Jonah Goldberg
[upbeat music] Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I’m Jonah Goldberg, and you’re not. On today’s roundtable, we’ll discuss the prospect of ground operations in Iran, ending the war without reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and Meta’s two landmark losses in social media addiction trials. I’m joined today by Dispatch contributors David French, Megan McArdle, and Mike Nelson. Let’s dive in. [upbeat music]
Jonah Goldberg
All right, let’s jump right in. I wanna do the first question in an unusual way, entirely in Esperanto. No, I wanna do the first question in an unusual way and do it sort of as a lightning round just to level set. We’re recording this on Thursday morning, April two. Happy Liberation Day, everybody, by the way.
Megan McArdle
Too soon, Jonah. Too soon.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughing] I think we all watched Donald Trump’s Cicero-like address to the nation last night about the war in Iran, and I thought I’d just go around the horn and hear what people thought about it so we can sort of divulge our priors. Why don’t we start with David?
David French
Very briefly, I just called it a live reading of Truth Social posts. I mean, that really was what we witnessed. It was a rehash of a lot of things. “We’re doing fantastic.” I think the thing that was the most disturbing about it was this assertion that the strait will open naturally, that this is just gonna happen naturally. Well, I mean-
Megan McArdle
You know, after nine months-
David French
Yeah. [laughs]
Megan McArdle
… nature will start, the contractions will begin. [laughs]
David French
It’ll just close. Yeah. So that was very strange. But I went back and I actually compared it to the opening speech that he gave, when the little eight-minute social media video that he posted when everything started, and it was a lot of the same stuff. I mean, the same litany about Iran, sort of the same sort of preview that they’re gonna be hitting a lot of Iranian military sites. Of course, no mention really in that, that opening of the downside effects too much, but yeah, it was a Truth Social post. There was nothing really new here. I guess the news was that there was nothing really new here. He’s been saying for a while, “We’re gonna wrap things up soon.” I just don’t know what the purpose was here really, if he wasn’t gonna bring anything other than everything that he’s already brought before to this.
Jonah Goldberg
Megan?
Megan McArdle
Yeah, I’ve reached the age now when you start worrying that incipient dementia may be creeping upon you. And so as I listened to him, and I didn’t hear anything that was interesting or surprising or indeed particularly coherent, I was like, “What if, what if it’s happened? What if it’s going?” And so I reached out to other people, and I was like, “Did something happen that I missed?” And everyone was like, “No, nothing happened. This was– There was no news there. It was just a free-form jazz odyssey.” I mean, that part was actually tremendously reassuring to know that I had not lost my marbles.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Megan McArdle
But of course, the flip side of that is that it was also reassuring us or confirming that Trump went in without any plan, and he doesn’t really have a plan now. He wants to both remove the Iranian regime and get credit for it, and he doesn’t wanna take any of the blame for the costs of doing that. And that’s not a viable strategy, but that won’t stop him from trying, as it has not stopped him from trying in so many other times and situations before.
Jonah Goldberg
Mike, I’m gonna cheat a little bit and change the question just for you.
Jonah Goldberg
Let’s say you’re a commander in theater, and you’re watching
Jonah Goldberg
that address last night. What is your takeaway from it? I’m not completely changing the question for you-
Jonah Goldberg
… but I just thought that perspective is probably helpful.
Mike Nelson
Well, I think that there’s a lot of confusion with the president’s messaging as far as what the political goals are and what we will accept the Iranians agree to, are agreeing to, and whether the Iranians have any interest in agreeing to it. But from the military perspective, I actually think they have fairly clear guidance and are probably communicating upwardly the limits of what they can achieve. So what we’ve seen with the shifting narratives about what the goals are, what the ends are, and we saw a lot of confusing rollouts through this week between Secretary Rubio, Caroline Levitt, Pete Hegseth, and then Secretary Rubio again contradicting himself from two days earlier. Some of the political end states are growing more and more nebulous. But the military guidance as far as attriting their ballistic missile capability, their defense industrial base, their navy, and now has been added the Air Force, which is probably a byproduct of earlier things they were doing, is all fairly clear, and CENTCOM is going about the business of dismantling those capabilities. So I don’t think it actually changes
Mike Nelson
that guidance as far as what they’re doing and what they have been doing. What is still unknown, at least in the public sphere, but it’s been reported widely, is what is being planned next. So we know that the Pentagon is preparing options for ground-based operations, and there’s a couple options as far as what those might be. Whether those are going to be executed and what those goals would be are probably causing a little bit of confusion as far as what the military can accomplish. But going about what was initiated a month ago, I think CENTCOM has pretty clear guidance and is accomplishing it.
Jonah Goldberg
So I should say, my biggest gripe with the address last night was, sort of to David’s point about it read like a bunch of true social tweets, is that it– Trump has this thing where he thinks he can talk simultaneously to competing interests in real time, where he says everything that every different constituency wants-
Jonah Goldberg
… and he thinks that-
Jonah Goldberg
… they will pluck out of it only the part they wanna hear rather than the stuff that they don’t wanna hear. And so he thinks he’s telling the markets it’s gonna be over soon. He thinks he’s telling Mark Levin and the see it to the end crowd that we’re gonna see it to the end and we’re gonna win. He thinks he’s telling the no forever wars people what they wanna… And the problem is everyone hears the full
Jonah Goldberg
Monty, right? They don’t just hear the parts that they wanna hear.The thing I found the most dismaying is I had smart– I had heard smart people say going into it that the word that the White House was telling people was that this was primarily gonna be appeal to our allies to join the fight-
Jonah Goldberg
… and to help us out with the Strait of Hormuz. And then basically all Trump said is, “And to our allies, muster some delayed courage and sign up,” which to me
Jonah Goldberg
felt like the most
Jonah Goldberg
al-almost deliberate sabotage to actually get them to come because all of our allies are politicians with voters. And-
Jonah Goldberg
… taking a taunt like this, “Come on, you cowards, join the fight,” is the last way you’re gonna get these guys to join a fight. And the fact that Trump couldn’t let go of that sort of framing and that sort of bitterness, I think, was not reassuring. Let’s put it that way. Mike, you had a piece about what a, for the dispatch, what a ground operation might look like. Why don’t you sort of talk us through it real quick and also which one you think is, at this point, the most likely, if any of them are?
Mike Nelson
So it’s been widely reported that the president is at least entertaining and has asked the Pentagon for plans for what could be done with ground forces. And specifically, we know deploying into theater, we have the two, the 11th and 31st MEU, which are Marine amphibious task forces, and then large portions of the 82nd Airborne Division and specialized special operations forces that have some key capabilities that might give us some options. While some specifics have been talked about, Kharg Island, everybody seems to wanna talk about that option as a specific. I think generally the three levers that might be available to the president are, number one, things that increase the pressure. You know, we’ve talked multiple times on this podcast about how the concept seemed to have been creating pain and pressure on the Iranian regime to coerce them into some kind of agreement, and that pain and pressure has not yet been sufficient despite what our estimations were going into it. So what’s the next lever that they can pull? Is it Kharg Island or other types of places like that that threaten Iranian interests, deprive them of some of their economic capability, or other ways to increase that pressure? A second factor or a second bin would be some kind of operation to try to remove some of the Iranian responses. So despite what the president has said, this was widely assumed that the Iranians would threaten commerce through the Strait of Hormuz as a response to any kind of a-offensive action against them.
Jonah Goldberg
Everybody knew this.
