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[upbeat music] [groans]
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Now, ladies and gentlemen, uh…
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Can I please have your attention? Can you dig it? [crowd cheering]
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[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. This is my first
Jonah Goldberg
solo ruminant, if you will, from, uh, my new office at AEI, and this is the first day ’cause I finally got the proper parking sticker
Jonah Goldberg
where I could actually leave my car behind and walk to work, which was kinda lovely. People keep asking, particularly on Twitter and elsewhere, ’cause not everyone gets the news simultaneously. I’ve moved.
Jonah Goldberg
Very painful process logistically. I mean, what, three moves equals one fire is kind of the rule. It’s very hard on my daughter. It’s very hard on me. We built a life in this home for twenty-three years, but we bought a new place. It’s not ready. We have to do renovations. And so my wife and I and the dogs are staying in a one-bedroom apartment, apartment in some hip place up by the Hinckley Hilton, which is sort of very northern DuPont, southern Adams Morgan, across the street from Kalorama, for people who know DC. I am hemorrhaging cash like you would not believe. It’s been very, very stressful and big time of transition for me and I gotta really hunker down on a book.
Jonah Goldberg
Anyway, it’s been a thing. Speaking of transitions, I should just go ahead and make this announcement now. Don’t worry, it’s not some, uh, I don’t know, it’s not some medical crisis or anything like that, but I can’t quite say I’m happy about this.
Jonah Goldberg
But one of the things you learn when you become an adult, or at least so I’ve been told, is that personal happiness isn’t everything. You definitely learn that when you start a business. So even if I don’t fully qualify as a grownup, I still like making, uh, pull my finger jokes, I do the clear the bar on this business thing and the simple fact is The Dispatch is a business.
Jonah Goldberg
We have a highfalutin mission and all that. We’re not making bean burritos, um, which are often great prep for those pull my finger jokes by the way, but we need this thing to succeed and the best way to do that while staying true to the mission
Jonah Goldberg
is to grow our membership, our annoying Steve Hayes approved word for subscribers.
Jonah Goldberg
And our business guys, I still call them the suits even though I’m technically their boss, have made the case that this is what’s best for The Dispatch, even if it’s not necessarily what’s best for me. So here’s what’s gonna happen.
Jonah Goldberg
The solo Remnant or ruminant or this thing that you’re listening to right now is going behind a paywall, but only the ruminant. The other conversational Remnants, the ones that drop on Mondays and Wednesdays, those aren’t changing and they’ll stay free.
Jonah Goldberg
There will be the same mix of eggheadery, rank punditry, and tasteful nudity that, that there’s always been. But the Saturday Remnant, the one my wife thinks is an unhealthy sign of self-indulgence and a disordered soul, is going to go behind the paywall effective next week.
Jonah Goldberg
Look, I get it. I’m a podcast listener too. I know the feeling of opening your app and seeing subscribers only on something you’ve been listening to for, for years and going, “Well, screw that.” I’m asking you not to be that guy or gal. Moreover, The Remnant, like the G-file and, by the way, Delta House, has a long history of existence in the community and it’s always been my thing to do with as I please,
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but my personal feelings aren’t the issue. It’s not personal, it’s business. So let me explain why we made this business decision. The Dispatch is trying to be something that doesn’t really exist right now in American media, a serious center-right publication with room for sane voices to its left and right that’s resolutely pro-democracy, obsessively nonpartisan, and anti-asininity, that takes ideas seriously, takes its readers and listeners seriously, and refuses to play the em- the engagement bait game that’s eaten most of our competitors alive. We publish writing and podcasts that take the issue seriously, but we try not to take ourselves so seriously that we lose sight of the fact our work has to be compelling and even entertaining. That’s the bet Steve and I made when we started this thing, and the only way that that bet pays off, the only way we get to keep doing this and do more of it, is if enough people decide it’s worth paying for. This isn’t a we need to do this to pay the bills thing.
Jonah Goldberg
It’s a we need to do this to grow to the next level thing. And here’s what membership growth actually unlocks. Gets more long form reporting like Kevin Williams’ pieces from Ukraine and Ohio where they are not eating the dogs and the cats. That’s more contributors like Jesse Singal and Emily Oster and Yascha Mounk. It’s better coverage of the Supreme Court, of national security, of economics, of parenting, and of tech and all the stuff that genuinely matters and that we think we can cover in a distinct and valuable way. It’s new products like Dispatch Voice and an app that improves the member experience. Every member who signs up is casting a vote for a bigger, more ambitious Dispatch and one that plays an even bigger role in the national conversation. I also know that a lot of you have been listening to The Remnant for years, years without paying a dime.And have probably felt vaguely guilty about it the whole time. Some may not. I’m not trying to, like, make you feel bad. I am honestly grateful, in fact, I’m discomfortedly flattered and a little bewildered that you’ve been listening at all. But if you’ve been waiting for a reason to actually pull a trigger and become a Dispatch member, this is me giving you one. And we’re gonna make it really, really easy. If you sign up for an annual membership using the promo code DINGO, you’ll get a free month, twelve months for the price of eleven. And we’ll throw in everything else the Dispatch does to boot. Kevin Williamson, Nick Catamia, the G-File, the Morning Dispatch, audio versions of every article, GIF links you can send to your friends. Also, invitations to Dispatch events, including the disastrously named Juntos that we’re calling our meetups. It is an incredible value. I mean, think about it this way. If you think the Rem– it- if you think it’s an edge case to pay to subscribe, you know, what is in effect, ten– was it ten bucks, eight bucks a month, whatever the subscription deal you’re getting for the Ruminant. If you think it’s like, eh, I don’t know, well, you’re also getting everything else we do included in that price and then some. Why this podcast? Why the Saturday Rumin-Ruminant? Well, because the data told us so, or rather, the, the dorks who read the data told me so.
Jonah Goldberg
Saturday is consistently the most listened to episode of the week, again, for reasons that defy rational explanation. That tells us something about what you actually want from this show, and it tells us that this is the episode that’s worth asking you to pay for. The interviews stay free because that’s where we bring in new listeners and where the guests deserve the biggest possible audience. You know, part of the point, part of the way we get– I get good people on the Remnant is that we’re good at moving books. Important people who listen to this thing, I’m not trying to be douchey about this, I mean, it just, it just happens to be true. Lots of people in publishing, lots of people in journalism,
Jonah Goldberg
lots of people on the Hill, lots of great people in business and, you know, I’m, I’m not trying to rank humans in any kinda way. I’m just saying that book buyers wanna come on here
Jonah Goldberg
and other people who of great stature and influence are willing to tolerate me in the fact that I smell like that blue liquid that barbers store their combs in, um, in order to, uh, get access to this audience. So anyway, that’s neither here, neither here nor there. Again, I just wanna be real clear, I don’t love doing this. I’ve been doing this podcast for almost a decade, and it’s, it’s my thing. It’s really the only way I’ve been able to do it is to do it as my thing. And the whole point of the Remnant, particularly the Ruminant, it’s the place where I get to think out loud with all of you. And I’ve made some, like, really great, mostly email, you know, friends and relationships, people I’ve learned an enormous amount from because of that relationship I have with the audience. And I know I’m gonna get a lot of angry email from a lot of people, and I apologize. I, I, again, it’s not personal, it’s business. I know people are gonna start comparing me to, like, the sort of podcast equivalent of the IRGC, you know, employing the Strait of Hormuz strategy on all of you and turning what was supposed to be a intellectual free passage zone into a toll booth. I get it. I apologize. Well, I don’t apologize in the sense that I think this is, like, the case is persuasive that we should do this, and it’s good for the Dispatch, and it’s good for the people that w-we’ve hired and that are working incredibly hard, and I have to make decisions based on what’s good for the company, um, beyond what’s just sort of personally good for me. And so, you know, that’s why I’m doing it. And I, and I really believe, and I’ve thought about this a lot, that the best way to keep doing this podcast for the long haul is to make the Dispatch the thing it should be.
Jonah Goldberg
And to do that, I have to ask people who get the most out of it to chip in. So that’s what I’m doing.
