Dollars
17:44
I guess. So imagine thirty five million dollars
17:46
in ten dollar bills with emblem, society and
17:48
stats and stack? Yeah, just have bailed up
17:51
like hey, he and his house. There were
17:53
rumors of his house he would just fall
17:55
of Stacks The Money Like Scrooge, Big Gap.
17:58
Badges. Is this normal is is. The will do.
18:00
Thanks. So. On these little
18:02
businesses like be little you know, nonprofits
18:05
on the people to choose to bomb.
18:07
You. Get themselves paychecks, Ah, It's
18:10
pretty common thing. I. Remember what
18:12
is the lady's name? The i'm not a
18:14
wish lady in a oh Christine, I'm not
18:16
all Oh Donald. Casino. Donald. Am
18:19
not. saying the what she was doing was was
18:21
corrupt and any legal way but I member after she
18:23
lost that racy set up a pack. And
18:25
a packed basically existing just to
18:27
you know if her a job
18:29
and a budget to you blue
18:31
stuff. And. It wasn't really you
18:33
know of is he doing much of anything else. Okay,
18:39
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apply. Were
21:13
you there when I had my sort of famous
21:15
confrontation with Cleta? No. We
21:17
should set that up because it's kind of like Chekhov's gun
21:19
at this point. We've name dropped her twice
21:21
and people are like, what are they talking about? So why
21:23
don't you just sort of start at the beginning and then,
21:25
you know. I'm not a
21:28
very good extemporaneous public speaker. That's
21:30
why I write stuff and I don't give speeches. But
21:32
it's one of my better moments as an extemporaneous public
21:34
speaker where it was a national review cruise I guess
21:36
and it was early
21:39
in the Trump thing and
21:41
she was giving some kind of ridiculous talk
21:43
about something and I disagreed
21:45
with her and she gave me
21:47
this thing. Well, you must be one of those inside
21:50
the Beltway establishment Republicans and
21:53
I stopped here and I said, you
21:55
literally have an office inside the
21:58
Beltway. You are such a waste. Washington
22:00
insider that you literally wrote
22:03
the book on being a lobbyist in DC. It's
22:05
called the Washington Lobby is compliance and you
22:08
host a new show on Fox News
22:10
called the insiders regular
22:13
panels on it. I don't think you get to
22:15
talk that way like you know you're out in
22:17
Topeka somewhere running a business
22:19
and being put upon by the people
22:21
in DC and she
22:24
tried to get me fired from National Review on
22:26
point you know she was on the board of
22:28
the Bradley foundation I guess the Bradley foundation small
22:30
donder to National Review and she made
22:33
some some noise about that and
22:36
so yeah I've got some some issues with
22:39
with Cleta she was one of the
22:41
lawyers who was involved in the truck
22:43
to attempt to she was on the phone she's
22:45
the one heard talking on the phone with the
22:47
famous tape of the Georgia one right yeah
22:50
yeah and she left her
22:53
very prestigious law firm under a little bit
22:55
of a cloud although she was
22:57
never charged with anything and she has
22:59
not been disbarred unlike some of the other
23:02
lawyers involved in that kind of stuff which Sarah
23:05
Isger gets upset about this every time I say it
23:07
but I kind of think every lawyer who worked with
23:09
the Trump administration probably should probably be disbarred or
23:12
at least the very the very senior
23:14
ones should be probably well it's
23:16
I so I'll push
23:18
back on that on Sarah's behalf I mean just
23:21
so people know the reason why Cleta came up
23:23
is she's named in this New
23:25
York Times fees who that is
23:28
nonprofit she was on the board of was spending lots
23:30
of money on vendors that were
23:32
controlled by or owned by members
23:34
of its board or people insiders at the at the
23:36
at the nonprofit or members of their families and she
23:39
was one of these who was collecting
23:42
payments it's all very incestuous so but
23:44
I'm on the lawyer thing look so
23:46
I know I do this is not
23:48
that sort of defend
23:50
people work for the Trump administration which as you know I
23:53
think is a complicated moral
23:55
story for the most part
23:57
but you know Steve
24:00
Tellez co-wrote this book
24:03
about the anti-Trump movement, right?
24:06
And the chapter, which
24:09
I've talked about on here a few times, one of the interesting
24:11
points he makes is how the
24:13
conservative legal movement weathered
24:15
the Trump era, or actually we should now
24:17
say right now the first Trump era, better
24:20
than almost
24:22
any other faction on the right. And
24:25
part of their theory is that lawyers have
24:29
all sorts of rules and
24:33
procedures and mechanisms in place
24:36
for dealing with corrupt and terrible
24:38
clients, right? That's like how they
24:40
know how to do that. And
24:43
so they know how to be more
24:45
transactional without compromising their integrity than the
24:50
grubbier intellectuals who just love
24:52
being part, get access or
24:54
political activists or political consultants
24:56
who just go with whatever the client wants, you know,
24:58
that kind of stuff. There are
25:00
fewer safeguards for a
25:03
lot of other people than there are for lawyers
25:05
who kind of know how to think about this
25:08
far and no farther. And
25:10
I think that's largely right. And
25:13
when you actually look at the lawyers in the
25:15
Trump administration or
25:18
in Trump world, more
25:20
of them, I think, behaved honorably
25:23
when they needed to than
25:26
not. And like the standout examples,
25:30
exceptions to that are of course, you know, Jeffrey Clark
25:33
and John Eastman. And
25:36
you can make the case for Cleta Mitchell, right?
25:38
I mean, again, some were in the administration, some
25:40
were in the periphery, Rudy Giuliani, obviously.
25:45
And you can go and that whole four season
25:47
landscaping crew. But
25:51
the whole bulk of the... You ever get that old?
25:53
It really doesn't. But the
25:55
bulk of the Justice Department guys,
25:57
Rod Rodency and all those guys, they were
26:00
like, we'll resign en masse if you
26:02
try to do this stuff, right? And they, and
26:04
they, and Bill Barr, who's clearly
26:06
no left winger and no partisan Democrat,
26:10
as much of a problem as I got with
26:12
the guy these days, you know, he said flatly,
26:14
the Trump's face, this is all BS. This didn't
26:16
happen. You're making it up. And so
26:18
I mean, my point is, is that, that
26:21
I don't think I don't, I disagree
26:23
with you that they should all be disbarred. I
26:26
don't think Sarah should be disbarred. But
26:28
moreover, I think this is
26:30
an important point to make, to keep
26:32
in mind going into a
26:34
potential second Trump administration, because
26:37
the kinds of people that we're talking
26:39
about these corrupt schmoes or allegedly corrupt
26:41
schmoes from, you know, these various Trumpy
26:44
quasi think tanks and activist groups and all
26:46
that kind of stuff, they're very
26:48
openly saying, we don't want those kinds of
26:50
lawyers anymore, right? We don't want
26:53
federal society lawyers, we want lawyers who know what time
26:55
it is, and are willing to
26:57
sort of break the rules and all
26:59
the rest. And that's an important thing to
27:01
keep in mind, you know, making those kinds of
27:03
distinctions. What I think about the lawyers is that
27:06
there's probably some sanction that goes
27:08
along with going to work for an administration
27:11
that had such contempt for the
27:13
rule of law. And main purpose was trying to
27:15
undermine the rule of law. When
27:17
you're a lawyer, you go to work for people like that, that's
27:19
an issue. If there were a whorehouse that had
27:21
a really, really good bar in it, and
27:24
you went to a house and just had a cocktail, you
27:26
know, and you just went and had an old
27:31
fashioned or two, and your
27:33
wife would still probably be unhappy about that, right? If you're
27:36
not supposed to hang out in a whorehouse. And
27:39
she's just a thing you don't do, even if you're
27:41
not, if you're not, not
27:43
taking the situation as far as it could. And
27:46
I think the working for the Trump administration is like
27:48
having a cocktail in a whorehouse. You
27:50
know, maybe you're not breaking
27:52
all your vows in life, maybe you're not
27:55
breaking all the rules, but you're still in a whorehouse. There are
27:57
people, you know, who went to work for the Trump administration the first
27:59
time around, I think. who had really good intentions
28:01
or well, people I know who
28:04
told me personally, look, these people are crazy and
28:06
incompetent, but we think that if we're there, we
28:08
can steer them in the right direction on some
28:10
things. And it was a theory. How'd
28:13
that work out? Not
28:15
great actually for most cases, I would argue. Well,
28:18
that's not what they'll say. I mean, like you
28:21
talked from Paul Ryan on down, those guys say,
28:23
I mean, they say publicly, but like
28:25
they'll say, you have no idea
28:27
how much bad stuff we prevented. Sure.