Mike Nelson
Yeah. You know, I spent years at CENTCOM. This was something that was always assumed, that this was going to be the great danger. Not only, obviously, is there a maritime component to that, mine sweeping, armed escorts, things like that, the ways that the Iranians are able to interdict this traffic are largely land-based through cruise missiles or drones that are launched from their own territory against shipping or at least the threat of those. So clearing out some of the points of origin from some of these attacks might be something to try to remove a portion of that capability that the Iranians can bring to bear in the Strait of Hormuz. And then the last one is some means or some operation against one of the various end states that have been articulated before that gives the president the opportunity to say, “This is a quantifiable thing that we did. The Iranians didn’t have to agree with it, but we’ve accomplished this, and we can withdraw with this benefit achieved.” And, and most of that looks like operations to try to secure the highly enriched uranium that remains after Midnight Hammer. It’d be a highly complex operation that would involve not only special operations forces who could render safe that material and retract it, but also additional forces to provide security and expand the security zone around them while they’re conducting that operation. This would be one of the most complex operations, number one, that President Trump has ever ordered, but also that these kinds of task forces have ever been asked to accomplish under direct threat of drone and rocket and artillery attacks, if not direct attacks from Iranian infantry. So that’s a very high-risk operation, but it does allow the president to say, “I have set their nuclear weapons program back even further than I did with Midnight Hammer because of now I’ve removed what was remaining of their material for enrichment or weaponization.” There are risks to each of those. The first one, obviously, just the inherent risk to force, that American soldiers or Marines are going to be put in greater harm’s way and that there will be American casualties if any of these are, are taken. With Kharg Island or something like that, the question remains that will increase the pressure, but what if that still isn’t enough pressure to convince the Iranian regime to change their calculus? Then we’ve just got Marines sitting on an island within drone and missile range of the Iranian forces, holding with the need to maintain open supply lines to keep that presence stable until such a time when we either find the next lever to increase pressure and coerce an agreement, or we withdraw in what turns out to be a futile effort.
Mike Nelson
As far as clearing some of the launching places that affect the Strait of Hormuz, that is hundreds of square miles from which they can affect the strait. And the forces we have in theater, while they may be able to interdict some of those launch-launching points, could nowhere near clear all that would be required. And then the same thing. Okay, we’ve cleared it out. While we hold it, they may not be able to interdict the strait from those specific locations, but as soon as we leave, they reoccupy them and can threaten the strait again. And then the last one, obviously, while it would achieve a quantifiable effect, it is incredibly high risk. That’s not to say that we couldn’t accomplish it, but it is– there are a lot of moving pieces, and I– and based on some of the deployments, I can make a guess as to what it would look like, but I don’t want to, just in case I’m right. But a lot of things would have to go right for it to succeed.
Jonah Goldberg
One question about that, to succeed.
Jonah Goldberg
And even, I’m not trying to be even mac-macabre, but even most definitions of wild success involve-Some number of American casualties, right?
Mike Nelson
Yes. Yes. A-and that goes to your point about, like, the president speaking all things to all audiences. It’s like the old business model. You know, you can have things cheap, fast, or good, and you have to pick two out of the three. The president doesn’t seem to want to concede that one of those three, or at least putting it in geopolitical terms, that something is going to come at a cost: higher gas prices, more American casualties. Whatever it is, the American people are going to pay a cost for the inherent good of degrading or destroying an Iranian capability, and he has to make that case because when it happens, he’s gonna bear the brunt of it. If I could go back to one thing you said about the European allies and his attempts at calling them cowards to get them– to compel them to be involved,
Mike Nelson
he’s basically laid out what he thinks is three end states for the Europeans. They can either join the fight and clear the strait, they can either buy gas directly and, or fuel from the United States, or they can wait until it opens naturally. I don’t think he’s assuming that the Iranians have actually created a fourth option for the Europeans, and what he has taken as a success might actually be a strategic failure for us. They have allowed ships. They have communicated, “We will allow ships who are not part of the coalition to transit the strait,” and they’ve done it with Pakistani ships.
Mike Nelson
What the president and the Iranians may be incentivizing is the Europeans to make their own separate peace with Iran and say, “We are not part of the coalition,” and allow our ships or ships that are in our interest to transit, and then it is only us who is left unable to transit the strait without interference.
Megan McArdle
Although how big a cost is it if our ships, which are minimal, can’t transit the strait, right? I mean, if Europe and the Gulf reopen the strait for their oil, you don’t have a lot of leverage left, right? The United States is not responding to the pressure of American ships not being able to transit the strait. It’s everywhere else that’s the problem.
David French
You have all the leverage if you’re the toll keeper.
Megan McArdle
Yeah.
David French
If you are the toll keeper, you have all the leverage.
Megan McArdle
You have that leverage as long as Europe is shut off and as long as Asia is shut off. But once you’ve made a deal with those countries,
Megan McArdle
the leverage on the U.S. is also gone because our, the US-flagged ships transiting the Straits of Hormuz are not that big a deal, and most of our stuff comes not from Europe through the Strait of Hormuz or from China through the Strait of Hormuz. We’re not getting that much stuff from the, the Gulf. It’s the Gulf to Europe and the Gulf to China and the Philippines and the rest of Asia that’s at issue here. So I don’t know. There is a kind of issue with cutting a separate peace, which is that the leverage right now on the United States is not the direct effect on us, it is the effect on the global economy, and if you allow the global economy to resume reoperation, the United States doesn’t necessarily need to open it just for us.
David French
Well, no, I don’t think that’s exactly right.
Megan McArdle
Okay.
David French
Because what you have in that situation is you have the strait, you have Iran in control of the strait, and it’s not gonna open it up for Europe for nothing. So it’s going to get something out of this. And so, for example, we’ve already seen billions flow to Iran, more than flowed to Iran during, as a result of the Obama deal, from some of the deals that have been cut.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
David French
Billion. I mean, fourteen billion is a number that’s enormous. And so what you have is a situation where if Iran is going to be able to control, maintain control of the strait, it can dictate terms on transit through the strait, which means it’s dictating terms for much of the global economy. And so that means Iran can continue to enrich itself even while it retains the ability to cut off the flow at any time that it wants to cut off the flow. And so if the end state of this is Iran having an enhanced practical control on its own financial terms of the Strait of Hormuz, that’s been a strategic setback for us in a pretty dramatic way. Because right before this conflict, they weren’t the toll keeper. [laughs] You– There weren’t special financial deals being cut to transit the Strait of Hormuz. That was free navigation. If at the end of this, you’re left with essentially an Iranian toll booth at the strait that can enrich the Iranian regime, and then they can cut it off at any time, I would question who’s established deterrence here.
Megan McArdle
I am just a humble caveman.
David French
[laughs]
Megan McArdle
So I think in the short term, that’s right. But in the long term, what happens is that people develop pathways that do not involve the Straits of Hormuz, and I think that’s actually likely at this point anyway. Now, that doesn’t mean that the United States can sustain the years it will take to do that. I mean, I think the net result of this is probably that we build pipelines that move oil to where it doesn’t need to transit the Strait of Hormuz, that shipping companies look for other ways around, certainly for, like, that oil companies will have policies, natural ga- liquid natural gas, will have policies that say you don’t go through the Straits of Hormuz, and that the ultimate result of this is going to be to remove that, that Iranian leverage point. But that’s probably a long-term project and as I say, I’m, I am just a humble caveman. I don’t know how long it will take. But I think that at this point, if you are a Gulf state, you are actively looking for a way to put your oil somewhere where it never has to touch the Straits of Hormuz.
Jonah Goldberg
I have to add this as moderator’s privilege. On the Ides of March, former Speaker of the House, two-time presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, cut the Gordian knot for how we solve all of this, and I’m just gonna read you his tweet. “Instead of fighting over a twenty-one-mile bottleneck forever, we cut a new channel through friendly territory, a dozen thermonuclear detonations, and you’ve got a waterway wider than the Panama Canal, deeper than the Suez, and safe from Iranian attacks.” And he has an illustration of it cutting through, I, I guess, Oman or something like that.
Megan McArdle
My expectation just from kind of economics is like, yes, if you are in possession of a valuable bottleneck, you can charge a lot of tolls on it, but also you incentivize people to go look for ways to undo your bottleneck.
Jonah Goldberg
So I, I agree with that, Megan, entirely, except it’s sort of like your point, I guess it was David’s point, about Trump saying the Strait of Hormuz will open naturally over time on its own.
