Is It Time to Panic?

The Dispatch podcast is presented by Pacific Legal Foundation, suing the government since 1973. Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss a troubling Washington Post report about a man named John from suburban Philadelphia visited by Department of Homeland Security officials after he sent an innocuous email to the government. Is this creeping authoritarianism? Is it fascism? We'll debate the utility of using those words. And finally, not worth your time. We'll talk about the Super Bowl and revisit some emails we got about bizarre injuries. I'm joined today by dispatch editor-in-chief Jonah Goldberg, New York Times columnist David French, and Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle, both dispatch contributors. Let's dive right in. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and all birds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer.

Welcome, everybody. I want to start with a Washington Post article that I read earlier this week that has been on my mind since I read it, and I'll give a brief description of it. The article is about John, a 67-year-old retiree who had read an article in the Washington Post as it happens, about plans for the U.S. to deport an Afghan identified as H in this piece, despite this Afghan refugee's concerns that he'd be targeted by the Taliban if he were returned to Afghanistan. John found the email address of the Department of Homeland Security prosecutor named in the case Joseph Dernbach and sent him a quick email from his Gmail account. The email read, Mr. Dernbach, don't play Russian roulette with H's life. Air on the side of caution. There's a reason the U.S. government, along with many other governments, don't recognize the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency. That's the entire email. Five hours and one minute later, according to the post, he received an email, a notification that read, Google has received legal process from a law enforcement authority compelling the release of information related to your Google account and listed below that notification was the type of legal process. It was a subpoena, and below that came the authority for the subpoena at the Department of Homeland Security. A little more than two weeks later, three men showed up at his door. One was a local cop. Two men dressed in civilian clothes. They identified themselves as Homeland Security officials, showed him a copy of that four-sentence email. And, again, according to John, said to him, we want to hear your side of the story. They interviewed him for 20 minutes and then left. David, I'll come to you first. We learn in reading this article that this is something called an administrative subpoena. The benefit of these administrative subpoenas, among other things, is that they can be issued very quickly. And the reporting from the Post says that even some mid-level Department of Homeland Security officials have been authorized to issue these subpoenas. They don't go before a judge. There's no court involvement. But they can result, apparently. in Department of Homeland Security officials showing up at your door, interviewing you for 20 minutes about a totally harmless four-sentence email pleading for the U.S. not to return an Afghan refugee. I guess big picture question to you is, what do you make of this? And two, what can you tell us about administrative subpoenas? Well, yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, one thing I make of this is this is just yet another sort of element of this full bore assault on the First Amendment that we're seeing from the Trump administration and from MAGA more broadly. You know, look, this is an administration that began with directed attacks on... law firms for their constitutionally protected acts of representation that has included into taking on universities in a way that directly attacks their academic freedom, as much beef as I have with universities and have had with universities for a long time. I mean, before I became a journalist, I may have sued more universities than any other lawyer alive on constitutional grounds. So I have my beefs.

but they still have their constitutional rights. And this is just continued and continued and continued. And so you're looking at, in many ways, the creation of what appears to be a version of, as far as he can push it, a kind of surveillance state. And I saw this really interesting graph that was put out by fire. I think it was earlier this week. And it showed just higher education. It was a graph on threats to free speech from the left. and from the right, because they track, like if you're trying to be canceled or whatever, if you're a professor who's trying to be canceled, did that come from the professor's left or did that come from the professor's right? And right around in 2021, 2022, that chart crossed, the lines crossed. And now it is far more likely even on campus. where the left holds sway much more, much, much more than the right, to be attacked, to have your free speech rights and now to be attacked from the right. And so it is very clear. I mean, it's just abundantly clear at this point. that Maga's free speech rhetoric was all in the vein of free speech for me and not for thee. And look, we're even seeing sort of Second Amendment for me and not for thee, you know, gun rights for me and not for thee. And what you're really realizing is this is just a purely factional movement. that is going to assert liberty on its own behalf. It's going to plead for liberty on its own behalf, and then it is going to flip around and suppress liberty ruthlessly for those who oppose it. And this has just been the dynamic since day one. And I'm sorry, all you anti-woke, heterodox, small L liberals who thought that Trump was going to usher in the end of cancel culture, you got played. You got played. Big time, it was completely obvious to anyone with their eyes open you were going to get played, but man, did you get played? And you have helped usher in an era of censorship in the United States that's literally unlike anything I've seen in my adult lifetime. Megan, it's tempting to look at this as maybe a one-off example, but the reporting in the post suggests that the issuance of these administrative subpoenas have increased pretty considerably. Precise numbers are hard to come by, but certainly if you look at the numbers that Google has said it has facilitated or sent on and the broadening of the number of people who are in a position to send these, this has become a thing. Beyond those administrative subpoenas, if you look at some of the other things we've seen, you had that sort of famous viral video from Minnesota a couple weeks ago where the Department of Homeland Security, I think it was an ICE official, is videoing a protester, a woman, and gets her on film and says, you know, you are now a part of the database. Welcome to the database. And DHS has denied that there is any such database of protesters.

