David French

Welcome to The Puck, Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that explores the evolving landscape in the venture capital world. We'll have candid conversations with today's VCs and entrepreneurs who are shaping those changes. I'm Jim Veer, the managing partner of Veer, Negron, and Troff and the president of CMEG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately to how they got to where they are today. Both sides, they have a very negative view.

The left has a much more negative view of the American past. The right has a much more negative view about the American present. And that very negative view makes them question the principles upon which the country was founded. And it's an argument that your normal everyday average person is not having. Our episode today is a fascinating conversation with David French, a political commentator, author, and a co host of the Dispatch and the Good Faith podcasts.

We run the gamut of topics from the truth about polarization, the notion of integrity in politics, how to gain perspective in today's fractured world, and the heroic leadership emerging out of the Ukraine crisis. It's a conversation that I've been looking forward to having for a long time. And so, without further ado, I'm extremely excited to have David French, and so I wanted to welcome you to the puck, David. And before we jump into this interview, I thought maybe you could take a minute and give us a little understanding of your background. Yeah.

So I spent the vast majority of my career not as a journalist. I, I went to law school, graduated in '94. And between 2015, I think I did about everything you can do in the practice of law other than be a judge. I was a law firm lawyer. I was a public interest lawyer.

I was a litigator. I joined the military in 2006 and was in the army reserves and was a JAG officer, deployed to Iraq in 'seven, taught law school for a while at Cornell Law School. So I did a lot of different things in the practice of law, but if I had to sort of narrow down what was it that I did the most of, it would be constitutional law. I was a constitutional litigator, civil liberties, civil rights, constitutional law, and law of armed conflict. My entire JAG career was focused on what was called operational law, which is detainees, rules of engagement, the laws of armed conflict as it pertains to wars between nation states and wars between terrorists and terrorist entities.

So that's what I did for twenty one years. And as I was doing it, I was doing a lot of writing kind of along the side, and I just kept doing more writing and more writing and more writing. And then finally, in 2015, I reached out to Rich Lowry at National Review, and I said, because I'd been doing a lot of writing for NR, and I said, I'd like to write more. And and Rich said, I was just thinking I want you to write more. And so I left the full time practice along, joined National Review full time, and I think that was May 2015.

And Trump came down the escalator in June, if I recall correctly, and then I don't think I had a vacation for five years. I understand. So what led you to leave the National Review and help found the dispatch? Yeah. You know, a couple of things.

One is Jonah Goldberg, one of the two founders of The Dispatch with Steve Hayes, was colleague and friend at National Review. We were very much aligned in kind of the way in which we saw the world and also very much aligned with Steve and what they saw as a big problem in right wing media. And the big problem in right wing media is that it is so very partisan that the dominant form of right wing media is takes, its opinion. And now there are good journalists, there are good reporters in conservative media that work for Fox or work for other publications who are legitimately good reporters. I'm not saying all of right wing media is just take after take after take.

But we just saw right wing media as dominated by takes, and they had a vision to found an organization that was dominated by news reporting and analysis and not opinion. And I just really shared in that vision that they had for a place more dominated by reporting and analysis than by opinion. And then the other thing is, you know, if you're, opponent of Donald Trump as I was and as Jonah was, Jonah said it very well, and you work at the sort of the longest running conservative opinion journal in National Review, there's a lot of tension there, you know, sometimes with donors, sometimes with readers. And, Jonah put it pretty well in a piece where he said he was tired of being a problem for his employer and kind of had the same feeling, you know, I was tired of being a problem for my employer. And The Dispatch was really founded for a post Trump world.

We weren't founded to be a Trump opposition journal. We are founded to be a trying to blaze a new trail in conservative media that is, again, centered around reporting analysis more than opinion. When we were talking last week, we kind of alluded to the fact that America has always faced certain typical cultural issues. Yeah. Whether or not those were lower taxes, for instance.

But you seem to believe that America faced a more serious challenge today. And if so, what is that challenge? Yeah. I kinda phrase it as new culture war and old culture war. So the old culture war is, as you were saying, what's our tax rate?

What should be our policy on background checks or magazine sizes for guns? Or how many restrictions on abortion rights in a given state? That's sort of the old culture war stuff. What's the extent of free exercise clause, First Amendment protections for freedom of religion? But then there's something that's sort of more, what I would say, foundational to our system of government itself.

