Steve Hayes
[upbeat music] 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 Kash 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. [upbeat music]
Steve Hayes
Welcome, gentlemen. I wanna 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.
David French
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
David French
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 wor-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 in the absence of an unexpected turn of events. So it just appears to be a mess, just a giant mess at the moment.
Steve Hayes
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 difficulties 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. Like, where are the negotiations going? What’s the goal?
Kevin Williamson
It’s interesting to me that a thing 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 Tehran 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 a war and get the crap kicked out of it on every single front that you could possibly get the crap kicked out of it and come out of it with effectively larger territory because [chuckles] it now essentially has sovereignty over this strait that’s an important part of international shipping and 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’d say things are going right on track.
Steve Hayes
Jonah, Donald Trump seems to be impatient. I mean, w-when you look at back at his rhetoric-
David French
This just in. [laughing]
Steve Hayes
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 signaling the end of this, we’re moving on, we’re getting this done, and now over the past forty-eight hours, he seems to be signaling patience? Is there something to be read in, or is this just like Donald Trump waking up in a different mood the next day?
David French
Well, so I think one of the things you gotta remember is that whether it’s, you know, 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.
Jonah Goldberg
Right? I just feel that COVID is gonna go away in the spring, right? My net worth goes up when I feel good about myself. The problem with that is, is like when– 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 s- Carlson says, “Well, how do you know that?” And he says, ” ‘Cause it always does.”
Jonah Goldberg
Right? I mean, 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-
Steve Hayes
[chuckles]
Jonah Goldberg
… and that the 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, the other problem with this, especially as he’s become just an old dude, is
Jonah Goldberg
he says what he wants to be true
Jonah Goldberg
sometimes about his own insecurities,
Jonah Goldberg
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.”
Jonah Goldberg
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? He sa– When he says, “I’m not impatient. Time is on my side. I’m not in a rush to get a deal,” the Iranians hear, “Man, he’s impatient. Man, [laughs] he’s in a rush to get a deal.” And, you know, as we’ve been talking about it for a long time,
Jonah Goldberg
whatever Trump may say in public about the negotiations and about the offers that he’s made or the, his re-receptivity to ending this thing and, or lack thereof,
Jonah Goldberg
the Iranians know the actual truth of it because they’re having the conversa- 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, ’cause when he talks to the American public, he sounds desperate, and there’s just no way of hiding that. 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 ’cause the Trump administration is saying it’s true. According to the original plan for 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 u-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’s, 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 molocracy of, you know, theocrats, we’re dealing with a theocracy of IRGC fanatics. Or dealing with multiple spheres of power in the region, which each, each little warlord controlling different slices of their, you know, access to the Strait of Hormuz. It’s just impossible to know from the outside.
Steve Hayes
Yeah, David, that would certainly affect the way that you frame the sort of who has more patience, right?
Steve Hayes
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 I’ll just say for the record, the moderates that they’re describing are not actual moderates in this case.
David French
Right. There’s no moderates to be found here, really. [laughs]
Steve Hayes
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’ve 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?
David French
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 i 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 wanna 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, you know, 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 e-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 interest 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 interest. 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, ’cause Steve, you said something– Or who was it that said you’ve k-kicked the crap out of the military? Oh, it’s Kevin. You’ve kicked the crap out of the Iranian military, and they’ve kind of weirdly perversely gotten bigger because they’ve now claimed the Strait of Hormuz, essentially. To use that term that a lot of people have sort of thrown around, restoring deterrence, one of the questions that emerges when you leave a war is who, 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 at air, dominance at least in sea combat. You saw a remarkable rescue operation. I mean, all things that show 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,”
David French
seems to be more us than Iran. And one other thing on the cracks emerging in the regime, you know, one of the things when we’ve been opponents of a regime for a while, and we, 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 gonna throw the emperor down the s- shaft of the Death Star, and then everything’s gonna be okay. When the reality is, the next people coming up, if this is the IRGC-dominated state, it’s probably gonna 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.
Kevin Williamson
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 that comes out on top in these things.
