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[upbeat music] [groans]
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Ladies and gentlemen, uh-
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Can I please have your attention? Can you dig it? [cheering] [upbeat music]
Jonah Goldberg
Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by The Dispatch and Dispatch Media. Um, I’m recording this, uh, a little before 9:00 on a rainy, bleak Friday morning. For those of you who don’t follow me on, uh, the Twitters, my gloriously dopey springer spaniel, Pippa, has hurt her leg and is– could not be
Jonah Goldberg
more pathetic if she tried. You know, Shriner’s Hospital, Sarah McLaughlin, ASPCA, someone should get a camera on her and, and film her in sepia tone or black and white or whatever. The only reason I’m bringing this up is, uh, there’s been an outpouring of concern. She’ll be fine. Vets in DC are something I could talk about for hours, and vets in general, I guess. I have very strong views on vets. I get very frustrated with vets. We finally gave up on our old vet. DC residents, many of you will know it as Friendship Animal Hospital. It has one of the only ERs in the area, and so it grabs you in and charges you large amounts of money, and there should be a Goldberg wing, or at least a Cosmo and Zoe wing of Friendship Animal Hospital, the amount of money I’ve spent there. We were just so incredibly impressed that our new vet, who’s out in Bethesda, um, who did wonderful help with us with Gracie and some stuff with Zoe, said that they didn’t think they needed to do an X-ray. And my experience with most vets, if there’s a plausible case for an X-ray, well, let’s just get that on the schedule and on the bill. So anyway, I mentioned that on Twitter, and lots of people had the same reaction, and I thought it was interesting. So Benson Animal Hospital in Bethesda, they’re great. All right. My life is in total freaking chaos. We are packing up this house to stage it, to sell it. Need not dwell further on that. Where to start? Well, I mean, the news
Jonah Goldberg
was that, uh, Pam Bondi was fired. I have this weird feeling, you know, about the administration is like when they fire hacks, I’m like, “Oh, that’s good.” And then I’m like, “Ugh, but who are they– They were fired because they were incompetent at their hackery, so who are they gonna try and replace her with?” And so it’s like,
Jonah Goldberg
I don’t know. Is America better off or not? I don’t know. I think this is, like, sort of a fundamental dynamic,
Jonah Goldberg
particularly the Trump second term, but it has its applications in the first term too. Trump cares more about anything, more than anything about personal loyalty. This is a well-established fan- fact. You know this from the way he talks. You know this from the, the, the literally the tests and interview questions that were given to employees about what they– what potential employees about what they thought about January 6th and all this kind of stuff. You know, I wrote about
Jonah Goldberg
critical Trump theory, you know, years ago, where, you know, Trump takes any inconvenient facts, any bad news, any, um, restraint on him personally. You know, so when Bill Barr said he looked into the, the stolen election stuff and said it was all BS, Trump’s response wasn’t, you know, “Oh, you screwed up. You gotta look harder.” It wasn’t, “Well, what about, what about these reports I’m seeing in Wisconsin?” Or whatever. It wasn’t anything like that. It was, “You must hate Trump.” Right? Because Trump thinks that if there’s any disparate impact, negative impact upon him in any regard, it’s a sign of irrational, unfair, unjust hatred of him or dislike of him, that you are an enemy. In fact, there’s this great clip of him speaking this week at some Easter thing where he talks about how if you’re nice to him, he loves you. He says, “You know, you’re not supposed to be that easily seduced, but what can I say?” It was amazingly– I think Tim Carney pointed out how, how, you know, people say Trump isn’t self-aware, but, like, he just, he said the quiet part out loud. He’s like, if you kiss his ass, if you praise him, if you’re nice to him, he’ll get your back, he’ll fight for you. And he says, “I, I don’t care if you’re a bad person. You know, I’ll, I just do it.” But the, the point I’m trying to get to is, so when you have that criteria, when the, the chief criteria is personal loyalty first, loyalty to the president, political loyalty, personal loyalty to the president first, that as a fact of logic just simply means that there’s
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content to the loyalty, right? I mean, the, the demonstration of loyalty is being willing to do things that are unethical, right? So that, that puts it down even– That puts integrity even lower on the list.
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And so the thing is that people with good qualifications for really hard, important jobs tend to actually have integrity, right? The way you rise to the top of the legal profession or, you know, foreign policy and all these kinds of things, it doesn’t mean you don’t play hardball. It doesn’t mean that you can’t be cutthroat about various things. But you learn
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that your reputation matters. You learn where– you know where the guardrails are. For those kinds of people-It’s really just not worth it to work for this administration. I mean, it, it was at the beginning of the first Trump administration because people thought, “Okay, we’ll be the guardrails, we’ll be the circuit breakers, we’ll be the, the checks, and my country is called to serve, and, and this guy’s inexperienced and he easy– needs help.” And so, you know, Mattis and Pompeo and all those gu- politicians too, right? They went in, but, like, it became apparent by the end of the Trump administration that those people get chewed up. And at, by the second Trump administration, the, the, the single most important criteria was
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yes men and women. No restrainers, right? No one who… Well, on- only enablers wanted here. When you start going through the list of potential candidates, part- particularly ones who could pass even a Republican-controlled Senate, there just aren’t a lot of them, and they tend to be, you know, a pretty shabby quality. There are a few exceptions. I think Burgum, Doug Burgum, you know, is a, is a serious, decent person. I think, you know, rumor is he really regrets his decision going in the administration or wants to get out, but I don’t know if that’s true. Wouldn’t surprise me.
