‘Complexity is a Subsidy’ | Ruminant

This episode of The Remnant is brought to you by our friends at the Pacific Legal Foundation. PLF is a national nonprofit law firm with more than 200 active lawsuits representing Americans hurt by government overreach. Across the country, PLF is fighting to free up more land and resources. They represent a California family who have oil reserves but can't drill because of a state ban. Alaska lumber companies that can't operate because of a federal rule. and a retired pediatrician in Florida whose property was wrongly declared a wetland. And they represent all their clients free of charge because they believe all Americans should live fearlessly in pursuit of happiness. If you agree, check out the Pacific Legal Foundation at pacificlegal.org slash flagship. Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention? Daniel Jiggins! Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media. Alright, so I'm just gonna level with you guys, because for all sorts of reasons been a rough winter and uh we don't need to get into all that but sort of coming to a head uh gracie our cat of just shy of 18 years she's been going through deteriorating kidneys and it's gotten really bad and um my daughter it's hitting my daughter very hard that in turn also just how it's hitting me it's sort of a one-two punch i have a crazy busy day tomorrow um in part because we may have to say goodbye to gracie tomorrow and i'm not going to talk anymore about any of that um might write about it down the road or this is also why i didn't write a wednesday g file we got the news about these test results and we had to break it to my daughter anyway um enough of all that it's been a crazy busy week steve and i went down it's amazing i we've been doing this steve has been going down for eight years i've been going down for seven so basically since we launched the dispatch and maybe a year before that we go down and speak to this nasco group it's the national association of security something i should know this off the top of my head but i don't i'm distracted but it's basically the trade association for private security which is a huge and fascinating business in america and sort of worldwide and we sort of do what's going on in washington kind of talk we become friends with the people who put it on and a lot of people come back every year and um steve and i went down to florida to do it and i got back and into the teeth of all this stuff but it's funny i was talking to steve about it It's sort of like, you know, Steve and I see each other a lot, but we don't have, we don't have a lot of meals, just the two of us, you know, and a few times a year kind of thing. And most of the time it's in Washington and it's for a specific purpose and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so it's just sort of as happenstance. We've, um, ended up having like these big, serious business conversations, future of the dispatch conversations in the same Fort Lauderdale hotel restaurant. many times over the last five years or seven years or whatever. And it was just kind of funny. We were sitting around the table talking to each other about how, you know, I think it was, it was here when you brought up X or it was here when I brought up Y. And anyway, we're just sort of kind of weird. I'm recording this and it won something on Thursday. So who knows what's going on with the news. So we did a dispatch podcast this morning. I recorded it from AEI because I had a meeting I wanted to go to at AEI. And it was me, David, Megan, and Steve. Steve brought up the topic of, brought up a column that Megan had written about two weeks ago about how people need to stop using the word fascism because it doesn't persuade anybody. I'm always surprised when people are surprised when I say this, but I agree entirely. Part of the point of when I wrote liberal fascism was, and I've said this a million times, I've said it on here a bunch of times, was part of my hope was people are going to stop using the word fascism in mainstream politics. Instead, I helped make it bipartisan. And lots of people on the right started calling lots of people on the left fascist in much the same way that people on the left called Americans on the Right Fascist for a very long time. And I think the term fascist doesn't really help anybody. It's sort of like, you know, Godwin's Law, whoever brings up Hitler first loses the debate. But part of the point, you know, for writing that book was to illustrate that if you're going to take the word seriously, if you're going to take the concept seriously, you should look within right you should look within your own movement your own cause your own views um your sort of own ideological checklists for places where you're similar where your side does things that if you were viewing them objectively from outside the movement you would recognize as fascistic right if not necessarily fascist i stand by that one of things that has always driven me crazy is the way the right I'm talking about the pre-trump right okay there's a lot that is legitimately in my opinion fascistic about the MAGA right starting with January 6 a point I made I wrote an essay for for Barry Weiss over the free press a few years ago like on the one of the anniversaries of January 6 um making that point is like if you're going to just talk about sort of the conventional normie person's understanding of what sort of fascistic behavior looks like. It looks like January 6th and the defenses of it are fascistic to me. And some of the things that Trump is doing with the government and a lot of this nationalism stuff, I mean, I can go on and on and on. I'm not trying to absolve anybody, but what I'm talking about is the pre-Trump right, where there was this tendency to make, know there are a lot of intellectuals well you know the left was top heavy with academics who love to study the right and even had a lot of academics who loved to study the left but when they studied the left it was overwhelmingly heroic narratives about advocates for change and progress When they wrote about the right, it was a tale of villainy of opponents to change in progress, positive change in progress. And the right was always asked to atone for and own its intellectual history. and to a certain extent i'm fine with that i i you guys know i think intellectual history matters but what bothered me was the way in which progressives felt they were entirely liberated from their own intellectual history and you know the new republic was just relentless with this kind of thing constantly pointing out things that william f buckley sometimes as fair criticism because some of the things that William F. Buckley and National Review published in the late 50s and early 60s was pretty terrible, and I don't like it, right? And the right, when I was growing up on the right, you know, struggled to figure out how to deal with that and atone for its history and adjust for its history and explain its history. William F. Buckley changed his views on a lot of things when he grappled with that history, and so I got no problem with that kind of thing on the merits. but then you know i would point out things about the intellectual history of the progressive left of the new republic and the whole idea was shrug who cares you know that's ancient history there's this i've mentioned this before but no there's this column that david brooks wrote either it was a column or chapter of a book but david brooks wrote about once how you know he was talking to, I don't think he revealed it, but it was E.J. Dionne. And maybe E.J. Dionne revealed it in a column where he was responding to David Brooks. I can't remember. But the gist of it is, you know, David was asking E.J. Dionne and maybe some other people, E.J. Dionne was a longtime progressive columnist for the Washington Post, which I guess we should talk about in a minute. And David was like, you know, who's