28:30
I mean, there's always that, but also, I mean,
28:32
you've got, you know, Larry Kudlow is a friend
28:34
of mine. I like Larry Kudlow. Larry Kudlow and
28:36
I agree about a lot of stuff. Larry
28:38
Kudlow is a libertarian economist who went
28:41
to work for the most protectionist administration
28:43
since Truman, probably,
28:46
and made excuses for the stuff they were
28:48
doing and did some hand waving and
28:51
tried to, you know, polish up those terrors as
28:53
best as he could. And,
28:55
you know, at some point, that kind of
28:57
thing gets more difficult to
29:00
defend. And it's certainly going to
29:02
be a lot more difficult to defend the second time around if there
29:04
is a second time. So that, that
29:06
I generally agree with. And I, you know, full disclosure,
29:08
you know, as you know, my
29:11
wife hates it when I say this, but
29:13
she did work for the Trump administration because she worked
29:15
for Nikki Haley at the UN. And, and
29:18
it's getting at the point that you're making here
29:20
is that whenever I tell people,
29:22
oh, yeah, my wife worked for the Trump
29:24
administration, she, like I'm sleeping
29:26
on the couch that night, you know, because
29:29
she is really, I worked for Nikki. She's
29:31
loyal to Nikki and, and,
29:33
and all that. And, you know, anyway,
29:36
but I get that point. I
29:38
do think, and there are other people
29:41
in the economics world in particular, our
29:43
old colleague, Kevin Hassett comes to mind, people
29:45
like Steve Moore. And he does
29:49
show you how the
29:53
demands of politics
29:55
can overpower the
29:59
convictions about free market economics. I'll put
30:01
it as diplomatically and as pleasantly as possible.
30:03
Yeah. And, you know, the problem is that, you
30:06
know, free market people don't have a lot to sell,
30:08
right? You know, libertarians don't have
30:10
a lot to sell. They don't have goodies to hand
30:12
out. I did an interview with Art Laffer years and
30:14
years ago, in which I was pressing
30:16
him pretty, pretty hard on the way in which Republicans
30:19
misrepresent the Laffer curve and some
30:21
of his findings. And
30:25
he was essentially fine with it. You
30:28
know, he was, he was, this is politics and you
30:31
have to promise people something that they want to hear.
30:33
You have to give them a, you
30:35
know, a story they like. It's the,
30:37
I forget who calls it the two
30:39
Santa Claus theory. The Democrats have
30:41
Santa Claus. Oh, it's PJ. That was PJ's
30:43
thing, I think. Was it? If it's
30:45
what you're saying, if I'm thinking of what you're describing, I
30:47
think it was, but go on. Yeah. And
30:49
the Republicans version of Santa Claus is that we've got
30:52
these tax cuts that we can give to you and
30:54
they don't cost anything. They, in fact, they pay for
30:56
themselves. In fact, they more than pay for themselves. And
30:59
most people know that that's not actually
31:01
true in most situations. I mean, there
31:04
are theoretical cases and probably some practical
31:06
cases in which you can find a
31:09
tax cut that was ultimately
31:12
revenue positivity. These are pretty rare things and they're
31:14
not things that you typically find in the United
31:16
States in our economy. And
31:18
there's reasons for that. And everybody who looks at this
31:20
stuff really very seriously kind of knows that that's true,
31:23
but they still end up talking about it as though
31:25
the fiction were the truth. And
31:28
that's, you know, that's corrupting. It's
31:30
intellectually corrupting and then at times it's actually
31:32
just regular old corrupting corrupting as we've
31:34
seen in some of these financial self-dealing cases. Okay.
31:37
That was not the PJ O'Rourke thing that
31:39
I was thinking of. He
31:42
has a whole thing about how God is a
31:44
Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat. And
31:47
the only problem is that God
31:49
exists. Is PJ a believer? I
31:52
believe so. I'm not
31:54
sure. I know it's a good question. Well, you know, it's
31:56
then one way or the other. Yeah, fair enough. So, but
31:58
you know, like I Go back and forth. On
32:00
a summer. Because. You're right, I mean
32:02
like the star or makes this point often
32:04
as well as is that. The.
32:06
Stuff that you and I really believe in. Ah
32:09
I'm as a matter of like. Much.
32:11
As conviction, but like as
32:13
what we believe is a
32:15
description of reality. Properly enough
32:18
understood. Ah, I'm. It's
32:20
not popular. right? And
32:22
and it's it's. basically never gonna
32:24
be popular an. Arm
32:26
I used to back when I was in
32:29
good odor on the right and I kind
32:31
of cornered the market of being cheaper than
32:33
people like David Brooks and Pj to do.
32:35
Sort of funny, After
32:37
dinner speaking, you know it, think tanks, Right wing,
32:39
think tanks and that kind of stuff and I
32:41
always end up like this. sort of rousing. Not
32:43
always, but often I would end with the sort
32:45
of rousing be a happy warrior thing because you're
32:48
always going to be outnumbered by people. Who.
32:50
Think government can love you and all was kind of
32:52
stuff and that were on the side of freedom and
32:54
we're on the side of. The. Only
32:56
successful anti poverty program in human history
32:58
which is. Free. Market Liberal Democratic Capitalism.
33:01
whatever labels want to put on it. And.
33:05
But if you're always and be outnumbered by people who don't
33:07
like it, And that message
33:09
when of a really really well with
33:11
those groups when. I and
33:14
they both were working on. The assumption
33:16
is that those people were basically. On.
33:19
The left. Or. Uninformed, but
33:21
not us. Right wing
33:23
straight and. And it turns
33:25
out that the desire to be popular. Is.
33:28
And we can put fancy labels on at
33:31
like status and whatever. But the desire to
33:33
be popular is. Among
33:35
the most corrupt things in life
33:37
and it's you know you've seen
33:39
as every time you data files
33:41
gushing about of a live audience
33:43
right. That and there's is
33:45
that desire to to play to the
33:47
audience that I'm some people find really
33:49
really difficult to you or resist. Yeah.
33:53
I. Think that's right. And. it's probably best at
33:55
the end is i mean is table shows as bad as
33:57
they are they got much worse they would be if you're
33:59
alive audience there. Yeah. No, I
34:01
think that's definitely true. I mean, Beck's show had a
34:04
while didn't it? When he was on Fox News, didn't
34:06
Glenn Beck show have an audience? He had regular, every
34:08
now and then he would do like town hall ones
34:10
where he would bring people in. Yeah, yeah. But
34:12
this is, I mean, I brought this up before, I first
34:15
got this idea of credit where it's due
34:17
from the revolutions podcast, which I
34:19
love, and I've become obsessed with finding,
34:21
and if you ever find any examples
34:23
of this, but like, oh, I look
34:25
for this often. One
34:29
of the key differences between the American
34:31
and French revolutions was
34:33
that most of our important
34:35
meetings were done behind closed doors, and
34:39
the French revolutionaries, even when
34:41
they were like guys you would
34:43
sympathize with, you know, more of the Montesquieu flavor than
34:45
the, that both flavor and that kind of stuff, but
34:48
always having meetings in front of
34:50
a bunch of drunk Frenchman where
34:53
the the crowd rewards
34:56
people who go to rhetorical
34:58
excess, and then the problem is,
35:00
is because they've said these things, they're now bought into
35:02
this position that makes it
35:04
impossible to find a compromise and work out, you
35:06
know, some sort of like, you know,
35:09
sustainable mode of government kind of thing.
35:12
The more transparency you have
35:14
across the board, the more
35:16
you encourage people to play to audiences
35:18
rather than actually do what stakeholders and
35:20
responsible people are supposed to do. Yeah,
35:22
it's a tragedy of C-SPAN, you
35:24
know, this enormously well intentioned, publicly
35:27
minded, eye-minded kind
35:30
of classically liberal thing to do. We're gonna open it up
35:32
and make sure that everyone can see and
35:34
just ruined the institution.
35:37
I mean, it was on the way to ruin anyway, but
35:39
it accelerated the wrong. Accelerate, right, right. I'm
35:42
a big believer that most of our
35:44
problems are multi-causal and Trump accelerated problems
35:46
that already existed and made them. Differences
35:49
of degree become differences in kind and all that kind
35:51
of stuff. So, big interview, a
35:53
question I wanted to ask you for a
35:55
while, and it's a balancing
35:58
thing. How much
36:00
do you think Trump brought
36:03
something into existence versus
36:06
how much do you think Trump was
36:08
essentially recruited by a
36:10
movement that preceded him? So
36:13
there was already this kind of populist mood
36:15
in the Republican Party. You know, it always
36:17
reminds people the whole thing of the Tea
36:19
Party movement wasn't people looking for alternatives to
36:21
Democrats. They were looking for alternatives to Republicans.
