The North Koreans Do a More Nuanced Show

Welcome to Bags to differ, The Bulwark weekly roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right. I am Monocharon, Sydney aided columnist and policy editor at the Bulwark, and I’m joined by our regulars, Bill Galston of the Bookings Institute in the Wall through journal, Linda Chavez of The Newskin Center, and Damon Linker who writes the Substack newsletter, eyes on the right. Our special guest this week is USA Today columnist, Jill Lawrence, author of the art of the political deal. I want to thank you one and all.

Thank you, Jill, for joining us. Thank you for having me. So we are going to begin with a tale of two speeches with Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden giving dueling speeches. We woke up on president’s day morning to the prize news that president Biden was in Keith, which was apparently quite the feat of first of all, secrecy, but second of all courage on his part because it were, you know, it’s a war zone in an area where there is no America and military presence, and Biden chose to do that. He had to take a long train ride through Poland and then Ukraine to get there.

So kind of amazing, and he gave a wonderful speech in Poland. A couple days later. So, I want to begin with you, Joanne. I guess, when people listen to this, it will be the one year anniversary of the Russian invasion. But I’d like to hear your reflections on the interest phenomenon that we have a hot war going on in Europe, the worst since World War two.

But we also have putin’s attempt as we saw again during his speech this week to make it a culture war. And, you know, he talked about this in terms of not that he’s fighting to obliterate the Ukrainian existence, but to fight Wokeism, in the United States. I did the West. Right. Well, thanks to Republicans for giving him his cues

there. I mean, to wake up on president’s day and find Biden on this trip a few days before the first anniversary of the war was just an amazing symbolic situation and also beyond perfectly timed, everything he did and said, was completely intentional, completely consistent with how he’s been since this all started. And really was quite the contrast with the Russian president. So here we go. He calls this a test for the ages.

That the allies must meet. His whole speech was about hope and resolve and inspiration. And then we have Putin who was doing diversion, distraction, culture war attacks, lies, projection, the things he said about Ukraine starting a war, Russia trying to stop it with force would like to solve the problem. Peacefully, you know, this is Well, as Tom Nichols, the Atlantic writer calls it, it’s so well in. It’s just nothing that anyone connected to reality could accept at all.

And so Biden is just continuing to exceed expectations at least for people like me who think, well, maybe he’s keeping quiet. You know, I believe someone talked about this a couple of weeks ago on your podcast. He’s trying not to polarize the country on this. He’s trying not to turn away Republicans. It just is mystifying to me.

That something as clear cut as this situation is still subject to need your opposition to a Democrat. Ron DeSantis comes out and talks about how it’s There’s no strategic goal. There’s a blank check. And this is not the party of Reagan, obviously. It’s gotten very far away.

But how do you not see the difference between, say, a reaction to Vietnam or a reaction to Iraq and a reaction to this, which is just such a threat to the entire world. So it’s very sad to see the partisanship, and I I hope that Biden has satisfied the people who were waiting for him to say, this is why we’re doing this. This is why we need to keep doing this. This is the most important fight of our lifetime.

Linda, I thought it was a beautiful speech I really did. I thought the one he gave in Poland really did check all the boxes. It would be nice if he also spoke about that more often in this country. But it was incredible. And also, I think Jill’s point about the major partisan reaction is really just dismay.

I mean, look, this is the sort of thing where in a different time, in a less polarized era, you know, Republicans would be able to say, well, you know, we don’t agree with Joe Biden about many things, but this is a matter of national security, and this is a matter of right versus wrong, not left versus right. And supportive, right, with some exceptions, we should be clear. I mean Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham have been really strong, but What did you make the speech on the reaction to it?

Well, first of all, I absolutely agree with you. It was a terrific Speed Chi actually also delivered it very well. I think it wasn’t too long ago on this program was a week or two. Before that we were talking about his state of the union, and I think many of us bemoaned the fact that he hadn’t said very much about foreign policy. It’s been almost his entire time.

On domestic policy. Well, he certainly made up for it. And like chill, it’s sort of, you know, sent a thrill. Through me when I woke up and turned on the TV and learned that the president was actually in Ukraine. I mean, he wasn’t just on the border or he would you know, he was actually in there.

He was, you know, attending a church there’s now a almost iconic photograph of him standing where he almost looks like he has a halo over his head. And as a Catholic, both Biden and I, Catholics, it sort of, you know, did. It sort of sent a shivered down his spine. But Look, the Republicans what they are doing is so awful. And it shows my age, I guess, but there used to be time when the president of the United States of whatever party, when he stepped foot outside of the country, We were all united and we did not criticize him when he was abroad.

And that was universal. It was true of Republicans when the democrats were and control of Congress and Democrats who knew Republicans were in control. Well, that clearly has gone by the wayside. But, you know, for someone like me who doesn’t agree, with Biden on a whole lot of policy in terms of domestic policy. And sort of looking to see, is there an alternative conservative Republican who can appeal to a voter like me.

I have to cross DeSantis off the list. His comments about Ukraine, his dishonesty, and his ignorance, seemed to me disqualifying. And as somebody who has always voted first and foremost on foreign policy and defense. And on economic issues of domestic policy, as a secondary matter. This, to me, was disqualified for DeSantis.