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Rubio, I think is a quality cabinet secretary with real skill, who has made some maneuvering compromises that obviously I have criticism of. But in the grand tradition of, you know, world’s tallest midget and all that kind of stuff, at minimum, Rubio really stands out in the administration for having,
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not just… I mean, I, in, you know, forget the word integrity for a second. Some professionalism, some understanding that arguments still matter, that facts still matter. Like, he’s, he’s better at debating
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and making his case than most of his critics and opponents. He stands out in that way in this administration. You know, and then there are people who have some positions that don’t really matter, and so their hackishness seems up, at an appropriate level for the job. Bondi is just, like, the perfect example of finding someone who is
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hackish enough, morally flexible enough, craven, cynical, glory-seeking, uh, partisan enough to
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wanna do the job
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with the qualifications to get the job, right? ‘Cause she wasn’t elected, you know, she was a, a, a prosecutor or a AG or district attorney, whatever it was, in, in Florida. But she’s also got sort of Mar-a-Lago poisoning, which is, like, why he would want her. But she’s not a top-tier candidate. You know, in, in a normie world, no one would ever think about her being appointed attorney general. And so the problem is, you get these people who lack competence, they lack integrity, which is why they got the job. They are subpar people, you know, in these positions, and the thing that ends up ruining it for them is that Trump cannot abide by the idea that he doesn’t have the best people, right? He like, he, it, it, he doesn’t mind it if it’s
Jonah Goldberg
secret, but he wants the public reputation that his people are the best and that there’s no trade-off in quality when you get someone willing to work for the Trump administration. And then he gets em- over time, he gets embarrassed by the fact that the only people he could get for a lot of these positions are unqualified hacks, and when they start demonstrating their un- unqualified hackery, it makes him look bad. That’s a pattern with a bunch of people, but, like, the, Bondi is just so perfect for it. You know, her testimony before Congress, which I think was a constitutional hate crime, and Republicans and Democrat… You know, forget Democrats. Of course they’re gonna be partisan about it and condemn it. But Republicans should have had some institutional cojones, some modicum, some fraction of respect for their own positions in the constitutional order and said, “You know, Madam Attorney General, I disagree with my colleagues on the other side of this table or the dais or whatever, but, um, you cannot come in here and insult members of this institution like this. It is simply uncalled for, and we’re gonna hold you in contempt if you continue to do it. This is not a cable news show.” I would have had respect for any Republican who had done that, or even something close to it. But, like, you watch some of the clips of, you know, about her doing the Dow is at 50,000, and she didn’t know how to, like, she didn’t know what word comes after 50,000, so she, for a second she tries to say dollars, you know? [chuckles] Um, and in this complete cringe-inducing non-sequitur of a defense of Donald Trump and a claim that Democrats are only going after Epstein because the Dow is at 50,000 or something like that. It was just painful. The reason why Trump is mad at Bondi,
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at least according to all the reports, I talked to some MAGA-adjacent people in the last 48 hours, is that she wasn’t successful at doing the base, cynical, unpatriotic, corrupt things, hackish things that Trump wanted her to do. And I, I, I, I know there are some people who cringe at some of those adjectives that I use, but I’ll stand by them. You know, when you don’t have a criminal case against some, a political opponent, when you’ve been put on notice, when you swore at your confirmation hearings that there would be no political bias in the Justice Department of any kind, and then you bring criminal cases against political opponents
Jonah Goldberg
when, and have to go over the heads of career prosecutors and in some case- some cases, polit- Trump-appointed, confirmed prosecutors, and you move those people aside to get it done anywayI get really tired of the people who love, who, who have this incredibly narrow definition of what patriotism is. If you’re a law- [laughs] if you’re the chief, if you’re the top lawyer in the government, right? If you’re the U.S. attorney general who’s taken an oath to defend the Constitution, whose inst- storied institution is all about trying to uphold the highest ideals of the rule of law and even protecting rights and all this kind of stuff, and you just turn it into this, you know, this banana republic persecution thing, destroying its reputation, then, you know, that’s unpatriotic to me. Um, I d- I, I have no problem with it. And, and so i- in some ways, the irony here is that Trump set her up to fail because the good news is, is that the rest of the system,
Jonah Goldberg
particularly the courts, aren’t gonna play along, right? I mean, Trump thinks that, like, the system is rigged because of his critical Trump theory thinking, right? He thinks if the system was bad to Trump, that must mean the system is corrupt, and therefore, if it’s corrupt, now that I’m in charge, I can use its corruption going the other way. And he cannot countenance the possibility that maybe some of those, uh, criminal prosecutions were legitimate, um, were justified. Now, I, I think some of them weren’t. The Tish James stuff and all that, that was very bad. But my biggest complaint about it was not the unfairness to Trump, right? I mean, it was the fact that it made the legitimate prosecutions or investigations into Trump look partisan, too. So anyway, I have no idea. The, the names are all over the place. Lee Zeldin’s being talked about a lot. Todd Blanche is gonna be the interim acting attorney general. And I gotta say, like, I have grown to really despise Todd Blanche. I know Rich Lowry and some other people think he’s this really int- effective communicator, and I know he used to have a pretty good reputation, but the final straw for me was his appearance at CPAC, which I think might have been anticipatory auditioning for the AG thing, given that he probably knew that Bondi’s time was coming to an end. Chris Christie had a good rant about this the other day, but if you can’t understand the damage that has been done. It’s funny, I, I pointed out, I buttered the line. I hate it when I do this on TV. They had a clip from Bondi’s resignation saying how she was proud to be the attorney general for the most consequential year in the Department of Justice’s history.
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And I love phrases like that because they sound like compliments,
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but they aren’t necessarily compliments. And anyway, I buttered the line, but the, the line I tried to get out was, you know, “Look, um,
Jonah Goldberg
the Titanic had the most consequential maiden voyage of any luxury cruise liner.” That’s a defensible statement. That doesn’t mean, um, it’s a positive statement necessarily. And I can’t speak to some of the corruption of the Teapot Dome era or the,
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or under Reconstruction or anything like that, so I, I very rarely wanna say ever. In my lifetime,
Jonah Goldberg
this has been the most corrupted, most damaged. She has been to the Department of Justice what, um… Kevin Roberts. There you go. Sorry, I looked it up ’cause I just, it was gonna drive me crazy. Yeah, I think Pam Bondi is the Kevin Roberts of the Justice Department. In some ways, Blanche is the guy who’s a better illustration of it because, I, I mean, I, I think Bondi was a subpar partisan hack politician before she took the job, and I expected her to be one as AG. But Blanche had something more of a reputation as a serious person. At CPAC, he said, he said two things. I’m trying to do this from memory. One, he bragged as if it was something to brag about,
Jonah Goldberg
that every single person who worked on any of the January 6th cases
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or the Trump Mar-a-Lago cases, something like that, had all been purged from the Department of Justice.
Jonah Goldberg
And you gotta think about what he’s saying there. He is bragging to, uh, explicitly, at minimum partisan, but really, I mean, it’s, it’s more than partisan, right? I mean,
Jonah Goldberg
m- m- Kellyanne Conway was right in 2017 where CPAC had become TPAC. Oh, CPAC is another institution. I didn’t think it had that far to fall, but man, uh, Matt Schlapp and those guys have ruined that thing. And I say this as the, I think, 2011 conservative CPAC Journalist of the Year. So he brags about firing line au- line attorneys at the Department of Justice and FBI agents and all that, who were simply
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following lawful orders from, and assignments, from their superiors on a
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perfectly defensible investigation into,
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uh, a president who tried to steal an election and a mob that tried to, you know, take members of Congress prisoner and beat up cops. And I mean, like, and that was, that, that was the other thing. So I’m, I’m conflating it because he said two things. One was he was taking pride that they purged anybody who had anything to do with those investigations, and the other thing he said is that his pardoning of every single January 6th, everyone con- convicted for an offense on January 6th, that by pardoning them, Trump was showing his commitment to the base.
