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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,

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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?

1:29:15

A high fiver? I kind of like

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