on your tie? And what he meant by that was like, you know, On the right, there are people who wear like Edmund Burke ties or Adam Smith ties. They sort of wear their intellectuals not necessarily on their sleeves, but on their ties as this sort of nerdy kind of thing. As I often joke about, you know, I grew up in the world where people were talking about how they were like a level 19 Hayekian. And Dion, who, to his credit, actually knows a lot about the intellectual history of progressivism. And he's just like, yeah, that's not the way we're wired. Because we are forward looking. we are for progress and change we don't have the same relationship with our intellectual heroes and our intellectual forebears that the right does and i think there's a lot of truth to that right there's this this thing inside of progressivism and i don't mean this pejoratively that just doesn't care that much about the rear view mirror so long as they're convinced they're going in the right direction, right? And, um, and they don't feel particularly bound by the ideas of people who came before them. Now, Marxists are a different thing, but I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about sort of mainstream progressive, you know, liberals, even, you know, pretty hard left, but not Marxists. There's just an enormous number of people on the right who seem to think that everybody on the left loves Marx, quotes Marx, is influenced by Marx. I mean, I think Marx had a lot of influence. But part of my point is that a lot of these people on the left never read Marx. They don't really care about Marx. They care about helping poor people or whatever. But it ends up being this double standard kind of just would drive me crazy where you'd have, I remember I used to talk about this all the time. it was in the 2008 democratic primaries. It was like the YouTube, YouTube primary, which is like a big deal that YouTube was sponsoring a debate and, uh, yes, YouTube primary debate, not the YouTube primary that's coming. Hillary Clinton got a question from the audience or from a viewer or someone boiled down to what is liberal? What is liberalism? And are you a liberal? Hillary Clinton's response was, liberalism used to mean sort of standing up for the little guy against entrenched power, but now it's become this, you know, label that, that, that diminishes people, blah, blah, blah, whatever, you know, something like that. And that's why I read, I don't call myself a liberal. I call myself a modern progressive, which has a deep and long history in the American political tradition or something like that. And I always used to say, you know, okay, imagine if Mike Huckabee, of whom I am not a giant fan, by the way, but imagine Mike Huckabee was asked a similar question in that, in the Republican debate, but, you know, what is a conservative and are you one? And he had said, well, you know, conservatism used to mean this, and now it means that, and I think that this, that's confusing to people, and so I don't call myself a conservative. I call myself a modern confederate, which has a deep tradition and deep roots in the American political tradition. If Huckabee had said something like that, the New York Times would have lost its mind. It would have drowned people with op-eds about doesn't Ackabe understand the historical connotations of this and doesn't understand what he's really saying. Isn't this a dog whistle? And look what the Confederates believed and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And to a certain extent, they'd be right to. But when someone calls himself a modern progressive, none of the historical baggage seems to stick on it. There's some excuses for it and there's some explanations for it. And the two circles in the Venn diagram don't completely overlap. But part of it is, you know, like progressive has this broader meaning, much like liberal used to and should have again, that, you know, means it's tied to progress. And, you know, you could use the word progressive about rock and roll or architecture or all sorts of things and people kind of understood it meant kind of positive but cutting edge or whatever but there's a there's also a reason for that which is that any of the political baggage or connotations of progressive aren't just aren't or were not repeated we're not dwelled upon by mainstream journalism by mainstream academia they protected the positive connotations of the word in all sorts of ways. And the funny thing is, is like, so first of all, they're the progressives of the progressive era who were almost uniformly some kind of eugenicist, either a positive eugenicist or a negative eugenicist or both positive and negative. But the difference between the two is that, you know, one school just wanted to uplift people out of their dysgenic poverty and do social engineering that improved the standards of the race. And then the other side wanted to actively cull or prevent the birth of unfit people. And we're talking about mostly white people here, right? Because the eugenics arguments were about whites for the most part. I mean, all of these eugenicists were racist too, but like they tapped into a different set of arguments there. Although I should say there were prominent black progressives who made similar arguments. W.E.B. Du Bois made the argument about the talented 10th of the then Negro, the black community, the African-American community. And there was definitely a eugenic valence to that, that like he was basically offering a black version of the sort of Margaret Sanger, white eugenicist kind of argument. But, you know, the progressives were spoke to the bone eugenicists and most, most of them were definitely racist. Not all of them. they were also um not great on civil liberties i mean that gets a little more complicated depending on who you're talking about a lot of the stuff that we associate with mccarthyism comes from the you know a certain wing of the progressive movement if you read the kinds of stuff that richard ellie ellie who was like the leading most important progressive economist of the progressive era up until very recently the american economic association had their their annual most prestigious, prestigious lecture was the Ellie lecture and it was named after him. He was, you know, this viciously anti-immigrant, um, eugenicist chest beating, super Patriot kind of guy. He was also kind of a socialist and he was definitely a theocrat and all that. And, uh, he was the founder of the Wisconsin school of, of sort of public policy, the group that basically created the intellectual foundations for the labor movement, for the new deal, for all of these kinds of things. And there's just no baggage associated with any of that when you call yourself a progressive, but if you call yourself a conservative, basically anything bad that happened in the past, even when it wasn't done by a conservative was, was hung on you. And, and so part of the point of writing, I knew I was going to get back to my point, but the point of writing liberal fascism was to say, hey, look, you know, if we're going to play this game and call, you know, as Orwell said in what, 1946 in politics in the English language, he said, you know, fascism has simply come to mean anything not desirable. If we're going to play that game of calling everything the left doesn't like fascist, um, we might as well like define our terms and look at the stuff that is, you know, that doesn't get a lot of introspection that doesn't get a lot of examination that is just sort of assumed to be good because progressives did it and really look closely at it and so i think that there is this tendency on the left to use phrases like fascism and racism basically as shibboleth right basically a way as ways of signaling to their own tribe to get organized as a catalyzing label to designate who the enemy is. It is almost never used as a way of persuading somebody who doesn't already agree with all