And you're beginning to see a rise of what sort of people who live in this space of political theory and political philosophy think of as a rise of what are called post liberals. Now, when you say post liberals, you're not talking about liberal like liberal versus conservative. You're talking about small l liberal as in the form of government known as sort of Western liberal democracy. The United States is a Western liberal democracy. It is a rule of law, rights based constitutional republic, and when you're talking about post liberals, which you're talking about people on the Left, say, maybe coming from the critical theory background, who question classical liberalism itself or people from the right who question classical liberalism itself.

So they're not even gonna agree necessarily about not just the extent of First Amendment protections, but is the First Amendment good? They're not gonna necessarily agree on things like due process, sort of foundational American kinds of values, big disagreements about what equal protection under the law means. So what you're talking about are movements on the right and on the left that kind of question the American system itself. All of these other issues, like, you know, the level of background checks or whatever, these are the kind of normal give and take push and pull of a constitutional republic. The other issues, whether it's this far hyper the great awakening on the left or the post liberal more authoritarian right, these are much more questioning our system itself and the moral and philosophical foundation of the system itself.

And that's what I call the new culture war. I mean, if we're gonna try to solve it. Right? And Yeah. We're gonna try to take the down to temperature, do we need to understand why we switched into this version?

Yeah. You know, it's a really good question, and people are arguing about that. You know, it's not something that's got a neat, clean, easy answer. And I think, you know, there's a couple of things going on. One, on the right, there sort of became this conviction amongst a lot of people that the right lost the culture war.

It lost the old culture war. In other words, the gay marriage decision and the some attacks on religious liberty and the spread of the sexual revolution meant the right had lost the culture war. And that because it had lost the culture, it needed to turn to where it was very powerful and strong, politics, to readjust the balance of power. So, there's this old statement that politics is downstream from culture. In other words, culture influences politics more than politics influences culture.

And, sort of, the post liberal or authoritarian right says, nope, nope, nope. I'm gonna reject that. We can use raw political power to change the culture. So if you've lost the culture war, you don't have a place in Hollywood, you don't have a place in the elite academy, pop culture goes against you, you can grab the reins of power and begin to readjust cultural power through political power. So that's one of the things that's happened on the right.

On the left, what you've seen is a coherent body of thought that essentially says America's classical liberal founding wasn't the answer to historical oppression. It was the cause of historical oppression in The United States. So a Constitution which accommodated slavery isn't any kind of document that we should continue to have any particular allegiance to, that essentially America's classical liberal founding the way I view our classical liberal founding is it was irreconcilably opposed to the worldviews that brought us 1619 and slavery. And over time, this push and pull between that spirit of 1619 and the spirit of 1776, we have moved more towards the spirit of 1776, more towards all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights. But the post liberal on the left says, nope, nope, that's the wrong way to look at it.

Seventeen seventy six, in many ways, is a continuation, not an opposition to 1619. And so, we need to rethink our systems. And so, both sides, they have a very negative view. The left has a much more negative view of the American past. The right has a much more negative view about the American present.

And that very negative view makes them question the principles upon which the country was founded. And it's an argument that a lot, you know, like your normal everyday average person is not having. You might have some listeners who are not super into this, you know, they're not super political nerds, and they're saying, what is he talking about? I had heard nothing about this. But it is utterly consuming a great deal of our political thinkers, our theorists, our political class, and to the extent that they filter down into battles over free speech, in social media, and CRT, and all of these things, they're filtering down to the grassroots as well.

It's interesting you frame it like that because I understand the notion that, you know, do we need to throw out the constitution, amend the constitution? Right. But when you look at the amendments to the constitutions and the Bill of Rights and the ending of slavery Right. It has been a document that, as you say, has moved us to this point for the first time in history where we've got this multicultural democracy. You know, I do hear people talk about how we you know, the constitution doesn't mean what it says and it's part of the problem.

But I'm curious, how do people get around the fact that it's a document that has been amended and is granted these additional rights? So, yeah, there's different answers on the left and on the right. Okay. So the answer on the right is, yeah, we've gotten all of this liberty, and we've turned it into libertinism. So what's happened is Americans imbued with more freedom and more personal autonomy than sort of any group of people in world history have squandered it in decadence, family dissolution, consumerism, materialism.