36:24
They were, you know, right libertarian people
36:26
who were unhappy with the state of the Republican
36:28
Party and thought of the leadership as being contented
36:31
and corrupt and lazy and all the
36:33
stuff you hear in the Georgetown cocktail
36:35
parties and all that. And by
36:38
the way, still the last Georgetown cocktail party I went
36:40
to was your 50th birthday. And
36:42
I think, well, all I ever went to one other one in
36:44
my whole life. So I'm good
36:46
on the populist front there, I suppose. So
36:49
there was this movement already out there and
36:52
that I think kind of maybe had enough
36:56
of a sort of intellectual and moral
36:58
wake that it sucked Trump into it
37:00
a little bit as
37:02
a guy who was sort of on the sidelines of
37:04
politics already, who had, you know, played with running
37:07
for office before and I guess
37:09
did run for president once sort of in a
37:11
desultory fashion. I remember
37:13
when I was working in National Review, I got a call in 2012 from someone
37:17
who, hi, this is blah, blah, blah with Donald Trump's
37:19
office and he's going to run for president this year. Would
37:21
you like to do an interview with him? And I thought they were prank
37:23
calling me. I was just joking
37:26
first. And then I thought, no, I'll
37:28
certainly I'll do the interview. It'll be a lark, you know, it'll
37:30
be, it'll be fun. And he ended up
37:32
not doing it. So I ended up not doing the interview, but
37:35
I certainly didn't take it seriously. On
37:37
the other hand, Trump does have
37:40
because he's a, he's a real celebrity. He's not
37:42
a political celebrity. He's not a cable news, Fox
37:44
news celebrity. He does
37:46
have the ability to sort of magic
37:48
things into existence because celebrity gives you that
37:50
kind of power. You know, you can
37:53
you have a real convening power if you're a real
37:55
celebrity. I mean, people joke
37:57
about Oprah Winfrey or Taylor Swift or someone running
37:59
for president. And they
38:01
shouldn't joke about it because if that happened,
38:04
those people would be able
38:06
to distort the Democratic Party and its politics
38:09
at least as much as Trump did on
38:11
the Republican side. So which
38:13
do you think it was? Do you think Trump more
38:15
created something or do you think he was more created
38:17
by something that pre-existed him? So this is
38:19
your question. I know where you're coming from on this. You
38:23
wrote about this a while back about how basically
38:26
the GOP was a despotic party looking for a despot,
38:28
right? Is that fair to characterize
38:30
your views? I
38:34
think there's some of that in there,
38:36
right? I think human
38:39
beings have a much more pronounced
38:41
sweet tooth for despotism
38:44
than we enlightened first
38:47
world people like to admit. And it's true
38:49
on the left and on the right. And as
38:52
you like to often say, fish don't know they're
38:54
wet. People don't see it about their own
38:57
despots. They only see it about the other
38:59
side's despots or would be despots. And
39:02
so I think I was probably a little more
39:04
blind to it on the right than I should
39:06
have been. At the same
39:08
time, if I were writing the history
39:11
of that period, I am not sure
39:13
I would make that central.
39:16
And I'm curious what you think about this because
39:18
like I actually think again,
39:20
many different causes, over-determined
39:22
phenomenon, celebrity is a huge part of it and all
39:24
that kind of stuff. We
39:27
can go down a list of the various factors. I
39:31
think that it's
39:33
worth pointing this out just because we just found
39:35
out yesterday that the Tea
39:37
Party is now basically officially dead and
39:40
the freedom work's closing up because
39:42
it can't exist in the
39:44
Trump era is basically how they explained it. So
39:47
it's worth blowing on this for a second. I
39:50
think there are a lot of people on the right who
39:52
had basically a psychic break because of
39:54
the treatment of the Tea Party. Of
40:00
course, there were loonies because loonies will always show up
40:02
where there are big crowds and lots of political energy.
40:05
But the median Tea Party person was actually a pretty
40:07
good, decent American who
40:10
was freaked out by the financial crisis,
40:13
freaked out by the idea of
40:17
bailing out all of these fat cat
40:19
bankers. And
40:21
their core messaging was about getting
40:23
back to basics, living within our means, all
40:26
that kind of stuff. And
40:28
they carried around the Constitution and they
40:31
talked about Friedrich Hayek and all that kind of stuff. And
40:34
they cleaned up after themselves at protests and
40:36
they got permits. They did everything basically the
40:38
right way. And they were
40:40
all called Nazis and fascists and racists anyway. And
40:43
the media was so unbelievably contemptuous
40:46
and dishonest about it that
40:49
I think a lot of those people said, well,
40:52
they're going to call us for that no matter what. We might
40:54
as well lean into this stuff. And I'm not saying that's true
40:56
for everybody, but I think it was one
40:58
of the dynamics. But
41:00
the thing I wanted to get to is I
41:05
actually think the factor that
41:07
I think is more important than the wanting
41:09
a despot thing, although it plays into it, is
41:14
I think Fox News, because
41:16
it was uncontested for almost
41:18
two decades as the 800-pound
41:20
gorilla, the issue
41:22
framer, the messaging machine of
41:24
the rights, it
41:27
incepted New York City-style
41:29
populism into
41:31
American politics. We
41:33
normally think of populism as like this
41:35
thing that William Jennings Bryan does in
41:37
Nebraska, but there's always been a
41:40
bridge and tunnel populism, outer
41:42
boroughs versus inner boroughs. And
41:45
Rudy Giuliani scratched
41:48
the itch of the despot thing. That's why I
41:50
think there's a connection here. And
41:55
if you go through the Eric Boling's and the
41:57
Sean Hannity's And the Bill O'Rourke.
42:00
Riley's and you gonna legalise? It's an
42:02
enormous number of people who. Like.
42:04
Grew up in Long Island or
42:06
New Jersey, are now lived in
42:08
Long Island or New Jersey and
42:10
they have this nostalgic golden age
42:12
understanding of what New York used
42:14
to be and Rudy Giuliani prove
42:16
that you could restore it and
42:18
that sort of like. You. Know
42:21
that. The most ardent.
42:24
Ah, Nationalists. Are the
42:26
ones who grew up abroad? Other
42:29
ones are just outside the Fishbowl saying
42:31
I could be as authentic as those
42:33
guys and Zero The Conquer Yeah, and
42:35
the Trump. Very
42:37
effectively because he was utterly immersed
42:39
in a product of that culture.
42:41
He was always the hero of
42:43
the outer borough people. And
42:46
hated by the Manhattan people. Cast
42:49
into that sort of socks populism
42:51
that Fox Bridge and Tunnel populism.
42:54
And scaled it. At a national
42:56
level. and I think that that's sort
42:58
of the cultural thing that a lot
43:00
of people missed. His that's boxes. Never
43:02
that conservative, it was populace right wing.
43:05
Much. Like The New York Post in In
43:07
the City. Yeah. It's with right
43:09
wing but it's it's. It's.
43:11
Always been much more populist in it's
43:13
sort of appeal. You. Know in a.
43:16
Cost falling down a well you know,
43:19
hero cop. All. That kind of stuff.
43:21
anyway. What? You think of all that I never
43:23
really thought about. Fox. News as
43:25
injecting a particularly New York. View.
43:29
Of of politics and populism. Medical research
43:31
dynamics. What a sense. He.
43:33
I've often thought that I'm. Sort.
43:36
Of Crack Up on the right Really started with
43:38
Nine Eleven. Because. It was dramatic the
43:40
one thing, but also because he brought a lot
43:43
of people into. Political.
43:45
Activism who were people who kind of grew up with
43:47
it. Yeah, so they're a lot of people who felt.
43:51
That. Have a cultural valence and kinship to the
43:53
republican party. answer to a right wing view
43:56
of the world. But. who didn't really
43:58
have yet to kind of bomb goes off
44:00
people grounding that and read the books. They weren't
44:03
national review readers. They weren't, you know, people who
44:05
had Bill Buckley's The
44:07
Jeweler's Eye at Home and any of that
44:09
sort of stuff. And
44:11
they came into politics and a lot
44:13
of these people were people from traditionally
44:16
democratic areas like New York and big
44:19
cities. I saw a lot of that
44:21
in Philadelphia where there was
44:23
a resurgence after 9-11 of what you might
44:25
call Rizzoism, you know, of sort
44:28
of being a Frank Rizzo kind of school of politics which
44:30
is big on like
44:33
sort of celebrating police brutality kind
44:36
of thing the way which I'm does. So
44:39
yeah, I suppose maybe I mean the Giuliani
44:41
time stuff was, you know, like yeah, so
44:44
I guess it's a real confluence of things
44:46
because you've got Fox
44:48
News and 9-11 and
44:50
that 9-11 school of politics kind of happening.
44:52
And 9-11 is what makes Fox News Fox
44:55
News, right? I mean, that's the turbo chart.
44:57
And then you get, you know, essentially the
44:59
rise of social media a few years after
45:01
that with the introduction of the
45:04
iPhone in Mozart 2011, something
45:06
like that. So yeah,
45:10
just a weird confluence of things that
45:13
any one of them by itself might have
45:15
been politically significant, but all of them together
45:18
really kind of changed both the
45:20
Republican Party and the conservative government and I
45:22
guess the country as a whole. You
45:26
know, the conspiracy stuff and the kind
45:28
of weird, fringy politics,
45:32
as you probably know because I mean, especially
45:34
you had a father who was in journalism
45:37
syndicates and they got all sorts of crazy weird
45:39
letters and stuff. You know, that
45:41
kind of thing was around for a lot, well
45:43
also having the name Goldberg probably you get to
45:45
see a lot more of that than the average
45:47
person does. That stuff was around, I remember from
45:50
when I was a kid like in the middle
45:52
80s when it was
45:54
done by mass faxes and
45:56
if you had a fax machine, you would occasionally
45:58
get a fax from somebody that you
46:00
didn't know and If
46:03
you were a business, I mean we'd have a fax machine at
46:05
the Williamson household that we barely had electricity,
46:07
but And
46:09
there were these mass faxes. There would be like,
46:11
you know, sir, Burt your stuff or neo-nazi stuff
46:13
or kind
46:16
of oh gosh, who's the Guy
46:19
who went to prison on tax charges who runs for
46:21
bettler oosh. Yeah the roosh. I'm trying to think of
46:23
you here lorussia stuff and people
46:26
would sort of hand it around furtively like,
46:28
you know pornography and But
46:30
the technological means for communicating that
46:32
stuff was so so limited that
46:35
you really It
46:37
kept its reach from being wide enough to
46:39
kind of normalize it. It's like Ron Paul
46:41
had those newsletters, remember? Yeah, I
46:43
wrote an essay a while back It was a
46:45
few years ago that made a lot of people
46:47
angry and it was about I've always hated the
46:49
phrase people write about normalizing
46:52
Donald Trump or normalizing this or
46:54
that and And I
46:56
wrote that there's no such thing
46:58
as normalizing Donald Trump, he doesn't
47:00
need to be normalized He is
47:02
absolutely normal. This is you know,
47:05
he is as American as You
47:07
know diabetes he's American as the
47:09
fentanyl overdose He is
47:12
you know He is the embodiment of
47:14
something that's a very deeply imprinted in
47:16
our culture in our national psyche in our in
47:18
our way of doing Things our way of being in the
47:20
world I mean there have been there's
47:22
been a Donald Trump sure to figure in in
47:24
every generation some of them and better some and
47:26
worse I mean the
47:28
real genius of Trump in 2016 was running essentially
47:31
the Ross Perot Campaign
47:33
but inside the Republican Party rather than as a
47:35
doomed third-party candidate That
47:38
stuff's always been there, but we're now
47:40
more connected in ways that make it up I
47:43
guess it seems less shocking because we're so deep dipped
47:45
in it now that we spend so much time with
47:47
it so you're 1988 if someone handed you a Some
47:51
mimeographed neo-nazi template I
47:53
mean there wouldn't be anything in there that would
47:55
surprise you exactly be the protocols the elders design
47:57
and all that stuff and Jewish bankers
48:00
run the world and it's the Rothschilds and all
48:02
that but it felt weird. It
48:04
would be this kind of like strange
48:06
feeling artifact that you'd be uncomfortable handling.
