Music
[upbeat music] [groans] Ladies and gentlemen, uh-
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Can I please have your attention? [upbeat music] Can you dig it! [cheering]
Jonah Goldberg
Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by The Dispatch and Dispatch Media. I am recording this at a weird time in a strange place. I’m doing an event, a speaking event tonight at Bowdoin College in Maine, and I’m at the Hotel Brunswick. And it is Thursday afternoon, a little before two o’clock. Apologies if there’s been major news since, uh, I recorded this, but anyway, this is the moment. This is the window I have. Where to begin? It’s, uh, [chuckles] it’s not been a fun week. The packing up stuff is happening in earnest. I’m having to get rid of hundreds of books, which really I hate doing, even though, you know, some of the books, it’s,
Jonah Goldberg
are not that emotional to get rid of. I just don’t like throwing away books and
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the hassle of trying to figure out where to donate them to and all that. It’s just, it’s a bummer. The, the harder part is there’s all this stuff
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that I grabbed, you know, either when my dad died or when my mom died, that I just didn’t wanna go through, but I also knew I didn’t wanna throw away, and I can’t in good conscience, given the logistics of this thing that we’re doing. I had to start going through some of it and weeding wheat from the chaff or whatever, separating the wheat from the chaff, and it’s just, you know, it’s the kind of thing you could spend an hour on one file folder. You could spend an afternoon on one file folder or one, you know, giant and, you know, giant box of pictures, or you could spend a minute, and it’s, it’s just sort of brutal. And so, like, there’s some things obviously I’m gonna keep. Lots of, you know, interesting stuff from my dad’s business. You know, it’s funny. So he– At some point, I think I’m gonna do, if I can, if I can curate it properly, I think I’m just gonna do a whole special podcast for my benefit as much as anybody else’s ’cause it will help me
Jonah Goldberg
actually sift through a lot of this stuff and organize it and just do, like, a podcast or a big article on going through my dad’s stuff. Because, for instance, I, I found this great folder where my dad had written me a note, I had no recollection of it, saying, “Jonah, you might find this of interest
Jonah Goldberg
one day because
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you might wanna know what I did for the first couple hours of the day for, for over,” [chuckles] you know, I don’t know what the time period was, you know, a decade, two decades. And I’ve tried to explain this to people. So my dad ran, was an editor at news syndicates, and so they would sell feature articles, sort of like what the AP does. It’s the only way that people today can understand, but n-news syndicates used to be a really, really big deal. And so, like, my dad would see a story about something or have an idea about a story about something, and he would go assign a reporter and say, “Go here and do that,” and then they would sell the piece that the guy wrote to hopefully hundreds, you know, maybe thousands of newspapers around the country. And there were different ways of doing that. You could put it in a packet that newspapers subscribed to. For the really cool stuff, you would do a one-off special thing. It’s, I, I can’t pretend to understand all the economics of it. I mean, I understand it better than a lot of people because a lot of people don’t even know that the business existed. But he would also, you know, write to all sorts of famous people about things going on, saying, “Hey, I would love, we would love to have a thousand to two thousand words from you,” Al Haig, right? I found some letters to Al Haig about this or that, right? Or famous academics, whatever. And, and he would write these letters. This is before email, right? And he would write hundreds of these letters to people all week long, fishing for, soliciting articles. And it’s just, some of it is just a really great snapshot in time. And then there are, I mean, I have no idea how many I threw away over the years, but for throughout the 1990s and into the, well into the 2000s, my dad, I know I’ve talked about this before, my dad would clip articles from newspapers, because he read a lot of newspapers, and then with, on a Post-it note or in the margins of the page or on a separate piece of paper or whatever, he would either make a little joke or he would say, “This is an interesting statistic,” or, “George Will loves these kinds of statistic, statistics.” You know, lots of stuff like I found that he ripped out this article from The New York Times, I wanna say in 1995, doesn’t really matter, about some horrible
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tapeworm parasite that was ravaging Guinea-Bissau, which had these, like, two paragraphs of descript- describing what it’s like, and he circles them and he writes me a little note and he says, “Jonah, you are absolutely forbidden to ever go swimming in a lake or a river in Guinea-Bissau,” um, because that’s how you would get one of these parasites, whatever. Anyway, I think it’s funny and it’s interesting, and so I’m just trying to save as much of that stuff as I can. But then there’s like, okay, I’m gonna keep my grandfather’s discharge papers from World War I. I didn’t even know he served in World War I. Or I should say, his discharge in 1919, so I assume World War I. But there’s, like, medical records for, you know, the, like, the bills for his parents when they were, you know, late in life and stuff like that. On the one hand-I don’t think there’s any real
Jonah Goldberg
serious value to any of it, but on the other hand, it feels like a crime against my own little personal history to throw it away. And anyway, I agonize about this stuff. I’m not quite a hoarder. I am bad about throwing things away, and I really hate throwing things away that have any kinda meaning. And it was particularly hard, you know, as I’m, like, the last survivor of my immediate family. So that’s not been fun, nor has it been fun just with the aches and pains of
Jonah Goldberg
lugging around furniture into a dumpster and loading boxes and boxes and boxes of books and other things, but it’s been stressful. So where to begin? I don’t know. Uh, well, uh, here I’ll, I’ll begin by making up for s- an oversight from last week’s solo. I don’t know. It was like an hour after I recorded the solo last week, I got an email from a avid listener who I’ve sparked a, you know, friendly email relationship with, and he asked me,
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“How come there’s all this coverage of Pam Bondi being fired and so little coverage and so little outrage comparatively to Pete Hegseth firing the Army Chief of Staff and all this crazy hazarai at the Pentagon?”
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And I think it was a good question. Even if you think the Pam Bondi thing was a bigger news stuff, it’s still a good question about the comparative lack of coverage and concern about it. I felt bad because, [chuckles] I had just finished recording a solo where I talked at length about the Pam Bondi thing and how to think about it, and virtually not at all about the Pete Hegseth stuff. So, um, maybe we can sorta start there. Look, I
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don’t trust Pete Hegseth. I don’t think firing
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all of those judge advocate generals at the begin– you know, all the, the, the lawyers, the ethics people at the beginning was a good sign. I thought the infomercial with every general in the Army at the beginning of the administration was pretty gross and unnecessary. I don’t think it did enormous damage, um, but it symbolically was not good. And then to have the commander-in-chief come on afterwards and talk about how, you know, after, after Hegseth does all this, we’re gonna be about killing people and being lethal and without mercy, and that’s what we do here as our job isn’t to be peacekeepers, our job isn’t to be social workers, our job isn’t to promote DEI. Our job is to kill, our job is to be lethal, our job is to blow up things, rah, rah, rah, and everyone’s gonna have to do more push-ups. And I thought that was all sort of juvenile. I thought it was pretty performative for Donald Trump rather than actually necessary. My understanding from people who’ve talked to people who were in the room, the generals did not think it was, I mean, it was, they did not think it was worth their time.