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I have a hard– Like, the deputy AG, and that’s what, you know, his title was when he was speaking at CPAC a week ago,
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is supposed to be, like,
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the serious, upstandingInternal defender of the institution and its values. And here he is going to CPAC and feeding these people the stuff that Trump issued pardons, which are s- you know, the process for pardons is supposed to be, like, incredibly above board, and you’re supposed to, you know, people are, for the most part, are supposed to serve their sentences, and they’re supposed to show contrition, and you’re supposed to do individual investigations. Now, there have been some pardons of whole classes of people, like Carter with the draft dodgers stuff. But come on. All right. I’m done with all that. I didn’t mean to go on that long. I just… Oh, okay. So, you know, we, we’ve changed the schedule for, for “The Remnant.” I don’t love it, but it makes sense institutionally for a bunch of reasons. But it means that I basically have to record the first Remnant of the week c- farther in advance than I sometimes would like if we’re gonna be talking about breaking news stuff, right? So the one that drops, I believe, Monday, is with Ross Douthat. I orig- we originally got him on the calendar, like, three months ago because he wrote a column for The New York Times about the end of the conservative era and all this kind of stuff and the, the future of the GOP that I just thought was, it was interesting,
Jonah Goldberg
it was serious, it was intellectually engaging, but I thought wrong in, as I put it, really interesting ways. And so I did this long response to it. And so I wanted to have him on to hash it out and, but it’s been three months, and the Iran stuff, we started with the Iran stuff, and then we kinda didn’t get off of it for a very long time. So we talked about that for a long time, and then we’d really kinda ended up giving short shrift to our, our, the disagreement I wanted to have him on about. It was interesting. I think people will enjoy it. But I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna, like, give any spoilers. I’ll just say that we thought, we were worried that Trump’s speech on Iran would, um,
Jonah Goldberg
overtake the conversation because it might involve some important change to the status quo or announce ground troops or whatever, um, or withdrawal, you know. And it turned out it did none of those things. Just a, a can-kicking exercise to a certain extent. It prompted my wife and I to get into quite a bit of a fight because I probably was a little too theatrical in my sighs and groaning during it, and she thought that was a sign of incipient bulwarkism, and I took great offense at that. And so we had a, we had a, a disagreement, um, where I think we came out in a better place on the other side. But she wanted to listen to the speech, and I was just too, um… I, I’ll just be honest. I mean, what is fair, I, I, I, I, I do not think I am guilty of incipient bulwarkism, but, um, I do think that it is fair to say that I have trouble listening to Trump for extended periods of time. I think he’s a bad communicator. I am open to the, you know, the Scott Adams kind of view is that he’s a brilliant communicator because he conveys things at a level that a lot of,
Jonah Goldberg
lot of different people can comprehend in their gut. I think one of the things that does make him charismatic is that a lot of people find him funny. I don’t think he’s as funny. I get it. I do get why people think he’s funny. I, I’ve talked about this before. My, one of my favorite words is fremdschämen, which is embarrassment for somebody else at a distance. So, like, when you watch “The Office” and Michael Scott, like, [chuckles] if you ever watched the Scots Tots episode, it makes, it, it, it makes me wanna put my head in an oven. But when people do things embarrassing and you cringe about it and all that kind of stuff, that’s how he makes me physically feel when I hear him talk sometimes. So that is a real bias on my part. I think it’s an, a deserved bias, but, like, people can differ. And so I struggle with that. The reason I bring it up is I struggle. It’s like, am I letting that feeling get in the way of my analysis? He raced through parts that were useful, um, because he hates reading from a teleprompter. He does, he thinks if it comes from a teleprompter, he gets no credit for whether a speech was good. It’s gotta be his weave. It’s gotta be this thing where he’s the one who brilliantly, on the fly, adds some special,
Jonah Goldberg
you know, joke or phrasing. You know, so, like, I’m sure he ad-libbed the bit about Obama giving cash, green cash, to the Iranians. He just, he thinks, like, that stuff is great. And, but even, even, even without the ad libs, I think the, the structure of the thing was a hot mess. The point of the thing was supposed to be persuasive, and I think he went into it because he had been told by a bunch of people, “You haven’t done a presidential address. You’re getting criticizing, cri- criticized for not doing a presidential address.” And he saw it as a box-checking exercise more than an attempt to move public opinion. And I think in some ways he resents the fact that he has to try to move public opinion. So it reminds me of the scene in the “Blues Brothers” where Jake is trying to explain to Carrie Fisher why he stood her up at the wedding.
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I ran out of gas. I had a flat tire. I, I didn’t have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn’t come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake, a terrible flood, locusts. It wasn’t my fault, I swear to God.
Jonah Goldberg
I, it’s not exactly the same thing, but the point is, is, and I, I, I keep making this, this, this point, you know, again, from, uh, from Eli, uh-About the difference between a liar and a BS’er, BS’ers will tell you anything that you wanna hear if they think it might work. And when you listen to that speech, he’s trying to tell every constituency what it wants to hear all at once, while at the same time not conceding anything has gone badly or unexpectedly. And all the targeted audiences also hear the stuff he’s saying to the other targeted audiences. And so, like, he wants to say one thing to markets, he wants to say one thing to the Iranians, he wants to say one thing to the Europeans, he wants to say one thing to Americans, he wants to say one thing to MAGA world, he wants to say one thing to Democrats, and he thinks that he can say all of them, even when they contradict each other,
Jonah Goldberg
without people hearing the contradictory bits. They only hear the bits that they wanna hear. And, and he also, I, I think it’s really, really important to point out, he also wants to say stuff that he wants to hear. Trump has– I mean, I, I’m very serious about this. Trump has this thing, going back to the prosperity gospel and, you know, the power of positive thinking, and I’ll leave it to other people who take– who, who have skin in that fight, but I– to pronounce too much on it, but I, I personally think
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there’s a pretty strong case that a lot of that stuff is heretical. But I think David French was making this point on the DisPod,
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somebody was, um, that, you know, the Strait of Romu- Hormuz,
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when the war is over, it will just, it’ll open naturally. And I think the point David made was that it was a lot like where he just asserted that come the spring, COVID will go away with the warm weather. It’ll just go away, right? He does this kinda thing all the time. And so that speech, which I think there was a speech in… Elliot Abrams had a good take on all of it, um, over at National Review. We can put it in the show notes. I think there was a good speech that could’ve been given. I think there was a good speech in it if you had trimmed it, focused it, made a, an actual argument. But he didn’t make, he didn’t make an argument other than, “I’m awesome. We’re doing great.” And the thing that really pisses me off about the, the, the address, first of all,
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I think the war should continue for a little while, so, like, the fact that it was not effective and didn’t do what it needed to do pisses me off, but that’s more of a lamentation than anger. The thing that really made me angry was I had been told by various people that the plan for the pa- the, one of the main goals for the speech was to get NATO
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and other allies involved in the effort and maybe help with the Strait of Hormuz.