Jonah Goldberg
We’re like the different blind men feeling at the elephant. It depends what timeframe you’re looking at, right? On geologic time, absolutely true. [laughing]
Megan McArdle
[laughing]
Jonah Goldberg
Right?
Jonah Goldberg
And on a economic time horizon, which is what you’re talking about, right, a sort of Schumpeterian, you can be a monopoly for a little while, but you invite competition kinda way. If it’s too heinous a toll road, if they ha- set too high a price for it, the market is just gonna respond and fix it. That is not Donald Trump’s timeline, who has literally said he wants to do this for two more weeks.
Megan McArdle
Oh, yeah, no, no. This, this is not in any way vindicating-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah
Megan McArdle
… what Trump says. I think it’s actually more an argument about, look, there’s an argument that now, not just because you break it, you bought it, but because of this toll issue, that we’ve triggered an event where Iran has now demonstrated its control over the straits, and therefore we have to go and figure out a way to reopen the straits to prove that cannot happen. And I think that argument presupposes that the market and the, you know, people in the neighborhood are not going to already be looking for ways to diversify past the straits. It was a cheap and efficient way to do things, but it created a single point of failure, and single points of failure are bad, and they often persist b- when they’re cheap, but it has been revealed that they are not cheap. And I think, you know, like, one of my analogies to this is the Arab oil embargo in the ’70s that basically incentivized people to look for new supply and vastly decreased OPEC’s control over the oil supply. And another one is COVID supply chains, where we used to have these incredibly far-flung supply chains. We do still to some extent, but companies by themselves, without even the government intervening, started thinking like, “Okay, well, how do I make my supply chain more robust to these kinds of in- interruptions? Because when those interruptions happen, it’s bad, and I can’t produce stuff.” And I th– uh, my assumption, perhaps naive, perhaps wrong, is that in the long run, I don’t wanna say it doesn’t matter what happens here, but regardless of what happens here, that we’re gonna be looking for ways to diversify around the Straits of Hormuz ’cause it is kind of crazy to let so much go through one, one bottleneck controlled by a bad actor.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Mike Nelson
So hedging against the strait ha- has been something that we’ve actually been looking at for a while. So the, the Omanis have spent, I think, billions expanding the port at Duqm as a kind of a strategic offset against the strait, and we have invested in that as well for some of our military capabilities so that we don’t have to fight our way into or out of the strait if we wanted to move things into theater. It has not expanded at a fast enough pace, and there haven’t been enough pipelines built to it or other ports. But this is something that has been underway for a while. But you’re right, this will probably a- accelerate that. The danger, I think, and Megan, you’re absolutely right, that reducing the pressure on the Europeans will overall have the net effect of reducing the price of oil globally and reduce the pressure on the U.S. consumers. But I do think there’s a danger… Y- you know, despite what some of the ca- catastrophists have said, there is no way we walk away from this conflict with Iran being a clear victor, right? Th- there are some people who have claimed that they are winning. That is not going to u- under any terms be the case. They have lost significantly. But they can get some wins. And Iran being able to walk away, saying, “At the beginning of this, we could not dictate what happened in the straits, and we could not dictate what happened with American shipping, and at the end of it, we can, and we demonstrated the Americans cannot compel us to do otherwise,” is a win for them and will shift perspectives within the region and globally about American leadership, American use of force, and Iranian resistance to us.
David French
One way to think about this is at the end of this, who is more likely to say, “Let’s not do that again”? That’s sort of the way you think about deterrence. Who’s gonna be saying, “This was just too much. This was too costly for us”? I’m gonna agree with Mike that if you’re looking at what we’re doing to their military, it’s devastating. Everyone who’s saying that the actual tactical accomplishments of the military are substantial are correct. I mean, we are decimating their military. There’s no question about it. But I wonder concretely, at the end of the day, we’re also dealing with a regime that actually doesn’t care about losses in the same way that we care about losses. I mean, this is a regime that had teenagers run through minefields, catastrophic child casualties, and the regime just go, just send them across minefields. And so you have a cost-benefit analysis on one side that’s just different from ours. And the question that I would have is, if at the end of all of this, you result in some kind of agreement that is acknowledging that we can’t actually end this without Iran’s consent to open the strait, then I really do question who’s deterred whom ultimately over the short to medium term. Because a lot of the logic and argument here is, well, we’ve just demonstrated we can walk all over the Iranian military whenever we want, and we can… If Iran tries to rebuild missiles, we could go back. If Iran tries to reconstitute a nuclear program, we can go back. But if the we can go back means strait closes again, gas skyrockets, conflict with allies, there’s a deterrent effect there for us. I think it’s pretty clear going on the front end that I don’t know that Israel terribly cares that much about the Strait of Hormuz, to be honest. The, the– it’s just way downstream from their concerns. We care a lot, and it’s pretty obvious that we undercounted in the cost of this, the closing of the strait. So I’m very-Curious. I mean, we don’t know. We don’t know how this thing is gonna end, but if it ends with the clear knowledge that you’ve got either basically two options, one is sort of pay Iran some sort of toll, or spend huge billion– billions upon billions of dollars of new infrastructure spending, all vulnerable to Iranian attack while it’s being constructed, ’cause they would have interest in preventing all of this diversification, then I would genuinely question at the end of all of this, who has deterred whom over the short to medium term? I do think, Meghan, over the long term, it’s just rational best interest to try to minimize this choke point, but this choke point is tough to minimize. It’s just tough.
Jonah Goldberg
So first of all, I will offer one small correction or pushback on the idea that Israel doesn’t care about the Strait of Hormuz. I agree it doesn’t care about the Strait of Hormuz in a pure military strategic sense. But in a geostrategic sense, the whole point of why this Strait of Hormuz thing is a problem is that if instead of having a ballistic missile program as its shield to build up its nuclear program, which is the argument that we’ve heard, which I think is total merit,
Jonah Goldberg
being able to say, “Okay, if you attack us next time, we’re not gonna launch a thousand missiles at Israel. We’re gonna cut the Strait of Hormuz and just crush the global energy market,” it’s still a deterrent against doing anything to Iran and the regime going forward. And so I think strategic– in that strategic sense, I think Israel does care and cannot abide the idea that the regime is left intact and now has this sort of shield of Achilles with the Strait of Hormuz. But more broadly, this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. My friend Noah Rothman was complaining on the National Review Editors podcast the other day, and I think it’s a very good point, which is the hypothetical was raised that we try to take Kharg Island, and it costs twenty-five casualties, American Marines or, you know, special operators,
Jonah Goldberg
and Trump doesn’t wanna risk that. And Noah’s response was, “Look, I don’t wanna minimize a single American casualty. It is a tragedy and all that. But if the world’s biggest superpower
Jonah Goldberg
cannot abide the loss of twenty-five troops in pursuit of a monumentally important geostrategic goal in a war, then all hope is lost.” And I think his point is not wrong.
David French
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
Insofar as, you know, I’ve been banging my spoon on my high chair about this for a while, America hasn’t lost… I mean, I’m actually curious, when was the last time we actually lost a war militarily? I don’t think ever, and certainly not in the twentieth century. The only times we’ve lost wars is because we lost the willpower and the commitment to keep them going. And I’m not saying that, you know, who’s that guy who ran in sixty-eight who wanted to nuke North Vietnam? I’m not– That’s not what I’m talking about. But all I’m saying is that we lose wars on the home front. We impose standards on ourselves. This is part of Hegseth’s whole theory of things, is like too many handcuffs and all that, and I don’t like any of that, the way he talks about it. But it is true that if a short period of high oil pri- oil prices and a total aversion to any more American casualties is the political limitation on what we can do, that’s very hard to– then that’s, that is our soft underbelly for the foreseeable future. And it’s conceivable to me, you can make the argument, we’re just too damn rich to tolerate inconveniences. Now, I, I, I know, I can feel David saying, “Well, if Trump had prepared America correctly for this, this would not be as much of an issue,” or something like that. I agree with that entirely. All I’m saying is that in the immediate term, it feels like Trump has gotten us into a place where because he wanted a Venezuela redux, he has very little tolerance for any political long-term pain. He also has no tolerance for claiming, claims that we lost, and that puts us in a weird place where demands of domestic politics are the biggest constraint on this war. Am I missing something?