Jonah Goldberg
But okay, whatever. Having a meeting with a bunch of generals at the beginning of a new administration, even though it was kind of unprecedented, it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. It wasn’t, you know, I mean, there was someone on NPR who compared it to Hitler’s purging of generals, which I thought was ridiculous. But then to have the President of the United States come in, and I know I’m broken record on this, and talk about, “Oh, how the really important thing you guys are gonna do is fight the enemy within, in our own cities,” that was really disgusting. I can’t blame Hegseth entirely for that because it’s something that came outta Trump’s mouth. But in a more grown-up and professional, um, administration and serious administration, there would’ve been some coordination about messaging and whatnot, but instead, Trump thought he could just do the thing like a rally, and Hegseth had no objection to it. Anyway, m- fast-forward, I think
Jonah Goldberg
the firings, some, I, I, I have some friends who will, who say that what Hegseth did, firing some leakers was, alleged leakers, was totally outrageous and unfair, and I, I don’t know. Some of that just sounds like intra-administration factional stuff that I, you know, I’m not part of and don’t care about, um, and happens in lots of administrations. But this recent stuff about blocking the promotion of mostly Black and female, um, officers, I think even if you, uh, there are a lot of people who say that the coverage of it has been unfair and mis- misleading and all this kinda stuff, I, I’ve not seen evidence that that’s true. It’s, it’s just people taking on faith that the mainstream media is, is biased and lying, you know, and, and, and hyping the, the racial and gender aspects of it beyond the facts. I just haven’t seen evidence of that. But even if, to a certain extent, even if you think that has some plausibility, again, I don’t think it does, um, not
Jonah Goldberg
meaningful plausibility, um, not dispositive sort of Hegseth’s being treated unfairly plausibility. But even if you grant, you know, a lot of benefit of the doubt, firing the Army Chief of Staff while we’re at war is kind of a big deal. And one of the defenses you’ll hear from people is, “Yeah, but he wasn’t doing it because of anything having to do with the war. He was doing it because he’s on this anti-DEI crusade, and, and he doesn’t like the Army chief of staff, and they got, it has to do with rivalries within the administration, and he thought maybe this guy was coming for his job, and Hegseth is really worried about being fired.” You hear all these sort of petty, sort of non-first order things, and I, that all may be right. I just don’t see how that’s a defense. I mean, Hegseth is the guy who’s saying every single American should be on bended knee praying for support of this army, and that we should all be unified with hope and unification and hopeful unity about unified hopefulness and-All this kind of stuff, and our, our warriors need, you know, everybody pulling in the same direction, and leakers should go to jail, and this is an all, you know, all-nation effort, and Jesus is on our side. But I’m gonna fire the Army Chief of Staff during this war for petty personal political agenda stuff. That’s not a defense. That’s, that’s an indictment. You know, I mean, like, I’m all in favor of firing generals who are, like, not conducting themselves well when we’re at war. I mean, that’s what you do in wars, is like, you gotta get the right people in the right positions. There’s been no evidence of that. There’s been no talk about that. This is all because of Broseph McChesty’s, you know, Fox News, you know, book-pushing, you know, stuff. And even if it’s not racist, and I– you know, who knows if it’s racist, there’s this weird kinda irony to this. And obv– there’s been some reporting on this, is that Hegseth insists he’s against DEI, that we need to purge the military of all this DEI stuff. And I have no problem with that as a top-line conceptual thing. I think a lot of the DEI stuff went way, way too far. But it’s important to keep in mind that the military has probably been the most successful institution in America
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for actually integrating minorities into the institution without an appreciable loss of effectiveness or, um,
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quality, right? And, and, like, y-you can point to individual mistakes or, you know, errors at the margins, but you can’t simultaneously go around bragging about how this military is the greatest military in the world, we’re better than everybody else in the world, nobody can do what we do,
Jonah Goldberg
and oh, by the way, our military was crippled by DEI. You know, the bulk of the people in the military right now were in the military under Joe Biden. A lot of them were in the military under Barack Obama. [chuckles] And, you know, so the, the, the theory of the case, it’s sort of like saying the… You know, Trump likes to go around saying the military was dead and broken until he got reelected. Well, I’m sorry, like, whatever changes they made to the military in the last fourteen months, I don’t think they made the difference between the greatest military in the world and a functionally dead military. Regardless, the, uh, the weird, dark irony in this is that in the name of alleged commitment to colorblindness and having a single standard for everybody, these guys are screwing over people who’ve dedicated their careers to the military, who were due for a promotion, and at least the appearance of it is that their race and gender played a big role in it. And so now you have, you know, women and minorities in the military, and I think, I think the military is something like forty percent non-white, something like that. You’ve got people now thinking that they can’t have a career in the military because the leadership in the, at the top is less welcoming of minorities. Now, again, that may be untrue and unfair of Hegseth’s motivations. Uh, I’m not… I, I… You can stipulate that for argument’s sake. But he doesn’t seem to care that that’s the message he’s sending. He also doesn’t seem to care very much. Again, I’ve seen people defending it on both sides, this, uh, brouhaha about how on Good Friday, they only had a service, a Protestant service at the Pentagon. I’ve heard people say this is not nearly as big a deal as people are making it, and the Huffington Post and these places are blowing it all out of proportion, and I think there’s probably some truth to that. At the same time, you know, there’s a certain amount of politics that goes in running an institution like that, and perceptions are important. And when you have some of these pretty fringe Protestant pastors in your orbit, in your life, who have come and, you know, preached and whatnot at the Pentagon, it sends a signal. You know, good leaders understand that, like, sometimes the pure facts don’t matter at that level. You need to make gestures to seem like you’re actually a leader of everybody in your institution. And I don’t, I just don’t think Hegseth has anywhere near the bandwidth for that. I don’t think he gets it. I don’t think he cares. I think he’s a sectarian. I worry about at l- the damage he’s doing to the military. I think… I just had this guy on, we’ll save it for when the podcast comes on, but I just had a military guy on. We recorded it yesterday. It won’t be on for a little while. And, um, he was great, and he was talking about the, just the incredible reserves of moral seriousness within the military, and I think that’s probably right. Um, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do real damage in the process. And moreover, you can do real damage to the reputation and perception
Jonah Goldberg
of the United States government, of the U.S. military, to people who are watching from afar, including American citizens. And, you know, I could just use a little less base, you know, GOP base service, Fox News audience service from the Secretary of Defense of all people. And so in that way, in some ways, it’s,
Jonah Goldberg
it’s basically the same story as, as Pam Bondi in, in some respects, except he’s not getting fired yet. That’s another thing I guess I could talk about for a second. I, um, got the idea to write this in part from last week’s solo. Um, I wrote my G file about this last Friday, the– Well, two Fridays ago, according to you people in the future listening to this. I had gone to… I was writing something, and I was trying to avoid using the word rhetoric again. Um, I don’t like repeating words. You know, here’s a writing tip. Try not to repeat words. It’s interesting. That is a stylistic thing in English, but not necessarily in all other languages. Um, a friend of mine who’sdone some journalism in Spanish. He says, you know, it is perfectly fine to repeat the same word over and over and over again in an article, and the reader doesn’t get annoyed by it. At the end of the road, he could see that the road behind him was as long as the road in front of him. You know, like you can just say road, road, road, road, road, and the reader just, that’s the word for road. But in English, you know, it’s path, you know, it’s trail, [chuckles] it’s… We like to mix things up with synonyms. Be that as it may, we can talk about style guides another time. And so I go to thesaurus.com, which is not great, um, and it’s gotten worse over the years. But sometimes at least it will trigger something in my head about another word I could use, whatever. And I type in rhetoric to thesaurus.com, and the synonyms are almost all negative. You know, hyperbole, blather, talkativeness, whatever. There were one or two eloquence. You know, there were like one or two that were at least mildly positive, but none of them got at like… You know, rhetoric is one of the most discussed and, and studied concepts in the
Jonah Goldberg
w-western world, in Western civilization. I mean, going back to Aristotle and Plato, who talked a great deal about rhetoric. Rhetoric was taught as part of the trivium that goes into the liberal arts throughout Christian history up until about the late 1900s. Um, it’s the art of persuasion. And of course, there are critics of rhetoric, philosophical critics of rhetoric, and that’s why, like Plato talks about true rhetoric, ’cause true rhetoric has to be persuasiveness towards
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the truth or the good, while mere rhetoric can be sort of cheap BS-ing salesmanship, right? And so there’s a different, you know, like those distinctions have been made before, but it’s like that
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the, the latter understanding of the term has completely eclipsed the, the former. And I think that’s just really, really bad. Anyway, so I went on a wide-ranging thing about this that got into the seven deadly sins and the role of envy and yada, yada, yada, yada. But I have the, uh, uh, s- I wrote it in there, but I’ve had this belief for a very long time, you know, that, um… It’s actually a big part of my underrated second book, is that it’s one of these things where I agree with Barack Obama, although I hated the way he made the argument. But he used to have this whole riff about people who say, “Oh, those are just words.” And he was like, “Just words? Just words?” And then he would talk about the importance of words, and I agree with him on the point. You know, and one of the reasons why rhetoric was so important from, you know, ancient Greece until the 1900s is that rhetoric in terms of the art of publicly speaking and writing, writing for a public au-audience, or really speaking for a public audience, to persuade them on the weighty issues of the day,