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And then
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the only bit about it was just a terrible pitch for that. If that was the goal, you know, just telling all these European powers, “Just go in and take it. Muster some delayed courage and take it,” that’s– and, you know, “You should’ve been with us from the beginning,” well, he didn’t ask them to be with him in the beginning. You know, this was just such a terrible way. If you actually wanted the allies to do what you claim you want them to do, you wouldn’t have done it that way. Except I don’t think he is incapable of conceding error. He’s incapable of acknowledging that the Europeans and, or NATO, whoever, you know, our allies, have a reason to be pissed. Oh, and so anyway, on the Ross thing, the, one of the things we really got into a fight about, fight strong, one of the things we, we had a sh- a pointed disagreement about
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was the betrayal thing, right? Whether or not going into Iran was a betrayal. And again, I feel a little bad pre-spinning a podcast y-you won’t hear until Monday, but I’ve been thinking about this a lot. And with serious
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deliberation and consideration and a rigorous
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personal intellectual inventory and emotional inventory of my thinking, I’ve come to the conclusion, however reluctantly, that I’m 100% right. The cherry-picking involved in saying that this was a particular betrayal is projection. It’s the people who wanted it to be true, right? If, if the reason w- if, like, the main reason you rationalize… I don’t, I don’t think a lot of people actually voted for Trump on the endless wars, you know, no more endless war stuff, but I think it was the most powerful rationalization for a lot of people to vote for Trump, right? Not, not a majority, but a chunk of, you know, people who have been yearning for a Buchananite insurgency within the right to take over the party. When they heard, you know… What, what was that? There was a fantastic book, uh, by
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Timberg was his last name, um, Nightingale Song, where he begins with this
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metaphor about, um, or analogy about
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hearing,
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maybe it was Ollie North, but somebody used some phrase from Vietnam
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that triggered in him this whole ca-cascade of memories, and he likens it to, like, when you, when one nightingale hears another nightingale’s song. I think there are a whole bunch of people on the Buchananite right and beyond into, into, into, into the swamps beyond who have been,
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you know, nurturing resentments about the GOP, about the Bush people, even the Reagan people, the neocons, all this kinda stuff, and when they heard Trump’s no more endless war stuff, it was their nightingale song, and it activated them, and they projected upon him a commitment to this stuff that I thought was wholly unwarranted. The reason why I think this idea that the Iran war is a first-order betrayalOf Trumpism or MAGA or Trumpists or whatever, the thing that I, I’ve been thinking about is, like, w-wait a second. Like,
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I bet you
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Trump
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said, “I will end the deficit in my first year,” or, um, “I will end the Ukraine war in a single day,” as often, if not, or more often than he said anything about no more endless wars. And his, his overspending, have, have any of the people who took him seriously about that or said other people should take him seriously, have they talked about how this is a betrayal? That, you know, Trump’s fiscal incontinence is, you know, uh, as Trump would say, like we’ve never seen before? Are they holding him to account for not ending the Ukraine war? Are we holding him to account for not getting rid of Obamacare or spending nine
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years and 11 months for his healthcare plan that was gonna come out in two weeks? And my point is, is that
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y-when you have just a massive
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splotch of paint or fa- or, or a bunch of clouds, and you find faces in clouds or, “Oh, look, it’s a poodle,” or whatever, that’s Trump. You are imposing on Trump the meaning that you want and then saying when the cloud shifts that you’ve been betrayed. That’s on you. That’s not what Trump did. I mean, this is not, uh, neither a defense of Trump nor a criticism of Trump, really. It is just a description of Trump. And the people who say they’re being betrayed, it’s ’cause they’re pissed at themselves ’cause they miscalculated about what Trump represented and the, and the glorious future that he was gonna bring them. And so I just, I just don’t, I don’t buy the argument
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at all. I’ll stop with the Trump stuff now. I know it’s gone on too long. This week, Steve’s traveling for family and other things, so I hosted the, the Dispatch podcast this week. The first episode of the week was, uh, specifically on Cuba and whether Cuba is next. And I got some criticism from a friend, hi, Kevin, not Kevin Williamson, that n- it was sad that none of us made more of an affirmative case for regime change in Cuba based on just the sort of fundamental, freedom is good, freedom agenda is good, bringing democracy to a pissant Marxist dictatorship is defensible, is, is, is, is, is a good in its own right, even if it’s not un-necessarily enough in the cost-benefit analysis. Because if it was, you know, we should have done– Well, maybe we should have done it, you know, 50 years ago, 75 years ago, whatever. But, um… And I think that criticism is fair. People can come down on different sides of the question, but, um, as a, as a guy who
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thinks that
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spreading freedom around the world where possible, when possible, when prudential, and all that is a good thing, we should have talked about it more. But, um, if I was– had my druthers and could just talk about Cuba the way I wanna talk about Cuba, it would just be a lot more airing of old grievances. Uh, I know I’ve said this a million times, but, like, my dad was obsessed with the biases of The New York Times and… Well, he loved The New York Times. He read it religiously every single day, thought it was a great newspaper. It drove– He thought it was a worthy– He thought it was the
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Moriarty to his Sherlock Holmes. He thought it was a worthy opponent. I would be walking to Murray’s Sturgeon Shop on 88th or 89th Street and Broadway. That was our Sunday tradition, is either I or my brother would, you know, hold my dad’s hand and walk to the bagel shop to get… My mom would yell as we left the house, “Release the Bagel Lancers.” And we would go up there and get bagels and get some lox and, you know.
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My dad would get friggin’ pickled herring, which, oh, do I hate. Ugh. My dad tried to get me to love pickled herring. And, you know, and we would talk. And from, like, I mean, my dad would talk about how much it drove him crazy that, um, The New York Times
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refer, it would refer routinely or periodically to Fidel Castro as Dr. Castro. He was like,
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“He’s got a law degree.
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Like, they don’t even call Henry Kissinger Dr. Kissinger.” [chuckles] Um, and, and so it’d be a lot of that kind of stuff. Like, you know, um, one of the most famous cartoons
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National Review ever published was… I guess I gotta set up the backstory. So there was a huge advertising campaign for the classified section, I think, I think it was The New York Times. It might’ve been The Wall Street Journal. But regardless, the, the tagline for the advertising campaign was, “I got my job through,” I think it was The New York Times. But probably the most famous cartoon, at least for a long time, that National Review ever ran had Fidel Castro saying, “I got my job through The New York Times.” And it’s funny ’cause it’s true. I mean, it’s not entirely true. There’s a whole rich tradition, and don’t– You coulda gotten my dad started on it, of, like, Wal- talking about Walter Duranty, who was The New York Times’, uh, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who basically just covered up the famine in Russia and s- a lot of Stalin’s crimes, um, because he was pro-Soviet. People talk less about Herbert Matthews, who was the, was a foreign correspondent who just got suckered by Castro. One of these classic examples, there are a lot of them. Actually, the, um, The Rest is History podcast recently did a bonus episode on a similar guy from the Daily Mail who just got seduced by Hitler. But Matthews, who I should, now that I mention it, should say, was similarly seduced by Fidel, I mean, uh, by, by Benito Mussolini 30 years earlier. But, uh, Matthews was one of these, you know-Old hands, storied foreign correspondent types, and he met with Castro in the hills when he was still a guerrilla. I’m truncating the story for podcast sake. And, um,
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the famous story is that
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at least he was a bit of a useful idiot, right? I mean, he was totally bought in. Castro, Castro talked, before he got, you know, in power, he talks a much bigger game about democracy and human rights and all that kind of stuff. That’s what communists do. But the, uh, the story, as the story has, I, I think it came out in partly in a bio for, of, of Matthews. What Castro did was he has this meeting in the jungle, very dramatic, right? And he would have his troops march by periodically, and the impression that Matthews got was that Castro had a massive number of troops. But what he did, what, what Castro did was he told his troops, “When, after you march by, go a, go a bit further down the jungle path and then swing around and slightly change your clothes and march past again, and, and again.” And so
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Matthews thought these were all different troops when it was really, like, the same, I don’t know, 20, 50 guys marching past, like, 10 times. Um, and he got suckered by that. And he got a thing, he got suckered by Castro, and the New York Ti- and his reporting in The New York Times was one of the things that’s helped turn around the cause for Castro when, when they were sort of on their last legs as guerrillas. I didn’t think that was the kind of thing to bring up in the podcast while I was moderating it, but I, I f- I love that stuff. And then on the, the Thursday, the, the, the Dispod- Dispatch podcast that dropped today, it was me, Megan, David French, and Mike Nelson, who’s really a, become a great value add on military stuff for us. And we mostly talked about the Iran war. I’m not gonna get back into that. But then the sec- like second subject was this, um,
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these two court cases against Meta. Look, at the end of the day, I am pretty much on David and Megan’s side. They’re, they basically hate these find, these rulings. They think these rulings are kind of ludicrous. They think, um,
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lawsuits for legal, you know, for platforms doing legal free speech is ridiculous and pernicious and will have deleterious consequences going forward and all that. And I am intellectually, for the most part, persuaded by all of that, but maybe it’s ’cause, you know, I’m trying to be more like Sarah and do the, you know, devil’s advocate thing. I kinda messed it up. That’s another thing. Like my Titanic line, I, I messed this thing up, too. I am
Jonah Goldberg
sufficiently pissed off about the damage that these social media apps have done to America and done to a generation of kids, or a half generation of kids, that I’m at least open to some of the intellectual arguments on the other side than I might have been even five years ago. For those of you who haven’t followed this, basically the novel legal theory, and it’s not entirely novel, but, uh, it’s novel at minimum because it succeeded, was that it’s not so much the content
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of these apps,
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Instagram, YouTube, whatever. It is
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the algorithm and the digital design or architecture that presents it that’s addictive.
