Are Democratic Socialists Reaching Their Limits?

Listeners, I want to tell you about the Competitive Enterprise Institute's How the World Works podcast featuring the dispatch's own Kevin Williamson. Each episode, Kevin sits down with a notable guest to discuss the jobs they've had, why work matters, and the role of work in our social lives. After all, work involves a lot more than the paychecks cashed. So listen to How the World Works, wherever you listen to podcasts, or visit cei.org slash podcasts. Yeah, I might want to download that Exxon Mobile Rewards Plus app. Yeah. Are you the Exxon Tiger? I am. Yeah, you know, new users can earn $10 and points. Five bucks after your first purchase and five after your second. That's a lot. That's a whole lot. It is. Well, hey, you get on that download, buddy. I will. Loading. Download the Exxon Mobile Rewards Plus app and join today. Exxon. Trust the Tiger. For details, visit Exxonoffer.com. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we discussed the results of recent Democratic primaries in the Upper Midwest. A DSA darling goes down in the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary, after polls showed her with a commanding lead. And next door in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed's slim victory over Haley Stevens. A hard-left candidates viable outside of deep blue districts? Why did the polling overestimate these candidates? Then, what is woke 1.0? Has the left properly reckoned with the wokenness of 2020? Is it enough to shrug off the damage the woke moment did with a chuckle and a shrug of the shoulders? And finally, something truly not worth your time, a People Magazine exclusive on Lori Masaro's visit to her son's fraternity. Let's dive right in.

Okay, I want to start today on politics. There's been a lot happening over the past few days, really over the past few weeks. Let's start as we always should in Wisconsin. Joe, I want to ask you about Francesca Hong. She was the Democratic Socialist of America candidate who began the month with a massive lead, if polls were to be believed, over the rest of the field in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, where she went on to lose by 4,000 votes out of more than 700,000 cast. The beginning of the month in the Marquette University Law School poll, which is generally regarded as one of the best polls in the country, she was shown with a lead of 38 percent, or polling lead of 38 percent. The eventual Victor, David Crowley, who's the Milwaukee County Executive, was polling. Two weeks ago, less than two weeks before the vote, at 7%. Jonah, what happened in Wisconsin? Let the history books record that Steve Hayes is asking me what happened in Wisconsin. Yeah, so let's dispense with the polling thing quickly, unless people think I'm wrong in some way, because I just think people, our class tends to obsess about the polling stuff more than I think. A lot of people care, but I think the two best explanations that are not mutually exclusive is one, because we also saw this in Michigan with Abdul El-Sayed, wildly advanced, I guess three explanations, huge leads that came out not to, didn't have fruition. So I think part of it is the people who are DSA voters are much easier to reach and find for pollsters. They're very online. They're digital natives. They don't remind responding to texts and all that kind of stuff. And so I think they're over responding and oversampled. And that shouldn't be a problem except there are a lot of bad polling firms out there that I think goose this a little bit for attention. But second, you don't have to believe that. Or you can believe that that happened, but it was a minor thing and not the dispositive explanatory thing. The other thing that happened is that Hung basically got destroyed by late deciders. And that's because a lot of the early deciders were obviously DSA people who were kind of plugged in. And the people were on the fence were either high information Wisconsin voters who just care about re-election. or low-information voters who weren't following things. And then their introduction to her is how she wants to cancel Thanksgiving and defund the police. And they're like, some of them think that's stupid on the merits. Some of them think it's just stupid for a Democrat to run on. She's not the more electable. And so what's his face? Crowley actually gets it back in the race precisely because he sees the tide moving the other way. On the substance, put the poll stuff aside. I think that one of the things that also happened is that there's a, I don't think it's necessarily some backroom deal or anything like that, though there's probably some backroom deals going on. It's that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders are, as much as I disagree with them, serious people. And they did not endorse Hong, which pissed off a lot of the DSA types. And that lack of endorsement combined with...

The lack of resources and organization that that lack of endorsement represents and that lack of confidence in Hong that represents didn't seal the deal. And I guess the last point I would say is anti-incumbency makes sense everywhere as far as I'm concerned. Kevin and I just recorded an hour and 20 long minute-long remnant about basically how we should just. start over with a new civilization. But if you're an anti-incumbent type in Wisconsin and you're saying that we have to, you know, the establishment backed Crowley or some of these other mainstream Democrats, the establishment there is a pretty left-wing guy named, you know, Evers, who's the governor of Wisconsin. Wisconsin's a liberal state. And the idea that, like, we have to send a message to Trump by throwing out well-known, well-liked. very mainstream, very, you know, serious left of center Democrats because they're part of the system. I just don't think it has the appeal there. that it might in some more purplish places where you could say the establishment is somehow giving into Trump or the Republicans or whatnot. Wisconsin political class, and Steve, you know this better than anybody, has been in a constant state of war with Republicans for 25 years. They're very engaged. They know the leadership. They're very high information voters. Ever since Scott Walker and all that stuff. So you can't tell them, oh, these people you've been on picket lines with for 25 years. They're the establishment and we need to throw the bums out. I just don't think that argument works as well, particularly from a candidate who's not very polished like Hong was. Yeah, I mean, Kevin, let me follow up on that with you. If you buy Jonah's argument that, yes, there may have been some polling errors, but really voters saw her for who she was and it made him nervous. I mean, she was bad of what Jonah talked about with her condemnation of Thanksgiving, sort of sticking to her condemnation of Thanksgiving, even when pressed about it. She gave a series of national television interviews. in which she just didn't, on a human level, she didn't present well. She had trouble answering questions. She seemed sort of meek. She was not sort of brash and confident like Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive candidate who won the senatorial primary in Michigan a week earlier. So certainly you could say that it was in part, at least, the fact that she just wasn't a very good candidate. And yet... She had done enough to have this commanding lead. She won, you know, several hundred thousand votes in a state like Wisconsin with her sort of unapologetically radical views. Is it accurate to say that sort of Wisconsinites just soured on DSA types and progressive types in the last couple weeks because they saw David Crowley as more electable?

Maybe. I think one of the things to keep in mind is that these political contests are contests. We have a tendency in the media to want to tell these stories about trends and everything going one way. So it's either going to be a DSA year or it's not going to be a DSA year. And it's actually going to be, you know, mixed. I don't know if we have really good data on this, but I have a kind of intuition that American voters prefer male candidates to a greater extent than they are willing to tell pollsters. And I noticed in both of these races we've been following the male candidate one, I don't know if that's something there's a lot of data for, women overperforming in polls and then underperforming on Election Day. But we do know from pretty good research on this that certain kinds of deficiencies in a candidate are amplified when that candidate is a woman in the perspective of voters. So, you know, things like perceived meekness or shrillness or inability to be assertive and that kind of thing tend to hurt female candidates and wouldn't hurt male candidates. I suspect that might be a bit of a factor here. But also it's just it was a weird up and down race where you had a guy who was out of the race and then back in the race and all that stuff. So... You know, there are times when the polls just aren't going to keep up with that stuff and or aren't going to be as quick to incorporate new data based on the latest actual events. And it also just may that people in Wisconsin, all present evidence notwithstanding are just a slightly more, you know, sensible than voters in some other states from time to time. But thank you so much. Are Wisconsin voters really super high information? Because I thought like the high information Wisconsin voter lived in Maryland. I mean, I think they're pretty high information, I will say. Are they? I do think they tend to pay a fair amount of attention and often long in advance of actually election day. That's a general rule. But I mean, when you look at the kinds of things, Joan made reference to Scott Walker and what was known as Act 10, these big budget reform things. People who weren't engaged at that point became engaged on both the left. and the right, whether they were supportive or opposed what Walker was doing. So I do think that people pay a lot of attention in Wisconsin. Walker did a great service to Wisconsin politics because, you know how in Finland, like everyone speaks English because nobody ever wants to learn Finnish because it's just too hard and there aren't enough Finnish people to care about. Like before Walker, there were no experts on Wisconsin politics, like outside of Wisconsin. Just nobody followed this stuff. And now a lot of people know a lot more about Wisconsin politics. So. Grateful to have you here is the ambassador from this, this often forgotten backward, backwater of, I mean, this is my moment, right? I mean, I would like to just turn this into an all-Wisconsin podcast if we could, and we could talk about politics, we could talk about Nuske's bacon, we could talk about cheese curts. Yeah, we just, we just couldn't sell it. Door County, where Jonah used to, Jonah used to make fun of Door County. Now we must buy a place in Door County. There's a lot to discuss as it relates to Wisconsin. Megan, I want to follow up on a point that Kevin made, which I think is seriously in evidence here. He talked about trends and the inclination of journalists, especially in a race that's as chaotic as this. I mean, you not only had David Crowley drop out. He dropped out in part because he wasn't going to win. It didn't look like he was going to win. He said there's no.