Jonah Goldberg
If you’re already a Dispatch member, thank you. Seriously. Genuinely. Thank you. None of this works without you. But in order to give you access to what you’re already paying for, you need to do a little rigmarole to set this up. So go into your My Account page,
Jonah Goldberg
find your custom code, and add it to your podcast player, the same way you might have for Dispatch Voiced earlier this year. Uh, we put a link in the show notes with a video that I did, or I, I, I hosted, Victoria did all the real work, showing you how to do all of this. So, like, don’t sweat this right this second. You got a week. Now, if you’re a premium member and you’ve already set up your ad-free podcast feed already, you don’t need to do anything. Well, I mean, you still need to, like, consume water and take in oxygen and, and, and proteins and whatnot. But, like, for this stuff, you don’t need to do anything. All three shows will continue to be published in those feeds as normal. Now, if you’re a free lister, which is, i.e. you, you’re on the free– you subscribed, but you don’t pay anything, and so you just get a limited number of articles, and you get, like, the Friday G-file, but nothing else. If you’re a free lister and you’ve been on the fence about a Dispatch membership, I’d love for you to take this opportunity to join us. The link and the DINGO promo code are in the show notes. And if you decide this isn’t for you, I get that too. I really do. I know. Like, like, this is not a uniformly great economy for a lot of people. I get people are making choices about where to cut cost centers from their lives. You don’t need to apologize to me. You don’t need to send me a long email saying how, you know, you wish you could do it, but you can’t. I get it. I understand. But anyway, um, the Wednesday and Friday episodes will still be there, same as always, and so will the first few minutes of the Ruminant every week. You’ll just hit the paywall and be reminded that you need to join to hear the rest. Okay, so, and one last thing before I get to, like, the stream of consciousness stuff that you’re– that you didn’t pay for, but, but you came for. Now that this thing is going to be a product that you do pay for, you should know that I’m gonna take it a bit more seriouslyEvery time I say I should take this more seriously, I get a lot of feedback from saying, “No, no, don’t change anything.” So I’m, I wanna be careful that it re- retains the quality that people like about it. But at the same time, I feel obliged to do more since I’m asking people to do more. So hopefully the stuff you like won’t change, and if it does, and if you think it does, please let me know, seriously. But I’ll start prepping a bit more. I’ll try to blood dope and maybe chew a bit more Kot before the recording starts so that I don’t complain as much about being tired. And I want you guys, my, my dear listeners, I say that sincerely, to recognize that I appreciate that I know I’m asking more of you, and therefore I owe more to you in exchange. All right. That’s it. I’m, I’ve done my bit. Let’s get on with whatever the hell this thing is. Okay. So as you could tell, some of that was written. I was negotiated with the, um, the business team. Can’t tell you how many times I had to tell these guys, “You know you work for me.” Let’s do a little, uh, rank punditry. On the dispatch pod this week, one of the things we talked about, the Indiana primary stuff. I don’t have a lot more to add
Jonah Goldberg
to what I think about all that, except to say I don’t think it had very much to do at all with redistricting. It was an attempt to send the signal that Trump still can destroy your political re- career as a Republican if you defy him, and he’s gonna need that fear. Since he’s losing love, he’s gonna near- need that fear going into the midterms in particular, and then presumably after Republicans lose the House, and possibly still too soon to tell the Senate, he needs the rank and file to hold the line for him, or he’s just, he’s screwed and he’s gonna be embarrassed and, and all the rest. It is not that he actually is this wildly popular, powerful politician. It’s, uh, he’s a wildly powerful, popular politician within the, the minority universe of the primary electorate
Jonah Goldberg
and the people who care about the primary electorate, which is not just elected politicians. It’s also most of the ratings-obsessed producers of Fox News, you know, and a lot of the sort of right-wing media complex, and also the
Jonah Goldberg
institutions that raise money off of that s- you know, m- small and medium-sized donor base. A small single-digit fraction of Americans watch Fox on any given night, but those people have a disproportionate influence within the GOP electorate and within the right-wing economy, as it were. So he has this outsized role in all that, but he is not a popular politician with the average American, and, and frankly,
Jonah Goldberg
never really has been. Um, this is something that Trump simply, I don’t think understands, but I d- I think a lot of his fans don’t understand, which is also the case with, with populist types, is that he’s polarizing, right? He’s incredibly popular with the people who love him, and he’s incredibly unpopular with the people who don’t. I’m sort of with Kevin Williamson on this stuff. I kind of, I increasingly yearn for a,
Jonah Goldberg
an Eisenhower type who
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is not wildly loved by many, but is respected and appreciated by most. And this is why, one of the reasons why I keep harping on the fact that I think our problems are more fixable than people realize if, if someone has the small R Republican courage
Jonah Goldberg
to simply push through some structural institutional reforms,
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but get a c- the incentive structure
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recalibrated for what’s best for the country. But I don’t know, I was thinking about Trump and this thing, and it, it, it’s not a great analogy, but it’s the one that comes to mind is, like,
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you know how there are, like,
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there were dudes who were, like, really, really
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popular in high school, and you kinda knew that these were their greatest days. I mean, sort of like the Al Bundy four touchdowns in one game stuff. You knew that things were gonna go downhill, you know, like, like I guess Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused, you know, all that kind of thing. And you probably knew people like that in college as well. I kinda feel like there’s an analogy there to how Trump views the GOP. He would
Jonah Goldberg
much rather the GOP become a rump party
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so long as if he was still the big man on campus within it, right? And the idea of growing the party with Republicans not loyal to him
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is just inconceivable. He’d rather it lose elections, but everybody who’s left be completely loyal and fearful and, and if possible, loving of him. And that’s his mindset, because, like, spending this money, sp- dedicating these resources to oust a bunch of otherwise basically MAGA
Jonah Goldberg
state senators in Indiana is incredibly stupid, but for that, right? I mean, like, they ran ads calling a g- you know, these guys RINOs when they were, like… had campaigned for and voted for and endorsed Trump in ’16, ’20, and ’24, and the only reason they were RINOs, right? The thing that defined them as left and, you know, as, as, as insufficiently conservative. And I, don’t get me started on how stupid
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the term RINO is for describing someone insufficiently conservative. If you’re truly conservative, right, whether you agree with my kind of conservatism or not,
Jonah Goldberg
if you’re truly conservative, then you should, in a real sense, be a RINO. Like, the RINO thing, its history goes back to, like, the sort of the Rockefeller types who were really squishy, and they ended up, you know, they would vote with Democrats or they would support Democrat stuff all the time, and that’s where the idea of RINO kinda comes from. It was, uh, you know, the Me Too Republican stuff comes out of that too. But now because of theIntellectual or I should say ideological triumph of conservatism within the GOP and the homogenization of it, commitment to conservative ideology and loyalty to the GOP have become hybridized and, and almost interchangeable. Like George Will, if you, if you take what Republican in name only is supposed to mean, then of course, like people like George Will, people like me, people like, you know, Charlie Cook, people who aren’t willing to sort of change their policy preferences and their points of view based upon pure partisan advantage for the Republicans, they’re the ones who should be called RINOs, right? If, if you’re that committed to something that you’re willing for the GOP to, to lose, um, rather than support it, then of course you’re, you’re not a party guy. But anyway, the, the way that these ads and the way the Trump team and shamefully Club for Growth, I don’t know what the hell’s going on with those guys, it’s really sad. The way they describe a RINO is that if you didn’t go along with this not completely unprecedented, but pretty norm-defying and, and, and unconscionably, you know, partisan mid-decade redistricting plan,
Jonah Goldberg
in part because, you know, some of these state senators who voted against that were doing so because of these like very close to the ground local, you know, politics issues about like not wanting to be, not wanting to represent Indianapolis rather than some outer suburb or rural area and that kind of thing. Like, things that, like, their constituents didn’t want, it was solely ’cause of this issue, that you were disloyal to Trump on this thing that Trump wanted, and that makes you a RINO. So basically, the, the definition that these guys are using for what it means to be a Republican in name only, which is, you know, c- again, coded for coward, squish, cuck, whatever, if you don’t work hard to give the president his heart’s desire, then, um, you’re not a real Republican. And that’s kinda gross. I think that’s gonna have lasting problems. Second thing, and then I’ll, I’ll get away from Trump ’cause I really don’t wanna talk about him anymore. It kinda feels like Trump is becoming
