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- [00:00]
Steve Hayes
The Dispatch Podcast is presented by Pacific Legal foundation, suing the government since 1973. Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Steve Hayes, joined today by my Dispatch co founder Jonah Goldberg and Dispatch contributors New York Times opinion columnist David French and Washington Post columnist Megan McCardell. On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss Stephen Colbert's pulled interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, the FCC's equal time rules and the Fairness Doctrine, and then the continuing military escalation with Iran and the likelihood of US Strikes, and finally, not worth your time returning to the moon. Before we get to today's conversation, please consider becoming a member of the Dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up@thedispatch.com join and if you use the promo code Roundtable, you'll get a month free. And if ads aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, two free gift memberships to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders, and more. All right, let's dive in.
- [01:13]
Podcast Advertiser/Host
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- [01:41]
Megan McArdle
The IRS said I filed my return, but I haven't.
- [01:44]
Jonah Goldberg
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- [01:47]
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- [01:48]
Megan McArdle
My refund though. I'm free. Freaking out.
- [01:50]
Jonah Goldberg
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- [01:56]
Megan McArdle
I'm so relieved. No problem. I'll be with you every step of the way.
- [02:00]
Jonah Goldberg
One in four was a fraud paying American. Not anymore. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply.
- [02:25]
Steve Hayes
Hello everybody. I want to start with a new decision that has sparked some controversy over the government's rules around talk shows and quote, unquote equal time. Last month the FCC provided new guidance to broadcast networks on the political content of talk shows and rules that require political equal time. And at the heart of the change is a claim by the administration that broadcast talk shows like the View and the Late show and others lean heavily to the left and as such amount to an unfair advantage for Democrats and their friends. So these shows have been covered for a long time, decades by an exemption for so called bonafide news shows. But the Trump administration has decided to change the way it applies this rule. And this is a quote from the new FCC announcement. The FCC has not been presented with any evidence that the interview portion of any late night or daytime television talk show program on air presently would qualify for the bona fide news exemption. This issue sort of burst onto the public notice this week with a controversy over Stephen Colbert in an interview that he was conducting with James Tallarico, who is a primary candidate for, for the Senate among Democrats in Texas. David, I'll start with you. You have a lot of background in these issues. What are we to make of this rule change and what are its implications for both, I'd say broadcast networks and the way that we have political discussions more broadly?
- [04:06]
David French
Yeah, well, you know, one thing we first want to say is that this is the very fact we're talking about this as a result of kind of a dinosaur legal regime that is rooted in the idea that the government owns the airwaves. So, you know, when broadcast, whether it's radio or television first started, you know, the government stepped in, essentially took control over the airwaves, now owns them. And so, you know, if you're cbs, abc, NBC, I don't know how many of your viewers are still getting your television on broadcast as opposed to streaming on YouTube or cable TV or satellite. But if you are getting it on broadcast, you're subject to these regulations. And one of the legacies is this idea of equal time. It's often misunderstood. It is not the same. It does not mean if I'm on Colbert, then Colbert has to have me on for the exact same amount of time. It can even mean something like equal time on a different say program that has an equivalent kind of audience. And there's a procedure for it. So it's not exactly the way it's often portrayed. But also there's been exceptions and carve outs and one of those exceptions and carve outs has been some of these talk shows. For example, when you're talking about say newsmakers or you know, so it's a, it's a rather elaborate and intricate and it really hasn't been used, enforced, you know, really strictly in recent years. And so what we're dealing with is a dinosaur regulation that's rather complicated that generally isn't enforced. Now suddenly into the middle of all of this and it's into the middle of all of this because it is actually, although there are still some disputes about what exactly happened there. What's absolutely the case is that this administration has been using the levers of power to try to suppress dissenting speech since virtually day one, when it began to volley out its threats against law firms and universities, et cetera. So we're in an atmosphere right now where the Trump administration, on one hand, is wagging its finger about free speech at Europe and then on the other hand, coming around and implementing very European style kinds of speech regulations and speech abuses here into the United States. It's. I don't think it's a stretch at all to say this is absolutely the most hostile 2 Free speech administration in my lifetime.
- [06:31]
Steve Hayes
Megan, is that right? Do you agree with. With that assessment?
- [06:34]
Megan McArdle
Yeah, I think so. Look, I think the irony of this is that this rule. People are talking about this interview as if this rule is hurting James Talarico against conservative candidates. In fact, it's a Democratic primary that is at issue here. And so I don't think that the Trump administration particularly cares about disfavoring Talarico relative to Jasmine Crockett. In fact, they might prefer that Crockett win. She's probably easier to beat in the general. But I think more broadly, this is just. I'm gonna put on my libertarian hat. This is why you restrict government power, because eventually it's gonna be abused. And people who think that they will be in charge of abusing it, as the left often has been with things like Title IX regulations, which have been used against conservatives with. I mean, there are a var. Really quite disturbing government intrusions on free speech and academic freedom over the last 10, 15 years. That doesn't excuse what Trump is doing. I mean, the flagrant hypocrisy of conservatives who complained totally fairly about what Democrats were doing and are now making excuses for the Trump administration's absolutely outrageous disrespect for the rule of law, violation of civic norms, and abuse of power. It is both risible and sad and a dark day for America. But ultimately, you know, the best safeguard against this is not expressing our outrage at norm violations. It is curbing the powers that can be abused by the government. This rule should have been repealed decades ago if it ever made sense. I am sort of dubious. It certainly doesn't make sense in an era where it's not just that, you know, we now have cable and the Internet and so forth. It's also that if you think about the world that this was crafted for, it was crafted for A world where there were no party primaries. You know, in some of these primaries you can have 12 candidates. It was crafted for a two party state in which equal time was a pretty narrow criteria. And that's not true now. But I'd also say this is not the first time these powers have been abused. The Kennedy administration used them to go after right wing talk radio in the 60s.
- [08:57]
David French
Right.
