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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Mike Warren. On today's roundtable, we'll take a look at the most recent decisions handed down by the Supreme Court, the right wing reaction to the birthright citizenship decision, and what the fallout says about the state of the conservative legal movement. Then we'll discuss the 250th anniversary of our independence. What exactly is going on on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. and rest of the country will celebrate America's birthday. I'm joined today by Dispatch co founder Jonah Goldberg, Dispatch contributor Megan McArdle, and Advisory Opinion's special guest, David French. Let's dive in. All right, well, let's talk about this Supreme Court term. It has just ended and I think we're going to have quite a bit to talk about the implications of the big final case on birthright citizenship. But, David, I want to start with you. And by the way, I should start before I start with you by saying that listeners, if you are not listening to advisory opinions, and this week of all weeks, you should go remedy that after you finish listening to us. David and Sarah, you know, really broke down in two episodes this week, these last days of opinions. But go check it out all the time. Of course, SCOTUS blog as well, well has all the coverage of these cases. But before we dive into birthright citizenship and some of those implications, David, maybe you could kind of give us an overview of what the takeaway might be from this term, because there are a lot of high profile cases and it's not just birthright citizenship as well. You know, at the beginning of this kind of decision season, we had the vra, the Voting Rights act case, we had the tariff case, a real slap against the Trump administration. It wasn't the only one. But I mean, you could just go on and on and on.
- [02:11]
B
There is transgender sports writing my column on that this week.
- [02:16]
C
So conversion therapy.
- [02:17]
A
Exactly. You've got the sort of mixed results on who Trump or who. Excuse me, a president can and can't fire in the federal government with those two cases. You've got all kinds of voting counting cases and campaign finance cases. So taking all of that together, David, are there any conclusions that we can make about this court, you know, themes? Is it a mishmash? Is it, you know, a triumph for constitutionalism and originalism, no matter how you slice the results? How do you see ultimately and observe and analyze this particular term of this Supreme Court?
- [02:55]
C
Yeah, you know, I've been thinking about that a lot, like how would I sum this all up? And I think that I would say that this court is a pre Trump conservative court. Okay? So the all of these folks became, you know, developed their philosophies, their legal philosophies before the present moment. They're all before times conservatives. And so one way to think about this is this court was never going to make the Democratic party or critics on the left happy because it was always no matter who the Republican was going to be, if there was going to be a Republican president, no matter who it was going to be, they were going to be a conservative court. They were going to be by and large an originalist court. So they were going to never make Democratic observers all that happy. But at the same time, because it's a pre Trump classical liberal conservative court, it is also really not going to be very amenable to Trump as God king type arguments. And so what you really saw here, the best way to predict the outcome for a majority of this court, I think, was to really ask yourself, how much does this case connect with what you might call pre Trump conservatism? How much does this case connect with Trumpian populism And those cases that connected with pre Trump conservatism? This would be the slaughter case, because for. And this is the firing independent commissioners case. So for all of the sort of anger you saw on the left about that case, this was a very standard conservative legal argument. That is, I mean, bog standard might all might just sort of be the word you would, that you would use that there cannot be unaccountable branches of government, that you're going to have to take your different functions of government and put them in one of those three branches. And if it's under the executive, then the executive has the authority to hire and fire. But then if you go on and you say, well, what about unchecked ability to deploy the National Guard? What about unchecked ability to engage in tariffing globally, unchecked ability to change the interpretation of the 14th Amendment, you know, again and again and again these giant big power grabs got just rejected one after the other. And then hovering in the background were a collection of culture war cases. The transports case, for example, conversion therapy case that honestly five, six, seven years ago would have been the headline cases of the term like that would be everyone be lighting their hair on fire one way or the other over the culture war cases. And they kind of just came and went. Part of it was the nature of them. The trans sports case was whether Title 9 requires biological males to participate in female sports. That is the weakest possible case that you can make about trans participation in sports, that the statute requires it. When it came to conversion therapy, it was really a First Amendment case. How much can the government dictate to, you know, counselors what they can and cannot say? So that was much more of a free speech case. And again, that one came and went, but the real headliners were all around, how much room does Donald Trump have to run? And the ultimate answer to that, I think, has been summed up in the trend that Sarah and I have been talking about for really, you know, a couple of years now, and that is the Supreme Court is saying that the president has more control over a diminished branch. In other words, the president runs the executive branch, but the executive branch is going to be jammed back into its box. And that is sort of how I would sort of describe the separation of powers approach to the sort of the whole term and the previous term, I mean, going back into some really big rulings under, under Biden as well.
- [06:47]
A
I like the way, David, that you sort of position this as this is what a pre Trump, meaning, you know, justices whose views are shaped in the era before Trump was a major political figure, that this was a pre Trump term and a pre Trump. Well, at least when we're talking about the conservatives sort of set of justices. But that leads me to wonder a bit. And Megan, I'd love your thoughts on this. What do post Trump justices look like on the conservative side? There has been so much anger in vitriol, and it's not coming from generally from Federalist Society folks. It's coming from sort of more political operative and activist types on the Internet, anger at this court, at the Roberts court, for, I guess, not giving Trump what he wants. I mean, you have to look at that reaction and wonder out loud. And I know David has talked a little bit about this with Sarah on ao. How does this shape the next couple of generations of conservatives who are thinking about these legal issues, thinking about these constitutional issues, and maybe are thinking less in the originalist terms that these justices have sort of been inculcated in? And will this affect, will the anger over not giving Trump, not giving the president, I should say, more authority, will that shape the way that conservatives are talking about these issues at the activist, at the campaign level? What do you think, Meghan?