Now it doesn’t mean that every Republican has been bad. In fact, you know, there was the Munich conference and there were Republicans there, including House Members, the Chair of, you know, the Foreign Relations Committee the minority leader in the Senate all were there, and they said it did all the right things. But for those who were running for office, this was very, very point. Damon

Linker, Linda Chavez, and I are the one fraction of one percent of the voters who vote mostly on foreign health see. We’re I think we’re it.

I’m gonna do it for you guys. Yeah.

Okay. You made a point a few weeks ago, Damon, that so much of which way the Republican Party, which is kind of poised between Maga, America Firstism, and old fashioned American strength, and world leadership that you said so much will depend on which way, Ron DeSantis jumps. And what I was thinking when you said that, but they didn’t say, but I was thinking, when is Ron DeSantis ever shown any inclination to put any daylight between himself and the MAGA base. And sure enough, this week, he comes out as my former colleague Amanda Carpenter wrote, president Biden went to keep and Ron DeSantis went to Fox and Friends. And on Fox and Friends, he said, this fear of Russia going into NATO countries and all that and steamrolling.

You know, that has not even come close to happening. Unquote, well, pay no attention to the fact that the brave Ukrainian people and all of the arms and so forth that the NATO countries have forwarded to them had a little something to do with that, plus NATO’s very existence. And then he said, this typical sort of MEGA talking point Biden’s very concerned about those borders halfway around the world. He’s not done anything to secure our own border here at home, etcetera.

Yeah, etcetera. It is very nicely queued up as you’ve reminded listeners that I was, you know, posing this question a few weeks ago about this all important question, you know, we know where Trump stands. And then Nicky Haley and a lot of others who are kind of on the periphery, waiting to jump into the race. We know that they’re more traditional hawkish Republicans. But where would the senators come down?

And he did clarify that this week. Although, In the interest of analysis, this is not in any way an endorsement of what he said. I do think it’s important to parse the precise things that DeSantis was doing in these statements which were, you know, very perfectly timed. I don’t know if they had, like, a heads up that Biden was going. Like, how do they know to have him on it?

Like, eight in the morning when Biden was showing up? There in Ukraine. The timing was a little uncanny there, but it is interesting that I think he did not go full magga full magga is to say along with Mersheimer and some other realist foreign policy analysts that this war happened because bad policies of America going back decades of provoking Russia and meddling and it’s near abroad and, you know, it’s our fault. Port Putin’s just trying to have control of his neighborhood and we should stop meddling in it. Trump has danced around that view for a long time.

Tucker Carlson says it on the air all the time. And yet DeSantis did not say that. He blamed Biden’s weakness and withdrawing from Afghanistan. And that is a different position. That’s the position of a guy who’s being very cagey who wants to get close to Trump on Ukraine so that he can’t take abuse from Trump on Ukraine.

While suddenly digging at Trump for, of course, starting the policy withdrawal from Afghanistan. In the first place but also still being critical of Biden for executing it poorly. DeSantis is in political terms a shrewd guy. And I see this whole dance that he did there on Monday. As very calculated, he wants to differentiate himself from Haley and from the others.

Who are more hawkish among the anti Trump faction of people who are gonna be running, and he wants to get as close to Trump as he can without abandoning what I think his instincts are, which is to be more internationalist than Trump himself. So, you know, again, this is in no way an endorsement or defense of what he’s doing. I think it’s pretty despicable and substance but as a political move, it didn’t really surprise me. It’s pretty much exactly what I expected him to do. And it shows that the cajuness continues here.

And the contrast with what we saw from Biden over there was pretty dramatic and the last brief thing I wanna say because of what I said last week listeners might remember, I I hit Biden pretty hard. On this point of how I wish he would talk more about this. And as if he heard me, though, I’m not taking credit. The

fear of

being too different.

Was unbelievable. Yes. It’s it reaches far he could not have made me happier with that surprise visit to Ukraine, to keep, to an act of war zone, and then the speech afterwards in Poland. Bravo to Joe Biden on that. And I think for those who do care about American International, finalism for the good of the country, for the good of the world, have a very very clear picture right now of who our two parties are, where they stand, where they come down on these issues?

Bill Galston, two things. One, Cooten did make

an announcement in his speech that he is pulling out of the last arms control treaty that was in negotiation between the US and the Russian Federation. I’d like to hear your views on that. My sense is that he’s trying to frighten people that that’s a little bit of nuclear saber rattling on his part, which he has done before. In fact, it’s milder than it was last year at this time when he was really threatening nuclear annihilation for anybody who interfered with his invasion of of Ukraine. But the other thing he did was, as I was mentioning with Jill, that he went after the culture war aspect of this, which is so interesting because some people on the right really do fall for this.

He said, look at what they’re doing to their own people. The destruction of families of cultural and national identities and the perversion that is child abuse all the way up to pedophilia are advertised as the norm and priests are forced to bless same sex marriages. Now first of all, this is a little rich coming from a person who was literally kidnapping Ukrainian children and brainwashing them in Russia. But in any event, I don’t recall a time when a foreign adversary was so cued into what would appeal to a particular audience in the US. What do you make of it?