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And it was the addiction argument that sort of won the day. And, um, I can’t remember if it was Megan or, or David, but one of them said, you know, “The idea that you could sue the makers of the TV show ‘The Pit’ because everyone ends on a cliffhanger, um, is ridiculous.” And I think it’s actually a very good point, right? It’s like TV,
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movies, lots of things are made to be compelling,
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this podcast notwithstanding. And I get that, right? I mean, there’s a reason why f- I mean, I, I read, I, I think all of the Tarzan books as a kid, and the reason why every chapter ends in a cliffhanger is sort of like with Charles Dickens, um, and, you know, the, a lot of his stories, is that they were serially. Like, that’s just the nature of the beast. Where I kinda get off the bus a little bit is that differences in degree can be differences in kind. And I don’t think it’s ludicrous to say
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that because there’s an endless scroll and an infinite supply of ones and zeros and an infinite supply of content, that
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companies that focus on making the
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presentation of the content addictive aren’t doing something different than a weekly TV show or, or newspaper, you know, story. I’m open to it, and that’s one of the reasons w- and I, I, I tried to do the devil’s advocate thing. I don’t think I did a particularly good job of it, but, you know, there’s a reason why a lot of people are liking this to the lawsuits against tobacco companies. It’s ’cause it, for a long time, everyone wanted to focus on the dangerous effects of tobacco. Understandable, ’cause it is the tobacco that is bad for you when you’re smoking cigarettes. But they didn’t focus for the longest time on the nicotine, which is the thing that makes it addictive. And if you didn’t have the nicotine as concentrated as it was-Fewer people would have smoked and fewer people would have been addicted. You still would have had people because nicotine comes naturally in tobacco, but they would, the tobacco companies, you know, the case was made that the tobacco companies basically turned cigarettes into nicotine delivery devices. And I think it is conceivable that we’re going to get to a point
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where, you know, we get essentially holodecks, right, from Star Trek, or we get neural implants that take us off into essentially orgiastic adventures
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that we never want to get out of. I know I’ve brought this up before. It might be Rawls. It might be somebody else. But there’s some
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thought experiment from some big philosopher who says if you could have a machine, you know, sort of like a virtual reality machine where you could have endless fun and pleasure but have no productive life whatsoever, would you do it, you know? And there’s some professor. I saw this
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article on Twitter linking to the article a long time ago about this professor would ask her students every year at the beginning of the year whether they would do it. And for 20 years, they all basically everyone said no.
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And then like around COVID or whatever, the kids all started saying yes.
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And that scares me, right? That scares me. And simply saying, well, it’s really compelling entertainment.
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Maybe
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Instagram feeds don’t cross that line yet.
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But it seems worth having a conversation about where that line is or where it’s going to be on the horizon. And that’s all. That’s what I’m getting at. I don’t I just don’t have a lot of sympathy for the social media companies, even though I think the law for the time being at least is on their side and should be on their side. And that that David and Megan are probably right on the merits, on the legal merits.
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But I just don’t think that ends the conversation at the very least. Speaking of Rawls, some cleanup. I got a great text from an old colleague of mine at NR. I don’t know if he wants to be outed on here saying I got Rawls and and Nozick wrong last week when I talked about Rawls. I’m not sure he’s right. But I also after reading his criticisms, I’m really, really glad that I said at the outset that I’m not an expert on Rawls. And
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part of my friend’s criticism was that Nozick thinks justice is prior to the good to I’ll read his exchange. I’ll read his thing with again, no attribution. I actually think you’re getting Rawls wrong in important ways. For one thing, Nozick agreed with Rawls that justice precedes the good. Nozick, for instance, famously defined rights as constraints on what you may do to others in pursuit of any particular conception of the good. At a sufficient level of abstraction, Rawls’s notion of individuals as the only unit of ethical analysis that matters is rooted in the biblical sanctity of the human soul as made in God’s image, as you discussed with that Israeli guy guest back a while here. The big difference between Nozick and Rawls is that Rawls thinks the argument from the original position implies an awful lot about the substance of justice via the supposition that there are an awful lot of things everyone, quote unquote, would agree to under conditions of ignorance. What he includes in that basket of things is where I think he goes badly wrong and where Nozick thought the same. So I agree with you there. Nozick says specifically, quote, there is no social entity with a good
Jonah Goldberg
that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people with their own individual lives. Rawls agrees with this, at least at the start of his argument and near the beginning of A Theory of Justice. He writes something to the effect that utilitarian utilitarianism fails because it applies to society the same principle of rational choice that an individual applies to his own life, extending across persons as if society or one big person maximizing satisfaction. Rawls explicitly calls this out as the fundamental error. I think he meant Nozick there. Sounds a lot like the Hayekian point about spheres of life, right? It’s not Hayek’s point, but it’s cousin to it. So anyway, neither Rawls nor Nozick were utilitarians. And I think the woke doctrine doesn’t come from any deontological morality properly understood. Indeed, the woke say explicitly that your rights can be abridged or abrogated in the pursuit of a very particular set of goods.