your priors. And so it's not a helpful thing, in Megan's view, in my view, of talking about Trump's ashism, per se. I have written a couple times about how I feel a special personal obligation to talk about my own views given how much grief and praise and controversy is generated off of my book about fascism And people ask me all the time well if you going to call it that fascism why are you calling this fascism? So I feel like I personally have an obligation to do it. But I think Megan's broader argument is that if you didn't write a book about fascism, it's probably not incumbent upon you to use that F word if you're trying to persuade people that Trump has gone off the rails. I think that's right. I think at the same time, you know, so the counter argument from people is, well, but we're not, we have to know what we're fighting. We have to know what the stakes are and all that kind of stuff. And this is one of these things where I think people of a certain intellectual bent often confuse words for things. Calling something fascist that isn't fascist will not make it fascist any more than calling something racist racist will make it racist but you don't have to call something racist racist or something that's fascist fascist in order to persuade people that it's wrong there are we have a big language we have other words we can use like un-american or bullying or even authoritarian and all that kind of thing maybe you go down a very long list but i mean this sort of gets sort of part of the point is that one of the reasons why i think the left burned through so much of its credibility with like the median voter is they just kept calling everything under the sun they didn't like fascist or racist to the point where they created a cry wolf problem for themselves so like stop doubling down on that um it doesn't mean you should accept all the stuff that trump is doing or the republic are doing but just as a pr matter i think megan's right stop calling it fascist because you just turn off more people than you turn on when you do that just stay on the trump stuff for two seconds the melania movie no i haven't seen it no i don't want to see it i will not pay to see it but you know when it's on the cable i'm curious enough to watch it i've read a few snippets about the reviews It kind of makes me sad because I kind of, I still had up until fairly recently, a soft spot in my heart for Melania. My own personal theory is that she got, she basically has a monkey paw marriage where she made a wish about marrying a billionaire who was like famous and could do a lot for her career and all this kind of stuff. And she got what she wished for, but not the way she wanted it. I do think that like I had to make a wacky prediction about 10 years from now. At some point, she's going to give an interview, maybe after, after Trump's dead or, um, do a memoir where she just tells a very different story about herself. Um, then the one that, uh, that, that either saw either team thinks is the truth of the matter. But this thing just sounds kind of like gross and cheesy. It certainly doesn't sound like a documentary. It sounds, I think it was Sonny Bunch who was talking about it. It feels more like a quasi sort of a making of special about a video press release kind of thing. You know, sort of like behind the scenes of this video shoot for this real estate deal, you know, a promotion, promotion reel or something. I don't know. I think it's really funny how in the era of the smartphone, when everybody is perfectly capable of posting pictures, um, when they are doing their agit prop stuff, I think it's really funny so far. And I'm sure I've missed something and maybe even the photo was accurate, but like I've been scrolling through the Fandango app on my phone and it's a little misleading because I live in Washington, D.C. where no matter what, Melania was not the stock. This movie was not going to do well, but I've never seen when you look at the seat map for buying tickets, I haven't seen a single theater that had more than three paid for seats. And I've seen lots of showings that had completely empty theaters. And yet you'll get these, you know, the sort of in the tank sycophants for Trump all over the place talking about how they, um, they're in the theater and it's absolutely packed. And the atmosphere is electric. Like if that were remotely true, why wouldn't you post a picture of it or a video? you know but i've seen these clips of people from fox news talking about my mom went last night and loved it she saw it for the third time and the audience was just crammed with people and blah blah blah pictures or it didn't happen is kind of my view about this and i do think it's kind of a gross bit of currying favor with the administration you know sort of a crony capitalism kind of play speaking of crony capitalism on wednesday i was kind of planning on writing a g file about it and then i was worried that glensicum would do it because it's so in his wheelhouse and and do it with more charts and all that kind of stuff but since there just just comes to mind we're talking about liberal fascism right the my initial idea for writing that book was almost entirely about economics. I think I've told this idea before. Um, I mean, it kind of, it clicked for me as an intellectual project because of this. I had, you know, I had the gripes about people being called Nazis, like who weren't Nazis for a very long time. But I remember I was, I was in Switzerland, la-di-da, it was this junket, fantastic junket. I think I've mentioned before that I really, I, I expected it to be, I grew up listening my parents tell stories of all these fantastic journalistic junkets that they went on in the 60s and early 70s and um and i was like okay now i'm a i'm a columnist and i'm a this i'll be going on this kind of thing all the time and i this thing called the u.s swiss foundation had this young leaders program and i went on it and it was fantastic and i was like this is awesome i'm going to be doing this kind of thing twice a year and i haven't really done anything remotely like it since except maybe for that trip to India I did though that was more of a think tanky thing than a journalistic junket but anyway I was in Switzerland and I was listening to this guy talk and it was really just sort of astounding to me the degree to which he talked about free markets capitalism and all that kind of stuff as important for maintaining some efficiencies for some of their smaller vendors but nestle which was this massive you know global corporation which you know was involved in just an incredibly wide array of things and was essentially an ngo in in big chunks of the world you know they didn't really think about in terms of like at least the way he was talking in terms of like actual capitalistic competition but he had some respect for the virtues of it to, you know, make sure that his supply chain was in a competitive market that kept everybody kind of honest kind of thing. And the way he talked is like, we really see ourselves really as sort of a partner of governments. And we have this, I don't think he uses the phrase social justice, but we have this kind of mission about enlightened policy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it just kind of clicked for me that this was essentially, basically you know in if in just purely economic terms the fascist bargain right i mean um there's a big debate in academia about like how to describe the economics of fascism if you listen to particularly the italians the italian fascists themselves it's not all that controversial they they subscribe to this idea of corporatism which is um basically just sort of which is an updating of the Catholic doctrine about economics going back to the Middle Ages, which is basically corporatism. It doesn't mean like U.S. steel per se. It means sort of the body, the body politic, right? The corpus of society. And that what you