And rather than sort of saying, hey, David, Jim, you guys need to be more responsible, you know, with liberty comes responsibility, They say liberty breeds irresponsibility. Liberty breeds libertinism. In other words, liberty becomes the problem. This sort of personal autonomy becomes the problem. And so what we have to do is to pull back this personal autonomy.

Okay. So move on to the other side. And all of this is kind of oversimplified to kind of be able to kind of wrap our minds around it quickly. Sure. The other side says, okay.

Hold on just a second. A lot of what you sort of think of as American individual autonomy and personal liberty is kind of a fiction because all of that arose up in a system that was inherently unequal. And so what you're looking at right now is you, David, white guy living in the suburbs. You are fundamentally unaware of all the ways in which the deck has been stacked in your favor. And your counterpart, living three miles away in a tough, previously redlined, segregated area of town, the deck is fundamentally stacked against him in ways you don't appreciate.

And so, therefore, when you say, well, we need to preserve this sort of structure, what you're saying is you're preserving something that has the veneer of equality but the reality of oppression. And so how do we fix that? Well, one of the things that we have to do is we have to use again, notice how everything flips back to more, sort of, more government power. We have to use government power to create equity And this principle of quote unquote equality and equality of opportunity is sort of a fiction. What is a reality is inequity, and what we need to do is greater use of power to achieve equity.

And so both sides sort of end up in the same place. On the right, it's more power to deal with the libertarianism or the hedonism or the family dissolution of caused by excessive amounts of human liberty. On the left, it's penetrating the illusion that there's all this human liberty in favor of the understanding the reality of these profoundly important systems that have created inequity. But again, you reach in both directions and you ultimately end up grabbing the levers of power. When I look back to my poli sci days in college and I think about democracies, one of the challenges is when you have a crisis Mhmm.

Right? Whether or not you have the civil war where Lincoln suspends habeas corpus or whether or not you have World War two and the Japanese internment. There's no question that when we are in a crisis, the country seems to move more to an authoritarian position to kind of get through the quote crisis. I'm wondering if because of globalization, because of the culture wars, because we're living in an environment of social media where things are purposely getting people to think there's constantly a crisis Yeah. That one of the reasons that the quote left and the right is saying, hey, we need to ignore the constitution, so to speak, and we need to take some liberties here.

I'm wondering if some of that is because of the artificial Yeah. Crisis that we're all led to believe we're in because of social media. Yeah. You know, it's not just social media. There's an old concept, and it goes all the way back more than a century, called the moral equivalent of war.

Okay. So in a situation like Russia invading Ukraine, everybody knows desperate times call for desperate measures. And what we're seeing is this groundswell of unity within the Ukrainian nation right now that they never had before. A groundswell of unity behind a president that they've never seen before. And so what ends up happening is people look at what nations are capable of accomplishing In war, they're capable of accomplishing horrific things truly, but also capable of accomplishing tremendous things.

Think of the Battle of Britain. Think of D Day. And look at what nations have the potential of accomplishing in that common purpose and that unity. And often people are looking for ways in which to essentially create the mindset of war in the absence of war. Right.

Because there's this unity. There's this purpose. And so, you know, this kind of is, one of the things we see in a lot of political rhetoric is, you know, the very phrase culture war itself. It's a modifier on war. And one of the things you see in this constantly urgent political rhetoric, The nation's over if Joe Biden wins.

I mean, that was an argument all over on the right. I mean, our American democracy is at stake if a, b, c, or d. And all of these things are designed to mobilize people in the way that war mobilizes people. The more distant and removed you get from war, the more you can kind of get there in your mind to convince you that you've got existential stakes. And then real war breaks out and all of that rhetoric starts to look dumb.

Right. You see the images of the siege of or it's not quite a siege yet, but the shelling of Kyiv and the attacks on Kharkiv. And you're thinking, that's not like getting suspended from Twitter. That's nothing like getting suspended from Twitter. Right.

And it begins to introduce some perspective. I think I read whether or not it was on the dispatcher who was listening to one of your podcast that there was some discussion that came out of the election recently with Dan Crenshaw. And for instance, there was some social media stuff that was talking about how, oh, he's not a true Republican, and we've gotta get him out of office. And it created this whole whipsaw, like there was this huge crisis. Yeah.

