Steve Hayes
[upbeat music] Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I’m Steve Hayes. On today’s roundtable, we’ll discuss the third assassination attempt against Donald Trump, this one at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C., and we’ll get into the rise of political violence. We’ll also discuss Derek Thompson’s essay on the, quote-unquote, “Tragic Twenties” and the national bad mood since the pandemic. And finally, not worth your time, one unexpected global industry that’s in the news for product shortages related to the Iran war. I’m joined today by my Dispatch colleagues Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, and Mike Warren. Let’s dive right in. [upbeat music]
Steve Hayes
Welcome, gentlemen. There was a shooting over the weekend at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner
Steve Hayes
in Washington, D.C., and I think there’s a lot to say about it. So we’re gonna discuss that today. Mike Warren, let me start with you.
Steve Hayes
Can you give us sort of a big picture overview of what happened and what we know about the shooter and his motives?
Mike Warren
So the sort of moment-by-moment story seems to have been that at the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner, which was held at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C., in this ballroom that’s at the sort of in the basement of this big giant hotel. People may remember it as the hotel where Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981 outside the hotel, so this was happening inside the hotel. So the big dinner with all of the members of the press, and traditionally the president shows up. President Trump has not shown up at this dinner. I don’t even know if he showed up in the first term at all now. I can’t remember.
Steve Hayes
It was his first time as president.
Mike Warren
It was his first time as president. He famously was at one in 2014, which Barack Obama made fun of him, which was a part of his motivation for running for president in 2016. So this dinner is happening on Saturday night. People are starting to eat, and all of the sudden from one of the feeds, you can hear shots ringing out from not within the ballroom, but somewhere outside the ballroom. Takes a few seconds, and then the Secret Service sort of rushes the stage where the president is sitting with the first lady, the vice president, some members of the White House Correspondents’ Association. And then pretty quickly after that, they rushed the president off the stage. They essentially locked down the ballroom. What we learned since then is that there was a shooter, a thirty-one-year-old man from Torrance, California, who had tried to breach a security barrier that was set up in the hotel before the ballroom, actually up a level from where the ballroom was. So b-before he was able to go down the stairs and access the ballroom, he was taken down by Secret Service or other security officials. He was armed. He had firearms. He had, I believe, a knife on him as well. And what we know about him and his motivation, he seems to be a pretty anti-Trump guy. I think it’s pretty clear from what we know about him, he was intending to harm and kill the president, members of his cabinet. His plan didn’t really get far, again, because he was taken down before he was even in the room, but pretty scary situation, I think, for the people who were gathered there. Again, in this room, a lot of journalists, a lot of members of the administration, members of Congress, second in line for the presidency, House Speaker Mike Johnson, was escorted out as well. There was some confusion about whether the event would go on, and then eventually they decided that it would end, and the president actually gave a brief to the press back at the White House later on Saturday evening. So here we are. This is the, depending on how you count these things, the third attempted assassination of Donald Trump. And so w-that’s what we know about what happened. What we know about the shooter’s motivations are, are that, again, he was an anti-Trump guy. He traveled from California to Washington, D.C. on train, and he was actually staying at the hotel, the, the Washington Hilton Hotel, it’s got like eleven hundred rooms, and was able to be in the hotel and tried to get past security for that reason, because he was staying in the hotel. So a lot of questions about the security at this event, and of course, I think what we’re gonna talk about today is the culture or what is happening within the country that’s causing people to try to do this. And so that’s what we know at this point. Pretty clear that he was trying to kill Donald Trump, and he failed.
Steve Hayes
Yeah, Jonah, there is a manifesto of sorts that was found in the hotel room, opened with a sort of bizarre, “Hello, everybody.” From there, walked into his details about what he was trying to do, as Mike says. Very clear that he was targeting the administration officials. He’d been motivated by his antipathy for Donald Trump. He had attended, I believe, uh, one of the No Kings rallies. He was a computer, or is a computer scientist, engineer, 2017 graduate of Caltech. He described himself as a friendly federal assassin and said that he was doing what he was doing because this was his opportunity and the, the time was now. You’ve been to these dinners before. What do you make of what you saw unfold on Saturday night, and are you surprised that this attacker was able to get as close as he was able to get to the actual dinner?
Jonah Goldberg
I’ll start with the last part first. He was taken down trying to rush the first perimeter of metal detectors. Like, wh-where do we want possible shooters to be taken down if not at the first line of defense, right? When the first reports came through, you know, I was like, “Wow, if he really made it past metal detectors, that’s a really big deal,” because it’s not just the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Lots of events are done at what colloquially people call the Hinckley Hilton ’cause that’s where Reagan was shot.
Steve Hayes
By John Hinckley.
Jonah Goldberg
Coincidentally enough-
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
… by John Hinckley. And I was in that ballroom for the AEI annual dinner when Alan Greenspan used the phrase irrational exuberance. I mean, like, it’s just one of the few big enough spaces in DC.
Steve Hayes
Upwards of 2,000 attendees for this dinner. Massive, massive room.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. We’re gonna get to the dumb ballroom discourse in a bit, but, like, my point is just simply, like, it’s one of the few rooms that can do this, and so, like, Secret Service, DC police, the hotel staff itself, it is one of the most rehearsed
Jonah Goldberg
places for securing, you know, dignitaries in Washington outside of, like, official government property and embassies and that kind of thing. And so if some guy had figured out a way to get past security, I was like, “Wow, that’s a big deal.” Except he didn’t. The way security works [chuckles] is like, yeah, I mean, I, I fully expect sort of like the– when Elliot Gould is running through the three greatest, most successful attempts to rob a casino in Ocean’s 11.
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
You know, one guy actually tasted fresh air. You know? [laughs] Like, yeah, like it does not shock me that someone could sprint past the metal detectors, but then he was taken down, you know, a few paces afterwards. And so I don’t get some of the freak out about the lack of security on this, unless I’m missing something. If we’re gonna live in a society where…
Jonah Goldberg
I mean, like, let’s say they’d done, they broadened the perimeter out to the, to another floor. Well, then he would’ve been caught rushing past that perimeter. I mean, like, that wasn’t the last line of defense. It was the first line of defense. And so I-I’m not an expert on this stuff, but I just think there’s a lot of cheap shots being done about this, and I think the Secret Service is a really poorly run agency. It has a lot of real problems, a lot of corruption problems.
Steve Hayes
And a terrible name.
Jonah Goldberg
Yes, and it’s a terrible name, you know. But– And terrible initials. But this is not part of that narrative as far as I can tell. More broadly, I have to say, look, I mean, I follow this ’cause it’s part of my job to follow a lot of this, but I am so done with these kinds of…
Jonah Goldberg
You know, e-everyone waits for five minutes. It’s just this long, pregnant pause waiting to find out what the ideological-
Jonah Goldberg
… flavor of the latest mass shooter or attempted mass shooter is, and then one side relie- sighs with relief because they get to be sanctimonious about how the other side’s rhetoric caused this. And sometimes the shooter is a right-wing crackpot, and sometimes they’re a left-wing crackpot, but the pure hypocrisy of our side has no crackpots and our rhetoric doesn’t encourage crackpots, but your rhetoric does, is just exhausting to me, and I want sort of no part of it. I think it is perfectly fair to say that this guy was motivated by some of the left-wing rhetoric out there, the way crackpots are motivated by rhetoric. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anybody is re- that all those people are responsible for attempting to kill Trump. And we can just go around this horn again and again and again. I mean, I’ve got columns about this kind of stuff I’ve been writing for twenty-five years now, and it’s just exhausting, and
Jonah Goldberg
I just think it’s a dumb waste of everybody’s time to a certain extent, but everyone gets sucked into it.