wanted were essentially all of the important organs working cooperatively with each other. And so it was the heads of the guilds and the heads of the church and the representatives of the monarchy would all sit around the table and hammer out how the economy would work and cooperation for us, regulation, prohibition for everybody else. And you needed license from the crown to do this, that, or the other thing. And if you had a better mousetrap, screw you, because this family has had the contract to make the royal mousetraps for 800 years and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That was sort of how the thing worked in the middle ages. And, um, you know, the Catholic church did not in the 19th century, did not love laissez faire stuff, you know, small L liberal democratic capitalism, but nor did it love socialism. And what they sort of worked out was, uh, corporatism and the Mussolini approach was sort of, it often got called syndicalism and all these other things, but it was basically an updating of that. We'll just get the trade unions and the, which are not, you know, which have replaced the guilds and we'll get the big corporations, which rely on government subsidies anyway, and we'll get them all around the table and we'll decide how to run the economy. And that's pretty much how the German fascist economic system worked as well. The left has always wanted to make it sound like fascism was hyper capitalism. That's partly because they were just cribbing off of, you know, essentially communist talking points, but there is an argument that it's so-called state capitalism, right? Which is sort of the argument about what China is today. And a bunch of people have written this. I've written about it. Winsicum's written about it. You know, Kevin's written about it. Greg Ip from the Wall Street Journal had a really good piece early on about it, about how Trump's economic program, if you're looking for a label for it, it looks the closest label that works is state capitalism, where it's not necessarily socialism, but it's sort of like the government getting deep involved in economic decision-making partially, you know, when it takes out these shares and corporations, um, these golden shares and all that kind of stuff, or it demands a piece of the action on all these trade deals anyway back to so so when i was first thinking about the book i was thinking that primarily is an economic thing and you know one of the points about all this is that you know the goes back on the remnant dingo cards the beginning is complexity is a subsidy and the more complex you make things the more red tape the more rules the more hurdles and hoops you have to jump over or through in order to bring a product to market or start a business the more you're rewarding people with uh special access inside information high levels of cognitive capital or financial capital now people who can afford lawyers who can afford lobbyists you know the example i always used to use is like this was in the book you know know, if you use the Americans with Disabilities Act, which is perfectly defensible matter of public policy, but it's, which is part of the point, right? It helps not everything that the statists want to do is certainly not all evil intended, right? Americans with disability act is, is a lofty and well-intentioned piece of legislation, but if you look at actually how it works in the real world, it kind of illustrates this point about barriers to entry, right? So if you're Coca-Cola or Pepsi and the Americans with Disabilities Act, which is now like a quarter century old or more, right? About 30 years or so. Um, you know, if, uh, if the Americans with Disabilities Act says, once you have 500 employees, you have to be fully compliant with it. So you have, you have to have all the wheelchair, this and all the stuff deaf people that and you have to have all of these programs to deal with all the other um admittedly you know unfair and kind of and sometimes tragic inequities and and problems of that come with life when you get to 500 employees you have to be fully compliant with it well that means that that your 500th employee right if you have 499 employees and one more tips you over into being compliant, that employee will cost you, depending on the business, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. And so it's a, it's an kind of quasi invisible barrier entry that keeps you from being able to grow and compete. But if you're Coke or Pepsi, you kind of like it, right? You're like, okay, we will raise the price of a soda by two cents. and that'll cover the costs for all this stuff and um since if you're pepsi you're like well since coke has to do it too it doesn't really eat into our market share not least not according to price right because we're still at the same competitive level but it keeps i don't know nantucket nectars or whoever from being able to sort a more nimble competitor from coming up from below because it makes it really expensive to achieve the kind of scale that the big incumbents already have. And so I've been making this point for a gazillion years about all sorts of well-intentioned regulations and well-intentioned progressive goals about this, that, or the other thing, or about the, you know, making the tax code more fair and yada, yada, yada. And I still believe all it right it's like it's still absolutely true about the sort of burdensome regulatory state stuff but the same thing applies to um the kind of personalist um economic policies that donald trump is practicing like you have anyway that's the what i was i forgot to mention so the The New York Times had a really good piece on this about how big corporations have managed to navigate Trump's tariffs really well, but small and mid-sized businesses are just getting brutalized by them. And that's in part because instead of having a team of great lawyers who know how to work the regulations and get you tax credits and this, that, and the other thing, you now have a lot of big firms that have full-time lobbying shops that know how to get to trump how to give them you know give them a gold plaque give them an award whatever and they'll cut your tariff rate by 15 they know how to work the system it's the same underlying problem it just manifests itself differently because this is in many ways like the red tape problem of complexity as a subsidy is a more modern problem than what we're seeing now. What we're seeing now is essentially, you know, the kind of problems with economics that we saw in the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries of, you know, depending on what country you're in, is like get on the good side of the czar or of the king, pull in favors at the imperial court, and you'll get a carve out from this policy or that policy. You'll be exempted and your ancestor and your descendants will be exempted from taxes or whatever it is. And that's the way Trump likes it. He like, it's, it's a monarchist way of doing economic policy. It's not the only point of the tariff regime, but it's a big feature. It's not a bug is it causes everybody to come to the white house and kiss Trump's ass and beg for favors and hire as lobbyists all of these Trumpy retreads you know the Jason Miller types who um and Reince Priebus who um their major added value is they know how to get Trump or Susie Wiles Susie Wiles got all these relatives who are like and former business partners who are just making bank off of this system because Trump's got no problem having carve outs and special dispensation for friends and cronies and all the rest. It's a more honest form of corruption, but it's still really, really gross. And it is by definition in the same, again, in the same way that if you can't hire a white shoe law firm to figure out how to get you around the full compliance with some regulation or, you know, that kind of thing. If you can't afford, um, a lobbyist with access, or some other