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Megan McArdle
These were always bad roles. They were always prone to abuse, Abuse. And we should never have had them in the first place. We should certainly get rid of them now.
- [09:05]
Steve Hayes
I will once again recommend a book by Paul Matzko and Jonah's interview of Paul Matzko, who's a scholar at the Cato Institute and wrote a book called the Radio Right, which goes into great detail about the Kennedy administration's abuse, among others, of these kinds of government regulations on what we can say and do and broadcast. And in that case, in the radio. Jonah, if you look back, I mean, this, this controversy stems from a law from 1934. It only applies to the broadcast networks, or maybe the broadcast networks and radio, but not. Certainly doesn't apply to cable, doesn't apply to the way, as David points out, that most of us get our information now. Why are we even having information? This argument.
- [09:54]
Jonah Goldberg
Well, I should just. As a matter of full disclosure, you know how Donald Trump talks about how nobody understands nuclear more than he does because his uncle was a physicist at mit. My uncle was the lawyer, the top lawyer at CBS news for like 20 years doing equal time stuff. So really the rest of this podcast should just be like a data dump.
- [10:16]
Steve Hayes
Jonah, you just talk. David.
- [10:18]
Megan McArdle
I'm here for it. Jonah.
- [10:21]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, look, I mean, I don't have a lot to add to what's already been said, except that, you know, it's interesting, I was listening to Chuck Todd talk about this a little bit, who had to deal with these issues when he was at NBC. And even if you credit everybody's version of events, this would have been an issue, you know, basically for affiliates in Texas. It would not have been a big giant thing. This is just simply a confluence of events where I have a more cynical interpretation of things. I think Colbert kind of wanted to help Talarico. Yeah, Colbert really wanted to stick it to his bosses who have already fired him.
- [10:59]
David French
Right, right.
- [11:00]
Steve Hayes
The show is canceled.
- [11:01]
Jonah Goldberg
Right. And so this worked out great. You know, the Streisand effect thing worked out great for Tyler Rico. He had more views on the YouTube Broadcast of Broadcast is the Wrong Word, the YouTube playing of the interview than the show on CBS got Which just underlines why it's so stupid. We still have this law, right? This law is about owning airwaves and we don't do airwaves in the same way. In fact, this law comes into being before television, nevermind primaries. I know technically the invention existed, but it had not penetrated the market very far outside of the lab. And so I don't necessarily trust Stephen Colbert's version of events. I don't necessarily trust CBS's. I really don't trust Brendan Carr who like literally said on, I think was a Fox interview that this was all a wild overreaction by CBS and he had we had not threatened them. And then in the same interview and then says, but yes, you're damn right I would have ordered the code Red and we would have gone after them. And we're like, you know, you're bad, strong, manning. And so the only thing I'd add is just put a finer point on, is we talk on here a lot and in our private lives and when we're muttering on the way to the grocery store about how norm violations beget more norm violations, right? That one side sees the norm violation of the other side, exaggerates how bad it is and then feels justified by its exaggerated understanding of it to form a precedent to go even further in violating the norm the other way. And so we have more than enough evidence that Trump and the Republican FCC were willing, you know, we've had stuff from Brennan Carr before about a nice network there. Be a shame if something happened to threats six months ago or eight months ago. If you don't think there's gonna be pressure from Democrats in the next Democratic administration to go hammer and tongs at right wing talk radio with the equal time provision, make Hannity get AOC on there every day or whatever it is. I mean, it is going to be, it is an embarrassingly stupid, short sighted, hypocritical thing that we're in. But I just don't necessarily think that Colbert is the most honest broker in all this. And you can tell that Jasmine Crockett, to back up. I saw an interview with Jasmine Crockett yesterday. She's pissed because this has been so good for Talarico. So like if the point was muzzling speech, it utterly failed. If the point was currying favor for a proposed merger, maybe it was a huge success. Because that's what Trump is taking from this is these institutions are bending to his will. Right? That's how he reads it.
- [13:38]
Megan McArdle
I would just like to say, Jonah, I'm a little Disturbed that you have been eavesdropping on my muttering to myself as I go to the grocery store. And I would really appreciate you taking whatever spy devices you were using for that. It's a gross invasion of my privacy. Almost Trumpian, one might say.
- [13:57]
Steve Hayes
Megan, you could just record it and call it a podcast, like Jonah does every weekend.
- [14:02]
Jonah Goldberg
I gotta say, when I thought when you, when were heading to the Trader Joe's the other way and you're talking about how Maynard Keynes had just gotten, you know, the money supply thing wrong, I thought it was really interesting. I didn't mind listening to it. But anyway, we don't need that.
- [14:13]
Steve Hayes
See, that's, that's my point. Jonah would just do it as a podcast.
- [14:17]
David French
So what?
- [14:18]
Steve Hayes
Let's look at the CBS Stephen Colbert thing a little bit more closely. Colbert came out and said, in effect, look, CBS lawyers came to me, they prohibited me. Was the way that he presented this publicly from doing this interview with Talarico on the show. He had to put it on YouTube of Jonah's. Right. The Streisand effect, which is when somebody's basically trying to bury something and then it becomes a bigger deal because they're trying to bury something. It gets more attention. Talario's gotten huge fundraising numbers. He. This video has had huge views. He's gotten a ton of attention that he wouldn't have otherwise gotten. CBS pushed back on what Colbert said and claimed in a statement that they merely sent a letter saying, hey, we've got to be mindful of these equal time provisions because there's this new FCC guideline published last month, and they seem to be sincere in doing this. Go back to you, David. Is Jonah right that Republicans can expect backlash on this? I mean, Ronald Reagan killed the fairness doctrine in 1987.
- [15:21]
David French
Yeah.