- [08:18]
B
I mean, I have a lot of thoughts here, and I also have a question for David, but I'll hold that to the end. The first thing I would say is that principle is the refuge of the weak, right? When the court was to the Left of the country, conservatives developed an extremely elaborate, principled reason to do various things, right? While the left was just kind of like yolo. The law is like, I understand there are deep principles of, like, justice and wonderfulness. And it's not so much like what the Constitution says, it's what I know in my heart. And that, like, is obviously most expansive in the 1960s and 70s, before conservatives start pushing back by developing a conservative legal movement. But conservatives now have a majority on the court, and that means that the base, at least they're not that interested in principle, right? What they want is for the court to give them the outcomes they want, just like the left wanted the court to give them the outcomes they wanted. On the other hand, I will say that, like, I, I got a lot of pushback to my remarks on at our wonderful live event at the 92nd Street Y, where I said, like, I actually think that in some ways things are going to be more normal post Trump than you think, because Trump really is weird. A person like Trump who is really totally unprincipled, totally disloyal, cares nothing about the party at all. In a normal era, that person cannot get where he is. It took like an incredible string of flukes to put Trump in office. And the next Republican president, whoever they are, is going to be a party man or woman. It is going to be someone who has a lot of ties to the party, who has benefited from the system and has some investment in it. And so they're not going to just repeat the Trump abuses. I think. I think it is going to be someone who behaves more normally, which means probably appointing judges more normally. And also, no one is going to strike terror into the hearts of their coalition the way that Trump does. And again, because he's so unprincipled, because he will primary people in his own party, right? He will, absolutely. That's not normal behavior for a president. The fact that he will do that has given him, in some ways unusual leverage over senators. But I think that's going to go back to normal. That said, the DSA winning a bunch of House seats, city council seats and so forth in New York and elsewhere in Colorado, or, sorry, winning primaries for seats that they are extremely likely to win, that are Democratic seats that they are extremely likely to win, unseating progressive incumbents. So in 2016, my husband and I planned a vacation to Asia, a two week extravaganza with a bunch of miles that we had run with the assistance of the great Gary Laff, who writes the View from the Wing Mile running blog. And we were like, yeah, we know who the Clinton transition team is going to be. None of them like us. We're not going to be well sourced. Let's just, like, we're exhausted. We're just gonna go to Asia. So that worked out. And right in the. I actually did also write the lead on the way to the ballpark. I wrote my Hillary Wynn's column. And yeah, so there I am in Asia and a lot of stuff is happening. And I'm also hideously jet lagged and I'm waking up at like 11 a. 11pm every night and then unable to get back to sleep. And so I wrote this Facebook post at like 2 in the morning.
- [11:49]
A
Always a good idea.
- [11:51]
B
Yeah, no, but I said, look, my Democratic friends think that this is some kind of Republican pathology, but the structural forces that produced Trump are gonna hit your party too. Now, I think that Trump is in some ways uniquely pathological because, again, he is uniquely unprincipled. It's not just that he has bad ideas, it's that he has a bad character. But I think we are now seeing that come true. And I think Trump to some extent held the Democratic establishment together longer than it otherwise would have, but they're now coming apart at the seams. And so that's the argument against my case that, like, everything is just going to get wild and it's going to be the fringes competing with the fringes. Doom, doom, doom. And I guess I still lean towards things will be more normal. Not great, not like my conservative ideal, but a little more normal after this election. But I hold that view a little more weakly than I did even a week ago. And then I would just like to ask David about these culture war cases, because it feels like the two cases in particular, the transgender cases, were cases where people looked at Bostock and were like, time to go for the gusto. And why didn't they pull these cases? Why did they take them all the way? And I know they tried in the case of Little v. Heacox, I believe, but why am I right that this was just like the most incredible strategic mistake of in legal advocacy in the last, like, 50 years? Or am I overreading that?
- [13:22]
C
You are not overreading it. And I would say, you know, in the Transports case, there were some procedural maneuvering to try to get it, you know, mooted, dismissed. Because everyone knew where this was headed. And if you look at the outcome, it was 9, 0 on the Title 9 issue. In other words, this was a partially Unanimous ruling. And then the three liberal justices were only hesitant on the constitutional sort of equal protection grounds. And, you know, I've thought a lot about this because the two trans related cases that have come to the Supreme Court are the worst possible cases for the trans legal movement, which is, you know, youth gender intervention with Medicare surgically or medically and requiring participation of biological males in women's sports. And they were always going to lose those cases. And I really think, honestly, it's a product of a very brief blip where there was such a hold that the trans movement in particular had over the left, that it was. I've really never seen a public debate go so quickly from, hey, let's have a conversation about this, to we've decided all of the answers to every permutation of this. And if you disagree with us for from 0.5% of what we say, you are horrible, you are evil, you are the equivalent of you should be fired. Yeah, you're out. You know, and so you're bull Connor, you know, you're horrible. And so during that brief period of time, this very aggressive legal strategy unfolded. And then as that cultural moment passed, as it always was going to, because you just. It was like a prairie fire, you know, burning across public discourse. Then all of a sudden there was this kind of, oh, oh, oh my gosh, look at these cases going to the Supreme Court. And there's a lot of recriminations right now on the left side of the aisle about this. There's a lot of internal discussion of, like, how did we get so high on our supply that we were taking cases the Supreme Court, that even our allies were not going to be fully. Even our most committed ideological allies on the Supreme Court were not going to be fully with us on this.
- [15:38]
B
I mean, there was that incredible moment in Scrametti where Chase Strangio from the aclu, who is a trans man and was the lead lawyer arguing it was basically asked about whether this raised the risk of suicide. And this had been the leading talking point. Yeah. That to deny children the Scrameti case was about puberty blockers, whether Tennessee could ban them, and a bunch of other states. But Tennessee was the lead. Lead defendant. And Chase Dangio was like, well, no, no, there's not actually evidence. And like, couldn't have answered honestly any other way. There is not evidence. But this had been like the driving conversational moment. And when your own advocate has now gotten up in the Supreme Court to state unequivocally that there's no evidence for your own side's biggest talking point. You know, something has gone dangerously awry. I am sorry that I've derailed this writing about it this week. So I'm like, I'm kind of obsessed with it.