Steve Hayes
Yeah, Kevin, so Jonah just summed up my response to this. I mean, you know, I think that i-initially, as I’m watching this unfold… So we should say, we do not think any Dispatch staffers were at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. I have been to many of them over the years, although I don’t think I’ve been to o-one in, like, twenty years since-
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Steve Hayes
… Jonah and I had a really good time at one a long time ago that I think that was my very last one.
Jonah Goldberg
That’s where the tattoo came from.
Steve Hayes
The matching tattoos. [laughs]
Steve Hayes
I have no tattoos. Let the record show, I have no tattoos. It was fun. We had a good time. So I haven’t been to one. I don’t think any Dispatch people were in attendance here. We should tell people that the way that the dinner unfolds is there are lots of pre-parties or receptions that precede the dinner that would’ve been external, outside of the security perimeter in this case. There are big reception rooms. I mean, this hotel is massive. There are big reception rooms, and you get invitations to different rooms, different parties. There was a Politico CBS party. There was a, an Axios story this year about how a lot of the mainstream establishments, the media establishments that usually host parties didn’t host parties or sort of toned down their parties, and all sorts of y-young upstart media companies ha-had sort of the biggest and best attended, the creator economy. There was a Sub Stack party, an Axios party. So there are pre-parties, then there’s the dinner. Everybody goes through the magnetometers and goes to the dinner, and then there are post-parties and big, you know, vanity fair. It’s sort of this Hollywood meets Washington moment, a, a see and be seen affair, actors mingling with news anchors. Really a collection of a lot of-
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Steve Hayes
… very annoying people. That’s the other reason I don’t go anymore. As it happens, my wife was there. She was at one of the early parties. Somebody that she-
Jonah Goldberg
You’re not trying to subtly imply your wife is annoying, though.
Steve Hayes
[laughs] No, I’m definitely not.
Jonah Goldberg
That was a weird segue.
Steve Hayes
Speaking of.
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Steve Hayes
[laughs] I did not make that transition, by the way. Um, my lovely, wonderful wife was there with a colleague of hers. My wife works for a big global-… charity. She was there with a colleague of hers who was in from Ukraine, you know, who has seen lots of this kind [chuckles] of violence in Ukraine, and then comes to a dinner in the United States. They had left before the party. They went to one of the pre-parties and then left, and everybody went into the, the magnetometer. But Kevin, to Jonah’s specific point, [laughs] this is just exhausting. I’ve watched this unfold. I was following it on social media. Y- you know,
Steve Hayes
Twitter in the moments after the shooting was this bizarre combination that we’ve grown accustomed to of real time actual, you know, video from the event, so you could see what was happening mere seconds after it was happening. And it was also, as Jonah says, immediately this positioning and this sort of exchanging charges, and both sides kind of hoping that it was the other side that was the perpetrator here. And, you know, all sorts of other sort of distasteful, [scoffs] sort of late stage republic moments like a young conservative influencer doing a duck face selfie, you know, Instagram. Yes, exactly like Kevin just did for people who are watching this on YouTube.
Steve Hayes
But, you know, a, a host of misleading videos. There was one video of some journalists or some attendees, we don’t know that they were journalists, scooping up bottles of wine and champagne from a table and-
Kevin Williamson
[laughs] You know they were journalists.
Mike Warren
Yeah, that sounds jour- like journalist activity to me.
Steve Hayes
I mean, they, they could well have been, but the accusation from a guy with two point three million followers on Twitter was that they were journalists and they were stealing the wine, which not necessarily the case. Some people bring their own wines. Some people, you know, you pay for the wine that’s at your table.
Kevin Williamson
Steve is not gonna not talk about wine in this.
Steve Hayes
I, I, I had to. I mean, it is… We are talking about a, an ugly shooting. But just basically everybody, uh, on s- many people on social media doing the kinds of things that we expect from s- from social media, sort of lowest common denominator stuff. I think it’s important to talk about events like this, moments like this, as discrete acts b- by discrete actors with agency, and we, we shouldn’t get sort of swept up in discussion of cultural influences or what have you. I wanna have that discussion, but I do want us to focus on this guy and the agency. Kevin, tell us for a moment about where were you, what did you see?
Steve Hayes
Were you exhausted in the way that Jonah and I were exhausted? When did you learn about the shooter? What did you come to understand in those moments after, or were you blissfully ignorant until the next morning?
Kevin Williamson
I was asleep, of course, [laughs] as I tend to be.
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Kevin Williamson
Because what you never hear in these stories, and the one that would be interested is, the shooter had just celebrated his twentieth wedding anniversary with his wife after a trip to Hawaii, and the two are happily married, and they have two kids that are in high school, and one’s in college. ‘Cause it’s never that guy, right? It’s always some, you know, person who’s got some kind of personal problems, who’s socially isolated. Irrespective of what the ideology is, the, the shooters all kinda look alike in a lot of ways, and I suspect we’ll find out that the same is largely true of this particular guy. I mean, one of the problems is that there is– Because, you know, in the, in ye olde dark ages of media, there were, like, three television networks and five newspapers that mattered, and that’s what had to be filled up. But now it’s endless amounts of digital territory and endless number of people in the content creation business. It has to be filled up. And the problem is, in spite of the way you opened it, that there’s a lot to say about this. There’s not a lot to say about this. There’s a lot not to say about it. The security worked, as Jonah said. The guy never even got on the same floor as the people he wanted to kill. So everything worked. The Secret Service’s body armor worked. The guy I guess got off a round, it was buckshot, I think, and hit the guy in the body armor. The body armor worked. Everything worked the way it was supposed to. The hotel was ready for it. They had the bulletproof panels on the table. Melania Trump ducks under the table, which she kinda know is where she wanted to be anyway. Everything worked. Everything went the way it was supposed to. The guy is exactly the kind of guy you expect him to be, at least from what we can tell so far, someone who has kind of flitted from one thing to the other, who is at loose ends in his life. People find themselves attracted to things like religious movements and political extremism and things like that because they’re looking for meaning in their lives. They’re looking for something to give them a sense of belonging and significance, and, uh, they write manifestos and do the kind of stuff this guy does. They get a lot of sort of joy out of the planning and all the aesthetics that go into it. For some reason, he wanted to exclude Kash Patel. I really wanna know about that. You know, there were– This is one of at least six shootings in DC that happened in the twenty-four hours around that period. We are violent people, and our violence often takes the form of being directed at political obsessions. It’s worth noting that Gerald Ford, probably the most inoffensive president [laughs] of his century, there were two very serious assassination attempts on Gerald Ford. One of them got off a shot. That was Carol Jane Moore. Was that her name? The one with the .38 who didn’t bother to adjust her sights first, and then, I guess, Squeaky from the Manson kooks tried to kill him, too-
Kevin Williamson
… and she forgot to put one in the chamber ’cause she didn’t know how an automatic worked. And, you know, Gerald Ford took to wearing a bulletproof trench coat around because people were trying to shoot him, and these are the attempts we know about on Trump, by the way. Surely there have been others. I mean, surely there were a lot during the other presidencies that we, they, they don’t make, uh, you know, publicity about because they don’t get close enough that shots are fired, or they have to go tackle a guy or something. But everyone seems to have done their job. Everything worked out the way it was supposed to. Trump did exactly what you expected him to, which he was halfway gracious for about 124 seconds, and then he turned back into being Trump and started talking about, “This is why I need a ballroom,” even though it’s unlikely that The White House is gonna rent out its ballroom to the White House Correspondence Association [laughs], the people in the world they like least, for a private event. And everything went exactly the way it was supposed to, and now you’ve got, of course, conspiracy kooks saying that, “Well, Trump staged this because he wants to make an argument for his ballroom,” or he’s trying to change the argument from Iran or whatever. And that, too, is expected. But also, if you go backWe’re a little more connected to the, the obsessiveness and ignorance of the public than we used to, thanks to social media. But if you go back and look at, you know, Reagan and Hinckley, Ford and Sara Jane Moore, Ford and Squeaky Fromme, there were, you know, all sorts of conspiracy kooks that– ideas that went around with that stuff too. Probably Carter and the rabbit, you know, generated some kind of, uh, conspiracy theory, I’m sure, at some point. It’s just– It’s everything is absolutely normal. It’s actually an unremarkable episode in most ways, except for the fact that it happened to a room full of media people and political people, so we’re all gonna talk about it ’cause we’re media people and political people, and we love to talk about this stuff. We’re not gonna talk about the other six or seven shootings that happened, uh, over the weekend in DC, but we weren’t gonna talk about those anyway because they happened to people nobody cares about.
