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Speaker 5:
[01:08] Welcome to The Dispatch Podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we'll discuss the state of the Trump administration's diplomacy with Iran, FBI Director Cash Patel's alleged excessive drinking, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' recent speech at the University of Texas. I'm joined today by my dispatch colleagues, Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, and dispatch contributor and New York Times writer, David French. Let's dive in. Welcome, gentlemen, I want to start with Iran. The US and Iran extended the ceasefire. Iran seized two cargo ships. The Secretary of Defense fired the Secretary of the Navy. And President Trump, after saying for weeks the war was won and nearly over, told Fox News, there's, quote, no time pressure to hold new diplomatic talks with Iran, and, quote, no timeline for the end of the war. David, it does not sound like the end is near.

Speaker 6:
[02:16] No, it doesn't sound like the end is near, and it doesn't sound like we really actually know what the end is gonna look like. One of the things that we've seen over the last several days is the President just blurting out things time and time again. Sometimes they're true, often they're not true. Sometimes about the state of the negotiations that are not true, and the reporting seems to indicate that him blurting out things is actually impacting the negotiations a great deal. I mean, part of the problem here is that you have had years and years and years of boasting from Trump that the Obama deal was the worst thing ever, that all it takes is a good negotiator to walk in and can absolutely do something better. You had the Obama people saying for years and years, well, the best we could do was this, and if you want war, you could have war, but you're never gonna do better than this. And so here we're looking at a situation where it's quite possible we end up with something like a version of the Obama deal after a war. So in a weird way, you end up with the worst of both worlds. You have the Obama deal with its downsides and you had a war with all of its terrible downsides. And so I'm hoping that whatever emerges from this moment is better than the Obama deal for all of our sakes. I think we should be definitely rooting for something better than the Obama deal. However, they have led us into a strategic dead end at the moment, it appears. And now it's possible that the continued blockade of Iranian ports will put enough pressure on Iran. But the question I have is who has a greater tolerance for pain? Is it the democracy that's accountable to the people or is it the autocracy that massacres the people? I think the democracy has the lower tolerance for pain and the absence of an unexpected turn of events. So it just appears to be a mess, just a giant mess at the moment.

Speaker 5:
[04:12] Kevin, on the other hand, taking all David's points, the Iranian military is severely degraded. We have taken out, we've really damaged their ability to produce new, highly enriched uranium. We think we've made progress on their nuclear sites. So it would be a better time for a deal, even with what David said about the difficult phase of war and this confusion that we're in. Would that be an accomplishment? As I read about the diplomacy, I think the thing that I find difficult to understand, and I don't know whether this is because the diplomacy itself is so chaotic or because the reporting on it is so difficult, I don't really know what the diplomatic talks are about. Where are the negotiations going? What's the goal?

Speaker 1:
[04:58] It's interesting to me that I think about the Strait of Hormuz is that this is an international strait. It's not sovereign Iranian territory, but the way the Trump administration now talks about it is that our goal is to get this thing open and the point of negotiations in part at least is to give to Iran what it wants in some negotiations so they will agree to open the strait. This amounts to whatever you call it, a recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, which is not something we should probably recognize. But it also raises the amusing possibility that Iran is going to be the first country to go into war and get the crap kicked out of it on every single front. You could possibly get the crap kicked out of it and come out of it with effectively larger territory because it now essentially has sovereignty over this strait that's an important part of international shipping in the international energy industry and all the rest of that stuff. So other than not having clearly stated war goals or a clearly stated way of achieving those unstated goals or a timeline for doing it, yeah, I would say things are going right on track.

Speaker 5:
[05:56] Jonah, Donald Trump seems to be impatient. I mean, when you look back at his rhetoric. He's impatient about everything, but he's at least judging by his rhetoric, he's been particularly impatient about Iran and this conflict. I think as we've discussed here before, he thought this was likely to unfold more or less like Venezuela unfolded, get the bad guys, move in, make a deal. The US runs it, we take the oil. Obviously, that hasn't happened, but is it notable that his rhetoric seems to have changed here, that he has been signalling the end of this, we're moving on, we're getting this done, and now, over the past 48 hours, he seems to be signalling patients? Is there something to be read in or is this just like Donald Trump waking up in a different mood the next day?

Speaker 7:
[06:45] Well, so I think one of the things you gotta remember is that whether it's the power of positive thinking or the prosperity gospel or just his own narcissistic personality disorder, he has developed an understandable conviction that he can incept into the world the reality he wants by saying it. I just feel that COVID is gonna go away in the spring. My net worth goes up when I feel good about myself. The problem with that, so when Tucker Carlson called him, there's been some reporting about this, when Tucker Carlson called him about how the Iran War would go badly or something like that, he said, no, it'll all work out. And Tucker Carlson says, well, how do you know that? And he says, because it always does. I think that's how Trump legitimately sees the world. And as someone who's been arguing that he is the millionth monkey banging on typewriters that produces something like Shakespeare, because he's just a statistical outlier and that norm breaking doesn't hurt him as much as it has for like everybody else, it's understandable that he would think this way. The thing is, the other problem with this, especially as he's become just an old dude, is he says what he wants to be true, sometimes about his own insecurities, and it's just a really bad negotiating strategy. So like for years, he will say when everybody criticizes him for his language, he'll say, look, I have the best words, but he doesn't use any, he just, I have them, I could use the best words, I went to the best schools, but I don't use them, right? When he says, I'm not impatient, time is on my side, I'm not in a rush to get a deal, the Iranians here, man, he's impatient, man, he's in a rush to get a deal, and as we've been talking about for a long time, whatever Trump may say in public about the negotiations and about the offers that he's made or his receptivity to ending this thing and or lack thereof, the Iranians know the actual truth of it because they're having the conversation, they're in the room where it happens as it were, right? And so like his desire to gaslight the American public is in direct tension with his desire to negotiate a deal with the Iranians because when he talks to the American public, he sounds desperate and there's just no way of hiding it. The one thing I will say like it's worth pointing out that the stuff we're seeing with the Iranian regime fracturing, which I think there's real credibility to that. Like it's not untrue just because the Trump administration is saying it's true. According to the original plan for a regime change, that would be one of the first consequences is to get elites within the regime. That's how regime change happens is when elites break their unity and start warring with each other and start worrying about their own hides and cutting deals to save themselves against the other factions and all that kind of stuff. So it is possible that this quote unquote regime collapses in some significant way that makes a deal more possible. It's also possible that it collapses in some significant way that instead of dealing with a malocracy of theocrats, we're dealing with a teroxxy of IRGC fanatics or dealing with multiple spheres of power in the region which each little warlord controlling different slices of their access to this rate of war moves. It's just impossible to know from the outside.

Speaker 5:
[10:27] David, that would certainly affect the way that you frame the sort of who has more patience, right?

Speaker 6:
[10:32] Right.

Speaker 5:
[10:33] The democracy or the autocracy. And what's interesting to me is, Jonah's right, we're reading more and more stories about these splits and different reporting, you know, puts the splits in different places and describes the factions in different ways. But I think it seems pretty clear that there are these splits. And let's just say for the record, the moderates that they're describing are not actual moderates in this case.