- [15:21]
Steve Hayes
And there has been periodically talk of reviving the Fairness Doctrine and the Fairness Doctrine. David, I'll let you. Because you know undoubtedly a lot more about it than I do. The Fairness Doctrine applies. Applies to topics, whereas the equal time rules apply to candidates. Candidates, as I understand it. But why wouldn't the Democrats, if they take Congress in 2026 or 2026 and 28, and they have the White House, why wouldn't they seek to reimpose the Fairness Doctrine and regulate what Republicans and conservatives can say in other arenas?
- [15:54]
David French
Well, you're raising, I think, what is going to be the key question going forward after the Trump era, which is, is Trump sort of the harbinger of the new style of American politics that's going to last indefinitely or Is he a turning point where we've looked and stared at the bottom of the abyss and said no more of this and we kind of have this return to normalcy. And so I think that's a very open question right now which way the Democrats would go. Are they going to tack more towards return to normalcy or are they going to lean into vengeance? And I would say the worse things get now, the more punitive the Trump administration is now. I would argue it's more likely that you're going to see that return because of the anger, the injustice, all of this that builds. But, you know, we're in a dark place right now because that is the crossroads. And there are people who are going to say, David, I have total confidence that what the American people are going to want is actually that return to normalcy, that that's gonna be the next turn of this, that I have real confidence in the American people. This is the way it's gonna go. I hope you're right. I really do. I really do. I'm not so sure. I'm not so sure that that's where we're gonna be, especially as you think it's gonna unfold for three more years. So, Megan, is 1 million percent right? The way to deal with this is not to have every four years a will they or won't they question that we ask about? Will they be authoritarian?
- [17:28]
Megan McArdle
They.
- [17:28]
David French
The way to deal with this is to change the law, get rid of this. It is a dinosaur provision. As I said, it is outdated, it is old. The only possible real uses for it now are malign uses like we're seeing. So as I think about this time, I've kind of got one eye on, kind of hanging on by our fingernails in the present moment. And I have another eye on what are the structural reforms we can make to make sure that this does not happen again, that this is not a tool in the toolbox.
- [17:59]
Steve Hayes
And it seems to me, Megan, that you would have to go beyond these equal time rules and the fcc. Last week, the Federal Trade Commission sent a letter to Tim Cook, the chief executive at Apple, warning that Apple was in violation potentially of consumer protection laws by not recommending enough conservative news articles from conservative news sites in Apple news. This was based on a study that the Media Research center had done that found that Apple had overwhelmingly been making recommendations to center or center left sites and according to the Media Research center, excluding conservative sites from consideration. So how do you do this in a way that is broad enough to actually contain these impulses or is it just the case that if people want to stifle speech, they're going to find a way to stifle speech.
- [18:55]
Megan McArdle
I mean, the fewer levers you give government, the less stifling you'll get. And I think that the left has, in fact, often loved the idea of government doing stuff like this as long as it was for stuff that they liked. And there was an implicit assumption in a lot of the dialogue about this when conservatives would complain about, for example, some of the shenanigans that were happening with social media. Right, the left liked the idea of doing this because the left just implicitly assumed, well, bureaucracies. Lean left. Conservatives don't like these agencies. They never fully, you know, conservative administrations come in and they just never fully wrap their arms around the bureaucracy of a lot of these departments because they do lean left. And it takes you six months to figure out where the, all the bathrooms are and, like, how the filing system works. And by the time you leave, the bureaucracy is going to outlast you. And courts lean left. The American Bar association leans left. And so their assumption was like, oh, well, what's going to happen is we will create these powers. We will be able to use them in soft ways to promote goals we like because it's going to be our people in charge. And libertarians have long said, like, no, you have to imagine not your favorite ideal. And this is another, I think, issue that on the left, when you debate government versus private, you know, enterprise and so forth, is that people will say, well, there's a market failure and they will look at a real market failure, and then they will conjure some imaginary ideal government that is going to administer their solution to the market failure rather than the actual government you have. But again, that's because they perceive these institutions as being fundamentally friendly to left wing predispositions. Now, the Trump administration is deftly illustrating the folly of that idea. You are not going to be in charge all the time. If you create these powers, someone else is going to pick up the stick and start whacking you with it. And this is not to excuse again, what the Trump administration is doing. It is to say, like, sorry to do when I told you so round, but I told you so. And now, having learned this lesson that these powers are dangerous, let's talk about rolling. Look, it's not like I think we need no government. I'm not even a minarchist, right? Real roles for government in various things. But every time you create a power, go, how could this be abused by my opponents? And Is it worth that risk? Sometimes it will be. Right. We need police. Even though, yes, people like politicians of all political stripes have abused the police from time immemorial. But think carefully, choose wisely, as they say in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and do not favor a maximalist approach that is going to create the maximalist possibility for repression.
- [21:50]
Steve Hayes
Jonah, take all of what Megan said. I mean, I think she's right in the descriptive way. What we hear from our Trump supporting friends is, yeah, that's the problem. What happens is when the left gets power, they use these institutions to gain more power and impose their will on the rest of us. And for too long, what Republicans have done in these areas and well beyond is win the presidency, assume leadership roles in these bureaucracies, and then not do anything, not actually change the rules, not use the rules to advance conservative interests. And that. That's the problem. What Megan is saying is a negative. What Megan suggests is basically surrender by the right. The right will make these, you know, philosophical arguments about less government, and the left will go in and use government to its advant. Aren't they right about that?
- [22:46]
Jonah Goldberg
So there's a soft case and a hard case or a small case and a large case behind all that. Because basically what you're doing is you're arguing for all the stuff that me and David have been yelling about for a long time about common good constitutionalism, about post liberalism, about the entire Chris Ruffo project is this idea of classical liberalism infused. Conservatism doesn't take politics seriously because it only cares about means and not about ends. I think that's wrong, but it's not entirely wrong. Right? I mean, there are reasonable arguments to be made about that kind of stuff, reasonable criticisms. I had a friend who was a high up guy in the first George W. Bush administration at the Department of Labor, and it was kind of cool. We were much younger back then. And I was like, he was the first friend I had who had a really high ranking job in the administration. And I was like, how's it going? And he says, oh, it's great. I was like, well, how do you measure great? What are your benchmarks for success? And he says, well, I'll tell you what, under Clinton, the Department of labor was issuing 100, and I'm making up the numbers, but directionally they're right. 150,000 new rules a month, and we got it down to 25,000amonth. And I'm like, really? That's success, Just going slower in the wrong direction. And so I think there's some truth at the margins for that kind of thing. Right. At the same time, the idea that conservatism is just about neutral rules and processes is just garbage. And it's also garbage. The idea that these rules and processes are neutral.