Steve Hayes
So I take your point on the context, and it’s worth noting that there were these other incidents in Washington DC that aren’t gonna get the kind of attention. But I don’t agree with you that this is not worth talking about. I do, I guess, agree with you, with your assessment that this is, quote, “absolutely normal.” I think it has become
Steve Hayes
more normal over the years for the reasons you suggest historically, if you go back and look at Gerald Ford. But political violence today is, I would say… I mean, certainly we’ve had periods, I would… The Ford assassination attempts, surely the ’60s-
Kevin Williamson
Yeah
Steve Hayes
…with successful assassinations of prominent leading political figures. But why I think this is different, in some respects it’s normal in that people are getting accustomed to it. What happened after the shooting on Saturday night, you know, there was talk of going back to the dinner.
Kevin Williamson
Mm-hmm.
Steve Hayes
Secret Service didn’t want that to happen.
Kevin Williamson
I kinda wish they would have, to be honest.
Steve Hayes
I mean, there’s something to be said for trying to proceed, go on with life as normal, not allow these things to be disrupted.
Kevin Williamson
And I love that guy from Creative Artists who was just sitting at the table, like just eating his burrata salad, [chuckles] watching the whole thing going down.
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Kevin Williamson
And then he said later, like, “I’m not gonna go to the schmutzy floor. Are you kidding me? I wanted to see what was happening.” I don’t hate, I don’t hate that guy.
Steve Hayes
Yeah, there was a video of sort of a super agent who was-
Kevin Williamson
Yeah
Steve Hayes
…as everybody else was kind of diving on the floor, remaining on the floor, was sitting upright at his table finishing his salad.
Kevin Williamson
He also said he had a bad back. Yeah, he had a bad back. Let me push back a little on this. You know, we had, you know, presidential assassinations in the 19th century, not just Lincoln, and this kind of demonstrative theatrical violence has been a big part of American life for a long time. As I often point out when the subject comes up, which unfortunately it does too often, the worst school massacre in American history happened in 1920. We don’t ever talk about it because it was so long ago, and it didn’t involve shootings, it involved bombs. They dynamited the place, or the guy dynamited the place. This kind of thing has been with us for a long time. I mean, yes, it’s worth talking about in the sense that it is both dramatic and newsworthy, obviously, even if it is normal and predictable. It’s like if a meteor falls some interesting place, we’re gonna talk about it even though meteors hitting the planet are just, you know, the laws of physics playing themselves out in inevitable kinds of ways. Doesn’t mean it’s not interesting. Of course it’s kind of interesting. The rhetoric policing stuff, like someone posted something I guess Erick Erickson wrote about, “I hope you, all you people who are talking about how Trump’s a threat to democracy and not going to lose, not gonna leave office after the election, know how you contributed to this,” which is just so ridiculous and embarrassing and shameful and hackish, that he should be ashamed of himself. The people who have said that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy and may not leave office after the end of his term may have in mind the fact that he illegally tried to stay in office last time around. It’s not like this stuff is without precedent. And the fact that some idiot, some bad person does something awful targeting people you like doesn’t mean that the people you like suddenly have all their sins forgiven, that they’re suddenly these, you know, flawless, defectless public servants, which they aren’t. And the way that people exploit these kinds of things to try to, you know, tone police or try to silence critics or things like that is just absolutely shameful. It happens on both sides, as Jonah was saying. Uh, it’s happening on the right side of the political spectrum right now. But we should just hold that stuff in contempt. We should laugh at it, we should make fun of it, we should highlight it when we get a chance to, and we should make people embarrassed to try to do this crap because it is embarrassing crap and they should be ashamed of themselves. So here’s to you, Erick Erickson. You are the loser of the day.
Steve Hayes
So I wanna talk a little bit about both of the things that you just raised. One, this idea that this is a one-side phenomenon, that people like you and Jonah who are saying this is both sides are just missing the argument. This is really a one-way series of threats, series of attempted attacks flowing from the left to the right. So that’s sort of topic number one. Jonah, on that, we saw, a-as Kevin mentioned, Erick Erickson send a tweet to the effect that Kevin described. Erick also, in his newsletter this morning, basically made that case. Like, this is not a both sides thing. This is left-wing violence attacking right-wingers. It’s more prevalent than the other way around. It’s not the case that everybody ha- every side has its kooks. And look, if you look at Trump, he has been the subject of three assassination plots. They point to the attack on the Republican baseball game by the Bernie Sanders follower that injured Steve Scalise. I mean, there are lots of examples. I- Is this right wing a left to right phenomenon, and if not, what are the counter examples?
Kevin Williamson
We’re gonna pretend like January 6th doesn’t count?
Steve Hayes
Literally left off of some of the long lists that we got from conservative friends, including sensible, sane conservatives like Guy Benson, had a long list of left on right political violence, and he announced at the top of it that it was incomplete, but didn’t include January 6th, didn’t include some of these others.
Kevin Williamson
Yeah, I mean, I think this was clearly all orchestrated by my friend Noah Rothman, who’s got a book coming out on the prevalence of left-wing violence. Look, I think part of the problem here, like I’ll stipulate, I think it’s a both sides thing
Jonah Goldberg
I think most of our problems have a both sides component to it, and as I’m a broken record on this, just because I say both sides doesn’t mean that the phenomenon are symmetric or mirror images of each other, right? And so one of the problems that you run into is that mainstream media, for whatever we wanna call that term, right, is largely dominated by partisans of a certain partisan narrative. And there are all sorts of institutions, Southern Poverty Law Center comes to mind, right, organizations, and foundation grants for the study of this, that, and the other thing, where they’re all looking rightward, and they’re all looking for evidence of, you know, the dark curtain of fascism descending on America from the right.