Mike Nelson
It’s funny you mention the question about whether we have won or lost wars since World War II, ’cause this is actually f- a running argument between myself and John Nagel at the Army War College. I’m going up to argue with him about it next month. I wrote a piece about that we actually have won several wars since World War II, and he wrote a piece basically calling me an idiot.
David French
[laughs]
Mike Nelson
But that notwithstanding-
David French
You’re– Mike, you’re right. You are a hundred percent right on this.
Jonah Goldberg
This doesn’t mean you’re not an idiot. I’m just saying that you can be right on this.
Mike Nelson
Right, right. The two are mutually exclusive.
Jonah Goldberg
Idiots are right every now and then.
Mike Nelson
Right. Exactly. But, you know, the, you see this argument a lot from either people who I would put in the Hegseth camp, that the Army was too weak and woke, so we haven’t won a war since nineteen forty-five, and that’s because we’re weak and woke, or from the Vance camp, we haven’t won a war because wars are inherently bad and foreign entanglements are messy, and we shouldn’t do them. All else aside, you know, uh, these people seem to have missed the victory parade that went down Constitution in 1991. I was there as a kid. I remember us winning in the Gulf War. But I would argue we’ve won multiple other wars since then, and some of these are controversial. You know, Seoul is democratic. It is not under communist control. Kosovo is independent. Libya, even though, you know, we didn’t think through the implications of it, Gaddafi is no longer in ch- in control. We have done certain things, and we have been able to accomplish the goals that we have set out through the use of military force. M- one of my controversial opinions is I believe we won, in a very messy and potentially unnecessary way, the war in Iraq-
Mike Nelson
… in that Saddam Hussein is no longer in control, and a government that we installed still is. But this goes to the point or the problem in Hegseth’s metrics. He constantly points to, as we’ve all acknowledged, the incredible work that the military has done in completely overmatching the Iranian military, but he’s using the same arguments that we used in Vietnam or Afghanistan, that we killed so many more NVA than they ever killed of us, or Talibs than they ever killed of us.
David French
Mm-hmm.
Mike Nelson
Which are both true and completely irrelevant becauseHo Chi Minh City is named that for a reason now, and the Taliban is back in Kabul. So those are-
David French
Right.
Mike Nelson
I, I would argue those are the two wars that we definitively lost. And as much as, you know, there were political considerations, we fought the wrong wars. The military fought the wrong wars in both of those. They went about the wars in ways to try to achieve effects that would not build up to a political goal that we were trying to achieve. Now, this goes to a key point that you bring up. A lot of people use the term asymmetric warfare, a lot of them use it incorrectly. It all goes back to this nineteen seventy-five article by Andrew Mack called Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars. And
Mike Nelson
when there is an asymmetry where an expeditionary large force can overmatch the domestic opponent, and the domestic opponent can’t fight on equal footing, they can do things to target the domestic population and change their calculus. In the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, that was s- casualties. In the case of Iran, it seems to be economic pressure. But they will try to find ways that they can compete that make it so painful the, for the public at home that we just decide we lose interest in it. And that’s where the disconnect between the president and Secretary Hegseth talking about our, you know, incredible metrics in lethality, as the secretary likes to talk about, and the disconnect between what we are trying to achieve and what that pain comes with, and preparing the American people for that pain.
David French
You know, I, one thing, Johnny, you know, we talk about the home front and everything. If you look at both Afghanistan and Iraq, where Afghanistan’s a special case, right after nine eleven, overwhelming support. You had, what was it, one, one negative vote for the authorization of use of military force? Was it Barbara Lee, if I’m remembering correctly?
Mike Nelson
I think that’s right.
David French
Right. Iraq, you had a year-long effort to persuade America. You had two-thirds support when the war was launched, two-thirds, three-quarters, depending on, you know, some of your polling. And look, we stuck it out, man. We absolutely stuck it out. And look, we had– we lost in Afghanistan, but we were in that for a very sustained period of time. I mean, we, you know, for all the talk about democracies being weak and unwilling to sustain fights, we sustained fights. And both of those where we were able to sustain fights, this is where I really take issue with the folks who really wanna just stampede past the total lack of preparing America for this. As if now, well, that’s just water under the bridge, and now let’s just look at this militarily and, “Hey, America, look, this, look at all the advantages you’re gonna get if we win, so you gotta back us now.” [laughs] No. The total lack of preparing the American people for this is it could be very well the main strategic impediment to the Trump administration actually prevailing in this war.
Mike Nelson
I agree with that.
David French
And then to turn around and scold America about not falling in line when the best the Trump administration can do is trot out its president to re- essentially do live reading of true social posts, and then it’s on us? Like, this is our fault? No. [laughs] That is not the way this works. And then I would also take issue with the idea that, like, the upper edge risk here is twenty-five Marines or twenty-five, you know, soldiers on Kharg Island. No, once we hit Kharg Island, we’re in artillery and drone range from the mainland.
Mike Nelson
Mm-hmm.
David French
And unless we can completely suppress that, there would be continual pressure on our troops on the island. There would be a lot of pressure to create buffer zones on the mainland, but then the buffer zones need buffer zones, and you’re starting to get pulled into a reality exactly where Iran wants you. It wants you on its level, eyeball to eyeball. And it’s interesting, I talked to General Stanley McChrystal last week, and he talked about the three great seductions that American presidents face. Number one is, like, the covert operations, like, the CIA can deliver for you. And then the second one is covert ops, special ops. Hey, this elite tip-of-the-spear group of Avengers, this Navy SEALs, Delta Force, can do miraculous things. And then the third one is air power. We’re just the best at it. And we keep going to these three seductions and then finding that they don’t actually engineer the outcomes that we want. And look, what this means is a lot of people look back at Bush and Obama as failures in the Middle East, but they, I think they understood something that Trump hasn’t understood yet, and that is that the logic of the invasion in Iraq is we wanted to control the outcome. We wanted to replace the regime and be in control of the outcome. The JCPOA, and in other ways, the Iran deal with their, with Obama, is another way of trying to control the outcome, but in a very different way, through agreement and compromise. And both of them have severe downsides. They have severe downsides, and Trump was wanting to accomplish something in the intres- in the world without the downsides. And they thought they were smarter, that they could figure this out in a way that Obama and Bush couldn’t. And what you’re seeing is the inexorable problems when you try to create an outcome that you’re not in control of, either diplomatically or militarily. And so here we are.
Mike Nelson
I mean, there, there is now reporting, we talked about this last week, that he doesn’t wanna be briefed about bad news.
David French
Mm-hmm.
Mike Nelson
And that’s, that’s scarier than a lot of the other scenarios, you know, things that are going around out there, is just it’s not Hitler in his bunker kind of, you know, bunker mentality. But if you have a commander in chief in a situation that is not anticipated, who doesn’t wanna hear bad news or thinks that you’re personally disloyal if you deliver bad news, not great, Bob. All right, one last scenario on the Iran thing. I just…
Mike Nelson
I think we are discounting maybe a little bit the possibility that the war in Iran is starting to yield the breakdown of the regime that we want, but that may not be the good news that we want insofar as you could have this scenario where you have different controls, you know, power centers of the IRGC
Jonah Goldberg
Who are basically like, “This is my slice of Hormuz. I get my cut.” You know, that kind of thing, and it becomes more, you know, warlordism than sort of, uh, you know, regime change in any significant way. I do think that the claim, he keeps saying it now, it’s so clear that the regime change thing bothers him, where he says, “Well, we killed all the old leaders of the regime, and therefore we have a different regime now.” It’s, it’s like if you take out the president and vice president, and the speaker of the house becomes president, you have not had regime change.
David French
Right.
Jonah Goldberg
Right? But that’s the way he’s trying to sell it.
David French
Yeah. Lee Harvey Oswald did not accomplish regime change.