David French
Right.
Kevin Williamson
And a good example of that, if you think about Pakistan in the sort of, you know, age of Benazir Bhutto, 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 as sort of independent parallel state, then you had the army. And when this sort of cracked up, when, you know, they had this incredible sort of factional confrontation, what ended up being the stronger element that come to the forefront in Pakistan was the kind of Taliban-allied element. So, you know, 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 Iran to, maybe Pakistan is not the worst, uh, example.
David French
That’s not encouraging.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. I mean, like, it’s interesting, like, throughout the
Jonah Goldberg
first couple years of the Ukraine war,
Jonah Goldberg
so many people were talking about, well, this could cost Putin, right? It’s a disaster. Russian history d- military disasters are– cause regime change and, or overthrow 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. [chuckles]
Kevin Williamson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
You know? Same dynamic, you know.
Kevin Williamson
Yeah. If the guy was gonna walk into, you know, Putin’s office and shoot him in the head and declare himself president, it’s gonna be a worse guy than Putin.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
I mean, [chuckles] it’s hard to imagine much worse than Putin, but here we are.
Kevin Williamson
Yeah, but it, there, there’s worse. [chuckles]
David French
The counter example seems to be currently Syria, where you have a guy who cut his teeth by being a vicious jihadist- [chuckles]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah
David French
… walking into office and extending– basically just vomiting olive branches in every single possible direction. That is not the norm.
Jonah Goldberg
Right.
David French
If you’re planning for that, that’s on you. That’s your problem. That is, 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.
Jonah Goldberg
That could turn quickly, I’m not convinced.
David French
Yeah, yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
It’s certainly the way that story has gone. I’m not sure it’s the way it ends. Not to inject just rank punditry i-into all of this, but there’s reports that the administration, people in the administration are now saying it might be six months before the Strait of Hormuz is normal, right?
David French
Right.
Jonah Goldberg
And, like, this s- permanent ceasefire thing that Trump has announced, well, we’ll just wait for the regime to get together.
Jonah Goldberg
Since he said that, you know, basically the traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is one day it’s ten ships, one day it’s five ships, one day it’s no ships. One day, I think it’s gotten up to eighteen, I think is the highest number, something like that.
Jonah Goldberg
The amount of cargo that went through that thing prior to the opening of the Strait of Hormuz was ten X of all of that.
David French
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
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 eighteen ships going through the Strait of Hormuz, it’s like a virtual impossibility, and six months from now
Jonah Goldberg
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 four dollar 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.
David French
It might be a good question, and maybe, you know, Kevin having the most Texas experience, what is the gas price that is the Talarico line?
Jonah Goldberg
[chuckles]
David French
In other words, versus Cornyn versus Paxton, what is the Talarico line on gas prices?
Kevin Williamson
I will point out to you that I reject the premise of this question because it is the wrong question, because your most dedicatedConsistent Trump voters in Texas do not buy gasoline. They have diesel trucks. And-
Steve Hayes
[laughs] That makes it worse, right?
Kevin Williamson
Yeah.
Steve Hayes
Makes it worse.
Kevin Williamson
I definitely picked the right time to switch my F250 for a Corolla. And [laughs] I’m not… It gave me two hundred dollar-
Steve Hayes
Wait, Kevin, there is never a time to switch an F250 for a Corolla. And no hate on the Corolla. It’s just the F250 is a magnificent vehicle.
Kevin Williamson
If you’ve ever tried to park an F250 at my local airport or train station, you would understand why that happened.
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
This is why David is a backer inner.
Kevin Williamson
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-
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Kevin Williamson
… in the sense that the things about him that are actually
Kevin Williamson
not things I agree with, but that are good and admirable, are things that people kinda hate the most about him.
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Kevin Williamson
So, you know, his religious sensibility, I think-
Steve Hayes
I was wondering where you were going with that. [laughs]
Kevin Williamson
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 the whole David French thing again.