Jonah Goldberg
If you only look rightward, you will find evidence to support that fear, because there are a bunch of jackasses out there. I mean, you know, the Nick Fuentes people, the things that they talk about, the Proud Boy types, even some of the more intellectual guys, they talk about things, about democracy being, you know, about the need for a red Caesar and this kind of garbage, right? There’s all sorts of things that are coming from the far right that are deplorable. There’s language that comes from members of this administration that is deplorable, and I’m using the word deplorable deliberately ’cause it triggers some people. But the problem is that those institutions do not look leftward,
Jonah Goldberg
and in fact, sometimes when they do look leftward, they go from these klieg lights, you know, these searchlights looking for villains on the, uh, you know, getting under the, coming in from the perimeter, these barbarian hordes, and instead, they turn it into mood lighting. And so they put a camera on friggin’ Hasan Piker, who’s literally calling for the murder of people, who endorses murder and rape, and they turn him into some sort of, you know, this generation’s Che Guevara sex symbol cool guy. And it is amazing to me how utterly irresponsible and tone-deaf these supposedly serious people are when they’re talking about the threat from the right when they don’t understand how the hypocrisy of this can drive reasonable people crazy on the normie right, on the mainstream center right. If all you’re hearing from people is, “Your side is full of racists. Your side is full of violent people. Your side is full of murderers. Your side condones, you know, hates democracy.” And by the way, you really gotta get a h- the handbag that this influencer from the left uses when she talks about shoplifting at Whole Foods and how great it is to blow up friggin’ pipelines. You know, like, you can’t have it both ways. And the way the sort of cultural elite, if you wanna call it, lionizes a certain kind of transgressive romantic, sort of Marxist-adjacent, you know, assaults on the system and threats to the system and says, you know, you know, like when there’s violence that comes from left-wing people, there’s this impulse that says, “Well, of course Trump’s rhetoric is what invites this kind of… This is what you get when you talk this way.” Now, I’m okay with a certain amount of that analysis, because the way Donald Trump talks is irresponsible, un-Republican, small R, un-statesmanlike, undemocratic, unhinged. And, like, I think it’s true that you will get unhinged people who will respond to some of that crap. At the same time, you can’t say, “Well, the people that he aroused, they have a point.” They don’t have a point. The guy who shot the CEO of UnitedHealthcare is just a murderer. He’s not a martyr. He’s not a hero. And so I think the way we talk about this stuff causes a lot of people, including, you know, Erick Erickson, I haven’t seen his stuff on this, but I’ll take you guys at face value about what it says, when you’re, all you’re doing is watching how the mainstream media describes your side,
Jonah Goldberg
the urge for whataboutism becomes irresistible, and I kind of understand that as a human thing. But the idea that it’s all one-sided, I just find… First of all, it’s a ludicrous argument to make, because you know that whatever set of facts you’re stringing together in the here and now to sustain it aren’t gonna last, because somebody on the other si- you know, somebody on your side is gonna do something hideous, like January 6th, right? So you might as well just-
Kevin Williamson
Or shoot up a Black church somewhere.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. I, I mean, there’s a lot of terrible things that have been done by a lot of terrible people, and some of them score higher on a right-wing index than on a left-wing index, and some of them don’t really score ideologically at all. I mean, the-
Kevin Williamson
Right
Jonah Goldberg
… main, I’m old enough to remember, everyone here is old enough to remember, how desperate everyone was to make Tim McVeigh into, like, or the guy from the Oklahoma City bombing, into-
Kevin Williamson
Mm-hmm
Jonah Goldberg
… you know, a run-of-the-mill Christian fundamentalist. He was not that. They wanted to make Jared Loughner, the guy who shot up Gabby Giffords and all those people, into a tea partier. He was a deranged schizophrenic who was h- getting instructions about grammar from his TV. And this is the point I’m getting at is that sometimes just this desire to run around while the metal is still w- warm enough that you can bend it and make your impressions on it, create some false idol, some friggin’ golden calf of your narrative to parade around as a new icon or idol, I find grotesque. Just give it up already. This country has huge problems. Some of them are right-wing flavored, and some of them are left-wing flavored, but it’s not one side, it’s not Manichaean with good guys on one side and bad guys on the other, at least not scored on ideological terms.
Kevin Williamson
They’re all American flavored, like Kraft Singles.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Kevin Williamson
Three of the four of us are old enough to remember when eco-terrorism was sort of a thing, right? And I can remember a lot of those conversations, people saying, “Well, I don’t really, you know, I don’t endorse letter bombs, but, you know, Kaczynski kinda had a point.”
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Kevin Williamson
And that was just a thing. That was just the way people talked about this stuff. And, you know, it’s not going to change 20 years from now. It wasn’t any different 20 years ago.
Jonah Goldberg
And I do like the continued age shaming of, of Mike Warren.
Kevin Williamson
Age shaming? I’m young. [laughs]
Steve Hayes
I take your point. Yes, w-we’ve had political violence in the past. We’ve got it today. It comes in different flavors. It’s perpetrated by folks on the left and the right, but there is more of it today. There are more threats, I think, today than there have been in the past. There are more attacks of a purely political nature today than there have been in the past. I think you have more copycats. There’s a report out by the Capitol Police that showed a pretty dramatic spike, not quite doubling, of threats against sitting members of Congress from twenty twenty-four to twenty twenty-five.
Kevin Williamson
Steve, I don’t know if that’s really– I don’t know if that’s really true. I mean, the threats certainly are true because the price of communication is way down. You know, you don’t have to write a letter, put a stamp on it, or even make a telephone call. You know, all of us, I’m sure, get crazy threats via email or social media, other stuff pretty regularly. I know I do, uh, to the point where I don’t even notice them anymore. But you think about how many political lynchings there were in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. You know, attacks on partisan newspapers and things like that. Political violence was very deeply written into the fabric of American public life, and it almost always has been. And that’s partly– And I don’t want to go off on my whole lecture about this, but it is worth keeping in mind that violence of all kinds is much more common in the United States than it is in lots of other comparable countries. We have much higher homicide rates-
Kevin Williamson
…not only by firearms, but by stabbings. We have higher rates of automobile accidents and other things related to high-risk behavior, drug overdoses, health problems related to excessive alcohol consumption.
Steve Hayes
It’s weirdly a Western Hemisphere stuff. We have more in common with, like, Brazil than we do England when it comes to a lot of the stuff Kevin’s talking about.
Kevin Williamson
Yeah.
Steve Hayes
Yeah, there was a really interesting David French piece several years ago when he was still a full-time colleague of ours that got into this. We can link that in the show notes. But it’s also the case– I mean, look, if you know and you talk to members of Congress, particularly over the past decade, you have had many members of Congress leave the body because of fears about physical safety.
Kevin Williamson
Mm-hmm.
Steve Hayes
Republicans dem– and Democrats alike. Jared Golden cited physical safety when he left. Our friend Mike Gallagher, his family had been subject to an ugly swatting, and when he voted the wrong way on a couple of subsequent controversial issues, massive increase in threats that were, I think, real threats. Mike Gallagher is a, he’s a Marine. This is not a guy who’s, like, li-likely to just bow out because he’s a wimp. There are– I mean, just in my own interactions, I can point to probably a handful of other members of Congress who have said– who have had incidents, many of them not reported publicly, of physical violence. One member of Congress was picked up by a big guy at a, a local town hall meeting, sort of both lapels thrust against a car and held there until the, the police came. Th-these stories are sort of more and more common, and while I don’t want to rely on the prevalence of anecdotes, it is supported by this data compiled by the US Capitol Police.
Kevin Williamson
Although being picked up by your lapels by a big guy, if you’ve ever read Harry Truman’s accounts of his conversations with Lyndon Johnson [laughing]
Kevin Williamson
Apparently about that, yeah.
Steve Hayes
Yeah. I mean, I think there– I don’t know that he was worried that Lyndon Johnson was going to actually bring long-term physical violence in the way that this was, but, um-
Kevin Williamson
Johnson apparently w– like, actually went into the White House and, like, grabbed him by the lapels and picked him up, and, like, th-that-
Steve Hayes
Certainly
Kevin Williamson
…Truman apparently had to, like, instruct people not to, like, let him be alone in a room with Johnson [chuckles] anymore.
Steve Hayes
M-Mike, is this just my recency bi– Am I just like, I’m seeing all of these headlines. We, we– Kevin’s right. We do see more because ev-every, everybody’s got a blog. Every incident is written up. M-Is it just my misperception that this is happening so much more and political violence really isn’t, isn’t any worse than it was before? ‘Cause it sure doesn’t f-feel that way, and that is why I’m, like Jonah said at the outset, just exhausted by this.
