Chicago’s Message
Episode Notes
Transcript
Axios’s Josh Kraushaar helps analyze the lab leak story, the Chicago election results, and Trump v. DeSantis.
highlights/lowlights
Josh’s:
Linda’s:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html
Bill’s:
Damon’s:
https://quillette.com/2023/02/22/heideggers-downfall/
https://harpers.org/archive/2023/03/historys-fool-ernst-junger/
Mona’s:
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This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
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Welcome to Begg to Beg to Differ. The Bulwark weekly round table discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right. I’m Mona Chang’s syndicated columnist and policy of your Bulwark, and I’m joined by our regulars, Will Saletan of the Bookings Institute in the Wall Street Journal. Linda Chavez of the Niskiren Center and Damon Linker who writes the Substack newsletter, eyes on the right.
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Our special guest this week is Josh Crosshart. Senior political correspondent at Axios. Welcome back, Josh. Welcome again to my regulars. We have a lot to get through this week, busy busy news week.
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Let’s start with the Department of Energy revealing that it now believes the lab leak is the most likely source of the coronavirus pandemic. This has been the source of so much nonsense. I’m gonna invite you to begin on this, Josh. The positions of the left and the right have been so locked in on this. It’s as if nobody can evaluate facts without considering whether it advances their side’s preferred narrative.
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Howard Bauchner: Yeah, Mona. This is an example of how there’s just such little nuance in our political discussions these days. And this has become an issue of political tribalism on both sides. And I was still stunned by some of the reaction on the left to the revelation that the Department of Energy is of reevaluating its analysis and has minimal confidence or some some degree of confidence that it’s now the LabLINK from Wuhan was the culprit of COVID, talk show host from Stephen Colbert to a lot of progressive commentators continue to think that this is still not a big deal or still not a significant news development. And in the big picture, I think it’s a reminder to have some kinds of intellectual humility when it comes to evaluating complicated issues where you don’t have automatically the degree of expertise.
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I remember in twenty twenty when Tom Cotton first raised the possibility that COVID was potentially from a a lab in Wuhan. And you had a lot of traditional media calling him a French conspiracy theorist, calling in anyone entertaining that idea as being racist. There was a lot of heat, not a lot of light, and there was a rush to just condem anyone who disagrees as something of a partisan enemy. And a lot of mainstream papers have actually issued corrections from that period of time in twenty twenty, and I think there’s been a course correction, and I think there’s been a lot of good done in how we kind of evaluate some new information in facts where we don’t have the full story. But look, I think it’s a reminder that, you know, not everything is black and white.
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There’s a whole lot of nuance and the the scourging trend to just paint an issue in partisan terms rather than trying to get facts and develop the reporting to make a sound conclusion. Is is, you know, it’s part of a disillusioning trend in our political system.
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Howard Bauchner: Right. Linda, admittedly, there were people who introduced racist elements into this fairly early, including Trump and kept calling it the Kung Flu or the China virus and so forth. So there was a little bit of that, no question about it. But when Tom Cotton simply said that one of the possibilities is that there was a lab leak. I mean, it just happens to be the case that the city where this thing originated has one of the world’s largest institutes of virology where they were looking into various kinds of gain of function, research, etcetera.
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He was lambasted. He was called a conspiracy theorist. The Washington Post ran a piece called Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus fringe theory that scientists have disputed and other mainstream outlets also sort of so called fact check cotton, attributing to him, views that he didn’t express,
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and it was a pretty unimpressive performance. What do you think? Well, that’s right. And I can remember at the time thinking, yeah. Well, of course, you could have.
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I mean, did it definitively come from a lab was it nefarious where the Chinese I don’t know what’s suicidally deciding to unleash a virus that would wreak havoc on their own country as well as the rest of the world? Probably not. That does not make sense. But could there have been an accident in this lab that could have led to the spread of this disease. I mean, it just defies reason to think that this is an impossibility.
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So now we have the Department of Energy saying, with not great confidence, but nonetheless saying they think it was the lab, was the source. You have Christopher Rae saying that the FBI thinks that it was the lab that was the source of the virus that’s spread and has killed so many people. And it just seems to me that particularly those of us who are very critical of Trump and the way he handled much of the pandemic. We keep saying, you know, let’s look at the science. Let’s look at the facts.
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Let’s look at the evidence. Well, it’s not conclusive, but to say that there’s no chance that this came from anywhere but a wet market, in Wuhan, I think is crazy. That’s, to me, crazier than the thought that it could possibly have come from a lab. And the fact is we just don’t know and we may never know.