I guess I would say, Mona, check and check. You’re right on both counts, although I do think we need to parse count number one. A little bit. It’s my understanding that Putin did not formally announce that Russia was withdrawing from new start. Rather that they were suspending cooperation under the terms of the agreement.

And I’ve read a couple of arms control experts who say that that’s a distinction with the difference and that under favorable future conditions, the door remains open to reentering cooperation. But he hasn’t left the building. As for your second point, this is not new. This is a line argument that foreign autocrats have been employed for some years now in order to seduce the American right, which doesn’t take a lot of work. Victor Obin started this.

And Putin, I think, is something of a latecomer to this. But certainly, what he’s doing is very blatant. And potentially quite significant, which actually brings me to my third and fourth points. The decisions that the Republican Party, especially in its congressional mode, makes over the next year, will be absolutely faithful. And I hope that that speaker Kevin McCarthy figures out how to manage his caucus to a yes.

When the issue was posed, of extending aid for Ukraine. Because if that doesn’t happen, it will be a catastrophe. And not just for the United States. I would also point out putting on my political hat for a second, that DeSantis’ decision opens a very wide field for a potential more traditional Republican candidate for the presidential nomination to really make a coherent and even passionate argument. For a mechanism in foreign policy, the third and fourth and fifth place people right now are not going to gain any ground by aching desantis beeping Trump, but they do have an opportunity, assuming they believe it.

To underscore a firm principled contract position and, in fact, create a long overdue foreign policy debate within the Republican Party, which is piece of a much larger overdue debate. So I see DeSantis as having given an adversary a huge opportunity to rise, to become larger, to articulate a principal basis for a Republican nomination contest. Jill, on Earth two point

o, there is a really great Republican candidate who makes the case and starts with a tweet from Trump or a truth from Trump where he is basically being the spokesman for Kim Jong un saying that he’s very upset about the exercises between the US and South Korea, and it’s a waste of money, and it’s terrible, and it’s very upsetting to Kim Jong un. And, you know, you would imagine that, again, on Earth point o. There could be a Republican who would say, what the hell? I mean, you know, the guy is speaking up for our enemies. It’s one thing to say, oh, you know, he’s making nice with Kim Jong un in order to get a deal to have Kim give up his nuclear weapons, but that didn’t happen.

So now he’s just his spokesperson.

So

you’re looking for the Republican that’s gonna stand up. Okay. That’s

Yeah. That’s the idea.

I mean, the whole time we’re discussing this, I’m thinking was Cheney was Cheney was Cheney. Yeah. You know, which is not a viable possibility. She has the courage and

she has the character to do it. The problem is the audience. Is there an audience for it?

You know, it would be an audience that might, I don’t know, have the same priorities as you and Linda, about a strong foreign policy. And you know, not that concerned about economics. I don’t know. I mean, you know, I only see a lane independently, and I don’t see a lane towards winning. I could see a lane towards helping Joe Biden or whoever the Democrat is winning by dividing conservative votes.

But in terms of you know, actually winning the presidency? No. There’s just no way to assert that world leadership, Reagan’s vision in this party. And when Trump first ran, I thought, well, great. I actually agree with him on this, but it was because we’d been enough gastian for, what, twenty years?

And because Iraq was, you know, an unprovoked invasion by the US, and it was different. It’s not the same as this. So I think that Bill Johnston is right, that somebody could actually get some traction and put that point of view out there for strong leadership in the world. I’m not sure a person like that could get the nomination.

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Okay. Moving on to our next topic. We had a revealing document Dominion Voting Systems is suing Fox News Corporation for definition, and they released a filing in that case where they had asked for some re judgment. This is routine in these cases, both sides asked for some re judgment. And there were pieces that were redacted, but this was page upon page upon page of the most extraordinary revelations that Dominion got through discovery of the internal discussions within Fox about the election laws.

And what they privately were saying to one another while in public they were giving this stuff credence. So let’s go to you first, Damon. Start wherever you want. Like, with the time that one of the Fox News reporters, Jackie, Heinrich went on Twitter to fact check and correct something that Trump was saying, and she corrected it. And this caused an eruption from Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity saying get her fired.

This is killing our brand.

Yeah. Well, and they talk a lot about the stock price getting hammered — Yeah. — probably because they’re getting partly paid and stock options and so forth. It’s ugly, ugly stuff. I can’t say it’s that surprising was more a confirmation of what pretty much everyone suspected.

That Fox News is a kind of center right journalistic outfit with a rabid disinformation organization tacked onto the top and it’s the ladder that drives most of the money and costs the most because each of these extremely talented individuals who have their prime time shows or earning, you know, seven, eight digits of income a year. And it’s pretty vile. I mean, at this point, there is no reason to suspect that any kind of shame is gonna work. To change this, the only thing that could possibly change is an extremely severe punitive damage from the suit It’s one point four billion. Is that what they’re asking for?

One one point six, you know,

you know, few

a few hundred million here and there and then we’re talking real money. So I guess I would say the only thing I can hold for and I’m not a lawyer, but this sure sounds compelling to me in trying to show malice and intentionally deceiving people. Is we have to hope for the greatest, largest possible outcome in this suit to really hurt Fox News and maybe they will backtrack a little bit and this kind of completely egregious behavior will be rained in a little bit. Again, it’s not going to be conscience, it’s not going to be shaming, because they’ve shown abundantly by now that they couldn’t care less about that. I mean Tucker Carlson comes off in these emails.