But they're using facial recognition technology, apparently all throughout these protests capturing this. Seems to me likely that they're keeping track of something. How worrying is this? I mean, David says he's never seen anything like this in his adult life. It certainly sounds creepy. Is this the big deal that David says it is? Or is this at this point much ado about not nothing, but very little? It's terribly worrying. This is, I mean, this is the government using legal procedures to harass people to harass its enemies, to strike fear into their hearts. As a libertarian, I do want to say that I think that this is the problem with expanding government power. We're all into expanding government power when we think that the people we trust will be using it. And I think that the left should... sort of take a long, hard look at the many ways in which it has wanted to expand government power. And the libertarian argument has always been, what if someone bad was in charge of it? Well, right? And, like, what I hope is that I still believe this will be over. And what I hope is that when that happens, we carry it forward and take the lesson that it's actually really dangerous to enhance government power. It should be done only... for extremely good and necessary reasons, and as narrowly as possible, every time you think about something good the government could do, just think about all the bad things the powers you're creating could do. Unfortunately, I fear that is not the lesson. that people are going to take. What they're going to take is that we need to expand government power to smash those evil-doers. And that was a lot of what you saw after the first Trump administration, where you saw a lot of abuses of prosecutorial power. I am not comparing these things to be clear. I'm not saying, like, what Letitia James did to Trump is as bad as what Trump is doing now. It was in no way as bad as what Trump is doing now. Nor am I blaming her for this. What I am saying is... We need a recommitment to sharply limiting the power of government because you always have to assume that someone who will have no guardrails, who will not be your friend, will use any power you create in a terrible way. And my hope is that we can take this lesson, but I am sort of skeptical that we will, unfortunately. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, but we will be back soon with more from the dispatch podcast. The most annoying thing about being an entrepreneur is the endless paperwork drudgery that comes with building a new business. You wait hopefully until the day that it all goes away and it just doesn't. In fact, as your business grows and you add employees, the HR work of just keeping track of everything can become nearly all-consuming. That's why Gusto feels like such a practical tool. It helps make payroll more organized and less stressful without anyone needing to be a payroll expert. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses, and it's all in one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use so you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. Gusto helps simplify payroll with automatic tax filing and unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price without hidden fees or surprises. Try Gusto today at gusto.com slash dispatch and get three months free when you run your first payroll.

That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash dispatch. One more time, gusto.com slash dispatch. This is summer at its peak. Whole Foods Market's summer fruit fest is your invitation to eat the season. Fresh, organic, and bursting with flavor. Start your day with peaches and organic blueberries and yogurt. Build a grazing board with fresh fruit, prosciutto, and artisanal cheese. Then fire up the grill with no antibiotics ever proteins and fresh produce. Savor the season. Shop Summer Fruit Fest at Whole Foods Market. When she said I don't dance now, I make money moves. That was a mission statement for a whole new generation. Respect, but that's not the Mount Rushmore. Listen, cash rules everything around me. When that line dropped, it changed the whole hustle. The greatest tracks are never finished. They're just debated forever. Introducing the Sprite Living Track List, 50 tracks that shaped the culture from six decades of hip-hop. Scan the QR code on a Sprite or Sprite Zero Sugar to see the full breakdown. Obey your thirst. Sprite. And we're back. You are listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. Yeah, Jonah, I mean, we read all these articles about these kinds of things happening in the UK. And I think the initial instinct was to mock the United Kingdom. You know, they'd go to somebody's house because they sent a tweet that the authorities didn't like and harassed them and maybe even charge them. JD Vance, of course, gave a famous speech at the Munich Security Conference, castigating our heretofore allies because of their sort of overzealous approach to policing. speech. Are we headed in the direction of Europe? I mean, if the Washington Post account is accurate and is becoming more prevalent, you could make an argument that we're quickly surpassing what they're doing. Yes and no. Like, I can't stand what's happened to the UK, but I think it's very different in some ways than, or at least the genesis of it, is very different. The way the UK embraced. omnipresent panopticon surveillance everywhere with closed circuit TVs goes back like, I don't know, 30, 40 years, basically since the introduction of the technology. I mean, I remember seeing a news report 15 years ago where someone littered in downtown in one city and a voice comes over the PA. Pick that garbage up, right? It's like it really was sort of Brave New World kind of. Algeus Huxley, nanny stateism. So I don't think necessarily the stuff that you're talking about, which I condemn, is nanny stateism, but it's only possible because they've developed the sort of muscle memory of...

constant surveillance of their society, that it even seems sane to people in the UK that the person who says something violent on Twitter gets a harsher criminal penalty and goes to jail longer than the person who actually commits physical violence is just so, you know, through the looking glass. It's hard for us to see, but I think that's how they got there. They got there through nanny statism. The stuff that the Trump administration is doing has no resemblance. There's very little DNA. to nanny stateism, right? It is not, we're doing this for your own good, we're here to help. It is them, as David was saying, using the levers of power to entrench their own power. It is much more of the traditional. I know we want to talk a little bit about fascism, but it's not quite the boot stamping on a human face that Orwell talks about. But it's more in that direction than the brave new world. Let's make everybody happy. Let's treat American society like it's one giant college campus, which is where I think the left comes from with a lot of their sort of soft totalitarian sort of excesses. This is much more traditional Trump-strong-like bull. we are going to punish our enemies. And the only thing I would add to what David was saying is, like, I came to the realization 10 years ago listening to an interview with Mike Pence. And look, we all know that history is going to be much kinder to Mike Pence than Donald Trump has been. And we wish him well. But back when he was a loyal vice president, I remember him being asked in an interview about some absolutely. typical partisan politics thing that Nancy Pelosi had done. And he said, oh, this is just outrageous. It is so offensive. Why would you, you know, like, it is, I'm just so sadden and disappointed that she would do something so outside. Maybe it was like tearing up the speech or something like that. But, and then he was asked about something that Trump did. That was like truly legit bonkers and indefensible and kind of insane. And Pence said, well, He was elected to be a disruptor. And what dawned on me at the time was, is like, we live in an age where very few people want to be constrained by the principles they claim to have, whether it's free speech or gun rights or anything else, or just decency and decorum and showing respect to their fellow citizens. But they want to have those principles near to hand to use as weapons against their enemies. And so it's not just free speech for me, you know, but not for thee. It's decency for me and not for thee. It's politeness for me and not for thee. It's agency and self-respect. And it can go down a whole list. And that's the age that we live in. And I think the Trumpies are worse about it in every way to get to Megan's point. When I say it's a both-sides thing, it doesn't mean it's a symmetrically everyone's just as bad as everybody else thing. But the dynamic is such that... When you live in an age where one side violates norms, it gives permission to the other side to violate norms too. And the two sides cannot figure out or fully comprehend that every time you violate a norm, you give the opposition permission to violate it even worse because they're going to perceive your norm violation as worse than it is.