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Yeah, along those lines, Bill Galston, One of the reasons that we may never know is that China has not been cooperating at all with getting to the source of this virus. They released a little bit of data right at the very beginning of the pandemic, and then they clamped down and made it extremely difficult to find out what really went on. So that’s part of the problem is that, you know, we have resin bind and assigning all of our intelligence agencies to find out what they can and and evaluate the evidence, but most of the important evidence is in the hands of Xi Jinping. Absolutely right. And the Chinese have behaved from the beginning as though they had something to
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hide, which doesn’t make the task of assessing the facts as they become available any easier. But as a couple of other panelists have already indicated, this is part of a larger story about our politics. Where a narrative is constructed for political purposes. And facts that are inconsistent with that narrative or even doubts that are inconsistent with that narrative
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are
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simply disregarded or exiled to some epistemological closet and the story rules on. And it’s hard for me to say that the contemporary media has done a very good job of pushing back against this trend too often they are part of it. Where a narrative line gets established and then it’s very difficult for contrary evidence to breakthrough certainly not to what used to be called Page one, and all of this in turn is exacerbating the mistrust that average citizens have about everything that they’re hearing, and it is reinforcing the tribalism that is a substitute these days for skepticism in common sense. This is not a good story that we’re discussing.
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Yeah. Damon, on the right, you’ve had any number of contradictory themes that have been rolled out about the virus, you know, either it was no big deal, it was nothing, it was less serious than the flu, or it was actually a Chinese biological warfare attack. They don’t seem to be hung up on consistency.
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No. Not at all. And as several of the panelists have been talking about and Bill, just prior to this. They’ve all noted variations on this theme that what happens is that you obviously as always, you have kind of universe of facts out there in the world and we need the scientific method and reasoning to try to figure out what’s going on, to have hypotheses, and test them. But the various narratives that crop up in the uncertainty that surrounds the hypotheses before we have affirm conclusion, get sucked up into and wrapped up into the negative partisan ship and polarization of the moment and narratives get formed, and then each side has a stake in defending its position regardless of what the evidence, the science, eventually.
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Shows, and this is tailor made in this case to really be bad because the virus clearly did arise from out of China. And our relationship with China is quite tested at the moment over the last several years. The country coming to realize that our hopes for closer relationship and liberalizing of China is not really taking place and that they are in fact our primary geopolitical rival and threat in the world and reassessing all kinds of things. From kind of historical narratives about the end of the cold war and triumph of liberalism to questions about the supply chain for various things and including pharmaceuticals, all big issues and big problems and things that have to be addressed, but because it happened in China and the Chinese are never going to allow our scientists to go in and have a look around and they’re never going to be completely forthright about what they know about it. We will never really know for sure, and it is worth noting that the energy department’s conclusion about this being that the Lab Leak theory is probably correct was stated with low confidence, which means that’s what they think happened, but they were quite forthright in admitting we don’t really know for sure this is the most plausible scenario out there, but we don’t have enough evidence to stake high confidence in it.
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And in that kind of scenario and you mix it with the polarization and the
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negative
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partisanship and the result is going to be these trrenched narratives where people can say pretty much anything they want knowing that there’s no one who has enough evidence on one side or the other to definitively prove them wrong. So it’s a big mess. Howard Bauchner:
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Yeah. I just wanna underline though something that Josh said, because I mentioned, you know, that CNN and others had run these sort of dubious fact checks on Tom Cotton and on the story in general. And a number of outlets have issued corrections. Since then. So that is important.
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That is part of our search for truth that, you know, you have to be able and willing to acknowledge error and correct the record, which is something that Fox News is not really very good at doing.
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Alright. Let’s turn to politics now, and I’m gonna come back to you, Josh Krausehart, big race in Chicago for the melody and its so interesting because well, first of all, the incumbent didn’t even make it through the first round. So she’s out. Laurie Lightfoot is out. And what is shaping up is a really classic left right battle, but they’re both Democrats.
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Yeah. Mona get your popcorn out because this is gonna be one of the most important tests, not just for the city of Chicago and its leadership and its ability to get the city up back under control and get crime down. But it really is gonna have loud ramifications for the future of the Democratic Party and whether the moderates within the party can reassert themselves and show that a tough on prime message And a message on school choice, education reform
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— Yeah.
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— Paul Vals is the more moderate nominee for mayor who has been a lifelong Democrat, but at one point in two thousand nine, called himself a Giuliani Republican back when Rudy Giuliani was a little more of a serious figure. And he is a centrist. You know, he’s been called a sort of a right winger by people who don’t like his politics, but he is very much within the centrist. Side of the Democratic Party, which was a lot more numerous, a lot more outspoken, not that long ago. And his opponent is pretty much as good of a caricature of the far left activists that you could draw up in Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson.
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So Johnson in twenty twenty called very openly for defunding the police. Paul Dallas has called for two thousand more cops on the beat in Chicago. A Dallas was CEO of the Chicago Public School System and the New Orleans school system where he was a big proponent of school choice and accountability measures. Johnson got the endorsement from a very powerful and controversial Chicago Teachers Union. And you obviously have also the issue of race in this contest where Dallas is white and white moderate, and Johnson is African American.