way of you know getting in the Oval Office to make your case or make or offer your bribe or whatever you screwed I willing to forego the I told you so if I can get some buy right? Like all of a sudden, there are a bunch of Democrats. There's this guy, they talked about it on Advisory Opinions. I wrote a piece for Slate saying, I wrote a book calling for nationalizing the elections. Trump changed my mind. And Sarah and David have this conversation about, you know, you welcome into the tent or do you, you know, say, I told you so. And, um, I struggle with this temptation all the time. Federalism, you know, state's right, state sovereignty. I'm not talking about anything about Jim Crow. It's like, it's amazing to me, like to this day, you cannot talk about, cannot use any of the sort of neutral terms for, um, the idea that the states were co-equal to the federal government and that, you know, the 10th amendment and the ninth amendment, these things mean something doesn't mean the 14th amendment doesn't mean something, but like that it's, there's a benefit to having laboratories of democracy or any of that kind of stuff. If you start talking like this without saying, I don't mean Jim Crow and I don't mean slavery, people think, Oh, it's just code for Jim Crow slavery. It's not, but it is dawning on a bunch of people that having a decentralized system for how to among, you know, in this case run elections makes it really difficult for someone with bad motives and bad intentions to steal elections. It just kills me that at the very moment where you're starting to get some buy-in and recognition of this fact from the left, the right is abandoning this, right? Trump more and more is just saying the states are agents of the federal government. That is that is a hate crime against conservative dogma and the constitution. They are not agents of the federal government, even allowing for all the 14th amendment and corporation stuff. They are not agents of the federal government. A lot of the public policy problems we have in this country is by trying to use federal funding to bully States into being agents of the federal government. But they're definitely not agents of the federal government the way Donald Trump talks about it. And if Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Bill Clinton had talked in that kind of language, a lot of the people who are like nodding along or keeping their mouth shut about Trump when he says it would be talking about secession, talking about, you know, the, the 10th or movement and all this kind of stuff and shame on all of them. But anyway, the, you know, big chunks of the left was like, Hey, you know, like when those conservatives would say this or that is a bulwark against tyranny, I always thought they were kind of silly. And now all of a sudden they're saying, well, you know, that second amendment stuff, that kind of makes some sense. You know, that whole thing about state's rights and like, you can't just act, you know, you just can't go over the heads of governors and impose your will and that makes some sense too. And, you know, and that's the thing about elections, Trump talking about nationalizing the election or Republicans taking over elections in like 15 different places. I just like, he talks about Republicans, like, first of all, that they are his to command. And that second of all, that quote unquote, Republicans are commandable by the president of the United States. Like that somehow they're like the, I don't know, the American protective league or the Iranian Republican guard that he can just say, go in there and do this stuff. Republicans can't just do these things. I used to make this point all the time, you know, when Trump tried to steal the election and all of these crazies were saying all this stuff about forged ballots. And, you know, my favorite was still Roger Stone saying that he has it on good authority that the North Koreans have unloaded counterfeit ballots in Maine, that they ship them by boat to Maine and then loaded them onto trucks and they were distributed in polling stations all along the Eastern seaboard. First of all, look at a map and look at the route that these North Korean ships would need to take to get to Maine. It's quite a schlup. The thing is even the more superficially plausible stolen election BS, it overlooks the fact that like, if you live in any sort of halfway dense metropolitan area, let me imagine, even a lot of rural places, the ballot at your precinct is going to look different than the ballots just across the street or like across the County line, you know, um, because you have in our elections, because they're run by States, you have, you know, the guy running for dog catcher in this county is going to be on the same ballot as Donald Trump and Joe Biden or whatever, but five minutes down the road, it's a different county or a different borough or a different jurisdiction. Um, and you're going to have a different guy running for dog catcher on the same ballot. And the idea that someone could forge all of these ballots and get all of the down ballot races right you know including like you know some candidate who died at the last minute before printing like getting all of that stuff right it's just preposterous and that's what you want you want it like i have really come to the belief that basically everything in life can be understood as some kind of portfolio management and i i don't mean that in a way to trigger a certain kind of um sort of neo-marxist critique about how capitalistic values have saturated into every nook and cranny of american life i just mean that if you have a diverse portfolio of commitments and of institutions they tend to balance each other they're a hedge against problems right and having a country where you don't put all your eggs in one basket or on one ballot for an election is just a fantastic hedge against massive anti-democratic fraud because it just becomes too complex to steal and i'm glad that a bunch of people on the left are recognizing that and i am ashamed of people like mike johnson for refusing to acknowledge that. Sorry, but that dude is really starting to piss me off in ways that, because he's just so frigging unctuous. He tries to make people feel stupid for raising obvious objections to his cowardice. That dude is in many ways undermining democracy more than Trump because people can price in Trump's BS. But when they hear people like Johnson ratifying it, it not only makes people think, some people think, oh, maybe there's some truth here, But it also sends the signal that, well, if the speaker of the house is going to be this craven and cowardly, um, and cave to pressure from Trump, then who am I not to cave to the same pressure? Washington post. Let's, first of all, I'll make a recommendation. I was expecting to be a little more annoyed by the commentary podcast discussion of the Washington Post. But I gotta say, I for the most part agreed with almost all of it. And so if you're looking for a longer discussion of all of it, I recommend it. This is the one that came out I don't know, your Wednesday or Thursday. I was just listening to the car on the way back from AEI. But here's my sort of basic take. Particularly with regard to the way it's being discussed on social media. I basically object to everybody who is absolutely 100 confident and passionate in their take on all of this i agree with a bunch of my friends on the right about how entitled and sanctimonious a lot of journalists have been and how you know how dare bezos spend his money on his business the way he wants to doesn't he you know understand what he owes everybody and blah blah blah but i i find all that stuff it leaves me cold the journalists who ran i don't want to i don't want to blame the victims here to a certain extent but the washington post has been making a lot of mistakes for a really long time and what we're seeing here is basically bezos and the