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Kevin Williamson
But I think that that’s not a great place for him. Whereas Crockett was a social media bomb thrower and probably would’ve been throwing bombs on social media in an ineffective kind of way, I think, in this race.
Steve Hayes
I’m very tempted to just trash the rest of the show and talk about James Talarico as a left-wing David French.
Kevin Williamson
Yes.
Steve Hayes
But we should move on. I wanna, 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-
Jonah Goldberg
Who among us?
Steve Hayes
… spends part of his weekends.
Jonah Goldberg
Who among us, really?
Steve Hayes
Um, drinks at N- Ned’s. This is a private club in Washington, D.C. 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, y- you’re often extraordinarily intoxicated-
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Steve Hayes
… and we need breaching equipment. [laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
Unreachable. [laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
And yet you perform at such a high level anyways.
Steve Hayes
Yeah, well, it’s pretty amazing what he’s been able to do. Your reaction to that story and there have been multiple stories. There was 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. Sort of one story after another about Kash Patel. Your reaction?
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, it kinda reminds me of there’s an old joke from the Senate in the 1980s, 1990s, that staffers who would answer the phone in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s office in the afternoon would say, “I’m sorry, the senator can’t come to the phone right now. He’s on the floor.” [laughs]
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
Like I, for the record, love Moynihan, but he liked his midday wine. So I,
Jonah Goldberg
I find all of this unbelievably unsurprising for an FBI director. I mean, I, like, I find it un- un- unsurprising f- we, 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. But my one criticism of this entire reporting is that my understanding is that right after never plagiarize and never reveal a source, what happens in the Poodle Room is supposed to stay in the Poodle Room. [laughs] But I think Kash Patel– I mean, there was this whole sort of cottage industry of 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, you know, the, that nexus, RFK still wins, but Patel is way up there, right?
Steve Hayes
Oh, man.
Jonah Goldberg
And the fact that he’s using this private jet, you know, this, uh, government jet to go to
Jonah Goldberg
see his wi- his girlfriend perform, all of this kind of stuff is
Jonah Goldberg
just a sign of how cor– I don’t mean corrupt in term- um, 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, he violates both of those norms.
Steve Hayes
David, I mean, we joke about this. The story was in, in some ways so shocking it was funny.He’s the FBI director. They are very serious-
David French
During a war.
David French
In a war.
Steve Hayes
Yeah. I mean, the threats against the homeland are up. We’ve got, you know, investigations, ah, counterterrorism investigations taking place around the world with FBI agents. He’s supposed to be running this or at least, like, monitoring this. I mean, there are very serious national security implications for what he’s alleged to have been doing.
David French
Oh, [chuckles] for sure. And by the way, doesn’t the reporting cast in a different light his little journey into the men’s hockey team-
David French
… locker room? I mean, that was out-of-control behavior that you were watching when he was running into the men’s hockey team, uh, 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-
Steve Hayes
[laughing]
David French
… “Is, has he had a little too much?”
Steve Hayes
Thank you for saying Doug.
David French
[laughing]
Steve Hayes
[laughing]
David French
o-o- one thing that I think is important to sort of think through is look at this, uh, look at Kash Patel in context. So Jen 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 more MAGA friends, and I would talk about, like, 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, w- 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 and that regime obv- oddly enough, and that is replace it with something worse. Replace it with something
David French
e-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, you know, 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.
Steve Hayes
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. And-
David French
How dare you compare-
David French
… use those names.
David French
[laughing]
Steve Hayes
[laughing]
David French
Those are great names in American history, Steve. How dare you?
Steve Hayes
That was the highlight of Devin Nunes’ career, such as it was before this. You know, 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 follow-up 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, h-hoping to weather the storm, that was not Kash Patel’s reaction. He filed a lawsuit, two hundred and fifty 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 because I find it so fascinating and 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 twenty-twenty election.
Steve Hayes
Dangerous territory, I would say, for Fox News [chuckles] to be doing this eight hundred million dollars 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 Blanche, 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 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?