Speaker 6:
[10:56] Right. There's no moderates to be found here, really.

Speaker 5:
[10:59] Exactly. Exactly. I think it's more people who are willing, Iranian leaders who are willing to at least talk with the United States and try to come to some compromise, some deal, and those who are not, those who are more intransigent. But it is interesting because on the US side, members of Congress, Republican members of Congress, people running for election in a little bit more than six months, have been putting some quiet pressure on the Trump administration, sending messages to the White House, we gotta get this done. The president has to give us direction. We need to be able to know what to say. Republicans in Congress do not wanna go out these days and blindly support this war if it doesn't appear that there's any real strategy and it doesn't appear that there's any timeframe. How much does it matter that Republicans on the Hill are getting more and more impatient and the Iranian leaders seem to be splintering?

Speaker 6:
[11:53] I mean, I hate to be a broken record on this, but I'm gonna be a broken record on this. This is one of the consequences of not doing this the right way of going through Congress, getting buy-in, persuading the American people, following that constitutional process. It's not just an eye-dotting T-cross refrigerator warranty kind of thing that you can just kind of discard and disregard. No, this is put there for a reason and you're beginning to see the strategic weaknesses that emerge when you don't follow this process in a democratic society. And this is one of them. So you have now your own Republican representatives who are feeling very vulnerable when they go back to their own districts. And when you hear Republican representatives saying they don't want to go back to their districts, just keep in mind these are heavily gerrymandered districts that they're often not wanting to go back to. So this is artificially created friendly territory for them. And they're facing this blowback. And I think that's incredibly significant. And look, I fully acknowledge exactly what Jonah said, which is if you do see these cracks emerging, and some of these cracks can widen and eventually create real fissures that could lead to true regime change or something that looks like civil war, which I'm not sure if that would necessarily be in our interests either. I mean, the civil war in Syria was one of the more destabilizing events to our Western allies of anything that's happened in the last quarter century. So that's not necessarily in our interests. But I do recognize that there is a possibility that things could turn out better. It's possible. It's possible. But one of the things I think that we need to consider, because Steve, you said something, or who was it that said you've kicked the crap out of the military? It was Kevin. You've kicked the crap out of the Iranian military and they've weirdly perversely gotten bigger because they've now claimed the Strait of Hormuz, essentially. To use that term that a lot of people sort of thrown around, restoring deterrence. One of the questions that emerges when you leave a war is which party, which of the parties to the conflict is the one saying, let's not do that again? They may both be saying it, but who's saying it more loudly? And I do wonder, I really do wonder, even though we absolutely showed the tactical brilliance of our military, we showed the dominance of air, we showed dominance at least in sea combat. You saw remarkable rescue operation. I mean, all things that showed, the just incredible technical proficiency and excellence of the American military. And even after all of that, at least of right now, I'm getting a distinct sense that between Iran and the United States, the party that's saying, let's not restart this, seems to be more us than Iran. And one other thing on the cracks emerging in the regime, one of the things when we've been opponents of a regime for a while, and we think about Vladimir Putin, or we think about the Ayatollah or Xi Jinping, and we sort of think of them as sort of the ultimate enemy, like that you're going to throw the emperor down the shaft of the Death Star, and then everything's going to be okay, when the reality is the next people coming up, if this is the IRGC dominated state, it's probably going to be even more radical than a Mullah dominated state. And if that's what emerges, then it's been terrible for us. But again, we don't know, and one of the problems here is we're absolutely not in charge of the outcome right now. We are not in charge of the outcome.

Speaker 1:
[15:18] You have a sort of effective regime change by means of factional dispute. One of the things, particularly in this part of the world that you see is it's not typically the more liberal, moderate, humane faction comes out on top of these things. And a good example of that, if you think about Pakistan in the sort of age of Benazir Brutto where you had a government that wasn't very great, it was corruption problems and things like that, but it sort of had some liberal democratic tendencies. You had the ISI, the Pakistani spy agency, which operates this sort of independent parallel state. Then you have the army. And when this sort of cracked up and they had this incredible sort of factional confrontation, what ended up being the stronger element that come to the forefront of Pakistan was the kind of Taliban allied element. So Pakistan is in worse shape now than it was back then in many ways. It is possible for things to get worse through regime change of this kind. And that's certainly an example. And I think that if you're looking at countries to compare around to, maybe Pakistan is not the worst example.

Speaker 5:
[16:11] That's not encouraging.

Speaker 7:
[16:13] Yeah, I mean, like throughout the first couple of years of the Ukraine war, so many people were talking about, well, this could cause Putin, right? It's a disaster. Russian history, military disasters are caused, regime change, and we're over there of leaders and all this kind of stuff. And almost every single Russia expert I talked to said, yes, that's definitely possible. The problem is the people who would replace Putin, who are lined up to replace Putin right now, are probably worse people than Putin, you know, same dynamic, you know.

Speaker 1:
[16:43] If a guy is going to walk into Putin's office and shoot him in the head and declare himself president, it's going to be a worse guy than Putin.

Speaker 7:
[16:49] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[16:50] It's hard to imagine much worse than Putin, but here we are.

Speaker 1:
[16:53] Yeah, there's worse.

Speaker 6:
[16:55] The counter example seems to be currently Syria, where you have a guy who cut his teeth by being a vicious jihadist, walking into office and extending, basically just vomiting olive branches in every single possible direction. That is not the norm. If you're planning for that, that's on you. That's your problem. That is getting, if it's genuine, if it's real, I mean, we'll see over time, that's getting very lucky. That's getting very lucky.

Speaker 5:
[17:25] That could turn quickly. I'm not convinced. It's certainly the way that story has gone. I'm not sure it's the way it ends.

Speaker 7:
[17:32] Not to inject just rank punditry into all of this, but there's reports that the people in the administration are now saying it might be six months before the Strait of Hormuz is normal. And this permanent ceasefire thing that Trump has announced, we'll just wait for the regime to get together. Since he said that, basically the traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is one day it's 10 ships, one day it's five ships, one day it's no ships, one day I think it's gotten up to 18, I think is the highest number, something like that. The amount of cargo that went through that thing prior to the opening of the Strait of Hormuz was 10X of all of that. And if you think gas and fertilizer prices and all of those things are gonna go down when you only have somewhere between zero and 18 ships going through the Strait of Hormuz, it's like a virtual impossibility and six months from now is the cusp of the midterms, right? So like I think just on the political side, that's, I mean, we always say a month is a year is an eternity in politics, but that six months of sustained $4 up gas prices is just a friggin disaster for the midterms. And that assumes that this unstable status quo thing just doesn't get worse or more chaotic. So I'm not even sure how it's sustainable.

Speaker 6:
[18:51] It might be a good question. And maybe, you know, Kevin having the most Texas experience, what is the gas price that is the Talerico line? In other words, versus Cornyn versus Paxton, what is the Talerico line on gas prices?

Speaker 1:
[19:06] I will point out to you that I reject the premise of this question but it is the wrong question because your most dedicated, consistent Trump voters in Texas do not buy gasoline. They have diesel trucks.

Speaker 5:
[19:19] That makes it worse, right? Makes it worse.