path to victory here. Sarah Rodriguez, who had been the leading sort of establishment candidate, ended up having to withdraw from the race at the last minute because of some financial improprieties in her campaign. Mandela Barnes, who had statewide name ID because he'd run a few years ago, also was, he was not a non-factor. It turned out he could have been a big factor, but he was not a candidate. at the very end. So this was just chaos over the past, the last six weeks before the actual voting. And yet people are, journalists in particular, are drawing these sweeping conclusions about what this means. The headline the day after the race in the Wall Street Journal was Midwesterners show the limits of far left. That was the Wall Street Journal. The New York Times headline was, A stunning loss in Wisconsin shows the limits of the left. And I've got to say, I think that's just flat wrong. You know, it was shocking earlier that Francesca Hong, being as radical as she was, was the leader, the prohibitive favorite for as long as she was again, if you believed the polling. We first spoke about her back in the spring. But if you look at the results, Kelta Roy's, who came in fourth place, hard left progressive candidate from Madison, Wisconsin. got 60,000 votes, add up her votes and Francesca Hong votes, and you have the triumph of the DSA progressive wing in Wisconsin. It may have been the case that journalists were too quick to say this is the DSA year a month ago, and they seems to me maybe equally too quick to say it's not because of this one loss. Yeah, look, I think it has shown the limits of the left to the extent that, like, you cannot just literally run anyone. And if you put a lunatic who... It was not just that she said a bunch of insane things during the Great Awakening, because that's true of many of our politicians on the left. But it's that she was not good at rebutting them, right? Her... She did not... kind of walk away with any grace. She just kind of attempted to dodge badly and then to laugh it off. And like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is doing a better, who has, you know, as you say, not in this race, not endorsing her, is doing a better job of defending her than she is. Now, it's not a good job, right? The woke one was crazy. Like, Oh, that's your explanation for the firings and the speech policing and the mobbing is that, sorry, I was inexplicably hysterical for a few years. Don't really know what happened. Like, as I wrote in my column, which posted last night, the Democratic establishment and the progressive establishment's idea of how they're going to deal with that stuff is...

kind of, it's like a bachelor party, right? The day after we're like, whoa, that got a little out of hand. Hey, guys, just remember what happened in Vegas, days in Vegas. I don't think that's going to work for Democrats, right? But I also think that Republicans have to appreciate the limits of how much all of that stuff matters, right? It mattered for Francesca Hong, even in a primary, because she is... a really bad candidate. She's not like super charismatic. She's not great on the stump. The number of people who are like, she's charismatic. And I was like, are we looking at the same candidate? You know, I mean, she can speak in fluent sentences, but that's not the same thing as charisma. But I do think there's a kind of an open question because you only have really one of these DSA candidates who's one statewide and it's Abdul El-Sayed. And that is a little bit weird. because he's in Michigan, which has this huge Arab vote, where Palestine is a much more salient issue outside of the DSA. Right. It's obviously super salient for the DSA. And he's not technically a DSA candidate, right? He is not DSA candidate. DSA aligned. But he is. Yeah. He rejects socialism, just to be clear, he says he's not DSA. He's in favor of capitalism. He just wants. He just wants the government to pay for everything. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Not a socialist, though. But he is part of this left-wing insurgency that's been upending Democratic primaries. And Michigan is a little bit of a weird state because it's the only state we're in a statewide race. I think you're going to have Palestine be a... a super salient issue. It's just not for most Democrats, right? It is very salient for the DSA to the point that, like, Zohran Mamdani Maldani has to make a video explaining why he can't arrest Benjamin Netanyahu when he arrives to go to the UN. But outside of those, like, hyper-progressive circles, it's just not something that's moving a lot of votes. And so him aside, the left-wing insurgency is succeeding in really, really, really, really, really, really blue districts. Right? It's succeeding in places where I guess you could argue Graham Platner, that went well. But in general, it's just, it's kind of localized to hyper-blue places. And the DSA politics and the progressive politics that's adjacent to it are optimized for a kind of organizing that has worked in those places for decades. You know, since the 70s, since the 60s, there has been... a kind of like, you know, what Matt Iglesias has dubbed the groups, that there is a way of maneuvering among those groups, of forcing candidates, Democratic candidates, to come to heal, to appease those groups.

And not just to appease them because, like, democratic politicians at all levels try to do that, but to appease them at the expense of saying things that are really going to alienate normal voters. And you saw that kind of politics being grossed up to the national level in 2020. And it didn't work. And you have seen, like, Governor Kathy Hochul realizing, like, actually, this kind of politics doesn't work. I need to back away from it, even though she's in a really deep blue state. She's New York's a governor for those who are not following, who are not familiar with the names of the governors of all 50 states. You have seen five years ago she was saying, well, you know, those millionaires don't let the doorknob hit you in the butt on the way out. And now she's like, hey guys, hey guys, don't leave. We love you. We love you. Come back. You know, like, I made your favorite dinner. Hey, tax base. Come home, tax base. Yeah. And so I don't know that. Like, one way you can read Francesca Hong is just that she's an incredibly bad candidate, and that's a totally fair way to read it. Another way you can read it is that those tactics don't work when you take them up to anywhere except, like, I don't know, maybe you can do it in Vermont, right? But when you try to take it up to statewide races, to national races, where you've got to bring in other voters who are not these hyper-progressive urban professionals or people who... are kind of spiritually hyper-progressive urban professionals like people in college towns, then you are going to have a really difficult time. And so, well, I'm not sure it shows the limits of the left-wing insurgency. We may look back and say, yeah, what we learned from that was the limits of the progressive insurgency. Yeah, Jonah, let me ask you about what Megam mentioned about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who appeared on ABCs this week over the weekend with our friend John Carl and made this comment that has now been at the center of the political discussion over the past week. She was asked about some of the crazy radical positions of the left and of the DSA, and she made sort of a joking reference to, I think it was a city commissioner. who looked back on those days just five years ago and said, woke one, that was crazy. It was, I think, sort of a smart and adept way of getting out of that particular question, as Megan points out. But it seems to be trying to do a lot of work with sort of a chuckle and a shrug of the shoulders of this movement that really in some ways captured the left and the Democratic Party and drove our politics for, you know, longer than the blink of an eye. Yeah, I have a, I mean, I bang furiously on the keyboard about some of this already. And we will put your G file from yesterday, which was even as long as it was. It was a little book, mini book, fantastic G file yesterday. And we will put Megan's.