I mean, it’s very clear. He doesn’t believe anything he said. It’s all just nonsense. He sits there and collects his paycheck and goes on TV every night and lies to a bunch of rooms. And he knows that’s what he’s doing and he couldn’t care less.

So nothing’s gonna change it unless the company is hurt so badly by this that they say, look, we cannot let this ever happen again because we’re gonna be out of business. So knock it off. Will it happen? I don’t know. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Yeah,

Linda, I’m going to violate one of the rules of this podcast, and it’s because I want to be very accurate here. So I am gonna use a little profanity, a little trigger warning there for this. Okay. So this is a direct quote from Sean Hannity that he sent to Susan Scott, Susan Scott. So this was again about this.

It was Jackie Heinrich, who had fact checked the president. So he sends an a memo saying, I’m three strikes. Wallace shit debate, election night, a disaster. Now this BS, nope, not gonna fly. Did I mention Cavuto?

So Neil Cavuto had at one point cutaway from a presidential spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany press conference because he said, wait a minute. Wait a minute. She’s saying all kinds of things that are not proved and can’t be proved and I’m not gonna be party to this and I’m gonna turn it off. And so that didn’t go down very well with the top brass at Fox. And, you know, a couple of things, Linda.

First of all, it’s worth dwelling on this because I’m afraid that this may be as good as it gets. That’s to say, I’m afraid there will not be a great jury award here. Why? Because it could be that Dominion is asking for too much money. In Fox’s reply, they claim that the people who bought the company in twenty eighteen only paid eighty million dollars for it.

If that’s true, then this award would be completely out of proportion to the damages suffered. Maybe that’s a possibility. But in any event, jurries or, you know, they do tend to be friendly to this kind of thing. They don’t like it when, like, it was we just saw with Alex Jones. They don’t like it when media figures lies so fragrantly and hurt people.

On the other hand, it may not turn out that way for a lot of other reasons. But this revelation by itself, you know, should be given as much oxygen as possible to persuade the persuadable that this is not a news channel.

Well, I guess I need to start with a disclosure. A disclosure because I was paid very handsomely by Fox News as one of their commentators from two thousand and one till out, I think it was two thousand fourteen, maybe the last year that I had a contract with them. And I was always happy to go on and to discuss a variety of issues. I will say that on the immigration issue, my views, according to the producers and to some of the on here hosts confused people because after all, I was conservative, but hey, I liked immigrants. I liked immigration.

So I have that history of Fox News. On the other hand, I think there has been an enormous change. Yes, Bill O’Reilly was all about entertainment. There’s no question about, then Sean Hannity has always been about entertainment. And they’ve always leaned right.

And what used to sort of irritate me is that they often would pair me with a liberal and they would always pick a weak link. And from my point of view, it’s no fun to debate somebody who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. So, you know, they were certainly skewed. But they have gone off the rails. Whether they will get one point six billion dollars is questionable, but they might nonetheless, get a favorable verdict.

And I don’t think it is necessarily only the amount of the verdict that is going to count. I think it is also the question of the precedent that this will set. And I’m not a lawyer and you are so you can correct me if I’m but, you know, malicious intent and reckless disregard is a very high standard. But it is hard for me to read these texts and emails from their on air personalities and from Rupert Murdoch himself. He’s, you know, the big guy owns the company.

And realized that they knew very well that the election was not stolen, that it was not rigged, and yet they continue to perpetuate this myth in their reporting and in their on air statement. So I think they could end up. With a verdict. And, you know, it’s clear to me that as it stands now, you know, I’ve joked on the program before that I watch Fox News so you guys don’t have to. I can’t do it anymore.

First one’s not even entertaining, but they don’t offer a kind of, you know, conservative take on the issues the way they used to and have the fair balance as they like to portray it. There is no balance there. And they are so heavily skewed. And they also cover stories that in my view, you know, should not be dominating the news. You know, when you’ve got a big story, certainly, story about Ukraine, a story about what’s going on even in domestic policy.

You’ll turn on Fox News and all they’re doing is battling the culture. Force and highlighting stories that ought to be, you know, one day stories at most and kind of minor stories. Not the kind of fixation. So they have an audience. This is all about making money and what was clear in terms of those text was the bottom line was this is hurting our brand.

We can’t afford to lose customers. NewsMax is siphoning away. Our most loyal watchers. And therefore, we’ve got to pull back and bend the truth in order to keep those people watching us.

Yeah, including, as you say, Linda, Rupert Murdoch himself, who is quoted in these documents. He said keep an eye on NewsMax. He he wanted everyone to do that. And then he said Trump will concede eventually, and we should concentrate on Georgia. On Mona interrupting here.

Concentrate on Georgia means the runoff election that was happening. This was in early November of twenty twenty. And he said, quote, helping any way we can unquote. So there you go. Nice, dispassionate view there.