Speaker 1:
[19:21] I definitely picked the right time to switch my F-250 for a Corolla.

Speaker 6:
[19:26] Wait, Kevin, there is never a time to switch an F-250 for a Corolla. And no hate on the Corolla. It's just the F-250 is a magnificent vehicle.

Speaker 1:
[19:35] If you ever tried to park an F-250 at my local airport or train station, you wouldn't understand why that happened.

Speaker 5:
[19:40] This is why David is a backer inner.

Speaker 1:
[19:42] It is possible for fuel prices to get a lot worse between now and election day. And my bet on Talarico in Texas is I'm pretty skeptical of his chances. I understand why the Democrats picked him and that they were trying to lean in the direction of responsibility. I actually think Crockett was a stronger candidate in a lot of ways, more a candidate of this kind of moment. And Talarico is this very, very sort of boring, flavorless kind of character. And plus he brings out, you know what Talarico is, he's kind of a left-wing David French in the sense that the things about him that are actually not things I agree with, but that are good and admirable are things that people kind of hate the most about him. So, you know, his religious sensibility, I think.

Speaker 5:
[20:23] I was wondering where you were going with that.

Speaker 1:
[20:27] This kind of liberal Presbyterianism is not, you know, is not my way of looking at the religious world, but I think in his case it's genuine and it really bothers people. And particularly people who have more kind of, you know, robust evangelical commitments. If he had been more of a kind of normal, consistent secular Democrat rather than being a kind of a liberal evangelical type, I think that actually might have helped him a little bit because it takes the issue off the table a little bit. But there's this irritating thing about him that's always sort of right there front and center for people who are prone to be irritated by it. And this is a whole David French thing again, but I think that that's not a great place for him. Whereas Crockett was a social media bomb thrower and probably would have been throwing bombs in social media in an effective kind of way, I think, in this race.

Speaker 5:
[21:08] I'm very tempted to just trash the rest of the show and talk about James Tellerico as a left-wing David French, but we should move on. I wanna spend a moment on the news this week about Kash Patel, our esteemed FBI director. There have been many, many stories written about Kash Patel over the past several days, triggered, I think, by a report in The Atlantic by Sarah Fitzpatrick about Kash Patel's sort of drinking and wild lifestyle. He is known to drink to excess at the Poodle Room in Las Vegas, she reports, where he frequently spends part of his weekends.

Speaker 6:
[21:50] Who among us, really?

Speaker 5:
[21:51] Drinks at Ned's, this is a private club in Washington DC. And then I want to read a paragraph from this story that I found jarring. On multiple occasions in the last year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to the Justice Department and White House officials. A request for quote, breaching equipment, normally used by SWAT and hostage rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings, was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request. Jonah, you're often extraordinarily intoxicated and we need breaching equipment.

Speaker 6:
[22:38] Unreachable. And yet you perform at such a high level anyways.

Speaker 5:
[22:43] It's pretty amazing what he's been able to do. Your reaction to that story and there have been multiple stories. There's a New York Times story that the FBI was investigating a New York Times reporter because she had done reporting back in February about the services that the FBI was giving Kash Patel's girlfriend. So one story after another about Kash Patel, your reaction.

Speaker 7:
[23:06] Yeah, it kind of reminds me of there's an old joke from the Senate in the 1980s, 1990s, that staffers who would answer the phone and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's office in the afternoon and say, I'm sorry, the Senator can't come to the phone right now, he's on the floor. For the record, he loved Moynihan, but he liked his midday wine. So I find all of this unbelievably unsurprising for an FBI director. I mean, unsurprising, we use this all the time, surprising but not shocking or shocking but not surprising, whatever, like it's shocking to have an FBI director who if reports are to be believed is a irresponsible drinker who also goes to Vegas. My one criticism of this entire reporting is that my understanding is that right after it never plagiarized and never reveal a source, what happens in the poodle room is supposed to stay in the poodle room. But I think Kash Patel, I mean, there was this whole sort of cottage industry trying to figure out who the most unqualified, most irresponsible appointee at the beginning of the Trump administration was. And I just think if you do the X and Y axis of like possible harm to unqualified, that nexus, RFK still wins, but Patel is way up there, right?

Speaker 6:
[24:29] Oh, man.

Speaker 7:
[24:30] And the fact that he's using this private jet, government jet to go to see his girlfriend perform, all of this kind of stuff is just a sign of how, I don't mean corrupt in terms, there's real corruption, but I just mean sort of ethically compromised and self-serving so many of the people in this administration are. And I suspect that Trump would be tempted to fire Patel, except it's really hard to find new FBI directors and he loves having a completely irresponsible loyalist in that position. But Trump doesn't like drinkers and he doesn't like people who create headlines that embarrass him. And Patel is, let's just say he violates both of those norms.

Speaker 5:
[25:16] David, I mean, we joke about this. The story was in some ways so shocking it was funny. He's the FBI director. They are very serious.

Speaker 7:
[25:26] During a war.

Speaker 6:
[25:27] In a war.

Speaker 5:
[25:27] Yeah, I mean the threats against the homeland are up. We've got investigations, counter-terrorism investigations taking place around the world with FBI agents. Is he supposed to be running this or at least monitoring this? I mean, there are very serious national security implications for what he's alleged to have been doing.

Speaker 6:
[25:47] Oh, for sure. And by the way, doesn't the reporting cast in a different light his little journey into the men's hockey team locker room? I mean, that was out of control behavior that you were watching when he was running into the men's hockey team locker room. Like he belonged there as FBI director to celebrate with them. Very strange. It was like giving off this kind of energy. You know, you've kind of maybe felt at a corporate retreat or something where like, what's going on with Doug over there? Like, is he had a little too much?

Speaker 1:
[26:19] Thank you for saying Doug.

Speaker 6:
[26:25] But one thing that I think is important to sort of think through is look at this, look at Kash Patel in context. So, Jonah was talking about RFK Jr., crazy story after crazy story. We just had a labor secretary go away. We've had our Homeland Security Attorney General, all of them with wild controversies and often in stories of really erratic and often just very personally corrupt behavior. And, you know, for a long time, I would talk to some of my Marmaga friends and I would talk about that kind of the constellation of clowns that orbited Donald Trump. And the argument again and again was no, these people are fine. They just know what it takes to sort of suck up to the king. And so, you know, you're, he's still surrounding himself with good people who just have, they play the game. Well, might I suggest to you if part of the game is doing children's books about like King Donald, the game has gone awry. I mean, and what you're doing is you're actually betraying something about yourself, that how much you're willing to already be debased to be in that position or to be in orbit around the king. And we have not replaced, these guys walk around strutting all day long that they have replaced DEI and wokeism. Well, whatever they have replaced, they have not replaced it with a meritocracy by any stretch. So they're doing probably the one thing that would be most guaranteed to restore DEI in that regime, oddly enough. And that is replace it with something worse, replace it with something even less beneficial to the public good than say race-based affirmative action. Instead it's sycophancy-based affirmative action, which was by the way, often the norm in institutions, you know, before the modern era. So people are kind of getting a glimpse of what the before, before times were like, the pre-civil rights era, all of this, where it was all about who did you know, who was your relationship, who were you, it was not some sort of golden era of meritocracy in America before those days. And we're kind of getting a glimpse of that right now, but nothing about this should surprise anyone. Kash Patel was radiating these signals before he got into office.