And then the next thing you know, he wins handily, so to speak. I'm wondering that if we get better at realizing that media is purposely trying to inflame us, what do you think about if people realize that they are in a sense being manipulated in this echo chamber that they can get better at taking control of their own lives? Yeah. It's a great question. And I think what's ending up happening is we're self selecting into separate communities, and we'll just draw them in two big broad brushes, the very online and normal people.

At the risk of just being I've already biased on where I think America's hope lies. Is it with the very online or the normal people? But one of the most important studies that I saw before the twenty twenty election was one from the folks at the Upshot New York Times, Nate Cohn's outfit. They broke down the differences between the very online, the social media Democrats, and the offline Democrats. Of course, offline Democrats aren't entirely offline, but they're just not spending a large chunk of their time following political media.

And the very online Democrats were far more progressive than the offline Democrats. They were just a different demographic. They were wider. They were far more progressive. The offline Democrats were more diverse.

They were more moderate. And the offline Democrats were two thirds, and the very online Democrats were one third. Well, because the way the online world works, where if you're part of this journalistic political world, you're online, it's easy to get a completely inaccurate view of where the electorate is. And in the Democratic primary, there was only one candidate who ran for the offline Democrats, and it was Joe Biden. Everyone else is fighting to carve up that one third pie, and Biden rolled to victory, just rolled to victory.

And it's interesting, if you're on the Republican side, the very online Republicans are the ones who are far more likely to buy into a lot of these theories critiquing liberalism, small l liberalism. They're far more likely to question Republican orthodoxy. They're far more likely to be extremely pugilistic in their posture. And then something happens, and they'll suddenly realize how out of step they are. So, on very online Republicans, very online Republicans had this weird kind of bromance with Vladimir Putin.

A lot of them did. You know, they saw the Russian solidarity and his embrace of the Russian Orthodox Church and his military strength, and they would contrast it with like a U. S. Army TikTok recruiting video where a young woman with two moms enlists and says, Side by side, look at this Russian ad, manly, and then this TikTok ad, unmanly. And then all of a sudden, Russia invades Ukraine, and the Russian military doesn't look so hot, and Vladimir Putin looks like a brutal thug and not some sort of, like, even diabolical genius, just a brutal thug.

And the American people rally overwhelmingly behind Ukraine, and even someone like Tucker Carlson, who two weeks ago said he was on Putin's side, is having to kind of roll back. And even some of the most sort of post liberal authoritarian voices on Twitter are saying, I mean, yeah, I am against the Russian invasion. And part of that is because that very online world doesn't reflect either on the right or the left where most people live their lives. Yeah. And I do wanna come back to talking a little bit about, obviously, what's going on with Ukraine and Russia right now.

But when you talk about your online crowds, is part of the challenge that the way our primary systems are run, that it's the online people on the left and the right that are voting the most, and therefore, the politicians have to play to that in order to even get on the ticket? Oh, gosh. I mean, it's a combination of two things at once. One is very red or very blue districts. Right.

Okay? So it's the primary voters of the district who decide the victor. That's it. The general election is meaningless. So if you live in an r plus 30 district, I mean, there are Democratic candidates.

I mean, they run, but you have no chance. It's all the primary. And so what ends up happening is if you're on the right, most, the vast majority of Republican legislators, are worried only about a challenge from the right. And if you're on the left, the vast majority worry only about a challenge from the left. And so that means that there's this constant pull.

And so you'll see legislators, state legislators, who everybody knows they don't like Marjorie Taylor Greene. They're nothing like Marjorie Taylor Greene. And I use her as a stand in for sort of this radical reactionary conspiracy theory populace. But they'll vote like a Marjorie Taylor Greene, and when they're called on it, they'll say, well, if I don't, then I'll get primaried by somebody like her. But the retort is, well, if you're gonna vote like them anyway, what's the difference?

You know? But, yeah, there is this constant feeling that I'm gonna get attacked from my right or from my left if I'm on the left and my right if I'm on the right. And it's a real problem. And so what ends up happening is because of this combination of deep red and deep blue districts, which is not entirely due to gerrymandering, by the way, because people are living in different parts of the country, and the primary system, only a very small percentage of Americans exercises a vastly disproportionate degree of power over who runs our government. Yeah.