They're going to exaggerate it, and then they're going to say, and I'm going to up the ante on it. And that's how you get this sort of cycle of the center not holding and, you know, me having to go buy gold and all that. I also think, like, look, I think that we should also understand, again, without saying, like, both sides just as bad. Trump bad, Trump worse, Trump worse, right? Okay, I'm just going to do that preface here, right? But we should understand. how norm violations look to his supporters, because I think a lot about this. I know, David, you interact with a lot of these people. I interact with a lot of these people. And there is always an asymmetry between pushing on an open door with the elite and pushing against what the elite wants to do. Right? So if you think about civil rights, during that fight, a lot of people are like, why are these people so disruptive? Why is everything so harsh? This was also... kind of the argument of the Great Awakening, to which I am semi- sympathetic, is that it's when you are trying to disrupt an elite consensus, you have to take much more forceful and disruptive action, you do more norm violations than when you are just trying to push the elite in the direction in which they're already going because those people have a lot of power and so forth, right? And their consensus is pretty strong. So, I mean, to put this into a practical terms, right? When you talk to conservatives about the universities, and they will say, well, you know, the Biden administration with the famous dear colleague letter in 2011 where they essentially said, like, don't give boys who are accused of rape due process, just railroad them. Any accusation should be treated as true, and you should punish those boys, right? And then you say, but look at what Trump's doing, this is so much, he's violating the Constitution, he's doing all these things. If you talk to kind of sophisticated, there are sophisticated people on the Magaray, and they will say, yeah, but they don't have to go as far as we do, because the elite already wanted to do that stuff. There was already a huge constituency within universities for railroading boys who were accused of sexual assault. So all they had to do was issue a letter. For us to get the universities to stop illegally discriminating against white males and hiring. We've got to take drastic, harsh action. And I am not defending the idea that therefore this justifies what the Trump administration did. I do not think it does. But that is why people are so angry is that there were a lot of norm violations. They were much quieter. They were enforced through social sanction, not through jackbooted thugs and so forth. But if you are a person who is not a member of the elite, who has no influence over them, or if you are...

how major universities operate, you basically have any time one party gets in power, the other party's elite, that whole demographic, feels like... the dark night of fascism is closing down on them because they're being shunted out of power with all this kind of stuff and vice versa. And that's why Madison was right about everything, about this stuff. If you have diffuse power and diffuse centers of power and diffuse institutions vying for power and competing for power, you have different sets of elites that are geographically diffused rather than taking all of their cues from centralized government. If you feel like your team is being persecuted when the other team gets in, part of the reason it feels that way is because it's true. And part of the reason it feels that way is because when so much power is concentrated in Washington, it's possible to feel persecuted that way. Well, you know, one thing Megan raises, I think, which is a great point, is that... A lot of the folks who are MAGA influencers, if you really look at them, they are red folks who were living, especially during the Great Awakening in very blue areas. And many of them moved down to Florida and fled over time. But there was a lot of experience with people who were sort of in the influencer class of the MAGA world. And they're red in blue areas. And they're experiencing, and often they're extremely sort of aggressively. MAGA in these blue areas. So they're going to be maximum irritant in that community. And they faced a lot of intolerance and a lot of efforts of cancellation, intimidation, et cetera, without any question. And so one of the things that frustrates me is... A lot of folks on the left now, it's really absorbed into them that this wotness really, really, really was bad. But they want to move on so fast. It's like, if you bring this stuff up, it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, we already know. We know, we know, we know. And they just want to move on. They don't want to think about it, dwell on it, talk about it. But my view is it's got to really sink in. It's really got to absorb into both these sides, the extent to which their own excesses have... inflamed and created the nightmare scenarios that seem to occur every time we're switching power. And so, yeah, I think it's very important to remind people that absolutely positively, the Great Awakening had an effect on real people. And one of the reasons why Trump won a 49.9% plurality as opposed to winning with a minority like he had in 2016 was I think a lot of those experiences filtered throughout American society and culture to such a way it was no longer a discussion just on television. It became something that people experienced in their lives and really, really didn't like. And I think one thing that I would say to my friends on the left,

is I think if you weren't on the left, you don't realize how smug and cruel it all was. as if we have completely figured out how to handle the legacy of hundreds of years of botched racial relations. And if you don't do what we do, the way we do it and the timing we do it and all of it, then you're just all part of the racist problem. I mean, it was just an overwhelming sense that was flowing. But then at the same time, there were those of us, a smaller minority who I think were... living in MAGA country while all this was going. And yeah, the left-wing intolerance was getting the headlines because it was happening in the media centers. But I was watching vicious intolerance. vicious arising in deep red areas, particularly in the church. And so on the one hand, everyone's talking about the Great Awakening. And I don't know if you guys remember this, but some of my like Sunday French presses back in that time were we're having a fundamentalist revival on both sides of the aisle. And it's nothing Christian about it. It's just a rise of massive intolerance. And so on the one hand, yeah, you were looking at universities, you were looking at some media outlets, you were looking at museums, and you were seeing this wild and crazy cancel culture at the same time that I'm sitting down in Middle Tennessee and they're trying to cancel Ruby Bridges goes to school. on the right. And so what you saw really were two competing, deeply illiberal movements arising. And one of the differences that I've seen to go to Megan's Trump worse, worse, worse, worse, I litigated against illiberalism for 21 years on college campuses, for 21 years, had countless cases, had countless court orders, reversing university policies. At no point, at no point ever in my legal career did I worry, the university is not going to comply with this court order. The university is going to refuse to take down this policy. The university is going to refuse to readmit this student or grant this professor of promotion or at all times. even though when universities were breaking through barriers on their policies, legal barriers, when they were called on it legally, they snapped back. They did what the law required. The thing that we're looking at now, and I still don't think this has gotten enough attention, you know, when you have a Scalia clerk chief judge from the District of Minnesota saying, in just weeks, 96 violated court orders, 96. That...