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that was as good as you really got with mass communication. There was no TV, there’s no radio, there’s no social media. There was a bunch of dudes in togas sitting around on hard stone benches listening to people, trying to figure out, you know, I don’t know, whether they should go to war with Sparta or something. Um, or whether they should spend some of their money on pillows because their asses were going numb sitting on the rock. But it was how leaders of society
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figured out what the society was for, what it was gonna do, how it was gonna respond to threats. It was the tool of deliberation and of critical thinking in a public forum. We don’t have to get all grandiose with, with the term rhetoric for a second, but like, you know, words still matter a lot. You know, uh, my, my big riff on this, you’ve heard me do it a million times, is about, you know, people say they don’t believe in labels, and I, I get where some people are coming from when they say that kind of thing. But at the end of the day, labels are just another word for words. They’re the,
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they’re the signifiers, they’re the,
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the names that we give really, really important concepts. And you know, it’s sort of like whenever, whenever, whenever you hear people say they don’t believe in labels, what they’re really saying is, “I don’t like
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that the words you use for things that you care about are getting in the way of me getting what I want.” You know, it’s like the people who say,
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you know, “Why can’t we get past all the partisan bickering and all these ideological disagreements?” They, they never say,
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“You know, we gotta get past these ideological disagreements. We gotta get, we gotta bridge the partisan divide, and that’s why I’m going to abandon my position and agree with you.” They only ever say that when they want you to abandon your position and get with them, you know? It’s the… No one ever says, “The time for debate is over, therefore I lost, and I, even though I think I’m right, I’m going to agree with you.” You know, or very rarely do, does anybody say that. And words and labels matter, how we talk about things. You know, people love to talk about how the media is biased because it frames things this way and that way, and I’m down for it. I’ve been doing it longer than most of the people listening to this podcast. I think liberal media bias is a real thing. I think there are other forms of bias. I talked about that recently. But then when it comes to our politicians, at least the politicians that they like,
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they, oh, they’re like, “Oh, why are you…” You know, on the left, they’ll say, “Why are you tone policing? Why are you, you know, why can’t you get over your objections to how Donald Trump talks about these things? That’s just the way he is.” Like, how our politicians talk about things. How… Let’s just, sorry for another segue here, or a digression, but people in this country love to talk about the problems with our leadership, and I got no problem talking about the problems with our leadership.But we got a massive frigging followership pro-problem in this country.
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People really suck at setting expectations and limitations on their leaders.
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They really stink at expecting more from the people on their team and that gives the, the leaders on their team the permission to be jackasses and to be demagogues.
Jonah Goldberg
And but sort of more broadly, you know, forget the politics point, forget the media bias point.
Jonah Goldberg
I, I think the way we talk as a country about our problems is so full of, I don’t wanna say negativity. I mean, negativity is such a boring sort of seminar word. Is so full of entitlement and victimhood, is so full of ingratitude,
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um, and so denying
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of individual agency, uh, the ability of people to actually overcome systemic problems. And if you don’t think that that kind of rhetoric, that kind of framing of how we talk about things has consequences… Well, I mean, like, again, uh,
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as I said in the GFile, I hate talking about government as f- like our family. The president… I mean, like I, I, again, I give George Washington a pass as the figurative father of our country, but I hated the Chris Rock stuff about Obama being America’s dad. I hate the people who talk about Trump being America’s dad or America’s boss or any of that kind of stuff. It’s all a category error. It’s all– It’s basically the same sort of intellectual base stealing that you get with arguments about the moral equivalent of war and that kind of stuff. The president of the United States is not the head of the American family. You don’t elect your father, first of all. Um, it’s just,
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it’s just a total confusion of categories and concepts. All that said, just to illustrate what I’m getting at,
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everybody knows somebody,
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and many of those people who know somebody, you know… And, and if… I’m not talking about somebody you know, I’m talking about you. But everybody knows somebody who grew up in a family
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where
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the parents were
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disparaging, negative, always expecting the worst,
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always focusing on failures of their kids, always saying they were disappointments and that kind of stuff to one extent or another. And while it’s absolutely true that there are a handful of people who become these wild success stories by rejecting all of that and rebelling against their parents, I think probably for every one of them, there’s probably a thousand people who just absorb that and become like their parents and just see the world as a nasty place. And because they think it’s nasty, they respond to it nastily because they’re… You know, they wanna preempt the nastiness. And that, a lot of that… Look, I’m not talking about parents who abuse their kids or anything like that. I’m just talking about parents who are just always hung up on how the system screwed them and all of that. Um, the kids absorb that to a large extent, and it frames how they see the world. In just the same way that the greatest predictor of what religion you are or what political party you belong to is
Jonah Goldberg
the religion or the politics of your parents, um, so too about your attitude towards the world. Now, genetics plays a little bit of a role in some of this kind of thing, and there’s contingency, and peers are important. But I think you get the point, is if you’re just surrounded by people who tell you the world is unfair, and life is unfair, and you have no control, and you have no agency, and you have no power, those people are going to grow up to a cer- To an overwhelming extent, they’re gonna grow up to think that’s true, and they’re gonna act out their lives as if it were true, and it becomes self-fulfilling prophecy.
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And because if you go into the world thinking everybody is gonna rip you off,
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your instinct is to rip them off first, and then people don’t trust you, and then the,
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it becomes reality. Anyway, I think you get the point I’m trying to get at. Well,
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if, uh, what is true of small institutions like your family or your community, it’s also true to some extent at scale in a country. And we have two parties now that are so dedicated to the idea that, first of all, the other side is evil and can never be trusted in any way. I mean, I saw this stupid line from Megyn Kelly the other day about how Trump could still, you know, n-use nukes or something, and she’d still vote Republican because, you know, the, the Democrats wanna nuke America, which is so stupid, even rhetorically, for want of a better word. But, you know, the arguments about poverty in this country, about economics in this country, about inequality in this country, about how our institutions work, about religion, everything is framed to a huge extent in these negative terms that cast everybody as victims and tell them that there is no hope, that they have no agency, that they’re interchangeable with anybody else who has the same skin color or the same faith or whatever. And there’s a certain amount of, of self-fulfilling prophecy to that. And, um, you know, there was a reason why Reagan’s rhetoric… I mean, people, people who are too young to remember, but the, just the rhetorical change that came with the Reagan presidency
Jonah Goldberg
was hugely important to this country. You can roll your eyes at it if you’re one of these sort of post-liberal-goon squad guys and all that kind of stuff but talking about how this is a great country, not just the Republicans in it, or not just the Democrats in it, or not just the white people in it or anything, but how this is a great country, and that individual achievement is one of the things that defines this country, and that if you set your heart to it and you have good morals and, and, and, and a hard work ethic and all these very, very, you know, various things, is that there’s no guarantees, but there’s a guarantee you’ll have a better shot
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at rising above your, quote-unquote, “station” than you will in almost any other country in the world. And the less you talk like that, the less you’re gonna make that true. Anyway, I just think it’s, it’s, it’s really underappreciated, and I, I know I am… I mean, I’m no Nick Catoggio, but I am prone to my Eeyore-ness. I am prone to my negativity, but I also just still, I love this country, and I think there is so much more good about this country than bad still, and that we have these massive reservoirs of decency in this country that we have to figure out how to tap. You know, it’s sort of like we need a shale revolution for d- for decency in this country and figure out new, [chuckles] you know, rhetorical technologies that come in through horizontal drilling or something to tap into it. You know, that’s one of the reasons why I wanna fix the, get rid of the primary system and all that. Anyway, I don’t know what got me on that, um, so I’ll just move on. I wrote on Wednesday about, um,
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J.D. Vance’s trip to Hungary, which I gotta say, all m- all the stuff a minute ago about not being too negative was freaking appalling.