48:09
But now it's just you know, I mean I don't know
48:11
what your email looks like and your social media mentions
48:14
look like. I imagine they're pretty
48:16
gross. I know what mine looks like and
48:19
it's just you know, it's seven,
48:21
eight, nine, ten of these things a
48:23
day and that's just what the junk mail
48:26
filter doesn't get. So
48:56
I was having a conversation recently
48:58
with a very prominent former Republican
49:00
politician. Let's
49:14
leave it at that and he
49:16
was hopeful that once
49:19
Trump is gone from the scene by
49:21
one means or another, the Republican
49:24
Party is going to snap back
49:26
to normal. And I
49:30
wasn't quite you know, oh
49:32
you sweet summer child but I was like it's
49:34
going to be more work than that. I do think
49:36
there's a very strong case that
49:38
because like Trump imitators don't do well, right?
49:41
And they don't have the like
49:45
say what you will and you wrote a
49:47
really devastating piece about J.D. Vance. Like
49:49
J.D. Vance is no
49:51
Donald Trump for good or for ill. Like He doesn't
49:53
appeal to people the same way. He's too earnest, all
49:56
that kind of stuff. When He fakes it. He seems.
49:58
fake all that. and you can say. That
50:00
about all of right a map data is
50:02
a jerk in a way that don't trump
50:04
as a jerk but like people noticed that
50:06
about metics and. Arms I do think
50:08
with trump out of the picture. A
50:11
lot of Republicans will feel much more
50:13
empowered to actually. Defend.
50:15
Normalcy and principles and all that. And
50:17
when you saw the Republican debates. It.
50:20
Was really remarkable how with the exception of
50:22
a vague. The. off argue
50:24
with each other basically with in.
50:27
The goalposts of. Mainstream.
50:30
Reaganite conservatism in a different emphasize different
50:32
things but like if our policy mattered
50:34
think we're free market all I kind
50:36
of stuff and and I think that's
50:39
where the do abuse muscle memory is.
50:41
Where. I think things are just. Irretrievably
50:44
different. Is. This point
50:46
that you're getting which is that. You.
50:48
Know. I'm a little you but. Ten.
50:51
Fifteen years before. We
50:53
were born. Basically.
50:56
Of way enough. buckley. Or.
50:58
George Will or any of those kinds
51:00
of people said. This person's a
51:02
crackpot. That was it
51:04
for them. Like. They. Were going to get on
51:06
Tv and the one and of Tpg regular only four
51:08
Gb channels by Tv channels. They were going to get
51:10
an op ed in the New York Times. On
51:13
there was the gatekeepers had
51:16
institutional haft. To
51:18
man the gates and now and turns
51:20
up a stable. And it's also extremely
51:22
valuable because again that worry thing about
51:24
transparency and in oh, and democratization as
51:26
real downsides and we can get into
51:28
that. But like. The.
51:32
The. Ability for people. To
51:35
just skip any gate keepers.
51:38
And vomit nasty stuff straight into people's
51:40
lives on Twitter, on Facebook and so
51:42
all over the past and on these
51:44
competing cable news channels and lord knows
51:46
what's going on on you tube. Rumble
51:49
on all the stuff, Is that?
51:51
There are no. Like.
51:54
I was honest politician like. Even.
51:56
If I had the skills and talents in the
51:58
wisdom and organisers. The way I
52:00
could be Charles Krauthammer today, Right? Because
52:03
no one wants to Charles ground humor.
52:05
No one wants someone who is a
52:07
legitimize or. A. Arguments:
52:09
Settler. And. An appetizer?
52:11
right? A gatekeeper? That all
52:13
gatekeepers and. And that's
52:15
a function of media as much as anything
52:17
else? Is it just? it makes populism a
52:20
lowers the barrier to entry for populace. In
52:23
ways that are, I don't think you never be
52:25
repaired. Yeah, I wonder how. It a
52:27
republican party. Is Rapper Boy if
52:30
I mean or is of course mean mean
52:32
less than they used to. It's something. You.
52:35
Are especially have been an obsessive about
52:37
Luminous in talking and Out and Eggs
52:39
in November. Useful I think is where
52:41
I've I've I've enjoyed your you were
52:44
of that this not just step. Is.
52:47
Them to my friend. But. On. What?
52:49
Year was it a strong term and ran
52:51
for president. The Dixie crowd was at and
52:53
consorting forty eight. Does the year
52:55
for people? Yeah. For. Terrorist
52:58
Norman Thomas German to eat
53:00
right in. And. Thurman.
53:03
So we're when he ran that campaign which
53:05
is weird for lot of reasons or when
53:07
he the whole Strom Thurmond thing. But people
53:09
are surprised at the time because. He
53:12
will had previously been seen as sort
53:14
of a moderate on on racial stuff
53:16
ah memories segregationist. He was someone who
53:18
tried to avoid like inflammatory language and.
53:21
I'm so that the sum it
53:23
up even more are really computational
53:25
versions. Bet. Anyway, but it seems
53:27
that when he ran for president that time round,
53:29
the democratic party had a big disagreement. About
53:31
a very important issue. But it
53:34
was still kind of a coherent thing. The.
53:36
Dad, you know, a couple decades later
53:38
when you get Wallace. On.
53:41
It's. Obvious that wire was yours is sending. They
53:43
can no longer live in the Democratic that he's
53:45
going somewhere else now. He ended up. Back.
53:47
And forth Democratic Party. But
53:50
he represented a thing that was. New
53:52
and separate in you. Reconcile. And
53:55
I wonder if some. Why?
53:57
me we may never get a chance to figure out
53:59
whether trump is zack send it irreconcilable to the Republican
54:01
Party because it's really just consumed it. I
54:05
mean, I think the real question is whatever the Republican Party used
54:07
to be, is that reconcilable with what
54:09
the thing the party is become? So, I
54:11
guess Trump is different in the sense that he didn't speak
54:13
for what ended up being a minority position in the Republican
54:15
Party, ended up speaking for what ended up being now
54:18
a majority position in the Republican Party. But
54:21
I don't know that I think that there's a way to put
54:23
these two things back together. I'm not sure they need to be
54:26
put back together. The
54:28
problem for people like us, of course, is that it leaves us
54:30
really without a political vehicle. You
54:32
know, people who are center-eyed, classical liberal,
54:34
American founding sort of people don't really
54:36
have a political party. It's not probably
54:38
going to be the Democratic Party. It's
54:40
probably not ever going to be the
54:42
Republican Party again. And
54:45
it may just be that there's a position, an
54:48
era of dormancy coming for those ideas, which
54:50
worries me some because I think they're necessary.
54:54
I don't think the country really works without them. They
54:56
don't have to constantly be in power. You
54:58
know, the American kind of tradition lived
55:01
through Woodrow Wilson, Cue
55:03
That Music. It lived through New Deal
55:06
and all of these very
55:08
anti-liberal, I don't use
55:10
the word anti-American like in a cheap demagogic
55:12
sort of way here, but these programs
55:15
that were just kind of fundamentally at odds
55:17
with the American way of doing things and
55:19
the American tradition and the American system, there
55:21
were much more European kind of programs. The
55:24
fact that the regular sort
55:26
of traditional American constitutional ideas
55:29
were still out there and still active in
55:31
politics kept the country from
55:33
completely going off the rails and ended up
55:35
being in a sort of Spanish Civil War
55:38
situation or England in
55:40
the 70s, where you really
55:42
kind of devolved into
55:44
something that's unrecognizable from what the country used to
55:46
be. But if
55:49
we have 20 years where essentially the kinds
55:51
of ideas that you and I advocate have,
55:56
no purchase and not much of a public hearing, it is
55:59
possible that people forget about them or that
56:01
so many people forget about them that they're
56:04
not in a position to come back when there's a vacuum for them
56:06
to come back into. And I do worry about
56:08
that. I worry that the, we
56:11
invested so much on the right in
56:13
the Republican Party and in the kind
56:15
of familiar organs of the conservative movement
56:18
that once these things got captured and broken
56:20
and distorted, we
56:23
didn't have a good plan B. And
56:25
I guess we're still looking around for a plan B. There's
56:27
a good question for you. So libertarians
56:30
and anarcho-capitalists, which I think you've
56:33
called yourself both at one point
56:35
or another, they have... I'm
56:39
a salon anarcho-capitalist, you know.