column also in the show notes. Which was not fantastic. Megan's always excellent column. You said it posted last night. I just assume excellence every time you write something, Megan. But I will confess to have not read it yet. No, it posted at 6.23 p.m. and we are recording this at 8 a.m. so it's not surprising. I'm forgiven. I will tell you it's going to be the very first thing I do as soon as we're done. Okay. Such diplomacy. Gosh. Yes. But with Megan, I actually mean it. I mean, Jonah. There's an institutional obligation to promote his stuff, so. So I agree. I think it's smart and she has the charm and the ability to pull it off of basically saying, oh, that's, of trying to communicate that's in the past. And we all lost her minds back then. And it will work on the people who want to give her and the left a pass for it. You know, the number of DSA candidates who. have given no argument or explanation for why they now don't believe in defund the police or why they now don't call themselves communist. It, you know, like, I used to ding, and I have a lot of respect for Mitt Romney. I like Mitt Romney. I think he was a decent politician in the moral sense of the word decent. I never found his explanation about why he switched from being pro-choice to being pro-life all that compelling. It was a philosophical treatise compared to what some of these DSA people are saying, where they're just with a nod on a wink saying, yeah, I don't believe that anymore. Or basically saying without the nod on the wink, yeah, I can't say I believe that anymore. And it's just nonsense, right? But I just think if you align yourself with incredibly pernicious, dangerous, stupid, historically loaded ideas and movements, and then say you don't believe in what, you have to provide an argument as to why if I'm going to trust you on it. But apparently other people disagree. My problem with the, where I think the idea of what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was trying to do was probably smart politically. I think calling it woke one was either dumb or too clever by half, right? Because woke one, as a lot of people pointed out, kind of implies that there's going to be a woke two. Right. And maybe this time. The reckoning. This time it'll be smarter. They'll be more electric boogaloo. Kind or gentler, woke. But this time it's personal. And also, so I think that the idea of talking about, you know, yeah, that stuff was crazy. You know, well, like, yeah, the cultural revolution. That was nuts, man. You know, Crystal Knocked, what was up with that? You know, like, you need to, like, explain because she wasn't just there during a passing storm. She was part of the movement to cancel people. She was part, she was egging people on. She was defending all sorts of behaviors from, you know, in the streets to whatnot. She was talking about and highlighting defund the police types. Like, she was not on the sidelines of woke one. No, she was not.

She was a central figure of it. And I, you know, my basic view on these kinds of things is if I can't trust you to be responsible and stable. and sober-minded when people are losing their minds, I can't trust you at all. Because, like, it's very easy to trust people when everything's calm and it's in your interest to sound sober and reasonable. The whole point we have, like, rules for behavior, for politicians, for society, for civilization is not for when they're easy, but for when it's hard. And if you can't keep your wits about you and tell your own side, cool it when they're losing their minds. then you don't deserve the trust of the voter. And I just so close, because I can hear the what aboutism brewing out there. I've anticipated all of it, and I agree with all of it. My larger problem with the woke one was crazy thing is the degree to which a lot of conservatives are like, Yeah, it was crazy, but you guys, you haven't apologized enough for it. You need to atone for it. You need to do right by it. You know, you need, we need an accounting and you're not providing it. I agree with all of that. Jot and Tittle. The problem is there's an enormous number of Republicans who gave in and are continuing to give in to their own version of woke one. their own version of hysteria, their own version of paranoia, their own lies and cynicism and hysteria. And the degree to which the exact same things, a lot of people on the right are saying how this isn't good enough for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she needs more of an accounting, also applies. to basically every single politician that has defended the stolen election thing. It applies to every politician that Donald Trump has endorsed. Right now, we've got a runoff in South Carolina between Lindsey Graham's sister and Ralph Northam. And Northam thought that the January 6th stuff was all sci-op and staged by Trump's enemies. There are crazy people defending craziness that it's a different kind of crazy than woke one was. But it's no less crazy. And in some ways it's better. A lot of ways it's worse because it got some of our fundamental institutions and at least woke one as bad as it was, as stupid as it was. was not defending abuses of power by people in power. It was airy-fairy nonsense about some utopian alternate reality that they wanted to live in, about where we didn't have police and didn't need police because everybody loved each other and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it defended some riots. It defended some violence in the streets. And that's outrageous. And people should be had had to account for it.

The right-wing version of it is defending Donald Trump trying to throw a dude who picked up a piece of debris from the reflecting pool in prison because it will help support the narrative of his lies about how he screwed up the reflecting pool. He wants to put, you know, political opponents in jail not on the merits, but because he wants payback. And the people defending that stuff are people in power. people who have sworn an oath to the Constitution, and they are all getting, they all have a sort of unfolding in real time, yeah, this stuff is crazy, man, but I got to go with it, kind of excuse for it. And I think that's outrageous too. And if some Democratic governor had offered a blanket pardon for the George Floyd rioters, yeah. There would have been things said about that. In fairness to Zohran Mamdani, by the way, he came up with a very good explanation for why he changed his mind about defund the police, which is you can't arrest Benjamin Netanyahu without a police department. So I want to kind of like second and expand a lot of what Jonah said. Because this is actually the topic of my column, which, as usual, I have tried to cram, like, a 1,600-word column into 800 words. That's why if you wrote a newsletter for the discad, there would be no such limits on. Just saying. So, but it is the fact that, like, over the last 10 years, everyone has a lot of legitimate grievances. And we can go back and forth about which are worse, because, well, I broadly agree with you, Jonah, if I try to make the best case for the other side, it is that, like, for example, prosecutors in New York were absolutely abusively attempting to wreck, like, you know, trying to jail Trump not over stuff that we can debate whether, like, was he technically in violation of the Insurrection Act and deserves to go to jail or not, but of stuff that was just clearly pretextual and a gross abuse of power that these people campaigned on. And not only that, I would say the majority of democratic institutionalists have defended this, have trumpeted, you know, 37 felonies and all the rest of it, right? And that those people actually have a lot of power. It's not government power, and I broadly agree that, like, people with guns worse than, like, people with pencils. But that this is, like, that this really is offensive and that people have kind of valid reason to have a lot of grievances. And, you know... People were fired. They lost their jobs. They lost their friends. They were unpersoned. They, like, in some cases, were debanked. Had their, you know, like, Cloudflare shuts down. It kind of gross Internet website that, like, shuts down the Daily Keir Starmer. I'm not, like, super sad about it. But it does raise questions about, like, if there is a company that can functionally make it impossible for you to function on the internet, how far are we from government power? Is there a kind of intermediate power that libertarian people like me should worry about somewhat, even if not as much as the government people with guns?