Jonah Goldberg
a caricature. You know, I often say, you know, the thing about caricatures, the reason why a good caricature works, whether it’s a Saturday Night Live skit or a drawing or whatever,
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is that it exaggerates certain features. It exaggerates certain truths. ‘Cause remember, you can only exaggerate the truth. You can’t exaggerate a lie. It exaggerates certain truth, truths about their subject. You know, so like caricatures of LBJ had that giant nose. He has a big nose, you know. You know, uh, caricatures of Nixon had, you know, darker five o’clock shadow than he actually had, right? The, all of the memes about Marco Rubio, I just saw one this morning where he was dressed up like Marvin the Martian about how Marco Rubio finds out he’s gonna, uh, have to take point on dealing with aliens. By the way, I, I’ll get back to my point in a second. How much must it bother JD Vance that
Jonah Goldberg
Vance, who is so much more online, so much more obsessed with Twitter and thinks Twitter is the real world, that the defining memes about JD Vance are him…
Jonah Goldberg
I, I still don’t quite understand why he’s purple in so many of them. You know, sort of like, uh, Veruca Salt in, in, in, um, Willy Wonka. But he’s like, he’s fat in them, and he’s got this long hair, not quite mullet situation, but he’s this like fat loser in these memes. And look, Vance has lost a lot of weight and looks pretty good these days, so I mean, I, I think it’s unfair. But regardless, that’s, the meme is of him, and he actually, I think he actually dressed up like the meme for Halloween, again, because he’s so frigging online. Meanwhile,
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the meme campaign, the joke about Rubio, which just will not go away, it just has like, it’s like, uh, permanent legs, is that he’s doing everything he can [chuckles] for the good of the country and for his job, and he’s just so super competent that there’s no job that, that they won’t give him, and he just has to take it and do it. And like,
Jonah Goldberg
uh, it’s difficult to think of a meme of a politician that technically pokes fun of the politician, but at the same time underscores the thing that people like about him and that people find to be like a- an admirable leadership quality. It just kinda… Wow, this just must piss off Vance so much that he wants to be loved on the internet, and he’s just mocked for it. And Rubio, who I think has a much better strategy, if he thinks he’s gonna run for 2028, but from the people I’ve talked to in, in that orbit, basically his view is so much is gonna change between now and then, just keep focused on the job. Don’t… You know, maintain a good relationship with Vance ’cause there’s no reason to have an ugly war now, and just, you make that decision when you have to make that decision. Um, in the meantime, if you do everything the right way as best you can in the process, you’ll be better positioned to run for president if you choose to run for president. And meanwhile, Vance is just like super thirsty and kind of constantly outthinking himself and… Anyway, I find it amusing. I, I really don’t love the idea of the GOP nominating anybody from this administration, um, in 2028, but obviously
Jonah Goldberg
if I were thinking about the primary, GOP primary in ’28, I would be all in for Rubio if the choi- if the other choice was Vance. Anyway, Trump’s becoming a bit of a character. Like [laughs] so it’s like the other morning, and I…
Jonah Goldberg
Look, I like Audie Corn- Cornish at CNNShe has this 6:00 a.m. show. I get asked to do it a lot. I have nothing against her, I have nothing against the show, but doing a 6:00 a.m. show when it’s my job to walk the dogs in the morning, it just, it’s hard. And so on Wednesday, I did it. I’m driving up to CNN, trying to get up to speed on, you know, the overnight stuff, and one of the things we were gonna talk about was Iran and, you know, okay, that’s fine, so…
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And then listening on NPR in the morning,
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and you know how sometimes Trump will say something that sounds so crazy or so stupid that at first you’re like, “Okay, that’s so stupid. That’s so crazy. He’s losing it.” And then you’re like, “Oh, I should be careful because,
Jonah Goldberg
like, I have, I might have confirmation bias, and maybe there’s a term I am missing that makes sense, that makes it make, make more sense.” This has happened a couple times when he’s talked about real estate stuff, which, which he actually does know about. And I was like, “Oh, that sounded stupid.” And they’re like, “Oh, no, it turned out that’s defensible.” Uh, you get sort of half a case of this with the, with the, with the dust thing, you know, where he talks about the nuclear dust, which is the enriched uranium at the bottom of the, what is it, Fordow, whatever that mountain is that we took out in Midnight Hammer. Like, I’d never in my life heard people refer to enriched uranium as dust, but apparently it’s a kinda, like, quasi-defensible thing, and it’s caught on. So I don’t, I don’t ding him for saying dust, even though I think it’s weird. And I think it’s bad politics for him because he does this thing, it’s like when he does debates and stuff, he’ll just, he’ll refer to very online shorthand for stuff that a lot of normal people don’t know, and he thinks that it works for him as a persuasive argument. You know, he’ll say in press conferences, “Oh, we just need to get the dust. They need to give us the dust.” And if you’re not up to speed, if you’re not following the news, you’re like, “What the hell is he talking about, the dust,” right? What the hell is he talking about when he says, “Russia, Russia, Russia”? A lot of people know what that means for Trump, but a bunch of people kinda don’t. Anyway,
Jonah Goldberg
I’m listening to this soundbite from him in the Oval Office, and he’s talking about, defensibly, understandably, I mean, obviously I have my disagreements about how Iran should just raise the white flag, Iran should capitulate, Iran should surrender, and, um, I don’t really understand why they aren’t doing it. And then he says something like,
Jonah Goldberg
you know, “What do they say in hockey? He should, they should cry uncle.” I have this, like, wait a second. I’m not a big hockey guy. Been to a couple hockey games. I have a lot of friends growing up who loved hockey, so I’ve been around people talking hockey all my life. I have friends now who love hockey. And, like, I’ve never heard
Jonah Goldberg
“say uncle” associated with hockey before. And apparently there’s some half defense that there were some high school kids in the room, and maybe they were hockey players or something like that. But they don’t say uncle in hockey. Like, wrestling maybe. Anyway, it was a very small example, but I, I think it’s a s- part of the, you know, the way he talks these days is becoming more and more of a caricature of Trump. That guy who impersonates Trump on SNL,
Jonah Goldberg
the verisimilitude to the, the
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actual person he’s im- im-
Jonah Goldberg
im- doing an impression of is getting so that it’s still funny, but it’s, it feels almost less made up, like he could actually just use an actual transcript of some things that Trump has said. Anyway, why, why am I bringing this up? So the, the point about the caricature thing is that, and I tried to make this point, I did it badly, I think, on the Dispatch podcast. And so I’ve been saying for 10 years, 11 years now, you can go back and find the old columns I’ve written on this, that
Jonah Goldberg
Trumpism is not an ideological phenomenon. It’s a psychological phenomenon, and both in terms of Trump himself, but also his biggest fans. If you wanna say it’s also a sociological phenomenon, that’s fine too, right? Like, I was listening to this thing on the radio yesterday about, they had these a little histrionic, a little over the top experts on authoritarianism on one of those NPR shows like Here and Now or something like that, talking about how Trump is an authoritarian and because, like authoritarians, he likes his face on everything and his name on any- everything and why is he putting his face on everything and, and this, whoever this academic was has this theory about authoritarians wanting their face on everything and… Pr- the reason I bring it up is just that, first of all,
Jonah Goldberg
the academic kept talking about how the, it’s an ideological thing, and I just don’t think it’s an ideological thing. I think megalomania and narcissism and all of that, which is aroused in and, and, you know, and amplified in people with power or people who think they have power, is a psychological thing, not an ideological thing. There, there are ideological justifications for it from yes men, but, like, it’s not a ideolo- ideology run thing. But, you know, the host asked at one point about, you know, how Trump insists, he’s said this a bunch of times now, like, about, uh, like, Trump Rx or, and the Trump Card and call, uh, on the Kennedy Center. There are a bunch of these things that he’s renamed or named after himself, and he says, “I swear, no one will believe me, but it wasn’t my idea. I didn’t say, I didn’t tell them to do this. They did this on their own.” I think that’s obviously true in a lot of cases, but that’s the point, is that he set up bureau– I don’t know, bureaucracy is the wrong word. He set up, uh, an incentive structure in his government, right, that says
Jonah Goldberg
the way you get
Jonah Goldberg