56:42
I have intellectual sympathies with that. And
56:45
I think it's a very
56:47
persuasive and compelling set of
56:49
ideas. It's not something
56:51
that I would embrace as
56:54
a political platform in
56:56
2024. But
56:58
my point is that our friends at
57:00
Reason and those kinds of places, they've
57:02
had, it's both a curse and a luxury of
57:07
not having a team to explicitly root for
57:10
in a way that like the
57:13
New Republic rooted for Democrats and National
57:15
Review, God love them, rooted for Republicans.
57:18
And although it's always worth pointing out, that's not how National
57:20
Review started, right? I mean, National Review started out with a
57:22
healthy tension with the Eisenhower administration and all
57:25
that. But the question I
57:27
have is like, so, and I want
57:29
to say this very respectfully because I'm describing
57:31
some of my closest friends and some people
57:33
I deeply respect and I think are good
57:36
and serious people and all that kind of stuff. But
57:38
it's like, you know, when you learn a new word and all of
57:41
a sudden you hear it all over the place? When
57:45
you get or like, you're
57:47
partly responsible for this. It's like when
57:49
you realize people are using
57:51
less and fewer wrong, whenever
57:54
you hear it, it just takes you out of the moment and
57:56
you're like, damn It, or begs the
57:58
question, that kind of thing. I meet
58:01
me in Game of Thrones. Yeah,
58:03
fair arm. I was probably
58:05
is guilty of. This is basically anybody
58:07
you know who I respect out there
58:09
for most of my career. That
58:11
when I would talk about republicans. Electoral
58:14
contests, policy fights on what kind
58:16
of stuff I would. Talk.
58:18
About them. The way a Packers fan
58:21
talks about the Packers like we did
58:23
This. We're. Gonna win this
58:25
one right? an. Arm.
58:28
And. Support of my theories and for a while that one
58:30
of the things I got to consider movement. Into.
58:33
Trouble or the concert of intellectual class
58:35
in the Trouble. Is.
58:38
Part. Of the unspoken job
58:40
description of being a. Conservative.
58:43
Intellectual is to be a de
58:45
facto political consultant. For. The
58:47
Republican Party. The here's what you gotta do to
58:49
win. Here's what we need to do to win.
58:51
Here's what a come to. The. Republican
58:54
candidates: Defence. Ah,
58:56
I'm. Were. Of the. The
58:58
priority is to descend the candidate and then
59:00
come up with the arguments to do it
59:02
randomly. The merits of the arguments drive you
59:04
to defend the candidates and. And.
59:07
Now when I hear that because I
59:09
am sufficiently alienated from the Republican party,
59:12
It. Sets my teeth on edge and I
59:14
hear all the time, including again since friends
59:16
former colleagues are people I admire respect our
59:19
laps into it from time to time and
59:21
I try to correct myself. And.
59:24
I don't think you've ever been guilty of
59:26
that because you've always been much more of
59:28
a by said the Republican party at arm's
59:30
length. Yeah, much more than I did for
59:32
a long time. And I'm and not to
59:34
say that I was like a wildly Ra
59:36
Ra partisan guy and I criticized the hello
59:39
George W H W W Bush. But.
59:41
I think that expect another part of
59:44
this thing that we're getting out about.
59:47
The transformation The g appease like. If.
59:50
They made a. I. Don't
59:52
know. If if. if
59:54
they just went down to the docks and
59:56
found a pimp and made him the standard
59:58
bearer the republican party It
1:00:00
would cause a similar crisis for a lot
1:00:03
of people. Well, you know, look, pimps
1:00:05
are basically they're important middleman's in a service
1:00:07
economy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
1:00:09
right? I mean, I like people will bend
1:00:11
to defend their team's guy. So
1:00:13
I'm just wondering like, you know, like, do you think part
1:00:17
of the answer is going to be we just
1:00:19
needed another generation of people who are sufficiently estranged
1:00:21
from the party to help
1:00:24
with this up or is it, are these, is
1:00:26
all lost, I guess. Yeah, well,
1:00:29
there's a few things going on there, I
1:00:31
think. Yeah, I was just
1:00:33
thinking probably the height of my Republican
1:00:35
partisanship would have been right after 9-11
1:00:37
George W. Bush administration. Maybe
1:00:40
it was a Texas thing, although I don't
1:00:42
think maybe that's it. I'll tell you what it
1:00:44
probably was, was the anti-war stuff. And
1:00:48
anytime I see this sort of, you know, hippie rabble lined
1:00:50
up on one side of a barricade, I just instinctively want
1:00:52
to be on the other side of it. Which
1:00:56
is not a particularly intellectually defensible way to go
1:00:58
about conducting your politics, but that's probably a big
1:01:00
part of me. But yeah,
1:01:02
I mean, my first presidential vote was for
1:01:04
Andre Marrou, the hearing candidate. What did you
1:01:06
run for Marrou? I've run for Marrou, 92.
1:01:09
Yeah. It turned out not
1:01:11
to be great in some ways, but
1:01:13
that's neither here nor there. I
1:01:15
was actually talking to our friend, Jay Norlinger about this
1:01:17
not long ago, through the history of my partisanship. Because
1:01:19
Jay was more of a, thought of himself as more
1:01:22
of a raw, raw Republican guy for years. For sure.
1:01:25
Is not. So
1:01:28
something you've been really good about talking about,
1:01:30
and I think people get a hard time being this to
1:01:32
their heads, that there's a difference
1:01:35
between what we do and what political campaign
1:01:37
managers do and political consultants do. And
1:01:39
it would be better if people understood that they were one
1:01:41
or the other, that you know, you're a writer or you're
1:01:43
a journalist or you're an intellectual or you're a professor, or
1:01:46
you're a campaign manager or you're a candidate. And
1:01:49
then these are just very different things. And there's overlap,
1:01:51
obviously, between these things. There are people like, oh,
1:01:53
Padouris was on the podcast the other day, on
1:01:56
your podcast day, talking about his time as a
1:01:58
speechwriter in the White House. and
1:02:00
in the Reagan administration, right? And
1:02:03
for a few months. Then carried over
1:02:05
into the H.W. Bush administration briefly. Yeah.
1:02:08
So people do move kind of back and forth, but they're
1:02:10
very different things. But it's the audience
1:02:12
capture thing you were talking about earlier. I remember
1:02:15
how I decided I had to leave National Review
1:02:17
way back when, before I came to the dispatch,
1:02:19
when I went to the Atlantic. I was at
1:02:22
a National Review event out in California and
1:02:24
a bunch of very nice people. But
1:02:27
as the evening progressed and
1:02:29
the drinks were consumed, the
1:02:32
crowd turned on me a little bit and no one
1:02:34
demanded of me very angrily, you know,
1:02:37
what are you doing to help get
1:02:39
Republicans elected? And
1:02:41
I told her, well, nothing. I mean,
1:02:43
it's not what I do. It's not my job. I probably wouldn't
1:02:46
be very good at it anyway because I'm
1:02:48
not exactly, you know, Mr. Pulse on
1:02:50
the finger of what the man on the street
1:02:52
wants. And
1:02:55
of course, I made the mistake then of calling up Jeffrey Goldberg and
1:02:57
saying, hey, I'm probably going to need a job here in a couple
1:02:59
months of the talk. And
1:03:02
I didn't work out exactly his plan, but that's
1:03:04
okay. But you
1:03:06
know, when people start thinking of people like
1:03:08
you and me as being people whose job
1:03:10
it is to get people elected, we
1:03:13
have to push back against that, obviously, but also
1:03:15
we probably have to tell ourselves that that particular
1:03:17
sort of audience has lost us. That
1:03:20
if what people really would care about is I need
1:03:22
to get someone who belongs to my team with an
1:03:24
R next to his name elected to
1:03:27
the city council in San Antonio, and
1:03:29
that's the main thing that matters, then we
1:03:32
just don't have a lot to say to those people. We
1:03:35
have a lot to say about a lot of other things, but they don't
1:03:37
care about that stuff. And that's fine. Not everybody has
1:03:39
to care about everything. There probably needs to
1:03:41
be some disaggregation of responsibilities and
1:03:43
talents and interests and those things.