Mike Warren
At the risk of sounding like I’m sort of dodging this debate, I kind of wonder if you guys are both right about this. I think the perception that there is more political violence, it may just be a perception if we’re looking at things historically and looking at, in the way that Kevin lays out here. But, you know, to, to [chuckles] use a cliché, perception can be reality. And the fact is that– The fact that this is, in general, in, in– meaning the twenty-first century is sort of a less violent time than it was, you know, a hundred and fifty years ago where everyone was walking around with a revolver and, you know, people were still, you know, uh, solving disputes with duels and that sort of thing. The fact that we live in a generally less violent society than, than we previously did makes these incursions into our cushy little perception that we live, you know, nice and easy here in the United States in twenty twenty-six, makes those more stark, so perhaps that’s what’s going on. That’s my attempt to split the baby on this question. I do think the perception is important because we live in such sort of s-media-saturated times. We’ve got a– I mean, again, Saturday night I was watching all of this unfold on my phone, sitting at home. We had a canceled Little League game, so nothing was really going on on a Saturday night. By the way, I’ve never been to a White House Correspondents’ Dinner. I have no desire to, and what happened on Saturday [chuckles] doesn’t change that one bit. But, you know, I’m seeing at the time multiple videos from different perspectives. There’s a bunch of journalists in there, so they’ve whip, whip out their phones and start taping this sort of thing, and so it creates a perception that this is happening. It’s happening now. It’s happening all of the time from every single angle, even though it was just one incident, and even though ultimately what happened, as we’ve discussed here, is that nothing happened. [chuckles] That is, I think, an important thing to underscore here is that ultimately nothing happened. Yet it feels like, and I’m sure it felt that way, and I know people who were in the room who f– it felt stressful, it felt scary. You figure I’m with the President of the United States. The, you know, this has to be one of the safest places, and for a moment, for a time, it did not feel that way. So look, I, I do think-The broader things that seem to be going on where, that which Kevin has talked about, right? The need to find meaning and purpose when you feel alone, when you feel your life is not going well. Again, this-these are not, you know, married with two kids and gainfully employed people who are going around shooting up places or attempting to. You know, I think you… The concentration of that toward politicians, we have a hyper celebrity focus in our culture, and we have ultimately in, in the President of the United States, kind of the ultimate avatar for that, right? This is like hyper-partisanship, hyper-celebrity. Everything is sort of always about him. I’m not claiming here that like, like he brings this on himself, but I do think it is a reflection of the time that we live in that everything, if you are sitting there in Torrance, California, things aren’t working out well, I think that’s what we’re gonna find is the, the people have talked with his members of his family, and he was sort of ranting about politics and his frustrations and all this a lot, was writing things down.
Jonah Goldberg
If ranting about politics and writing things down are signs of [laughing] the four of us are in trouble.
Mike Warren
Exactly. We’re not crazy. It’s there. [laughing]
Jonah Goldberg
He wasn’t getting paid for it. [laughing]
Mike Warren
I just think this is increasingly happening because it feels as if, you know, if you have no agency in your own life, you’re gonna take agency in other ways. You combine that with this particular political obsession. I’m- There’s a sense that it makes in our sort of senseless moment that you’re seeing more of this, and that you’re seeing it directed at the ubiquitous celebrity president that we have, and it’s terrible. It’s certainly not everybody. It’s not even, it’s not ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of people who are sort of obsessed with politics at the moment. But it stands out because it’s so remarkable when it does happen, and we’re all watching it happen in real time. That just changes everybody’s perception, and I think it’s what’s driving a lot of our big picture concern about what’s happening in the country right now.
Jonah Goldberg
On the resignations from Congress stuff-
Jonah Goldberg
… I’m open to the idea that there are more security threats on Congress than there have been, maybe not ever. Like I’m sure there were quite a few death threats in the lead-up to the Civil War, you know, including on the floor from other members of Congress.
Jonah Goldberg
But [laughs] um, I think part of that is you’re only looking at one variable here, which is
Jonah Goldberg
the crap these guys have to go through, and again, that might be getting worse. It’s certainly gotten worse for specific people we know, right?
Jonah Goldberg
At the same time, the payoff has gotten worse,
Jonah Goldberg
right? So like the garbage that you have to put up with if you’re a member of Congress has gone through the roof, and the return for decent people has gone through the floor.
Mike Warren
For sure.
Jonah Goldberg
And so like it’d be one thing if these guys were, you know, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster crafting legislation to, you know, usher in a new American century and yada, yada, yada. But if instead it’s just constant fundraising and being drowned out by morons who have figured out that the reason you go to Congress is to get on TV and you can’t get anything done, and meanwhile, your wife is getting really creepy phone calls, or your husband’s getting really creepy phone calls, or your children are getting really creepy phone calls or letters or emails, and you could make ten X in the private sector-
Mike Warren
For sure
Jonah Goldberg
… when you wanna give people an explanation for why you’re leaving Congress, you don’t wanna necessarily lead with the, “I could make ten times more.” You wanna lead with, “I get all these death threats, and my wife hates it, and it’s, it’s ter- it’s terrible.” And it, those are all defensible reasons to get the hell out of there. But I just think, like this is one of the things you get when you have institutions coming apart and failing to do their job. And, and so I mean, I take Kevin’s broader perspective very seriously, and I think that’s a point I’ll often make in various contexts. But like the Supreme Court is getting a lot more death threats than it used to.
Jonah Goldberg
There’s just a lot of people who are visible now
Jonah Goldberg
that didn’t used to be visible, and visibility brings with it unwanted attention in ways that a- anonymity doesn’t.
Steve Hayes
Yeah. I take your point, Jonah. No, no mono-causal explanation from me. I think you’re right to add that additional context. But United States Capitol Police threat assessment cases for twenty twenty-five, fourteen thousand nine hundred and thirty-eight concerning statements, behaviors, and communications directed against members of Congress, their families, staff, and the Capitol Complex. For the last five years, in twenty twenty-four, that was nine thousand four hundred and seventy-four. In twenty twenty-three, that was eight thousand eight. In twenty twenty-two, it was seventy-five hundred-ish. There had been more in, in twenty twenty-one, up to ninety-six hundred. And these are not, by the way, the way that they count these, these are not sort of one-off, throwaway, I really hate my member of Congress type thing. These are-
Steve Hayes
… you know, much more considered things that the intelligence, the professionals who work on these issues ha-have determined constitute actual threats. And I guess, while I think you’re right, it, it, the, the payoff, the upside of being a member of Congress is certainly lower. They don’t do any legislating. If you care about ideas, why would you be in Congress? You’re much better doing a lot of other things. The kinds of people that are attracted to serving in the [censored] Congress that we have right now are not the kind of people who were attracted to serving in Congress even ten years ago, even fifteen years ago. They’re very different, I think, in terms of quality, and it’s something that’s, it’s hard to describe to people who didn’t, you know, who haven’t spentHours and hours with these members of Congress and the ones in the past, and sort of understanding the differences. But I also think that we have seen this increase, and you talk to some of those people about these threats, and sure, maybe some of them would rather go make 10 times more money as a lobbyist. But I think that many of them are very serious about the level of threats against them and their families. This includes, by the way, people who were serving 20 years ago and are serving today.
Steve Hayes
And the, the– what they thought they could tolerate 20 years ago is very different than what they think they can tolerate today.
Mike Warren
I think you’ve both hit upon something in that this is really driven by visibility, by, and particularly members of Congress, by the fact that they are on television and they’re on– very prominent on social media because it’s– Congress, we go over and over and over here, doesn’t really do anything. Like, if you were really driven by a desire to use violence to create political change, why would you bother wasting ammunition on Mike Johnson, you know, or any other member of the House of Representatives? With all due respect for a taxi driver, why would you bother shooting a senator? They just don’t do very much, but you see them because they’re famous. And I don’t know that we have data on this, but there’s some anecdotal reason to believe that it’s not the very powerful members of Congress who get the most of this stuff, it’s the most famous ones. Like Marjorie Taylor Greene got a lot of this kind of stuff apparently from people. She was really a focus of a lot of people because she was just very high profile. She wasn’t someone who was particularly influential in Congress. In some ways, she was not influential. In some ways, she was the opposite of that. Supreme Court justices, because there’s only nine of them, it’s easier to pay attention to them.
Steve Hayes
I just don’t think people are doing that kind of rational calculus necessarily. I mean, some people undoubtedly are. There was a spike in threats to members of the Supreme Court in the lead up to the Dobbs-
Steve Hayes
… decision, for instance. So some people are doing that. But I think with a lot of them, you know, if it’s a Marjorie Taylor Greene, you’re right. She’s absolutely more visible than the average member of Congress. She also says things that are more provocative that will piss off the, exactly the kind of unhinged people that would be most likely to do something about these things.