praise and power and support from the president is if you take initiative to celebrate how awesome the president is. And, you know, so, like, this jackass at the Mint who’s putting Trump’s picture on a coin, it’s entirely believable to me that it was his idea, but he’s trying to, like, get noticed by Trump. And, like, that’s the kinda government Trump has set up, is that he wants to create competition tryouts for sycophancy.That small segment of the public that still, like, wildly loves Trump and loves this stuff, it helps you politically down the road to say, you know, “When I was at the, I don’t know, the Department of Parks and Rec, I was the one who named every outhouse after Jim Comey and every, you know, playground after Donald Trump,” and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s a, it’s a credential for you. The character s- caricature, again, stems from his psychology, from his personality, from his character, not from his, from any body of ideas that he has. And, you know, I’ve, I’ve talked about this a bunch about how, you know, his, one of his major political influences was this mob boss from Queens, and also Roy Cohn, who was also kind of a mob lawyer, and he loves mob movies, and he thinks like a mobster. I think he likes mob movies and he likes mob stuff because he thinks like a mobster, not because– He doesn’t think like a mobster because of the influence of those movies. And not to go all Mansor Olson on you, but, like, the logic of a mob boss is very much like, uh, the logic of a warlord. It’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s, it’s, it’s programming that we have in us, right? This is a big part of the point of Suicide of the West, is that when civilization breaks down, the, you know, the factory preset social order looks a lot like tribalism with, you know, with chieftains and rival power lords. That’s why, you know, prisons devolve very quickly into prison gang kinda stuff. It’s the whole Lord of the Flies thing and, um, or The Walking Dead thing. And I think Trump’s lizard brain controls a big part of him in ways that oth- for other people, it, it doesn’t. You know, like, fractals? I think that’s what they call it, right? Where they can do these, like,
Jonah Goldberg
like you’ve seen this animation, or you might have seen this animation, um, some of you have better things to do [chuckles] where, like, you can close up on essentially a grain of sand, and it’s got this kinda, like,
Jonah Goldberg
structure that looks like the coastline of an island chain or something like that, and you can keep pulling out to different and different levels, and those structures just keep repeating, sort of like the Fibonacci series in, uh, which is a series of numbers. It’s, like, this natural thing, and it describes the ratio of curves or whatever in a conch shell. You find it throughout nature. There’s just something, like, the golden mean. There’s a thing in nature that just reverts to this, and you can find it at almost any scale. I think, uh, for want of a better metaphor or analogy or, or whatever, a simile, I kinda see Trump increasingly that way, is that Trump is Trump in every context. Trump is Trump,
Jonah Goldberg
um, you know, uh, it, it’s– This is not necessarily a new point. I’ve been c- I’ve been saying this stuff about character is destiny for a really long time with regard to Trump. But,
Jonah Goldberg
like, if you look at, so we’re pulling five thousand troops out of Germany because the prime, because the, the chancellor of Germany said something that Trump didn’t like. The naming petty little things and naming big things all about himself, the ballroom stuff and how he handled that. Trump is being the same guy in every sphere of his life, and
Jonah Goldberg
I think that people are missing, I mean, obviously the people who think he’s a 4D chess player and a genius and all that kinda stuff, they’ve been missing Trump’s character from the beginning. But I think, you know, when I listen to a lot of the talk about the Iran war, particularly from friends who were very bullish in the beginning and are now increasingly worried, but not just the Iran war, I mean, all sorts of things, right? You know, his approach to AI or crypto or the about-face on TikTok, right?
Jonah Goldberg
Each time, if you listen closely, his reasons are the same reasons he does, he has for everything else, right? He, like,
Jonah Goldberg
he, he changed his mind on TikTok because TikTok helped him win. And he says it, right? Like, you know, “I, I, I, I know I signed that law about banning TikTok, but, you know, in the last election, TikTok was very much on my side.” And it’s clearly exaggerated, and clearly the people with a financial stake in TikTok exaggerated to him about how good TikTok was to him. It’s the same guy in every sphere, and that’s not historically how, like, presidents are, right? Presidents, you know, historically, particularly in their second terms, which I know this is kind of not quite a real second term because of the interregnum, they’re often very different when it comes to foreign policy and domestic policy. Well, ’cause first of all, foreign policy and domestic policy are very different things, but also because presidents are more unconstrained in foreign policy than they are in domestic policy stuff. And they also have sort of not easily apply, like, your ideological views, you know, and I don’t mean this in a, in any pejorative sense, but your philosophical views about foreign policy are, for a normally ordered brain, going to be different than your form, your, your views about domestic policy, ’cause they’re just different things. And you might be more cautious on foreign policy, or you might be more cautious on domestic policy. Um, you understand that you don’t have control over other nation-states the way you do over the levers of government domestically, you know. All sorts of, like, perfectly normal, sane, rational,
Jonah Goldberg
kinda obvious, so it feels weird explaining it, differences between foreign policy and domestic policy, and also between, like,
Jonah Goldberg
personnel policy in the White House and how you deal with Congress, or stuff you do with your business versus stuff you do with the people’s business. These are distinctions that most presidents recognizeAnd change their approach and tactics accordingly. And I think that this is the thing I think a lot of people don’t recognize, is that Trump is always the same guy.
Jonah Goldberg
He’s always the guy who’s susceptible to flattery. He’s always the guy who personalizes differences.
Jonah Goldberg
He’s always the guy who says that a difference in disagreement is a, a personal affront to him, and it doesn’t matter if it’s in foreign policy or domestic policy or domestic politics, which is different than domestic policy. And if you’re not on Team Trump, it’s because you have either Trump derangement syndrome or you have some version of critical Trump theory going on or whatever it is. And I just think that’s becoming ever more apparent, that people are trying to make, do Trump-splaining in more and more sophisticated ways when it’s actually just getting a lot easier. All right, uh, I can go on, but I think, I think I made the– I don’t know if I made the point. Here is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on someone named Ilana Glazer. For all I know, that’s a huge podcast that I should know about, but I’m increasingly proud about how few of, like, the huge influencers I ever watch or in many, many, many, many cases have ever heard of. Regardless, she’s apparently a big enough deal for AOC to think she needs to be on there, and I’ll just play it.
Media Clip
There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned, right? [laughs] You can’t earn a billion dollars. That’s right. You just can’t earn that. That’s exactly correct. You can, you can get market power. You can
Media Clip
break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. Yep. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. Yep. But you can’t earn that, right? That’s right. And so you have to create a myth that since you didn’t earn that, you have to create a myth of earning it.
Jonah Goldberg
Okay, so a lot of stuff going on here. First of all, I should say, look,
Jonah Goldberg
I don’t think AOC is dumb. I know a lot of people who do. I think she’s a very attractive woman. Anyone who thinks she’s gonna be President of the United States with that voice. Her voice to me is, is, I’m open to charges of sexism and whatnot on this, but critical remarks about
Jonah Goldberg
Republicans all the time, I think it’s fair to say. I think for the people who think that she’s gonna be president one day, not if that nasal twang endures. I would get the, whatever the, you know,
Jonah Goldberg
the deviated septum surgery or vocal cord whatever, to drop a few octaves, get the training, because that voice,
Jonah Goldberg
it’s very similar to, like,
Jonah Goldberg
you know, the voice my wife makes when she’s mocking people,
Jonah Goldberg
mocking women who don’t know what they’re talking about. My wife will, will do this thing where she talks about women who wear if-I-only-had-a-brain glasses, like, because they think, like, if they wear glasses, they’ll seem smarter, and then say things in, in kind of that voice. And again, I’m not saying that she’s dumb. Certainly not saying my wife’s dumb. I’m saying, I’m not saying that AOC is dumb. I’m just saying that that voice I don’t think is in her best interest, and if she can do something about it, she should. There are only two points I wanna make about this, is, like, first of all, I don’t know what the broader context of this thing is,
Jonah Goldberg
but there’s this idea. It’s all over the place. You know, there are all these people who think there shouldn’t be billionaires. Mom Donna has said it. There are people who think,
Jonah Goldberg
you know, this is a really old idea of how there shouldn’t be a minimum wage. There should be a maximum wage. In fact, weird serendipity. So yesterday, uh, I’m sorry, I’ll get to the point. I will. But yesterday, uh, w-we were trying to figure out, we were talking about what should be the, uh, not-worth-your-time segment on the Dispatch Pod. And Steve pointed out to us and floated the idea, we didn’t end up talking about it, that RFK Jr. wants,
Jonah Goldberg
wants to essentially ban
Jonah Goldberg
Jell-O and other sugary foods from hospitals.