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And the big question to me as an analyst looking at this contest, you’ve got the ideological divisions. And you actually look at the African American vote in that first round of ballot meeting. And most black voters stuck with Lori Lightfoot. Johnson actually did really well with the most white progressive elements of the city and Validus did well with moderates and what we used to call whiteethics
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— Mhmm. — in
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the outer areas of Chicago. And Lightfoot still did very, very well in the African American community. So this race will be decided by African American voters who are very concerned about crime. It’s a big issue as especially in the south side and west side of the city. And whether they will vote on identity or whether they’ll vote on the issues in
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this very consequential era. Right. So Damon Linker branded Johnson has said that even now, as Josh mentioned that he was for defunding the police three years ago, even now, he says that he will not fill vacancies in the Chicago Police Department as they arise, and they’ve already been quite a few they’ve lost a fair number of police. It’s a matter of opinion as to whether they need to hire more. But he has said, quote, spending more on policing per capita has been a failure.
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Black voters are gonna have to, you know, weigh in on this and they are not in general for defunding the police?
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No. And in fact, when you dig into what’s off called the cross tabs of opinion polls over the last year on crime. You find that people of color typically are more concerned about it than white progressive voters. So this is not great. I mean, the whole issue about policing in urban areas is such a mess in our public life right now.
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It’s quite despairing, but, you know, we have to push ahead and try not to despair. But the first step to doing that is recognizing that the solution is not to get rid of the police. It’s to spend more on police and train them better. And punish them when they abuse their power. And that is a kind of multipronged strategy that takes money and time and effort, and it means going to head off and with police unions, which is not easy or something Democrats are eager to do in part because their unions are often bound together with other urban unions that are very deep within the Democratic Party coalition.
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It’s a big complicated mess. But the answer is not to say, let’s stop hiring police. Let’s have fewer police. The fact is that Bulwark Chicagoans often live in areas with really terrible violent crime, and it is horribly unfair to them. To have the government throw up up its hands and say the solution is to basically let the criminals rule your neighborhoods We worry a lot about harm from violence, from school shootings, and that is obviously a very serious problem.
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But what about the harm of raising generations of kids in neighborhoods where people are getting shot to death right outside where they live, even aside from the actual, the literal consequences being one of the victims of the spray of bullets that’s going on there in the street, just the anxiety and fear and danger in people’s daily lives, sending your kids out to the store, to school, to the school bus in a situation where you never know when the next shooting is gonna erupt is atrocious and all Americans should be appalled by this, and we need to address it. But again, the politics of it, especially in urban areas, with the combination of the kind of ideological attachment of certain white progressives to defunding rhetoric and ideas. Combined with the lack of influence that the people who suffer from this violence have over the kind of democratic machine in these places where only a Democrat can win. It’s just bad news. And I will be watching as I sure we all will as Chicago.
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To find its way through this massive maze. Linda, I’m
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old enough to remember. When I was first becoming politically aware, there was a term that can just as easily apply to today’s progressives. It was limousine liberal. Right? It was people who were not themselves touched by urban crime because they went around at limousines, but they were very, very hostile to the police and to any measures that would make neighborhoods safer because it wasn’t their problem.
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And it kind of does amaze me to see progressives walking into this trap again because Republicans were able to win elections for decades on being tough on crime. Now I totally agree with Damon that, you know, we also need to focus on training police better and making sure that they’re not abusive and making sure that they don’t violate people’s rights and murder people. Etcetera. But the message of defund the police or don’t hire more police, I mean, that’s such a trap that
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least some parts of the Democratic Party are just walking straight into, like, into an open manhole? Well, that’s absolutely right. And the politics of this race was very interesting. I mean, here you have a organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union an organization. I know well, having worked for the American Federation of Teacher, of which the CTU is an affiliate for many, many years.
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He’s running against the former head of the school system and yet it doesn’t seem to be schools that were an issue, although that certainly should be an issue in the city of Chicago because education is very troubled in Chicago. But the point is that crime is what’s driving all of this. And, you know, blacks may have stayed with Lori Lightfoot for whatever reason and racial solidarity might have been one of them and perhaps they will transfer their votes now to Johnson, but it’s hard to believe that blacks who are the largest victims of crime are not also very concerned about what has happened in their city. I mean, the number of deaths shooting violence the right loves to point out whenever there’s some mass shooting a well more. People were shot in Chicago last weekend than in the, you know, most recent mass shooting, which is, I don’t think, a fair comparison.