Kevin Williamson
Well, yeah. There’s, there’s electoral– 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 gonna go out there and arrest a whole lot of people-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah
Kevin Williamson
… and expose this fraud.” You’ve got J.D. Vance making weird comments about pizza and talks and stuff, and sort of touching on another conspiracy theory. Some weird things. So that’s kinda how I read it. I mean, 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, you know, media outlets, of course, and, you know, suing The Atlantic is… Yeah, I’m all in favor of suing The Atlantic because I once signed something-
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Kevin Williamson
… that says I wasn’t allowed to sue The Atlantic.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Kevin Williamson
So I’m glad someone’s out there doing it. But no, in, 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 the 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. Just that’s a real touristy kinda… That’s a rich guy touristy thing to do, so I don’t know about that.
Jonah Goldberg
There are better places to drink in D.C. than The Net, too, but-
Kevin Williamson
And my, my Vegas references are, like, twenty 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. 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, uh, much harder-
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Kevin Williamson
… to walk to a bar in Las Vegas, where you can get Ubered around, that sort of thing. So first person in the world ever moved to Vegas to drink less, but it kinda worked. And yeah, I don’t think Patel is very long for this position. Although in terms of people who are, like, you know, super embarrassing, it’s, it is funny what presses the administration’s internal buttons and what doesn’t. Like, you know, you’d think that Bobby Kennedy would’ve been sort of 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 kind of broader, you know, Republican coalition who still take things like the FBI seriously. And also, like, I mean, who wants the FBI guy at the party anyway? I mean, you’re out drinking at the, you know, Poodle Room. Do you really want the feds in the house? It’s just [laughing]
Kevin Williamson
funny.
Jonah Goldberg
I would say also one thing, like, I, I don’t think the lawsuit against The Atlantic, sorry, Kev, is gonna go very far. But, like, Kash Patel is one of these guys who used to top five people to bitch and moan about the deep state, right? That was one of his main things.
Jonah Goldberg
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– And 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.
Kevin Williamson
Led by J. Edgar Hoover in a dress.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, the dress thing was a lie, by the way. That we can debate that another time.
Kevin Williamson
It was a good theory.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, it was one of the perfect examples of too good to, to not to print. But the point is that they like that reputation, right? They cultivated that as an institutional thing.
Jonah Goldberg
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,
Jonah Goldberg
bragging at CPAC, which is outrageous that he was even attending CPAC, saying, you know,
Jonah Goldberg
the fact that every single person who worked on those investigations and everybody from January 6th was pardoned is proof that Trump protects his base and cares for his base is so freaking outrageous.
Kevin Williamson
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
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-
Kevin Williamson
Oh.
Jonah Goldberg
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 that-
Kevin Williamson
Already is. Yeah
Jonah Goldberg
… it’s like everybody because-
Kevin Williamson
Yeah
Jonah Goldberg
… everybody hates him.
Kevin Williamson
Please send your news tips to kevin@thedispatch.com y’all. [laughing]
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Kevin Williamson
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-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah
Kevin Williamson
… 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.
Jonah Goldberg
Right.
Kevin Williamson
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 gonna 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.
Kevin Williamson
Is that now creating job insecurity?
Jonah Goldberg
Right.
Kevin Williamson
I mean, it, 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 gotta 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.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Kevin Williamson
And that’s not even counting national security. People do care about the reputations of their agencies, especially if they’ve given, you know, twenty-five or thirty years of their lives to them.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, right.
Kevin Williamson
During the Lois Lerner stuff at the IRS, I, I talked to a guy up 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.” You know, people just, like, walk away from you and don’t [laughing]
David French
[laughing]
Steve Hayes
Right. Yeah.
Kevin Williamson
But he cared about, you know, what his agency was– how it was perceived in the world, and it was perceived as being professional and competent and good at its job, and it’s gotta be ten times that sort of dynamic at-
Kevin Williamson
… military institutions, and particularly at the FBI and places like that.