Jonah Goldberg
And then he goes on, but I think you get the point. And I wrote to him very quickly. This is this is how I spend my time DMing people. This was great. I need to digest more, but I’m out but am on multiple ass ache deadlines. Fact check true. I will say that I think there’s more damage done because of Rawls’s influence than you’re allowing for. Whether that is an unfair burden to put on Rawls is a secondary question. I do think his difference principle stuff yields a permission structure for some DEI stuff in the institutions influenced by Rawls. He championed looking at the pattern of outcomes in a disinterested way that gave short shrift to motives. I am a Hayek guy and agree with you. Agree with him about the perniciousness of social justice thinking. Nozick has a Hayekian view of this, saying that the justness of an act is contingent on how it actually happened with real people in real specific circumstances. Rawls lent a lot of weight to judging justice by result. Nozick by process. I’m team process.All that said, I’m very glad I conceded up front that I am not an expert on Rawls and I know lots of good folks who still hold a candle for him. So peek inside the tent. I hope my friend who I have not disclosed, um, is not upset about me reading all that. And since I’m reading correspondence… Oh, and I should say just one of the things I have been noodling about the Hannah Arendt episode, which a lot of people loved, and I’m very happy to hear that, I have some problems with Roger Berkowitz’s view
Jonah Goldberg
of Arendt’s view, which I think is the correct one, that there is no truth in politics. I have some problems with that at the margins, depending upon what you take from that, but I’m actually much more sympathetic to this idea that politics is about conversation, you know, which is also, as I said, a very Oakeshottian thing, and that you find usable political truths through conversation, through political context, through elections, through marketplace of ideas and other in, you know, spheres of politics, right? It’s, it’s the usable truth in politics is a negotiated truth to a certain extent. I don’t like talk of negotiated truths and all… It sounds very post-modern-y to me and all that kind of thing. But I think in this dis-difference about Nozick versus Rawls and my friend’s point about how
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Rawls tries to impose
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rational choices on a whole society, I think the Arendt stuff comes into play there insofar as Rawls doesn’t have
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anything like the expertise to make sweeping decisions about how all of society should be organized. He has opinions, they’re more informed than most, but he still… You still have to engage with other people who have perfectly defensible
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other points of view about what is the good life. And one person’s definition of justice cannot be imposed on everybody, certainly not without serious conversation, as, as Arendt might put it, right? Serious discussion. And that’s why a lot of the decisions about
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how to define justice have to be just sort of clear
Jonah Goldberg
rules that are agreeable to a really large number of people from different perspectives precisely because they’re so basic. I’m a simple rules for a complex society guy, and bespoke, clever, complicated definitions of justice which venture into redistribution and aesthetic choices about what society should look like I think are deeply problematic when you’re talking about using state power for them. Anyway, uh, didn’t mean to get this egghead-y on this, but, um, I think it’s interesting stuff. And who wants all that punditry? But anyway, speaking of correspondence, I got an email from Robbie George, uh, who, you know, I kind of buttered my interview with him, my podcast with him about his book, uh, for which I feel very bad, but I revere Robbie George. Everyone loves Robbie George, great scholar and man of integrity. Um, and he sent me this wonderful, I just thought,
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sort of like pure philosophy nerd gold note. He says nice things about me in the front. We don’t need to read that. And then he says that he thought the Mansfield podcast was the best of the best.
Jonah Goldberg
Um, he says, “Harvey was spectacular, and you did a beautiful job drawing him out on the big issues in the new book and some other things, too. I’m especially glad that you asked him about why the great medieval Christian thinkers found so much to admire, embrace, and make use of in Plato, Aristotle, and the other great thinkers of Greek and Roman antiki-antiquti-antiquity despite their paganism.”
Jonah Goldberg
If, if, if you don’t… If you didn’t listen to it or if you don’t recall, I asked him this question about, like,
Jonah Goldberg
how come the, the great theologians of the Middle Ages, you know, or even the earlier, you know, like St. Augustine through Aquinas, all those guys, how come they didn’t struggle more with the fact that they were so influenced by
Jonah Goldberg
pagans when they thought that, you know, the divinity of Christ and, and the Bible were such a refutation of all of that? Anyway, that’s the point he’s… That’s, that’s the thing we’re getting at here. Anyway, back to it. Uh, Robbie writes, “Cryptically but insightfully, he raises the question of whether they were in fact pagans. More precisely, he expressed doubt about whether their understandings of divinity were in fact pagan understandings. I myself have long thought that they were not, and neither Harvey nor I are the first to doubt that they were. Some early Christian thinkers were so impressed by Plato’s insights that they wondered about two possibilities. One,
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might Plato have had some access to the texts of Hebrew revelation?
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Two, if not, might God have given him a private revelation of the content of that revelation? Now, they didn’t in the end assert affirmative answers to these questions, but it’s telling that they speculated about them.
Jonah Goldberg
Where it matters in his writings, Plato does seem to be working with a conception of divinity more like that of what we now call classical theism than like that of the Athenian paganism of his time. Years ago, when I was doing some work involving Plato’s Gorgias, um, Gorgias, I expressed to my doctoral advisor, John Finnis, perplexity about Plato sometimes speaking of the gods, plural, and other times speaking of God or the God, singular.”Professor Finnis pointed out to me,
Jonah Goldberg
pointed out to me something interesting. Namely, that Plato seems to refer to the gods when the reference is ritualistic or ceremonial, but to God when the concept of divinity is doing any real work in the argument or analysis he’s developing.