If you are passing unconstitutional policies and then complying with court orders when you called on it, you are straining the rule of law, you should have never enacted the policy to begin with. But when you have unconstitutional and illegal actions and then you refuse to comply with court orders, you are shattering the rule of law. Yeah. You are shattering it. And that is in many ways, I think, the difference between what we've been enduring through the awokening and what we're enduring now. Can I add one very quick point, which is that I think, like, co-sign everything David just said. I would add, though, that I think in the hopes of healing the country, perhaps a dim hope, perhaps a utopian hope, but everyone should remember. that you have forgotten the stuff that didn't make you mad. And this has struck me when I used to write about Supreme Court wars, right, where everyone remembered with, like, painful clarity, every single norm violation in this escalating tit for tat that Republicans and Democrats have been playing with the Supreme Court and the lower courts for decades. They remembered every single thing the other side had done. And I would talk to Democrats and they would say, Well, look at all of these escalations that Republicans did, and I said, well, what about when Teddy Robert F. Kennedy Jr. organized against Bork? What about when they blocked Miguel Estrada's nomination to the appellate court so that you couldn't position a Hispanic Republican for the Supreme Court? What about this? What about that? And they would not remember it at all. It's true when I would write about Bush v. Gore, that everyone would remember all the bad things that the Democrats or the Republicans did. They did not remember a single norm violation committed by their own side. Why? Because you remember the stuff that made you mad. But you have to remember, they remember all the stuff that made them mad. Yeah. And that, like, if you want to get to a better place, we are all going to have to do a better job. at remembering the stuff we did that made other people mad and apologizing for it. Yeah, no, I think that's a very important point. Yeah, that's a great point. Just quickly before we move on, David, to your point, I mean, you know, I remember I worked, I was sort of a staffer on the 1996 ballot proposition 209 in California, which used the language of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to ban preferential hiring and quotas in state contracting, admissions, all these things. Immediately after it passed, it passed, I think, 54-46, basically the University of California system said, too bad, we're not doing it. And they devised all sorts of ways that were effectively workarounds, and you didn't see them really abandon it until recently. So, you know, in some of these cases, there were these, you know, whether it was, you know, a ballot initiative or whether there were court, I guess the distinction you would perhaps make is. What you're talking about is specifically court orders, go do these things, remedy this, and they were followed. But I think one of the frustrating things for people who were on the other side of that, of course, as that campaign played out, one of the arguments that the side that wanted to eliminate racial preferences and quotas would make is, if you think this isn't building resentment among the people who are being actively and demonstrably discriminated against, you're crazy. Of course this is going to come back.

And I think it did. But it was also the after the fact kind of dismissal of the results of that election and what that ballot initiative meant that got people on the right, even more angry beyond just the substance of the question. So I'm going to play ombudsman for our listeners for a second, for our left of center listeners. I will point out that we've been talking for a while. And to Megan's point about remembering the things that made you mad, we spent a lot of time talking about. things that the left did. Yeah. It's true. We used to be conservatives back in those days. Yeah. Well, I'm still a conservative. I don't know. Do you have an announcement for us, John? Have you gone? Jonah lefty? But I, you know, yes, I agree with all of that, Steve. But I think, you know, just to bring the ship back, one of the things that we're dealing with here is a view that everything that we just talked about the stuff that makes you mad, that has made us mad. For a lot of MAGA, what that means is I am now relieved of any moral slash legal responsibility. Yep. And what I do going forward. And that your sins essentially have expunged any sin I commit in response to you. And then the way this works as a dynamic is now it doesn't even have to be something that happened to me. It can be something to happen that I read about on Fox. And so I'm going to inflict pain on other people because of stuff I saw on Fox or Newsmax or O-A-N. May or may not be true. And then also there is this sense in MAGA that if you go after one of them, you've gone after me. You know, this is sort of the way all politics has been deeply personalized in MAGA. It's almost like the, you know, written about this before, like the shame honor society in the South. There is even this really fascinating. University of Michigan study years and years ago where they took young men from the South, young men from the Midwest, and bumped into them in the halls and found that young men of the South got more fight or flight juices flowing through them. Now, that's not the technical term. I don't think they refer to as fighter flight juices and the literature. But you know what I mean? Sort of coursing through their veins. I believe they call it adrenaline. Yeah. There you go. There you go. And so, you know, you do have a culture that is extraordinarily focused on group solidarity and combativeness. And what that has resulted in. And this is also this is where people who don't understand or are not really familiar with the American religion don't see. This is also classic American fundamentalism. And if I was going to say, how has the religious influence on the Republican Party changed? it's become much more fundamentalist. And you scratch a fundamentalist and right underneath the surface is a totalitarian. Absolutely. I've lived with this my entire life. You scratch a fundamentalist, under there is a totalitarian. And this has been one of the flips. So you take, say, like my friend Russell Moore, who's a small L liberal evangelical, and you push them out and you replace them with, you know, these quote unquote conservative Southern Baptists. who were overt Christian nationalists or Doug Wilson from Moscow, Idaho. And what you're doing is you're just fundamentally changing the culture of religious influence in the GOP towards harsh, punitive. This is where you're seeing the war on empathy, fundamentalist totalitarianism. And they have given into that in much the same way that large parts the Democratic Party gave in to sort of what you might call the fundamentalist to totalitarian left.

But again, the difference is it's as if all of the levers of government, all of the levers of power are now being pulled in that direction in such a way that, you know, you read back and you read about, say, the Palmer raids after World War I, and you think, man, how could we let something like that happen? And we're now in a moment in American history, where I hope we emerge from it in a sufficient amount of time that some people in the relatively near future will say, How could we let this happen? But the last turn on this, and I know we've got other stuff to do, one thing that is different is the physical brutality of it. That is something like, yeah, I was shouted down when I was in universities on occasion, but what we're doing to people in these detention facilities, When it is fully understood and fully known, the conditions in these detention facilities, and I would encourage you all to read the Human Rights Watch reports that are out there. They're based on very partial information. The conditions in the detention facilities, what we were doing to people in the streets, beating them. has, I'm sorry, guys, it has no analog. It has no analog in campus illiberalism or anything like that. And I defy you to find that. And so it is notching up to a level of physical brutality that is something that is much more reminiscent of Bull Connor. than it is the English department at Oberlin for crying out loud. And that is where we're going to put this country on tilt with this physical brutality. And we are putting this country on tilt with this physical brutality. It is a dramatic escalation. I want to get to the strange doings in Fulton County before we end, but I want to use this opportunity. Megan, David, several times used the word totalitarian and its description of sort of the trajectory of the country, of the right, of the MAGA right, of fundamentalists, what have you. And you had an interesting calm in the post, not this week, but last week, about not totalitarianism, but about fascism. Saying in effect, I'll let you summarize your own argument, but saying in effect, look, it's not helpful when people use the term fascism because, as you write, when ordinary people hear that Trump is a fascist, they aren't primed for an academic debate over when right-wing populism shades over into fascism. They hear you saying that Trump is either an adherent of the political ideology known as fascism or a dictator whose practices are fascist, even if he issues the name. When you hear David say totalitarian, what's your reaction there? Is it the same as the fascism argument?