But that said, there are a lot of grievances. Everyone has really legitimate reasons to be outraged about stuff that has happened since 2016, to be personally offended. And the thing that, as I was writing this column, I had a long phone call with my husband because I'm traveling and he's at home. And so we were talking, and I was trying to pin down what it was that so offended me about it. And it was the cruelty of it, like the wanton cruelty, the way that people... were using, you know, racial justice, whatever, to just justify their glee in destroying people and how fun it was to get a mob together and hurt someone and how they would do it in this particularly disgusting way where they would like say, hey, employer, why is your employee saying this? And then when someone called them out, they'd be like, well, I didn't call for them to be fired. Like, you know, you were a grown person and you were behaving like a teenage girl and teenage girls have the excuse that they are teenage girls and they don't know very much about the world. And you don't have that excuse. And it really, like, that is the root. And it's true on the right as well. It's like a slightly different flavor in that the right is willing to take credit for destroying people and they're really happy about it, whereas like the left wants to destroy people without even taking the grown-up risk of owning what they're doing. But I am still very angry about it. I'm still very angry about many things over the last 10 years. And the thing about that is that I want an accounting. I want people to explain why they said ridiculous things and offensive things and why they tried to destroy so many people. I want Republicans to explain why when Donald Trump was, like, attacking the constitutional foundations of our civic order, they were lying supine on the ground, like, frantically scrambling to make excuses for all of this. But I'm not going to get it. And I think I have to just accept, and this is actually the takeaway from my column, it's not going to happen. No one's going to apologize. First of all, our political institutions are way too well sorted. There's no way to force an internal accounting because they're either liberal or conservative. And it would be internally divisive to actually reckon with what has been done over the last 10 years. Because some of the people in the institution who were against going along with Trump and or randomly destroying people who had suggested that biological sex was real. They can't, to do that would divide your organization. It's not going to happen. There's no way to force an external reckoning either. Again, because our institutions are so well-sorted, but also because the voters don't care that much.

They just don't. Like, we care a lot about it. This is in many ways an intra-elite dispute. It's not what they're worried about. They're worried about their gas prices and their groceries and whether their kids are going to have a good job. They are not, like, worried about whether Megan McArdle spent five years waking up every morning and checking Twitter to find out if she was canceled. I found that very unpleasant and, like, I am entitled to be mad, but I should not expect that my anger is going to achieve righteous vengeance because it's not. And sometimes you just got to accept that it won't happen. Look, I agree with all that. I've been making the point about how, like, the Republican Party never really came to grips with Nixon. It just moved on to Reagan, like, right? I get out of that. Yep. Where I think, I'm not saying you disagree, but where I think you allied a very important point is when you say, I think you're right that this is basically an intra-elite argument. The problem is elites matter. Yeah. Oh, I agree. And, you know, when people would always say, who gets to decide this? Well. elites get to decide things. Like, by definition, in every field, whether it's in formal institutions of law and government, or whether it's in academia or in business, there are elites, right? And they are supposed to be imbued with a certain amount of small our Republican virtue. And the problem is we have two sets of elites right now that are dominated by people who are pandering to small populist populations who, I mean, I was talking to Kevin about this yesterday. Try to think of a politician who's willing to say that they're an insider, that they're part of the establishment. Donald Trump talks as if he's taking on an establishment in a Republican Party and a government. He completely runs, right? He talks about himself as an outsider. JD Vance is out there talking about how the system is making the burritos expensive when his party and his boss control both houses of Congress and the White House and have every single Republican living in terror of him. Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren constantly talk about how they're taking on elites. They are elites. They're all elites. And the problem is the whole point of having elites is they're supposed to be the ones who are... trying to have cooler heads prevail during times of moral panics. And instead, we have competing elite panics going on. And so I agree we're not going to get the kind of truth and reconciliation that we all want. But like society, we talk about regime change in Iran. Every serious expert about regime change doesn't think regime change happens anywhere because of protests in the street. They happen because elite factions break. from the power and turn against it. There's no elite faction that is willing to say they're in charge, that they're responsible, that they run things. They want to say that other elites are responsible for all of our problems, even when those elites aren't making any meaningful decisions. And that distortion and corruption of Republican virtue in favor of demagogic, democratic BS.

is one of the reasons you have to start worrying about the center holding. Because nobody wants to take responsibility and be responsible. And look, I agree with all of that. When I say it's an intra-elite battle, that doesn't mean that it's like some sort of effete. Sometimes it is, right? Like, sometimes it is just effete battles for status. Like, before the pandemic, I would talk to, like, senators, Republican senators and staffers. And at one point, I think I said to them, I was certainly thinking it. Like, why don't y'all just go apply to be Twitter moderators? Because that's clearly what your actual passion is, is running Twitter moderation, not, like, running the country. I just mean that, like, look, I have spent 10 years. trying to explain to ordinary voters why what Trump has done to our institutions is so dangerous, and why these violations of civic norms are so dangerous. And I believe very fundamentally that what he's doing is incredibly dangerous and corrosive. What I have discovered is that this just falls on deaf ears, in part because it's quite subtle, right? It's, well, you know, yes, Joe Biden's kid was kind of corrupt, but that's different from... And maybe Joe Biden was winking at it when he would get on the phone with his son on speakerphone so that his son's friends could hear that, yeah, he can get the vice president on the phone. And that would make them feel like they were in a third world country getting access to power through children. And yeah, that's kind of corrupt. But it's not the same as Trump's crypto adventures, right? Now, to be clear, I think it is not the same as Trump's crypto adventures. It's not good. It should not happen. We should shun people who do that more than we do, but it is not the same magnitude of danger. But explaining those subtle distinctions, which are embedded in elite culture, which are embedded in the folk ways and practices that our political elites evolved to handle conflict and keep it from spinning out of control. as much as it is embedded in the formal rules of the Constitution and our laws, I believe all these things. What I have realized is that it's too hard to explain to someone who is not spending all their time thinking about politics. And also it sounds self-serving. And to some extent is self-serving, right? This is the famous Stephen Wright quote. I believe that my brain is my most important organ, but then look who's telling me that, right? So I'm not saying that it's because it's intra-elite, it doesn't matter, or it's trivial, or it's just people posturing for status. What I'm saying is it's just not something you are going to get the great mass of voters extremely interested in, and ultimately they are the referees of the culture wars, right? Ultimately, the public are the referees, and there is no way, there's just a limit to how much we're going to get them interested in making Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. like, confess and recant, or in making Republicans who, you know, went along with election denial, confess or decant, or recant. They should care about the election denial. I think they should care about what happened to our institutions. And they kind of do sometimes briefly. But they're not going to muster the kind of sustained focus we would need for, like, broad reform.

Some of this woke up was about cultural appropriation. And I just heard Megan McArdle, who I'm pretty sure was born at Zabar's Tropa y'all. I had a roommate from Charleston for a summer. Yeah, some of my best friends are from Charleston. No, no, it's actually like English. English wants to have a plural. And these idiot tofts in, I believe, 18th century Britain. 16th century, 17th century? They drop our plural and they just make you the, it wants to have a second person plural. We lost it to these stupid Brits. And like we just keep reinventing it because it's a necessary and good part of our language. I agree with you as much as I've ever agreed with you on anything English needs a bothotros. Yeah. So I could do use, but I feel y'all is actually just a more sonorous and better second person plural. One minor correction on this conversation, though, that I think is worth keeping in mind is that while this was largely an inter-elite phenomenon, it was not exclusively an inter-elite phenomenon. Some of the people who got fired worked at Starbucks. One of the guys who got fired who had some dumb political opinions, gross like Nazi stuff, but he worked at a place called Mojo Burrito. And like if Mojo Burrito is where you're going to do your political policing, I think that it's well outside the elites. On the subject of burritos, by the way, JD Vance talking about the price of burritos. Am I the only one who remembers that President Camacho's great speech to Congress in idiocracy? is about the cost of burritos. He talks about the price of burrito coverings and the scarcity of burrito coverings. That movie is, is straight-up prophecy. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. As regular dispatch podcast listeners know, I've now given each of my parents an aura frame. Well, earlier this summer, I was back home in Wisconsin, standing in the kitchen, and there appeared on the screen a video of my son's hockey game, his moment of the greatest glory, scoring a last second goal from an impossible angle. And in that way, and in so many other ways, the hour frame has helped. Keep my parents close to my kids. That's free unlimited storage on your aura frame. You can provide it as a gift fully packed with pictures and videos. Name number one by wirecutter. You can save now by visitingoraFrames.com. For a limited time, listeners can get $35 off to select frames plus free shipping with the code dispatch. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com promo code dispatch. Support the show by mentioning us a checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Yeah, yeah, I might want to download that Exxon Mobile Rewards Plus app. Yeah. Are you the Exxon Tiger? I am. Yeah, you know, new users can earn $10 and points. Five bucks after your first purchase and five after your second. That's a lot. That's a whole lot. It is. Well, hey, you get on that download, buddy. I will. Loading.