I know there's different people working on, like, ranked voting and different ways to try to deal with that, and and so, hopefully, there'll be ways to kind of address that. Going back to a more slightly optimistic view, when you look at what's going on in the world today and you talk about liberalism and a constitutional democracy, and you look at kind of the existential battle that's going on right now, in terms of challenging West versus the East and these things, I mean, do you think in a sense that this is gonna accelerate things again for the better, hopefully, or the worse because it's really gonna focus our system against their system and what we can do in this situation? Yeah. You know, it's interesting. It's difficult to predict what a crisis will do.

It's difficult to predict. I mean, I was very interested. I wrote a book called Divided We Fall, basically saying our divisions are growing so profound that we need to really think long and hard about whether or not The United States Of America will stay together over the long term as a country. I finished at summer of twenty twenty right as the pandemic was really cresting. And one of my theories was that we're becoming so divided that not even a common emergency will unite us in the way that it has in the past.

And along comes the pandemic, and next thing you know, we're having culture wars over masks. We're having culture wars over vaccines, over lockdown. I mean, you name it. We're having a culture war over it. But the interesting thing is, with Ukraine and Russia, we're not really having so much of a culture war over that here in The U.

S. Right. We're really not. It's interesting. If you look historically, pandemics don't tend to unite societies as much, Even though it was an existential threat in the sense of hundreds of thousands, almost a million Americans dead, deep damage to our economy, and it came from outside our shores.

It came from China. It's a virus that came from China. That still didn't unite us in the way that a renewed sense of emergency from Russian military aggression has. And they're just different in nature kinds of challenges. And I think one of the interesting questions about Russia and Ukraine is, quite frankly, how long before it goes off the front page and we sort of just get back to each other's throats?

Even if it goes off the front page, does it give us at least a little bit of perspective That maybe fighting over Twitter's moderation policies isn't the be all end all of, you know, that's not the moral equivalent of war. So switching back to this notion of leadership and character and Yeah. The notion of how you do bring people back into a feeling of belief in the system and so forth. What do you think about what's going on with, you know, Zelensky and the way he's rallied the world? And does that give us something to aspire towards in terms of the types of leaders we look for in America Yeah.

Whether or not in the church or politically because we have a more robust discussion about what is a genuine leader. Yeah. Oh my goodness. I think that that is a really important point because if you look at history, you see Zelensky's and you see Putin's, and they both rise in history. You see them both all the time.

It's really interesting, you know, the Putin's rise for some reasons that are kind of endemic to human nature, you know, so that idea in times of confusion you turn to strength. National glory provides purpose and identity. All of these things kind of scratch itches we have at a really deep level. And you don't even have to go to Hitler. Everyone compares everything to Hitler.

Let's not do that. Let's go to Napoleon, you know. Let's go to Napoleon and talk about, you know, how he provided a struggling French Republic under attack by multiple powers with unparalleled military glory, with sense of purpose. And he's not the only sort of strong man in history who did that. And if you look at Vladimir Putin, when he came to power, Russia was struggling.

It was at a low ebb in its historic power, but he won military conflicts in Chechnya, and then in Georgia, and then in Crimea, and then in Syria, and Russia modernized its military, and asserted itself on the international stage, and all of these things that autocrats and victorious autocrats do that sort of bind them and bond them to their people. And then on the other hand, you have this guy Zelenskyy, who's a very unlikely hero. You know, he's a former actor. He won Dancing with the Stars, for crying out loud. There's a video of him dancing in high heels.

He wins election as president of Ukraine, and, you know, frankly, he had a tough job, and a lot of people had some fair critiques of how well he did it. And then all of a sudden when the bombs start falling, he's like Ukraine's Churchill. Right. But, you know, what's interesting about it and why you would say words as bold as Ukraine's Churchill, even though, of course, there's only one Winston Churchill, it's an interesting kind of leadership. It's a leadership that says, I don't just lead you.

I don't just command you. I am with you. And his absolute reluctance to abandon Kyiv while it's under direct attack, his walking in the streets to demonstrate that he hasn't left while the city is being bombed, his willingness just to basically say, no, we will not yield. We will fight for every inch of Ukraine. He's connecting with sort of this virtuous model of leadership and inspiration that stands in direct contrast and is ultimately, you know, the force that often has arise throughout history to withstand and defeat the autocrat.