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But the point is there are a lot of deaths on the street of Chicago. But it is going to be interesting to see what power the unions have this time. They are very effective organizers And I think Dallas is gonna have a race on his hands. If you look at the numbers in terms of the initial vote, it doesn’t look like it. He’s got almost twice as larger percentage of the vote as Johnson did, but that’s before perhaps the organizing could take place.
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But even the union politics are interesting because, of course, Dallas also had a union endorsement, but it was the police union. Not — Right. — teachers. And there are a
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lot more teachers. Right? Or are there? I’m not sure. Are
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there a lot more teachers? And there are Yes. I would I would think so. Yeah. But doesn’t necessarily mean that just because the union — No.
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— you know, endorses that they’re gonna vote. And by the way, a lot of teachers in the city of Chicago probably do not live in the city of Chicago. So Right. They may pay dues to the Chicago Teachers Union, but they may not be voter in Chicago.
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Right. Right. Right. Okay. Will Saletan, so this issue is already being seized upon by Republicans, of course.
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And we we saw Ron DeSantis, for example, who’s on a book tour, spoke to police in New York City, in the Philadelphia suburbs, and in a Chicago suburb this week.
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Well, indeed, he did. I have a prediction that if Paul Validus becomes the next mayor of the city of Chicago, taken in tandem with Eric Adams’ victory in New York City, that is going to have a very sobering effect on the Democratic Party. And I think will probably reinforce Biden’s instincts to shift in that direction and to avoid anything that could be seen as signaling weakness on crime. But do forgive me, Mona, and faithful audience. If I roll up my sleeves and do a little nitty gritty political analysis of Chicago, a city I’ve come to know very well.
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I did my graduate work there as did my wife, my son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren lived there, my wife was born there, and I’ve studied it pretty carefully. The beginning of wisdom is to understand that the story of Chicago is no longer just a black white. Story. Whites are thirty three percent of the demography of Chicago, but Hispanics actually outnumber African Americans in the city of Chicago. Hispanics now have twenty nine percent of the vote.
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Black’s have twenty eight percent of the vote. And so we really can’t analyze the prospects of the two candidates without looking at the way the largest minority group in the city voted. And the Hispanic candidate, Hazuz Chuy Garcia, finished pretty weak fourth with fourteen percent of the vote. He did, however, carry six wards. The awards in Chicago with the densest concentrations of Latino voters.
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And In five of those six words, Validus actually finished second, not either of the two leading black candidates in the race. Why is that? Well, there was a Donnie Brook over the Regist percent of the Chicago Awards in twenty twenty, and the bulk of the contest was between blacks and Hispanics. For control of swing warts and it was a bruising battle that left a lot of hard feelings particularly on the Hispanic side because they felt that they did not get their share of pluralities in thewards. And it is certainly possible that the lingering feelings from that competition will lead some Hispanic voters to opt for Validus rather than Johnson.
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If that happens, then Dallas will no longer be dependent on humongous turnouts. In white districts, largely in the far northwest and also in the southeast and far west, which is his base of support. One other thing to point out, the Bulwark vote did stick with lightfoot for the most part, but her margins in the warts that she won were unimpressive, and even more significantly, turnout in those warts was miserably low. And Lightfoot did very poorly in the words with high turnouts and did her best in the words with low turnouts. So if African American enthusiasm doesn’t increase and if Johnson is not able to capture the imagination of black voters in Chicago, which is certainly possible for the reasons that Linda among others has pointed out, that would be another indication of a likely, valus victory.
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And to come back to the beginning of this soliloquy, I think a victory of someone who is tough on crime and in favor of school choice would send a very loud signal to the credit party?
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Yeah. Damon, what’s your view on this? I mean, you add that to, you know, the victory of Eric Adams in New York and the cashiering of Chesapeake, in San Francisco. And you’ve got you know, a lot of messages coming from the Democratic Party’s own voters suggesting what they prefer.
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Yeah. And also, what we’ve seen happened in Portland and throughout the northwest. It it’s happening in places around the country, whereas always, know, there’s never any ending in politics, so we’re always kind of in the middle of the game. And we don’t know how this one and cargo will turn out, but the pieces are definitely in place for a possible outcome that does send that kind of message. And I think it would be a very positive one for the democrats and for the country as a whole.
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To go back to my despairing cry in my earlier comments, the problem of urban crime and safety in public areas is a major problem and something that we have to address as a society and the first step toward doing it. I think is to reverse some of these trends that have allowed it to fester as badly as it has.
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Josh Krausshart, you had a a note in Axios this week where you we’re taking note of some recent polling, and of course, it’s still super early. And still, it’s interesting that these in contrast to the ones we saw a week or two ago, these do not show Ron DeSantis performing that well against Donald Trump, rather the opposite.