Speaker 5:
[28:49] Yeah, I mean, he was sort of Devin Nunes' sidekick on the Devin Nunes' podcast. He was the Ed McMahon to Devin Nunes' Johnny Carson.

Speaker 6:
[28:58] How dare you compare, use those names. Hey-o! Those are great names in American history, Steve. How dare you?

Speaker 5:
[29:07] That was the highlight of Devin Nunes' career, such as it was before this. What's been interesting to me is after this story broke in the Atlantic on Friday night, and then there were, again, several sort of followup stories in rapid succession, usually somebody in Kash Patel's position would respond to a story like this. It had the Atlantic story had lots of details, lots of sources by hunkering down, hoping to weather the storm. That was not Kash Patel's reaction. He filed a lawsuit, 250 million against the Atlantic, against Sarah Fitzpatrick. He's done this before. They haven't been successful. And then he went on Maria Bartiromo's Sunday morning show to give an interview. And I want to read part of their exchange. I find it so fascinating in telling potentially about what's to come. She asks Kash Patel from sort of Donald Trump's position about investigations that the FBI is doing into the people who supposedly stole the 2020 election. Dangerous territory, I would say, for Fox News to be doing this $800 million later, but she did it anyway. So she asked him about this and he responds, we've got all the information we need. We're working with our prosecutors at the DOJ, Under Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch, and we're going to be making arrests. It's coming and I promise you it's coming soon. Maria Bartiromo is skeptical. She's heard this before, so she pushes back and she says, whether or not you have any information to verify what President Trump says all the time, which is the election was rigged, that's what I asked you, Kash. And he says, we have the information that backs President Trump's claims, but because it's an ongoing prosecution and investigation, I can't get ahead of the DOJ and the president. So here's Kash Patel, in my view, going out and giving an interview to save his job by giving the president what he wants. Is there any other way to look at this, Kevin?

Speaker 1:
[31:09] Well, yeah, there's an electoral way to look at it, I think. You know, you've got Patel out there essentially trying to revive the old QAnon energy. You know, the storm is coming, we're going to go out there and arrest a whole lot of people and expose this fraud. You've got JD Vance making weird comments about pizza, and talks and stuff. I was sort of touching on another conspiracy theory, some weird things. So that's kind of how I read it. I have to assume that Patel feels like he's on the ropes because he is embarrassing the Trump administration. It's really hard to embarrass the Trump administration, which goes out and hires people like Kash Patel, and then gets embarrassed by them. But it is possible to embarrass the Trump administration. They love to sue media outlets, of course, and suing the Atlantic is... I'm all in favor of suing the Atlantic because I once signed something that said I wasn't allowed to sue the Atlantic. So I'm glad someone's out there doing it. But no, in all fairness, I don't think that they make stuff up over there. And I think that Patel, if this thing ever goes to court, which of course it probably never will, would not enjoy the discovery process very much, and it would go probably pretty badly for him. You know, there are better places to drink in Vegas than the Poodle Room, incidentally. That's a real touristy kind of, it's a rich guy touristy thing to do, so I don't know about that.

Speaker 7:
[32:19] There are better places to drink in DC than the Net too.

Speaker 5:
[32:22] My Vegas references are like 20 years old. Like Mandalay Bay was the fancy thing when I was there last, and I think that's probably no longer the big place to go.

Speaker 1:
[32:30] We have to remember you're talking to someone who actually moved to Las Vegas in part because he thought he was drinking too much in New York, where it's really easy to walk to a bar, and it's much harder to walk to a bar in Las Vegas if you get ubered around, that sort of thing. So first person in the world ever moved to Vegas to drink less, but it kind of worked. Yeah, I don't think Patel is very long for this position. Although in terms of people who are super embarrassing, it is funny what presses the administration's internal buttons and what doesn't. You think that Bobby Kennedy would have been top of the list because he's been really embarrassing in office, but I guess he hasn't been embarrassing in a way that's imposing a lot of political costs on the administration. Whereas maybe Patel is, I think that there are some people out there in the broader Republican coalition who still take things like the FBI seriously. And also, who wants the FBI guy at the party anyway? You're not drinking at the poodle room. Do you really want the feds in the house?

Speaker 7:
[33:20] It's just... I would say also one thing. I don't think the lawsuit against the Atlantic, sorry, Kev, is going to go very far, but Kash Patel is one of these guys who used to top five people to bitch and moan about the deep state. That was one of his main things. And as we've all written, read and talked about before, the deep state is a very promiscuous term, an elastic term that can mean some real things. It can also be a complete conspiracy theory BS nonsense term. There are people at the... I just know this from actually talking to people, right? Like there are people at the FBI, there are still sort of like in Game of Thrones, the North remembers, there are still people at the FBI who remember, who like the old reputation of incorruptible, untouchable, just the facts by the book, serious people.

Speaker 1:
[34:13] Led by Jack Hoover in a dress.

Speaker 7:
[34:15] Yeah, the dress thing was a lie, by the way, that we can debate that another time.

Speaker 1:
[34:19] It was a good story.

Speaker 7:
[34:20] Yeah, it was one of the perfect examples of too good not to print. But the point is they like that reputation, right? They cultivated that as an institutional thing. Some of those people have to be pissed that friends of theirs were fired simply because they were following the letter of the law and doing what their supervisors told them. And now you have the acting attorney general saying recently that bragging at CPAC, which is outrageous that he was even attending CPAC, saying the fact that every single person who worked on those investigations and everybody from January 6th was pardoned as proof that Trump protects his base and cares for his base is so friggin outrageous. And for some of those, including very hardcore conservative FBI guys, they just gotta be so mortified and so pissed about it, the amount of leaking that will happen about Patel's behavior is inevitable, right? And so like this stuff is just gonna come out and they're gonna relish doing it and Patel is gonna go on witch hunts trying to find it and he's gonna find out.

Speaker 5:
[35:19] It already is.

Speaker 7:
[35:20] It's like everybody because everybody hates him.

Speaker 1:
[35:23] Please send your news tips to Kevin at thedispatch.com.

Speaker 6:
[35:28] But Jonah, you raise a great point that there are in all of these institutions, not just in the FBI, but in the military also, in the DOJ, there are a lot of people who are right now furious because what has happened is they've seen colleagues fired, lose their jobs, be demoted, et cetera, punished in some way for really nothing other than doing what their prior bosses asked them to do, that's it. And they are now losing their jobs, they're being fired. And so they're looking at this world where wait a minute, if I do what my current bosses say, does that mean that the next team is going to fire me when I just did what my bosses asked me to do? In other words, performing exactly the role we ask of civil servants to be lawful tools of the elected government, is that now creating job insecurity? We're moving towards a system where it's becoming almost like a de facto spoils system. And so what happens next? Does a Democratic president walk in and say, well, the permanent bureaucracy was cleaned out and replaced with Maga Loyalists. Well, now I got to clean out the Maga Loyalists. Well, then we're on this cycle all over again. I mean, we are breaking things. And I think this is really important for people to understand we are breaking things that you just can't fix with the next election.