current leadership of the post trying to fix the problem by changing their audience. That's going to be really hard. I am not convinced it's going to fail. A lot of people are, but at the same time, like, I think it's, it's sad when a major journalistic institution dies or is severely wounded, um, and looks like it might die. And so the reveling in people losing their jobs, the reveling in, you know, the cry more lib stuff leaves me cold. But so does the preening that we're getting from a bunch of elite journalists in Washington and New York. And I think part of the problem, I'd say part of the problem with the Washington post is they got really hooked and forget their democracy dies in darkness phase from the first Trump administration. Going back to Wartigate, the, the Washington post took itself incredibly seriously. I have no problem with journalists taking themselves seriously and newsgatherers and editors taking the job seriously. You know, my own view is take your ideas and your beliefs seriously, but you don't have to take yourself too seriously. But the post got into this frame of mind that they were just about serious, nationally relevant journalism. And they were able to do that for a long time because as I was just talking to somebody about this today, um, who used to work at the post. The Post was a monopoly in the Washington region, which is like one of the richest regions in the country. They were vicious towards anybody trying to start a competitive newspaper. Once the Washington Star died, they really made it difficult to get home delivery for competing newspapers. They had a monopoly. That's why Warren Buffett invested in it. It was a monopoly. It threw off a lot of cash. It was hugely profitable. over time. I think the mistake the Washington post made, or a lot of people at the Washington post, the culture, I mean, there were individual, like Marty Baron, there were a bunch of people who were smart editors and journalists and who kind of understood what a newspaper was for. But over time, the sort of zeitgeist, the collective understanding of itself, the culture of the post got more and more into this thing that, you know, we don't really need to cover local politics and we don't need to be doing the crime stuff. Cause that's kind of embarrassing, ideologically for us and you know we don't even need to do the really sort of nitty-gritty k street kind of stuff um we're very important i mean you've heard of woodward and bernstein right and what they missed was that they could sustain that for a long time first of all because they were monopoly and then during the trump era because of this brief window where they could basically monetize Jen Rubin fans, people who just wanted relentless sort of resistance journalism. And I want to be fair. Some of that journalism was, was good and perfectly defensible. But in the meantime, it became, especially the op-ed page, it became incredibly woke and, and lefty and, um, and sanctimonious. And, but because it was able to monetize the anti-Trump stuff. And before that, because it was a monopoly, it just, it kind of lost sight of the fact that it wasn't doing what the flagship newspaper for the nation's capital should be doing. There's so much commentary. And part of it, part of the reason why I care about this stuff is like, I grew up, my dad was in the newspaper business in one way or the other his entire life. And, um, and he lectured me about newspapers a lot. um and part of it is like so i see a lot of this commentary on social media and some of it on cable that people are like let's put it this way people are disparaging the new york times for things like wordle and wire cutter and the new york times cooking app which i use my wife uses um all three of those things are actually great products and people are like you know it's it's degrading to the calling that, you know, Wordle is paying for, you know, our Africa coverage or our Ukrainian coverage. I'm like, what is wrong with you people? What do you think Ann Landers and Snoopy and Garfield and Dilbert and movie listings and Parade Magazine and classified ads and the word jumble. What do you think those did in 1973 when the Watergate stories were coming out? Newspapers were always a buffet. They were never a single kind of dish. And there are a whole bunch of people who get really snooty about newspapers trying to provide things that people want enough to subscribe to them. I had zero problem. with the Washington put with the New York times running wordle. I know we talk about it internally. If we could come up with a game that was not, you know, immediately duplicable by somebody else that we could, and we could, you know, get the technology right. And I would be happy to have a crossword or, or something else. If it attracted more readers, you know, at, at national review for years, we had that weird anagram word finder thing on the back page. almost nobody liked it and you know we would do survey they would do surveys about it i never even understood how the stupid thing work um and uh but it was kind of like this brain teaser word thing so when they did a redesign i think it was before i got there that they did this redesign but they do this redesign and they get rid of it and justice scalia that's colin buckley and ed capano was then the publisher and anybody else in national review is like furious what do you do you got rid of that thing. That's why I subscribe. You know, people subscribe for different reasons. The host, you know, there are a whole bunch of people. I don't know how many it is, but there are a whole bunch of people who subscribe to a local newspaper because they want local news and, um, or good stuff about local sports. The post decided that it really didn't care about doing good local news coverage. And it got really political with its sports coach. At least that's what people tell me. I, you know, I, I am not a big sports guy. And then, you know, I think the great profound malpractice was they let Politico deal their thunder on like nitty gritty political coverage. I was like, what's the point of this thing? It can't all be like grand epics about, you know, big thumb sucky things. you got to give people a reason to subscribe to your newspaper and you can't expect you know a billionaire to just subsidize massive losses on a product that people don't want to read and so i have a certain amount of sympathy for what bezos is allegedly trying to do here but i also you know frankly i have a lot of sympathy for the idea that wanting the post to simply be profitable. I wouldn't begrudge a billionaire who bought the post and said, you know, this is just a cool thing to do for my country and yada, yada, yada. But like, that's a choice. And, um, if the post is going to be saved, it's not going to be saved by somebody who wants to run it as a nonprofit. It's going to be saved by somebody who wants to make it relevant. And the fact that the New York times is doing so well and look, the New York times is a great newspaper i got my differences with it i come from a family that considers complaining about the new york times to be a birthright it's a really good well-run business of a newspaper there's no reason why the washington post can't be one but it can't be one if it's dependent on the audience it had and so it's trying to change its audience you know one of the things i think that is under discussed here um is that the the news guild you know the the union, the rules made it that it was sort of impossible just to fire the bad foreign correspondents or the bad sports writers. They had to sort of fire them as a group. And so it'll be interesting to see who gets hired back as a contractor. I don't, again, I was talking to somebody who knows the post much better than I do, who was, uh, who was bouncing some of these ideas off We were bouncing these ideas off of each other Um But I suspect that kind of the case All right Enough of