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Yeah. These are four pretty reputable pollsters that not just showed Trump ahead of Ron DeSantis by double digit margins. But I believe in every single one of them showed Trump expanding his support over to Sandoz over the last month or a period of time since the last poll they took. And it coincides, frankly, with a pretty good stretch of about a month for Donald Trump as he adjusts to be that candidate again. He’s not doing these big mega rallies, which certainly are filled with lots of adoring supporters, but it forces him to do sort of the give and take of retail politics and actually have conversations and show empathy and do the things that Let’s not
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get carried away, Josh. Empathy. We’re
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great not a curve here, Mona. As I said in the story, the at least by Trump standards, we’re we’re judging by. But no, you’re right. But look, I thought it was smart politics to go to East Palestine in Ohio last week. Ahead of the president and ahead of transportation Secret Podcast Buttigieg, you know, he had Trump water or the Trump hats, you know, the the classic cash but he also did show as best as he could some empathy and he went to a McDonald’s after the event and took some pictures with the retail staff and, you know, kind of did the things that, frankly, got him on the radar politically in the first place when he ran for president in twenty fifteen.
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Look, you’re absolutely right. This is a snapshot in time. Rhonda Santos hasn’t even announced his candidacy yet. We have a long, long way to go. But I think the lesson as I wrote in Axios is the notion that Trump is just gonna go away.
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The notion that he’s not a candidate that you’d If you’re Nikki Haley, if you’re Ron DeSantis, if you’re Mike Pence, you don’t actually have to say his name. I I think he’s very, very mistaken. And We learned that in twenty sixteen when there was an assumption among most Republican campaigns that it was a phase that Trump success was gonna go away on its own, and everyone was focused on attacking each other. And we’re seeing that exact same dynamic in the early stages of this twenty twenty four contest And if anything, these polls underscore the fact that someone is gonna have to challenge the former president himself. Again, just pretend that his supporters and even soft supporters, people who are gonna be shopping around for a candidate are not ultimately gonna land with Donald Trump in
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the end. Damon, I think you experienced this week something that I’ve experienced, you know, to maybe to a lesser degree also, but there is a species of person out there on sort of progressive Twitter who, you know, if you just even say anything remotely along the lines of I don’t like Ron DeSantis, but he is not as bad as Trump. You will get, you know, Fire and brimstone rained down on your head. So you you had a piece this week. Why don’t you talk about that and the reaction?
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And Yeah.
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Well, yeah, I I wrote a piece for The New York Times that was itself a response to things that I seem published there are a couple of pieces in vanity fair, one in the New Republic in the last month or so. All making variations in the case that Ron DeSantis is going to be just as bad as or worse than Trump. And I’ve also seen lots people more informally just on Twitter asserting this. And this strikes me as wrong headed. Now, obviously, it’s not a slam dunk obvious case, but I wanted to kind of build the case for saying that as bad as DeSantis is and probably will be going forward, Trump brings equal badness on policy initiatives combined with distinctively bad things that are wrapped up with who Trump is, his character, his maliciousness, his capriciousness, the fact that he has total contempt for the rule of law, tried to overthrow the government, make himself a dick changer, had himself for starters.
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You’ve you’ve you’ve heard of these. Things. And so I wrote this piece that said in it several times, yes, to Sandoz is bad. But what happened is in addition to the phenomenon you referred to at the top about how there are certain people who assume if you don’t say Ron DeSantis is evil incarnate and the worst republican to ever walk the face of the earth you must be saying, Actually, to say this is pretty good. But then the New York Times in one of their iterations of the piece put a headline on the piece was something like my fellow Liberals are exaggerating the awfulness of Ron DeSantis, which on one level is accurate to the piece because I was saying that relative to the awfulness of Trump, it made it sound like the point of the piece was to say, Ron DeSantis isn’t so bad.
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Which then
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fed into that tendency. So I had swarms of hundreds of very angry liberals attacking me for days because the Times has such an impact and other people would discover the peace unlike it and then tweet it out. And then another round would surge up And, you know, my feeling about all of it as unpleasant as the experience is, I do think that it’s had the intended effect of beginning a debate that sort of has been raging now all week on this question of exactly how bad is DeSantis and how bad is Trump? And when it comes to things like political tactics, you know, when DeSantis stands up and says, as he says, regularly, what I’m doing about these Florida public universities, all I’m saying is that the voters of Florida are taxpayers that these are public institutions, they should have a say in what they teach and who they hire and fire, which sounds very reasonable, I think, a lot of people. And then the liberal response is not actually universities are centers of learning and they need freedom of academic pursuit of the truth and government shouldn’t be involved in that making some kind of rational case.
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Instead, they scream fascist, Yeah. I fear that this is gonna have the effect of a lot of kind of ordinary, low information voters scratching their heads and going, what? But it sounds you you sound crazy. You liberals. What are you saying here?
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So my message very often tends to be calm down. Right? And — Yeah. — you know, that’s not the kind of thing that in and of itself gets a lot of traction online. But a lot of people screaming at me and then me calmly saying calm down in response does get some attention.