Speaker 1:
[36:52] Yeah.

Speaker 6:
[36:53] And that's not even counting national security.

Speaker 1:
[36:56] People do care about the reputations of their agencies, especially if they've given you 25 or 30 years of their lives.

Speaker 6:
[37:01] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[37:02] During the lowest learner stuff at the IRS, I talked to a guy over at the IRS who was sort of an IRS lifer. And he was like, look, nobody likes us. Like no one like says thank you for your service for working for the IRS. And it's not like being at the EPA where there's like, are you doing something that people think is important to the world or whatever. Everyone hates us anyway. The one thing we had was our reputation that we did our job and we did our job in a good way. And now we don't have that anymore either. Surely didn't get into it for the money, not getting into it for the love. You don't go to a dinner party and say, I work for the IRS. People just like walk away from you and don't care. But he cared about what his agency was, how it was perceived in the world. And that was perceived as being professional and competent and good at his job. And it's got to be 10 times that sort of dynamic at military institutions and particularly at the FBI and places like that.

Speaker 5:
[37:46] Yeah. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from The Dispatch Podcast. I know our team spends more afternoons than I'd like buried in forms, double checking tax details, or tracking down onboarding documents. It's the kind of stuff that eats up your entire day before you even notice. And that's why I really appreciate what Gusto brings to the table. Gusto is online payroll and benefit software built for small businesses. It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use. So you can pay higher onboard and support your team from anywhere. One of the big things I love is how Gusto takes the repetitive, boring admin tasks off your plate. It's also genuinely quick to switch to Gusto. You just transfer your existing data and get up and running fast. You don't pay a cent until you run your first payroll. Try Gusto today at gusto.com/dispatch and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com/dispatch. One more time gusto.com/dispatch.

Speaker 3:
[38:55] Unlike other AI, Slackbot lives in Slack. It understands you, your team, and your work so you can ask it for help with anything.

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[39:03] Can I ask it to summarize client feedback?

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Speaker 8:
[39:25] This episode is brought to you by MGM+. From and its horrors returns for season four, centered around a town that traps all those who enter. Terrifying creatures that come out at night, horrors some wished had stayed buried, where desperate hope leads to darker truths. Dangerous new arrivals, a sinister figure, a shocking revelation. New episodes of From, Sundays on MGM+. Some doors should remain closed.

Speaker 5:
[39:57] And we're back. You're listening to The Dispatch Podcast. Let's jump in. Before we wrap up, I want to spend a few minutes on what I thought was an extraordinary speech by Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court justice at the University of Texas, Civitas Institute last week. He gave a long speech about the Declaration of Independence tied to America's 250th. And I found this speech extraordinary for a number of reasons and very compelling. He talked about the declaration and quoted the lines that we're all familiar with, but said that his favorite line in the declaration was the last line. And it reads, and for the support of this declaration, with a firm alliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. It was also my favorite line, I think the most compelling line of the declaration. And then talked about how easy it is to use words that means something and how much harder it is to be devoted to seeing those words put into action. And I thought it was a really extraordinary message. Then the speech took a turn sort of in the middle, and he focused on the ways in which the United States and those who have led it have moved away from the principles of the declaration. And he talked specifically about progressivism. David, I wanted to just get your impression generally of the speech. And there's been some debate about whether it's appropriate for a Supreme Court justice to give such a speech.

Speaker 6:
[41:33] Well, you know, we talked about this on Advisory Opinions, and a point that I made is...

Speaker 5:
[41:38] Advisory Opinions for people who don't know, it's just a legal podcast, sort of niche legal podcast.

Speaker 6:
[41:42] Yeah, our little niche legal podcast. Yeah, yeah, very highly bespoke audience. And so we are, we're talking about this, and the coverage of it was coverage as if he was talking about progressivism, like say, somebody who votes for Bernie Sanders would describe them. Like, I'm for single payer healthcare or no. That is not what this was about. This was about Woodrow Wilson era progressivism. And I know Jonah has cornered the market on the Yurakai theme at the mention of Woodrow Wilson, but he's talking about a specific ideological movement in the same way that you would talk about liberalism, small l liberalism is different from calling someone a liberal versus a conservative politically. And so he's talking about this concept, an ideological concept of progressivism. He's not talking about left of center people in the US right now. That's not what he's talking about. So I think that was a lot of the confusion. And look, I thought it was an interesting, very interesting speech. And on America's 250th, I actually like to see some of our leading public figures thinking through the philosophical basis of the American experiment. I think I like it. You know, we have so we just went through, think about how much better this conversation is. We just talked about the poodle room and maybe somebody's too drunk to be woken up unless they've got like a battering ram at the door. Now we're talking about an intelligence speech by a public figure, talking about big ideas. And I'm sorry, that's great. Let's have that conversation and debate the ideas and debate, you know, but as far as is it acceptable for him to do this, 100% yes, absolutely. It's absolutely acceptable. And in fact, you know, I would like to hear Elena Kagan thinking through some of the philosophical bases of the founding. I would like to hear it from Justice Jackson. I mean, I would like to hear it from Gorsuch. He's got a book coming out that's gonna be dealing with some of the themes of the 250th. So I'm very interested. I'd like to hear these things. This is what it looks like to me when you have a functioning branch of government with thoughtful people, they give thought provoking speeches about big ideas and great, let's have more of it.

Speaker 5:
[44:06] Kevin, I mean, I was reminded watching the criticism, sort of the backlash about Justice Thomas' speech of the criticism from conservatives about Hamilton. And my view is basically the same as David's. If we are having a national discussion about the principles of the founding, even if I, you know, I could pick nits about Hamilton and the way things were portrayed, this is great. Like my kids can all sing songs about the things that led to the founding, not only they all sing songs about some made up romance in Hamilton. But this is a good thing for everybody. Shouldn't we want people, justices, elected officials to be giving speeches like this so that they're engaging these ideas and we can have a debate about whether we've strayed too far from the founding as Justice Thomas argued.

Speaker 1:
[44:55] Yeah. Let me give my impersonation of 80% of the response to this speech. Progressives only believe in nice things. That was basically what everyone said. He's out there talking about Wilson and Dewey and he goes from the Harry Jaffa speech to the Jonah Goldberg speech there in the last third of it, where he's hitting on some themes that are very much associated with our friend and colleague here and I thought it was an extraordinary speech. I've argued for a long time that Clarence Thomas is, if not the most important and consequential public person in American life in his lifetime, surely in the top three or four. I think he's just an enormously consequential figure. We'll be talking about and analyzing a hundred years from now. Are there a couple of lines in the speech that really chomped out at me, particularly when he was talking about growing up in Georgia and the conditions he did where that he says, I won't get the quotation exactly right. He said, people could treat us unequally, but they didn't have the divine power to make it so. And that's in the Declaration of Independence, which I thought was just enormously well put. And there's this wonderful kind of patriotic, inspiring story in his life where he's talking about sitting with his grandparents at that kitchen table in 1955, where they tell him and his brother that we're taking over your lives. As soon as they at this point, we're going to be the ones who raise you. And he goes from that table in 1955 to the Supreme Court. It's a pretty good American story. Not a lot of people have stories like that. Not a lot of countries have conditions where stories like that happen. And Thomas, given any other set of politics, you know, if Thomas has sort of conventional liberal politics, conventional liberal jurisprudence, here I mean liberal in the sense that we almost never use it, you know, kind of progressive democratic party aligned, he would be, they would be putting him on Mount Rushmore. I mean, he is such a great inspiring American figure, but he has a different sort of politics and in an unsparing way of talking, I think too, which doesn't necessarily win him a lot of friends, although I love it. And it makes me happy to hear it every time he does it. So I think that everyone should read this speech, watch this speech, talk about this speech. I think it's good for the country. And of course it's appropriate for a Supreme Court justice to ever talk like this. I think it would be inappropriate for him not to. He's sitting on top of this really useful and inspiring and worthwhile and illuminating body of knowledge and personal experience and history that he's been a part of that you absolutely should share with the country. Although I think if UT is going to be naming institutes in Latin, we should pronounce them in Latin. So it's the Kiwitas.