1:03:46
Everyone can go ahead and assume that there's a footnote here on
1:03:49
the name Sam Francis, and we can talk about what a crackpot
1:03:51
he turned out to be later in life. But
1:03:53
one of his arguments early on,
1:03:55
and I think Michael,
1:03:58
Brendan Dardish, written about this, he did. did make
1:04:00
me about San Francis, I guess, a few years ago, was
1:04:04
that Francis thought that conservatives cared
1:04:06
too much about ideas and not enough about power
1:04:09
and that we should or about how
1:04:11
power is actually achieved and wielded and
1:04:14
maintained. And there
1:04:17
probably is something to
1:04:19
that. You know, the left had
1:04:22
great success with the long march through
1:04:24
the institutions. It really did matter that
1:04:26
they ended up controlling things like seminaries
1:04:30
and universities and HR departments. And of course,
1:04:32
the major media and all the stuff we
1:04:34
could talk about and talk about and talk
1:04:36
about, that stuff really ended up mattering. And that's
1:04:38
a real form of power that people I think
1:04:40
don't appreciate until they find themselves on the receiving
1:04:42
end of it. And
1:04:44
conservatives have not
1:04:47
been as successful with that. You have been
1:04:49
more successful building counter institutions. Those
1:04:52
are not again,
1:04:54
I'll go back to this guy,
1:04:56
Jonah Goldberg, who I've read a lot
1:04:58
that you can't start a new Harvard,
1:05:00
right? You can't create new old things.
1:05:02
These things that have been there for a
1:05:04
long time matter for various reasons. But the
1:05:06
people who are good at thinking about and
1:05:10
doing the business of achieving and wielding power
1:05:12
in an effective way are generally not the
1:05:14
same people who are good at doing the
1:05:17
other stuff, at the
1:05:20
ideas people and trying
1:05:22
to do what you and I do, I think, which is try to explain
1:05:24
the world to people and try to help them understand it from a certain
1:05:26
point of view. Yeah, I mean, it's
1:05:28
funny. One of
1:05:30
the best example illustrations of the
1:05:33
corrupting of power of sort
1:05:35
of partisanship and populism
1:05:37
and stuff. Heritage Foundation
1:05:39
used to do these first principles
1:05:42
conferences, where they would go
1:05:44
around the country and I spoke at a
1:05:46
couple of them, you know, the usual suspects,
1:05:49
talking about the founders
1:05:51
and the role of the Constitution or free
1:05:53
market economics and, you know, and
1:05:56
a bunch of people show up and it's like taking a
1:05:58
little class kind of thing. And the
1:06:02
problem was that, and I saw it firsthand,
1:06:05
is like the lady who went up to you and said, what are
1:06:07
you doing to get Republicans elected? People
1:06:09
would say, this is all
1:06:11
great, but what are you gonna do to get Republicans elected?
1:06:14
And so Heritage created
1:06:17
Heritage Action so
1:06:19
that less to sort of answer
1:06:22
that question on the
1:06:24
merits and more to get their credit card numbers.
1:06:26
But like they thought the
1:06:28
two went together in their mind. And then for a long time,
1:06:30
Heritage Action became the tale that wagged the dog in Heritage, and
1:06:33
now basically the spirit of Heritage Action
1:06:35
is the Heritage Foundation. And it's the
1:06:38
organizations, the
1:06:41
institutions that
1:06:43
went the most Trumpy
1:06:45
earliest and most surprisingly were
1:06:47
always talk radio and
1:06:51
the public facing part of
1:06:54
Hillsdale, Heritage
1:06:56
Foundation, these institutions that depend
1:06:58
upon large mass
1:07:00
customer or donor
1:07:03
bases. And when they're go to
1:07:05
people, I must go with them for I am their leader
1:07:07
kind of thing kicks in. There's something to be said for
1:07:10
significant, immediate financial feedback.
1:07:13
Yeah, it's really effective. But
1:07:16
yeah, it was like if we were food critics,
1:07:21
we would run into fewer people saying, what are
1:07:23
you gonna do to get Joe Biden elected? You
1:07:25
still would run into them because everything's becoming
1:07:28
so politicized, but fewer
1:07:30
of them. And but
1:07:33
because we write about politics and ideas
1:07:35
and political stuff, people assume
1:07:37
that we're doing it as a surrogate
1:07:39
for a party.
1:07:41
And I do think this sort of gets to, we don't have to
1:07:44
dwell on it because I'm probably gonna have more
1:07:46
profound comments about it later, but like the
1:07:49
differences between the dispatch and the bulwark. The
1:07:52
bulwark is basically committed to this idea
1:07:54
of being a player in elections and
1:07:56
in politics and putting
1:07:58
its thumb on the scale. they do
1:08:00
is without merit or anything like
1:08:02
that. But they have one foot in the political
1:08:05
activist world and one foot in
1:08:08
the sort of journalism world, and the two coordinate
1:08:11
with each other. And at the
1:08:13
same time, we want nothing to do with any of
1:08:15
that stuff. And some of our subscribers are mad at
1:08:17
us about it. And other
1:08:21
subscribers get it. And it's a
1:08:23
tension. It's a difficult thing to explain to people because
1:08:26
that's where the culture is. It's
1:08:29
getting back to what's normal and what's
1:08:31
not normal. What we're doing is abnormal.
1:08:36
What the nation does
1:08:39
or Mother Jones does or whatever
1:08:42
to support a party kind
1:08:44
of thing, that's normal in our
1:08:46
current political climate. And explaining to people
1:08:49
that we have a different lane, a
1:08:51
lot of people can't hear it or
1:08:53
can't understand it or do understand it and
1:08:55
reject it because the stakes are just too
1:08:57
high. Yeah, I think that part of that
1:08:59
just work. It's
1:09:02
more work to dig through the intellectual stuff
1:09:04
and it's not as much fun. It's
1:09:07
not a game show. It's not the Packers
1:09:10
to use an unusual
1:09:13
and rare sports metaphor
1:09:15
for me. I was a pretty good football
1:09:17
player. I just never enjoyed watching it.
1:09:20
Right tackle, big and slow. Could
1:09:23
remember the plays. That's all we really need to do to be
1:09:25
a right tackle. And
1:09:28
for the losingest 5A football team in
1:09:30
Texas history, I should point out,
1:09:32
we were the worst. Literally the
1:09:34
losingest 5A football team in Texas
1:09:36
history at that point. We were everyone's
1:09:38
homecoming game. It was a mess. You
1:09:41
were the Washington Generals of Texas high
1:09:43
school football? That's the team that
1:09:45
plays the Harlem Globes Runners? Yeah, you know, I'm
1:09:47
both. Short version of this. So I played in
1:09:49
the league in the year that the famous book
1:09:51
Friday Night Lights was written about. So
1:09:55
I didn't actually play Ermian
1:09:57
that year because I wasn't. I
1:10:01
went back and forth between JV and the other
1:10:03
one, but I
1:10:05
think they beat us 88 to nothing or something. But
1:10:08
I went to this nerd school, you know, we had a really good chess team
1:10:10
and a really good women's gymnastics team
1:10:12
and a terrible, terrible high school football
1:10:15
team. So we lost every game for
1:10:17
just season after season after season after season. We had
1:10:19
this whole tradition of cheers that were
1:10:21
made up about how bad our team was and
1:10:23
that stuff. Now, I'll never forget, I was after
1:10:25
my junior year, I decided I wasn't gonna play
1:10:28
football anymore and I went to tell the coach
1:10:30
that I was not gonna come back next year
1:10:32
and he was just in a fuse. I mean, he
1:10:34
wasn't even angry. He was just, he didn't understand why if
1:10:36
you got a chance to play football, you wouldn't play
1:10:38
football. And I said, well, I think I'm gonna, you
1:10:41
know, spend more time working on the school newspaper. And
1:10:44
he said, well, what the hell do
1:10:46
you expect to come to that? As
1:10:50
for I don't know, but I don't think I'm probably
1:10:52
headed to the NFL and I'm probably not even good
1:10:54
enough to play at UT. I definitely wasn't good enough
1:10:56
to play at UT. So
1:10:58
anyway, that's my sorry football
1:11:01
career, although I was a very good wrestler. Look,
1:11:03
I played Division III basketball in college
1:11:06
as a 6'3 dude
1:11:09
on a campus with only a couple
1:11:11
dozen dudes. Like
1:11:14
I was qualified. It was not
1:11:16
very good. We were not very good. I
1:11:18
didn't know you were a basketball player. Yeah. Oh,
1:11:21
that's fun. My wife was a good
1:11:23
basketball player. She was like a star high school basketball player.
1:11:25
Yeah, I knew she was a sporty
1:11:28
type. Actually played against Sarah Palin in high
1:11:30
school at one point. Who won? So
1:11:33
like, we should get back to the original point,
1:11:35
but well,
1:11:40
well into the second hour so it's okay
1:11:42
to go field, I think. You remember that
1:11:44
momentary just absolute hysteria about Palin when she
1:11:47
got picked, you know, and everyone was just
1:11:49
going nuts about her pro or con and
1:11:51
all that kind of stuff. So,
1:11:53
Jess had met, we had both met Palin
1:11:56
on a Hillsdale cruise and
1:11:58
then on a National Review cruise, right? that was that
1:12:00
time when the circuits were going up there
1:12:03
and she held court with everybody. And
1:12:06
they talked Alaska. And it was interesting. The first
1:12:08
thing that Sarah Palin said
1:12:11
to my wife, when she said,
1:12:13
I'm from Alaska. The
1:12:15
first thing Sarah Palin said to
1:12:17
her is, how did you get
1:12:20
out? Which was an interesting tale.