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So at least I’ve had that impact. Guess.
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Well, Linda, one of the things that has arisen in the last week in addition to Damon stimulating that particular debate is the question of whether DeSantis is too much on the autism spectrum to appeal to voters, whether he’s too nerdy, he’s not funny, he’s not enjoying himself. He doesn’t make audiences laugh, and this has been a subject that I’ve seen batted around a lot this week, whereas everyone says, look, you know, say what you will about Trump being a villain, at least for his audience, he was entertaining, and they had fun at those rallies. And he made them laugh, and the synthesis to grim and doer. I don’t necessarily buy this. What do you think?
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No. Neither do I.
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Okay. I do think that, look, he’s not all that appealing. Meatball ran as I think the Bulwark had in the headline, and I think that’s one of Trump’s That’s
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a
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definition. Right? Mhmm. And he’s got, I think, a rather unfortunate voice and people make a lot of mileage out of things like height and candidates or milks and candidate’s voice is very important as well. And his is not a very fortunate one.
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You know, I don’t think he is the kind of person that you would in any stretch of the imagination called charismatic. And again, for whatever you think of him and issue, no, I don’t think much of Donald Trump, he did attract people. He did pull people toward him. And I don’t see DeSantis doing that. On the other hand, I think that Republicans, or at least those who are not part of the hardcore mega base, are looking for competence.
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They are looking for someone who can articulate policies that are right of center, maybe even very right of center. But do it in a way that is not quite as ham handed as Trump did. And there, I think, you know, DeSantis may have some appeal. And while CPAC is going on this weekend, in Washington, D. C.
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DeSantis is not going there. Many of the other people who are being talked about, including Mike Pence, are not going there. Instead, they’re going to go to a meeting of donors that the club for growth is putting together. And so, you know, there clearly is a lane for Ron DeSantis. Whether he’ll make it all the way through, I mean, we just don’t know these things.
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It’s, you know, it’s hard to imagine. I can remember way back when when Jimmy Carter, you know, first through his head of the ring. Was like Jimmy who, nobody knew who
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it was,
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nobody could imagine that the peanut farmer from Georgia was gonna even become the nominee, much less president of the United state. So it’s very early out, but certainly Republicans, at least a portion of the Republican Party, is looking for an all alternative to Donald Trump. And at the moment, at least, Ron DeSantis seems to be the favorite in that group.
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Bill, most people think that whatever Ron DeSantis’ strengths as a candidate, and he certainly very canny as a politician. The day will come inevitably when he will have to confront Trump, he will have to take him on directly, and that’s a big unknown, big black box. About what the outcome of that will be. But I will just present to you the results of some focus groups over the last couple weeks where Republicans, hardcore Republicans were asked about Trump’s attacks Ron DeSantis, and they didn’t like it. Which is interesting.
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It suggests that for the first time, Trump might be finding some resistance even among his own followers when he goes into attack mode against somebody because DeSantis has established himself in the minds of even magma Republicans as being someone they like. I think that’s right. And I absolutely agree with the proposition
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that at some Ron DeSantis, if he wants to be a serious candidate, a let alone winning
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candidate,
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is going to have to go toe to toe with Trump and it will be more than entertaining to see how he manages that competition. But there’s a question that interests me even more. And it’s this, will any candidate stand up and articulate the values and programs that I associate with the Republican Party that at trracted you and Linda to its service decades ago. Is someone gonna make that case? If so, who and how.
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We’ve seen bits and pieces of it. Certainly, they’re the beginning of a serious division in Republican ranks over Ukraine and sustained American support for Ukraine. And there there are indications that Mike Pence for example, is going to articulate what I’ll call the McConnell line, which is very full throated and internationalist in the Reagan tradition. But I don’t need to tell you or our listeners that the older Republican party is more than a foreign policy. It’s also a set of assumptions about the economy, the role of government in the economy, the role of the American economy in the world economy and, of course, the role of America in the world.
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And by the way, the role of patriotism, inclusion, immigration, and a number of other important historical factors in building. American. And above all of that, is the question of whether conservatism has a human base even a friendly and agreeable face Ron DeSantis the face of anger to the electorate and the world. And I am pretty sure that there’s a portion of the Republican Party that will continue to respond to that message. And the question in my mind to go back to the beginning of this comment is whether anybody will stand up and seriously articulate that message and be prepared to defend it against the new base of the Republican Party.