And he's connecting with something, you know, that phrase, better angels of our nature. I think he's connecting with us so powerfully because we have not seen the kind of leadership that connects with the better angels of our nature in a long time. And when you see it, it's like coming across an oasis in the desert, and it's moving people, not just in Ukraine. He's literally become a symbol of resistance to tyranny. And from what an unlikely place, unlikely place in the sense of former actor, embattled controversial president before the bombs fall, a kind of an ordinary guy put in an extraordinary situation who's come through magnificently so far.

When you refer to the desert, Aaron Sorkin in the movie, The American President, talks about how people are so desperate for leadership that they will drink the sand because they can't, you know, they can't tell the difference, so to speak. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think all of us on our in our soul are desperate for that mentor or that leader.

And, again, whether or not we find it in God or we find it in Jesus or Moses or King David Yes. We want that person or being to kind of give us that courage, so to speak, or allow ourselves to attach to something. And when we see somebody like Zelensky, as you said, it appeals to our better angels. I mean, in America, I'm wondering in this time of dethroning of institutions, for instance. And when you talk about the offline people and the disengaged or silent majority, I'm wondering if, yes, it calls on us to look for genuine leadership.

But, also, do you think there's room for each of us Yeah. To look inside ourselves and try to find the ability within ourselves to be leaders? Oh, absolutely. You know, one of the things I'm starting to get out and give speeches again, you know, post vaccine and everything. I get this in my inbox, but it's so much more poignant when you get it in person, which is, what can we do?

So many of our leaders seem to have zero courage. They can't even withstand a Twitter mob. Do you think that they could withstand, you know, Russian shelling? I mean, they seem to have so little courage. They seem to have so little character.

What can we do? And one of the things that I say is start modeling the values you seek to advance in our culture. In other words, we can't just sit there and lament what everybody else is getting wrong. We have to live out our values. We have to walk our talk.

And that includes by having a decreasing level of tolerance in our own political voice for that lack of integrity, for that lack of courage. What's the words from social needs? And I'm gonna totally butcher them, but, you know, the lie may come. The lie may even triumph, but it will not come through me. And to sort of just say that, like, for me, I have made an absolute commitment.

I'm not going to vote for a low integrity politician. Period. I don't care if you scream at me at the top of your voice, binary choice. No. I will not.

I will write in somebody. I will not because I have this view that says the only way low integrity politicians make it into office is by getting votes. Right. And here's a basic plan for getting rid of low integrity politicians. Don't vote for them.

Here we it. And, you know, just that simple idea could be transformational. My vote has to be earned. It is not the birthright of either the Democrat or the Republican Party. It has to be earned, and one way you have to earn it is with integrity.

And if you don't have it, you don't get the vote. And instead, we have low integrity politicians that win primaries, and then they turn around and they say, woah, it's me or the other guy. It's me or the other guy. What are you gonna choose? You gotta choose.

You gotta choose. Yeah. I choose not you. Not you. And I think that that's an important, very basic choice.

Don't vote for bad people. Period. And I agree with you, and I think having more of a discussion of values as opposed to rights is long overdue. Right. But I also go back to what you said about the new war.

When people are afraid of, you know, an existential crisis, I've heard a lot of people saying, well, I'm voting for this person, but they're low integrity. But at the end of the day, I need this club in order to get things done, and so they're willing to sacrifice because they see as an existential crisis. Right. Doesn't it come back to what you were saying, which is, do we have a constitution? Do we have something that we all believe in and that we're willing to keep as sacred?

Because if we don't have any common rules that we're following, it becomes a free for all. Well, you raise a really good point. And I think one of the things that low integrity politicians do is they tell you, you have to vote for me or it's a catastrophe. You have to vote for me or everything's over. So in other words, they're trying to corner you and say, raise the stakes, raise the stakes, raise the stakes so that you feel like you have no choice.

There's this famous essay before the twenty sixteen election called the Flight ninety three Election. Rush Limbaugh read it aloud to all his millions of listeners, and basically they were saying that this election is Flight 93. You have to charge the cockpit or this nation will die. In other words, it's Trump or death. It's vote for Trump or death.