Mike Warren
The, the space laser lobby you’re talking about.
Steve Hayes
[laughing] I mean, a-any of a number of things that sh-she said. Again, not justifying it, but just-
Steve Hayes
… she’s high profile because she says controversial and provocative things, which raises her profile among the people who oppose her most.
Steve Hayes
Which is this cyclical phenomenon that I think has, in part,
Steve Hayes
led us to where we are. I think this is all sort of, of a piece. I wanna talk, I wanna spend the last few minutes here talking about sort of the broader environment that our politics are taking place in, that sort of the American people are living in these days, and there was a really outstanding essay from Derek Thompson, former writer for The Atlantic, now has a Substack, and he goes into all sorts of explanations basically for why the United States, why the U.S. populace is basically just in a bad mood. It’s a state of malaise. Kyla Scanlon, who’s an author for Dispatch Markets, called it a vibe session. People are just down. People are discouraged. And Thompson walks through in great detail a number of different reasons, the increasing prevalence of social media, the ability to sort of tap into other people who are down, uh, the, the economic changes we’ve seen. The most prominent one, I would say, where he kind of settles, and again, not a mono-causal explanation, is sort of the ha-hangover from the pandemic and what we’ve seen both in terms of economics, in terms of sort of sustained inflation, even though there are other economic indicators that point in the other direction that suggest we should be happier or have more confidence in the U.S. economy, but also the social and, and societal implications of this post-pandemic world. And I wanna just read one, where he sums it up, one paragraph here. He writes, “And so this is as close as I can get to a unified theory of the Tragic Twenties. American sadness this decade has been forged by the fact of and the feeling of a permanent, unrelenting economic crisis, amplified by a uniquely negative news and media environment, and exacerbated by the rise of solitude and the declining centrality of trusted institutions. Inflation has made today’s life harder to afford, while the ambient awareness of other people’s triumphs on social media had made tomorrow’s success feel harder to achieve. The ongoing collapse of confidence in the establishment has made Americans feel unusually adrift and dissatisfied with institutions outside of their control, while the chosen self-isolation of modern life has demolished communal trust as we increasingly experience other people’s minds through the toxic surreality of our screens rather than through the embodied reality of strangers who are, for the most part, just as nice as we are.” Mike, your reaction to the Derek Thompson essay and that selection in particular.
Mike Warren
It certainly spoke to a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about and had not sort of organized into thoughts and put them down into any kind of unified theory, and I don’t think he, Derek, attempts to say it’s the end-all be-all. As you said, n- he’s not making a totally mono-causal argument, and even his sort of unified theory is, has lots of different, you know, it is economics, society, and technology all sort of coming together. In that way, it is not unusual or even remarkable because that’s always what kinda defines how, uh, society’s doing at any moment. It’s all those kind of factors coming in, and so in some ways it’s maybe is not as re-revelatory as I would, would have hoped. But I do think the pandemic is something that we remain just stuck in, and the things that were happening, the technological changes, the political upheaval, the economic uncertainty, that was all happening before. The pandemic has– is this moment of, it’s like, uh, all these conditions were a-at work here, and then sort of an atomic bomb blew up, and all of the problems that we had were… This is a really poor metaphor. But all the problems we had were sort of mutated and got a lot worse, and yes-People are not dying of COVID the way they were six years ago. The restrictions that we had placed on ourselves or that our governments have placed on us are lifted, but that hangover from everything of sort of losing the, the little platoons of democracy that we were sort of e- engaged in, it’s not entirely the case. I mean, we are still doing things like Little League and Boy Scouts, and I’m just talking about my own neighborhood, you know, swim and tennis, and the elementary school PTA. Like, all those things still exist and are still vibrant in my neck of the woods, and I think that’s true for a lot of Americans. But again, it comes back to the perception. The perception is that it’s not that way everywhere else, and we can see that, we can be told that, we can see it in the, the version of that story that we want it to be told. We can be told that it’s because of the breakdown of organized religion, but of course, like, that was going on long before the pandemic. We can be told that it’s about, you know, economic inequality and, and that sort of thing, which is happening, but also, like, people are richer than they ever, have ever been in the United States, and that includes poor people in the United States are richer than they have been in decades past. So I think so much of it comes from perception and relative perception. Everybody else seems happy, and I’m not for all these various reasons, and that kind of gets exacerbated. It’s concerning. I don’t know where, uh, uh, I don’t think Derek comes up with a way out of it, but I think it all seems to have been exacerbated and amplified by the pandemic, and we just haven’t gotten, we haven’t gotten out of it yet. Look who’s the president of the United States, the guy who was president at the beginning of the pandemic, Donald Trump. We’re just, we’re just stuck in that way, and I don’t know how we get out.
Steve Hayes
Jonah, how do we get out?
Jonah Goldberg
Muddling through. I mean, like I, [chuckles] I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m very reluctant to give into, like, silver bullet solutions to-
Jonah Goldberg
… these kinds of things. Look, I agree. Like, all of these things enrich marbled, complicated phenomenon. Like, I often use, when I try to explain what an overdetermined phenomenon is, I’ll, you know, I’ll explain why Jews are liberal, and because I used to get asked that all the time. And I can give you 10 different reasons, and for some Jewish people, eight of them apply really strongly, and two have no bearing, and for other people, three apply really strongly, and seven don’t. You know, like, it depends, and so for, there’s some people for whom the pandemic really screwed them up, and then for other people, for whom the pandemic only did minor damage, right? But in a society where other people are screwed up, you sort of, your mood is in some ways pegged to the mean or the median, and when o- other people are reacting so negatively to so much of life, it brings you down. I mean, this is sort of a, at scale, kinda like you’re only as happy as your least happy child. A society with a critical mass of really cranky, upset people is just gonna be a bummer of a society, even if things are going okay for you for all sorts of different reasons. And, you know, we made this point a lot. I remember r- you know, we recorded a lot of podcasts during the pandemic, and I used to make the point all the time. There’s a lot of, you know, there’s a lot of reason to think that pandemics in particular mess with people.
Jonah Goldberg
Like, their brains. It just, like, unseen enemy, fear of contagion.
Jonah Goldberg
You know, all sorts of, you know, like Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind talks about how the fear of contagion or of disgust at germs and obscenity and all these kinds of things are very close to the parts of the brain that deal with more, like, high-minded things of religion and shame and approval in all sorts of ways. And I think that has a very long tail to it, and you combine it with
Jonah Goldberg
the social media stuff, which I really do think is destructive to, on net, is more destructive to people’s psyches than it is beneficial. You know, I’ve used this quote from Montesquieu a bunch of times, but I think it’s a very helpful way of thinking about this stuff, and as, as pretentious as it is to quote Montesquieu. He once said, “If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy. But we want to be happier than other people, which is difficult since we think them happier than they really are.” And the whole functioning of social media is to make happy people seem much happier than they are and also to get a lot of people to pretend to be happy when they’re-
Jonah Goldberg
… in fact friggin’ miserable.
Jonah Goldberg
And the dissonance of be- behaving as if you’re happy when you’re in fact miserable is kind of a cancer on your soul, and I think it’s contagious in a lot of ways. So I have no great solution here except for the usual ones, which is, as Kevin began this conversation by pointing out, you very rarely hear about the mass shooter getting a good, solid eight hours of sleep every night-
Mike Warren
[chuckles]
Jonah Goldberg
… because he’s got a bunch of kids and a good, rewarding job and a loving marriage, right? Like, the things that give you meaning and satisfaction and fill up the holes in your soul are always going to be closer to home. They’re always gonna be those traditional sort of bourgeois things. And that doesn’t mean everybody who’s, quote-unquote, “trapped in the suburbs” is gonna be happy, but the myth that being, quote-unquote, “trapped in the suburbs” makes you miserable is a romantic myth that go, that, uh, that is 150, 200-year-old pedigree by a bunch of miserable friggin’ romantic poets and writers who hate the bourgeois and wanna-
Jonah Goldberg
… live in a time of excitement and thrill and sacrifice and violence, and screw those people. Get a good job, meet a nice girl, meet a nice boy, whatever it is, settle down, have a decent life, live with decency, and a lot of this other stuff will roll off of you, whether or not you’re making as much money as you’d like to.