- [16:33]
A
Well, but what you've touched on here, Megan, if that blip that David talked about, that sort of moment where the most maximalist approach on the left on these culture war issues, was that a blip, a sort of a prairie fire that then burned itself out? I do wonder, Jonah, about that same but different phenomenon happening on the right. There is this moment where a sort of angry activist base within the Republican Party is just looking for, you know, they're looking for authoritarianism wherever they can find it. And can we sort of push the limits of that? We've lost these cases here and so we need to double down. It's a very like the victories have been on the originalist side, not on this new way of viewing the Constitution, the sort of living constitution from the right perspective. And yet the activists seem to be taking the wrong lesson from all this and saying, no, the problem is we didn't double down enough and we need, you know, Amy Coney Barrett isn't who we thought she was and we need more. Isn't that going to be where the energy is? Aren't they going to continue to learn the wrong lesson from the Roberts court in this current period?
- [17:44]
D
Yes.
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A
Okay.
- [17:46]
D
All right. So look, I think I'm very much in Megan's camp in the. I think that we're not going to get to the status quo ante right anytime soon. But I think that the right's decade long experiment with temper tantrums and populist excesses is starting to burn itself out a little bit. And there's going to be something of a regression to a mean. Basically, anybody who hasn't gone full Trumpy by now never will. And a lot of people who did are getting a little tired of it. There are a lot of institutions that are forming. There are a lot of places that are saying maybe a little more grown up stuff, a little more seriousness is required. I've made this point a million times on here. If you watch the 2024 Republican primary debates, with the exception of Vivek Ramaswamy, who has now gone normie, but back then was trying to be a mini Trump, everybody else basically spoke some sub dialect of Reaganism because it's what Republicans actually know how to speak fluently and they don't know how to do some of this boob bait stuff. And I think there are a lot of people who sense it. Stephen Miller in the White House, I think sees the Overton window closing for the kind of foreigner, however you say foreigner free in German policy that he wants is closing. And so I think that the reaction, I mean, I wrote this very quick piece. I'd do it a little differently if I had the 48 hours to do over again about the birthright citizenship case, asking whether politically not legally. I mean, because it's very sound decision legally, even if you disagree with it, you can't read the majority opinion and say, oh, these guys are just, they pulled that out of thin air, right? I mean, it's like a very sound argument even if you agree, even if you side more with Thomas on some of this stuff. And I think a lot of people have mischaracterized the decision dissents. The sense don't all agree with each other, never mind make the claims that some people want them to make. But regardless, legally, I don't think this is going to be like Roe v. Wade. I think politically it might be on the right.
- [19:53]
A
Can I interrupt for a second? When you say going to be like Roe v. Wade, what do you mean by that?
- [19:58]
D
What I mean by that is, you know, the classic argument which even Ruth Bader Ginsburg subscribed to to some extent, is that Roe took an issue away from Congress and away from legislatures nationally and tried to settle it for all time to everybody's satisfaction and say, okay, we're done talking about this. And instead it became this festering wound that creates the pro life movement, that creates in many respects a big chunk of the conservative legal movement that fuels Reaganism in all sorts of ways to overturn Roe. And I want to be clear. There are a lot of people who hated Roe because they were passionate pro lifers, but there were a lot of people who hated Roe cause they just thought it was garbage constitutional law. And those two sides could beg and borrow from each other's arguments and they could have dinners together and they all worked fine together. But they didn't. Their primary concerns weren't always the same on this. I mean, it is amazing the response to the birthright citizenship case, which as everybody now who has read anything about it knows, merely upholds the status quo. It extends what is essentially the way we've done things for over a century. And I'm open to the idea that maybe there are some things that with the fullness of time, material circumstances change that say, okay, this constitutional provision doesn't work for this new environment. The answer to that is not to read new meaning into the law, but to amend the Constitution. And maybe that's necessary. But my point is, I'm very sympathetic to Kavanaugh's argument. I know David is less so. But I think it probably would have been better if they didn't settle the fundamental constitutional question and Simply said in a 9.0 ruling, this EO is garbage. The president cannot unilaterally do this. That's where I thought this thing was gonna go for a very long time. And if they did that, they would then throw the debate to Congress. But now this question of birthright citizenship is becoming almost a religiously dogmatic thing for a bunch of people. We can't have a country anymore. Right? I mean, the same people who say, we need to make America great again anytime that they thought America was great in the past. The current interpretation of birthright citizenship was in effect.
- [22:21]
A
So don't give me this like, oh,
- [22:22]
D
it was better in the 1950s. Oh, you mean when we had birthright citizenship. And what is really sort of fascinating to me, getting back to the trans thing, is the anti trans stuff, which is a. Has been, up until about five minutes ago, a big part of the sort of conservative mobilization, support for Trump, sort of the Chris Rufo right, all that kind of stuff. The trans thing was the empowering, motivating passion, in some ways, for the intellectual right more than immigration. And then the Supreme Court gives them an unalloyed victory. Nobody talks about it. Yeah, the Supreme Court upholds existing law, which, you know, and Trump's executive order had never been put into effect. So, like, nothing changes. And they're like, this is the end of the country. We have destroyed this country. Can America survive? Shaun Davis goes full Shaun Davis and talks about sterilizing women, female tourists before they can come here and civil war and nullification of the continent, all this kind of nonsense.
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A
This is Sean Davis of the Federalist, who posted a lengthy kind of screed
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D
on X before the nurse with the syringe came in and stopped him.
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B
Can I just say that I really enjoyed Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire losing his mind, who I am guessing from his last name that many of Matt Walsh's ancestors, like mine, did not arrive on the Mayflower, but rather came in the 1850s, when there were basically no immigration laws at all. I will say I also, the other side of my family all came over on the Mayflower. So I swing both ways.
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D
I have one side that got here in, like, the 1720s.
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A
You're safe.
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D
No, I'm not.
- [24:01]
B
Yeah. But my Mayflower ancestors were convinced that Matt Walsh's and my Irish ancestors were gonna ruin the Republic. And there's still Matt Walsh talking about how like the Supreme Court has stolen the right he has to preserve the precious heritage. There was an entire political party devoted to keeping our ancestors out of this country, Matt.