- [24:24]
Steve Hayes
Yeah.
- [24:25]
Jonah Goldberg
Like, there's an enormous amount of moral quality to this idea of having the government not picking sides. The idea that the government should be policing the ideological bias of niche programs in an age where, like the, you know, like in the 90s, Michael Kinsley used to joke about, you went to the. Went from the point of do you have a fax number? To what's your fax number? In like the course of six months in the change of things. Right? And then it was, do you have a blog to. What's your blog? Well, like, everyone's got a frigging podcast now. Everyone's got a, you know, like, it's just. It's absurd. And the idea in this riot.
- [25:02]
Megan McArdle
Stop subtweeting me, Jonah.
- [25:05]
Jonah Goldberg
This cacophony of communications out there that somehow the FCC has the ability to police the political bias of one tiny sliver at all is sort of ludicrous. And then finally there's, you know, and this is a particularly, you know, Megan McCardell adjacent point. And I've made it years now here with my sandwich board and cowbell. When Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman and these guys talked about how economic planning from a central government doesn't work, they didn't mean that it doesn't work when progressives do it. They meant that it doesn't work. And this idea that, oh, well, we're so much smarter, we're so much better at government with this clown show that's really hard to believe anyway, that we'll be able to micromanage the economy and get the results we want is preposterous. I mean, bring it up all the time, but like that Marco Rubio op ed from the Washington Post where he says he changed his mind about industrial planning, so now he's for industrial planning, but done right, you know, it's like that's the mindset that these guys is like, no one pointed out to Hayek. I know this is really interesting, this whole constitution of knowledge thing, but have you ever thought about doing industrial planning right? And, oh, now it makes sense. I'm completely wrong. It's nonsense. But anyway, as you know, I can rant on this.
- [26:31]
Megan McArdle
So this is like the, you know, Milton Friedman's. My favorite Milton Friedman line on this is he Wrote something about the FDA and how it was bad. And a chemist, I believe, wrote in and said, well, yeah, sure, you're right. It does all these things wrong, but we don't need to, like, get rid of it. We need to just make it work properly. And he writes back and he says, if you tell me that you want a cat who barks, I might not disagree that, like, that would be ideal, but it is not a possibility. And I think this is also true in a lot of cases of the government regulation. Sure, sure. It would be nice if you could do these things, maybe. Right. It would be nice if you could do industrial policy. Well. And I think we can also quibble about what industrial policy is, right? Like infrastructure, arguably, industrial policy. I'm okay with the government doing that
- [27:24]
Jonah Goldberg
to a certain extent. Laissez faire is an industrial policy. Right?
- [27:27]
Megan McArdle
I mean, like, yeah, but in general. Right, yeah. The idea that. While, of course, I am thrilled that our Secretary of State decided to take his thoughts to the Washington Post, I respectfully disagree that industrial policy writ large is going to work. I think there's narrow areas where, like, you know, defense and so forth. But conservatives, it's like they realize that the way around the bureaucracy is that they just ignored the rules and now they're like, but think of all the things we could do if we had all this power. It's like, no, don't, guys. Yeah, don't think about it. It's not. It's not going to end well.
- [28:07]
Jonah Goldberg
Don't put on the ring.
- [28:08]
Steve Hayes
Isn't the net effect of this jawboning basically to discourage these talk shows from even having these kind of political people on? I mean, that's going to be what happens. The rule, according to reporting in the Hollywood Reporter, is that networks will have to file a petition to determine whether they qualify for this bona fide news exemption anytime they want to interview a political candidate without meeting those requirements. And if they have to do that, who's going to do that? You're just not going to. You're just going to end up not having it. And look, I mean, I don't think that'll be a great loss, but it's certainly not a proper use of government power to discourage those kind of discussions.
- [28:47]
David French
Yeah, I mean, this is one part actual legal initiative, but like five parts bullying and intimidation. And so, you know, they'll. They'll find a way to bully or try to intimidate, even if they don't necessarily even have a legal lever. But the difference here is they have legal levers. That they don't have in other contexts and they're they're using it. But yeah, I mean, I don't think there's much question at all that these guys are trying to just set precedents where people don't want to cross them just because it's even if they can win, it's more trouble than it's worth.
- [29:19]
Steve Hayes
Right. All right. Time for a quick break. We'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. And welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. Well, we will be talking about this, I think, quite a bit in the coming weeks and months. I want to move now to our second topic, which is something we've talked about a few times here over the past several weeks, but seems to be taken on greater urgency, and that is the prospect of military action in Iran. The Wall Street Journal reported this morning, we're recording this Thursday morning that the United States has assembled the greatest collection of US air assets in the Gulf in more than 20 years lead up to the Iraq war. Sky News reports that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told Polish citizens in Iran they should leave immediately. Tusk said, quote, in a few hours there may be no more possibility to evacuate. So something that's been long discussed, President Trump has been making threats to attack Iran going back to late December. David, are we finally at the hour where this is likely to take place? The administration should be said is still saying even at this late moment that they would prefer some kind of deal. What exactly that deal would involve is still hard to determine. They're saying that. But it seems to me this kind of assembly of military assets in the region would be an awfully big bluff if. Yeah, or, or, or threat.