Download the Exxon Mobile Rewards Plus app and join today. Exxon, trust the tiger. For details, visit Exxonoffer.com. So I'm very happy to report that after a few days, waiting eagerly for my new Brooklyn betting Aurora cooling elite, we got it. We've now had it for only 36 hours. But the thing I can tell you is it was a great night's sleep. And my two young kids have changed their television viewing habits so that they can come. fly on our new bet. This 120-night comfort trial, Brooklyn betting means it. You can return it if you're not satisfied with it after you slept on it. I can assure you that we will not need to take advantage of the 120-night comfort trial. So go to Brooklynbetting.com and use my promo code dispatch at checkout to get 30% off sitewide. That's Brooklyn. Betting.com and promo code dispatch for 30% off sitewide, exclusive with my code. Brooklynbetting.com promo code dispatch. And we're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. Kevin, I want to come to you with something else that Jonah said, and I want to sort of bring this back to practical politics. I'm not sure I agree with Jonah that because she made Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made reference to Woke 1, that the obvious. turn for people will be, okay, well, what's in woke too? I think it's a fair point. Certainly we've seen some of that, some people asking that question. And if I were Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I would expect to be asked the next time I do one of these interviews. She doesn't do many of these interviews. But I wonder if we're not giving her enough credit for the cleverness of effectively time boxing, Woke 1. Because by saying that this was a thing, she's declaring that it's behind us. And in some ways, that's ridiculous. I think we can point to things on a daily basis that suggest the new strain of woke one, while maybe not as virulent as the early strain is still around. On the other hand, as rhetorical device, I think it makes some sense. She's saying, hey, kind of we all lost our minds. Forgive us this. And while we are all, I think probably in agreement that it would be nice to have the kind of reflection and self-flagellation where appropriate from the woke right and the woke left, we're not going to get it, as Megan says. And in that case, this is a pretty smart rhetorical move for her. She's declaring it over. She's moving on. She can now say,

Anything that comes up, anytime somebody points to something she said in the past, she can say, ah, that too was in the woke one crazy. Yeah, I think Jonah said earlier in the conversation that he thinks of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders is being serious people. And I just kind of reject that premise. I don't think they actually are serious people. But unserious people can wander into positions of serious authority and influence from time to time in a big country like ours. I don't think she's particularly clever about this kind of stuff. This may be a generational thing. She seems kind of, you know, obvious. And sort of high school debater issue about some of the sort of stuff. Like if I win points on the board. for the contest and that matters to the real world, which I just don't think it does. I think it's effective to the extent that as we were talking about earlier, that this has been a largely intra-elite phenomenon. The vast majority of people don't really care all that much about it. And so it's not something that's going to end up being a broad-based political problem for Democrats in the future. And the people who do remember this era with some... personal bitterness are not going to forget it because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said what was in the past like if you go to the company christmas party excuse me coming holiday party and you get drunk and you get up in the morning and say well i was drunk you don't like get excused for that and in some ways it's you know it's where it's not what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas it's not the stuff was in the past and we know that is the these are the rules of the game right because a lot of these people in the in the woke era who were being canceled were being canceled about stuff that was a long time ago You know, some of these professors and stuff were getting run over the coals by things they had written in the 90s or, you know, some meeting they went to in the 1980s or some committee they were on 25 years ago. I just don't think that the whole thing matters very much. as a matter of the kind of politics that affects election outcomes. I just don't think it does. It had the effect of radicalizing a lot of people on the right, and particularly these, you know, very online social media driven types. But I kind of think they were looking for something to radicalize them anyway. And if it weren't that, it would be what's happening now? Oh, these socialists are taking over. Now we've got an excuse to be the sorts of... And there's all sorts of words I could put in the middle of the sentence that I can't use on this podcast. But sorts of people we've always really wanted to be. And, you know, people who are looking to misbehave to use politics as an excuse to be cruel or stupid or vulgar. or hateful are going to find their excuse one way or the other. And the woke stuff, well, it was certainly a real phenomenon in a genuine mass hysteria. As Joan and I were talking about yesterday, I think it more resembles like the satanic abuse panic of the 1990s than it does the any political phenomenon. It was a genuine mass hysteria kind of movement, which often expresses itself from religious terms in the United States, which the woke movement certainly had a religious undertone to it when it wasn't explicitly.

being presented in these kind of terms of spiritual renewal. It doesn't often attach itself to politics, at least it hasn't in the past, although I suspect in the future it will as politics becomes more central to our cultural life in a way that a religion used to be. You'll see more of this kind of thing. But no, she's not, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn't that clever and cleverness is overrated. One of the worst things about our politics and our political discourse is the sort of centrality of this kind of cheap and superficial form of verbal cleverness that we treat like it's a real thing, like it really matters. And this is why I tease Sarah Isker so much about the problem of having so many people who went to law school having so much influence in our politics, because it's really all about how you talk about problems and not about what the underlying problem is. And that's going to be a habit. The limitations of which are revealed in dramatic and unpleasant ways when we come into our pending fiscal crisis or the war with China or whatever the actual big emergency awaiting us in the future is that there's no clever way to talk your way out of. We have reached this moment, I think, where calling people on the things they said in the past, I suppose a good point to bring the conversation full circle to Francesca Hongan, her defeat, and say, there is somebody who is paying for the sins of what she has said in the past in a way that I think reflects accountability more than sort of gotcha. But in other ways, the pace of our politics and the sort of velocity of our... national conversation doesn't really allow us to call people on their hypocrisy or their changing minds without explanation to Jonas' point. I mean, Tim Russert did this better than anybody when he was the moderator of meet the press. He would, the politician would go on and he would play a clip of them saying something else and then make them squirm because they were not able to or willing to in some cases explain why. They had changed their mind. Now, I think with the benefit of this sort of hyper-speed politics, I think it's why somebody like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is why I think it is clever for her to do this. A quick clip, a quick quip, and then move on. She sells seashells by the seashore. I agree with Steve on this. I think, Kevin, we have a disagreement here insofar as I think you are getting your is into your aught insofar as. It should not matter that being verbally clever matters much. And I think one of the problems is that you're smarter than the people who think they're being verbally clever, so you don't think it's clever. But Bill Clinton got away with a lot of cleverness. If Francesca Hong had a more glib and convincing answer to her cancel Thanksgiving and to fund the police stuff, she probably would have won. Because it was very close. If Haley Stevens didn't talk like she lives in a van down by the river and was just a little bit more sophisticated, she might have won. The verbal sophistication stuff, and I don't mean legitimate...