- [24:25]
D
And the last point is, the last tell on this is they are not screaming at the author of the decision or at the chief Justice. They're screaming at Amy Coney Barrett who merely signed onto this thing and trafficking in like I think it's fair to say I don't often like play the you're a sexist card. The most ridiculous sexist and racist stuff about. Oh well, because she has two adopted kids from Haiti, she cannot be trusted. You know, these gyno American justices don't work and we can't have them anymore. I mean, it's just the dumbest frigging stuff. But it tells you that this is the cultural marker. And I think you're gonna have and because Congress won't do anything now. Right? Cuz Congress has been bailed out by the Supreme Court by settling this issue constitutionally the way Roe settled the abortion thing, but didn't really, you're now gonna have this be a litmus test. Do you think we need to amend the Constitution to get rid of birthright citizenship? And it is going to be a galvanizing thing on the right that is going to lead to a lot of ugliness and a lot of stupidity. Even if it doesn't get to create the kind of political organizations and momentum that Roe did, I think it's going to get much uglier before it gets better and unnecessarily so. Because there are plenty of things you can do to stop birthright, you know, tourism under this constitutional regime. Right. There are all sorts of rameshpreneur. Our friend did a good column on this. You can put all sorts of things into effect to reduce this while at the same time recognizing what the Constitution says.
- [25:58]
A
All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast.
- [26:05]
E
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- [27:09]
A
You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. I'm struck by how organized, and I may be even overstating things, but the reaction from the folks, many of whom we just mentioned and others sort of in the kind of right wing rage, bait, industrial complex, was all sort of uniform about this, right? This is the, you know, the end of the country as we know it. There's talk about packing the corridor, expanding the court, which is interesting because this has been, up to this point, you know, a kind of left wing and not so left wing. A pretty almost mainstream liberal idea, right, is that the Roberts court is so bad and so corrupt and is so giving Trump everything he wants, which as we've established many times is not true, but that we need to expand the court and give liberals a heads up to see it on, on the right in reaction to this. I mean, it's on the one hand we can sort of sit here and mock it for how over the top and insane these reactions are. On the other hand, you know, I was thinking about one of my favorite sketches on Saturday Night Live. Tom Hanks is the president of the Mr. Belvedere Fan Club, which is a bunch of weirdos who are obsessed with the character Mr. Belvedere from the 1980s sitcom. And at one point, Chris Farley, I believe, stands up and professes his love for Mr. Belvedere and then proposes that they kill him. Mr. Belvedere and Tom Hanks is cajoled into taking a vote of the club on whether they should kill Mr. Belvedere. And he holds the vote. And the vote wins that they do not kill Mr. Belvedere. And Tom Hanks's line is, all right, good, we won't be killing Mr. Belvedere, but it shouldn't have been that close. That's the reaction I had from this birthright citizenship case. And thinking about the ways in which conservatives of a certain stripe, right wingers, really of a certain stripe who were trying to gin up outrage about this were sort of looking at this not as necessarily even a loss, but the beginning of an opportunity to sort of push this really novel idea that was not a mainstream issue. In fact, ted Cruz, in 2011, before, I guess he was either running for or preparing to run for the Senate for the first time, essentially dismissed the idea that the 14th Amendment was anything but, you know, offered anything but, like, a clear case that birthright citizenship is in the Constitution. Dismiss that as sort of cranky. And here we are in 2026. Ted Cruz is posting on Twitter about how this is sort of an outrageous misreading of the 14th Amendment, taking his position and completely reversing it. I don't know, David. Should we be worried that this is becoming this kind of issue, these kinds of things, by virtue of the new political media economy that we have, the way that sort of podcasters, no offense to any of us here, like, can sort of come up with an idea and it becomes mainstream pretty quickly. Should we be worried that this is. Might be the future of the right on these kinds of issues?
- [30:15]
C
Yes, I do think we should be concerned. However, in a weird way, my concern is tempered by the almost comical level. I say almost comical because when it turned sexist against Amy Coney Barrett, when it turned racist, when people were putting pictures of her family up, nothing comical about that. Like, that's just dark, evil stuff. But look through another lens. A lot of these meltdowns were almost hilarious. I mean, if you just take a look at it, like, what was the point? How did the right make so much headway against the left? They made so much headway against the left, the cultural left, and the far left by saying, these guys overreact emotionally. You would see the GIFs of, like, triggered, you know, like showing some undergrad furious. They can't handle contrary ideas. They just pitch temper tantrums. They don't tolerate any disagreement. You know, the whole kind of debate me bro culture was sort of a direct middle finger to that intolerance, et cetera. And then you can't be a woman in leadership because you're just so emotional. And then you have like a Sean Davis or Matt Walsh pitching a temper tantrum that would embarrass an undergrad.
- [31:29]
A
I mean, just absolutely physician heal myself, Right?
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C
Meltdowns. Just meltdowns. And so on the one hand, the meltdown indicates that, yeah, this is something that there is. There is some degree of passion in parts of the right here. This big coalition, patchwork coalition the right, there's huge energy also. They're being completely intolerant idiots about it. They're doing everything possible to do to kind of repel everybody who is not already on board. And so they're doing exactly, they're making exactly the mistake. And this seems to be a pattern with Maga in Trump 2.0 is to take everything that you critiqued the left for and just say, well, the real problem is that we weren't doing it and that it wasn't being done aggressively enough. So, you know, you have Burisma and Hunter Biden, you're gonna wear that out and wear that out and wear that out. And then you get in control and you're like, Hunter Biden, the real problem, that guy was an amateur. You wanna see how to make money from the government or you know, look, we're anti woke. We don't like that campus intolerance. You get into power, you wanna see what intolerance looks like. We're gonna, you know, arrest to try to deport somebody for an op ed. We're going to crack down on law firms, we're going to crack down on everybody who disagrees. We're going to threaten broadcasters licenses. I mean, you know, so it, you know, what it reminds me of is there's this phrase from I believe the 19th century called the burned over district. And it refers to central and western New York that had so many religious revivals sweep through that after a while everybody just kind of inoculated against all of it.
- [33:08]
B
My mom grew up there.
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C
Oh, is that right?
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B
In fact, like, it's really funny because my grandfather was born in the town where Mormonism was founded. There are like zero Mormons in that region.