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I’m going to toss this to Josh Krausehart, and I’ll just add this comment, which is I do agree with Bill that there’s probably still a constituency out there for some of those things that Republicanism used to stand for. I’m not sure though that on immigration in particular, which is unfortunate because it’s really dear to my heart, but I don’t know that anybody in the and party these days would dare make the case for more legal
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immigration. What do you think? Well, I think Bill hit the nail on the head, which is that there’s a divide within the Republican Party on some of these core issues, foreign policy, first and foremost, trade immigration. And going back to the Ron DeSantis conversation, I think the challenge Ron DeSantis is gonna face is how he triangulates effectively, if at all, between the maggie wing of the party, which in my estimation is ascendant. It’s growing whether Trump is there or not.
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Versus the old school conservatives, the traditional Reagan conservatives that until recently made up the the lion’s share of the party. And, you know, the debate over funding and supporting Ukraine until the end is one of those fascinating divides that is literally, if you look at the public opinion polls, splitting the party in half. Maybe a majority of lawmakers are are still on the side of making sure money in military aid is gonna continuing Ron DeSantis, but the voting Republican public has moved in the other direction. And Ron DeSantis gave this extremely awkward interview where he was trying to have it both ways. He started out by sort of talking about how Biden was weak in Afghanistan and wasn’t hawkish enough.
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And by the end of the interview, he kind of ended up echoing a whole lot of MAGA talking points about Russia not being a threat. To the global order. And look, that’s a real red flag for the DeSantis emerging campaign. That this guy’s brand is that he knows what he stands for and that he’s taking on all the enemies on the left. And on such a core issue or at least a core issue, subsequently, the fact that he can’t figure it out, and I I talked to his campaign and they were after that interview, they just did not wanna talk about it foreign policy at all.
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They were very nervous about weighing in any further. That is not a good sign. This is a guy who’s gonna be on the big leagues if he runs for president and makes the announcement. And the fact that that big issue was such a tricky task for him both shows his challenges and also the challenges between these two wings of the Republican Party that have increasingly irreconcilable differences.
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Yes. Well said, alright. Let us then move to the final segment. Our highlight
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or low light of the week, Linda Chavez. Well, there was a major expose in the New York Times over the weekend about migrant children who were working in unbelievably dangerous brutal jobs. And it was an expose that was based on interviews, I guess, with more than a hundred different migrant child workers in twenty states. The ex Bazay talked about children who were working in factories late at night, some of them working on the overnight shift. Tending a large industrial ovens where they could be harmed, working on assembly lines where they were stuffing into bags, things like chinos and other snacks, children as young as twelve years old being up on top of a roof and working as roofers in various places.
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It was horrifying and it sparked a major response from the Biden administration, which I think was a good response, which is to appoint a task force to take a look at how child labor lots are being flouted in many places. But I think the article itself pointed out to me how little we understand what the challenges are for this population. There were over a hundred and twenty thousand unaccompanied children who came into the United States in twenty twenty two. They work through the system very quickly, spend about thirty days under the auspices of the Office of Grand Feechie resettlement. And then are essentially formed out either to relatives or to foster homes.
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And then basically, nothing much is done. There’s not much follow-up. These children are not eligible for any of the kind of nutrition programs that we make available for poor children across America. And it’s not surprising that many of them end up feeling they must work. Some of them may be forced into work some of them may end up working just because they feel an obligation in the households they live in to contribute, which is both a cultural factor and is something that immigrants, you know, I’m sure of those people on the program or listening who had immigrant grandparents are great grandparents.
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Some of them came as teenagers, and they came here not to go to school but to work. So there’s nothing new about this story, but it was horrifying, it reminds us what a problem this is and how difficult it is to solve it. The article was called alone and exploited migrant children Bulwark brutal jobs across the US by Hannah Dreyer.
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Thank you for that. Okay, Josh. My highlight of the week Secret Podcast from Barry Weisworshey interviews. Lake, former governor and presidential candidate, former governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, where one of the more interesting exchanges I’ve heard from Nikki Haley in talking about taking down the confederate flag as governor in twenty fifteen in the aftermath of the horrible mass murder at Emmanuel African methodist, the Piscipal Church. She talked about how she united the state in the aftermath of that awful shooting in her introductory video, but she did not talk about taking down the confederate flag.
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Again, she did not mention that in her kickoff speech, but she speaks extensively about that episode. In great detail and with a real sense of leadership that you haven’t heard writ large on the campaign trail. And look, Haley is not the front runner for the Republican nomination, but it’s that type of outspokenness. And when she talks about sort of muscling, these recalcitrant conservative lawmakers in South Carolina who in the state house were refusing to take down the flag. And there was an episode where she says that they were willing to take down the flag, but they Wanted to keep the poll, the old poll up, and she refused to accept that compromise, and she stood up for her principles, and talks about her own childhood.
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And her father facing discrimination in South Carolina. Maybe that stuff doesn’t play in a Republican primary, but that’s the type of rhetoric from Nikki Haley. That I think could really get her a lot of attention and and really add a little more meat on the bones to her talking points on the presidential campaign trail.