Speaker 5:
[47:24] But thank you for the correction.

Speaker 1:
[47:25] I appreciate that. I like those Latin P Ws because it just sounds so much less, it's so much less tough, you know, when Julius Caesar says, whiningly de weaky.

Speaker 6:
[47:35] True, so true.

Speaker 1:
[47:37] You pronounce it in Italian, it sounds cool.

Speaker 5:
[47:40] I want to play a clip Jonah about, I like Kevin heard echoes of liberal fascism in the speech. And I want to-

Speaker 7:
[47:46] There's also a lot of suicide of the West in there too. But anyway, cause I listened to the whole thing this morning.

Speaker 5:
[47:50] No tyranny of cliches?

Speaker 7:
[47:52] No tyranny.

Speaker 5:
[47:53] You're very underrated second book.

Speaker 6:
[47:56] The most underrated second book.

Speaker 5:
[47:58] Yes. If we can play a clip of Justice Thomas on progressivism.

Speaker 9:
[48:03] Progressivism was not native to America. Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it from Otto von Bismarck's Germany, whose state-centric society they admired. Progressives like Wilson argued that America needed to leave behind the principles of the founding and catch up with the more advanced and sophisticated system of relatively unimpeded state power, nearly perfected. He acknowledged that it was a foreign science speaking very little of the language of English or American principle, which offers none but what are to our minds alien ideas. He thus described America still stuck with its original system of government as, quote, slow to see the superiority of the European system. The progressivism was the first mainstream American political movement with the possible exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration.

Speaker 5:
[49:26] Jonah, as David says, that's not whining about Bernie Sanders' lefty stuff. That's a profound point about the drift from the principles of the American founding that we saw in the progressives. You have spent some time writing about this, talking about this.

Speaker 7:
[49:42] Yeah, so Thomas is absolutely right. I mean, he shorthands a bunch of stuff, but it's a speech for a general audience, so like, and it's still very highbrow, so I could be bopping the scat on all sorts of things here. And he's right, people really just don't understand how much Germany, which was, got to remember, at the end of the 19th century, Germany was considered far more intellectually advanced and serious than the United States of America was. And if you go and you look at, say, the first people to get, Woodrow Wilson's the first president with a PhD. He goes to Johns Hopkins, which is the first major research university modeled on the German model. You look at the founders of the American Economic Association, it's just hundreds of people who trained in Germany, learned in Germany, came to the United States with this idea that sort of married Darwin, not that much Marx, but married these ideas of that relativity and what in the scholarship we would call historicism. And Wilson is the guy who encapsulates this stuff by being the first president of the United States to actually openly campaign against the Bill of Rights and the founding to say that they're holding us back. He says they need to be there, that they're too Newtonian. Checks and balances are stupid. We need to be, I have a Darwinian system. I mean, I can get into all this all day long, but suffice it to say strong agree with Clarence Thomas, where I think a lot of people, I'm thinking about writing of this. So if I repeat myself in the Friday G File, that's the price you have to pay. I think a lot of people are missing bigger point here. This isn't just owning the Libs or the Prague or whatever. When Clarence Thomas talks about the disdain European intellectuals had for the Lockean arrangements that we have here of a mixed regime and that we're the first really only country to have checks and balances and a system that is driven around the sanctity of natural rights, which he gets a lot of the stuff is hardcore Harry Jaffa stuff. But Harry Jaffa was a major intellectual. He was a Straussian. He was basically the founder of Claremont McKenna before Claremont McKenna got into all sorts of craziness. And he's one of the guys who wrote a wonderful book. Everybody agrees it's a wonderful book, Crisis of a House Divided, where he basically makes the case, as David often will say on AO, that the Declaration of Independence is sort of the mission statement to the United States and the Constitution is the user manual. And so that's why you have that.

Speaker 5:
[51:59] Once you read that book, you can't see it any other way. Like a reframing book.

Speaker 7:
[52:02] And Thomas sees the Constitution in that light. And this is like the culmination of 40 years of his thinking about all this. You know, there's this thing going on on the right right now that seems to have missed, gone by over everybody's heads in the conversation about this. When he's talking about not giving up on the Lockean framework of this country, who the hell is he owning, if not the post-liberal Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen. Those guys are the ones who want to embrace an older European model of governance. They're the ones who are rejecting the Enlightenment principles that Clarence Thomas is out there standing for. And I mean, I get why people, the Daily Beast, for Christ's sake, took the bait and thought this was all about owning the libs. But like, I want to see where's the deafening silence from the first things crowd, from the anti-liberal, post-liberal, neo-monarchist, all of these incredibly stupid, pernicious, anti-American ideologies that are all over place on the right. These guys are all like, oh, Clarence Thomas went up to progressives, isn't that great? Or they're just not saying anything at all when he is offering just a massive indictment. And if you read some of the stuff he talks about having courage, I think he's talking, you know, like, it applies to lots of people in different contexts and different people can think, oh, is he talking about me and all that kind of stuff? I think he's talking about a lot of people who gave up on all these principles, Fox News crowd and all of the rest, or at least they should hear it that way. The one place where I'm gonna disagree with him, at least for now, is I love the sacred honor, you know, our mutual pledge, our lives, our fortunes, that's all great, that's wonderful stuff. That's the crap you say when you're launching a violent revolution. It is not the crap you say when you disagree about a piece of legislation or a court case. And he constantly mixes this metaphor where he takes talking about, you need the courage to fight for your life to uphold these principles in American domestic politics. And I believe you should have courage and you should fight for them, but it's a different kind of courage. And I think he makes a mistake talking about it the same way. I forgive it because a lot of it is poetic license, but I just think it's worth pointing out.

Speaker 5:
[54:17] Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't hear it that way. I heard him praising the framers, the signers, for having that level of commitment and lamenting the fact that so many people in modern politics don't share that level of commitment. I didn't hear him saying, you know, so pick up arms and let's...

Speaker 7:
[54:35] No, I'm not saying he's inciting violence or anything, but if you actually, some of those sentences I think were a little ambiguous, if I were like a January 6th guy, I could be like... I'm not saying, again, I'm not saying that Clarence Thomas deliberately is trying to inspire those people. His wife was, but I think that there was more nuance needed on some of those points.