Christopher Hitchens at the Oxford Union verbal sophistication stuff. I mean, what gets you through interviews and seems like a passable answer, which Donald Trump has a version of. I mean, there's a corollary in this Donald Trump. Donald Trump's answers are utter garbage, 85% at the time. Generating. But he manages to get through more interviews than any president in American history. because he just bullies his way through and it makes it very difficult to pin him down. You know, a handful of interviewers have done it. Jonathan Swan comes to mind. But for the most part, he just says, well, yeah, your fake news and moves on to something else. And it works for him. It shouldn't. But like if your point were right that this stuff doesn't really matter, the fiscal crisis that you're talking about coming. wouldn't have gotten this bad because nobody would have believed their answers to it, but they do. You know, Al Gore talked about a friggin lockbox for Social Security and people like, okay, that gives me permission not to worry about it for another 10 years. That's part of the problem. All right, fair criticism. I don't understand why these people who change their minds about things don't actually just tell the truth about it and say that I changed my mind about this because of, you know, experiences and whatnot. You know, we did a podcast like a week ago in which we all talked about things we changed our minds about, things we've been wrong about. We've got a tremendous amount of goodwill for that, probably more credit than we deserve in some cases, you know, from readers. Particularly since Steve didn't offer any, but gone. Right, because Steve's obviously never been wrong about anything because, you know, Wisconsin and all that stuff. But I kind of suspect that, I mean, If you were someone who's running for a house seat from Wisconsin and someone said, you believed Crazy Thing X five years ago and now you've changed your mind about that, if you said, yeah, I've seen some things in that time and I've had some conversations and read some books and learned a little bit more about some of the policy details and got some new information. And I changed my mind about it. And I think I've arrived at a better or more mature position that will better serve the people I want to be my constituents. I kind of think you'd do real well if you could string three sentences together and say that. Mm-hmm. Instead of just, well, you know. you're fake news. This is gotcha journalism or this is, you know, you sound like you should be on Fox or MSNBC or whatever. It's just, you know, that stuff sounds just dumb to me. And it's not Jonas Kindness, notwithstanding, because I'm so damn smart. You know, it actually is dumb. And like I think even dumb people probably know it's dumb. I'm just saying, you know, Kevin, those of us who are glib and superficial. verbal adapts like we need we need employment too right guy who has never done anything except right for a living pisses on verbal cleverness and so i'm arguing against interest here that's how you know that it's true yeah

I have to say to finish our conversation on a note of praise for Zohran Mamdani, which is not something I do typically. He was asked about Woke One at an event on Wednesday, I believe, and he didn't go back and he didn't do the kind of, you know, he didn't show the kind of contrition that we wanted or didn't do the kind of reflection that we would have liked to have seen. But he said that politicians have an obligation to just say what they believe. And then added, and sometimes what you believe can change and develop. It can grow. And I know that there are some for whom they still believe that. He was talking in this case about defunding the police. And then said, I've made very clear that I do not believe in defunding the police and that I will not be defunding the police. So it is a sort of next step. I don't know if that'll be enough to put it behind him. I still think he has a lot to answer for that position and others. But it was a longer attempt than. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had given us. And he was elected merit like age 11 or something. He's got to change his mind on some things. Before we take an ad break, please consider becoming a member of the dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up at the dispatch.com slash join. And if you use the promo code roundtable, you'll get a month for free. And speaking of ads, if they aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, two free gift memberships to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders, and more. Okay, we'll be right back. As regular dispatch podcast listeners know, I've now given each of my parents an aura frame. Well, earlier this summer, I was back home in Wisconsin, standing in the kitchen, and there appeared on the screen a video of my son's hockey game, his moment of the greatest glory, scoring a last second goal from an impossible angle. And in that way, and in so many other ways, the hour frame has helped. Keep my parents close to my kids. That's free unlimited storage on your Aura Frame. You can provide it as a gift fully packed with pictures and videos. Name number one by wirecutter. You can save now by visitingoraFrames.com. For a limited time, listeners can get $35 off to select frames plus free shipping with the code dispatch. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com promo code. Dispatch. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Yeah, yeah, I might want to download that Exxon Mobile Rewards Plus app. Yeah. Are you the Exxon Tiger? I am. Yeah, you know, new users can earn $10 and points. Five bucks after your first purchase and five after your second. That's a lot. That's a whole lot. It is. Well, hey, you get on that download, buddy. I will. Loading. Download the Exxon Mobile Rewards Plus app and join today. Exxon, trust the tiger. For details, visit Exxonoffer.com. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion.

Finally, today, for not worth your time, I have an article that I read yesterday and I found it fascinating. I don't know that our panel will think it is as fascinating as I did, but I found it fascinating for a dozen plus reasons. So let me give you a little taste of the article and then I'm going to ask our group to react. The headline, this People magazine, article with a red banner that says exclusive. The headline is mom moves 19 year old son into his fraternity house and can't believe what she finds inside. And then in case you miss the banner red exclusive, it also says parenthetically at the end of the headline, exclusive. People Magazine really wants you to know that People Magazine alone is the one with this. story. They landed it. They got it. Nobody else. So we're crediting People Magazine for this reportage. When Lori Massaro arrived to move her 19-year-old son into his fraternity house, the 61-year-old mom thought she had a pretty good idea. of what fraternity living would look like. Turns out she was wrong. Mentioned that she teaches at the Fashion Institute of New York. Her other son was in a fraternity, but she never visited the house. Her youngest son, Will is a sophomore at the University of Delaware where he majors in accounting and belongs to a fraternity after pledging as a freshman. Will was excited to spend his sophomore year living among his fraternity brothers. Masaro tells people exclusively, I never had any personal experience with fraternity houses. So when Will decided he wanted to move into his fraternity house for his sophomore year, I really had no idea what to expect. She saw it from the outside, thought it looked fine. Her expectations were shaped by a recent binge watch of Amazon Prime's off campus, which had her imagining a very different kind of college house, complete with a, quote, beautiful kitchen with a big center island. Well, Massaro says, Will's fraternity house looked nothing like Garrett's house. So she goes and she visits. She doesn't see any problems from the front. She goes around to the back and she's appalled. There was random furniture and old couches piled up on the back porch and driveway, she says. It honestly looked like the Gallagher house from Shameless. She goes on and looks inside the house. The house itself looked like it was under construction. And to put it nicely... It definitely wasn't clean, she says. The kitchen was particularly shocking. There were no countertops, no cabinets, and the refrigerator was actually sitting out in the hallway. The living room offered very old dirty couches in what Massaro describes as stadium seating with the couches sitting on raised platforms.

At first, the setup seemed bizarre. She certainly there was some logic to it. Good God, Steve. I'm not even halfway done. Jesus. The segment is called Not Worth Your Time. At first, the set up seemed completely bizarre. But soon she learned there was some logic to it. The arrangement allows everyone to see the TV while maximizing seating when the fraternity brothers are hanging out. During parties, she was told the couches are moved out to create more open space. We're getting to it, Kevin. When she went to see her son's room, she went in and figured out that the previous document had left the room, quote, really dirty, and some of the furniture was, quote, literally falling apart, so the family bought Will a new mattress. And here she says, at that point, my mom instincts definitely kicked in. Rather than attempt to overhaul the entire house, Masaro focused on creating a space where she felt comfortable leaving her son. The family spent the day cleaning. and setting up his room so he would have quote one clean comfortable and livable space to come home to she said i was still pretty horrified by the rest of the house but i felt much better knowing that his room was clean and safe the kid of course they mentioned didn't really care so this is the kicker Masaro couldn't quite shake what she had seen. Having created TikTok and Instagram content for the past few years about her family, fashion, food, and everyday life, she did what came naturally. She pulled out her phone and started filming. I immediately thought, I have to film this. I thought it would be funny to capture my genuine reaction and share it with my followers. Undoubtedly, it was her genuine reaction. The post went viral, yada, yada, yada. People had different reactions to that Jonah has left. Then she says the responses to this, other moms had reached out privately to say they had similar experiences, which Masaro found reassuring. It made me realize that apparently there is an entire fraternity mom community out there that understands exactly what I was going through. The last, the last one, this viral reel goes everywhere. This is a people exclusive remember. One response to the viral reel, Instagram reel, may actually lead to change in the house itself. The mother of one of Will's new housemates saw the video and reached out with an idea. The moms could start a, quote, mom text thread and coordinate a major cleanup. She says, so apparently the moms may be taking matters into their own hands. Okay, aside from the fact that... At least two of you seem to think that that was too much of a setup. Megan's too polite to make it at quorum. Megan may also, you should feel completely comfortable criticizing.