Jonah Goldberg
I increasingly find J.D. Vance to be among the creepiest American politicians, um, of my lifetime, and I, I also have to say, I think his political instincts suck. And people say, “Well, he’s the youngest guy to be vice president and blah blah blah blah blah. He was a senator, and he wrote a book.” You know, okay, well, he, he wrote a book that he basically had to renounce the thesis of, and he worked his way through elite America, ingratiating himself with, you know, various important, powerful people to rise to a certain level of prominence. And, um, you know, he didn’t become
Jonah Goldberg
Trump’s VP choice because of some groundwe- swell of popularity. He became Trump’s VP choice because Tucker Carlson and the, the Trump boys, um, freaked out at the idea of Doug Burgum or, uh, Marco Rubio being VP, and they got in Trump’s ear, and he switched at the last minute. But, you know, the people who talk about him as he’s this incredible political talent, I just don’t frigging see it. He’s won one primary in his entire life, and he only did it because Trump bailed him out in a, like, a five-or-six-way field, um, and he barely won his race in Ohio because first Mitch McConnell and the Silicon Valley bros and Trump had to drag him across the finish line in a state that Trump won by eight two years earlier and that the gov- the Republican governor, the normie Republican governor, won by, like, twenty-eight points on the same ballot as Vance. Vance won by four or by six, something like that. I, I know I’m a broken record on this. I just, I find this projection on Vance as this,
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you know, as the white knight, um, I use that phrase only slightly unironically, for the, for the, the future of MAGA to be such wish casting. Anyway, he goes to Hungary this week, and
Jonah Goldberg
he literally, while, like, literally campaigning for Viktor Orbán, like, at rallies, in press interviews, in a bunch of different speaking events, literally saying, “Get out there and vote to save God and Western civilization,” and all this crap. You know, “You gotta vote for Viktor Orbán.” He’s literally talking in these, you know, these panel discussions and in these speeches about how outrageous foreign interference in people’s, um, internal elections is, about how, h- how, what an incredible breach of sovereignty it is for another country to meddle in the internal politics of a, of an ally or any other country, and he’s saying this while he’s literally stumping. I mean, like, he’s talking about how… Look, I, I think, uh, Zelenskyy made a mistake when he came to the United States shortly before the, the twenty twenty-four election and allowed himself to be photographed with Democrats. You know, he was basically just visiting munitions factories, but he, they, they screwed up. Democrats screwed up by letting that happen. It was a bad idea. It was bad for Zelenskyy. It was bad for America. It was bad for Ukraine. Okay.
Jonah Goldberg
And Vance exaggerates how outrageous it was, but he’s not wrong directionally that it was not good, okay? Fine. He’s talking about how… Like, th- this was his example of how the elements in the Ukrainian government are trying to put their thumb on the scale of American politics and how terrible that is and yada, yada, yada. And again, he’s talking about that while he is doing ten X, twenty X, fifty X what Zelenskyy did for Orbán in Hungary days before the election. It is grotesque, and he does it with a straight face. He makes it sound like he’s sincere. I don’t think he, I don’t think he’s a dumb guy. He’s just so profoundly dishonest and unself-aware. I, I don’t mean unself-aware in the sense that, that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. I just don’t think he cares about what he’s doing to, like, his soul and his reputation, and I just have no patience for, for, for the people defending it, um, or really, frankly, defending Hungary. I mean, I, I, I’m a, I’ve, I’ve done the thing about Hungary a million times, and I get why, like, Vance and these guys, one of, one of Vance’s closest egghead friends is this Gladys Pappen guy who’s, Gladden Pap, Gladden B-Happen, whatever. It’s one of these guy- one of these Americans who now lives in Budapest and, you know, with a plum state-sponsored job, who argues for, you know, who, who’s argued at least tongue in cheek for notions of monarchy, and he’s a post-liberal integralist who thinks that the United States government should become subservient to Rome and all this stuff. I’m not doing justice to all of his nuance, but I don’t take the dude seriously anyway. And, you know, he’s there and doing warm-up stuff for Vance. All these guys, they’re sort of connected with Thiel, Peter Thiel, and they’ve got these potted, idiotic notions about how Hungary is a model
Jonah Goldberg
for the United States, and, um, that, you know, ’cause Orbán says, you know, flatly that his political philosophy is illiberalism. Matt Schlapp has licensed CPAC to Hungary, and you got all of these boondoggle junkets and people defending, um, the Hungarian model and the Orbán model and this post-liberal model, and it’s all such horse [beep]. You know, even on its best terms, it’s just… I’m sorry, it’s just nonsense. God, look, I, I like Hungary. I, like, historically, I think it’s a fascinating country. Um, Budapest is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Hungarian culture, Hun-Hungary punches above its weight culturally and civilizationally more than a lot of countries. It’s a really interesting place with a deep and rich, you know, history to, to celebrate and all that. You know, let’s not get over our skis here. It’s this landlocked country of 10 million people with a crappy economy,
Jonah Goldberg
run by this guy who is basically putting cronies in all the institutions of power, undermining the rule of law, just lying incessantly about threats to the country and about Ukraine and all these kinds of things and, and shuttering the, a free press and, like, purging the, the courts of non-corrupt judges and all this kind of stuff.
Jonah Goldberg
And what happens is you get these guys who think,
Jonah Goldberg
“Oh, this isn’t about grift. This is about some higher, more noble understanding of what the role of the state is and the highest good,” and yada, yada, yada. And they’re proving that you can do these things without worshiping mammon and the, the, you know, and the, the, the soul-draining secularism of liberal democratic capitalism and all this stuff. And yet all of the metrics that they claim matter, Hungary is not doing well at. First of all, economically, it’s a mess. It’s doesn’t have… You know, this alleged birth rate success is nonsense. It is not the most atheistic or secular country in Europe, but it is by no means the most religious either. Almost on every single thing that the, the Orbán worshipers and the, you know, Hungary uber alles crowd talk about, Poland is doing better. Economically, Poland is crushing it, although not as much as Ireland. I was really surprised to find out that Ireland’s real GDP growth in twenty twenty-five was, like, just shy of 13%. It’s, that’s wild, and it’s… And you know why? It’s because the Irish have really embraced globalism and the big neoliberal multinational corporate regime. That’s why they’re getting so frigging rich, but that’s a topic for another day. But it’s sort of like Tucker Carlson’s too important for The Heritage Foundation to abandon it, abandon him, and Hungary is too important a talking point or an idea for these schmucks to abandon it. And, you know, it’s very similar to the left’s 50-year obsession with Cuba as this alternative model. And it was, I mean, now, like, very few people on the left, except for some code, code pink wack jobs, um, would dare to talk that way. But, I mean, like, people my age and older, they can remember when people talked about Cuba as if it proved all sorts of things that it didn’t prove [chuckles] about the failures of, of, of the capitalist and democratic world and how, you know, look at their education system and their healthcare system, they’re so awesome. You know, and it’s very similar, as I read the other day, it’s very similar to the way another f- sliver of the left talks about Scandinavia, you know, the, how, you know, Bernie Sanders talks about Denmark and Sweden as if they are these basically blonde hair kibbutzes, um, and they’re just not. They’re not. And, like, at least, maybe all of them, but at l- at, at least a couple of the Scandinavian countries have a higher number of billionaires per capita than America does. Um, I mean, you just wind Kevin Williamson up and have him talk about how capitalism is alive and well and living in Hels- Helsinki or, or, or Malmö or whatever. Anyway, I just think it’s, it’s, it’s one of these obsessions that… It’s funny, I know a lot about this, ’cause I wrote about this in Liberal Fascism, about the communists and the progressives who look to fascist Italy or, or, or, you know, the Soviet Union or, or, or even briefly, you know, Hitler’s Germany, and how they thought that this proved
Jonah Goldberg
that the American model was defunct, decrepit, outmoded, outdated, um, past its sell-by date, and that the really exciting experiments, that was the, that was the key word back then, that the, you know, what Rexford Tugwell, you know, one of the key brain trusters for FDR, called the Russian-Italian method, um, or what, um, Charles Beard, the progressive historian, called, you know, the,
Jonah Goldberg
you know, this great, exciting experiment in fascist Italy. And when you actually strip it all away-You know, it’s, it’s power worship. It’s, it’s no, it’s not particularly different than Tom Friedman talking about how we should all just, you know, if we could only be China for a day. Well, the reason, according to Tom Friedman, you know, at least in the late ’90s, early 2000s when he was talking about being China for a day,
Jonah Goldberg
it was because, I mean, he literally said it in the cha- in one of the chapters of his book, um, you know, wouldn’t it be great if we could, like,
Jonah Goldberg
all that stuff about checks and balances and factions and limited government and the rule of law, wouldn’t it be just great if we could suspend that
Jonah Goldberg
for one day and be like China and just impose the most optimal policies? ‘Cause that’s what China’s doing, is it’s imposing optimal policies. The chutzpah of this sort of thinking, which I can name you a