Speaker 1:
[54:56] Yeah, I think the way he engages the Declaration of Independence, and he said this in the speech and some other context, I think, too, is that he sees it not so much as an expression of a list of philosophical principles, but the encapsulation of a way of life. And I think that's why he talks about it in that particular kind of way. So he wants to take this sort of the courage and virtue that's expressed at the beginning of the revolution, which of course is a violent military conflict and a violent, well, revolutions are violent by nature, and say we can extract out of that certain virtues, including the courage to live as a citizen in a certain kind of way.

Speaker 6:
[55:31] You know, I'm so glad you said that about the Post-Liberals on the right, Jonah, because the speech really reminded me of the George Will book written a couple of years ago, of essentially arguing the essential goal of conservatism is to preserve the founding, it's to conserve the American founding. And I took that speech in that spirit, and where are the threats to the American founding? Well, absolutely from the sort of far left, like the critical theory left, a lot of critical theory is taking on and attacking the liberal founding and the liberal foundation of American government. But he's also, when he's talking about, John Locke is a trigger name. He is a trigger name for the post-liberal right. I mean, whether you're talking about sort of the Catholic integralist right, which I think is now having a real crisis, is there's a president-pope fight, or you're talking about the theonomist, like the Doug Wilson Protestant Christian Nationalist. You know, Locke is a trigger word. This is not what they're about at all. So this was a speech really truly in sort of the great mainstream of American legal and political philosophy against the French. And if you're progressive and you're upset at this, I mean, you're associating yourself with Wilsonian progressivism, and I'm not sure you want to do that, because this is the dude that resegregated the federal government. This is the dude who threw hundreds of his political opponents in jail. This is a guy who, for the life of me, the more I learn about him, the more I'm just genuinely stumped as to why my entire life I was taught he was one of our great presidents, which I just don't get it.

Speaker 7:
[57:13] And also we should point out that some of the new nationalist guys have openly sort of said, maybe we need to re-embrace Woodrow Wilson in the last few years. Like, it's one thing to embrace Woodrow Wilson when all you've heard, like David's talking about, is the myths about Woodrow Wilson and the misunderstandings about, you know, the print the legend version of Woodrow Wilson that endured for so long. It's another thing after 15 years of revisionism about Wilson, which I was a big part of, I'm proud to say, about how his racism, his sports eugenics, his antipathy towards democracies, antipathy towards the Bill of Rights and say, hey, we need to make a second look at this guy. Right? I mean, like, that's what...

Speaker 5:
[57:54] Eugenics reconsidered.

Speaker 7:
[57:56] Tell me more. You know, like, that's a weird thing.

Speaker 5:
[58:00] It is weird. Before we take an ad break, please consider becoming a member of The Dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up at thedispatch.com/join. And if you use the promo code roundtable, you'll get one month free. And speaking of ads, if they aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, two free gift memberships to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders, and more. Okay, we'll be right back.

Speaker 10:
[58:33] Hi, Diva. It's Rachel.

Speaker 6:
[58:35] And Jordan. Yeah, hi.

Speaker 9:
[58:36] Quick question.

Speaker 10:
[58:37] Why are you not spending your Venmo balance?

Speaker 6:
[58:39] Yeah, we're concerned.

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[58:40] You can like buy stuff with it.

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[58:41] You love buying stuff.

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[58:43] And earn cash back on eligible purchases.

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[58:45] You love purchasing eligible things.

Speaker 10:
[58:47] So the money your friend sent you yesterday, that's today's ramen or ride share or eye patches.

Speaker 6:
[58:52] The skincare kind, not the pyro kind.

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[58:54] Spend with Venmo and you can earn cash back with Venmostache. Venmostache bundle terms and exclusions apply.

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[58:59] Max $100 cash back per month.

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[59:00] See terms at Venmo.me slash slash terms. ID verification required to use a Venmo balance.

Speaker 6:
[59:03] Hey, you.

Speaker 11:
[59:04] Feeling hungry? Run the Denny's for. The new Eternia Everyday Value Slam. Part of Denny's Slam and Meal Deals and see the new Masters of the Universe movie only in theaters June 5th. Welcome back.

Speaker 5:
[59:20] Let's return to our discussion. So I want to, before we move to not worth your time, get from each of you a recommendation of something that you have read in Dispatch. Could be last week, could be recently. Go back further if you like. David, do you have a recommendation for us?

Speaker 6:
[59:40] Well, I'm going to, I'm just going to be kind of harping on something I've been harping on for a bit, and that is gambling. I wrote a piece recently about sports gambling at The Times. I debated Chris Christie about it. And so I'm going to point to Charles Layman's piece Online Gambling is Breaking Containment. I really think we're at a moment where this is one of those things. It's one of these sort of emerging, I'm not going to say 80-20, but it's emerging 60-40, 70-30 kind of issue where the real world result of all of this online gambling is really impacting American families. There's a real increase in demand to do something about this. And I thought the piece was great. I thought it was timed in the right time. There is just there is a building movement that says like, we are making vice way too easy for people and we're making virtue harder. And so that's a bad combo. That is a bad combo in this country. And so I would urge folks to read that piece.

Speaker 5:
[60:43] Kevin?

Speaker 1:
[60:43] Well, that was my choice as well. So I guess if I have a number two, that was a very, very fun read. It's Catogeo on Don Jr., the move toward dynastic politics. I've been writing about gambling for a long time. Do you want to think it's just absolutely pernicious in all sorts of ways, but including aesthetically? Again, I'll say this as someone who lived in Vegas for a while. If casinos actually were like James Bond movies, guys in dinner jackets playing, back rat and things like that, I'd have a whole different feel about it. But it's guys on their phones. I live in a college town and I spent a lot of time with undergraduate age men, and talked to at the gym and stuff like that. Just the prevalence of gambling and their lives is a gambling and weed. Two things that I spent a lot of my life working to, to liberalize attitudes toward and that the consequences of wins have been worse than expected.

Speaker 6:
[61:33] Fifty-two percent of nineteen to forty-four year old men have an online sports gambling account. Fifty-two percent. That is, and thirty-one percent of all online sports bettors have had someone talk to them in their life to say, you're doing too much, dude. I mean, that's wild.

Speaker 1:
[61:52] And compare that to the people who have IRAs or something like that or 401Ks.

Speaker 5:
[61:56] We are on the front end of those problems for sure. Jonah.

Speaker 7:
[62:00] So I'm doing this for two reasons. One, on the merits. When the New York Times came out with its expose about the conspiracy that led to the secret dark or partisan origins of the emergency docket, I was just like, you know, I am not even going to read this until the episode of AO comes out explaining their take on it. And then I'll go back and look at it because I just, I don't think, you know, it's an ironic thing because David also works at the New York Times. And so I will be gentle about this, but I just was so deeply suspicious, two paragraphs in, I was like, meh, I'll hold off. And the AO discussion of it was exceedingly useful, contextualizing, David valiantly, you know, tried to defend his pay masters a couple of times. And that was fine. But the other reason I'm bringing this up is I thought it would provide me with something of a segue to congratulate our friend and colleague, Sarah Isgur, host of AO, who debuted at number five on the New York Times bestseller list this week. And we are all very happy for her.