the topic selection, the setup, the reading, whatever you want. I was riveted. The fact that you left out that she ends by buying him a mattress, and if there's one thing you can do on a podcast, it's sell mattress advertising. Come on, Steve. Brought to you buy Casper. It did not say if it was Brooklyn Bedding. It did not say, but I will tell you my Brooklyn betting, new mattress, is fantastic. So, Kevin, you were the most exasperated by this. You didn't want me to keep reading. Your face showed the level of disgust. I wanted you to do it as a Ken Burns Civil War letter. So let me put it to you this way. What is the most outrageous or preposterous thing about the story? that I just shared. Is it that People magazine was so excited to have an exclusive? Is it that this mom group is apparently going to be trying to clean up a fraternity? Is it that she talked about going through an experience dropping her kid off at his fraternity as if she had survived cancer? Is it the fact that poor Will is now going to be mocked by all of his fraternity brothers? Or if there is in fact an all fraternity mom cleanup, the fraternity is going to be probably empty after a year or two because it will be so ridiculed for having moms come in and clean it up? Or is it the fact that we're talking about this on this podcast at this moment? The most shocking thing is that Steve Hayes. graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism clicked on a people exclusive. And then was shocked. I was suckered by the exclusive. And then was shocked to find something stupid on the other side. Go figure. Actually, what really bothered me most about this story was this punk-ass kid letting his mommy moving him to his fraternity house. Like, when I graduated from high school, I had a concert to play that evening. Me and my friend, Bill, we were playing a guitar duet, a box prelude 2 in C minor. And you know what I did? I went home and I put my stuff in my 1985 Mercury Topaz and I drove away. And I went to school. I didn't have my parents moving into it. And he's a sophomore. He's not even a freshman. He's been at college for a year and he's got his mommy moving him into his fraternity room. What kind of fraternity is this? Not all of us had individual cars growing up. Mr. Williams. Yes, I know you grew up in New York City. People don't have cars there. Jonah was in a sorority because he went to a girls' college. I can see where all this is going. But still, as a father of four... Tell us about the time they lined you up by breast size, Jonah. And like... Circles your cellular marker. Man rack. We're putting that on the pay, behind the paywall. That hasn't gotten any better, has it? It's a visual I do not need. Yeah. I do have four boys at home. They are, of course, filthy and anarchists, and as all young men are. And, yeah, the lady who teaches at the Fashion Institute.

Strangely experienced some unusually neat college students? Well, raise my rent. I could not imagine where that came from. Yeah, this whole thing is stupid from soup to nuts, and I hated every minute of listening to you read that, and there were a lot of minutes to hate. Yeah, I was on Morning Joe one time, and they particularly liked a column that I had written. So I'm doing it remote, and the camera comes on, and my face shows up on the screen, and Mika starts reading my column, and she just gets into it. And she reads the whole thing from the beginning to the end. And then the segment's over, and I go, and we're done. I didn't actually speak. I was on television and said, thank you. And that was pretty much the whole thing. And this was more excruciating than that for me. Well, of course, you like to hear your own words, read back to you. I do actually kind of. You know, people say, like, I don't like to look at my own stuff. I kind of enjoy my own stuff. I'm exactly that much of a narcissist and egotistical monster. Well, I mean, there was nowhere to cut. I mean, there was so much. There was so much in that piece. I couldn't leave out those details for you if I was going to ask you about it. That would have been unfair to you. I was really doing it for you. You could have brought a filet. You brought the whole steer. Okay, Megan, you can agree with Kevin. You haven't been as angry and frustrated as Kevin and Jonah obviously were. What stood out to you from that fantastic reading? Speaking is a media professional who spends a lot of time worrying that our profession is going away. It is heartening to me to know that the upworthy style of headline of like, a mom walked into a fraternity house, you'll never believe what happened next can still get people to click. I actually, so for listeners who don't know, this was a startup that had mastered the Facebook algorithm and getting people to click on headlines along those lines. They had a bunch of different tricks. And I actually wrote a piece for Newsweek on this. And then as a joke, I posted it on Facebook with a, like, I wrote an article about Upworthy. You'll never believe what happened next. And it went viral. It really worked. Did it just go viral in Wisconsin? Boo. The thing is, like, I am afraid, Kevin, that I was moved into college by my parents because, again, we had one car in my family. I could not pack anything up and drive it off. I guess I could have taken the subway, but that would have been awkward since it terminated long before the University of Pennsylvania. There are car rental places in New York. There's even a U-Haul. So I didn't get a driver's license until I was 23. One of those. I got it. Actually, I did try. I got mono my senior year of high school, and so I missed drivers. And because in New York, you can't get a driver's license until you're 17. I basically missed my window. And I didn't turn 17 until January of my senior year of high school. I basically missed my window to learn to drive until I was 23. So anyway, I, once summer, I was subletting a place in Philadelphia. And it was. terrible. It was a seven or seven or nine room group house and all of the people who lived in it had sublet their rooms and then they had walked off and not cleaned the kitchen. And we were all just sort of terrified of it.

You know, like I would cook stuff on the stove, but I wouldn't have put anything in the fridge because there was like crazy stuff growing in that fridge. And I then made the mistake of not calling my parents for six weeks, in part because I had decided to spontaneously do some traveling. I'd gotten, I had a summer job, I got an opportunity for a ton of overtime, and then I quit my job. So anyway, I get back and I hang with my roommate for a weekend and then we go out for brunch and I come back to a horrified subletter saying, your parents are here. They had gotten into the one family car. Luckily, my boyfriend, who had come down to stay with me because he was in Bucks County for the summer, had departed earlier that morning. So it's just me and my normal year roommate. And, I mean, I chained smoked at the time. there may or may not have been an open copy of The Joy of Sex lying on the floor. I was also not a very neat person. I cannot even describe the look on my mother's face when I walked in. And she hadn't even seen the rest of the house. And then also I was a vegetarian and I'd lost a ton of weight. And my mother, like... So my mother basically... makes me clean the whole house. She and I and my father cleaned this entire giant old Victorian mansion from stem to stern, cleaned out the fridge, all of it. Took like three days. And then she also made me eat meat. And when I say made me, she basically started crying when I said, but I'm a vegetarian. And my principles were not. strong enough to overcome. And my mother was, my parents were not hovering parents. I just, they were actually concerned that perhaps I had died and they thought they should come investigate because it was the 90s and there were no cell phones. But so I had a lot of resonance with this article and I, this, but the thing is, this is the thing. This was the 90s. This sort of thing has been happening. for decades, where parents show up and they realize the squalor that their children freed from adult supervision for the first time in their lives have chosen to live in. And they are surprised and perhaps a little disappointed. But like, this is just, it's the circle of life. It's a natural part of burgeoning into adulthood. And I do not think that it merited a people exclusive, though I do have to hand it to whatever social media genius. decided to make it one anyway. I mean, the people exclusive thing, three different times in the first like five paragraphs, the big label. Kevin, to answer your question, the reason I was drawn in by the exclusive. Did I ask you a question?