Look, I don't want to like tone police anyone exactly. How dare you, Megan? How dare you? You can go after David in a very nice tone if you disagree. I'm really horrified by what the Trump administration is doing. I think we have moved a notch or seven closer to totalitarianism than we were before. certainly before Trump's first term and also before his second term, right? So I get the impulse to say, this is a totalitarian style. But like totalitarian, that's a big word. And if you look at the societies we have called totalitarian, America does not, in fact, look very much like them. So why does that matter? Because I get what people are intuiting, I think, correctly, right, is that many people in Trump's administration do have those instincts. That's what I'm saying. Including and especially Trump, right? If the system were not restraining them, they might like to do that. But... Yes. So a couple arguments, I'm going to channel my inner, like, slightly more mega-friendly center-right person, right? And number one is that, like, there were people on the left who had those instincts. They were also restrained by the system. They were restrained by the fact that they had control not just of the government, but all of these other... extra governmental institutional sources of power, right? And so, you know, they had the media, they had academia. And those things were very powerful, not just because, like, I like reading people who talk like me in the pages of the Washington Post or the New York Times. They are powerful because when academia issues a white paper, the government will then act on it often. Right? So if you can corrupt the process of getting research papers issued, you can change policy by a lot. And I think we saw that with the public health community. during COVID, which had a bunch of normative commitments to stuff that had nothing to do with how, like, numerically trying to minimize the number of people killed by the virus. This culminated, I've told the story a bunch, where the vaccine committee that is in charge of recommending the rollout plan for vaccinating people literally chooses the plan that their own data shows. Will kill more people? in the name of equity. Even my mother, who was like a, at that point, the liberal equivalent of the Fox News dad is the CNN mom. And she was freaking out about this and incredibly angry because she was a senior citizen. She had COPD. She wanted to get vaccinated. But also, like, the idea that you would risk her death. in order to marginally promote equity was so offensive to her. And as I say, she was like a resistance lib, like a very serious resistance lib. And that stuff, that's really bad. Those instincts are always there. And they have been given free reign by a president and a movement that has discarded any respect for the idea of institutions or norms.

And one of the things I've been trying to explain not to the people at the top because they don't care what I say, but to their supporters is why actually, for I have been, like you, my credentials on critiquing liberal over the overreach of left-wing institutions, of left-leaning institutions, of the establishment, whatever you want to call it. unimpeachable. I have been screaming at these people for two decades to knock it off. And my critiques of some of the norms within those institutions, again, I have been critiquing them for two decades in many of the ways that these MAGA people were critiquing them. But I was also trying to explain to them like, I know, I know why you're mad. I know that this isn't perfect. These institutions are really valuable and the norms are really valuable and you're not going to like the world post norms. I did not have a huge amount of success at that, I'm afraid. And like part of their argument was these institutions are discarding their own norms. Why am I going to respect them? And they were not entirely wrong about that. Again, does not excuse what they did. Yeah. But to go back to the fascism question, circling back, landing the plane, if I can, is that you have to reach those people. You have to reach, right? Like, convincing us talking about whether it's totalitarian or fascism, like, that is all very fun for us. We already know who we're going to vote for. 100% of the people who are interested in talking about whether this is fascism are already going to vote against Trump or his successor. They're going to vote against Republicans in the midterms, or they are going to, at least the more MAGA Republicans, they are going to vote against anyone who is MAGA affiliated in 2026 and 28. So it has some intellectual interest kind of pinpointing exactly how bad this is. The problem is that, and this has been a problem for like more than a decade now, when you are talking, you are not just talking to each other. You were talking to people outside that institution. And when you say Trump is a fascist, right? People outside that institution, outside of that little circle, hear you, and you sound deranged. Because what their picture of fascism is, is that, like, Hitler is sweeping people off the streets, not doing bad immigration rates, not even abusing administrative subpo. As I say, we are moving closer towards that. But we don't have a Gestapo. Right? And if you think we have a Gestapo, I invite you to go read what the actual Gestapo did to people. And there's a cost to using these terms. And I think people don't perceive that. Like the number of people who said to me in response to that column, no, it's really important to name what this is because that's how we fight it. And I was like, okay, like we have been trying that. What's the step after we name it? And no one has named any way in which calling it fascism then somehow makes something happen other than this.

obviously falsified theory, that if you call it fascism, that you will awaken the revulsion of the American people towards fascism, and then they will rise up and do something. No, no, they will not, because they have not for a decade, right? And that leaves you with, don't say the things. that make you sound deranged and less persuasive to the actual people you have to persuade, who are not the people on this call and not the people reading my columns or David's columns. They are the people who are just normie voters, not that politically engaged. And you need to persuade them by saying, These policies are bad, not these policies are fascist. You don't like people getting shot by ICE. You don't like the conditions in detention. I think that totalitarianism and fascism are not additive words in that battle, and indeed they are instead subtractive words, in the core goal of trying to refute what is being done now. Sorry, that was a really long-winded rant. Just for the record, let me say, I said that you scratch a fundamentalist, you find a totalitarian. That is one billion percent true. I'm not saying the Trump administration is totalitarian. I'm not saying the Trump administration is fascists. I'm saying you deal with these Christian fundamentalists. They are totalitarians. I mean, they are. And I'm not going to soft pedal that. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. And I'll tell you another thing about them. They don't give a rip about what the wokesters did truly. Like these are the intellectual errors of Bull Connor. Okay. This is not a spontaneous or rising movement to wokeism. I have been around southern fundamentalism my whole life. They don't need Harvard. They don't need to have these views. These views have been percolating. on the fundamentalist right for a long time. And they were suppressed, they were suppressed, they were shoved into the corner, they were shoved into the corner, and now they're all out. They're all out because they learned very quickly that if we just bear hug Donald Trump, no matter what he does, we're going to have an opportunity to have some power and authority that we've never enjoyed ever in our history because we've been pushed to the side, pushed to the side, pushed to the side. And the wokeism for them isn't... a motivator. It's an excuse. Okay? And this is, I think this is really important for folks, you know, because I am 100% in agreement with Megan that we have to reach persuadable people. Absolutely. And sometimes saying the Trump administration is fascist or the administration is totalitarian is going to repel some people.