- [33:17]
C
It's not a super religious area. It is not the burned over. And so I have a feeling like after you've had two prairie fire movements and we may get a third, is the DSA stuff we could talk about. But if you've had these prairie fire movements, they do burn through. And then I do wonder if we're going to actually end up with a period of time. And this sort of goes to the mega thesis of where we've got the American politics is the burned over district. In other words, we are going to be sort of at this point reach a point where there's a critical mass of kind of rejection of hysteria because hysteria has been fueling us and has been fueling these cultural brush fires for more than a decade. And I think people are starting to get tired of it. It's just it's endlessly self defeating. It's endlessly immiserating. But right now, the two parties have a real problem. That's a big bulk of their base. So what do you do?
- [34:12]
A
My question, Megan, about the court is you have what we've just seen over the last few days. Marry that with what's been going on on the left, which is just a complete lack of faith in the institution of the courts. I think that's misguided, but it is there. You can't deny that there is, you know, again, talking about expanding the court, talking about all of the overreaction to so many of these decisions, which again, do not always and don't even usually go in Donald Trump's way, despite the fact that he appointed three of these justices to this court, the legitimacy of the court seems like it's in danger and in question. The fact that you have folks on the right now talking like, how many folks on the left have been talking about the court for so long? Makes me concerned. Why shouldn't we be concerned? Why should we buy into your theory that everything's going to go back to normal and the Supreme Court will be something that is just this boring thing that everybody worries about. Who, who doesn't listen to Ao, you know, of course everybody only worries and talks about in June and then moves on with their lives.
- [35:19]
B
I mean, so I go back to what David said. This level of hysteria is exhausting. Yeah, right. There's only so long that most people can keep it up.
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D
There are just what a woman would say. Yeah, no strength.
- [35:36]
A
Stop being hysterical about this, Megan.
- [35:38]
B
Actually, the one area where women are somewhat more female athletes are somewhat competitive with male athletes still not like, you know, equally likely to win but have a better shot is in ultra endurance sports. So, in fact, we're the ones with the staying power.
- [35:57]
D
There you go.
- [35:57]
B
No, I just think that, look, there is a handful of people who just love being mad and they just want to spend all of their time being mad. I think a lot of it, a surprising amount of it, is kind of older people who aren't getting out much and so they want media. Like, I watched this with my parents and with Fox News and cnn. I had one of each. So CNN mom, Fox News dad. Now, my dad was not full maga. My dad was just in an interesting place of being extremely mad at the party he had spent his life working in and for. But he would watch all of the, both of them would watch these stories and be like, what's happening with this? I'd Be like, I've never heard of this story. It's just some bait that some producer picked up. And I think there's a lot of reasons this happens, but partly it's that when you are kind of bedbound or housebound, like, watching the news feels like you're still participating in society, forming an opinion feels like you're still participating in society. And that's a kind of sad commentary on how American society treats its older people. But there's just this enormous appetite for finding things to be mad about. And if, like, so, you know, working at a mainstream publication for years now, if I wrote about anything that was not the outrage, the Trump outrage of the day or the Republican outrage of the day, or even if it wasn't, like, being nice, mean to the left or nice to the right, people would be like, why aren't you writing about this thing? Why are you denying it? It was like, I'm not denying it. I just wrote about a column about something else. David, I'm sure you get this as well, because what they want is for me to find them something to be mad about. That's what they think. My job is to find them something to be mad about, to be mad with them, to lead them in their rage. And I think it's tremendously unhealthy. But I also see more and more people burning out on it. Like people who were all in on Resistance Liberty in 2017. I have a number of friends like this, and they're just like, I've checked out. I can't follow the news. It makes me too upset. I'm just getting on with my life. And I just see more and more people. I see people doing this on the right, too. They're just checking out because it's. You can't keep it up. And is your whole life just gonna be going online and finding reasons to be mad? And then that was your life when you die. And so I think that's actually fundamentally a healthy instinct. And I hope that as that happens, we will get back to a more normal environment. I also think that, like, these emerging podcasters and so forth, there's always a wild. When you get a new communications technology, there's like a wild west phase where everyone's trying stuff. There's no real, like, collective ethical standards. You see this in journalism multiple times. And then, like, stuff settles out, reputation starts to matter. People talk of, you know, work on getting a reputation for telling the truth or, you know, being the National Enquirer. And you're not supposed to believe it anyway. Although I do believe that Elvis was touring the seven elevens of the south during the nineties.
- [38:56]
C
That's established.
- [38:57]
A
Wow.
- [38:58]
B
Yeah, that's established. And so like, I just think that a lot of the forces that are pushing us towards this terrible state are going to start pushing us back again. Which doesn't mean that we're going to restore our institutions to their former blooming health. But I will also point out that our institutions, trusted institutions, has been collapsing since the 70s. David Frum has a really excellent book called How We Got here on the 1970s and shows how much of this started in the 70s. And so this isn't new, it's just worse.
- [39:24]
A
Jonah, last word on this topic to you.
- [39:27]
D
Well, I was just gonna say on Megan's point about the oldsters, I'm butchering it, but somebody once said that basically Facebook and Fox did to our parents what our parents said video games was gonna do to us. And it made them. I mean, like, you can call it Fox News poisoning. You can call it Facebook poisoning. You know, I mean, there are different versions of it. There's definitely a kind of MSNBC poisoning. And there's, I think it's three year Letterman, this satirical account has this great response every time one of these guys says, I mean, I know we're not supposed to do a lot of social media thing here, but the social media reaction to the Supreme Court ruling really was, I think actually truly significant because there were literally people calling for civil war.
- [40:11]
A
Yeah, right.
- [40:12]
D
People of influence among a certain crowd. And anyway, he's got this response where he has this meme of a fat guy in an ill fitting dirty shirt sitting at his computer saying this will mean civil war. And then underneath it's a picture of real Americans, like at bars and at picnics and, you know, and barbecues talking to each other like normal people. And I think that there's the addiction to crisis and drama stuff. I'm not sure it's going away completely. I do think it's dying out on the right. I think it's now the left's turn to have a lot more of it. And we're gonna see that with the DSA stuff. But this is in part an argument about what? You know, like normally presidents and parties worry about what responses their actions are going to arouse in their opponents. And we're now 10 years into an era where getting the worst reactions from your opponents is a sign of success rather than a sign that maybe you're going too far. And I think we're now going to see that flipped because there's a whole generation of young people on the left who grew up in that environment. And I think that's what politics is.