No, you made a criticism. But there was a question implied in your critique. Really? I've taken all social media off my phone. So the only thing I have to read on my phone are ESPN headlines. And the People Magazine app. No. And Google News. And Google News. And so I get fed all of these Google News stories, many of which, Megan... have these exact kind of upworthy headlines. Like, pose the question, but don't answer it so you click. But this one was just way too good. I am, in fact, going to be dropping a child at a fraternity in the coming days. So I was very curious. Are you going to be inspecting? No. God, no. Brooklyn betting to get a... No, I am going to drop. He can move all of his stuff in. He can do whatever he wants. The house can look however it wants. I lived in a fraternity for three years. It was squalor is an appropriate description for the way that we lived. And those were three of the best years of my life. They were great. It didn't matter. I wasn't clean. Jonah, I want to ask you specifically about poor. Will. Can you imagine being a 19 year old? He's probably the first time he's going to live with a bunch of dudes. You're about to move in. You're 19 years old. You want to be cool. You're in a fraternity. And your mom makes a viral TikTok video about the way your fraternity looks. And then she gives an interview to People magazine announcing that she's going to have a mom text chain and a mom group that's going to clean the house. I mean, this kid is done. I'd like a clarification on this question real quick. Are we asking how Jonah would feel if it was some generic mom or if it was his mom? That's a good point. Generic mom. Yeah, because I should, clever, I've had. Lots of friends were always psyched when my mom came to town or came over because she either brought booze or cooked food for people and could not care less about or would not be scandalized about the squalor. Yeah, look, I think it is. You know, there's a certain violation of the Civil Society Geneva conventions about what happened here. I blame the mom more than I blame People magazine, right? I mean, like, we'll keep it a little sort of thumb-sucky Columbia journalism school level conversation here. Have you guys watched the ABC, CBS, or NBC Nightly News lately? It is at most, like, three, four, five minutes of, like, legitimate news. And then it's a lot of teases for the viral video that'll be at the end of the show to get people to stay on. I was talking to somebody over the weekend who loves to watch the Today Show. And it's basically, it used to be like 15 minutes of real news at the beginning of the Today Show. And then lifestyle and whatever. It's now like nine minutes, according to her.

and then three and a half hours of this kind of People magazine kind of thing. So, like, I'm as shocked that there are Lord of the Flies like Frat Hasses as I am shocked that People magazine is leaning into this trend in journalism. And the only place I have any disagreement, I think, look, Kevin, I'll make the prediction now. You will be behind the wheel and taking... one of your kids or all of your kids to college like the to think that that's sort of the weirdest thing in the story that's pretty normie it's the Or let's roll up our sleeves like Rosie the Riveter and clean up this frat house thing that is incredibly stupid and weird. And I sent this, I wasn't a fraternity. I've lived with dudes though. Like I've lived in apartments and houses with dudes. Dudes are disgusting. Young men are gross. And like one of my best friends was really proud that he and his buddies kept some plants alive in their house for like two years when they lived in a group house. And then some pointed out that they were plastic. And none of them knew. And they had been watering them for two years. And they thought they had green thumbs, you know. I like to point out that the place I lived my freshman year at the University of Texas, we successfully kept some plants alive too. And we weren't supposed to. And actually, like we're doing life advice stuff for maybe not in college because that's more difficult. But like after college, if you're going to live in a group house. try to have some female roommates as well. Not so much because you should have any expectation that women are going to clean up after you or anything like that. But men around women will be slightly more civilized and hygienic. than if men are all left to themselves. But yeah, I thought the incredibly stupid. I was trying to figure out what about, it was like one of these diner placemats, what's wrong with this picture? I was trying to figure out why Steve was so interested and thought the story was so fascinating. And then when he made us listen to the whole thing, like we have talked about the potential of nuclear war. of pandemics, of financial crises on here. And Steve has given three sentence summaries of the news article. But helicopter mom cleans up frat house. He's like, you have to hear the whole thing. Yeah, well, I couldn't leave it out. I couldn't skip on the details. You've got to give the people what they want. And also, like, think about the nuanced reporting on her views on stadium seating. You know, at first she was appalled that they had stadium seating and that they had built it this way. And then when somebody explained the logic to her, she understood. And she was told later that they took the stadium seating down to create more open spaces. I mean, if you watch HGTV, half of the discussion is about.

We wanted a house with an open concept. Yeah, open concept. No, I had my fraternity had stadium seating. My post-college dude house had stadium. Stadium seating is one of the best things that young men have ever invented. We had bleachers built so that we could watch the 1996 Super Bowl with one couch raised behind the others so we could all see. And then we just left it there. I mean, stadium seating is a tremendous, tremendous. innovation and it was to me the highlight of the article actually was that these young men were as creative and resourceful with obviously very limited resources and i thought that was one of many notable things about the story i think the people we could have done the whole thing yes that's how i felt exactly pipe in the lee greenwood i did think we could spend a lot of time on the exclusive because the question is does people magazine like Whoever slapped the exclusive label on the article, did they really think they're fighting off other publications for having the get that was Lori Masaro talking about her son, Will's Brat House? Do we think, I mean, in all seriousness, do we think, because like I get, I know Megan gets, Steve, you probably get, don't know about Kevin, but I get. because of my CNN affiliation, before that Fox, and because of my LA Times affiliation. I am on every single friggin' PR mailing list, and it would not shock me in the slightest if this woman... has a personal PR agent for her Instagram account. Maybe. Who pitched it as an exclusive. Pitching it as an exclusive to People magazine and saying that you have to cite as exclusive. Again, poor will. Poor will. Can I just change the topic slightly while we're on this? Please.

I mean, I will make one sociological observation. I was listening to an interview with Matthew McConaughey recently where he was talking about how he cut off his mom because his mom could not stop from, like, telling reporters everything when he was, when he first got famous. I didn't talk to her for like five years. Because she would just be on, like, you know, entertainment tonight or whatever, telling, just spilling all about everything in his childhood. You know, yeah, that's the bathroom where he used to, you know, spend a lot of time locked inside when he was in. Like, just really. And that, like, that was something that was always a problem for stars, but is now a problem for everyone. Yes. But I actually want to go back to the Flack emails because it's killing me. Have you noticed that they have discovered that if they put correction in the subject? you will pay attention to it. So what they do is they send out like an email with a typo so that they can send another one out to say correction. And I am on principle and as a Catholic against the death penalty. But these people are testing me. Because like I don't, because when I see the word correction, sometimes Flax email me to say like they're demanding a correction. But you got something wrong. And then like. Yeah, so my heart races. I'm, like, freaking out. And then it's like, correction. We misspelled the name of Batman in our last even, like, our Batman figurines are in fact, like, and it is really, and it's just, it's overwhelming. I don't open any of these emails unless I know the person because, like, I couldn't possibly. I get hundreds of them every day. I feel seen. I feel like we could probably go for another 20 minutes on this. Are there other aspects of this? No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding, Kevin. We'll let you get on to your day. But I think that very much was worth our time. I'm glad we did it. I don't think we got one ye gods out of Kevin, which is like the expression I would expect from him on this. But anyway. It was internal. God, Zooks. Oh, my stars and carters. Thank you all for joining me and indulging me. And we will talk again next time. Finally, if you want to support what we're doing here, you can rate review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. Speaking of support, here's a shout-out to a few folks who recently joined as founding lifetime members, Paul Tully, Brian Hall, and James Herberg. We're glad to have you aboard. One quick note, we are ending our founding lifetime membership offer at the end of August. So if you're interested in supporting the dispatch and enjoying a lifetime of dispatch editorial goodness, please join us as a dispatch founding lifetime member today. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at Roundtable at the dispatch.com. We read everything, even the ones from members of the Mom Fraternity Cleanup Club. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible, Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.

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