Jonah Goldberg
[scoffs] Right. All right. We have not talked about this much on here, or yet, I should say, and it was kind of a big deal, and I’m kinda curious what people have to say about it. Meta, you know, the owner of Facebook and all that, had two big losses in court last week, or was it the beginning of this week? I mean, time is such a flat circle. And the novel argument that sort of Kobayashi Maru-ed the legal system in Section 230 was that it was sort of, it was a lot of, the analogy a lot of people are using is that it was like the cigarette argument. The product itself, not the content, not the First Amendment content in terms of what Hasan Piker or Tucker Carlson is saying on it, but the algorithm and the way it structures the feed is itself addictive, and the companies knew it, and they lost these two big judgments. Not huge financial losses for Meta or for the social me- you know, Silicon Valley, but it’s sort of like in one of these movies when the first two orcs make it over the wall, it reminds you that there are 100 million orcs on the other side of the wall that can now make it over too, and there’s so many other lawsuits that are gonna be coming that everyone is sort of freaking out about this. So I, I think since we have the co-ho- or the frequent guest on Advisory Opinions, I figured we’d go to, with David first. What was your read on the whole case?
David French
So I’m in the uncomfortable position of saying I really don’t like social media, and I really don’t like these verdicts. [chuckles] That essentially what we’re doing here, think of it like this. Traditionally, you cannot censor, regulate speech except in very limited circumstances. And so those circumstances, so think of it like this. There are categories of expression that are generally not protected speech. That’s like obscenity, defamation, true threats, incitement, et cetera. But if it’s literary speech, artistic speech, cultural speech, religious speech, political speech, you name it, it’s, enjoys robust protection. Now, here’s what’s tricky a- and what’s dangerous about this case. There wasn’t really a claim that Meta was sending this young girl,
David French
she started using social media at age six, six years old, so that’s a parenting fail right there. But starts using social media at six, and the allegation isn’t that she was getting all this unprotected, illegal expression. She was getting a whole bunch of protected legal expression, and the argument is that it was laid out, in essence, in such an at- attractive and compelling way that she couldn’t stop seeing [chuckles] this protected legal expression. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out, hey, how dangerous this conception is, that it says essentially, look, if a jury can say that this presentation of information was so attractive and compelling, it’s not expression anymore, it’s, quote, addiction.
David French
Yikes. Like [chuckles] yikes. And so, uh, there are just some massive free speech issues here, just extraordinarily huge free speech issues, and you don’t have to really do this, I think, to deal with social media. I mean, there’s a lot of other ways to, both in public education, I’m seeing a sea change in parenting mores all around me about this. The phone-free schools movement, which is not a threat to constitutional rights, I think is a very healthy thing. There are many, there are other ways we can deal with this. But to essentially say legal expression, protected speech can become unprotected addiction based on how attractive or compelling the way we package the speech is, wow. [chuckles] I’m, I’m nervous about it.
Jonah Goldberg
Meghan, I, I’m expecting you to out-libertarian David on this. [laughs]
Megan McArdle
Yeah. Look, uh,
Megan McArdle
were the Sweet Hella- Valley High books of my childhood, were these actually a, an addictive substance that should’ve been banned because everyone rushed out to the store to get the next one immediately? Is J.K. Rowling a drug pusher who should be in federal prison right now for her incredibly compelling content? This is a, a really, really silly way to look at it. And I think that what’s happening here, and I don’t know, David, I would not expect this to make it past SCOTUS review. I could be wrong about that, but, and you know better, but I would be very surprised if it did. But I think that what’s happening, and I think we’re seeing this in a bunch of ways, is stuff we’re uncomfortable with is getting sh- shoehorned into lawsuits because we can’t figure out any way, other way to address it as a society. I think that’s true of social media. I think you’ve seen this with, you know, pediatric medical transition, where what’s happened here has been a real abdication at the medical societies and of the researchers who were, and of the clinicians who did these protocols. They didn’t validate them. There was a lot of kind of backslapping, logrolling, “I’m gonna write these standards,” and then the, you know, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health would write these standards. The American Medical Association would endorse them, and then, you know, the WPATH would say, “Well, this has been validated. Look at all the medical associations endorsing it.” And there was this kind of circular logic. And when people started poking into it, they sort of s- [chuckles] including me, I was shocked at how shoddy the research base for this was.I was shocked at how far this advanced before people started saying, “Well, you know, does this work?” But, eh, that said, the courts aren’t actually a good place to adjudicate that problem, and the problem is that every other institution seems to have basically comprehensively failed to do so. And I think that’s true of social media too. We’re really uncomfortable with what this is doing to our society in ways that I am also uncomfortable. And so what people are saying is, “Well, what if we could sue?” And that’s not really the right venue for this problem, but people can’t… They just want a quick fix. They don’t wanna do the hard cultural work. You know, like, for me, the social media bans are another example of this for kids. I think actually what you wanna do is if you’re gonna ban anything, you ban smartphones, and you give kids flip phone, and you just say, “Under 16, you can’t have a smartphone.” And there’s gonna be some parents who let their kids use the smartphone sometimes, and I will be sympathetic if [laughs] you know, two of the kids have the flu, and the third one is screaming. Gi- give the kid the iPad for a, a couple hours. But instead, what we have, because we are… no one is really looking at those policies, instead what we have is, “Okay, well, we’re gonna try to ban access to these social media apps,” which I think is not really working in Australia right now, especially for older kids, or we’re gonna try to sue this out of existence by imposing liability for it. These are not the right ways to handle this question, and it is a problem with our society that we can no longer think of any way to handle a question except to try to shoehorn it into some weird theory of liability or some other weird theory of civil rights in order to get the outcome we want.
Jonah Goldberg
Okay, so before I go on a tear of devil’s advocacy, Mike, do you wanna add anything here?
Mike Nelson
Well, uh, there are obviously… and I don’t mean to, you know, pile on too much violent agreement with what’s been said already. Th- there are obviously numerous societal ills that come with social media, not the least of which is, probably the greatest, in fact, is that I have been forced to learn a number of TikTok dances to participate with my teenage daughter.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Mike Nelson
So I will never forget the app for that.
David French
This I gotta see.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. Uh, you can’t enter that into evidence and then not provide it for the court here. [laughs] I would love to.
Mike Nelson
It is primarily for the entertainment of her friends, that they can see-
Jonah Goldberg
Uh-huh
Mike Nelson
… what a non-dancing fool her father is. But anyway, I do, you know… I- I’m shocked to find out that various companies package their material in ways that make them more compelling and susceptible to repetitive use.
David French
[laughs]
Mike Nelson
Right? But as others have pointed out, there is a little bit of a slippery slope here, that if we take issue, and there are issues with the way that social media is changing perceptions, changing the way we in- ingest information, people’s attention spans seem to be shorter, et cetera, et cetera. But as Megan pointed out, that is primarily a factor of how families, cultures approach it, the physical limitations to it in terms of limiting access to the devices that can do this for younger children, and then adults making choices to- trying to, you know, shape their use thereof. But, you know, this is a similar argument, I don’t see it too dissimilar from if I wanted to bring suit and say that every time “The Pitt” uh, ends an episode with a cliffhanger, they are, you know, compelling my addiction, and therefore they should be held criminally liable for that, because they make me wait a week until I can find out what happened. That’s just… That’s the way that they get me to dial in.
Megan McArdle
It should be illegal to make Oreos so tasty.
Mike Nelson
Exactly, exactly.
David French
[laughs]
Mike Nelson
Or at least in so many varieties. There are too many.
Megan McArdle
Yeah. Potato chips should only be available in repulsive flavors where you’ll eat one and stop, right?
Megan McArdle
Like, we-
David French
Yeah. I mean, come on. What are we doing here?
Jonah Goldberg
Pringles rubber tire.