1:12:23
So they figured out that they had at least one
1:12:26
game against each other. Alaska
1:12:28
basketball is weird because a
1:12:30
lot of the way games are by plane to
1:12:32
get to these places because the state's so big. And
1:12:36
then they would sleep on the gym floor
1:12:39
at some other high school. There's bears and
1:12:41
ice and stuff. Yeah. So word gets out
1:12:43
that Jess, who
1:12:45
had written for the standard and written books and
1:12:47
was a speech writer and all had written, played
1:12:50
basketball against Sarah Palin. And
1:12:53
she gets calls from Richard Starr at
1:12:55
the standard at the time saying, could
1:12:58
you do a 5,000 word
1:13:00
piece on what it was like
1:13:02
to play basketball against Sarah Palin?
1:13:04
And I'm probably a little unfair
1:13:07
to Starr, but those kinds of
1:13:09
calls. And Jess was like, I
1:13:11
don't even remember what she looked like. And the idea
1:13:14
that I'm going to stretch it out to
1:13:16
like, I could tell by the way she
1:13:18
charged the hoop that she was going to
1:13:20
be a hero on tax cuts. You know,
1:13:22
there's nothing there to write about. But anyway,
1:13:26
interesting times. What
1:13:30
were we talking about before? She asked $5 worth. Yeah.
1:13:33
Then for sure you could come
1:13:35
up with something to say. And
1:13:38
I should full disclosure, my wife worked
1:13:41
on Sarah Palin's second book. I'm
1:13:44
not sure Palin read it, but
1:13:46
she didn't brag about shooting any dogs either. So
1:13:48
there's that. Why
1:13:51
did you bring up the Packers in your
1:13:53
football metaphor that derailed us? There's a 4C
1:13:55
kind of thinking about stuff, you know, the...
1:14:00
Is a lot easier way to engage with
1:14:02
public affairs than you know, re-knife. Yeah.
1:14:05
And also, I just to take that analogy
1:14:07
a little bit further, it's like, people
1:14:10
understand that sports writers actually
1:14:12
can't affect what's
1:14:15
going to happen on the field in a significant
1:14:18
way for the most part, right? I mean, they're
1:14:20
not going to, when
1:14:22
they write, they're not like, if you
1:14:24
change the crowd's mind about a player,
1:14:26
that's going to change things, whatever. But they think that
1:14:28
like, you and I and
1:14:31
people like us and our class of
1:14:33
professionals, that if
1:14:37
we write about something, that that will
1:14:39
change politics in a significant
1:14:41
way. And I like to think that that can happen from
1:14:43
time to time, it helps you get out of bed in
1:14:45
the morning. But
1:14:48
I would rather people had a more of a, I'm
1:14:51
a sports writer writing about sports,
1:14:53
you know, the sports version of
1:14:55
politics, than thinking, I'm
1:14:58
like, actually on the team and
1:15:00
can effectuate. Yeah, and no one ever said,
1:15:02
you know, some columnist for Sports Illustrated, why
1:15:04
don't you go down there and be the
1:15:06
quarterback? Right. You know, which we've got to
1:15:08
get a lot of, you know, why don't you run for office? Well,
1:15:11
I'm right. I have to explain why I've been voted in 30 years.
1:15:16
All right. So y'all
1:15:18
there, Jonah, does that mean the conversation's coming to a
1:15:21
close? No, no, we just, we're an hour and 16
1:15:23
minutes on this thing. And we've managed
1:15:26
to studiously avoid anything actually really in
1:15:28
the news, except
1:15:30
for allegedly corrupt, you know,
1:15:33
hack outfit that's supporting Trump. I did,
1:15:36
you know, I'm a big believer that if I raise an issue, I
1:15:38
should make sure it gets put back
1:15:40
to bed for listeners who are like, you never got back
1:15:42
to that thing because I hate getting those emails. Just
1:15:44
sort of quickly, in
1:15:47
the grand spirit of burying the lead, Biden
1:15:49
announced yesterday that he is, the reporting
1:15:53
is clear. He waited to
1:15:55
make this announcement about withholding sending weapons
1:15:57
to Israel until after he can
1:15:59
give. his not
1:16:01
terrible Holocaust Remembrance
1:16:04
Day speech about how he's backing Israel
1:16:06
to the hilt and anti-Semitism is bad.
1:16:08
And then he's like, yeah, but
1:16:11
in an interview on CNN on Wednesday night, he
1:16:13
says, Israel's been targeting civilians and
1:16:15
we're not gonna give them weapons and they can't
1:16:17
go into Rafah with our weapons. Some
1:16:20
of our friends are
1:16:22
apoplectic about this. I'm pretty
1:16:24
pissed off about it. As
1:16:27
I said on the Dispatch podcast a
1:16:29
minute ago, Howard Howard something minutes
1:16:31
ago, it kind of reminds me
1:16:33
of Talley Rand's thing about it's not
1:16:35
even a crime, it's a mistake. Like
1:16:39
the infuriating thing about it to me is that like, even
1:16:43
if you're okay with the policy, the
1:16:47
policy is clearly being driven by politics and
1:16:49
the political decision strikes me as
1:16:51
incredibly stupid. Like Biden's
1:16:53
gonna lose more support than gain in
1:16:56
this and he's throwing
1:16:58
Israel under the bus in the process. So
1:17:01
I just don't get it. But like, that's how I feel about it.
1:17:03
Where do you come down on it? Yeah,
1:17:05
I think the United States
1:17:08
is overestimating
1:17:10
its influence. Obviously
1:17:13
we are an important ally for Israel
1:17:15
and obviously we are the senior partner
1:17:17
in the relationship being a large
1:17:20
and very powerful country and Israel
1:17:22
being a small and not very powerful country. That
1:17:25
being said, part
1:17:28
of this is about Netanyahu and
1:17:30
this weird thing where we read
1:17:32
the American relationship with
1:17:35
Israel and the UK and a
1:17:37
few other countries in Canada through
1:17:39
our own partisan lens. So we Republicans
1:17:42
like the UK better when they've got
1:17:44
a conservative prime minister and
1:17:46
they like Canada better when they've got a
1:17:48
conservative prime minister. And people
1:17:51
who don't know anything about Canadian politics but
1:17:53
who are sort of culturally on the right and have very
1:17:55
strong opinions about people like Justin Trudeau. because
1:18:00
he's just the wrong kind of person. So
1:18:02
people on the American left who don't really know
1:18:04
anything about Israeli politics or Israel in general have
1:18:07
really strong feelings about Netanyahu. And
1:18:11
that's part of it is,
1:18:13
of course, old-fashioned anti-Semitism, which is more of
1:18:15
a live political issue in
1:18:17
the Democratic Party than it is in the
1:18:20
Republican Party for historical reasons, partly
1:18:23
because it's
1:18:25
a more prominent theme of
1:18:27
black politics in big cities. Anti-Semitism
1:18:31
is just much more part of that politics, which has to do
1:18:33
with, you know, nation of Islam and other sorts of stuff. But
1:18:36
if you read like, you know,
1:18:38
I spent years reading the black newspapers in
1:18:40
Philadelphia and there would be crazy
1:18:42
anti-Semitic stuff in there that you
1:18:44
just, you know, you wouldn't get in the
1:18:46
equivalent kind of, you know, right-wing publications. And
1:18:51
also because Arab Americans tend to support
1:18:54
Democrats more than they do Republicans.
1:18:56
So there's not necessarily
1:18:59
anti-Semitism in that, but certainly an anti-Israel
1:19:01
sentiment that's attached to that. That
1:19:04
being said, the Israelis are going to do what they're
1:19:06
going to do. You know, they killed a whole bunch
1:19:08
of people in horrible, horrible ways. You're still hostages there.
1:19:10
They're going to do what any other country would do. And
1:19:13
they're going to stop these guys into
1:19:15
oblivion to the extent that they can. And
1:19:17
I don't think that anything the Biden administration says or
1:19:19
does is really probably going to stop that short
1:19:22
of sending, you know, troops to stop the Israelis
1:19:24
from going into Rafa, which is not going to
1:19:26
happen, obviously. Israelis have to
1:19:29
do this. You can't leave
1:19:31
Hamas standing. That doesn't mean you
1:19:33
have to, you know, kill
1:19:35
every single person who's ever been on a letterhead
1:19:38
for a Hamas branch office somewhere, but you have
1:19:41
to smash them as an organization. You have to
1:19:43
end them as an organization the way the United
1:19:45
States essentially did with Al Qaeda after
1:19:47
9-11. And I think that
1:19:49
these Israelis probably do that. You
1:19:52
and John were talking about you and Pedroros were talking about
1:19:54
the other day, there is this misunderstanding that
1:19:56
among some people in the American
1:19:59
political world that if Someone other than
1:20:01
Netanyahu were in power that this would come out
1:20:03
differently, which probably not the case There
1:20:06
are politicians who are far to the left of him and
1:20:08
Israel who would be prosecuting the war and more or less
1:20:10
the same way Biden
1:20:13
because he is not very smart guy and
1:20:15
because he's always been politically very cowardly Says
1:20:19
a lot of dumb things that no one takes seriously.