that Oh so one of the things that Steve told me while I try to think about what actually to talk about is I didn know this but I suspected it but Steve didn even suspect it. He was just stunned by it. We had this internal report. I haven't seen it yet about our podcast stuff and audio visual and strategic plan and yada, yada, yada. and sort of big review and then perspective going forward. And one of the things Steve learned from reading it in his CEO capacity is that the Solo Ruminant podcast outperforms the regular conversation podcasts episodes of The Remnant. Steve was just blown away by this. And I was not particularly surprised by it. I kind of suspected it because I hear from a lot of people who say, you know, I, I tune in sometimes for the conversation ones. It kind of depends who it is, or I'll listen for a few minutes and decide if I want to listen, but, um, I've made the ruminant part of my Saturday morning ritual. And I think that is part of it. It's a Saturday morning thing or a weekend thing. As much as it is, you know, people really want to hear me blather on solo. Steve thought it was ridiculous for me to want to do this. Um, when I first proposed it, but he was like, Hey, you know, you're a co-founder, your chief want to do this it's your time who cares you know and maybe some people like it but you know he was like he was extrapolating from his own experience of like not needing to hear me talk more and which i totally understand my wife thought it was a bad idea and she still thinks it reflects poorly on me as a human being but you know my problem was is i spend a lot of the time with the remnant with the normal episodes trying to elicit what somebody else thinks and over and over the course of the week there are things i want to get off my chest that i can't write about because we don't have a group blog another brilliant idea of mine that we should implement and so this was an opportunity to sort of do that and i should be more disciplined about it and i should have better notes come you know friday mornings when i normally do it but i'm kind of pleased that that that i was once again proven right and steve was proven wrong yes i don't think i'll be coming back here after we come back from the vet i think i've gone long enough and if i don't end up writing uh g final tomorrow i apologize we'll see how it goes i i have a glop i have to do that's on the books and all these other kind of things i do have this idea in my head from coming from a thousand different directions i wrote my la times column this week about the todd blanche and the newspeg for it was todd blanche's he's the deputy attorney he's number two guy at the justice department and he was asked by stephanopoulos on the on abc's show about the wall street journal story about an unprecedented you know example of potential corruption or at least conflict of interest because this this the spy shake from uae bought a 49 share in world liberty financial which is the trump family crypto currency grift our own alex demas has written some good stuff on this if you want the background or we can put it in the show notes also andy mccarthy has written a bunch but just it's it's really unseemly unseemly what they're doing but this was like next level the story and so this shaky buys this half billion dollar share of this company propping it up to make it you know it wasn't just putting the money in is that by putting the money in the value of these coins went crazy went way up because it was actually backed up by real cash so the amount of value that trump got out of it was even bigger than just the investment and then what looks like a quid pro quo i said looks like appears right it's not proven yet uae got uh clearance to purchase these very national security sensitive uh ai chips so here's the thing again i'm saying allegedly looks corrupt it looks like quid pro quo and all that kind of thing two points about this one is that's not the first one has nothing to do with the column. If you're still listening to this podcast and you're still inclined to take offense at the suggestion that Donald Trump would ever do something so corrupt, I got nothing for you. First of all, why do any politicians get your benefit of the doubt, right? Isn't that the whole point is to be skeptical towards government and towards politicians, particularly for journalists? but think about him personally it is just so obvious like my my de facto position is if he um doesn't do something bad it's not because his conscience or his principles prevented it it's because uh he didn't think he could get away with it if he thought he can get pam bondy or christy noem on the supreme court he would try to get them on the supreme court has nothing to do qualifications principles ethics good government none of those things are primary considerations for him. It's just, you know, what he can get away with. And so he can get away with this kind of behavior. And I, I presume without knowing it's corrupt. It certainly looks corrupt. He's the first president in my lifetime who has not put all of his business dealings in a blind trust. He promised to do it his first time. Second time, he just says, screw you. I'm not going to do it. It worked out fine the last time he is making a lot of money off of the presidency. So was his family so are his cronies but anyway the point is it doesn't really matter getting back to the column it doesn't really matter what i believe is going on what matters politically is so stephanopoulos asks the deputy attorney general about this and he's in quotes from the wall street journal which said that this this appears to be an unprecedented conflict of interest blah blah blah and blanche goes on this terror where he just says it out loud he says oh i think it's so I think it's so funny when these papers and these newspapers, they talk about something being unprecedented. In fact, the last administration, the Biden administration did the exact same thing. And he goes on about how, you know, they did it, but you know, the difference between the Trump administration and the Biden administration is that the Trump administration is transparent. He tells you what they're doing. They do it out in the open. Meanwhile, you don't have to wait three years to read it, find out about it on some laptop. You know, after the fact with the Biden administration, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There is a point there. It's not quite the point that Blanche thinks it is. Because part of the point is Trump, J.D. Vance. I don't know about Todd Blanche because I think he was sort of a Democratic, you know, private sector lawyer back then. But Mike Johnson, Comer, all the guys in the House, most of the guys in the Senate, virtually every Fox News opinion host. was calling Biden's business dealings corrupt, was saying that this was the Biden crime family, that saying this was absolutely appalling and worthy of impeachment for a lot of people and just unbelievably corrupt. And on some aspects of this, I think they were entirely correct that it was corrupt. Another aspect, they kind of played fast and loose with the timeline, talking about stuff Biden did. When he was on his way out as a lame duck vice president, it made it sound like he was doing it as president, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like, it's definitely true that Hunter Biden did really corrupt things. So did Joe Biden's brother. They both traded on Biden's name. How much of it was illegal versus just unethical and gross? I'll let others sort out. But the point is all of the entire Trump entertainment complex was insisting that what Biden was doing was unprecedented criminal activity, outrageous criminal corruption, and should be condemned. And here's the number two guy at the Justice Department saying, well, what's the big deal? Trump is just doing the same thing that Biden did, which gets you to this thing about like