Jonah Goldberg
Anyway, I’m so glad you had Harvey on the podcast. It was one of… It was one that I literally didn’t want to end. And Robbie did not send me that for publication, but I so loved the email, I asked him for permission, and I said I could anonymize him, and he said, “No need. Just go, feel free.” So thank you, Robbie, for that. I think that’s really fascinating, and I do not… I, I have to admit, I’ve just never been the Platophile that, um, some of my friends are. I’m not disputing his influence or any of that kind of stuff, just like, um, I don’t know, Ar- Aristotle and Socrates w- w- I don’t… I just… The sum of what Plato just never really loved, although I am grateful for him for introducing us to the concept of Atlantis. But, uh, this idea that Plato talks about a monotheistic God when
Jonah Goldberg
it’s doing important philosophical work and the pagan plural gods when it’s just simply sort of ritualistic, customary, traditional sort of boilerplate is really, really interesting to me and makes me wanna go back and look. So anyway, a lot of philosophy these days. I, I know, it’s my podcast. It’s interesting. I, I, I struggle with how much preparation I should do for these things and whether or not this could do better if it were more polished and all of that. But, you know, it does well. In fact, I’ve mentioned this before, but much to Steve’s dismay, um, because he was so skeptical of me doing the solo at all, it does
Jonah Goldberg
on average better than the conversation podcast, which I, I’m mixed about that personally, but, um, I do think it’s interesting. I actually think… I was a former television producer. I could do much more polished remnants that would take more work and all that kind of thing, and we’re kind of at the ceiling,
Jonah Goldberg
kind of plateaued in listenership for a while, which personally I don’t care that much about. You know? Um, I struggle with this a bunch. I remember Russ Roberts talking about this once, about hi- the audience for his podcast, and he’s like… I, and if I, if I’m misquoting him or
Jonah Goldberg
treating him unfairly in this, I apologize. That’s not my intent. I thought it was just a really good point. He, he says, you know,
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something along the lines of,
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“You know, on the one hand, you look at like the ratings of television shows or whatever, and you think 30, 40, 50,000 people listening to you on a regular basis isn’t very impressive. And then you think about, ‘Well, wait a second. If I were giving a s- weekly speech and I filled a good-sized football stadium, um, with people every week, that’d be really impressive.'” Right? And so you kind of think about it in, in different kinds of ways. I don’t say this for ego stuff at all, but it does bum me out for the country when you look at like the lists, whether it’s Spotify or Apple Podcasts, of the top news podcasts, and that’s the category that I think all of ours fall under, and you see, you know, how it’s… how the top is f- so heavy with Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and, uh, Megyn Kelly and a bunch of, you know, sort of Fox crap. And, and it does make you think maybe if, you know, we… if I did this as a more polished thing and I got my little fake studio and, um, my fake, you know, studio audience lighting and all that kind of stuff, and did this with a teleprompter or a little more prep,
Jonah Goldberg
would we reach a lot more people? And again, I don’t, I don’t know that I wanna reach a lot more people for its own sake. I’m kind of past that stage in my life. But I’m also, you know, a co-founder of a business and, you know, more people would be good, and more subscribers would be good. And so I, I, I struggle with how to think about this, about on the one hand,
Jonah Goldberg
I find it really comfortable being able to do m- you know, write the G file the way I wanna write it, do the remnant more or less the way I wanna do it. On the other hand, is that being selfish on my part or is that me be- is, is it a kind of audience capture that the people who like it the way it is are the people I’m listening to because they’re telling me what I wanna hear? And I, anyway, I s- I struggle with this. At the same time, like,
Jonah Goldberg
we’d like a lot more subscribers to the, to the dispatch. We’d like a lot more people to subscribe to this podcast and all our podcasts.
Jonah Goldberg
Y’all, it al- also is kind of amazing if you actually go through… The numbers in the podcast world are BS. Um, they’re very hard. There’s a lot of BS in the numbers in podcast world. Very few places report what their actual numbers are. It’s everyone who has
Jonah Goldberg
their own podcast can know what their own number of downloads are, but it’s very difficult to trust anybody else. And part of the problem with the charts is that they measure intensity m- as m- it’s sort of like, it’s a lot like the Amazon book ratings or rankings. Um, it has, it has to do with absolute numbers, but it also has to do with comparative numbers. Like if you rise quickly,
Jonah Goldberg
momentum gets caught up. At least this is my i- this is my understanding of how the New York Times bestseller list. It’s definitely my understanding of how the, the Amazon book ranking list works, and it is my informed assumption about how, say, the Apple Podcast thing works because-Having been at NR and having, knowing a few other people and what their podcast numbers are and trusting their answers, sometimes you’ll see brand new podcasts sh- fly to, you know, the top 10, and you know it’s not because they have 100,000 listeners with the first episode. It’s because they have probably 20,000, 15,000 listeners who s- downloaded it the first day, and that rate of download, that enthusiasm at the front, sends it up to the top. I have no idea if anybody finds this at all interesting, but I will say, what it– if you actually go by the sort of Edison Research stuff, I looked it up recently for something else that we’re doing, and, like, the average podcast, you know, the typical small political podcast, probably has no more than a couple hundred listeners. So it really is down to, like, friends and family kind of thing. And then a pretty, a relatively successful podcast has in the high hundreds to the low single-digit thousands. Like, you know, 1,500 would be really impressive. And then in the top, essentially top 1%, you have tens of thousands. And in the poi- top .0001%, you have hundreds of thousands. Perfectly happy that this thing is in the top 1%. It’s nice. I get lots of nice feedback from people. But it would be really good for The Dispatch if we could get… I don’t really care about The Remnant being in the top .01%, but it’d be great if we get The Dispatch podcast in the top .01%. So if people could subscribe to it, download it from, you know, like, just go into your podcast apps and click follow. You don’t have to listen to every one if you want. We, I, I think you should, and it would be great if you did, and it’d be great if you give us a review. But, you know, we’re in a real push to, for growth, and this stuff is easy. And if you have ideas about special segments, I don’t know, 10 minutes on a biography of a famous thinker, or five minutes on a philosophical question, or whatever that’s a regular feature, I’m open to all that. I don’t know. It’s a- all a question of the trade-offs of how much prep it requires and how interesting I think people would find it, but I’m a servant to you people. That’s what I’m trying to say, I guess. Thank you to everybody who said that they don’t want GLOP to die. Um, we’re gonna try and talk Pod off the ledge about all of that. Oh, I guess I should wrap up. I, I’ll just say, um, the birthright citizenship case was this week. And speaking of podcasts, the, uh, the podcast that the, our f- friends at SCOTUSblog and Advisory Opinions did right after the case was great, very useful. I got into, I got a lot of grief yesterday on Twitter because I basically stated my position on… Okay, this is what I wrote on Twitter. “My warm take on birthright citizenship. Wholly defensible to be against it as a policy and wholly reasonable to want to reform it in some way. Also intellectually defensible to say that the 14th Amendment is being misinterpreted. Doesn’t mean I agree, but I don’t think it’s crazy either. But even if you win that argument, you still need to deal with a century-plus of precedent and statutory language that codifies it and has created ma- created massive reliance interests.