- [41:21]
A
Before we take an ad break, 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 one month free. And speaking of ads, if they 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. Okay. We'll be right back. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. Well, I think that's a great opportunity for us to roll into a discussion. This is our final Dispatch podcast before the 4th of July, Independence Day, and it's the 250th anniversary of that very first Independence Day in 1776. So we've got to talk about what has been going on the National MALL In Washington, D.C. you have seen a of number, number of videos FOX News has posted itself speaking of on the Mall to, I guess, have coverage of the Great American State Fair. That has been a project of Freedom250, which is the Donald Trump administration project, separate from America250, which was based on a sort of bipartisan, bicameral congressional panel that put that together. It seems to have all of the energy and resources have shifted from the bipartisan America 250 to this freedom 250. It seems in general like it's been a bust, which in on the one hand is kind of a bummer because it's the 250th anniversary of this country. And the fact that nobody seems to be showing up to these events on the Mall. You can see these videos. It's just, you know, yards and yards of nice, beautiful green grass where there ought to be people going into exhibits or at the stage. And there's just like a few, you know, dozen folks kind of milling around. This is a festival that's supposed to be going on through next week. And it's just a part of how the country or the federal government, the executive branch, is trying to celebrate the 250th anniversary. On the other hand, it's clearly not the only way people are going to be at, you know, at the barbecues and cookouts and fireworks shows all across the country, not thinking at all about what's been going on the National Mall was this. Megan, I guess I'll start with you. Was this attempt by Donald Trump to sort of take control of the 250th anniversary, was it a complete failure? Was it a success on his terms? You know, he's going to give his speech on the mall on July 4th, and so maybe we'll have to evaluate that. But am I wrong to think that this has been kind of an embarrassing bust on the part of the United States government?
- [44:21]
B
I am going to give the most qualified possible defense of Donald Trump trying to take over this celebration, which was that American, America 250 had already screwed it up six ways from Sunday.
- [44:33]
A
Okay, let's hear it.
- [44:34]
B
So, first of all, if you went and looked at their website, it was the most pathetic thing I have ever seen. They could not bring themselves to be like, America 250. Hell, yeah. Instead, it was they literally like nothing about the glories of America's founding on the website because it's a bipartisan commission. And the left wing people on the commission, as far as I can tell, reading between the lines of public accounts and so forth, basically couldn't. Were dead set against anything that celebrated this racist hellhole of a country. And so instead, what they did was pathetically like, hold an essay contest for young people, offer Americans the opportunity to reflect on what it means to them to be American. And, like, I was shamed. What it meant to me to be an American at the moment I first laid eyes upon this website was to be shamed that my country had fallen to such a low state. But, yeah, and there was other stuff. It was mired and infighting. People kept flouncing off, alleging MeToo stuff, corruption. It was a disaster. So. And there were no plans. I actually asked the Harris campaign what their plans were, and they were like, are you kidding me? We're running for president. Right? Like, and so this was like, this is just. It was bad. And Democrats were not gonna do a good job with it because they, like those people. The people who didn't wanna say how awesome is it that we've been around for 250 years? Were the same people who would have been on Kamala's staff. She would have had, like, some nice speech on 4th of July, et cetera. I'm not saying that they literally would have been like, oh, I'm not celebrating Fourth of July. But they would not have done the moment justice. Because you can't do the moment justice unless you are willing to say that with all of our flaws and the original sins of slavery, and the Native American genocide. Those are real and terrible, and we should take ownership of them and understand that there is a tragic element to our nation's founding and also celebrate the incredible promise of the Declaration of Independence and the enormous strides we have made in realizing those. The famous words from the opening, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. All men are created equal. But then, of course, Donald Trump, like, the idea of a state fair is, like, really nice. And then Donald Trump can't do it, right? Because he's like, he doesn't pick people for competence. He picks them for loyalty. He doesn't care about doing a thing that is good. He cares about doing a thing that aggrandizes Donald Trump. He has a dumb instinct for fan service. I was actually not offended by the UFC thing. Like, first of all, Teddy Roosevelt used to stage boxing matches at the White House. But second of all, like, it was so classist, right? It was just like, oh, this is gross. Working class people will watch this. Like, you know, if it had been a ballet, the left would have been like, you know, and staged by a Democrat. The left would have been like, how beautiful. You know what? Like, entertainment is entertainment. I like. I personally do not care for fighting. Sports, especially because of head trauma, can damage people. I have some moral qualms. But as a. But. But that wasn't what people were expressing. They were just like, oh, gross, gross working class men. And it was kind of offensive watching that percolate across social media. But he cannot do the like. He has good ideas that he then fails to implement. Although with the lone exception, I will say getting the fountains back working in Washington, D.C. big props, Mr. President. A grateful city thanks you. But, like, in general, he just. He screws up implementation over and over again because he doesn't appoint good people and he doesn't take the job seriously. And it's all about him. And the idea that this is the problem with the whole great man theory of history, that you're gonna, you know, elevate one strong man who's gonna, like, make things happen for the people. Like, this one strong man doesn't care about making things happen for the people. He cares about making things happen that put his name on things and aggrandize him, and that is the natural result of this. So I was hopeful that he would do a better job than America 250 and President Trump, you have refuted me. I stand thoroughly rebutted, and I apologize for ever being so silly as to think that this might work.
- [48:59]
A
But, Jonah, are we falling into this trap of even caring about what happens in Washington and what happens with the federal government with regard to the 250th anniversary. Like, that's not where the focus should be on this anniversary, on what's happening in Washington. Right. Like all over the country there are going to be celebrations, as I said. But also, you know, I mean, we are in some ways playing into Trump's own self aggrandizement here by even pointing it out, even mocking what's going on. This is not what people are really going to be focused on this Saturday. They're going to be focused on what's happening in their communities, their, their own traditions. You know, people like to read the Declaration of Independence sometimes. I think that sounds like kind of a nerdy fourth of July party. I prefer hot dog and beer and fireworks. But like, to each their own. I mean, isn't the way that we should all celebrate the 4th of July and the 250th anniversary is to not care about what Trump is doing or what the congressional committee is doing and just focus on how we're doing it ourselves?