And then he said, we don’t want to antagonize Trump further. They had antagonized him by calling the election for Biden. But Giuliani take him with a large grain of salt, everything at stake here, meaning that they could be, as you were saying, Linda, they could be losing their audience to NewsMax, and they had to engage in fan service. Just a quick point on the legal matter. I think they easily clear the bar of actual malice here.

But I wish they didn’t have to, honestly, because I think the courts have way over interpreted who’s a public figure. I mean, the only reason that Dominion Voting Systems is a public figure is because they were defamed. And that seems to me to being a little bit backwards — Right. — shouldn’t be that way. Right?

Right. And so but in any event, even with that higher standard, this certainly needs it. They obviously knew what they were saying was false, and they said it anyway. So that’s that. Okay.

So Bill Galston, this idea of being concerned about the brand and about fan service rather than about delivering a fair product ties into something that I linked to last week in my highlight of the week, which is that The nature of news now is one of the problems in our society because the commercial interest of people like Fox is antithetical to the national interest, arguably. And others too, it’s not just Fox. What do you make that argument? Well,

news in the United States has always been a commercial enterprise. And so the fundamental question is why the commercial incentives have shifted so far in the direction of outright falsehood. And there one would have to do a deep dive into the disappearance or at least the weakening of the broad center of the American electorate that made it possible for broadcasting to be a profitable business model. It has now been replaced almost entirely with narrowcasting as a business model, and that creates very perverse incentives to divert from the path of truth or at least pursuit of truth. I mean, the old saw was that journalism was the first draft of history.

And now it appears to be the first draft in many cases. Of, you know, a disagreeable fiction novel. So in order to deal with this problem, one would have to address at the same time the underlying political and social changes that have made this conversion of journalism boss So that’s comment number one. Comment number two is about the legal standard. Setting aside the complexities Mona that you pointed to about being a public person or a public entity, I agree with you completely.

About that argument being backwards at this point. Certainly, nobody had heard of Dominion. Before they were defamed. It’s as simple as that. But if you’re a juror, being instructed by a judge, I suspect that you’ll hear something like the following.

To proved defamation, a plaintiff must show four things. Number one, a false statement purporting to be fact. Check. Number two, publication or communication of that statement to a third person check a few tens of millions of times. Third, fault amounting to at least negligence.

Well, this isn’t just reckless disregard this is a deliberate lie and it is now absolutely clear that it was a deliberate lie and what the motive for that lie was. And fourth, damages or some harm caused to the reputation of the person or the entity who is the subject of the statement. As far as I’m concerned from a legal standpoint, if this isn’t a slam dunk case after the revelations that came out because of the disclosure, I don’t know what is. And I would be amazed if the jury didn’t find for the plaintiff. In this case, I’m not a lawyer, but I’m saying I would be amazed, and I would be further amazed if the effrontery that Fox displayed in treating this subject did not lead to a considerable damage award intended by an outraged jury to send them a message.

So I’m an optimist about this case, and I I hope I’m

right. I do too. Okay. Jill Lawrence, one of the best lines in the whole filing was from Fox News, president Jay Wallace, who describing the programming of Lou Dobbs since fired by Fox said that the North Koreans do a more nuanced show.

I’d

like you to react to that, but also this one. Suzanne Scott who was the CEO, I believe still is CEO Fox News. When when she got an angry message from Carlson about the viewers fleeing to NewsMax, she immediately responded that she couldn’t see how these people could not failed to understand that it was urgent to call the election in Arizona because Bill Salmon, who was the former VP, that it was, quote, his job to protect the brand, unquote, protect the brand.

Well, Some of you may know my background. I’ve spent decades as a news reporter for the Associated Press and USA Today. Some of you have probably been interviewed by in the eighties. Bill and Linda. I mean, this whole idea you ask is Fox a News station.

No. It’s a propaganda machine, and I I think it’s true. North Korea would be more nuanced on some of this. And protecting the brand in this case means protecting the audience from truth. And really, this is not a goal of any news organization.

I’m not saying that interest don’t matter they do. There’s a lot going on. I could personally tell you stories. I can’t even count the number of times my husband and I both been subject to commercial pressures in our careers, but most legitimate news outlets are obsessive about facts, fairness, and correcting mistakes, and it it hurts me to think of people like Benjamin Hart who was so terribly injured covering the war in Ukraine to be, you know, on stocks and friends where, you know, Rhonda Santos just said, this is a blank check for, you know, it was no real objective, well, except for saving Ukraine. But — Yeah.

— you know, in checking Russia, The other thing is that as an editor for several years and a writer of opinion and an opinion editor, facts are even more important to an opinion, to be believed, to be legitimate, have any chance of persuading anyone to carry your part of the argument. You’ve got to base your argument on facts. And so when I see what’s going on there, anyone who did what they do at any other place that’s a legitimate news outlets that would be fired instantly. Whether you’re an opinion journalist or a war reporter or a host of a show, you’ve got to tell the truth. You’ve got to stick to the facts.

I mean, maybe I’m really old fashioned and old, probably both true, but this is just the business. I have a folder on my laptop that’s called lies on trial, and it’s just been there forever. And I hope against hope that this will be the outcome of the Dominion trial where it’s not just the business they lost and the reputational damage their executives had to flee their homes. They were in danger. You know, this was a very fraught situation.