Mike Nelson
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
That’d be fantastic. [laughs]
Mike Nelson
Well, what they do is in a stack of Pringles, every fifth one is a revolting flavor, so it keeps you-
David French
Yeah. [laughs]
Mike Nelson
… you know, from eating the entire stack.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Mike Nelson
But, you know, we live in a society that allows adults to make choices about their own, you know, behaviors and decisions and, and consumption, and we should not use government power to change that overall construct.
Jonah Goldberg
All right. So I am not gonna divulge too much of my own position, but I will take, as Sarah is good, but I will try to steel man something here, right? I’ve heard David more times than I can count on advisory opinions make the case that the way that it’s an illuminating
Jonah Goldberg
mental tool or heuristic or device to try to think of real world analogies to the arguments people are making about the online world. You know? How would you feel about this if instead of a social media group, it was a afterschool meeting, that kind of thing. What… Instead of a post, what about a poster on a door in a dorm?
Mike Nelson
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
That kind of… I think it’s a perfectly legitimate way to think about it.
Jonah Goldberg
All you guys have come up with all these analogies about what this is like that are very beneficial to your priors about this, and I know you’re gonna have answers to this, but there are other analogies, right? It seems to be part of the problem is that for understandable reasons, particularly for sort of First Amendment
Jonah Goldberg
fanboys and girls, we see things that look like or feel like speech
Jonah Goldberg
to be very different than things that look like chemical or biological, right? That there’s a… That I, I don’t wanna
Jonah Goldberg
get into a Cartesian kind of thing here, but there’s a physical and there’s an abstract thing here going on, and we would all agree
Jonah Goldberg
that, which was actually very common in the eight- late 18th and early… uh, late, late 19th and early 20th century, we agree it’s probably wrong to put cocaine in sodas, right? We think it’s probably wrong to put alcohol in health tonics, or amphetamines in various pep pills that you can buy over the counter. And that’s be- And we all agree on this to one extent or another. I mean, I don’t know about Megan, she wants to legalize all the drugs, so [laughs] –
Mike Nelson
Don’t touch the opium in my patent medicine, Jonah.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. Right. So, like, but this used to be much more common when before there were these rules. I mean, there are major pharmaceutical companies that, you know, were born producing chemically addictive things, and there was a lot of food and sort of non-prescription medicine type things that wereDone the– Anyone who’s seen the Vitameatavegamin episode of I Love Lucy knows this. And so the point I’m trying to get at is, I think the point about the cliffhanger at the end of Pit is very well taken. At the same time, there are a lot of parents out there who really do feel, for not irrational reasons, and I can give you some anecdotes from people I know,
Jonah Goldberg
that there is something that is– the analogy is far closer to a chemical addiction for some of these algorithms than it is to a cliffhanger at the end of Pit. And I agree with Meghan entirely that lawsuits are less than an ideal way to deal with any of this stuff, and I agree with everybody here that parenting is the best way to fend against this. But I know some parents who feel like they messed up as parents,
Jonah Goldberg
but at the same time, they’re now trying to fix it, and it’s really hard because their kids are so unbelievably addicted to their phones that they are no longer rational actors. And
Jonah Goldberg
so I’ll just throw it out this way. I’m very sympathetic to all of your arguments. I probably agree with your arguments. But in the spirit of steelmanning this, I will say, I am very glad that these cases, one, even though they’ll probably get overturned, even though, you know, there’s all sorts of problems with it, because at the very least, it is a shot across the bow of these companies that have been pretty amoral, if not immoral, in not caring about this problem until it’s thrown in their face and becomes a PR problem. Thoughts?
Megan McArdle
Okay, so let me try to steelman a bit.
Jonah Goldberg
[chuckles]
Megan McArdle
Part of the problem with this, I will say first, though, is that, look, when you go in and you say, “Well, I’m addicted, and it made me depressed and sad,” like, you’re a teenager. That’s depressing. I was depressed and sad without, uh, for most of my teenage existence without the benefit of social media, and d- all I needed was fashion magazines to show me how inadequate I was compared to my ideals.
Jonah Goldberg
I think you’re a fine dresser.
Megan McArdle
[laughing]
Jonah Goldberg
[laughing]
Megan McArdle
Yeah, I’m in this charming pink hoodie that our listeners can’t see.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughing]
Megan McArdle
But I think the problem that is legit is that people who just say it’s a parenting problem, when I talk to parents, none of them wanna give their kids smartphones, and none of them can figure out how to not do it, because it’s a collective action problem.
Megan McArdle
Because if you don’t give your kid a smartphone– So, for example, I was talking to one person, his son wants to get a scholarship to soccer. In order to do that, he’s gotta put clips of himself in order to attract the attention of scouts. He’s gotta put clips of himself on Instagram.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Megan McArdle
Right? But more generally, if you are the only parent who doesn’t give your kid a phone, your child is not able to participate in the social life of their peer group. And you can be the ultra-religious holdout, but for non-religious nuts, and I say that with love, I just mean for people who don’t have this incredibly strong overriding normative, “No, like, we are doing this. We are aiming for glory,” and, you know, secular popularity is not your problem.
Jonah Goldberg
In fairness to the religious families, a lot of those religious families are embedded in networks of other religious families.
Jonah Goldberg
So there’s a huge amount of social capital-
Jonah Goldberg
… that backs up those decisions.
Megan McArdle
And that’s why I say, look, I think that if you wanna do this, the way you do this is by banning smartphones for kids under some age. And the reason you do that is that’s a physical device, and the government does have the authority to regulate that in a way that I don’t think it has the authority to regulate speech. And the fact that people are not willing to do this, and look, I understand, there are diabetic kids who need a smartphone ’cause that’s gonna connect to their dia-diabetes monitor. You carve out reasonable ass-assumption, like reasonable exceptions for physical health stuff. But there are ways around this, and people are not aiming for them. And so instead, you are getting– I’m really sympathetic to parents who say, “I don’t wanna give my kid a smartphone. I cannot figure out how not to.” And that maybe does actually suggest some need for government intervention because this has become so ubiquitous, and our lives are conditioned on it in ways that we’re uncomfortable. I think y- we can also try to search for social technology around this, where the norm is that you don’t give your kid a smartphone until they’re 16. But either way, I think the thing that you do is you target the technology that you say young brains can’t handle this. You do not attempt to restrict the speech of the companies that are doing this. I just think it’s a better way to do it. It’s actually a more effective way, because what’s happened in Australia is [chuckles] like, they’ve banned it, and now all the kids have figured out that if they scrunch up their face, the AI can’t figure out how old they are, and they’ll… They, I mean… Don’t try to defeat children-
Jonah Goldberg
[laughing]
Megan McArdle
… by creating a technical bar on doing something. They’re the ones who know how to program the controls. Instead, you know, just go to the physical thing, because the telecoms companies absolutely can prevent non-adults from getting smartphones.
David French
The, uh, kids being endlessly ingenious, my favorite story about that is there was a kid in my son’s school who kept using social media to harass the other girls. And so big intervention, all social media apps removed from his phone, blocked even from texting, like massive intervention. The only thing he had left was a Bible app.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughing]
David French
And then
David French
he was still harassing girls at the school because the Bible app had a chat function. So even the Bible app was an entry into all-
Jonah Goldberg
The irony.
David French
Yeah, [chuckles] I know. Just… Yeah. I’m with Meghan that the banning of the phone, it’s the phone. I mean, when my kids were in high school, it actually wasn’t social media as much, ’cause there was a lot of parental buy-in on restricting social media. And that, at that moment, with, you know, my kids at a certain age, there was a lot of parent- parental buy-in. So you know what they would do? They would beef with each other and ma- and argue with each other on Google Docs.They would open shared Google Docs and start chatting back and forth.
David French
So endlessly inventive ways [laughs] ah, circumventing all of this, and you just end up playing sort of free expression Whac-A-Mole once you start down this road. Well, that, that speech, well, that’s too addictive, we’re gonna whack that. But my question is, if you wanna talk about addictive, video gaming. Like video game- people love to game. How far down, how far are we going on this quest?
Megan McArdle
I gave up video games for Lent precisely because I felt like it was… And like I am like an iPad gamer. I’m not a serious video gamer, but I just felt like this is taking up too much space.