- [49:59]
D
Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, how we celebrate on Saturday is one thing, but this Thursday, and we're a DC based podcast talking about how the President United States screwed something up. So seems worth talking about. You know, I fair enough. At the same time, as you say, teach their own. Some people are going to celebrate the fourth of July by hate watching the Trump fourth of July stuff, you know, and that's so sad. That's really weird to me. But okay, I'm going to New York to watch the tall ships. But at the same time, you know, there is a element of it as you know, this is the holiday, this is the commemoration of us becoming a country.
- [50:35]
A
Right.
- [50:36]
D
You know, an actual government. I mean, I guess I kind of think 1789 is the more important date, but whatever.
- [50:42]
A
Agree with you, by the way.
- [50:43]
D
So what Washington does has some symbolic significance to it that's worth paying attention to. I think that, I mean, I agree with Megan. I think that the great American State fair thing is sort of like the Trump phone. Right. The important thing is getting the branding for Trump and the fact that it's actually not made in America. Not a very good phone. Only suckers who really are obsessed with Trump will buy it. Doesn't bother him at all. And so like now he's gonna have a big partisan rally on the mall and screw a lot of families that wanna see the fireworks. I mean, they're not gonna do the fireworks until at least 11, right? If he speaks to time, the fireworks will be around 11. So the fireworks could be at 1 in the morning for all we know.
- [51:29]
A
DC's dogs and babies will protest if that's the case.
- [51:33]
C
And moms and Dads, honestly, in D.C.
- [51:36]
B
proper, the local fireworks celebrations, which can be like, you know, the our nation's capital's drug dealers like to sort of spread joy in the neighborhood. I am not making this up, but driving to Pennsylvania, it's not only drug dealers, also normal citizens. And I kind of support this as a lawless libertarian.
- [51:54]
D
It's the Taliban wedding approach to celebration.
- [51:56]
B
No, but like, like I actually asked about this at like one of the housing projects near us. Really does a spectacular display. And what I was told by people in the neighborhood was that's because the drug dealers their money to really put on a show. But they drive to Pennsylvania and get a bunch of illegal fireworks. And so dc, like the National Mall fireworks for the majority of DC residents, really not the issue.
- [52:18]
A
Got it.
- [52:19]
B
I love it, actually. Like, I am sedating our dogs because they don't, but I think it's great. But that is gonna be the main issue for the babies and dogs, not the ones on the mall.
- [52:29]
C
Cool.
- [52:29]
A
There we go. David, you are the eternal optimist right now on this podcast.
- [52:34]
C
I was about to unleash a wave of optimism. I was good.
- [52:37]
A
Well, I'm trying you up here to do just that. You and I were talking before we started recording a little bit about the World Cup. We're recording this on Thursday, the night after the US won its first game in the knockout round of the World Cup. There's also just. We have talked about on this podcast about the way in which, you know, the Europeans and other foreign visitors to the US for the World cup have been marveling in posts online about how great America is. So there's been a great performance by our men's soccer team. There's been sort of a great hosting by our country as part of the host. Three countries hosting the World Cup. Isn't this really the 250th celebration properly? Like, everybody is looking at the United States and going, hey, that is a great country. And maybe we should appreciate our own country a little more here on this anniversary. Give us some optimism about how to be thinking about the 250th anniversary this weekend.
- [53:32]
C
Mike, I'm going to tell you, it is going to be hard for anything this weekend to top the feeling I had watching 70,000Americans in the freaking Bay Area decked Out in head to toe red, white and blue. Like, this isn't rural Alabama. This is the Bay Area, okay?
- [53:51]
A
And by the way, singing Take Me Home Country Roads.
- [53:53]
C
Well, you're getting ahead of me, Mike.
- [53:54]
A
Sorry, sorry.
- [53:56]
C
And so you have this win, you know, then followed by, you know, this singing of this just great American song, you know, take Me Home Country Roads. It is so evocative of just Americana, this love of this place, the beauty of the country. And they're at the top of their lungs singing in the Bay Area, this, like, ode to West Virginia that is. But it's also just a classic American song. And I was sitting there and I felt kind of moved by it because I feel like, you know, and to Megan's point, about America, 250 and then pivoting to freedom. 250. We have a political class in our country that is so in its own head and so in its own bubble and so consumed with beefs and this and that. They can't even. They're gonna fumbling. America 250 is one of the hardest things you could possibly do, like just pop up some founding documents and ignite a billion fireworks. I mean, there's just a lot. It's the easiest thing in the world, but our political class will fumble this ball. But the American people are rising to the occasion, and I think the World Cup's been tremendous. And look, I know it's now cliched, you know, the German soccer tourist who is looking at America with fresh eyes. And then, you know, of course, our terrible political class kind of started piling on him and supported. And he, you know, just, of course, that once our political class got involved, it was going to go south. But until that moment, what I thought was just so powerful and, you know, probably the paradigmatic guy was this guy Freddie.
- [55:34]
A
Freddie, yeah.