So Yeah. You I’m getting really exercise to your

No. I forgot that part. Thank you for remembering that. Yeah.

Well, it’s my life. It’s my career that we’re talking about here and it’s so corrupted by what we’ve seen just You know, I mean, I know Chris Starowaltz. I know he wouldn’t have done a false call or a premature call on Arizona. You know, people who are trying to practice journalism, who are trying to set check people in power. They shouldn’t be threatened with firing.

They shouldn’t be actually fired. They shouldn’t be driven out. So it’s all turned upside down, and I just pray that the Dominion case will help us put things right, we’ll send that signal, set that precedent that some of you have talked about.

Okay. Thank you so much. Let us now briefly talk about one more thing, not to give marguerite Taylor Green unwarranted attention but she did say something this week that I’m afraid is not just her own nutty musings. She talked about a divorce, a national divorce. And she said, everyone that she talks to, this always comes up, which I believe, because it is out there.

And it’s particularly circulating on the right, but it’s not exclusively on the right. There was a poll for example by the Virginia Center for Politics had found that about forty one percent of Biden voters said that they agree or at least somewhat agree that it’s time to split the country into red and blue states. So Bill Galston, I’m gonna start with you this time. It’s a little worrying this kind of talk because it’s insane.

It’s insane. It’s all too easy to say where it’s coming from. The more we focus on the culture wars, which are much harder to negotiate in both senses of that verb, the more we see ourselves as an irremediably divided society, which I believe is not the case. Mhmm. But it’s going to take a change in our politics at the top.

In how we talk about the cultural issues. We desperately need a national leader Who understands that the cultural issues cannot be sidesteped and cannot be resolved simply by taking one side firmly? But by looking as hard as possible for common ground even on these very difficult issues. It is rarely the case, and I address this to my own side of the divide. I’m a democrat.

It is rarely the case that there is no truth whatsoever in the criticisms of one’s own position from the other side however ill tempered and ill advised it may be. And the longer we believe as Democrats that we can simply pound our fist on the table and talk about the economic issues and avoid the deep cultural divisions in the country. The worse it’s going to get. A quick second point, there are no red states and blue states. There are red areas and blue areas.

There is no Mason Dixon line for the culture war. It is marbled through our geography and through our society. It was possible, barely possible, to imagine secession. In eighteen sixty, although it did produce this new state of West Virginia, as an indicator of a deep divide within that geographical territory. But to say something like that now is not an invitation to secession.

It’s an invitation to internal struggle that will end with blood in our streets evenly spread across the political landscape of the country.

Damon, that’s such an important point that it’s not like we have red states or blue states. Every single state, no matter which way it tends to go for president has within it sections that are for the other party, and mostly it’s along the urban rural divide. And it’s really dangerous as well as come on. It is just absurd to talk about succession or divorce. I mean, who would get the thirty eight hundred nuclear warheads that are spread all around the country?

Who would get the courts? The federal treasury, Social Security checks.

I mean It is certainly true that in any kind of practical sense, it’s an absurd proposition. We’re a country of three thirty million people in one nation and as you and Bill have both indicated, we are intertwined with each other. And as you said, if you’re going to try to find some cleavage that really gets at the division, it is the urban rural one. And so what are you gonna have like an archipelago of all the cities and then surrounded by a sea of red and those are gonna be two countries with one embedded within the other. It’s absurd.

But even in the in those terms, in my area just outside of Philadelphia, I think my area voted seventy percent Biden, thirty percent Trump. But I have two or three Trump voting families on my very street. What are they gonna do? Like, pick up and move twenty miles west of here where it’s more of the opposite seventy percent Trump voter and they’ll live there and then kick out the Biden voters who live there and they’ll come move in here. I mean, and then we’re gonna repeat that, like, five hundred thousand times around the country.

It’s a sir. The problem though and I I totally am with Bill and wanting to depolarize our cultural disagreements. And I emphasize that in my writing a lot, but it is also the case that we’re dealing with here and this gets back to Marjorie Taylor Green and her loveliness. We’re dealing here with a party, namely the Republican Party, that sees it very much in its own political interest to intensify this stuff as much as it can because it thinks and because of the way, you know, of the demography breaks down along political fault lines, they are largely right that they benefit politically by intensifying these hatreds, by getting their own voters, to fear and hate people in, quote, blue states and getting them to believe that the people in blue states hate their guts and look down at them and think that they’re inferior? And is there some truth to those claims?

Yeah. There is, unfortunately, but it’s not anywhere near as bad or severe as they claim it is. And they say that it’s that bad because when their voters feel that way, they show up to vote on election day. And that’s really all it comes down to is Margery Taylor Green wants to be the queen of polarization because she thinks that will strengthen her own party’s political position and her own political fortunes going forward. And as long as that is the case, it won’t be possible to depolarize on these issues?

Because, again, one of the two parties is benefiting from it or at least they’re and so convinced they are that it might as well be true whether or not it is. And that’s the sad fact.

Not only will the voters show up if they are persuaded that the other side is absolutely Satan, but they will also forgive you for almost anything because you’re against the bad people. And so you can get away with the tremendous amount. You can be George Santos for heaven’s sake. As long as you oppose the truly evil people. But, Linda, there is another side here.