1:20:21
So I guess yesterday he said that You
1:20:24
know, we can't have a situation in which
1:20:26
the Israelis endanger any Civilians
1:20:28
in Rafa, which is this nonsense? Of course, there's
1:20:30
no way to fight a war in
1:20:32
an urban area without endangering some civilians You
1:20:35
can take steps and these are ladies have taken
1:20:37
extraordinary steps to minimize the
1:20:41
loss of life among civilians and innocent third
1:20:43
parties But there it there's no way to
1:20:45
take it to zero and Biden
1:20:47
says those sorts of things without meaning it It's just
1:20:49
the way people In
1:20:51
politics just they have these kind of
1:20:54
weird word salad things. They say that are just sort of Wrote
1:20:57
ritual pronunciations that don't actually have any
1:20:59
any effect on the real world. I Don't
1:21:03
think that in the long term. There's much of a much
1:21:06
of a likelihood that the
1:21:08
practical Aspects of our
1:21:10
security relationship with Israel are going to change
1:21:13
very much We're
1:21:16
going to continue to support the military really
1:21:18
in various kinds of ways The
1:21:21
Israelis are going to continue to be able to are
1:21:23
themselves with or without our help doesn't really matter whether
1:21:25
we want to participate in that or not, they've got
1:21:28
Sufficient resources to do down on their own. There are lots of
1:21:30
people who can sell them weapons and
1:21:32
if we don't other people certainly will and but
1:21:35
I don't think we're gonna stop doing that either because
1:21:37
it's the sort of Radical
1:21:39
change that seems like it's something that's likely to
1:21:42
happen while passions are very hot and the headlines
1:21:44
are going on But six months from
1:21:46
now nine months from now 18 months from now when
1:21:48
things have cooled off a little bit I
1:21:50
expect that things will very much go back to normal
1:21:52
because things tend to do Yeah,
1:21:55
I agree with all that I just and again I think
1:22:00
The thing that is
1:22:02
infuriating about it is that, first
1:22:04
of all, it's wildly exaggerated the number of people
1:22:06
who care
1:22:09
to the point where they're going to vote on the issue, care
1:22:12
about the Middle East. We just had a... Actually,
1:22:16
it's just put out a poll of college
1:22:19
kids, and of the
1:22:22
nine issues that was the most important issue,
1:22:24
conflict in the Middle East came in dead
1:22:26
last. Only 13% said
1:22:29
it was the number one issue. That leaves out
1:22:31
the fact that some of those people who say it's
1:22:33
the number one issue are pro-Israel. It's
1:22:37
not necessarily that all 13% are supportive
1:22:40
of Hamas or the Palestinians
1:22:42
generally. But
1:22:47
the people who do really care about that stuff, this
1:22:50
decision by Biden isn't going to win over their votes.
1:22:54
They're not going to forgive him for this stuff. Dearborn
1:22:58
is not moving back into his column in any
1:23:00
way. The
1:23:02
damage done to the
1:23:05
sense that when
1:23:09
something like this happens to an ally and we say
1:23:11
we're going to back you to the hilt and then
1:23:13
we don't, that has long-lasting
1:23:15
moral hazard for American foreign policy.
1:23:19
If Israel goes into Raffa without
1:23:22
precision bombs, more
1:23:25
Palestinians will die, not fewer. And
1:23:30
if Israel is successful in crushing
1:23:32
Hamas in Raffa, they
1:23:34
can declare victory and Biden can't because he said,
1:23:36
I didn't want anything to do with it. I
1:23:40
don't get where
1:23:42
the sort of strategically is
1:23:44
here that I'd
1:23:46
be perfectly fine if this was a cynical ploy.
1:23:49
If I understood why
1:23:51
the cost benefit analysis rewarded
1:23:54
the cynicism, but it seems like a
1:23:56
weird mix of virtue signaling
1:23:58
and and process
1:24:02
mongering, like the whole
1:24:04
cookie pusher talking is
1:24:07
better than anything, and all that kind
1:24:09
of stuff, and process
1:24:11
capture, and playing to
1:24:14
constituencies that they care
1:24:16
about that they shouldn't. And
1:24:18
so if this was a move to guarantee he
1:24:20
was going to win the presidency, I'm not saying
1:24:22
I would agree with it, but
1:24:25
I would process it with less
1:24:27
rage, right? I guess that's my
1:24:29
point. Yeah, well Biden's not good at politics.
1:24:32
I mean, he's kind of, you know, Chauncey
1:24:34
Gardner, his way into the presidency, but,
1:24:36
you know, he's been in politics for 50 years. You
1:24:39
know, a little bit more. He first entered elected
1:24:41
office the year I was born. And
1:24:45
now if you had said to someone 20 years
1:24:48
ago, Joe Biden's going to
1:24:50
be the most important man in American politics in
1:24:52
2024, nobody
1:24:54
would have believed you. And he'd been in politics
1:24:56
for 30 years at that point. He's not very
1:24:58
good at this stuff. I think that
1:25:01
the thing that will really matter in the long
1:25:03
run is that this will change the kind of
1:25:05
emotional and psychological nature of our relationship with Israel,
1:25:07
particularly on the Israel side. So you
1:25:09
could take a country like, you know,
1:25:11
Austria. Austria
1:25:13
knows, well, we're a NATO member. We've got
1:25:15
this alliance with the United States. If someone
1:25:17
invades Austria, the United States will
1:25:19
come to our defense. We've got this relationship. But
1:25:22
no one in Vienna thinks, well, the Americans love us.
1:25:25
And they don't want to be anything. The Americans really care about us.
1:25:28
They want to see us thrive. There's no one here. We're just
1:25:30
another country in Europe to them. And
1:25:33
Mozart, whatever. And they don't
1:25:35
have this kind of, you know, sort of
1:25:37
intimate emotional relationship that you have between many
1:25:39
Americans, Jewish
1:25:41
Americans, evangelical Christians, and other people
1:25:44
who just kind of admire Israel
1:25:46
for being this, you know, scrappy,
1:25:48
decent, good
1:25:51
little country that's achieved amazing things in a
1:25:53
part of the world where amazing things are
1:25:55
hard to achieve. And
1:25:57
the Israelis thought we had that kind of relationship.
1:25:59
with them. A lot of Israelis thought that and
1:26:02
that we cared about them
1:26:04
on some personal kind of
1:26:07
level, even though we don't have the kind
1:26:09
of formal legal mutual defense relationship within that we have
1:26:11
with a lot of other. So the way we, a
1:26:13
lot of people feel about the British, right? They're just
1:26:16
the kind of thing. Yeah.
1:26:18
Yeah. And, and I think that a
1:26:21
lot of people in Israel now must be looking at
1:26:23
the United States and saying, hmm, these
1:26:25
are not the people we thought they were, at least some
1:26:27
of them are. And if
1:26:29
it were just some kids on some
1:26:31
college campus screaming and being stupid, it would
1:26:34
be one thing, but these kids
1:26:36
apparently have the year of the president and
1:26:39
the president of the more liberal, more progressive
1:26:41
party in the United States. And
1:26:44
that's got to have a long-term
1:26:46
effect on how particularly
1:26:49
younger Israelis, I mean, people maybe in their twenties and thirties
1:26:51
who are actually doing the fighting right now and to
1:26:54
have probably the closest
1:26:57
connection to much
1:27:00
of the recent horror because
1:27:03
it wasn't, you know, people in their seventies at that concert
1:27:05
for the most part. And
1:27:08
they're going to be looking at their relationship with the
1:27:10
United States, I think differently for many, many years to
1:27:12
come. And that's going to be
1:27:14
a real loss for us, I
1:27:16
think, because while we don't have a lot of allies
1:27:19
in that part of the world, we have
1:27:21
even fewer friends. Yeah. All right. On
1:27:23
that note, because the bomb is going
1:27:25
to kill me to go 90 minutes on the day
1:27:27
that we have to turn this around the same day.
1:27:30
Kevin Williamson, thank you for doing this. And
1:27:34
obviously, we'll have you back. One
1:27:38
of the few places where I can say it's a command
1:27:40
performance if necessary. And
1:27:44
congrats with the brood.
1:27:47
It's a source of
1:27:50
major excitement within triplet
1:27:52
stuff is a source
1:27:54
of major enthusiasm among the staff. So I
1:27:56
feel like I abused the dispatch
1:27:58
slack a little bit with too many. I don't,
1:28:01
I've never heard a single complaint. So, um.
1:28:03
Okay, there'll be more. And that's
1:28:05
it, so thanks again. Okay, thank you
1:28:07
to Kevin Williamson for indulging me and doing this
1:28:10
at short notice. Thank you to all of you
1:28:12
for indulging us and listening to us for 90
1:28:14
minutes of sort of, I
1:28:17
mean this has been a week of podcasts of sort of two
1:28:21
old, overweight guys doing
1:28:24
the sort of snore
1:28:26
kind of conversation. But
1:28:29
people like the pod conversation. I think people will like
1:28:31
this. At least I hope they
1:28:33
will. I have probably things I
1:28:35
should be announcing or telling you, but I can't remember
1:28:37
what they are. So, I'm
1:28:40
gonna leave you here and I'll just see you next time. That
1:28:42
is now the tourist check. Yeah. Yeah.
1:28:45
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:28:48
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:28:52
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:28:55
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:28:58
Yeah. Yeah. It
1:29:07
is Ryan here and I have a
1:29:09
question for you. What do you do
1:29:11
when you win? Like are you a
1:29:13
fist pumper? A woohooer? A hand clapper?
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