Jonah Goldberg
three dozen progressive intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s who said similar things, um, about fascist Italy or the Soviet Union. And look at it, if you don’t believe me, I mean, just two books, because I know there are still people out there who think, like, I just sort of made up everything in liberal fascism. John Patrick Diggins wrote a really fascinating, very useful book for me about Italian fashion. I, I’m gonna bu- butcher the title, but you’ll find it. J- JP Diggins, one of the great, you know, liberal historians of the 20th century, um, about the Mussolini through American eyes, basically. Um, that’s not the exact title, but it’s findable, and gets into all of the, the Mussolini worship, or a lot of it. And I have my differences with Amity Shlaes’ book, The Forgotten Man. Great book, don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to criticize Amity. But I think her interpretation about the travelers to the Soviet Union gets it a little wrong. Um, she wants to say that a lot of American progressives were, were sort of turned on to their sociopolitical economic thinking by their visit to the Soviet Union, and I don’t think that’s actually right. The argument I make is that, that American progressives loved war socialism under Woodrow Wilson, and they thought that that was the way to run the country, as if we had a war economy. This is, like, my
Jonah Goldberg
Jonah against the moral equivalent of war, war 101 stuff, right? And their great rage came when Americans, in their infinite wisdom, threw Wilson and the Democrats out, um, and the progressives out in pursuit of a, quote-unquote, “return to normalcy.” And so you had for a decade all of these major intellectuals and activists and, and, and, and
Jonah Goldberg
experts, technocrats and whatever, who were really loving what John Dewey called the social benefits of war at home. About how it caused people, it caused the country to put aside individualism. It caused, it made business leaders work with the government. They called them dollar-a-year men, right, un-under the War Industries Board. And we had sort of this cartelized, corporatized, um, economy where government and business were interchangeable and, and synergistic, the ultimate in public-private partnerships, right? And it was all about planning the domestic economy to fight a total war, and they loved that stuff. And then Americans said, “You know,
Jonah Goldberg
this was fine for when we were fighting a war, but we’re not fighting a war. I want to go back to my normal life.” And they sort of just turned their back on it. And this pissed off these intellectuals in the 1920s. So they started casting about
Jonah Goldberg
for other places where the government was, was, was doing this sort of
Jonah Goldberg
moral equivalent of war, social mobilization, economic mobilization, we’re all in it together stuff. And they looked at the Soviet Union. They looked at fascist Italy. Later, they looked at, it was, the Hitler stu- the Nazi Germany stuff is more complicated. But man, did they just dig
Jonah Goldberg
a lot of what fascist Italy and the Soviet Union were doing. And they went blind to the bad things that were going on because they just wanted it to be true. They wanted it to be true that the Soviet Union could do all this stuff, that it was ex- as exciting as John Dewey and all these people thought it was. And so you got, you know, these people who just turned a blind eye or just, not even a blind eye. They just, they couldn’t see it. They couldn’t let themselves see it, the brutality, the, the cruelty, the injustice of even, you know, the Soviet Union under Lenin, as Richard Pipes used to talk about chapter and verse, was still pretty evil. Long, there were a lot of people who think, oh, who claimed that, oh, you know, the Soviet Union was pretty great and full of social justice until Stalin took over. And, you know, there are even some Soviet historians that talked about how Stalin was really a secret fascist and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We don’t need to get into all that.
Jonah Goldberg
Lenin was just a stone-cold murderer and a horrible human being, and there was a lot of murder in the earliest days of, of the Soviet Union. But in fairness to some of these, you know, visitors, you know, when Lincoln Steffens goes to the Soviet Union, comes back and says, you know, “I’ve been to the future and it works,” it was a Rorschach test, and they only wanted to see the stuff that excited them. And so you had this guy like George Solt, who was a big New Republic, you know, intellectual, um, wrote a whole book in the 1920s called We Planned in War. And the point was, was like, we were doing this really cool stuff before the Italians and before the Russians were doing it, and you stupid Americans, you didn’t want this kind of country, and this is what we need. And that’s where the New Deal eventually comes in, is that FDR actually, because of the Great Depression, it creates, it moves the Overton window and allows him to run, promising to use the methods that Woodrow Wilson used under his war socialism to fight the Great Depression. And so in effect, you know, and Robert Higgs does this stuff chapter and verse, but, you know, the,
Jonah Goldberg
the New Deal was a moral equivalent of war thing from the beginning, and it was based on Woodrow Wilson’s war socialism stuff. Anyway, but the, my point about this is that simply that at the end of the day-The people who talk about this, and I just, it’s just so disappointing that it’s now happening with conservatives, ’cause it used to be, like, one of the key talking points about how progressives made this mistake all this time by seeing only what they wanted to see in Europe and wanting to Europeanize American politics, and why can’t we be more like Europe, where they trust the experts and elites basically get to have their way? Look how sophisticated Europe is. It got rid of the death penalty. It got rid of gun, all gun rights, right? It getting rid of, of hate speech and all that kind of thing. This used to be a purely, almost purely progressive thing, at least for a very long time. And now, a bunch of c- supposed conservatives, or let’s just call them right-wingers, are doing the same thing about Hungary, and a few total jackasses have been trying to do it about Russia. Um, you know, I remember Steve Bannon going, “They don’t do pronouns in Moscow.” And at the end of the day, they talk a big game, whether it’s the progressives or these new, new right guys, they talk a big game about how this is really just about best practices and looking for the best forms of public policy and proving that, you know, the, the, the way we’re doing things here is stale and this is fresh thinking,
Jonah Goldberg
and it’s almost always just purely power worship. It’s an attempt to find some sort of rhetorical tool to grab power and to be able to use power without having to persuade people. That’s what J.D. Vance likes about Orbanism. That’s what all these guys like about Orbanism. This is what… You know, this is, this is why the, the new right guys, um, get so pissed off about the Constitution, is they have
Jonah Goldberg
insep- they’ve, they’ve incorporated into themselves the same instinct that used to drive me crazy about the left, which is they just don’t wanna hear contrary arguments. They just wanna have their way. It’s about power. It’s not about ideas. I’m sorry, I’m, I’m really down on the new right stuff, not just because of the book I’m working on, but I read this really depressing piece in, um, the latest New Yorker about
Jonah Goldberg
Griper world. And, um, Griper is just… Now, again, for those of you who don’t know, it’s, it’s just basically the catch-all term
Jonah Goldberg
for the Nick Fuentes
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Nazi joke telling, um, I love Hitler, racist dog whistle kinda crowd.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. Okay, so the, the piece is called How the Internet Fringe Infiltr- Infiltrated Republican Politics:
Jonah Goldberg
Inside the Battle for the Post-MAGA GOP by Antonia Hitchens. We’ll put it in the show notes. I think there’s a lot of interesting and good reporting in it. Um, I think, I think Hitchens probably exaggerates the problem, but it kinda doesn’t matter. If she’s even fift- if, if the reality is only 50% of what she says, it’s still really, really, really depressing. And when you read the piece, I mean, I’m not gonna go deep in the weeds on it, um, but it’s incredibly sad for the country. Um, forget sad for the GOP, forget sad for conservatism. It’s just sad
Jonah Goldberg
for the country that
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a significant, I don’t think it’s as big as, as she does or as Rod Dreher does, um, but a significant number of people in positions of influence within the broader GOP coalition are either racist
Jonah Goldberg
or really just don’t care if they sound racist,
Jonah Goldberg
are either antisemitic or just don’t care if they sound antisemitic, and none of them care ab- if other people are antisemitic or racist. Antisemitism and racism, that’s one of the things that comes through in the piece, is no longer a litmus test about whether you can be part of the in crowd, polite society, respectable opinion or whatever, and again, I think the thing is a little exaggerated, but it’s, it’s a, there’s a truth there that, you know, you can only exaggerate truths, and it’s really, really, really depressing. And it’s interesting, there’s a, there’s this weird contradiction. At some point, there’s this stuff that, these quotes from Nick Fuentes in it about how, you know, the…
Jonah Goldberg
and from some other people, about the Holocaust. And there’s this, I don’t know exactly how to express this, but there’s this weird contradiction, tension, cognitive dissonance, I don’t know what you wanna call it, in this crowd, in that the…
Jonah Goldberg
At some point, Fuentes is talking about… He was shown some clip of some Holocaust survivor talking about, you know,
Jonah Goldberg
just the torture and cruelty and slave labor and dying babies or whatever, you know, the usual
Jonah Goldberg
horrors from the Holocaust, and his response is, “So some old Jew is mad ’cause Hitler was mean to him,” or something like that. And he says, “Who cares?”