Jonah Goldberg
I consider it an open question whether Congress can repeal or modify birthright citizenship. I think it is absolutely nuts and dangerous to think a president can repeal it through executive order, and defending the EO because you agree with the underlying policy is itself indefensible. That’s it. That’s my take.” And I got about, I don’t know, j- a little more than 400 replies to it. You know, some of the criticisms I think probably shouldn’t have said Congress can repeal birthright citizenship. I think that’s probably a mistake. It can modify it, ’cause there’s that language, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which people who want the status quo would see any modification as a repeal. But again, probably shouldn’t have used that word, repeal, ’cause I don’t think that Congress can repeal birthright citizenship in whole. But beyond that, pretty much stand by what I wrote, and lots of people got very, very, very, very, very, very angry with me. And it’s funny, the, the, anyway, the funny part about it was, it’s a lot of people on, I, I presume the left, were very, very angry with me, and a lot of people on the right were very, very angry with me. And frankly, I think the left had better arguments, but the, and the right were scarier, because it is amazing. I mean, Tim Pool, who’s, you know, one of these jabroni podcaster guys, and a bunch of people in the replies, they’re, they’re, they’re throwing out this argument that it, it involves an enormous amount of question-begging that birthright citizenship is destroying the country, Congre- so maybe Congress sh- it would be better for Congress to do something. But it’s, since it’s not, Donald Trump must save America, and therefore the president should do it, even if, and this is what pissed me off about what Tim Pool wrote. He said, “Even though there’s something written down somewhere that says he can’t,” right? And the number of people who think that you’re a weakling, a coward, a fool, a [censored] if you think presidents can’t do unconstitutional or illegal things that they think they should do is just amazing to me. And I, I just, look, I just think it’s just flatly ridiculous to claim, to suggest that the president can, through executive order,
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change
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150-ish years of,
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of Constitution- widespread consensus about what the Constitution says that has been codified in precedent and law. I’m perfectly fine having the argument that the 14th Amendment was as-As Trump likes to say about the babies of slaves and not about Chinese billionaires, um, having mistresses in American Samoa or whatever. That, um, that’s a perfectly legitimate debate to have, and I think there’s more merit to the,
Jonah Goldberg
the restrictionist side than I like. I, I, just for the record, I have no problem using the subject to the jurisdiction thereof clause to basically say that Chinese billionaires buying American ba- buying babies with American birth certificates in surrogacy mills for the purpose of parking assets in America, if and when necessary or whatever reason they’re doing it, I got zero problem saying Congress can restrict that. But in general, I think the s- the ideas behind this executive order are bad, and I think that… and that I wouldn’t basically touch the jurisprudence and the constitutional interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, and I’ll be very happy if the Supreme Court comes out nine to one, probably gonna be eight to one on this. But I think it’s a perfectly legitimate argument to have in terms of on the merits. It’s amazing how if you like the status quo of how a constitutional amendment is interpreted, you think it is kind of sacrilege to talk about any other interpretation. But if you don’t like the way it’s interpreted, you
Jonah Goldberg
think it’s an important conversation to have. That, but you see this with the, the gun people. It’s like the anti-gun people think it is outrageous the way the Second Amendment has been interpreted, and they constantly wanna yell about it, and the Second Amendment people who like the way it’s being interpreted, interpreted these days are like, “How dare you? This is a constitutional right like any other. You know, this debate is settled.” It’s, it… When it comes to constitutional stuff, like I’m okay with having an argument as long as it’s an ar- a fair argument in a court of law and in legal journals, and it’s done in good faith and all that kind of thing. And but, you know, I got grief from people about the reliance interest point, where I said people have been relying on this interpretation for a very long time, and people are like, “You know what you’re talking about? This is just prospective. It’s not re-retroactive,” which, you know, meaning that the Trump administration is not arguing that their revised understanding of, uh, Fourteenth Amendment should be applied retroactively. And I don’t say this very often, but Justice Sotomayor asked a very good and on point question, which was, “Given the argument that you’re making, what would prevent a future president from making it retroactive?” And John Sauer, the solicitor general, did not have a very compelling answer, and I think that’s cause for concern. I also think it’s cause for concern that, and I did a deep dive on this the other day, there are a whole bunch of MAGA-land
Jonah Goldberg
types, I’ll be generous, who have, uh, it’s become like a meme to talk about deporting 100 million people.
Jonah Goldberg
And even, so even if you take the biggest estimates about how many illegal immigrants there are in America, that only gets you to like, and I don’t think the number’s this big, but it gets you to like 20, 25 million, maybe 30 million. I’ve not seen anything higher than that.
Jonah Goldberg
Okay. And then you’re gonna talk about
Jonah Goldberg
to get to 100 million, you’re gonna have to start deporting people with visas, legal immigrants, people born here. I mean, to get to 100 million, that’s a th- almost a third of the population.
Jonah Goldberg
It’s really stupid, and coming from some of the people, like that guy who left Bon- not, not, not Dan Bongino, but he had a similar name. He was the head of CPB, who, who dreff- dressed a little bit like, you know, Albert Speer or Beria or something like that. Um, he talked about how he wanted to deport 100 million people. This guy at CPAC who’s running for Texas Railroad Commissioner, which is actually an important job in Texas, he talks about deporting 100 million people. People are trying to normalize this number of 100 million people, and some of them, you know, are in this administration or have been in this administration. You’ve got other people in this administration talking about heritage Americans having more political legitimacy, including the vice president, than non-heritage Americans. And so the idea that this administration deserves a benefit of a doubt about what it would do if it got its way with birthright citizenship stuff, I think is preposterous.
Jonah Goldberg
You know, there are reports Stephen Miller just really wants this country to be a white country again. And, um, I’m not, and I, I don’t mean like fevered stuff. It’s apparently stuff that he’s kinda said in conversations or whatever. But even if, even if that’s hearsay or whatever, you’ve got this faction that is well, uh, entrenched inside this administration that’s just simply racist and antisemitic. And I don’t necessarily mean that they’re all sitting around using the N-word, or they want people who talk that way in their coalition. They wanna protect them. And, uh, you know, if you look at the guys who were running the Department of Labor and now the, Department of Homeland Security’s, you know, social media stuff, there’s a lot of very sort of quasi Nazi-coded white supremacy stuff in there. And it’s gross.
Jonah Goldberg
Like,
Jonah Goldberg
the idea that this administration has earned the benefit of the doubt about why it is doing things is one of the most shockingly ridiculous arguments that I hear from people I otherwise respect and trust. And often what they’ll do is they’ll, they’ll s- they’ll code switch, and they’ll talk about how the president deserves deference, right? Or the executive branch, um, has a colorable ar- agreement and that kind of thing. And that’s fine. In, in academic talk, in the abstract, I think that’s fine. But we’ve already had judges say that they no longer trust-The Justice Department to be acting in good faith, to be presenting facts and arguments and evidence honestly. And if judges feel that way about the Department of frickin’ Justice,
Jonah Goldberg
why should I feel differently about, you know, about Hegseth or Trump? You know, I mean, Trump lied all along. Hegseth lied all along about why we were doing the Venezuela stuff. And then once we successfully got Maduro, Trump says we’re here for the oil. Why should I give him a benefit of doubt about Iran? And again, I want to win the war in Iran. The idea that the Trump administration has high-minded, idealistic
Jonah Goldberg
goals about what it would do if it had carte blanche to revise what birthrights, how birthright citizenship works, I think is just simply preposterous. And I think it’s preposterous about almost any issue at this point.
Jonah Goldberg
And if that sounds like insimpient bulwarkism, that’s fine. Where I think that charge is unfair is that I think the Democrats suck. And I don’t think, you know, you had Tim Miller writing the, taking this position that people should stop making a big deal about Hassan Piker because Democrats need to win. Oh yeah, screw that. I’m not a political activist. I’m not trying to organize campaigns. If I think Hassan Piker is, there’s a good piece in Mediaite about this, about how Hassan Piker is essentially the left’s Candace Owens and yet a lot of mainstream media extols Hassan Piker while even a lot of pretty fringy right-wing media is kind of hands-off with Candace Owens. I would rather just everybody be hands-off with these people. And just saying that somebody is popular is not an argument for anything. It’s an observation. You know, Nick Fuentes may be popular. I think that’s exaggerated. But the fact that he’s popular means I should give in more to what he believes?
Jonah Goldberg
It’s just pure intellectual and moral corruption. Thank you everybody for all the great feedback I’ve gotten lately on the counterprogramming.
Jonah Goldberg
We’re going to do more of it. I’ve gotten a lot of great suggestions for the Who Was So-and-So series. And we’ll keep casting about on all that. And
Jonah Goldberg
thanks for listening and I’ll talk to you next time.