I mean, I do agree with what Damon said completely about some Republicans and stoking this kind of thing, but I do also think that the forces on the other side, the so called woke sensibility is incredibly intolerant and incredibly authoritative Perian and does want to silence dissent as we’ve seen with the letter that was sent to The New York Times last week, you know, about its coverage trans issues and there is a corresponding side of the culture war that is also just very absolutist. Yeah, that’s absolutely true. I think the difference is there’s no question that the woke left

has totalitarian instincts. But what Martin Taylor Green is proposing is actual to castarianism. She has shared she is actually suggesting that you are going to deny the right to vote to people who differ from you. Ideally, if she would turn these newly constituted red states into one party states essentially. And you would essentially have to be, I guess, having some kind of secret police out there to try to figure out if people, you know, go astray.

I mean, this is really scary stuff. She is easy to make fun of. She is easy to laugh at. She doesn’t seem very bright, frankly. I don’t think she knows a whole lot of history.

But what she is proposing has resonance. On the newly constituted right and it’s scary because there are people a lot smarter than March retailer Green, who’ve also asked for this kind of secession. I mean, we see folks over at the American mine, the Clairemont Institute has had people who’ve basically called for this kind of separation. And so,

Alan West, the former child. Texas

GOP. Absolutely. So that’s what worries me about this. And it is so ill liberal in the good meaning of liberal in that sense. It is so much leaning into a kind of totalitarian mindset that I think we should be concerned about it.

Now, you know, I think, you know, she will be slapped down by some. But her growing influence within the majority in the house, her close relationship with Kevin McCarthy. The fact that she supported him in order for him to become speaker of the house and her having gotten choice appointments to various committees, including homeland security. All of this makes it far more dangerous. And so, you know, we can laugh about it.

We can joke about it. She can be, you know, a clown, but the movement that she is part of is not clownish. It’s serious and it’s natures.

Yeah, Jill, we could say, you know, it’s probably a minority of people who would ever take this sort of thing seriously and yet a committed minority led by irresponsible leaders we’ve seen what they can do. We saw it on January sixth. You know, a small number of people committed to something really dangerous can destabilize an entire country.

Well, that’s true. And no one’s really gotten into too much detail about her fourteen hundred word elaboration on why she wants this divorce and what she thinks each side will do, particularly the blue side. And the thing that’s so disturbing, well, besides the part that the only thing she says that’s true has to do with my home at DC. It’s true that the council passed a law saying illegal immigrant convert, and I don’t approve of that. But everything else is an exaggeration or a completely made up situation.

She pretends to know what these blue states will do, like, get rid of the national anthem and the pledge and, you know, take away every gun and replace them with Anthem’s and pledges to the trans flag and black lives matter. You know, it’s really astonishing. I’ve you know, she says that law enforcement will be seen as heroes once again and not for trade as racist thugs. I mean, it’s The problem is the caricature, but also the problem is that a lot of people will believe them. And maybe this is her audition.

To be the vice president on a ticket led by Trump or DeSantis. I don’t know. But she talks about how they’re fed up with the left cramming and forcing their ways on us. It’s Ron DeSantis who’s changing a very successful college into a new Hillsdale and that sort of thing, who’s dictating what Disney can’t say and and not say about his laws. So it’s a very specific view with a lot of exaggerations and falsehoods to back it up, and I think it’s gonna get a huge audience.

But it’s

performative, like most of what she’s doing. Indeed, alright, thank you. Let us now turn to our final topic, which is our highlight or low light of the week, Bill Galston.

Well, I suspect The listeners have picked up the fact that I don’t have much of a voice this week. And that’s actually connected to my highlight of the week. My wife and I are in Chicago for the better part of the week. Taking care of our four grandchildren while the biological units who produced them are enjoying a well deserved rest in Cancun. Mhmm.

Now if you know anything about children. You know that statistically, if you have more than one, the odds are that at least one of them will be ill. At any given time. My highlight of the week has been snuggling with my two year old granddaughter who wakes up singing. Oh.

Whether it’s from a nap or in the morning, she wakes up singing. Oh. I’m seventy seven years old and I didn’t think that second love was possible. But I’m here to tell you that it is. And if the price of the snuggling is the disappearance of my voice, it’s worth it to all the future grandparents of the country, I say, You don’t know what you’re in for.

Gosh. I am so jealous. Alright. Thank you for this, Linda Chavez. Well, of my nine grandchildren, there are very few of them that are young enough to snuggle, but I really appreciate Bill’s little story.

That was wonderful. I have a highlight of this week that may surprise some listeners and some of our co panelists here. I want to highlight a piece that was an opinion piece written in The New York Times on Sunday, and it was written by Henry Lewis Gates Jr. Who I should disclose is a friend in addition to somebody whose work I admire, but he wrote a piece called who’s afraid of black history. And it was in response to the controversy about Ron DeSantis and the AP course but it was not the kind of usual liberal diatribe against DeSantis, etcetera.