Steve Hayes
Before we wrap up, I wanna 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 the speech extraordinary for a number of reasons, and very compelling. He talked about the declaration and s- you know, 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 reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”
Steve Hayes
It was also my favorite line, I think the most compelling line of the declaration. And, um, then talked about how easy it is to use words that mean something, and how much harder it is to be devoted to seeing those words put into action, and I thought it was a, a really extraordinary message.
Steve Hayes
Then the speech took a turn, sort of in the middle, and he focused on th- the ways in which the United States and those who have let 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.
David French
Well, you know, we talked about this on Advisory Opinions, and a point that I made is-
Steve Hayes
Advisory Opinions, for people who don’t know, it’s just a, it’s a legal podcast or niche legal podcast, uh, that David is lead on.
David French
Yeah. That– 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,
David French
like, say, somebody who votes for Bernie Sanders would describe themself. 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 Eureka theme-
Steve Hayes
[laughing]
David French
… 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 and 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 interesting, very interesting speech. And on America’s 250th, I actually like to see some of our leading public figures thinking through the philosophical-
David French
… basis of the American experiment. I, I think I like it. You know, we have so [laughs]– we just went through… Think about how much better this conversation is. We just talked about the poodle room-
Steve Hayes
[laughing]
David French
… 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 intelligent 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 ablu- absolutely acceptable, and in fact, uh, you know, I would like to hear Elena Kagan thinking through some of the-
David French
… 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.
Steve Hayes
Kevin, I mean, I was reminded watching the criticism or the backlash about Justice Thomas’s 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. Now they also 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.
Kevin Williamson
Yeah, let me, uh, give my impersonation of 80% of the response to this speech. “Well, progressives only believe in nice things.” Uh, [laughs] I mean, that was basically what everyone said. He’s out there talking about Wilson and Dewey and-
Kevin Williamson
… you know, 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, you know, Clarence Thomas is, if not the most important and consequential public person in American life in his lifetime, certainly in the top three or four. I think he’s just an enormously consequential figure we’ll be talking about and analyzing 100 years from now. Uh, there are a couple lines in the speech that really jumped out at me, particularly when he was talking about growing up in Georgia and the conditions he did-
Kevin Williamson
… where the, he says, I, 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-
Kevin Williamson
… in the Declaration of Independence, which I thought was just enormously well put. And there’s this, you know, thisWonderful, kind of, you know, 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 essentially at this point. We’re gonna 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, but, 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, and 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, he does it. So, uh, 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 give a talk like this. I think it would be sort of inappropriate for him not to. You know, 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 he absolutely should share with the country. Although I think if UT is gonna be naming institutes in Latin, we should pronounce them in Latin, so it’s the Kiwi-tos, uh, Civitos, but-
Steve Hayes
Thank you for the correction.
Kevin Williamson
You’re welcome.
Steve Hayes
Appreciate that. [laughs]
Kevin Williamson
I like those Latin Es as Ws because it just sounds so much less, and so much less tough, you know, when Julius Caesar says, “Whiny, weedy, weaky.”
Kevin Williamson
[laughs]
Steve Hayes
True. So true.
Kevin Williamson
Pronounced in Italian it sounds cool.
Steve Hayes
I wanna play a clip, Jonah, about, I, like Kevin, heard echoes of liberal fascism in the speech, and I wanna-
Jonah Goldberg
There’s also a lot of Suicide of the West in there too. But anyway, ’cause I listened to the whole thing this morning, um-
Steve Hayes
No Tyranny of Cliches?
Jonah Goldberg
No Tyranny of Cliches.
Steve Hayes
Your, your very underrated second book?
Jonah Goldberg
That’s right.
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
David French
The most underrated second book.
Steve Hayes
Yes. [laughs] If we can play a clip of Justice Thomas on progressivism.
Audio
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, uh, nearly perfected.
Audio
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.
Audio
He thus described America still stuck with its original system of government as, quote, “slow to see the superiority of the European system.”
Audio
Pro- progressivism was the first mainstream American political movement, with the possible exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War,
Audio
to openly oppose the principles of the declaration.
Steve Hayes
Jonah, as David says, that’s not whining about Bernie Sanders lefty stuff.