Jonah Goldberg
And the thing is, there’s also a bunch of people, including Fuentes, who deny the Holocaust happened,
Jonah Goldberg
and you can’t take both positions.
Jonah Goldberg
Like, either the Holocaust was so horrible a thing it must be a lie, or it’s true and you’re saying you don’t care, but you can’t really argue both things. And I think this is one of these things that the sort of antisemitic, um, Jew-baiting crowd, um, plays fast and loose with. And I think in, it’s in part because it’s, it’s a weird, twisted form of envy, is, you know… And it gets to this rhetoric point I was getting at earlier, I guess. When you teach people that the coin of the realm is victimhood, you’re, you know… It’s, it’s a rule in life that what you subsidize, you get more of, right? What you say is valuable,
Jonah Goldberg
you get more of. And if you can’t come up with a plausible victimization thesis for yourself-Then the next best thing is to tear down somebody else’s victim narrative,
Jonah Goldberg
and on the grounds that if, if, if their victim status doesn’t count or if their tale of oppression is not admissible culturally or, or, or if you can convince people it’s a lie, then your much weaker claims of victimhood become, um, more legitimate and, and, and have more currency. And that’s what a lot of these sort of
Jonah Goldberg
white, you know, white people are the real victims, jabronis guys are doing. It’s– that’s the project, is to say raci- you know, if racism against Black people is not a big deal, then it makes it possible in their own minds to say that racism against white people is.
Jonah Goldberg
If you say that, you know, um, the Holocaust didn’t happen or doesn’t matter and that antisemitism is funny and there’s, there’s no moral weight to it, it makes your BS narrative about your own, your own identitarian victim status more plausible, and I think that’s part of the practice. And so I– when I talk about how, you know, once the right becomes illiberal, illiberal horseshoe theory makes a lot more sense, this is part of what I’m getting at, is that… And I know there are a lot of progressive left-wing people who get mad at me and think this is just bad both sidesism, but it’s, it’s– there’s a causation
Jonah Goldberg
sequencing thing that I think people need to understand, at least in how I see a lot of this.
Jonah Goldberg
For decades, conservatives, intellectually serious conservatives, argued that identity politics was bad,
Jonah Goldberg
that identitarianism was illiberal. You had some good sort of center-left people making these, these kind of arguments as well. Todd Gitlin made this argument in the late ’90s. Um, Sheldon Wolin, I mean, I can, uh, Bill Galston, I mean, I can think of, you know, a bunch of sort of New Republic-type liberals who made this argument as well. But
Jonah Goldberg
it was considered, because the left so embraced identity politics, to make this argument on the left was basically to declare yourself a, essentially a neoconservative and therefore no longer fit in the liberal left coalition. And so over time, it basically became a purely conservative argument, except at a very high level of academic abstraction. And so the conservatives argued that identitarianism, identity politics was bad.
Jonah Goldberg
But we had, what, two generations, three generations of the people controlling the commanding heights of our culture, of our institutions, of our, uh, of higher education, of Hollywood, media, publishing, go down the list, who basically invested an incredible amount of moral legitimacy into essentially identity politics arguments, that there was something inherently, you know, partly because, you know, I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna get all Rene Girard here, but, like, you know, the being able to claim victim status
Jonah Goldberg
was rewarded, because again, bad rhetoric in this country, um, and being able to claim you were a victim because of irrational bigotry put you on an even higher pedestal. I am not trying to say that irrational bigotry is defensible or that people shouldn’t complain about it. I’m against bigotry, but I’m also against reducing people to arbitrary, superficial characteristics. You know, William F. Buckley used to say, “If you walk into a– if you’re the sort of person who walks into a room and immediately says to themself, ‘Okay, there are five Hispanics, six Blacks, twelve women, um, three Jews,’ you know, whatever,” you’re the one trafficking in a kind of bigotry, because you’re reducing, you know, incredibly, for all, for all you know, wildly divergent people down to a single characteristic. And conservatives used to make this kind of argument, that, that’s bad, that reducing people to their race or ethnicity as if that is the sole lens through which to see their soul is bad. And they lost that argument culturally.
Jonah Goldberg
we are now seeing a generation of kids sort of
Jonah Goldberg
raised in that sort of framing, who now in a sort of Nietzschean way, I’ll admit, are inverting it, and they’re saying, “Okay, identity politics is the prism through which we see things,
Jonah Goldberg
um, so I’m gonna identify as a white person. I’m going to identify as a Christian. I am going to identify…” And I, look, I have no problem with people calling themselves Christian. Being Christian is a wonderful thing. I’m just simply saying in this c- in this context, it’s like the Christian nationalist kind of Christian. “I’m gonna claim this country belongs to me and my tribe and not to you and your tribe.” You know, it was really int- that Richard Spencer guy, when he was interviewed around the whole Charlottesville stuff, in a bunch of interviews, he just kept talking about how identity was the most important thing, that identity matters more than anything else, that he was– all these other arguments that conservatives use are kinda stupid. The, the future is all about identity. And he was talking about white identity. He was all, it was identity politics for white people. And this sort of thinking, what I think a lot of people on the right can’t see, and a lot of people on the left, but for different reasons, but a lot of people on the right who practice this kind of stuff can’t see, is not that they are rejecting the left or fighting the left. They’re joining the left in the sense that they’re letting
Jonah Goldberg
this framing, this way of seeing the world colonize their minds.
Jonah Goldberg
And I am perfectly happy to say that white identity politics, for a whole bunch of reasons, is, is morally and ethically worse than Black identity politics. Like, Blacks were victims in this country. Like, like, if you wanna deny that, go ahead, but you’re an idiot. Um, you cannot read about [chuckles] you know, what slavery was like or what Jim Crow was like, um, or what Reconstruction was like-And not be ashamed for how this country treated these people. And there is not that story about white people anywhere, and there’s nothing approaching it. And anything that you want to call anti-white discrimination, there’s some things I am perfectly happy to call anti-white discrimination. They’re not centuries of chattel slavery and, you know, and terrorism and second-class citizenship. You know, they’re just, they’re not. They’re like, it’s not, it’s, it’s, it’s bad that people lost jobs on account of their race, but I think it’s, you know, getting back to the Hegseth stuff,
Jonah Goldberg
it would be bad if we started living in a country where white people start getting jobs because of their race.