Yes, it will, it will. But also at the same time, what we have to do is say to some of these persuadable people is you're in bed with some vipers, man. You are in bed with some vipers and snakes. And these folks are not your friend the way you think that they might be your friend. It is not a situation where the enemy of my enemy is my friend. These folks are actually ultimately your enemy. These folks are actually ultimately not at all interested in creating a kind of wide spectrum, big, tent version of conservatism. No, no, no, no. This is not what they're after. at all. And I think that's very important to point out because history did not begin with the racial reckoning in 2020. We have had a sort of a George Wallace. Yeah. We have had a George Wallace segment of American population for a long time. And one of the things that helped keep it in check was that it was kind of split between the parties. We had a working class element at the Democratic Party that had some of that populist George Wallaceism. We had some of that in the Republican Party. And now that giant sucking sound is the whole George Wallace faction, essentially, that populist reactionary faction, compressing into one political party and arguably building a plurality with that political party. And that faction... has been poisonous for a really long time. It's just that, you know, to the extent that they've had some ability to have influence outside of that has been their awokening helped them, no question. But I do not want to create the impression that right-wing illiberalism is just a reaction to left-wing illiberalism. I'm sorry, if I sounded like I was saying that, I do not believe that. I think it is turbocharged it, but obviously it has always existed. So I am only arguing about kind of strategically what's actually effective at pushing back. And I don't think talking about fascism is, I am not arguing about like, this is all the resistance lips fault. That is not in any way the case. Before we pause for some ads, 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 one month free. And speaking of ads, if they aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, two free gift subscriptions to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders, and more. Okay, we'll be right back.

Howdy shoppers, fire up that propane grill and settle in for a new season of Hulu's hit animated series, King of the Hill. Hank and Peggy are staying active in retirement. That's a dog? You will not have to lift a finger. Bobby and Connie hard-launched their relationship. Now that we're dating, it's important your parents know I'm a man. And the alley guys are, well, there's still the alley guys. Yep. Watch the new season of the Hulu original series, King of the Hill. Now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers. Terms applied, this has been a paid ad... for Tasman. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. So Jonah, let me bring you in here. If I listen to this, I take Megan at face value, she's not rationalized. She's providing context. She's not saying, you know, one leads the other, one rationalizes the other. On the other hand, like, isn't it a bit delicate to be so worried about the language we're using if you have... the Department of Homeland Security sending, I mean, we can't call him jackbooted thuds, but maybe Pennylofer thuds, to this guy's house because he sent a totally innocuous email urging careful consideration of the plight of this Afghan refugee. And if, to bring in Fulton County... You have the Trump administration six years on sending the Director of National Intelligence to seize ballots from the 2020 election, perhaps pursuant to this crazy conspiracy about Italian spy satellites and foreign intervention in 2020, which has been really seizing those ballots. You know, you could point to 50 other examples that I would say if we wouldn't classify them as. out and out fascism, we're certainly traveling on that path. So you wrote a book called liberal fascism. You were not very delicate. Then, would you call this right-wing fascism now? Well, okay, so a couple things. One, actually was pretty delicate. I said time and time again that when I'm using this phrase, which I got from H.G. Wells, that I was not saying that today's progressives are the equivalent of stormtroopers, not, you know, SS officers and Auschwitz and all these kinds of things. So this was just book cover clickbait for you. Well, to a certain, well, the cover. It was a wonderful book cover. It was a wonderful book cover, by the way. It really was a wonderful book, actually. Yeah. If you're ever wondering why the phrase don't judge a book by its cover emerged, you could refer to my book. So I have very strong views about all of this. First of all, I've been saying now for over a decade, part of my goal was to get people to stop using the word fascism. And I utterly failed. I actually made it quite fashionable for right-wingers to call left-wingers fascists. And I did not even make it dent in the tendency of left-wingers to call right-winger as fascists that had...

was one of the things that made me want to write the book in the first place. I mean, Orwell, in the politics of English language in 1946, says fascists come to mean anything not desirable. And it has basically been that way ever since. My standard line when I was promoting the book was when Newt Gingrich pushed the contract with America, Charlie Rangel, then a major committee chair, said, and Democrat, said, Hitler wasn't even talking about doing things like this. I mean, probably actually technically correct. No, it's 100% true. Hitler had no program for term limiting committee chairs or reforming the House post office. So I agree with Megan that the word fascism has reached the point of diminishing returns. And that the word fascism is used by people on the left as a way to galvanize support on the left, not as a way to convert people who aren't already converted. That has been true for a very long time. I don't think it's about to change. But if we're going to get into the terminological stuff, let's just assume we are now in a Strausian faculty lounge where we get to talk freely. A lot of this stuff is pretty fascist. Talk about clickbait. Wow. We should use that as the... To get all a Straussian dot, dot, that. But no, my only point is, is that, first of all, what people don't seem to understand and have a really hard time grasping is that fascism was really popular. It was popular in Europe. It was popular in the United States. It was not seen as somehow discrediting to the New Deal to talk about how we were doing a lot of the same things here because it was seemed like it was this new idea that had come, as Anne Moreau Lindberg put it, it was the wave of the future. That's where the phrase basically comes from. Morales was popularized. And also the term totalitarian, that was coined by Mussolini. And it was not meant to be this sort of like authoritarian police state term, which it became for good reason. It was basically the way a lot of lefties in the 90s would use holistic, right? Everyone's included. No one's left behind. We're all in it together. Government is the word for the one thing that we all do together. Very fascistic way of thinking about things. But I do think that if we're going to talk about how fascism in Germany and Italy unfolded, and they unfolded very, very, very differently, you know, Mussolini killed a couple dozen people, maybe. You know, Hitler killed. Quite a few more. But if you're going to talk about in terms of like the cultural wellsprings that Trump is drawing on, it's pretty fascistic. And all you have to do is look at January 6th to see it. Right. January 6th settles the argument about, you know, using force. on decrepit, corrupt democracy to help a singular leader under the fewer of principle to achieve power and yada, yada, yada, yada. You can go down a whole, all the checklists of fascism. One of the things you learn when you read a lot of books on fascism is everyone wants to skip step one and define the thing in an understandable way. Because part of the problem is that the left has been so, the serious intellectual left has been so frustrated and offended by the fact.