Megan McArdle
I need to take this out of my life temporarily, and what I found for Catholics, you kinda get a day off from Lent on Sunday, ’cause Sunday is always a feast day. And what I found is that I’m much less interested in doing it ’cause I’ve broken that addiction. They really do, right? It’s like kinda like quitting smoking. But that said, like are we gonna ban people from making fun games that people enjoy?
David French
Right.
Jonah Goldberg
Just to continue my losing battle here.
David French
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
The temptation to say, well, what about, you know, okay, so we’re gonna chase everybody to do social media on Google Docs, right? I mean, I like the story, and I– and look, I’m actually very sympathetic to everybody here. But the case for banning drugs or the case for a 21 drinking age or the case for an 18 age limits on driver’s license, pick your, pick, pick your social regulation, is not that you’re gonna get 100% compliance. It’s that the median kid, the median kid won’t do it, and the kids at the margin are less likely to do it. I remember when I was in a more foot loose and fancy free phase of my life in high school, talking to a friend of mine about a rumor that the inside strips of banana peels, if you dried them out, you could smoke ’em and get high.
David French
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
And, and I’d heard this rumor, it’s sort of like anyone who read the autobiography of Malcolm X knew that you could make tea from nutmeg and get high from it, and all this kind of stuff. And I said to my friend who was a real stoner, “Have you heard this?” He says, “Yeah, I’ve heard it.” And I said, “Have you ever tried it?” He said, “No.” And I was like, “How come?” Well, like first of all, if it was really true,
Jonah Goldberg
you’d be out here buying dime bags of banana peels, and there would be laws against buying banana peels.
Jonah Goldberg
It can’t actually be all that true. The end– so even if– my point is that let’s say it is a little true, weed gets you much higher, so people buy weed. Google Docs are not the same thing as an algorithm primed by five thousand PhD scientists who want to figure out how they can incept themselves into a fifteen-year-old girl’s brain in perpetuity. It’s easier for kids to walk away from a Google Doc chat and go play a game outside. And so laws that are regulations that limit access to social media, they don’t have to be 100% fool, foolproof. They just have to make it easier for kids to say no to it, to find alternative avenues. And the reports we’re getting from schools where they ban phones in schools, to Meghan’s point, most kids actually welcome it after a while because
Jonah Goldberg
once that FOMO thing is gone, once that social pressure thing is gone,
Jonah Goldberg
they actually enjoy having conversations at lunchtime rather than everybody looking at their phones. And so the, it’s more of a nudge point than it is a prohibition point.
Megan McArdle
Look, I’m all in favor of banning phones in schools, right? I’m a fogey, but you don’t need a phone in the schools. But I think, like parents are also gonna have to sacrifice some controls, right? And that’s one of the things that you hear is that, “Oh, well, what if there was a mass shooting at my school?” It’s like your kid is way more likely to be in a car accident than they are to experience a mass shooting at the school. And planning, building the entire, our entire society around an extremely unlikely event is just not a good trade-off. It’s vivid, but and it would be terrible, but the odds of this happening are extremely low, and the odds of something bad happening on social media to your child are probably higher, right? But also parent, all of my parent friends love the fact that they’re following their kids around on the app at all times. And I find that kind of, no offense to parents, I find it kind of creepy. Look, I’m Gen X. I grew up in Manhattan. Jonah too.
Jonah Goldberg
I do, and it’s still creepy.
David French
Right. [laughs]
Megan McArdle
Like, my parents had no idea where I was most of the time.
Megan McArdle
And that was f- you know, not necessarily fine. I got into some trouble, but also I think it’s having that tether, it gives you a, a sense of security, but it is also preventing your kid from, they have to test boundaries. They have to go do stuff. If they’re in a twenty-four/seven surveillance state, it’s ultimately not good for them as adults. You gotta let them make some mistakes within guardrails. That’s what curfews are for. And parents are gonna have to let go a little, right? But I think go back to the flip phones. If your child needs something, they will be able to call you. They will be able to text their little friends. But they are not gonna be able to spend twenty-four/seven on the infinite scroll, and that strikes me as a much easier decision, right? Because part of the problem with this lawsuit is that the implication, if it’s allowed to stand, like exactly how good is too good, right? The companies are now have to wonder about introducing any feature that will make you like it-
David French
Too much
Megan McArdle
… because that’s too good.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Megan McArdle
And that’s, that is a crazy position to put companies in. And when we do ban a substance, what we decide is it’s just too good, full stop.
Megan McArdle
You can’t have it. You can’t have opioids. I might disagree with that decision as, as a libertarian, but it’s a concrete decision. We know what an opioid is. We know we can schedule it in this class. We do always have edge cases with these new synthetic things that are being made, but ultimately, we have a good sense of what we are banning and what we are not banning. With this, it’s just like a, well, make your product good, but not too good, because if you do, you’re gonna get sued.And that’s not sustainable, and I think you’ve also seen this. This is why fast food lawsuits failed, [chuckles] right? Back in the day, they actually tried to sue McDonald’s-
Jonah Goldberg
Right
Megan McArdle
… for m-making people fat. And, like, what is that? Okay, well, you can have a Big Mac that’s pretty tasty, but not extra tasty.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Megan McArdle
Or you can have one that’s pretty cheap, but not extremely cheap. This is not a standard that is actually enforceable in law ultimately, I think.
Jonah Goldberg
Okay. I’ve been– I guess I find this topic interesting, and I like annoying people by asking hypothetical-
Megan McArdle
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
… scenarios, but we gotta press on. Before we get to not worth your time, very quickly, if we go around the horn, if anybody has a dispatch recommendation. This is where we ask our contributors for things that they, that they read or heard that they liked and wanna recommend to other people out there. I’ll go to Mike first.
Mike Nelson
So David Drucker had a piece yesterday or the day before about, uh, Marco Rubio’s rising stock within the MAGA movement, which is– it traces his, you know, am- remarkable recovery within MAGA from the days of twenty sixteen when he was making fun of Donald Trump’s hand size, and also setting up kind of where the fight, I think, is going to be for the race in twenty twenty-eight between, you know, obviously J.D. Vance is the heir apparent, but if J.D. Vance chooses not to run, how Rubio might be the one who, who leads the party/reshapes the party. So I think that was the thing that grabbed my attention this week.
Jonah Goldberg
Megan?
Megan McArdle
I would just like to recommend the excellent advisory opinions episode on birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court. I learned a tremendous amount. Very well done, and kudos to David and Sarah and the team at SCOTUSblog for an excellent presentation.
Jonah Goldberg
David?
David French
Well, thank you for that. It was actually, it was a lot of fun to do that. I think we’re getting better at the immediate reaction to the oral argument podcast, which is fun to do. I’m gonna go with John Yoo’s piece on birthright citizenship. There was this great point-counterpoint, and what I liked about it is, you know, Yoo, who’s been a– He– probably one of the legal scholars that is best at steel-manning Trump positions.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
David French
I debated him on Trump’s border wall emergency in Trump one point O. He made lots of great points. So he’s traditionally, a lot of his work recently has been probably providing the best possible argument you’re gonna read for a Trump legal position. In this circumstance, he did not do that. He walked through the history of birthright citizenship in a way that I think pretty clearly showed that if you’re going with text, history, and tradition, all three things point in the exact same direction. It’s a really good piece.
Jonah Goldberg
I’m gonna go, in part because Kevin guilted me for not commending a piece by him on Monday. He’ll deny that, but it’s true. Kevin Williamson has a piece up this week, “The Welfare/Warfare State Redux.” I can’t quite do it justice because it is sort of pure
Jonah Goldberg
Williamson in it covers a lot of territory about supply-side corporate welfare and how it leads us into such things as actually subsidizing Iran’s oil industry while we were at war with it. So highly recommend that.