Jonah Goldberg
If they’re more qualified than Black people, I’m against quotas and all that kind of stuff, fine. But putting– Once you’re in the business of assigning points on the board to race in any direction for any reason, you’re going down a bad path. And I think that people just have a really hard time understanding what I’m getting at when I talk about how this is not an alternative to,
Jonah Goldberg
you know,
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left liberalism that we’re seeing. It is
Jonah Goldberg
a crude, really stupid, really bigoted, really offensive at times, right-wing version of it. And I know I just, I piss off a lot of people when I talk like this, but I, I believe it. Speaking of anti-Semitism, you guys have heard me rail a zillion times about how much I hate the modern
Jonah Goldberg
school of foreign policy that calls itself realism. There’s a totally legit form of realism going back to Thucydides that takes into account a lot of the things I don’t like about what we call realism these days. But, uh, my friend Rebecca Heinrichs, uh, I was… I went to India with her on that trip a year and a half ago, and we became kind of buddy-buddy on that trip, although I haven’t seen her much since then. Um, she has a great piece over at NR on John Mearsheimer.
Jonah Goldberg
Mearsheimer’s– First of all, she does a good job of just explaining why Mearsheimer’s version of real- uh, realism is just garbage. I mean, it’s just, it’s such obvious garbage. You know, that
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ideology
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and culture
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of states means almost nothing, and that states only pursue what is in their vital national, uh, they only pursue security and their vital national security interests, and everything else is just sort of boob bait for the bubbas and, and distraction. And just, just, just, it’s just completely not true. You know, there are profound differences in, in how different states act based upon ideology. You know, as she points out, uh, if you think you can simply say that the jihadist theology, um, and radical ideology of the Iranian regime plays no part in its foreign policy,
Jonah Goldberg
you’re a moron. Now, you, perfectly legitimate to argue or to debate h-how much of a role it has, but, you know, if, it, it’s absurd to sort of say, “Oh, this is just what any country with Iran’s national security interests and geography or whatever would do for the last forty-seven years.” It’s just, it’s just stupid, right? Um, or look at it this way. She doesn’t mention this, but I was thinking about this recently ’cause I had this, I had this guy, um,
Jonah Goldberg
this Australian military expert, uh, Mick Ryan, on, and, uh, we recorded yesterday, and he’s just great. I really liked him, wanted to get him on for a long time. But we were talking about, you know, Russia’s… It’s mostly about the Ukraine stuff, but we, we did, we did some China and some Iran stuff too. And I was thinking about this one. I didn’t talk to him about this in- specifically, but we had been talking about
Jonah Goldberg
the, the rescue of the two American pilots, and then later on we were talking about the, Russia’s meat wave tactics. You know, they, they’re now up to, like, one point three million,
Jonah Goldberg
uh, casualties, killed and wounded, on the Russian side alone.
Jonah Goldberg
And, um, I was reading, there’s this absolutely brutal piece in The Economist about how corrupt and horrif- and truly horrifying big chunks of the Russian army have become, where these commanders will say to their… But, you know, like, there’s this one guy, one Russian commander who says, “I’ve buried two regiments, and you’ll be my third, and that the only way you can survive being in my regiment is by paying me.” And they extort massive sums from these soldiers to be, um, sent to the rear or not just fed into machine gun nests. And, and soldiers who don’t pay get tortured. There’s all these videos of, of Russian sh- soldiers in Russian territory, this is not done by Ukrainians, who are, you know, found dead tied to trees ’cause they’ve been tortured to death ’cause they didn’t pay up or whatever. And, you know, it just, it’s unbelievably gruesome. And anyway, the only reason I bring this up is, you cannot tell me that
Jonah Goldberg
there is not a cultural, ideological difference between Putin’s Russia and the United States. When we dropped, I don’t know, I bet you if you started adding up the total cost of that rescue operation, it’s probably in the billions. You know, we lost two really big, nice planes. I th- what, two big, you know, what, C-130s or something like that. And we lost a couple other planes in that operation, and we moved hell on earth, and we, just jet fuel alone bill must have been massive to save two guys. I’m all for it. I think it’s great. I think it’s important. I think it sends a n- really important message about what we’ll do to not leave someone behind. And I mean, obviously, I would rather we didn’t lose all those resources, but, like, the people talking about how this is stupid, I just-Or that we shouldn’t be proud of it. I just, I think it’s idiotic. But when Russia is deliberately, as a matter of tactics,
Jonah Goldberg
sending literally hundreds of thousands of people
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straight into machine gun fire so that they can, they can exhaust Ukrainian ammunition
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while we’re
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m- moving hell on earth to save just two pilots, you can’t tell me that like all states act in the same way.
Jonah Goldberg
Um, anyway, Rebecca does a good job of sort of just pointing out that Mearsheimer is, is essentially just anti-Israel, and not every anti-Israel position is necessarily anti-Semitic. But when you have one standard and one standard alone for the only Jewish country in the world that you do not apply to any other country, you don’t need me, hear me do my structural anti-Semitism thing, but it’s structurally anti-Semitic, and it’s grotesque. And Mearsheimer, I think, has been a ridiculous hero of the anti-Israel left for a really long time, and I think his arguments are garbage and are made in bad faith and are often just simply not true. Anyway, it’s a good piece. We’ll put it in the show notes. You know, I resist. I hope they take it as a compliment. I’ve never, I really basically never heard anything from them about it, about how often I talk about the editors podcast on here. But I, you know, I listen to it regularly, in part because I think it’s a great podcast, um, and in part because, you know, it’s this institution that was a huge part of my life for twenty years, and I sort of care about where it comes down on things. I have a lot of respect for, for those guys. And even when I think it’s, I, even when I think they’re wrong, I think it’s, it’s, it’s useful for me
Jonah Goldberg
to, for all sorts of gut check reasons, to think through why they might be right, because I, and I, we, we generally see the world through the same kind of prism and start from a lot of the base assumptions about things. And, you know, when I’m doing the solo,
Jonah Goldberg
there’s only so much content that I can talk about relevantly here, and I listen to that. I listen to the commentary podcast. Oh, by the way, uh, the commentary podcast from yesterday, so that would be Wednesday, April 8th, I found really useful. Uh, Noah Rothman and Eli Lake were on, and I was very curious because of
Jonah Goldberg
how much Budoritz and Greenwald and all these guys supported the war and how they thought it was a much more successful war than I did on geostrategic terms, not on military terms. I was very curious to see how they came down on the ceasefire thing, which I ha- guess I haven’t talked about. Um, I’ll get back to the editors podcast in a second, um, because it’s easy to tie the two things together. It was, and I don’t mean this in a condescending way or an insulting way, it was really interestingly nuanced insofar as I think everybody had the giant caveat of it’s too soon to tell, right? I mean, uh, Nick Catoggio did a really good, um, newsletter about this on, on Wednesday as well, um, something like Schrödinger’s Ceasefire, because it’s just like we don’t
Jonah Goldberg
— It doesn’t seem like it’s holding. It didn’t seem like it was even gonna hold yesterday, on Wednesday when it was announced. No one knows what it means. No one knows what it includes. No one knows what things, how things are gonna look in two weeks. I have very strong views about how I think that Trump panicked for political reasons and not strategic reasons, not military reasons, but for his own personal political reasons. He, he panicked and, and gave up when he shouldn’t have. And some of the guys at the commentary pod agree with me and some don’t. And, um, and they were all over the map on how to interpret this, and it was very useful. Part of the problem, part of the reason why it’s Schrödinger’s Ceasefire, is that
Jonah Goldberg
we can’t know right now whether this was a good thing on the merits. I’ve talked on here a million times about how the,
Jonah Goldberg
we’re accustomed to thinking that the present can change the future. Like, oh, if I choose door A or door B, um, I’ll lead to one future or another future, right? You know, that’s part of how we think as human beings. But we don’t think
Jonah Goldberg
very much about how the present or the future can change the past.