Instead, it was a very interesting informative piece about the history of the way in which black history has been taught, and I shouldn’t say black history, the way in which the civil war has been taught, particularly in the south. And he goes into great depth about the propaganda efforts that promoted the lost cause movement throughout the south. And he talks about a woman named Mildred Lewis Rutherford, whom I had not heard of before. And her efforts essentially to make sure that all the textbooks that were being used in the south erased slavery as one of the causes of the civil war that, of course, promoted this idea of the lost cause and the whole idea that the civil war was really about state’s rights in it. You know, was this noble struggle.

And it’s just a very interesting nuance piece. And of course, Henry Louis Gates himself is at Harvard and he’s the director of the Hudson Center for African and African American research and his written many, many books about the black experience in America. But for people who want to understand how it is that the south came to have this view of its own history and that distortion of that history and why it was that black scholars pushed against it and how the history of blacks in America should be taught.

I couldn’t recommend more highly a piece than this one by skip gates. Thank you so much. I’ll just note true story. My husband’s college roommate freshman year was from the South, and he actually was surprised to learn that in Philadelphia where my husband grew up, they didn’t call it the war of Northern aggression. No joke.

Alright. Damon Linker. Well,

this week, I’m not gonna point to something I’ve read or something else like that that I’ve encountered intellectually. It’s more an observation that I’m pondering and trying to grasp. This was inspired by the fact that a guy named Vivek Ramaswamy, who’s a thirty seven year old, very wealthy entrepreneur, has launched a presidential campaign for the Republican nomination. He did so on Tucker Carlson Show the other day, and he’s basically the full spectrum anti woke candidate. He talks about little else.

Everything is about culture war even though I don’t know if technically he’s a billionaire or just has several hundred million dollars, but he’s very wealthy. This has led Bernie Belvedere, who’s the editor in chief of Arc Digital, to remark on Twitter that this guy is a red billionaire which is an interesting combination of the idea of everyone being red build of, like, taking a pill and waking up and realizing that know, the left is in charge of everything and then combining that with him being a millionaire or a billionaire. But it’s very odd. We have Peter Sealed have Curtis Jarvin. We have Elon Musk.

And now we have Vivek Ramaswamy. This class of extremely wealthy men who have become completely radicalized by an almost conspiratorial hatred of certain trends on the progressive left of which I am also a critic and several people on this show are regular critics, but did they have put this concern at the absolute center of their politics and they are all trying to rise to the top of a kind of populist revolution on the basis of these issues It’s a very peculiar, a friend of mine remarked today in talking about this, that we need a new Joan Didion to really just focus in on the sociological fact and tell its story because it’s clearly it’s a thing. It’s not just one person or of people. It’s you you envision this group of people like all getting together and just kind of whipping each other into a frenzy about this stuff. Had a very exclusive cocktail party somewhere.

So so just an interesting observation or at least I think it’s interesting. I hope our

listeners do too. Thank you. Okay. Jill Lawrence. So is this supposed to be a highlight or a low light?

Yes. Whatever you wish.

Well, I’m out here seeing my kids and it’s very depressing because they don’t have children. I don’t have grandchildren and they are very depressed about environmentalism and AI and the drought and the floods and the fire. One lives in LA, one lives in Salt Lake. But I am hoping they change their minds. So I’m gonna give you my political low point of this week.

It’s speaker McCarthy giving Tucker Carlson the January sixth footage. That’s already happened. We can’t avoid that. It reminds me of when Bill Barr got the head start on framing the Mueller report, he’s gonna have a head start. And if we trust his judgment, he won’t give away National’s security secrets of the capital?

How the capital is protected? I don’t know. Do we trust his judgment? Is he gonna create a whole new narrative, a whole fictional narrative of what happens? I think that this has got to be the thing with the most ramifications, and I see that some people our urging Democrats to get hold of the material and give it to regular news outlets so that there’ll be some counterweight.

I think it may be already too late for that.

Yeah. That is a very depressing development. Okay. Thank you for that. So mine is a little unusual.

It’s a corrections slash apology. So a few weeks ago when we were discussing the Republican new majority in Congress and their plans to investigate Hunter Biden Linda said that she thought that would be okay. And I said, no, it’s not okay. They should when when has a congressional committee ever investigated presidential relative. Well, when I was doing some research on Jimmy Carter this week, I noticed that there was in fact an investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee into Billy Carter, Jimmy Carter’s Blake Brother, who had a contract with the Libyan government.

And so at the time, there was an investigation, and there was a subcommittee of the committee on judiciary share, you investigate individuals representing the interests of foreign governments. The Libyan government at the time was a state sponsor of terrorism, and it was a topic of much worry that Billy Carter was in their place. So, Linda, sorry about that. You were right. And There we are.

With that, I want to thank our guests, Joe Lawrence, and our regular panel, as well as our sound engineer this week, Joe Armstrong, and our producer, Katie Cooper. And of course, thank you to all of our listeners, especially those who subscribe and to rate and review us and help get the word out. We will return next week as every week.

Former Navy SEAL Sean Ryan shares real stories from real people, from all walks of life. On the Sean Ryan show, This

one’s about my friend call sign ninja. So

there

was all these things that I wanted to do in army. I was like, this is it. In army, you do roads and air fields, and they say, well, they can test and see what you fall. I was like, yeah. But if I could do that and all this stuff too, just drive tanks, jump out of play.

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