Jonah Goldberg
Right.
Steve Hayes
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.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, so Thomas is absolutely right. You know, 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, you know, I could bebopping the scat on all sorts of things here. And he’s right. You know, people really just don’t understand how much
Jonah Goldberg
Germany, which was, you gotta remember, at the end of the 19th century, Germany was considered far more intellectually advanced and serious and, than the United States of America was. And if you go and you look at, say, the, the first people to get, you know, Woodrow Wilson’s the first president with a PhD. He goes to Johns Hopkins, which is the, the first major research university modeled on the German model. You look at the founders of the American Economic Association, just hundreds of people who trained in Germany, learned in Germany, came to the United States with this idea that sort of married, you know, Darwin, not that much Marx, but married these ideas of that relativity and what, you know, the, 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 re- they’re, that they’re too Newtonian. Checks and balances is stupid. We need to be, have a Darwinian system. And 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 prog or, 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 this stuff is hardcore Harry Jaffa stuff. But-
Steve Hayes
Harry Jaffa-
Jonah Goldberg
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, 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’s the user manual, right? And so that’s why you have that-
Steve Hayes
Once you read that book, you can’t see it any other way.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Steve Hayes
It’s like a reframing book.
Jonah Goldberg
And Thomas sees the ConstitutionIn that light, and this is like-
Jonah Goldberg
… the culmination of 40 years of his thinking about all this.
Jonah Goldberg
You know, there’s this thing going on on the right right now that seems to have missed, gone by o- 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-
David French
Thank you
Jonah Goldberg
… the post-liberal Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen.
Jonah Goldberg
You know, 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 the, I mean, I get why, you know, people at Daily Beast, for Christ’s sake, took the bait and thought this was all about owning the libs. But, like, I wanna see where’s the, the, 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 the place on the right. These guys are all like, “Oh, Clarence Thomas went after progressives. Isn’t that great?” Or they’re just not saying anything at all when he is offering just a massive indictment.
Jonah Goldberg
And if you read some of the stuff, he talks about having courage. I think he’s talking, you know, like, you, it, 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. All, that’s all great, that’s wonderful stuff. That’s the crap you say when you’re launching a revolu- a violent revolution.
Jonah Goldberg
It is not the crap you say when you disagree about a piece of legislation-
David French
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
… or a court case.
David French
True. [laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
And he constantly mixes this metaphor-
David French
Mm-hmm
Jonah Goldberg
… 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.
David French
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
And I think he makes a mistake talking about it the same way. I forgive it ’cause a lot of it is poetic license, but I just think it’s worth pointing out.
David French
Yeah, that’s interesting. I didn’t hear it that way. I heard him s- 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-”
Jonah Goldberg
No, I don’t, think he’s, I, I don’t, I’m not saying he was inciting violence or anything. But if you actually, some of those sentences
Jonah Goldberg
I think were a little ambiguous, and if I were, like, a January 6th guy, I could be like… I’m not saying, and I’m, again, I’m not saying that Clarence Thomas deliberately is trying to inspire those people. His wife was, but I, I think that there’s, there was more nuance needed on some of those points.
Kevin Williamson
Yeah, I think the way he engages with the Declaration of Independence, and he said this in the speech and in some other contexts, I think too, is that he sees it not so much as a expression of a list of philosophical principles, but the encapsulation of a way of life.
David French
Mm-hmm, mm.
Kevin Williamson
And I think that’s, you know, why he talks about it in that particular kind of way, so he wants to take this sort of, you know, the courage and virtue that’s expressed at the beginning of the Revolution, which of course is a violent, you know, military conflict and a violent… Well, revolutions are violent by nature, and say we can extract out of that, you know, certain virtues, including the courage to live as a citizen in a certain kind of way.
David French
You know, I’m so glad you said that about the post-liberals on the right, Jonah, ’cause it, the speech really reminded me of the George Will book written a couple 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 the spirit, that, that speech and 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, you know, 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 as a trigger name-
Jonah Goldberg
Yes.