Jonah Goldberg
Now, I looked into it. It’s, right now it’s more like a strong suggestion and threats about Medicare funding if they don’t go along with the MAHA diet suggestions. But it’s not clear to me that this can actually happen, but, so it may just be jawboning. I’ll just be very, very clear. I think it’s incredibly stupid. Like, if somebody is going through chemo, or if it’s some old person who needs, just needs to take in fluids, and they wanna eat Jell-O, give them some fricking Jell-O. I mean, I hate Jell-O. I think Jell-O creeps me out. But, but when we were talking about it, I hadn’t heard anything about it, and I looked, I did a really quick Google search of Kennedy and Jell-O, and I saw this, like, and Google News came up with, um, like, I don’t know, this three, four-week-old story about how Jello Biafra, one of the founders of the band Dead Kennedys, was in the hospital after suffering a stroke. Apparently, he’s getting better. That’s great. I’m not trying to make light of him having a stroke or anything. But the reason why I bring this up is that the first time I ever heard anybody say this crap about there should be a maximum wage was when I used to do this thing called the Spitfire Tour, and I would go around country with Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys and a bunch of other people. He would get up on stage and say, “People talk about a minimum wage. What I wanna know is, why don’t we have a maximum wage?” And the crowds would go wild, and I just thought it was incredibly stupid then, and this is like ’98, ’99.And it’s just this kind of stuff has, has never gone away. Um, it’s just becoming more credible in elite Democratic, um, political circles. I think it was Frank Bruni who talked about why we should just get rid of billionaires as a, as a, as a category. And, uh, Kevin had the,
Jonah Goldberg
I think, fairly astute, um, yet simultaneously should be obvious observation that anytime you’re talking about eliminating a whole category of people to have to improve, um, society, you might wanna just sort of check yourself. But all right, so just very quickly on the billionaires can’t earn this thing. I think she’s kind of making a
Jonah Goldberg
economically illiterate point, but also a morally illiterate point. Um, and they’re not necessarily the same thing. If I understand her correctly, what she’s trying to say is like,
Jonah Goldberg
there’s no way you could legitimately earn a billion dollars. The only way you could earn it is by manipulating the system in some way to maximize your personal profit. Well, that’s just, I just, there’s just, there’s no evidence to say… I’m not saying by… To be sure, there are billionaires who have done all of those things, but there’s no evidence to say that that’s the only way you can become a billionaire. And secondly, I mean, like let’s just make this a hypothetical.
Jonah Goldberg
Let’s say for the sake of argument
Jonah Goldberg
that I have
Jonah Goldberg
a proven
Jonah Goldberg
cure for cancer, right? I can prove it, it works, it’s affordable, it’s scalable, and I– it’s, and it’s basically just a,
Jonah Goldberg
an otherwise harmless pill you take every morning and it guarantees you’ll never have cancer. I do- I wanna ma- make it available to people as much as conceivably possible, but I also feel like I should be compensated. So I want to charge people a penny a day to take this pill,
Jonah Goldberg
and that’s how I set it up. That’s how I set up the business. The lawyers do it all, right? I will become a bill- and since pretty much everyone on the planet will wanna take this pill, and governments can subsidize poor, you know, governments can subsidize poor people to be able to afford a penny a day if they can’t otherwise afford it. You know, that’s fine. Whatever. But I should make a penny of profit per pill per day.
Jonah Goldberg
Seems reasonable to me. I will become a billionaire very quickly.
Jonah Goldberg
Who’s
Jonah Goldberg
worse off because of this? How does my existence as a newly minted billionaire make the world a worse place? Who’s suffering? What, what, uh, uh, what, what, what zero-sum penalty is the world paying for this? Now, you can argue I shouldn’t make any profit at all saving people’s lives. You know, I should wanna do it for the good of my soul or whatever, or I should make, have a smaller cut. Okay, that’s, those are all different, I think bad, but different arguments. But w- I would become a billionaire very, very, very quickly,
Jonah Goldberg
and the world would be spared cancer.
Jonah Goldberg
Now, obviously, a lot of the things that have made billionaires aren’t as noble or desirable as cures for cancer.
Jonah Goldberg
But now you’re getting into this place where you’re gonna say the government gets to decide what products you’re selling to Americans or to the world that are morally justifiable to get rich off of. And look, I’m not, I’m not a
Jonah Goldberg
total zealot about this. I, I think the government can make those kinds of rules on the edge cases, right? I mean, like we don’t let people legally become billionaires by selling fentanyl or heroin. Should the guy who invented Crocs be barred from becoming a billionaire? Did he do something evil? Did… I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t think that Rubik guy became a billionaire ’cause he invented the Rubik’s Cube, but like he got rich. Why, why does the government get to intercede because of the amount of wealth it generated rather than the source of the wealth? And I, I, I just don’t think there’s any clear argument against it. Like there are plenty of arguments for high taxation rates and, and, and all of that kind of thing, but there aren’t like
Jonah Goldberg
very good arguments for saying that consenting adults committing capitalist acts with each other has made somebody very rich, um, and that’s wrong, right? Like, like she is bringing into this assumptions about how economics work that I just think are preposterous. And I find it just… I don’t know, maybe it’s ’cause it’s, you know, this primary season for Democrats and, you know, in California, um, and in N- and in D.C., I just keep seeing more and more economically illiterate nonsense from various candidates and, uh, Democratic candidates. You know, there’s this woman who’s running for mayor in D.C., and she’s not alone. There are a bunch of people I’ve seen ads, similar ads in California for various things about making, stuff like making, uh,
Jonah Goldberg
rent largely tax-free, um, to make rent more affordable. Now, we’ve, we’ve talked about this before, but you don’t fix housing problems by subsidizing demand.
Jonah Goldberg
If everybody gets,
Jonah Goldberg
you know, I think this woman, something Brooks, wants
Jonah Goldberg
to make the first $15,000 a year of rent tax-free, um, or tax-deductible or whatever. Well, if everybody gets that, then rents will go up because the demandWill go up, right? I mean, like, if everybody gets that same kind of credit, it doesn’t expand the housing supply. It just makes the competition more intense for the existing housing supply and, and more expensive. And you just see this stuff all over. And, like, it’s amazing to me watching some of these ads. You know, I was out in L.A., and, you know, L.A. could be s- was once such a great city, could be a great city again. It’s still got a lot of greatness in it, a lot of great neighborhoods and all that kind of stuff. But man, like,
Jonah Goldberg
to listen to Democrats in California, you know, like, watch this, watch some of the Katie Porter ads about what they’re campaigning on, you know, abolish ICE, free healthcare for illegal immigrants, all of these kinds of things, you know, um, all this stuff about homelessness. You would think that they were outsiders running against a Republican establishment when Republicans have been a
Jonah Goldberg
rump party in that state for decades. You know, this was, I thought, the reason why Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson wrote that Abundance book is ’cause they realized, holy crap, California has all sorts of problems, and we can’t blame Republican obstruction for any of them because Republicans don’t have any power at the state level in California, and they don’t have it at the local level in most of the big cities. And yet California is this mess of, uh, sludge, as Cass Sunstein would call it. It is, you know, it’s bureaucratic. It’s plagued by NIMBYism.
Jonah Goldberg
The homeless encampments are out of control. Um, the place
Jonah Goldberg
is a hot mess. You know, like, I, I cannot believe… Santa Monica, I used to, my, my wife and I and my daughter would go out to Santa Monica quite a bit when she was, my daughter was little, and we would stay out there, and we would go to Santa Monica Pier, and then we would have dinner at the Third Street Promenade. Third Street Promenade was this great sort of family-friendly stretch of stores and restaurants, and there were street performers, you know, like jugglers and, you know, the breakdancers who would do these crazy leaps and all that kind of stuff, and just a lovely family thing. And there was a little homelessness,
Jonah Goldberg
but most of that was kept off of the Third Street Promenade. Third Street Promenade is almost dead, and they’re trying to revitalize it. And look, and COVID was part of the problem, but it’s just been swamped by homeless people, by drug addicts. And look, Republicans had nothing to do with any of that. And to listen to these Democrats talk about how they’re gonna fix California’s problems when many of these Democrats are, in fact, already elected officials who have been, you know, working in Democratic California politics on the city council or in state government or, or in Washington. And California has become a hot mess on their watch, and they’re making it sound like, you know, like, uh, it was, uh, my friend, um, Iowa Hawk was saying about one woman running for city coun- or running for mayor of L.A. from the city council. She was talking about how he, he said, you know, “This is the most hot dog guy trying to find out who did the hot dog truck thing ever.” And for those of you who don’t know the reference, the meme where the hot dog guy, there’s a guy dressed in a hot dog suit, and a Wienermobile has crashed into something or whatever, and the hot dog guy is saying to everybody, “We, we have to do everything we can to find out who’s responsible for this.” California Democrats have screwed up California. There is not a problem that California has that cannot be laid at the feet of Democrats. Now, m- uh, maybe there’s some structural thing that goes back to
Jonah Goldberg
Schwarzenegger maybe or Pete Wilson. I doubt it. But California Democrats own that state. And so people have been asking me who I would vote for for governor, and again, I don’t like to get into the, like, I’m not endorsing anybody. I don’t endorse people. But I can tell you it’s just sort of my preferences. I don’t like much of what I’ve seen from the Republicans. Um, I know Steve Hilton a little personally, you know, back from my Fox days. I think he’s a nice guy personally. I think his theories about populism and some other stuff about America are just
Jonah Goldberg
materially wrong, but I don’t think he’s a bad guy. I think he’s just in a weird bubble in some ways, and I don’t really know much about the other Republican candidates. But if there was a normie Republican of some kind, like that Caruso guy who ran for mayor, like, I think he would have been a great choice for mayor of L.A. I just so firmly believe that you need competitive parties, and you need, you need to fire parties that are basically have machine-like control or monopolies over politics, whether they’re Republican or Democrat. So at the same time, I, not knowing enough about the Republicans, I’m open to the idea that none of them meet a certain threshold, although I, I, I, I guess I would vote for Hilton if there was, if, if the choice was, like, Becerra or one of those guys. And it has n- almost, almost has nothing to do with, like, Republican versus Democrat or conservative versus liberal. It’s basically just, like, you need to clean the arteries by voting out the party that is self-enriching and self-serving by being in power too long, and you just need to flush the system. And so my druthers would be to vote in the most sane Republican you could. If that’s a bridge too far for some people, the only candidate I’ve seen running on the Democratic side that I think seems like a perfectly l- decent guy is this Matt Mahan guy. In just every in-interview I’ve seen, he’s, like, the mayor of San Jose.