- [30:58]
David French
You know, there was a really good Axios report that ended with essentially that the window for diplomacy seems to be closing or the aperture, the opening is closing and the opening for military action is just expanding dramatically. It's like we're looking at sort of a version of a cocked pistol aimed at Iran right now. Look, I have profoundly mixed feelings about this because on the one hand, there are ample justifications for military strikes against Iran, whether it is the decades of active efforts to attack and kill Americans, American soldiers. They've been behind countless attacks on Americans, whether it's fomenting violence against or directly attacking our ally, Israel. From the hostage crisis forward, Iran has been acting as if it's in a state of war with the United States. And the idea that Iran could get a nuclear bomb should be unthinkable in American planning. So Is there a reason? And then, never mind the massacre that unfolded of innocent protesters in Iran. So there are reasons here why striking Iran with an intelligent plan, with achievable goals, with competent leadership would be in the American national interest right now. But notice what I said. Achievable goals, competent leadership, buy in from the public. I should have added. So this is risky. I mean, it could be, you have one of these aerial campaigns where no American planes are shot down like Libya, or it could get much more messy than that. Much more messy. And the American people have not been brought into this at all. I mean, it's unfolding often, mainly through Twitter rumors. Finally, you're starting to get more mainstream coverage of it. We have no public buy in, no real concept of what the real goals are here. And while I think the military, the actual tactical military leadership is excellent. In other words, will we perform the tasks that we're assigned competently? Yes, yes. Will we be competently assigned those tasks is the question that I have. And so that's why I have very, very mixed feelings. I, I think Iran richly deserves, if that's the right word or it's very much in our national interest, while Iran is on the back foot to permanently or is indefinitely crippled its nuclear program to save innocent protesters, if that's at all possible. But the execution really worries me, Jonah,
- [33:35]
Steve Hayes
if this happens, why would we be doing this? I mean, the President made his threats in response to the prospective massacre of Iranian citizens. And then we saw that with estimates of the death toll, I think credible estimates of the death toll, 30,000 people and up over the course of several days in early January. So that would seem to be in part a retaliatory strike based on the red line that the President drew. On the other hand, J.D. vance gave an interview to our old colleague Martha MacCallum on Fox News yesterday and said that our primary interest here is we don't want Iran to get a nuclear weapon. Isn't this the same administration that told us they had obliterated Iran's nuclear sites nuclear program just a few months ago?
- [34:21]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I actually think it still says that on the website of the White House. Look, I have boundless respect for Walter Russell Mead, but I don't always agree with him. But on his last column about all this, I actually agree with him a great deal. The reason why Trump is doing this is this is, as he puts it, this is Trump's sweet spot, right? The entire world gets to watch as he does his Hamlet act about will he or won't he what is he gonna do? Everyone has to kiss up to him. Everyone wants to call him to get their two cents in. He gets to show great power, which is not his power, it's the United States power. But he's the president. He gets to show that there's no one who can really stop him from doing whatever he wants. And this is also Trump's sweet spot. And this is less Mead's point than mine, insofar as he stumbled into this by accident. He got moved by a bunch of images and tweeted out something at 2 in the morning about the protesters and then backed it up. And so I think we've talked about this several times. I think the telling those people to continue protesting and take over the institutions and then saying help is on the way and then not showing up was really terrible. I think those initial tweets, I talked about Eli Lake about this for a while. That's part of the reason why you have an NSC process, so that if you make threats on social media from the Commander in Chief, there are assets in the region which well ready and able to back them up, and they weren't. And so basically, a lot of those people were essentially sacrificed to Trump's impetuousness. At the same time, like, if it ends up that we get, with all of David's caveats seconded by me, but if it turns out that we get something like plausible, actual competent regime change in Iran, people are going to forget those tweets or those true social posts are not going to go down in history as grave sins by Trump. It's going to be remembered that he actually followed through on his red line. You know, one of the things that Trump really loves to do militarily is provide the last 10% of force to get the lid off the ketchup bottle, right? Israel did a lot of the heavy lifting against Iran the first time. And then Trump comes in for the coup de grace. And in fairness, only America could have done the coup de grace with Operation Midnight Hammer and taking out those Iranian facilities. And the irony is that because of that program, because of the absolutely abysmal state of the Iranian economy, because of the protests, because Israel, with a little help from America, but mostly Israel, has taken out Hamas, Hezbollah and the Syrian regime. The Iran does not have a lot of cards to play. And so, like, Trump loves this, and he can go on for a long time being the center of attention while he just gets more and more assets in the region. And the mystery here, the black box, is what the hell The Iranian regime is thinking, because they're talking about, oh, we'll promise to delay the nuclear program for three years, which is like, like, who's going to buy Iran's promises on this stuff at this point? And why are you going to Trump with a weaker promise than the one you made with the Obama administration? So, you know, Vance, I think it's important to listen to Vance because when he says things that make it sound like we're going to go to war, that means we're probably going to go to war, because he can't get on the wrong side of that. And everything else that he says, I just think is spin about his presidential prospects where he doesn't want to be quoted saying he's in favor of regime change. He's making arguments about protecting America, vital national security, and that's it. And that's the only criminology that matters with Vance.
- [38:10]
Steve Hayes
Megan Jonas says if you listen to Vance, you know, there's good reason to believe that we're going to go to war. What does that even mean these days, that we're going to go to war? You remember in the lead up to the Iraq war in 2003, there was all sorts of discussion about the pottery Rule, the so called pottery rule rule, if you break it, you own it. And the implication was that there were certain moral obligations to help rebuild a country such as Iraq if the United States were to go in and try to remove Saddam Hussein. Nobody thinks that Donald Trump is contemplating that kind of a ground invasion or extended engagement. On the other hand, if there's an attempt at a decapitation strike, does the United States have some obligation to help rebuild Iran or to play a role in choosing the regime that would follow?
- [39:02]
Megan McArdle
I don't understand any of this. And now partly that's just because I am not a foreign policy expert. But look, I loathe. I am second to none in my disdain for Iran's regime and their activities in the region, as Jonah so slyly implied. I have a podcast at the Washington Post. It's a very good podcast. Thank you very much.