Kevin Williamson
Right
David French
… 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 theonomists, like the Doug Wilson Protestant Christian nationalists. You know, W- Locke is a trigger word. It, 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 fringe. And if you’re a progressive and you’re upset at this, I mean,
David French
you’re as- associating yourself with Wilsonian progressivism, and I’m not sure you wanna do that. ‘Cause 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 I, 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 [laughs] I’m, I just don’t get it.
Jonah Goldberg
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”-
David French
Mm-hmm
Jonah Goldberg
… in the last few years. Like, it’s one thing to embrace W- 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-
David French
Totally
Jonah Goldberg
… about how his racism, his support for eugenics, his antipathy towards democracy, his antipathy towards the Bill of Rights-
Jonah Goldberg
… and say, “Hey, we need to take a second look at this guy.”
David French
Yes. [laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
Right? I mean, like, they a- that’s-
David French
Eugenics reconsidered. [laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, tell me more. You know, like, that’s-
Jonah Goldberg
… the weird thing.
David French
It is weird. 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 The Dispatch, could be last week, could be recently. Go back further if you like
Jonah Goldberg
David, do you have a recommendation for us?
Steve Hayes
Well, I’m going to– I’m just gonna 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 gonna point to Charles Lehman’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 gonna say eighty/twenty, but it’s emerging sixty/forty, seventy/thirty 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
Steve Hayes
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, I would urge folks to read that piece.
Jonah Goldberg
Kevin?
Kevin Williamson
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, uh, Catogio on Don Jr., The, uh, Move Toward Dynastic Politics. I’ve been writing about gambling for a long time too, and I think it’s just absolutely pernicious in all sorts of ways, but including aesthetically. You know, if, uh, 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 baccarat and things like that, I’d have a whole different feel about it. [chuckles] But it’s guys on their phones. You know, I live in a, I live in a college town, and I spend a lot of time with, you know, undergraduate age men, you know, and talk to at the gym and stuff like that, and just the prevalence of gambling in their lives is-
Kevin Williamson
Like gambling and weed, two things that I spend a lot of my life working to [chuckles] liberalize attitudes toward and, and that the, you know, consequences of which have been worse than expected.
Steve Hayes
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.”
Kevin Williamson
Yeah.
Steve Hayes
I mean, that’s-
Kevin Williamson
Yeah.
Kevin Williamson
And compare that to the percent who have IRAs or something [chuckles] like that or 401(k)s.
Steve Hayes
We are on the front end of those problems, for sure. Jonah.
Jonah Goldberg
So I’m doing this for two reasons. One, on the merits. When The New York Times came out with its
Jonah Goldberg
exposé about the conspiracy that led to the, the secret dark ori- partisan origins of the emergency docket, I was just like, “You know, I am not even gonna 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 I… And, you know, it’s an ironic thing ’cause David also is, works at The New York Times, and so-
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
-I will be gentle about this, but I just was so deeply suspicious two paragraphs in. I was like, “Eh, I’ll hold off.” And the AO discussion of it was exceedingly useful, contextualizing. David valiantly, you know, tried to defend his paymasters a couple times, and that was fine.
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
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-
Jonah Goldberg
-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.
Steve Hayes
Very, very proud of, 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.”
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Steve Hayes
Because that’s his favorite thing to do to me. There was also a very good SCOTUSblog 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, or your old friend, Jonah.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Steve Hayes
Tucker Carlson.
Jonah Goldberg
Uh-huh.
Steve Hayes
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.
Steve Hayes
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.
Steve Hayes
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?
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, you’re gonna have to stop with that. [laughs]
Steve Hayes
You were friends. You’ve described him that way.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair enough.
Jonah Goldberg
Uh-
Steve Hayes
[chuckles] Yeah, I like that. You’re gonna have to stop that. That is a very subtle…
Jonah Goldberg
Okay. So I think the bovine excrement particulate content is very high on all of this, and I don’t think 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, you know, 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, th-this is the same president we’ve seen for, you know-A decade now. The same guy we’ve seen for a decade. In twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen when David, Kevin, and I in particular were, like,
Jonah Goldberg
saying, “This guy’s character is obviously flawed, and this will end badly no matter what.”