Jonah Goldberg
so many of the other candidates are talking about, you know, banning ICE and various rights for illegal immigrants and building housing for homeless people and,
Jonah Goldberg
and, you know… Look, I’m, I’m not necessarily per seopposed to building housing for homeless people. But homelessness in California is not primarily driven
Jonah Goldberg
by a lack of housing. Housing costs and flight from California is driven by a lack of housing, and that plagues sort of middle class and working class people. The real problems for homelessness are drug addiction and mental health stuff. But there’s a guy, Matt Mahan, like, he talks about, like, normie stuff, about fighting crime and, like, uh, ensuring that the tax base is healthy. I don’t know where he comes down on, like, all this wealth tax nonsense, but, like, the idea that it’s good policy, which is very– you know, to do this AOC-type stuff of imposing wealth taxes and chasing rich people out of California is so incredibly stupid to me. It’s the, and it’s same thing with New York City. Like,
Jonah Goldberg
you can’t have a great city without a lot of rich people in it. And I’m not saying it’s ri- it’s a great city because there are rich people in it. It’s more of a chicken and egg thing.
Jonah Goldberg
As cities become great, rich people wanna be there, and as, as rich people wanna be there, the cities become greater.
Jonah Goldberg
But declaring war as, like, this, was it the woman in, in Washington State, you know, who’s like, “If you don’t like this wealth tax and you leave because of it, see ya,” and gigga-gigga-goo, and the audience all laughs. That is so clownishly stupid. It’s hard for me to get my mind around it. And so I would just… Anyone who talks about that kind of stuff rather than, like, real problems of, like, quality of life stuff and, you know, that kind of thing, I would just rule out voting for her. Anyway, there was this whole crop of young, sort of wonkish progressive types when I first came to Washington, um, and that, that was not that long ago. It was more like in the early 2000s, when more as California continued to move left but still had a robust economy, and, you know, it still has. It’s still, like, a big-ass economy. I think if it was its own country, it’d be the third or fourth largest economy in the world. So, like, it’s got a lot going for it, and it deserves much more serious politicians. But, um, people used to say as it got more and more progressive and did all, you know, let the trial lawyers run everything and got super green
Jonah Goldberg
and anti-growth and anti-carbon fuel, you know, car- you know, fossil fuels, they would say, “California proves that this sort of A- American Nordic model can work and that, you know, this, this progressive economics thing that California is doing is proof that, um, you know, you don’t need these trade-offs and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And I just, I would always hit them with, “So you’re, you’re telling me that, like,
Jonah Goldberg
having 270, 280, 200 and, you know, 300 beautiful days of weather doesn’t explain a lot of California’s attractiveness, um, more than, like, your niche thing about, you know,
Jonah Goldberg
housing subsidies or whatever the hell they were talking about, or about, you know, banning, or wind farms?” And try the Calif- how, you know, uh, you know, like, the California model, you know how quickly it would fail if they tried it in South Dakota? People pay a premium to live in California because it’s,
Jonah Goldberg
it’s beautiful, the weather is fantastic, and up until recently, you know, Hollywood had, and Silicon Valley had this buzz factor that, you know, was incredibly magnetic. They’re losing it with Hollywood. Hollywood is dying because California has treated the golden goose of the film industry as a cash cow, and they have made it so expensive to film in California that, you know, we talk about this on Glop. What’s his face? Um,
Jonah Goldberg
Rob Lowe had some game show where they flew everybody, including the contestants, to Ireland to tape it because it was cheaper to do that than to film in California.
Jonah Goldberg
These frigging idiots, right? And, like, they’re chasing out, with this wealth tax stuff, they’re chasing out all of these Silicon Valley guys. Um, now I have big problems politically with a lot of the Silicon Valley guys these days, but, like, the idea that California is better off if the billionaires leave is just so mind-bogglingly stupid. Anyway,
Jonah Goldberg
I think I’ve
Jonah Goldberg
exhausted this point and probably exhausted all of you. Oh, just the last thing about AOC. I’m sorry, ’cause I, I didn’t get back to it. She also talks about how you have to create the myth of the billionaire who earned his money, right? And this, there is this thing in left-wing, revolutionary, radical politics that I d-
Jonah Goldberg
I, I don’t know that she’s appealing to that, but, like, every now and then she says things that tell me that she listened to a few too many, you know, basement speeches of, for the Democratic Socialists of America and imbibed some of this stuff and thinks it’s much more serious than it is. You know, so this idea of the myth, I mean, you can go back to Plato and the noble lie and the role of myths and all that kind of stuff, but, like, the modern, semi-modern conception of myths in politics really comes from this guy Georges Sorel, who was one of the founders of syndicalism and was a huge influence on both Mussolini and on Lenin. And he’s the guy who basically came up with, like, the myth of the general strike, right? He’s the guy who really turns to 11, uh, it’s not cultural Marxism, but, like, this…
Jonah Goldberg
He, he has this idea of, like, he basically, basically concludes, rightly, that m- Marx, Das Kapital, whatever, you know, doesn’t really work as economics,
Jonah Goldberg
but it works great as an organizing myth. He ca- he calls it, you know, the, it’s a great, what he calls it, a apocalyptic text, where it taps into popularMyths, right? Popular, pop- popular, you know, uh, organizing passions. Um, it lights fires in the minds of men. And so, like, the myth of the general strike is this idea which, you know, exists to this day, you know. Like, uh, we just had May Day, and you’ll, um, Google around about general strike, you’ll find it all the time, is this idea of all the workers just walked a- walked away from their looms and their conveyor belts or whatever and, um, and their coal furnaces, that everything would ground to a stop, and the, the proletariat would
Jonah Goldberg
be able to take over the means of production and by demonstrating how they actually run everything and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it’s not actually true as a sort of political, sociological, or even economic matter, but as a political organizing myth for labor, it’s extremely useful, and they never let it go. The idea of a day without immigrants, which is this thing that comes around every now and then, is, is just an, a sort of ethno-immigrant kinda updating of the idea of the myth of the general strike. And so what I found just sort of interesting, again, I don’t know if this is what was in AOC’s thing in mind, but, like, when she says the billionaires have to create this myth, it’s like she’s a th- she’s updating
Jonah Goldberg
left-wing sort of, uh, radical politics and applying them to billionaires. I just gotta tell you, like, I know a couple billionaires. I’ve met a lot of billionaires. They are not conspiring to create a myth that they earned their money. Whether they earned it or not, you know, a lot depends on what you mean by earn, but, like, the billionaires I’m friendly with, they earned their money, and they think they earned their money, and they’re not going around trying to create a myth that they earned their money. They, they wanna convince people that they earned their money, and they aren’t buying into Sorelian notions of, of, of myths and noble lies. Anyway, but I wanted to do a bit about Napoleon. In fact, I, on Wednesday, was the 205th, I think it was, anniversary of Napoleon’s death. And since I had done all that Hegel and Marx stuff last week, and, you know, and Hegel considers Napoleon the quintessential world historical figure, I thought, and I had made these assertions about Napoleon, I thought it’d be fun to sort of talk about Napoleon’s lasting influence. I do not have time at, like, an hour 20 in to talk about Napoleon’s lasting influence. But, um, his influence is lasting, whether you like him or not. Not in intentional terms necessarily, right? I mean, what, what– His ambitions for himself were not the ambitions that defined
Jonah Goldberg
his legacy and his impact, right? I think, you know, I, I don’t… He, he agreed to the Louisiana purch- you know, he sold Louisiana to the United States, uh, and that whole, you know, territory, to raise money for his own purposes. He was not thinking, “Oh, this is gonna help
Jonah Goldberg
little United States become
Jonah Goldberg
this, you know,
Jonah Goldberg
hegemonic superpower one day by becoming a continental nation,” or anything like that. But, like, he did that. I think probably the most disastrous, in some ways, consequence of Napoleon’s rule was he inadvertently unified Germany. So much of these German little mini states were arou- their nationalist spirit was aroused by Napoleon invading and trying to impose a bunch of revolutionary ideas. But also, he, like, put his brothers-in-law and nephews or whatever in charge of some city sta- some, some, some of these territories in Germany, and so there was, like, a corruption thing too, and it ignited the nationalist passions that would one day lead to the unification of Germany. Which, let me just cut to the chase, a unified Germany was never in France’s long-term strategic interests. [chuckles] You know, lots of other things happened because of, of German nationalism. You could look it up. But, you know, like, canned goods, he’s kind of responsible for those because he needed, you know, he’s the armies march on their stomachs guy, and he, he gave out a pri- he offered a prize for whoever could come, figure out a way to extend the shelf life, as it were, of,
Jonah Goldberg
of food on the, on the march, and some guy came up with canned goods, and there you have it. Anyway, uh, we’ll, we can do more Napoleon later.