Speaker 5:
[63:06] Very proud of Sarah. As I said in my note to her, after we heard the news, now Jonah will start making fun of you for only having had one New York Times bestseller. Because that's his favorite thing to do to me. There was also a very good SCOTUS blog post pushing back on the New York Times reporting from a professor at Bradley. I'm scrambling to look it up here. We will put that also in the show notes. My recommendation is I think for the second week in a row, the morning dispatch had a terrific report out Thursday morning on the economic fallout from the Strait of Hormuz closure and what that might mean in the near future. We'll put all of those in the show notes. And finally today, not worth your time. We need to go back, I think, to our old friend, your old friend, Jonah, Tucker Carlson. Tucker was never my old friend. Tucker Carlson had an epiphany this week, it seems. He put out a video discussion with his brother Buckley Carlson in which he apologized for his role in making Donald Trump the president. Tucker said, I do think it's like a moment to wrestle with our own consciences, which I thought was news that Tucker still thinks he has a conscience. He says, you know, we'll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be and I wanna say I'm sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional. He goes on to say, it's not enough to say, well, I changed my mind or like, oh, this is bad, I'm out. It's like in very small ways, but in real ways, you and me and millions of people like us for the reason this is happening right now. Jonah, what do you think of your old friend wrestling with his conscience in such a public way?

Speaker 7:
[65:05] Yeah, you're going to have to stop with that.

Speaker 5:
[65:07] You were friends, you described him that way.

Speaker 7:
[65:09] Yeah, yeah, yeah, fair enough.

Speaker 6:
[65:12] I like that, you're going to have to stop that. That is a very subtle, okay.

Speaker 7:
[65:17] So I think the bovine excrement particulate content is very high on all of this. And I don't think that we have time in a not worth your time segment for me to get into all the reasons why I think that. But whenever I hear this, right, first of all, this whole idea that Trump has changed or betrayed MAGA and there are smart versions of it and there are very dumb versions of it, they're still all wrong, right? I mean, this is the same president we've seen for a decade now, the same guy we've seen for a decade. In 2015 and 2016 when David, Kevin and I in particular were like saying this guy's character is obviously flawed and this will end badly no matter what.

Speaker 5:
[66:01] What do you mean David, Kevin and you in particular?

Speaker 6:
[66:03] Where was I?

Speaker 7:
[66:04] That's a great question.

Speaker 6:
[66:06] Where were you Steve? Where were you Steve?

Speaker 5:
[66:07] Trump is, who are you, Sarah Longwell? What are you Sarah Longwell? Trump was attacking me from the stage.

Speaker 7:
[66:14] When David, Kevin and I pledged our mutual honor and our fortunes, our fortunes such as they are. You keep calling him my old friend and you're gonna get this kind of treatment. And so anyway, like the argument was before anything else was his character, right? And his character is not such that everything he ever does is always wrong or always bad, but his character is such that he's unreliable, he is self-interested, he is a deeply flawed human being in ways that exceed normal parameters. And to me, when I hear people say, oh, this is a betrayal, it is like saying, I love this bull in a china shop that for a decade has smashed and destroyed things and dumped on the floor, but whoa, not that vase. You know, you can't break that. You know, when we knew that when he was saying, oh, he was like, grab women by their privates or take the oil or a thousand, like it's not even a foreign policy argument from Tucker. It's about Israel because he was fine with the Venezuela stuff, right? Marjorie Taylor Greene was fine with the Venezuela stuff. Megyn Kelly was fine with the Venezuela stuff, fine with bullying NATO allies to take Greenland. The only thing that sets them is that, my God, we might have done something to help the Jews. And for that to cause a crisis of conscience tells you more about the dude's conscience and it tells you about the seriousness of his arguments.

Speaker 5:
[67:41] David, go ahead.

Speaker 6:
[67:42] There's real IRGC turning on the Ayatollah vibes here. Like that. This is not, oh, Tucker has seen the light. This is the kind of thing where you're talking about the right being shanked by the further right. Like if you're talking about somebody hard right turning on Putin or the IRGC turning on the Ayatollah, which is why I am looking at a lot of this commentary, sort of, I'm beginning to see the glimmers, you know, of the strange new respect phenomenon. And it's exactly what Jonah was saying. This strange new respect, they've broken with Trump, not because of the violence. I mean, I honestly think that they'd stick with Trump if he bombed Ukraine. These guys hate Ukraine, many of them. And so it's not the violence of it all. It really is, I mean, it's the Israel of it all. And you just don't give credit to that kind of mindset. Kevin?

Speaker 1:
[68:43] Tucker wrestled his conscience. Tucker what? You know, I used to be a pretty good wrestler. I had one undefeated season in high school. I think I had 11 consecutive pins or something like that. And I wrestle my three year old in the evening sometimes. And that's Tucker wrestling his conscience. Conscience does not have much of a chance. If conscience is going to win, you have to let conscience win. That's how that works out. Yeah, I don't think there's anything else to say about that. I don't think there's any danger of being swept away by conscience. But even when he's like, and this is what, I will say this about this. He's one of these people who can't actually apologize. So I apologize for this, but I didn't mean to do it. I wasn't aware I was doing it at the time. So there's no real culpability for me at it. So I'm saying the word apology while exonerating myself from actually being morally culpable in any way for the things that I've done and said. And I hate that kind of apology. God knows I've made many of those apologies in my life and I apologize for those apologies. I regret them.

Speaker 7:
[69:42] But I'm sorry you feel that way.

Speaker 1:
[69:44] Yes, I'm sorry.

Speaker 7:
[69:45] You feel that way.

Speaker 1:
[69:47] I didn't know it would hurt your feeling so much when I punched you in the face. Yeah, she's just the worst. I won't go on. David was talking about broken records earlier and talking about obsolete technological references. We'll have to stop talking about broken records one of these days, but we can talk about Dispatch audio story reader going haywire and people will get the reference sometimes. But Tucker to be a broken record on the subject is just such a mystery to me. I understand people who do things for certain kinds of reasons. I understand people who sell out just for financial reasons and stuff like that. There are people out in Trump's world who are clearly just doing it for the money. That's not honorable, but I get it. Tucker is doing something else. I don't think it's just about money. I don't think it's even just about being famous and trying to stay relevant to the conversation and all that and being in people's heads. There's something else going on with this guy and I do not know what it is. I don't know him as well as his good friend Jonah used to hang out with him a lot. I did know him a little bit and I never saw any glimmer of this particular madness in him. But then again, I wasn't as intimately acquainted with Jonah Goldberg.

Speaker 5:
[70:52] Well, without thinking that we've provided the answer to your question or solved the mystery that you mentioned, Kevin, we will also post John McCormack's very fine piece about Tucker Carlson, profile about Tucker Carlson and my much less fine review of Jason Zangarly's book about Tucker Carlson. We will include those in the show notes. Thank you all for joining today. This was a fun discussion and we will see you again next time. And finally, if you like what we're doing here, you can rate, review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. And as always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns or corrections, you can email us at roundtable at the dispatch.com. We read everything, even the ones from old friends of Tucker Carlson. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in and thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Noah Hickey and Peter Bonavitcher. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.