Steve Hayes
What do you mean David, Kevin, and you in particular? Where was I? [laughing]
Jonah Goldberg
That’s a great question.
David French
Where were you, Steve?
Steve Hayes
Where were you, Steve?
David French
Where were you, Steve?
Steve Hayes
Trump is– Who are you, Sarah Longwell?
David French
Answer the wrong question.
Steve Hayes
Are you Sarah Longwell?
Jonah Goldberg
When, when-
Steve Hayes
I was… Trump was attacking me from the stage, man.
Jonah Goldberg
When Da-when David, Kevin, and I pledged our mutual honor and our fortunes.
Steve Hayes
[laughing]
David French
[laughing]
Jonah Goldberg
Our fortunes, such as they are.
Steve Hayes
[laughing]
David French
Yes. Our piggy bank.
Jonah Goldberg
You keep calling my old friend, you’re gonna get this kind of treatment.
Steve Hayes
[laughing]
Jonah Goldberg
And so anyway, like, the argument was, you know, before anything else, was his character, right?
Steve Hayes
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
And, like, and
Jonah Goldberg
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 tw- 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-
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
-and dumped on the floor, but whoa, not that vase. You know, you can’t break that.”
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
You know, when we knew that when he was saying how 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 um, upsets 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 than it tells you about the seriousness of his arguments. David, go ahead.
David French
There’s real IRGC turning on the Ayatollah vibes here.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
David French
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 a, somebody hard right turning on Putin, or the IR-IRGC turning on the Ayatollah, which is why I am looking at a lot of this commentary, this 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.
Steve Hayes
Yeah.
David French
I mean, I honestly think that they’d stick with Trump if he bombed Ukraine. Like [laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
Right.
Steve Hayes
Sure.
David French
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.
Steve Hayes
Kevin?
Kevin Williamson
Tucker wrestled his conscience.
Steve Hayes
Tucker what? [laughing]
Kevin Williamson
Uh, you know, I used to be a pretty good wrestler. I had one undefeated season in high school. I think I had eleven consecutive pins or something like that, and I wrestle my three-year-old in the evening sometimes, and that’s Tucker wrestling his conscience. [laughs]
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Kevin Williamson
Conscience does not have much of a chance. If conscience is going to win, you have to let conscience win. That’s how that, that how that works out.
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Kevin Williamson
Yeah, I don’t think there’s anything else to say about that.
Kevin Williamson
I don’t think there’s any danger of being swept away by conscience. But even when he’s like, and this is what, uh, well, I will say this about this. He’s one of these people who can’t actually apologize, so he, “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 in 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. [laughs] I regret them, but uh-
Steve Hayes
I’m sorry you feel that way.
Kevin Williamson
Yes, I’m sorry you feel that way.
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Kevin Williamson
I s- I, I didn’t know it would hurt your feelings so much when I punched you in the face. Uh-
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Kevin Williamson
Yeah, she’s, he’s just the worst. I won’t go on about… 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-
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Kevin Williamson
-you know, dispatch audio story reader going haywire, and people will get the reference sometimes. But Tucker, to be a broken record on the subject, he’s just such a mystery to me. Like, I understand people who do things for certain kinds of reasons. Like, I understand people who sell out just for financial reasons and stuff like that. Like, there are people out in sort of 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, who used to hang out with him a lot.
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Kevin Williamson
But I did know him a little bit, and I never saw any glimmer of this particular kind of madness in him. But then again, I wasn’t, you know, I wasn’t as intimately acquainted with him as Jonah Goldberg.
Steve Hayes
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 McCormick’s very fine piece about Tucker Carlson, profile about Tucker Carlson, and my much less fine review of Jason Zengerle’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. [upbeat music] 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@thedispatch.com. We read everything, even the ones from old friends of Tucker Carlson. That’s gonna 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 Bonaventure. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.
Steve Hayes
[upbeat music]