that it's very difficult to come up with a definition that describes Nazism that doesn't describe Stalinism. And so you end up getting all of these incredibly complicated Ernst Nolte's Six Negations of Fascism is like one of the more famous definitions, you know, or the palingenetic, revengeous, re-reactionary, modern, you know, all this stuff. When really all it is, it's the cult of unity. And nationalism married to this idea that all the institutions should all be working together in the same direction. The word comes from the bundle of sticks around an axe, which was a symbol of authority under the Romans, and before that the Etruscans. And fascism is literally the meaning of it just means strength in numbers. And the way Trump talks about one of my favorite lines from him, I hope I don't butcher it, is all that matters is unifying the people. because the other people don't matter. And that's how he thinks about these things. He thinks only Republicans, only Trump supporters are real Americans, are real citizens. It's not the same thing as German Nazism. It's closer to some of the Italian fascism. It's closer still to some of the flange stuff of Franco. But like... You second you start talking about this kind of thing, you're like the guy from the movie airplane and the person sitting next to you starts committing suppacu or upending Jerry can of gasoline on their head, setting themselves on fire, right? Because people don't want to hear all this. So I just think strongman works, thuggish, corrupt. Part of the reason, one of the main reason Trump isn't a fascist is because if you take fascism seriously, it's an ideology and the guy has no ideology. Yeah. And so I think un-American works just fine for me. Un-American is my personal favorite because I think it also helps his opponents take back the idea that they're trying to undermine America and that they're not patriotic. And, like, I think, in fact, there is a faction of progressives who revile patriotism. But a lot of us oppose Trump because we are intensely patriotic and we believe in the Constitution and all of the ideals of our founders. And... This is not that. And his is a weaponized patriotism, I would argue, not sort of authentic patriotism. We have to leave it there. I'm sorry, we have to go. We have just a few minutes left. We need to get to not worth your time. I want to recommend because we didn't get to a David's piece in the New York Times. We'll put it in the show notes called This Is Not a Drill. He looks forward to the elections. And the lead of the piece is it's only February and the November elections are already in peril. And I don't think that's a provocative lead that's overstating things. I think he's right. So highly recommend you take the time to do that. We'll put it in the show notes. But we need to get to Not Worth Your Time. I do want to read a couple of the emails that we got back from people after our discussion of weird injuries last week. But before we do that, this week's not worth your time. We have finally arrived at Super Bowl weekend. Jonah. Starting with you, how important has Jackson Smith and Jigba bend to the Seattle Seahawks return to the big game behind an inconsistent run game and a journeyman quarterback? So as Rodney Dangerfield said and back to school, four?

I don't know. It's just my attempt at payback for all of the references to Warp Drive and Starbuck and Klingon and tattooing stuff, that I have no idea. Like, I don't know what any of that means. By the way, pour one out for Minnesota Vikings fans right now. Totally. Because Sam Darnold. Which is kind of great, honestly. Yeah. I mean, what a fan base. You ditch what turned into the Super Bowl quarterback for a guy. And look, I don't know. Maybe he'll turn it around. Maybe, maybe. But at the present, he looks like a generational bust. Yes. And you ditched the guy who's going to be starting the Super Bowl for this generational bust. Man, that's a long-suffering fan base. So the backstory there is Sam Darnold, who was drafted originally by the Jets. I think he spent time in Carolina, if I'm not mistaken, had a successful year with the Minnesota Vikings, and now as the quarterback of the Seattle Seahawks, and appears to be the quarterback he was drafted to be many years ago. So we're not going to get into... the game and a breakdown of the various defensive schemes that the teams play my question uh i have three questions one do you watch the super bowl and two if you do watch do you watch for the ads the game or the traditional interview with the president jona I do not watch for the traditional interview with the president. I turn to the puppy bowl during the traditional interview with the president, another great American tradition, the puppy bowl. I generally watch it. I watch it partly for the ads, partly for the spectacle, partly to sort of just follow the conversations that follow. I like football. I just don't spend a lot of time on it. I try to watch the World Series too. I'm that kind of very fair weather fan. Megan? I am on record in a column for the Washington Post expressing my moral disquiet with watching football because you are basically watching young men mash their brains and setting themselves up for... terrible pain. I mean, first of all, what it does to them physically, and also for early dementia. And I say this, I have a second cousin who actually played for the Jacksonville Jaguars for several years. He now has a podcast like everyone these days. Right, right. But I can't do it. I just, I think about it's an exciting game, it's all the rest of it, and then I watch it, and I know that every hit... is putting those young men at risk of becoming demented old people at 50. And I can't do it. So, no. I do watch the ads and the puppy bowl. I didn't play football and I'm a demented 50-something. I mean, it's not guaranteed. Glad you said it. David, you love football.