Steve Hayes
I mean, if getting eight hours of sleep is a key component here, I’m prouder of myself-
Jonah Goldberg
You’re screwed, Steve
Steve Hayes
… than I ever have been-
Mike Warren
[laughs]
Steve Hayes
… that I have not become a mass shooter, because-
Mike Warren
[laughs]
Steve Hayes
… I don’t know the last time that I’ve, uh, done that.
Steve Hayes
Kevin, a couple things just again, speaking from my own experience. I went out on Friday to my favorite butcher. It’s about forty-five minutes south of my house, Nick’s of Calvert, phenomenal butcher shop. Used to have these, like, crazy prices, you know, fifty, seventy percent cheaper than Safeway, ninety percent cheaper than Whole Foods for a variety of fantastic meats. I went there the other day because my wife was having some work colleagues over, and I got the typical ten-pound bag of ground round. And I haven’t paid careful attention to that. I get it pretty regularly. This is the best burger meat you could possibly have. It was fifty-seven dollars.
Steve Hayes
And I think five years ago, six years ago, it was thirty-five maybe. And you just look around and everything… Jonah and I went out for a dinner and a drink f- with some of our colleagues middle of last week. And again, I don’t eat out, I don’t eat out that much downtown D.C. Nineteen-dollar plate of chicken nachos?
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Steve Hayes
Twenty dollars for two street tacos?
Steve Hayes
Sixteen, seventeen dollars a drink?
Steve Hayes
Like, this is crazy. So that’s sort of one, and Thompson really makes the point that this, the sort of omnipresence of inflation, yes, it’s gone up and down, ebbs and flows, but collectively, we don’t think about it [chuckles] on a month-to-month basis based on the CPI. We think about going out, and as he put it, excuse my language, “Holy [beep] these groceries are expensive.” That is true. Then the other question, y-you know, just in terms of interacting, and again, I’m– this is way more personal than I usually am on these podcasts, but I think people i-in this polarized political environment, even if you’re not a terribly political person, maybe especially if you’re not a terribly political person, with all of this confrontational politics everywhere, certainly on television, definitely on social media, but increasingly in our personal spaces. You go somewhere, and you’re afraid to say something because you don’t know if somebody’s gonna get in your face, whether you’re talking about, you know, the super lefties, in my experience growing up was what they were the most obvious. They were the ones who usually were wanted to get in my face about things because I disagreed with them. Or now sort of super MAGA, and you know, I think people are concluding like, “Eh, is it even worth it to go to the local, you know, social or the block party or the probably less the church function than other things?”
Steve Hayes
Because it’s just not worth it. You just could find yourself in a conversation that’ll be unpleasant. You don’t wanna deal with it. It’s too much. It’s easier to stay home and watch another, you know, binge another Netflix series.
Jonah Goldberg
One data point on this, I think I told you about this at the time. My wife and I did this fantastic trip for our anniversary in Europe, and it was a group biking trip, and they said that they saw a huge drop-off in bookings from America because people were terrified that they would go and have to do a vacation, where you do a lot of group meals, with people where you have to disagree with about politics. And they were just like, “It’s not worth it,” you know?
Steve Hayes
Interesting. Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
I think that’s a real thing.
Kevin Williamson
Well, so many thoughts about this. So Jonah mentioned a critical mass of cranky people. Steve talked about the usual selection of terrific meats. One of those needs to be the, uh, title of this episode. [laughing] And Derek Thompson wants me to believe that the world is full of people who are, quote, “just as nice as I am.” If that’s the case, I’m gonna jump off a bridge because I’m gonna need a much nicer world than that. [laughing] That’s not a great thing to think about. Yeah, I think that the disconnect between our material prosperity and our national mood is worth thinking about and meditating on for a bit in the sense that it shows not only that we are not homo economicus, that there are lots of things in life that are not gonna be fixed by higher GDP, higher wages, even higher real wages in reference to the inflation problem. And that while economic prosperity certainly is something that enables some of these other things, like it’s a lot easier to have a happy marriage and family if you’re economically stable and, you know, doing all right that way. It’s easier to be involved in your community or your church if you’re not desperately thinking about the next twenty-five dollars and how am I gonna, you know, cover milk and eggs and bread for my family. But that stuff in and of itself not only doesn’t suffice to get you past the other things in life that you may need to feel healthier, more attached, more happy, more secure, more meaningful, but in some ways, they make it worse because, you know, the nature of our work has changed in such a way that we’ve got more time to dawdle on our phones and look at social media and do those sorts of things. We have some, you know, luxury problems in the United States, things that we worry about that you only worry about when you’re a pretty wealthy and prosperous country that, you know, poor people who really are desperately trying to make ends meet don’t think about as much. I think those things all kind of come together, but it is also worth thinking about, as you alluded to earlier, Steve, how much of this stuff really is self-chosen. You know, you c- have a lot of this kind of anomie among the, the upper middle classes, you know, relatively affluent, educated professionals who could live their lives in different ways if they chose to, but they really, really like being on that phone, or they really, really, as you say, want to stay home and binge a Netflix series rather than, you know, go to the church potluck or whatever. And these are choices people make, and I think that they make themIn the same way that people make choices that lead to bad health outcomes, right? Like, nobody wants to get lung cancer and nobody wants to weigh four hundred pounds, nobody wants to be an alcoholic, but you make that individual choice in the moment not for, “Am I gonna be an alcoholic or a lifelong smoker?” but, “Am I gonna have this drink? Am I gonna smoke this cigarette? Am I gonna do this thing?” And so we’re making these choices on an hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute, you know, maybe day-by-day or week-by-week basis, not thinking about, “What does my life look like in five years from now if this is the kinda choice that I consistently make?” And it’s difficult in the best of times to get ahead of yourself that way and r- and really lead your life in that kinda long-term way. But when you’ve got these little, you know, short-term, instant feedback doses of hubris and happiness from, you know, social media or whatever, or watching, you know… In my case, if I still had a television, you know, watching some season of Justified for the sixty-fifth time or whatever ’cause I really liked watching that show. And watching Apocalypse Now for the ninetieth time or whatever it is. By the way, I was… A, a clip of Apocalypse Now came up the other day, and I was really thinking about it in terms of parenthood, which I think about a lot right now for obvious reasons. But, you know, Willard has come into Kurtz’s camp and passed all these decapitated corpses and a pile of skulls and all this stuff, and people who were painting their faces and worshiping as a god, and Kurtz says, “I worry sometimes that my son will not understand what it is I’ve tried to do here.”