hypocrisy. That is just, it drives me crazy in the way people use hypocrisy as if, if the other side, quote unquote, other side is hypocritical for complaining about something. That means the complaint has no merit. And it's just not how logic works. It's certainly not how morality works. um and yet this is so much of our political discourse is since they have no right to judge because they did a bad thing and now they're pointing out that we're doing a bad thing we should be allowed to do a bad thing too i'm sorry it's just not like you're supposed to learn as a child that that's not how morality works that's not how ethics work that just because everyone else is doing it doesn't mean it's okay for you to do it and just because everyone else are hypocrites for complaining about you doing it doesn't mean the merits of what they're saying is wrong and so i wrote that la times come about this point it drives me crazy anyway this whole point about hypocrisy thing which i think about a lot right this is like this is the main intellectual reason or political intellectual reason i i feel like i take crazy pills in so far as i think the things that I criticized Democrats for liberals, for progressives, for whatever. I think it is more incumbent upon me to criticize conservatives or Republicans or right wingers when they do the same thing. I believe in this sort of like, you can't criticize others if you're going to turn a blind eye to your own team's alleged team. It's not really my team anymore, if you know what I mean. But, and the selective approach to this of using principles and ideological commitments and even good manners. I talk about this a little bit on the dispatch podcast as weapons against your enemies, but as completely irrelevant to your own actions is just a form of politics that I despise. and I don't know why I am wired this way I don't think I'm alone but I just I'm I am shocked by the number of people who aren't wired this way that it makes me feel like I'm a weirdo for it you know so like as I spent all that time earlier talking about you know complexities of subsidy and how um the big guys shouldn't be able to freeze out the little guys and the only way that monopoly works is if the government protects it you know i think those arguments are really really important to make against the left because the left gets that stuff wrong but when the right starts getting that stuff wrong i think it's even more important to make that point because i don't want two parties that that are wrong about the same things just with like different jerseys and and different sets of people that they claim are victims um or protected groups or whatever i don't like that stuff at like the meta level and i know i keep returning to it because it's the thing that just i can't get past i don't know what to write about in terms of or talk about in terms of politics i get it there's always going to be a little of that in politics but if if it just becomes you know you know free speech for me but not for thee if it becomes decency and good manners and basic respect for me and my tribe but not for you and your tribe freaking jd vance right jd vance has was asked if he was going to apologize for um retweeting or boosting steven miller's claim that Alex pretty was a, um, a domestic terrorist bent on assassinating federal officials. Vance says, apologize for what, why should I apologize? And then goes on to say, Hey, look, you know, we shouldn't prejudge the investigation. Like what the hell is wrong with this guy? If you think you shouldn't apologize for leaping to the conclusion that this guy was an assassin bent on, and a domestic terrorist bent on murdering federal officials, but you're going to lecture Democrats for leaping to a conclusion about this and prejudging the investigation, an investigation that this administration tried really hard not to have at all? If your standards and your principles and your rules are not binding on you and only binding on your political opponents or your enemies, then they're not standards or principles or rules. They're just weapons nearest to hand. The rabbit hole that kind of went down, and I've been thinking about it a lot, is it kind of feels to me, and I think I'm right about this. I did some poking around about it, but it feels to me that hypocrisy is a... I think everybody dislikes hypocrisy. It's just sort of on a personal interpersonal level that bothers people. But I think there's something almost uniquely American by our, about our obsession with hypocrisy. And I've been writing about hypocrisy for a long, long time. I remember, I remember Howard Dean saying in 2004 that his principal mission in politics was to root out hypocrisy wherever he found it. And, you know, some of this gets into a lot of romanticism stuff about how, you know, we live in an era with this cult of authenticity. And so therefore hypocrisy is a kind of secular sin. You know, it used to be the hypocrisy was like preaching about godly, you know, divine religious precepts and falling short of them or not practicing them yourself. and now for a certain part of the secular part of the culture hypocrisy is um about not staying true to your authentic inward facing self like that you have to be true to who you are and doesn't matter if you're fit external notions of good or bad it matters or not about whether you are out of alignment with your own personal values and instincts and all of that kind of stuff so that's one part of hypocrisy I've been talking about a lot, but it occurs to me that it's like, there's something else going on. If you go, I've been on this Alexis de Tocqueville kick now for some other stuff. Um, and he gets into some of this, he doesn't talk about hypocrisy per se, but he kind of makes this American exceptionalism point that, you know, in Europe, aristocracy and rank, social rank could absorb all sorts of social, all sorts of moral failure. like, you know, Kings, you know, you'd say, well, you know, the King has a loose decadent sex life or whatever. He said, well, he's the King. He has every right to do what he wants, right? You know, he behaves the way he behaves because he's the King. It's Melbrook said, it's good to be the King. And, you know, the Marquis de Sade, you know, whatever, you can go through a lot of these kinds of things about how, you know, rank has its privileges and you can, you don't have to behave the same way that you expect the little people to behave. And, you know, the Tocqueville talks about how like, you know, the commoners, if they had a feud or duel, they could fight with sticks, but high ranking aristocrats and nobles had to fight with lances and swords because, you know, the little people don't have honor. And he didn't mean, he says it explicitly, it doesn't mean that the low ranking people, The commoners are contemptible, bad people, but they're not bound by codes of honor the way that the aristocrats are, the nobles are. In America, we got rid of titles of nobility and notions of aristocracy and all that kind of thing. And so, you know, elite hypocrisy that you follow one set of rules that you expect the little people to follow lands very differently. because there aren't supposed to be in a society based on egalitarian principles and this idea that we're all subject to the same rights, you know, the same rules have the same rights and also the same obligations. Hypocrisy seems like a bit of a violation of the American creed, sort of what this whole country was about. And I think I've been looking for stuff that's good on this, that articulates this, and I haven't really found it yet. But I think there's something there and it's worth thinking about. anyway now i do have to get going um thank you for all the nice words of sport thank you for indulging me once again on this thing and hey if you can please subscribe to the dispatch it would be a great thing other than that i'll talk to you next time Bye.