David French
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
And now not worth your time. So I hope you guys have followed this. An Army flight crew flew over Kid Rock’s mansion. The flight crew was suspended. The incident is now under, quote, “The incident is now under an Army Regulation 15-6 administrative investigation. The personnel involved have been suspended from flight duties while the Army reviews the circumstances surrounding the mission, including compliance with relevant FAA regulations, aviation safety protocol, and approvable requirements,” said Major Montrell Russell to Fox News Digital. And then Secretary of quote-unquote War, Pete Hegseth, Broseph McChesty, said, tweeted that he was unsuspending the flight crew, writing on X, “Thank you, Kid Rock and US Army pilots. Suspension lifted. No punishment, no investigation. Carry on patriots.” David, what do you think of it?
David French
It’s ridiculous. I mean, it, an Apache helicopter is not a toy. It’s not your– like, it’s your, not your uncle’s car that you grab the keys to and you go joyride. Look, if he deviated from a flight path, if he provided sort of a special, “Hey, I looked up on Google Maps where Kid Rock lives. Let’s go say hi to him,” that’s just not how this is done. And to walk in before any investigation– And look, maybe they did nothing wrong. Maybe they did nothing wrong, but that’s why you take a look at it. It looked bad. It looked really bad. You don’t give special favors to politically connected celebrities with Apache helicopters. That’s not the way it, this works. And you knew, a-as soon as I saw this, the clock was ticking. You knew he was coming in, and he was gonna, he, he was going to take away any sort of investigation at all. You knew that was gonna happen. It happened, and the message is very clear to the military. Political favoritism is A-okay.
Jonah Goldberg
Mike, I mean, I know that you are a, um, just enormous Kid Rock fan, so I, I wanna see if you had a different take on this.
Mike Nelson
Huge fan of Kid Rock and Secretary Hegseth.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Mike Nelson
You know, I have pictures of both of them up in this office. So I, uh, I had my initial impressions of this, but I also consulted some expertise, namely my brother, who was an Army Black Hawk pilot, and my friend Rob, who was in the same company, flew with him, and they gave me way more technical information about flight paths and airspace deconfliction than I actually wanted. So these pilots may not have done anything by the letter of the law unsafe, but they definitely did things that are weird, right? You know, we’re not gonna go– No other Army pilot is going to go and hover outside someone’s house without coordinating it anywhere else. Like, you could imagine if this is okay, and I, and I’m going to go a little bit-Absurd to make the point, is a pilot hovering over his ex-wife’s house, you know, acceptable if it follows the flight plan? And again, as David pointed out, the end of the investigation may have found out that nothing was done wrong. These fifteen-sixes are done to determine if there was something wrong, not necessarily… They are not criminal proceedings, you know. N-no one is being charged. It is just an investigation conducted at a command level to make sure that nothing has taken place that’s wrong. And what Secretary Hegseth did here is he basically undercut the authority of the aviation brigade commander to determine what is being done on his behalf in his organization by his pilots. And some of the reporting suggested one of the two Apache pilots was actually a battalion commander. So I would call into question the judgment of someone we’ve entrusted to lead one of our, you know, aviation organizations, and instead, without any kind of information at hand, besides knowing that he likes Kid Rock and that he doesn’t like investigations, the Secretary of Defense weighed in, you know, twenty layers deep to say, “I’m gonna say that whatever they did was fine and kosher because I like Kid Rock, and I think this is an awesome video.” And it just, it just reinforces the basic unseriousness of the secretary at that level as he’s trying to lead this organization that’s supposed to be professional.
Jonah Goldberg
So this is my m-moderator’s interpretation, but this feels like, too, this is worth our time. Megan?
Megan McArdle
Yeah, it’s worth our time because I think it’s a really good example of why you don’t put a television host in charge of the Defense Department. You know, look, I understand he was in the military, but he was not a senior leader in the military. And I think when you are, you think a lot about what it means to endorse a stunt like this, right? Because it’s not just that it stops here, it now sends a signal to troops that, like, the rules don’t apply, go follow your bliss-
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Megan McArdle
… boys will be boys. And I think that’s a really bad signal to send, and it is going– it, it– I can’t say it will. It risks cascading in ways that are really bad, and it will blow back on you, senior leader of the Defense Department, who will then be explaining that when you said that it was okay to take your helicopter and hover over Kid Rock’s house, you didn’t mean that it was okay to use your helicopter to stalk your ex-wife, right? But you might find that out when people push it.
Megan McArdle
Or to take, you know, naked pictures of some famous person sunbathing in their own backyard, right? There are lots of ways in which this could go extremely wrong, look extremely bad for the military, and force you to crack down. The best way to not have that happen is to crack down appropriately and to not interfere. There are also just reasons that you don’t have command overriding investigations like this. It is good to have procedures. It is not good to be doing this on a, like, “Did you tickle the fancy of the, the, the Secretary of Defense?” Sorry, the Secretary of War. That’s not a good way to run an organization. It’s not a good way to run any organization, and the larger the organization, the more problematic it is.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, to Mike’s point, it just seems to me that when you short-circuit an investigation that might have cleared these guys-
Megan McArdle
Yeah
Jonah Goldberg
… right, that might have said these guys did nothing wrong, you are saying you don’t care if they did nothing wrong.
Megan McArdle
Right.
Jonah Goldberg
Right? You don’t care if they did something terrible. You just don’t think this is the kind of thing that should be punished. And that is sending a tone from the top that I think Megan’s absolutely right about. It is just– i-it has so many sort of not just unforeseen consequences, but foreseeable [chuckles] bad consequences to it-
Megan McArdle
Yeah
Jonah Goldberg
… that it’s really, uh, it, it’s just shameful, but anyway.
Mike Nelson
Well, Jake Tapper asked the question on Twitter, you know, would this get the same response if these pilots had paid tribute to Bruce Springsteen, right?
Jonah Goldberg
Right.
Mike Nelson
Somebody obviously politically opposed to the administration. And the response that he got from many of the sycophants and reliable trolls who will rally behind anything that the secretary or the president does said, “Are you kidding? That’s, you know, Kid Rock’s a patriot and, and Bruce Springsteen’s a traitor,” or whatever it was. And they were inherently making his point that the interpretation of whether someone is acceptable or not is– seems to be the determining factor, not the acceptability of the act itself. So we are obviously, I mean, we’ve seen it with any number of things that Secretary Hegseth has done, including, you know, there’s been a little bit of a straw man on hi- from his department when there has been questions about his proselytizing his own faith from the position of the Secretary of Defense. There’s a difference between, you know, praying in his own capacity and saying that he encourages others to pray in their own traditions and saying, calling on all Americans to invoke the name of Jesus Christ on behalf of our, our fighting men and women. I think he confuses a lot what he believes is his own interpretation of good versus what he’s supposed to do in the mantle of the Secretary of Defense.
Jonah Goldberg
No, also, I just think when the defense is that the, the Secretary of War, air quotes, can show favoritism on the domestic front to, quote unquote, “patriots and political allies,” those are distinctions that we have developed. I mean, I don’t wanna go all Sam Huntington here, but, like, we’ve made these distinction– th-these distinctions are not ones that members of the military industrial complex are supposed to be making about which domestic citizens are, quote unquote, “patriots” and which ones aren’t. That is out of their purview. And to show favoritism or discrimination of any kind based upon those political judgments to domestic affairs is just, it’s not great, Bob.
Mike Nelson
Right.
Jonah Goldberg
All right. Thank you everybody for being here. I apologize for going too long, but thank you all for listening, and thank you guys for being here.
Jonah Goldberg
[outro jingle] If you like what we’re doing here, you can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. Seriously, look at the top podcasts in news and tell me we don’t deserve to be higher up than we are. I mean, we’re doing well. We’re almost always in the top one or two hundred, you know, and sometimes in the top fifty or whatever. But if you look at some of the jabronis and weirdos who are in the top ten and you can tell me that we shouldn’t be doing better, I disagree. So as always, if you got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at roundtable@thedispatch.com. That’s gonna do it for today’s show. Thanks so much for tuning in, and thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible, Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.
Jonah Goldberg
[outro jingle]