- [39:27]
Jonah Goldberg
Listen, everyone has a podcast. You fall into the subset of everyone.
- [39:32]
Megan McArdle
No, but I interviewed Jason Rezaian. He was our Tehran bureau chief. He was arrested and held by the regime for 544 days, in part as a weird combination of trying to stop the Obama administration's nuclear talks with Iran and then as a bargaining chip in those talks.
- [39:54]
Steve Hayes
I'll just interject that that was a great episode. Everybody should listen to it and we will put it in the show notes.
- [39:59]
Megan McArdle
Thank you. I mean, like, it was a great episode because Jason has a really compelling story, and I mostly just let him tell it.
- [40:04]
Steve Hayes
It's unbelievable. Yeah, his story was incredible.
- [40:06]
Megan McArdle
It's really. It's just an incredible story. So it is a loathsome regime, and it is also, obviously, fomenting lots of problems in the region. And, you know, you do a deal with them on one thing, like nuclear, and they just use that money to go build up Hamas and Hezbollah and so forth. It's. It's a really thorny problem. But I think, as we learned in Iraq, thorny problems often do not have easy solutions, which is why they're thorny. And if you think that you can just go in and, like, whack it hard and fix it that way, you know, like, I think with Iraq, we had this vision that this was gonna be like, World War II, and we would go in, and it would be, like, Germany and Japan, and we would occupy it, and then we would build them a beautiful democracy, and then we would leave them in better shape than we found them. And that was really not exactly how it turned out for those who were alive back then. And this is even less well planned. I don't understand how American interests are definitely better after this. I don't even understand what the end case is. I don't understand how they think they are going to, you know, like, yes, okay, you say you actually just decapitated the whole regime. What then? Like, there is going to be zero appetite for sending American troops in to stabilize the area. If you don't stabilize it, the whole country is going to fall apart into various ethnic stands and in a similar, although not identical way to what happened in Iraq. And that's probably not going to make the region more stable. Right. I just think, like, what is the end game? In what scenario are Americans better off because this happened? And in what scenario is even the Trump administration better off? I mean, sure, like, yes, if you, like, decapitated it. And rather than, like, the hydra head, two more bad regimes grow in its place, a good regime sprouts there instead. Great. But I am having trouble describing the path to that outcome.
- [42:08]
Steve Hayes
Yeah. We had Kareem Sajapur, an Iran expert, I think one of the country's leading Iran experts from the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, I think it is a couple weeks ago, and he said one of the problems with contemplating a decapitation strike is that the regime's roots go so deep into society. And while it's certainly not the case that the regime is popular at this point, unseating it with a decapitation strike aimed at the Supreme Leader will not succeed. There's far too much to get rid of in order to open that up. David, some people have suggested, and this appears to be driving at least some of the thinking of people around the president, that Venezuela is a model here.
- [42:46]
David French
Right.
- [42:47]
Steve Hayes
And that rather than regime change, the United States could seek what Neil Ferguson calls regime alteration, which would be, in effect, cut a deal with some, you know, leading Iranian regime official, take out the Supreme Leader and those closest to him and essentially allow the continuation of the Islamic Republic. But with a regime that at least purports to be more friendly to the United States, is that feasible? And if it's not, what are the potential pitfalls?
- [43:18]
David French
I mean, is it possible remotely? I mean, if you sort of squint a little bit, maybe One of the things that's puzzling me, and again, one of the reasons why it's so important to go to Congress to articulate war aims and to get public support for those war aims, it's very unclear to me what we're doing. Is it a situation where he's using the bombing campaign or a threatened bombing campaign for very simple, much more narrower purpose, a new nuclear deal, just a deal that he can sign, that he can say, not only did I destroy the program on the ground, I got them to consent to never try to revive it. Total victory on nuclear. That would be something that I would think is more attainable. But are we morphing into. We're going to use American military power to decapitate the regime a la Venezuela? That is where it is a monumental stretch. Just a monumental stretch. Because, you know, look, with Venezuela, absolutely you had deep ideological roots behind the Chavez regime morphing into Maduro and all of that. But we're talking about, as you talk about, deep roots. I mean, a theocracy that's existed for decades is still sustained by a ton of true believers. There's a lot of dissent. Absolutely. There's also a lot. There are a lot of true believers out there. And so is it as susceptible? I mean, we have decapitated Al Qaeda, we have decapitated isis, we have taken out Israel, has taken out the leaders of countless of its opponents. They're still there. They are a hydra. So the regime change possibility, if that's what we're trying to do, if that's what we're doing, that to me is a worst case scenario right now. Worst case that we're going to try Regime change from a distance.
- [45:17]
Megan McArdle
Yeah. I don't think there's a Delsey Rodriguez figure there. Right.
- [45:21]
Steve Hayes
That's the question. Right. Yeah.
- [45:23]
Megan McArdle
I just. Who is that? And it's really hard to see who that could be.
- [45:28]
Steve Hayes
We don't even necessarily know that Delsey Rodriguez is a viable partner at this point either. Right. I mean, the administration's telling us no.
- [45:35]
Megan McArdle
Right. I, I am not really lauding what happened in Venezuela, but if you take their case at face value, it's hard to see how you run that playbook in Iran. I would assume that our CIA and other intelligence people have been looking for that person for a long time. Like, have they found that person? I, I have my doubts and no,
- [45:57]
Steve Hayes
it's a very good question. If you think about, you know, the reporting from your Washington Post colleague Bob Woodward in the lead up to the Iraq war, we learned that the CIA had exactly, actually fewer than five senior human intelligence sources in Iraq before the Iraq war. I would hope that we have done better in our development of sources over there, but I would expect that we would probably have to lean pretty heavily on the Israelis. Yes.
- [46:24]
David French
Yeah.