Jonah Goldberg
And, you know, again, I’ve done this a million times, but w- just for the newcomers, what I mean by that is simply that new events all of a sudden illuminate things in our past as being vastly more significant than we thought at the time. And, and sometimes new events make things in the past seem much less significant than we thought all along. And, you know, the war on terror all of a sudden illuminated this entire other storyline of the wa- of the prior seventy years, eighty years, that all of a sudden everyone was going to school and, you know, the Salafi takeover of Saudi Arabia and what that portended and all that kind of stuff. And, like, how many people knew who Sayyid Qutb was and how important he was, you know. It was like a few specialists really knew about him, and then all of a sudden he was this incredibly important guy and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, and because the Cold War had ended, you know, 1917, which was probably considered the most epochal, important date of the twentieth century, started to recede because it was no longer a live thing, you know. And all the, you know, my poor wife, who got a degree in Soviet politics the year the Soviet Union ended, you know, sort of that at scale. And similarly, in three weeks, it could be that this
Jonah Goldberg
ceasefire thing turns out to be,
Jonah Goldberg
uh, great. I’m, I’m, I’m a little skeptical of. But it could be that the,
Jonah Goldberg
this all makes all sorts of sense, and it was a good thing, and that the outcome was a desirable one.Or it could be really, really, really, really bad. And that’s just not knowable right now. But I do think that, that tr- as, as, as Pod put it, I felt bad ’cause I used this, I used a similar line on CNN without, um, before I had heard him say it first. But, um, if we’re doing this as negotiations with Iran, that’s one thing. But if this was all about negotiating with ourselves, if this was all about trying to figure out what was a politically viable off-ramp rather than based on geostrategic considerations, then I think it’s a real problem. And, uh, we just don’t know. We’ll just, you know, uh, we don’t know. But anyway, on the editors podcast, they did a lightning round thing about rating Donald Trump as a wartime leader, and I gotta say I was astounded by the high ratings that everyone gave him. Rich was the lowest at five, and then, uh, Noah and Charlie Cook were at six, and Jim Geraghty was at seven.
Jonah Goldberg
Look, it… Obviously, their definition of wartime leader differs from my own, um, and it depends on what you’re focusing on, and I think the way that they defend their position is they thought that the Iran…
Jonah Goldberg
That taking out the Iran r- regime, if that’s what happens, is a good thing and a necessary thing, and therefore him having the willingness and the courage to do it is a good thing, and taking out Soleimani was good and blah, blah, blah. Okay, fine. I, I get it. But the way they talk about a war, like they all say, “Well, look, he’s really bad at communicating. He’s really bad at the rhetoric of being a wartime leader.” And I think that’s just a huge concession to say, and then to still give him a, you know, a nearly passing grade or say that he’s above average as a wartime leader. The, a huge part in America of being a wartime leader is preparing and rallying the American people for the war.
Jonah Goldberg
You know? It is not picking targets. It is not, you know, hiring this general or that general. I mean, like it’s part, I guess it’s part of that, right? I mean, like Lincoln kept running through generals until he, till he found one who could win and all that stuff. But, like,
Jonah Goldberg
we haven’t lost a war militarily in a really long time, if ever. We lost a lot of wars, though, because of failing to articulate and organize a coherent strategy that got buy-in from the various institutions of government and from the public about what victory would look like, and Trump has done none of that. Um, in fact, he’s not, it’s not just that he’s done, it’s not that he’s done none of it. He has changed what the war aims are a half dozen times. Things go on the list and off the list. Just today, he said something about how, “Oh, the military’s resting, but we’re gonna be back, and we’re really looking forward to our next conquest.” Our next conquest? And he, he said the quiet part out loud this, I think it was this week, if not, it was late last week, where he said, like he said the words, you know, that, “I’m not calling this war a war. I have to call it a military operation, because if I call it a war, people in Congress think that they have, you know, some say in how this thing goes, and so we call it a military operation, but of course it’s a war.” I mean, he, uh, that’s a paraphrase, but that’s the gist of what he said. And he calls it a war all the time. And look, uh, like I have all sorts of disagreements with Michael Brendan Dougherty about a lot of things, but like [chuckles] Michael, Michael makes a very good point the other day, um, in the corner where he said,
Jonah Goldberg
“Hey, look, um, seems to me that,” this is before the deadline, right? Um, he says, “Seems to me that
Jonah Goldberg
vowing to destroy an entire civilization, to kill, you know, like an entire civilization will die tonight,” um, when presidents say they’re about to do that if they don’t get their we- their war aims, it’s probably kinda silly to call it, you know, a military operation. Like, put the War Powers Act stuff to the, to the side. Destroying an entire civilization is not a military operation. And again, I don’t think he was ever gonna destroy Persian civilization. I don’t think blowing up power plants and bridges kills a civilization. I think it was, it was bluster and threatening and all that kind of stuff, and it was a sign of panic on his part. And, you know, the Financial Times has reporting that he was in fact begging for a ceasefire since March 21st in all of this. We’ll see. A, a lot of the stuff we, we won’t know finally what to think about a lot of these things until, you know, some history is written about it. But, um, I just do not get how you can give him… If you wanna talk about, you know,
Jonah Goldberg
wartime leadership for a general, uh, uh, General Keane, I know he gets an eight, a nine, something like that. I mean, I don’t, I don’t think he comes out great in The New York Times story about how the war started. Um, you know, that thing that is so obviously largely as told to by J.D. Vance. But, uh, Keane has done everything that his role is expected to do. Donald Trump has not. The way he talks about war, the way he talks about his military, the way he talks about conquest and killing civilizations, the way he talks about how he has to play word games so that Congress doesn’t, you know, ha- feel any pressure to exercise its constitutional obligations.
Jonah Goldberg
He’s a craptacular wartime leader. The way he talks about, he personalizes all the, it’ll be his personal honor to topple the regime in Cuba. Look, I wanna see the top- the regime in Cuba go. The regime in Cuba sucks. But, like, it’s not about him, and he talks about all of this stuff as essentially as if it’s about him. And I just, like, like-He is grading on rhetoric, which seems to be the theme of this podcast, which I think matters particularly for wartime presidents. He is arguably the worst wartime president in U.S. history. I can’t speak too authoritatively on that because I don’t know. I mean, Andrew Jackson is probably pretty competitive. Wilson erred on the other side of the spectrum where he wanted to pretend that World War I had no national interest in it. And that’s stupid too. And that he had no personal interest in it. He was just this sort of world historical man in the Hegelian sense ushering us into a new era and that he wanted to depersonalize everything. And that’s really bad too, but for completely different reasons. But at least, you know, he talked about freedom and democracy to a certain extent. I think he gets more credit. You know, the Wilsonians all want to talk about self-determination as if it was all about democracy and they conflate making the world safe for democracy with national or self-determination. But
Jonah Goldberg
Wilson had a very racist view of ethnicity and race. And he thought that some non-Aryan peoples were not ready for democracy. And so therefore, they just had to have – he was against empires. And so – but if some
Jonah Goldberg
ethnic state wanted to be an authoritarian state because that was their nature, he was okay with it. He was not quite the friend of democracy that so-called Wilsonians like to claim. But obviously that’s a topic for another time. I’m now rambling because I’m trying to avoid getting changed and going to this thing. I mean, I’m looking forward. It’ll be nice and these are nice people and all that. It’s just – it’s probably not a great idea to prattle on for 90 minutes before having to go give a paid talk. Anyway, I got a lot of great feedback about how to do the solo, how not to do the solo, how much I should prepare, how polished it should or shouldn’t be and all these kinds of things. And I meant to talk about that a little bit, but we’ll save that for another time. I’m sorry I wasn’t on the Dispatch podcast this week, but I was on a plane when they had to record because Sarah Isgur couldn’t move her time and, you know, everyone’s got to do whatever Sarah – no, Sarah’s got a book coming out and we want to make sure she was on it to talk about the book and about the Bondy stuff and all that. And so – and it would have been hard to move the time for everybody else too. And I did record a podcast with Sarah about her book, which everyone should get, Last Branch Standing. That’ll drop – that’ll be the first podcast of next week. Other than that, thanks for listening and I’ll talk to you next time.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah!