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Yeah. That was arguably her finest moment in public life. And I noticed that she had omitted it from her announcement video, so interesting that she did at least talk about it with very wise. Alright. Interesting.
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Bill Galston.
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My highlight takes me back to the Windy City. Indeed to the mayor all contest. People may not know it, but this is not the first time Paul Dallas has run for mayor of Chicago. He ran the last time, came in ninth with five point four percent of the vote. This time around, he got thirty four percent of the vote, which is in a multi candidate field, a very, very strong showing, although as we discussed earlier, no guarantee of results in the runoff.
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My point is I am a pretty unabashed, Paul Dallas fan. I’ve tracked his career as the CEO of a number of public school systems. He has been a brave and effective leader. In my judgment, for the two major problems that the city of Chicago faces, criminal justice, and public education. He is the right man at the right time.
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And I am encouraged to believe that the citizens of the city of Chicago are coming to the same conclusion. So that’s why he is my highlight of the week.
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Okay. You’re not on the fence then, Bill. Okay. Damon Linker.
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Well, those who aren’t listeners and subscribe to my sub stack, have heard about these two pieces there, but I wanna plug them here because they’re both very good. You actually get two for one today for me. These are a couple of essays about people who are really on the anti liberal right. None of this, you know, hemming and hogging Trump Ron DeSantis, this kind of stuff. These are people who, in one case, a philosopher who became a devoted Nazi and another one who remained at arm’s length from the Nazi party still had definite anti liberal right wing leanings and influence in the Weimar period of Germany and in the years of Hitler’s rain.
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The first of these essays is a very good long piece in Colette titled Heidiger’s downfall by historian Jeffrey Hurf. He’s reviewing a book by historian Richard Wallen titled Heidiger in ruins. It compiles the latest evidence of heidigars, not just complicity with national socialism in that period, but really rapid enthusiasm for it that was much worse than has been known for much of the intervening years where the review Rick counts the way his record had been whitewashed in his collected works in German and other things really recommend this as a Heidegger’s downfall by Jeffrey Heref in Quillette, and then also a very good essay in Harper’s titled History’s Fools by Thomas Meeny. This is a subtitled, the long century of Ernst Junger, who is of very prominent interwar writer who was a decorated veteran from the First World War who went on to become quite a literary smash in the years leading up to the Nazi takeover in kind of glorifying and aestheticizing the experience of the war and really created a hunger for rearmament of Nazi Germany, and then the kind of redemptive violence of war seeing that as an answer all of our problems like, you know, liberalism, things like that boring little liberalism.
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But Ernst Youngar was an important writer and this is an excellent essay about him. So for listeners who wanna, you know, do some deep reading in these themes, I recommend both essays very highly.
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Thank you. Alright. I want to draw attention to a piece that appeared in The Economist It was noting the publication of a study that appeared in an academic magazine and BER And it was titled Opiates of the masses’ question, deaths of despair and the decline of American religion. And this is addressing a point that I’ve been interested in for many, many years because there was a tremendous assumption that really came to a head during the rise of Trump that the source of middle class anxiety in America and middle class dysfunction and the rise of suicides and deaths of despair could be attributed to either deindustrialization, the loss of factory jobs, or alternatively, another very popular theory is that especially noting that a lot of these suicides and deaths of despair are happening among white middle class people. The idea was that they have some sort of fear of becoming a minority in this country and that that is the source of a lot of this despair and anxiety.
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Well, I’ve always been skeptical about that, and this study tracks the attendance at religious services and deaths of despair, and notices there’s a strong correlation. In other words, the more that people actually attend religious services, the lower their rates of deaths by suicide and other deaths of despair, drinking yourself to death or drug overdoses and so forth. And it looked at the fact that, for example, the opioids that are often cited as the cause of these deaths that these started before the opioids really became a thing. And anyway, it’s very interesting Of course, it tends to support my view that people need other people and they need social interaction and they need to be part of a community and of family. And the more people become atomized and alone and lonely, the worse off they are psychologically and this study tends to support that point of view.
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So of course, I’m highlighting it because that’s what I think. But anyway, I will post a link and you can make up your own mind. With that, I would like to thank Josh Kraussfar for joining us. And I want to thank, of course, our sound engineer today, Joe Armstrong, our producer as always, Katie Cooper and our wonderful listeners We will be back next week as every week.
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Former Navy Seal Sean Ryan shares real stories from real people from all walks of life. On the Sean Ryan show. This
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one’s about my friend call sign ninja. So
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there
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was all these things that I wanted to do in the army. He was like, this is it. An army do roads and air fields, and they say, well, but take a test and see what you fall. I was like, yeah. But if I could do that and all this stuff too, drive tanks to better play.
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Do you guys have a sampler platter? The Sean Ryan show on YouTube or wherever you listen.
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