- [46:24]
Jonah Goldberg
It's an Israeli.
- [46:26]
Megan McArdle
Yeah.
- [46:26]
Steve Hayes
Jonah, the question I had to you is if you look at the way that the administration is apparently contemplating this, we haven't seen anything that resembles a public case for doing this. You haven't had President Trump go out and make the case that Iran presents a threat to the United States. You haven't had Trump or really anyone else give any extended remarks about the plight of the Iranian people and the extent of the massacres. There's nothing resembling a case for war that we've been presented and certainly that Congress has been presented. Is that potentially somewhat on purpose? Because the more you make the case for war, the more it obligates you to do the things after such a strike that Trump has forsworn now for years. He doesn't want these longer engagements. He opposes the so called forever wars.
- [47:26]
Megan McArdle
Yeah.
- [47:26]
Jonah Goldberg
So I'd frame it a little differently. Like one of the things that Trump is going to great at is sort of, again, it's the last 10% of the effort on the ketchup bottle. Well, that works for domestic politics too. Right. Conservatives did all of the work making, or Republicans, whatever, making Hillary Clinton a toxic figure. And then Trump just turned it to 11. Republicans laid down the predicates for the argument about the closing of the border and fixing immigration long before Trump entered the chat. He just pushed it to 11. Right. He takes arguments about, I don't know, pulling out of the Paris climate treaty. You can go down a long way pulling out of the Iran deal. He's terrible at making the case for almost any of these things, but he's great at agreeing with crowds that love hearing about it. And so that applies to the Iran situation, too. You and me and David Less Megan, because she's not a foreign policy person. But the Weekly Standard and National Review and Fox News have been making the case about Iran, the Iranian regime needing to go, you know, for decades. I mean, it's. I mean, how many hundreds of thousands of words has the New York Post and Commentary magazine and, you know, like, this is something that there's wide consensus on the right that Iran's the bad guys. There's also wide consensus in America, particularly people old enough to remember the hostage crisis. And so he thinks he doesn't have to make an argument because he just thinks in the terms of the TV drama that is unfolding. We're the cowboys and they're the Indians, in effect. That said, this can all go really, really badly for him or really well for him, depending on the ground truth about what happens. It is a fact that presidents, lame duck presidents, second term presidents, tend to move towards foreign policy in normal times. Right. Just because they have a freer hand. They don't have to get congressional approval for everything. It makes them feel more historic. It makes them feel like they're big actors on the world stage. And all of that is on steroids when it comes to Trump. And so if it goes badly, he's gonna have very few allies because he's recruited very few allies to support this. Every committee chairman in the Republican Party can say, hey, look, obviously we all knew Iran was the bad guy, but that doesn't mean I was in favor of this. And, you know, and Trump was acting unilaterally, as Trump does, and people like that. But, like, this is serious stuff. And I wish he had consulted us, but he didn't consult. I mean, like, they all have free reign to do that because Trump likes doing this on his own as a lone wolf. And the lone wolf stuff works until you need a pack.
- [50:18]
Steve Hayes
He also, I think that the feedback loop for him the previous two times the US has used military force on Iran or Iranian people, its nuclear program, the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, and Operation Midnight Hammer in June. And the feedback that he's gotten is, the United States is strong. These were incredible missions. You're so powerful, Mr. Trump.
- [50:45]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
- [50:45]
Steve Hayes
And we all know he loves that feedback. He bathes in that feedback. And I think it will likely help determine what course he chooses next. We're going to take a break. We'll be back shortly. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. Finally today, not worth your time. We're going back to the moon. Artemis 2 has been delayed a few times. There are some problems, but it looks like it will be the first human moon mission in more than 50 years. Circling the moon, as I understand it, not actually landing on the moon. And my question to you, I'll start with you, Megan. Is space travel like this worth our time? And is it worth our time in particular, given the fact that we're $38 trillion in debt, projected to be $64 trillion in debt in a decade, can we afford to do this kind of thing?
- [51:49]
Megan McArdle
I'm going to say yes. I will be accused of special pleading, may be fair, but you know, look, I take all the criticisms that, like, what's it good for? Although I think people actually really underweight the things that it has been good for. Not just satellites, which are a keystone of the modern economy, that the space program has seeded all sorts of innovations in other fields, including medical fields, because of things that were invented to deal with the problems of throwing someone in a small capsule into space and then needing to like monitor them and so forth. But I'd also say this when people say, like, it's just obviously useless. What's it good for? I sort of imagine a tribe of foragers standing on the ocean shore with a guy who's like, look guys, I made this bark boat. I'm going out. And people are like, what's out there? It's going to kill you. There's nothing there. I mean, sure, there's some fish there, but you can't get them because you're going to be in bark. A boat. Why would you do this? It's mad, it's insane. And indeed, I'm sure many of the early explorers were killed. I'm sure it was an objective waste of tribal resources and was also necessary to advance humanity to the next step. And I think that that's also true of humans that like, look, I actually support space travel for some of the same reasons that I support doing something about climate change, which is that we have only got the one planet right now and that makes us vulnerable. I don't want to run one way experiments with the climate, even if it's probably going to be fine. The costs of not fine, extremely high. But similarly, like, we are vulnerable to things like asteroids or other natural disasters. And it would sure be nice to have some backup. And that's why we should invest in asteroid defense. But it's also why we should invest in spreading humanity beyond this single planet. Because I believe in our species and I believe that we are destined for the stars.
- [53:51]
Steve Hayes
David, is she right?