I love football. And now I feel like kind of guilty saying that. I love football. I get it. I get like why people love it. It's just I can't. Yeah. Like I love many things that I should not and I try not to do the things that I shouldn't. So I'm looking forward to the Super Bowl, not as much as others, just because the two teams that are in it. I love football so much. I basically have a one to last ranking of NFL teams so that I always have a rooting interest in any game I'm watching. So these are two teams near the bottom of my rankings. So I'm not super excited about rooting for either one of them. But I'm going to watch every second of it. I love it. One of the most fun things I've ever done was spur of the moment. Took my son and son-in-law to the Packers playoff game. Sorry, Steve, the Bears Packers game with 25 degrees in soldier fields. and watched that Bears come back with 60,000 deliriously happy neighbors. And it was one of the most fun, like just fun evenings of my life. So I really, I'm a big football fan. I love football. That's because it had been so long coming for the Bears fans. They had 20, what, years and years to wait to celebrate. My number one team is the Titans, and we're horrible. So I have vaulted Chicago to number two. Oh, no. And they have a bright future, Steve. There is a bright future. That is terrible. Had I known, I wouldn't have even gone. I know. I'm off the podcast. I was at the NFC championship game years ago when the Packers played the Bears at Old Soldier Field, and I got tickets and took a Bears friend, a buddy of mine who was in my wedding and college friend. And little did we know that in this massive stadium, we were seated in a section that was exclusively Packers fans. So this poor guy had to watch the Bears lose to the Packers seated with Packers fans in the sea of Bears fans. It was a great experience and traumatic for him, which made it that much enjoyable for me. I went to a Super Bowl party years and years ago at Tucker Carlson's house. I did not socialize with Tucker Carlson. I was not friends with Tucker Carlson, but I was invited because I worked at the Weekly Standard. Went to a Super Bowl party at Tucker Carlson's house. And the game was about to kick off. And there was this mad scramble to get the game on the television. The television wasn't turned on. And somebody, the person who was trying to put it on, it was not Tucker Carlson. It was a former, it was a business guy at the Weekly Standard, said, what channel is it on?

and took the remote control and somebody said, it's on Fox, and he tuned to Fox News, which was about the most DC thing I've ever experienced that he was looking for the game on Fox News. No, I watch the game. I think it's fun. I don't care that much about the ads. You always see the good ones afterwards. I watch for the game, and I will watch the Super Bowl. So last week we talked about our bizarre injuries, our old man, old woman injuries, various maladies that came to us usually in unfortunate situations. We got a number of fantastic emails from listeners. And I'm going to read two of them. And then there's a third that is really funny, but too long to read. And we're going to post that. in the show notes on the website. So the first one comes from Margie, who writes, in 1979, I was newly graduated from college and so proud and eager to start my job as an editorial assistant at a think tank in Washington, D.C. Having come from a small Pennsylvania town, I was thrilled to be working in the Watergate building as my first big girl job. Sewing had always been my hobby, and I made lots of my own clothes. On this particularly beautiful spring morning, I was walking to work along Virginia Avenue in front of the Watergate and was... wearing a kilt that I'd made. Kilts are fastened by a hook at the waistband and a kilt pin on the skirt. As I was walking along, I began tripping on something and looked down to see myself stumbling over my skirt, which was on the ground. Left in nothing more than a pair of panty hose, I tumbled to the ground, skinned my knees, and most injuriously damaged my pride. Of course, this had to happen during rush hour, and I recall several honked horns. It's the visual that is there of poor Margie walking along. Virginia Avenue would be a very crowded street during rush hour, for those of you're not familiar with, Washington, D.C. And then this from Joe. When I was an early teen, my brother and I woke to my mom screaming for help. I go into her bedroom and she's stuck to the mattress. A mattress spring had popped through the mattress and coiled its way through her arm. She couldn't get up. Obviously, my brother and I had to find a wire cutter to cut the spring. We then slowly worked the coil out of her arm. This all happened around 3 a.m. Fun times. Absolutely. Brutal. I don't know. You know, we started that conversation last week by reading the chunk of the Bill Bryson column about how ridiculous it was that there had been 50,000 people the previous year injured in confrontations with their betting or their mattresses. And there is one. I can't imagine what that would have felt like to wake up to that.

piercing horrendous pain in the middle of the night. So in an attempt to cleanse from our listeners the searing memory of that anecdote, I should say I forgot one of my best incredibly stupid injuries last week. which is that when I was a freshman in high school, you know, I was kind of an awkward, socially isolated nerd in middle school, which I think is going to shock many of our listeners who imagined me as, you know, the popular kid. But so my mother decided in consultation with me that we would like, we would do a makeover, which was a little bit of a problem because I had also stopped growing and then gained a bunch of weight in eighth grade and it had not come off yet. Anyway, so we go and we get me a new haircut at a grown-up salon. And the problem is I have very curly hair. And it looked like, it looked beautiful when she blowdried it straight. And then when I washed it, all the curls sprung up and it looked like the left side of my head was trying to crawl over onto the right. And so I get new clothes and I walk onto campus and my campus had a lot of beautiful old oak trees. I am three... steps onto campus, and I sprained my ankle by stepping on an acorn. The school nurse has to come and take a wheelchair. Because it's a campus. Like it's up in the Bronx. There's different buildings. And I am rolled through with my terrible new haircut. The crowds of arriving students by the nurse and wheelchair. And that was my entry into high school. An acorn? Yeah. It was just like a massive acorn? No, I just have quite weak ankles. So I stepped on the acorn and then my foot rolled. Oh, my gosh. Like it just caught in the right. It was so bad. And there, I mean, like before the nurse, there was me lying on the ground screaming. I mean, it was possibly the most inauspicious first day of high school in history. Thank you. Don't forget to tip your waiters. So I am going to, we're going to find a way to post the long story that we got from Lisa G, which is well worth your time if you can. We'll post it on the show notes. But Lisa G, this is apparently a thing. I did not know this was a thing, but apparently, Megan, females, when they go into a bathroom, look, sometimes cast a glance. underneath the door of the stalls to see if the stalls are occupied. And it's not a common thing. I think in men's rooms that I've been in, maybe, Jonah, you've had different experiences. I think it might have a very different valence. Yeah, I mean, Senator Craig had strong feelings on this. Larry Craig, wide stance. Remember wide stance? Oh, man. But Lisa G. was on a cruise, and she looked.

underneath the door of the stall at precisely the time that the woman who had been occupying the stall opened the door. Oh no. And smoked her in the head. And I will leave it to others to read the rest of her story. But it is hilarious. And it goes on for a while. So we will find a way to put that in the show notes. And we will have more fun with Not Your Up Through Time next week. Thank you all for joining. Talk to you soon. If you like what we're doing here, there are a few easy ways to support us. You can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. And 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 people who prefer Star Trek to the Super Bowl. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in, and a big thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Noah Hickey, Victoria Holmes, and Peter Bonaventure. We couldn't do it without you. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.

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