Jonah Goldberg
I did wanna, like, I’ve been noodling my conversation with Adrian Woold- Wooldridge about his book on liberalism. And look, a- as you guys, I think know,
Jonah Goldberg
do not like inviting people on… Like, if somebody invites me on their podcast, I am perfectly happy if the moment requires it to really pick a fight if necessary. Or, you know, I, I, I try to be polite. I, I used to be much more confrontational in my youth, and I’m trying to model better behavior. But, uh, I have no problem with, with picking real fights, right? I think I like intellectual disagreement and all that. But when I invite people on to talk about their book, I try to be a generous host. I try to give them room. I, sometimes I think I, I bend too far backwards to be gracious and don’t push back enough, and I hear from people that I don’t push back enough. So, uh, the more I think about my conversation with Adrian Wooldridge, where again, I agree with him on a lot of stuff, but I am glad I expressed the skepticism that I did about some of his things and some of his positions,
Jonah Goldberg
particularly, you know, his, his at least conceptual defense of positive rights and statism being liberal.You know, he’s, uh, on policy grounds, he said he wouldn’t go so far as to support like a right to housing or a right to a job or a right to healthcare. But provisioning these things, you know, he’s much more open to the idea that the rhetoric and the policies that are based on those assumptions are defensible and still liberal.
Jonah Goldberg
And again, we’re talking about liberalism, classical liberalism, right? As in sort of like liberal democratic democracy, yada, yada, yada. You know, I made the point at the time, I was like, “Look, Lincoln,
Jonah Goldberg
I think, was a liberal. I think he was one of the most heroic defenders of American liberalism because, you know, he saved the Union, and he ended slavery, and he elevated the,
Jonah Goldberg
the principles of the Declaration, uh, to a higher place in our national estimation and sort of understanding about ourselves and all.” Lots of reasons why Lincoln was a liberal, although technically he was, you know, kind of a Whig first. But anyway, but he did illiberal things to save the Union, right? He suspended habeas corpus, shut down some newspapers. He, you know, he did…
Jonah Goldberg
I think it is perfectly fine to say that liberals, in a moment of exigency or extremis or, or, or threat,
Jonah Goldberg
can do illiberal things to–
Jonah Goldberg
if the times demanded of them. And we don’t need to get into my whole thing about how I think the Jaffa-ites or the Claremontsters or the West Coast Straussians, whatever, were so committed to that point that they ended up finding, seeing
Jonah Goldberg
existential threats or apocalyptic threats that weren’t there and saying that these justify sort of illiberal means or whatever. I don’t, I don’t agree with that, right? But, like, that’s a conversation for another day. Um, but this whole point that I was trying to make that, like, you can fall back on concepts like Western civilization, right? You know, the American tradition, right and wrong, right? There are these other concepts that aren’t ideological concepts, you know, necessity, that can justify things that are not necessarily liberal. What I have a problem with is this sort of no true Scotsman fallacy of liberalism, that liberalism is right because liberals are right. And I think the more I think about it, I think that Wooldridge goes over the line with that kind of thinking. And you’ve heard me say this before, but Woodrow Wilson admire, admired Lincoln for his illiberalism, for what he considered… He liked the way Lincoln, uh, wielded power. What he didn’t like was
Jonah Goldberg
why he wielded power, right? He liked, he liked Lincoln’s means, he didn’t like Lincoln’s ends, which I think is morally corrupt, right? He lamented that Lincoln ended slavery and that he used the power of the presidency to defeat the Confederacy, because he wished that the Confederacy had won,
Jonah Goldberg
but he respected the use of power. And that is turning
Jonah Goldberg
the moral equation about Lincoln on its head. The reason why you should like and admire Lincoln is that he did some necessary evils for the greater good. And if
Jonah Goldberg
you don’t make those kinds of distinctions, you end up more of the, with more of the liberalism of Wilson than you do of, of Lincoln, right?
Jonah Goldberg
Wilson wanted to use the state to advance the power of the state. I mean, Lincoln, by the way– I mean, Wilson, by the way, loved Hegel. He wrote a, you know, he, he, he quoted Hegel in a love letter to his wife, and he saw himself in many ways as a world historical figure in the Hegelian mode. That was a big part of the whole making the world safe for democracy agenda, was that he thought he was advancing freedom as a Napoleonic kind of figure. And a lot like Napoleon, Wilson worshiped power. But Wilson also, you know, campaigned against the, you know, he, he, he denounced essentially the Bill of Rights. He denounced the sort of, he che- denounced checks and balances. And so the kind of liberalism that Wilson evidenced or demonstrated that really informed the New Deal in many, many, many, many ways, I just don’t think is liberalism. It’s progressivism. And it doesn’t mean that it’s all bad, but if liberalism means certain non-negotiable things like checks and balances, free speech, conscience rights, freedom to worship, freedom, you know, of private property, all that kind of stuff, then Wilson’s not a liberal. Like FDR, I should have gotten more into this with Wooldridge, but, you know, it’s just been, it’s been sitting badly with me like some bad clams, that conversation, because, you know, FDR censored a lot of people. You know, these are supposed to be these non-negotiable things according to Wooldridge, right? He has these handful of things that I agree with should be basically non-negotiable for liberalism, and then everything else is dependent on circumstances. And, um,
Jonah Goldberg
Wilson completely compromised on all of those things. I mean, w- censorship under Wilson was out of control. But censorship under FDR was not great either. W- also, FDR was not great on civil rights. Um, and I think if you’re gonna talk about how liberalism is this and not that, then you have to make these distinctions even when there are political leaders that liberals love or, like, or new liberals love. And anyway, it just dawned on me, you know, given all of my complaints about quote unquote “common good conservatism”It seems to me that Wooldridge is ultimately, I don’t want to say he’s guilty, but he is certainly open to the charge of having a similar version of common good liberalism. You know, so there’s a lot of place where I agree with him. Our Venn diagrams overlap a lot, but, and there are a lot of things that he wants to, a lot of problems he wants to fix that I would like to fix, but I’m much more skeptical. And it’s sort of like, you know, the
Jonah Goldberg
stuff I was saying before, the logic of AOC’s position is that the government should have a sort of
Jonah Goldberg
presumptive authority to conclude that if you make a certain amount of money, that therefore you didn’t earn it and that it’s illegitimate regardless of how, how you made your money, right? And that if you make a billion dollars selling wire hangers,
Jonah Goldberg
you’re not an immoral person. You’re get, you know, like I still remember, I know I’ve talked about this before. My friend and colleague, Tim Carney, years ago, I don’t know, it was 10, 15 years ago, I remember him talking about how he hates this phrase you hear from people about giving back, right? This country made me rich and now I want to give back to it. Uh, or this country gave me everything. And like, I mean, he was being playful. Like I think that sentiment is often utterly defensible, but he was making a point. And, and he talked about how, you know, this guy who invented the cronut had decided he was going to do this big philanthropic thing because he wanted to give back. And Tim’s point was, give back,
Jonah Goldberg
you gave us the cronut. Like, like you were compensated for giving us the cronut and the cronut, it’s awesome. Like you don’t owe us something because people liked your product. Again, I think philanthropy is good. I think people who are grateful for being Americans should, should help America and all that. But I think Tim’s point is a good one as well. Like if, if you’re giving people something that they want, that they want to trade their hard-earned money for because they think it gives them value and it doesn’t fall into a
Jonah Goldberg
very specific group of vices or, or things that are contrary to, um, public health, right? Or whatever, you can come up with your criteria. Then you can’t say, “Oh, you’ve earned too much from this.” You know, you earned what the market was going to reward you with. And if it’s, if it’s wire hangers or,