- [53:53]
David French
Oh, man. If anything, she's understated it. Steve, beforehand, we were talking about this is not worth your time, but Jonah was saying. I know what everybody's going to say. Jonah, I am not going to surprise you in any way, shape or form. I am all about this new space race, whether it's the government through Artemis or SpaceX. You know, look, I mean, I, I can't really improve on, on what Megan said. I mean, we are created beings who are created to be also creative. And this kind of looking at the stars and wanting to go and wanting to see and wanting to explore is part of the fundamental nature of who we are. It is who we are supposed to be. It's what we're created to be. And so, you know, I'm not gonna list this as high on the list of problems over the last 30 years that have beset our country, but we have had in many ways felt like a lack of national purpose, that what are we doing as a country that is something that we can be really excited about. And I do think that there is a threshold of wonder that you can cross when it comes to the space program that we're actually getting closer to than people realize. I don't, you know, if you're not following this closely, some of the stuff that SpaceX has been doing is incredible. The Bezos Blue Origin project is really hitting its next level. We've got the Artemis mission. Things are going to start building in a way that's going to surprise some people. And I do think you can hit a threshold of wonder in all of this that actually does get people excited, that actually does make people proud of what we are capable of doing still as a country. And so I don't think we're there yet. There's very little talk about this, but this is very much worth our time.
- [55:39]
Steve Hayes
Jonah, can this kind of space exploration help the United States rediscover, as Nathan R. Johnson once did, our special purpose?
- [55:49]
Jonah Goldberg
I think it helps, right? I mean, 35 years ago when I was a television producer doing a TV show called Think Tank, we did a thing about space exploration. And I was talking to this guy, John Logston, who's at gw, was their space guy. And I was trying to say, yeah, we're Trying to do this thing about this sort of the emotional aspect of, you know, galvanizing national will, blah blah, blah, blah, blah. And he was like, oh yeah, yeah. Cathedrals in space. And this is a thing. There are things that cultures have that, you know, the cathedrals in the Middle Ages, there's a reason why they competed to have the highest spire, right. And it is this thing that is accessible to everybody that is inspiring, right? Which is same Latin root as spire. I will say my favorite dumb journalism, which you see on social media a lot about the benefits of space exploration, which I am all in favor of is when they talk about if we could get this asteroid to earth, it's worth $50 trillion in gold and it would erase our national debt and the economic illiteracy of people who not realizing if you make gold as available as sand, it doesn't make gold valuable anymore anyway.
- [57:10]
Megan McArdle
But like it does have some industrial uses. We could make everything out of for sure. But like yeah, yeah, not gonna.
- [57:17]
Jonah Goldberg
And the rare earths thing, there are some like game changing minerals that conceivably you get from asteroid mining and whatnot. But the point I would make is
- [57:25]
Steve Hayes
just simply that couldn't really calm rare
- [57:26]
Jonah Goldberg
earth then I know it's a problem. You know, I often make this point about whenever I look up the number because whenever I try to talk about this I always think I'm exaggerating and I look it up and I'm right. The amount of money the United States spends on Alzheimer's and Alzheimer's, like mental problems like dementia and whatnot is staggering. And sure there's some waste, fraud and abuse in there, sure there's all sorts of other bureaucratic things in there. But the simple fact is it's really, really frigging expensive. And if you could cure it, it would be just a massive leap forward fiscally. And all these things for the debt problem, all that kind of stuff. I think the space exploration stuff, like basic research into cold fusion and whatnot, you're putting more chips on the table, making bets that you're gonna find some silver bullet new technology that as Francis Bacon would say, relieves man's estate, that has a transformative effect. I don't know if it's on energy production or health or transportation or whatever, but the more you look at that stuff, that's where I'm not libertarian is. I think general scientific research is a public good and deserves. I mean it needs to be scrutinized, but it should be well funded. And I think space just has a Massive sort of possibilities in that way.
- [58:46]
Steve Hayes
Well, I hate to make it four for four, but I'm with you all and that's a change for me. I was not an enthusiast of space exploration. I mean, I like the idea of space exploration. I was for any and all kinds of private space exploration, but was pretty skeptical of government funding on fiscal grounds. Grounds that we have to make tough choices at $38 trillion in debt. I mean, these are arguments I was making when we would 20 or 15 trillion dollars in debt. But I've spent a lot of time over the years with Charles Krauthammer talking about this. And Charles was a tremendous enthusiast of the space programs. And I would say in all of the time that Charles and I just spent sitting around and BSing, he tried hardest to convince me that he was right in two areas. One was that baseball is superior to football and he failed. And the second was on the value and importance of space exploration. For all the reasons that you all have articulated, I won't rehash those. But also beyond that, it really has pretty serious national security implications now. And if we're not there, and if we don't dominate space, China's there, Russia's there, we know that there will be a tremendous competition. And that's, I think, a fight that we can't afford to lose. So we will be pinged.
- [60:07]
Megan McArdle
Yeah, Robert Heinlein in his famous book, also his best book, the Moon is a Harsh Mistress, actually dramatizes this. By the moon winning a war with Earth by literally throwing rocks, just taking big rocks and hurling them into the gravity well. And then they're basically like kind of like nuclear bombs, except without the radiation. And yeah, there's real security threats that I should have mentioned but didn't.
- [60:29]
Jonah Goldberg
Speaking of security threats, like, I think Skynet jokes are wildly overdone at this point in the age of AI. Right. We've heard it sort of like, fine, but when I heard that as part of this merger of X and SpaceX that Musk wants orbital platforms of freestanding independent AI systems that can be solar powered and therefore not turned off from the ground, it's like that's really on the nose, like bad sci fi scenarios and that legit makes me nervous.
- [61:06]
Steve Hayes
I will leave sci fi to all of you. This is as sci fi as I get, is a discussion of Artemis Dew, but we'll be following it and I do think it's pretty exciting. Thank you all for joining us again this week and we will talk to you again soon if you like what we're doing here, there are a few easy ways to support us. You can rate, review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. Speaking of support, here's a shout out to a few folks who recently joined as Dispatch Premium members Linda Beggs, Don Engels and Becky Baskin Ferguson. We are very glad to have you aboard. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns or corrections, you can you can email us@roundtablethedispatch.com we read everything, even the ones from people who believe the federal government should get involved in policing media bias. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And a big 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.
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