- [55:35]
C
And what I want the political class to do is to see and think about Freddie's America and what he and who he interacted with. And I genuinely think, and I want to write about this, that I think one of the biggest gaps in America, one of the biggest divisions is between the political obsessives, of which we're, you know, four guilty as charged, and everybody else. And that there is a failure to understand on the part of an enormous number of people in America that for the vast bulk, it is still true that politics is pretty downstream from their daily lives. And in this moment, that's a pretty healthy thing. I mean, I wish in some ways it'd be more upstream, so there would be more accountability. But in some, you know, very important ways, when you're in the bleachers at Wrigley Field, you know, I'm thinking about America 250, you know, remember the famous William F. Buckley? I'd rather be run the country be run by the first 100 names in the Boston phone book than the faculty. I would rather America250 be planned by the a random 100 folks in the Wrigley bleachers, which would have been bipartisan and a just incredible time. Right. Than these political classes. But the important thing is I think we need to be able to look around us and grab onto those moments. Like this red, white and blue covered Bay Area crowd singing an ode to West Virginia at the top of their lungs in front of this US Men's soccer team that I guarantee you about half of them didn't know a single name of them before the World cup started, but they had the flag on their shirts. And it was a wonderful moment. I, like, I. I found myself kind of getting. I mean, I'm a sappy person in general when it comes to patriotism, but, like, I kind of found myself getting a little bit, you know, emotional just seeing that thing unfold. And it just was yet another reminder that when we get together and we can, and when we shed a lot of this bull crap that's all around us, we actually can like each other. And, you know, I know the polls are saying we hate each other more than any other country. You know, the darn Canadians love each other more than any other country and we hate each other more. But I keep feeling like this is a blip, that this is something that is an artificial imposition upon a country that for all of its divisions and it has had them for a very, very long time, the bottom line is we still have affection for this place. We still have affection for each other. And when the political class can get out of the way, we can often express it in ways that I think are deeply meaningful and unify.
- [58:15]
D
So I agree with that entirely. And I was going to make a made a similar point to this Australian I had coffee with this morning. Actually, I think it's not just that real American America's in real America are get patriotism better than elites do. I think part of the problem is that, you know, Trump world has tried to own the word patriot. Like literally, like say that it's a patriot agenda, patriot policies, like all that kind of stuff. So they've made the word patriot even more toxic for people who dislike Trump or disagree with Trump or Whatever. But also, you have all of these people on the left who are saying, america's bad America. I'm opposed to Western civilization, yada, yada, yada. And so what we've basically done is we've irradiated the conventional language and icons of expressing patriotism, like, going to the Mall is now a partisan gesture on the 4th of July, which is outrageous and offensive and all that.
- [59:12]
A
Yes.
- [59:13]
D
But so what happens is what takes its place is, like, British dudes going to BUC EE's and talking about it on Instagram. And people are like, I love this crap. Right. Cause it's a way to talk about loving your country as it actually is that cannot be coded as partisan. And he almost needed the World Cup. You know, this foreign strange ritual with this clock that goes backwards and no one wants to score. You know, they bring this thing to America, and it's kind of like this, you know, this acid test thing. You know, this thing that you. This reacting agent that these fans come in from Europe, they're like, oh, my gosh, the media lied to us about how terrible this country is. And our media, whether it's on the left or right, lied to us about how either super sophisticated or how much Europeans hate us. And it turns out that the things they love about America aren't our checks and balances. And the Lincoln Memorial, it's frigging free refills and air conditioning. And, like, that's awesome. You know, And I think that that's so.
- [60:16]
A
Hey, me too. I love. That's what I love about it.
- [60:18]
D
I think that's a super. Part of. That's a big of part. Part of, like, the reaction to the superfans from Europe is like, oh, my gosh, these guys see us as we really are, and they think we're pretty cool and they're pretty nice about it. And like, oh, my gosh, this is a nice country, and it has nothing
- [60:32]
C
to do with politics, you know, and also I think what's important is we're seeing how much regular Americans actually like people from other countries.
- [60:39]
A
Yeah.
- [60:40]
C
Because, you know, we've had this real xenophobic rise on the populist. Right. And so I think a lot of people came with an enormous amount of trepidation, especially from, you know, countries that have been in the crosshairs of Donald Trump, that what kind of reception am I going to get? And, like, Boston seemed to be overjoyed to be just drunk dry by the Scots. And, you know, you've seen things like,
- [61:01]
B
a little shame, but also a Real shame.
- [61:03]
D
Yeah.
- [61:04]
C
That they're, you know, was it Algerians? They got to step up their game in Lawrence, Kansas. I can't remember. And the Kansas were like, yes, we get the Algerian team. I can't remember, you know, which country was there. But this sort of. And then also it's reminded us of the beauty of this country, which in. And all the vitriol around the birthright citizenship. Think about this. Virtually every country coming to America to play here also can connect with a community that already exists here that has ties with that country. And they kind of have this cool, like, family reunion in a way. And it's really neat. And I love this tweet that I saw. And I always hate to say things like, I love this tweet that I saw because it says I'm on social media too much. But it said it's almost like it's a big sleepover with long lost cousins after mom and dad had told us to hate each other for five years. And we find out that, oh, you're actually super cool. And that's sort of the sense that you've gotten from this World cup moment is this reunion, this reconnection of America with the rest of the world, where America is kind of sort of also the rest of the world. And I think it's a beautiful thing. I'd love to see it. It's been incredibly heartening. And I'm not a soccer guy. Like, I'm the guy who's furious at the red card that I saw yesterday with no knowledge of the rules. Right. And I'm still furious about it. My favorite again. I'm gonna do it again. My favorite tweet of the morning was barstool sports with the, you know, the Washington crossing the Delaware iconic image saying me and the boys appealing. The red card. You know, I, you know, I love it. So there's just so much to love. And I feel like the last two to three weeks have done that in a way and brought that to us. And then I'd also add, I honestly that that whole Knicks in five thing and what happened with the New York Knicks and like this just spontaneous wave of joy in a city that is, you know, not really known lately for a whole lot putting. Spreading a whole lot of joy to America. I thought that kind of primed the pumpkin for then what was to come.
- [63:10]
A
Yeah, a very good friend of mine who lives in New York said it has not been as patriotic in New York as it has been in the last month or so.
- [63:19]
B
911 was pretty patriotic.
- [63:22]
A
Well, since this person, no, in a long time since this person had lived in New York because of the Knicks and the World cup and everything else is just sort of an outpouring of that feeling. Well, listen, I am going to, by the power vested in me by the Dispatch Media Company, declare that America's 250th birthday is worth our time. And this discussion as well has been worth our time. I want to thank Jonah and Megan and David for joining me to talk about all of this and I want to wish everybody who is listening a Happy Independence Day. Happy Birthday, America, and we will talk to you next week. Time. If you like what we're doing here, you can rate, review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns or corrections, you can email us@roundtablethedispatch.com we read everything, even the ones from people who think America deserved that red card that's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in and thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure, thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.