Jonah Goldberg
or, or cures for cancer, you know, so be it. Like you want a system where people are incentivized to think the sky’s the limit on the payoff for doing things that make us more productive, that make us healthier or whatever. And, um, I just think that, that not to revisit what I talked about for ad nauseam earlier, but Wooldridge’s point about social media,
Jonah Goldberg
I think you guys know I’m conflicted on this. I do think it’s closer to an edge case than, uh, Megan McArdle and, and Sarah Isgur and some of my colleagues do, um, when we talked about it last time it came up on the Dispatch podcast. I’m very much in Jonathan Haidt’s camp when it comes to protecting kids
Jonah Goldberg
and, you know, things like Polymarket. I think we need to catch up, the laws need to catch up on a lot of that stuff. But, um,
Jonah Goldberg
I don’t think it’s a slam dunk in the way Wooldridge talks about it, that we could just sort of create a government agency that declares this social media product needs to go because it’s too compelling, um, it’s too entertaining, and this one can stay because it’s redeeming. I’m, I’m just skeptical about how you actually do that. And his example of repealing Section 230 doesn’t get me any closer ’cause I’m all in favor of getting rid of Section 230 once you explain to me what you’re gonna replace it with. But I, you know, I’ve grown up on the internet and the idea that the Dispatch can be sued because of something a commenter says in the comment section, that just don’t fly with me. And if you just got rid of Section 230, that’s what would happen. So you have to, you have to explain what you replace it with. I’m all in favor of making things better, but like you need arguments and you need to explain how they fit within a principled philosophical and moral framework. And it can’t just be that liberalism is the ideology of, of doing good things for good people and other ideologies aren’t. There’s a lot of that sort of stuff among conservatives, the way they talk about conservatism. There’s a whole, you know, grand tradition of no true Scotsman fallacies among conservatives, and I think it’s true basically of every ism out there, and you need to bring more. So anyway, um, I didn’t talk about Iran. I wanted to talk about Iran. It’s funny, I went back and looked at, uh,
Jonah Goldberg
the columns I wrote since the Iran war began, which is still pretty easy because it’s only been about 70 days. And it’s really kind of amazing how, I, I’m not saying because I was so brilliant or I was so, you know, had such foresight, because it was already gelling into conventional wisdom when I wrote about it at the end of March, that the Strait of Hormuz thing is a real problem for the Trump administration because of the asymmetry in power or, or risk, um, tolerance that the two countries have, right? And it’s been basically frozen like that ever since. And Trump has not figured out a way to fix the Strait of Hormuz problem. And I mean, we have ways to fixing the Strait of Hormuz problem. It’s just the, the costs for those are beyond what the administration wants to pay.
Jonah Goldberg
And, you know,
Jonah Goldberg
you, there’s a strong argument. I have friends in the, um,
Jonah Goldberg
Iran- Iranian diaspora that would love to see, and also have friends in, you know, in-In the pro-Israel camp, I would love to see a serious effort of boots on the ground to finish the job. I should also say that I have friends in just the plain Iran hawk camp that would be open to that as well.
Jonah Goldberg
And
Jonah Goldberg
whether that’s right or wrong or whether it’s desirable or not, the simple fact is that that’s a price Trump is not willing to pay. And you can say that’s good that he’s not willing to pay it, no boots on the ground, got to stick by that. Or you can say it’s bad. But as of right now, it’s a fact. It’s a descriptive fact of his position. And
Jonah Goldberg
so short of that, you know, you then run into this problem. Jonathan Chansor talks about this over at the commentary podcast about how there just aren’t enough military targets that are worth the expenditure of this very expensive ordnance and weaponry to take out when there’s very little reason to think it’ll persuade Iran to change its course. And Chansor makes this argument that
Jonah Goldberg
I’m a little uncomfortable with that, like, our problem, as he puts it, is that the global international order is preventing America from being able to finish this job. And I like Chansor, I respect Chansor. I know his heart’s in the right place and all that. But like when I was listening to the commentary podcast, it was a little discomforting that he wouldn’t explain
Jonah Goldberg
specifically what the global international order, rules-based order is preventing us from doing that would finish the job. He said Israel runs into this problem all the time because it can beat the crap out of Hamas, but they still won’t give up. And then if they go any farther, they get accused of genocide. Well, like, what is it that would arouse accusations of genocide that America could do to end this war that are worth doing? And I’m just, I’m legitimately curious what his answer is to that. Maybe we’ll have him on to ask. You know, I keep thinking like all of these movies and TV shows, right, where the wimp fights the bully in high school or, you know, I don’t know, Theon Greyjoy fights one of the
Jonah Goldberg
Ironborn. It’s a total trope and Hollywood trope, right, of the weaker guy not knowing when to quit. And he just won’t stay down. And people yell at him, stay down, don’t get up, right? And the guy keeps getting up. And most of the time that character is a hero or a ironic hero or whatever.
Jonah Goldberg
I am not saying that Iran is a hero. Iran has a horrific regime, decent people, horrific regime, but they won’t stay down, right? They won’t give up fighting. And so like America is in this position of all it can do now is like
Jonah Goldberg
beat this beaten and bloodied country to death, which would lose any moral high ground for us because of the collateral damage that comes from that. And Trump hasn’t figured out a way to square the circle. And so I find so much of the comment, like it’s really weird. You can go and listen to a month old podcast of foreign policy experts talking about Iran. And except for like a couple, like as Trump said yesterday, or as Pete Hegseth said yesterday kind of things that dated, it’s just the same arguments. Like this whole thing is just in a holding pattern. I honestly, I don’t know how Trump gets out of it. I think it’s really fascinating to see Hugh Hewitt and some others talk about how if Trump agrees to this 14 point memorandum thing as expressed, it’ll be a disaster and a betrayal and all the rest. But like,
Jonah Goldberg
I just, I can’t listen to people tell me that like that
Jonah Goldberg
we’ve achieved all of our strategic goals already. And so therefore finding an exit is totally defensible. Like it may be, I’m open to the argument that finding an exit is totally defensible. But if you look at what the strategic goals were as laid out by Trump, you know, unconditional surrender, regime change, giving us all of the nuclear stuff, abandoning the ballistic missile program.
Jonah Goldberg
We haven’t done that. And, you know, we mowed the lawn. We did an incredible amount of damage, but we just haven’t done those things. And claiming, you know, moving the goalposts, the claim that we have accomplished everything. I think there’s a real moral hazard to it. And I don’t know. I honestly, I don’t have a really good idea of how we get out. I think I was a little ahead of the conventional wisdom about the problems of how we got in.
Jonah Goldberg
But now I’m squarely in the conventional wisdom about this insofar as we’re stuck. We’ll see. So,
Jonah Goldberg
all right. Again, I get it. I know people don’t want to have this behind a paywall. I apologize for those for whom that’s a real burden. But it’s a necessity for us. It’s the right thing to do. It’s the grown up thing to do. I’m grateful to everybody and anybody who can swing it. Please subscribe to The Dispatch. I’ve been asking you for years to do it. And a lot of you haven’t. We know there are a lot of people out there who are huge fans of The Dispatch, huge fans of Kevin, huge fans of Nick Catoggio, fans of Sarah Isgur, even fans of Steve Hayes, and feel like they’re part of the family, as it were, who don’t subscribe. And I’m asking you to subscribe. And I’m telling you, if you want to listen to the full ruminants in the future, you’re going to have to subscribe. So I don’t like it, but it is what it is. And pull my finger and I’ll talk to you next time.