Kevin Williamson
[laughing] And I thought, “Story of my life, K- Colonel Kurtz. I kinda get that.” [laughing] And yeah, so not to get in everyone’s, like, you know, business about, you know, religion and family life and that kinda stuff, but these things really do help. Having those kinds of connections really do make a difference in life. And yeah, I wrote this piece many years ago for National Review that made a lot of people angry. It was about incels when that first kinda became part of the conversation. And my advice for them was just go join a church. Like, I don’t really care what you believe in, and chances are neither does the church. Most churches are open to people who are, you know, people of good intention who maybe have some doubts about the theological claims of any particular religion. But, you know, particularly kinda mainline, you know, evangelical Protestant churches are full of young women who wanna get married, and they’re also full of the kinda young women that you might actually wanna marry if you’re a sort of desperately unhappy 22-year-old guy, 25-year-old guy who obviously is not, like, good at going to bars and picking up chicks and stuff. And people got really mad about that because they thought it was, you know, a counsel of insincerity, but there really is something very important in life to be said for going through the motions. Like, I’ve done a lot of stuff related to family with my parents and things that I didn’t wanna do, but I went through the motions in certain kinds of things, and it was worth going through the motions. It was worth keeping up relationships that were otherwise weren’t gonna be kept up. It was worth doing some of the things that one just has to do because they’re the things that one does. And we have a much more kind of libertarian ethos in many ways right now when it comes to our personal lives, our social lives, our families, and that kind of thing, and we have these choices. You really can get away with not
Kevin Williamson
seeing your parents for Christmas or sending that card or having that conversation or being a member of a church, or if you are a member of a church, getting involved in things. But just because you can get away with it isn’t necessarily an indicator that you should get away with it or that it’s going to be good for you. That this thing that feels like the convenient thing for you to do, which it is right now in this moment, isn’t in the long term something that’s gonna contribute to your unhappiness.
Mike Warren
Well said.
Kevin Williamson
Yeah, very well said.
Mike Warren
Oh, thank you.
Kevin Williamson
We are way over time, but I want to get in a quick round of Dispatch recommends and an even quicker Not Worth Your Time. So, the Dispatch article that I wanna recommend actually goes to some of this, particularly sort of the ways in which the United States is different than our neighbors and our neighbors in the West. There’s a terrific essay that we ran about a week ago, April 20th, by Stephanie Murray, and the title is “I Am a Free-Range Parent. I Probably Won’t Be When I Move to America.” And she talks of living in England and letting her five-year-old walk to the corner market and not having to worry about it very much and allowing the kids a lot of freedom there that she likely won’t when she moves back here. And I have to say, it mirrored my experience living in Spain in 2018, 2019, where we would let our kids walk several blocks to the corner market at 10:30 at night to get fresh-squeezed orange juice. A really terrific essay, a lot of food for thought. We will include it in the show notes. Mike Warren, what do you recommend?
Mike Warren
As a matter of sort of understanding our politics at the moment, and particularly the mechanics of our politics, I recommend Alex Demas’ piece, “The Price of Crossing Crypto Could Be Higher in 2026.” Just a great look at sort of the money that the crypto lobby is spending on our politics. It’s interesting. I learned a lot reading it, and so I high re- highly recommend it if you’re like me and don’t really understand the industry or sort of the political valence of its big donors. You’ll learn a lot.
Kevin Williamson
Kevin. You know, on that free-range parenting story, it reminded me of something that I think I have… I think I have this in common with Jonah, if I’m remembering, which is the experience of being sent by your mother to the store to buy cigarettes when you’re a little kid. [chuckles] And, you know, in Lubbock, Texas, my mother would give me a check, [chuckles] and I would walk to the grocery store, you know, six, seven years old, buy a carton of smokes, give the guy a check, and it was like nothing had happened. But the story I wanted to recommend was the one on Philipsburg, Montana, by Lawson Chapman, and about this, you know, town in Montana that was famously written about by a poet some years ago and was kind of in decline and what it’s like now. And Montana’s an inherently interesting place, I think, and I like stories about Montana, and I hope we have more Montana coverage in The Dispatch. Jonah.
Jonah Goldberg
Partly ’cause it’s just so in my wheelhouse these days. We had a very good piece, I think it was part of the 250, the Next 250 series, yeah, by an academic, George Hawley, called “The Enduring Lessons of Fusionism.”
Kevin Williamson
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
And one of the points he just simply makes is that-You know, it’s funny, it’s, it’s contrary to the point I’m often making because a lot of people wanna say that fusionism was just a coalitional device for like the Reagan three-legged stool kind of thing. And it wasn’t that. It was an actual philosophical orientation. But he also makes a very good point that at a very high level, it was a coalition-building thing because the nature of fusionism was such
Jonah Goldberg
that you had to look askance at populism and crack pottery and these other sort of, I don’t wanna use the word demonic, but like these passions that can corrupt clear thinking. And so it’s very well done. It’s a good correction to a lot of the way people, both anti-fusionism and pro-fusionism, have talked about it in recent years.
Steve Hayes
Before we get to today’s Not Worth Your Time, we went a little off-color today. I warned the panel that we were gonna head in this direction, even though I had some misgivings. We did it anyway, so if you’ve got kids in the car, please give it a pause and come back and listen to it later.
Steve Hayes
Jonah, straight back to you on this Not Worth Your Time. I am only gonna read the first two sentences of this New York Times article, and I’m gonna leave it to you three to react.
Steve Hayes
“The world’s largest condom maker is raising prices of its products up by up to thirty percent, warning that shortages of raw materials and chemicals because of the Iran war could disrupt production. The Malaysian condom company Karex, which produces about five billion condoms a year,
Steve Hayes
blamed a surge in raw material prices, global shipping distributions, and higher freight costs for the price increases.” Jonah.
Jonah Goldberg
So the problem here is we talked about this very briefly before we started, and you said that you were afraid about what people were gonna do with this topic-
Steve Hayes
[chuckles]
Jonah Goldberg
… and whether it was gonna be inappropriate or not. So of course, that’s where I was primed to go. So when you talked about the world’s largest condom maker, I thought you were about the person who made the largest condom.
Steve Hayes
Don’t, don’t. [laughing] Already regretting the topic. We– I’m gonna go back, and we are gonna edit in a warning before we do Not Worth Your Time.
Jonah Goldberg
We just need a little verbal oxymoronic comma in there.
Steve Hayes
For any parents, for any parents who’s, who are listening to us with children in the, in the back of the car.
Jonah Goldberg
Ugh. I think, look at me like all jokes aside, I think this is just a good example of… I mean, it, there’s, there, there are people talking about how this is pro-natalist because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Eh, we can have that conversation. But I think this is just a good example of how it illustrates how the stuff that comes out of the petrochemical wider complex, something Kevin and I have talked about a bunch of times, isn’t just oil and gas. It is a vast array of products that when you make them more expensive or more scarce, which as Kevin will probably say is the same thing, there are knock-on effects all over the place. And it’s why this is much more inflationary than I think people are appreciating.
Steve Hayes
Mike.
Mike Warren
All I’ll say about this is I got a real kick out of the kicker quote in that New York Times story, which is from the CEO of this condom company. Quote, “Everyone hopes that this ends fast and swiftly.” And I, I don’t feel like I need to add any other commentary to, to that.
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Mike Warren
I just think it’s one of those things, it’s perfect.
Jonah Goldberg
Ugh.
Mike Warren
Now just say it and get out.
Steve Hayes
Kevin.
Jonah Goldberg
So to speak.
Mike Warren
So to speak. [laughs]
Steve Hayes
You know, Jonah making magnum condom jokes, I think that’s beneath a man of my caliber.
Mike Warren
[laughs]
Steve Hayes
And he ended with the word inflationary, so you know, I’m drawing a blank there.
Mike Warren
You asked for this, Steve. You asked for it.
Steve Hayes
Uh, yeah, I’m, I’m regretting this already. To the more serious point about, you know, petrochemicals and polymers and things like that, they are in every damn thing, stuff you don’t even think about. You know, every plastic, pharmaceuticals, clothing, artificial fibers, all this kind of stuff. And yeah, you’re gonna feel that throughout the supply chain for a long time in various unpleasant ways that probably haven’t yet manifested themselves.
Mike Warren
[laughs]
Steve Hayes
And with that, deep regret for having opened that up, but selection of terrific meats, Steve was saying. [laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Steve Hayes
Also glad that, that we let this run long a little bit, and I didn’t mean that. God, you guys. You guys.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Steve Hayes
Jeez. All right, I just end it. End it. Done. Thanks. See ya. Talk to you next time. Bye.
Steve Hayes
[upbeat music] 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. 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 masters of the double entendre. 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]