And I have friends, I have neighbors who never would have voted for Trump in their lives, but they were convinced it was Trump or death. And as much as they didn't like Trump, it's better than The United States dying. But this gets all the way back to that moral equivalent of war argument. Right. You raise the stakes artificially, which ends up creating a sense of emergency where we lower the threshold for integrity.

But if you've ever been in a military conflict, you know, when I served in Iraq, I will tell you this, when the stakes are really high, you need integrity and competence. When the stakes are actually high, you need leaders who will lead from the front. You need leaders who are competent, who are capable, who have integrity, who have the ability to inspire rather than just spawn fear. We've reached this weird world where in politics, we say, the stakes are too high for honesty. What?

Right. Do we do that in business? Do we do that in the military? But in politics, we sort of say, well, you know, I know I wouldn't even hire him to manage him at local McDonald's, but the stakes are too high. Wait a minute.

That doesn't flow for me. Well, yeah. And if you go back to the social contract, whether or not you're a, as you said, person that's saying that the system is stacked against me or, again, from a cultural war perspective or you've got in certain rights, but you're afraid they're gonna get taken away. Yeah. It seems to me there's not enough faith and there's too much fear on both sides.

Oh, yes. I mean, what you're constantly told is you will lose all your rights. Not just some. Not just like if you look at the First Amendment and you say, well, we have a 100% of what we want in the First Amendment now, but if I lose this election, we'll end up after four years with only 98% of what I want in the First Amendment, which is the much more accurate way of looking at it. You're told there's a First Amendment or there's nothing.

There's religious liberty or there's nothing. And it is always catastrophic, catastrophic, catastrophic. Now that doesn't mean that some of these legal precedents don't matter or that differences in tax rates don't matter. I'm not saying it's all or nothing. I'm just saying it's not all.

It's not everything is at stake. And yet we're constantly told that to the point where people actually look at you as if you're betraying The United States Of America as a nation by not voting for a particular candidate because you have been so thoroughly convinced that The United States will end over as the nation you know and love if your candidate loses, which is a total absurdity. As my colleague, Jonah Goldberg says, if we're one election away from the loss of the country, it's already gone because you're not gonna win every one of them. You know, you're not. So, Dan, here's a question for you.

Knowing history as well as you do, when you look at the time of the revolutionary war and the founding fathers, and you look at the civil war, and you look at the duel between Hamilton and Burr Yeah. And you look at polarization, and you look at the newspapers, and the flagrant misleading things in those times, Is there any possibility that it's not that things are so much worse now, but that rather we all are involved in politics? Like, politics has always been a pretty dirty full on combat business by us allowing everybody with a cell phone and a Twitter account Yeah. To essentially become an expert, right Mhmm. On politics.

I'm wondering in others, is there any possibility that that's part of it? That it's not that it's that different, but it's that we've just become all politicians? Well, you know, what's arisen is a class a big class of what you would call political hobbyists. This group called More in Common, which has been trying to sort of figure out American polarization for the last several years, did a study on this called Hidden Tribes, trying to figure out where we, beyond red and blue, on a more nuanced basis, where are we? And what they found is only about 14% of Americans are what you would call in the polarizing wings.

And that at the top end, if you take the most obsessed people with politics and then add the second most obsessed, it's about 33% of America. They're disproportionately white, disproportionately well off, disproportionately likely to view politics as a hobby. So just to put this in historical perspective, if you were in The United States Of America in the year 2022 and you're upper middle class white person, you're amongst the most privileged people who have ever walked the planet Earth. Absolutely. Seriously.

And yet you're running around with your hair on fire thinking everything's about to come crashing to the end. Right. And that's our political class right now. And so we do have millions of people for whom politics is essentially their life. They'll go to work, they'll make their living, and then they'll come home and they'll flip on Fox and won't turn it off until they go to bed.

We all know people who do that. Or we all know people, as soon as they get together, what are they talking about? Are they talking about SEC football and its unimaginable power and glory? No. They're talking about politics from the moment they walk in the door till the moment that they leave.

Again, it's not that politics don't matter. It's not that you shouldn't be an informed citizen. But the wild thing is how much brain space we give it, given how little control we have over it. And when you give it all that brain space, you're often crowding out brain space that you should be giving to things that you do have some degree of control over and relationships that you should be cultivating. And so we're creating a class of citizens who are political zealots and extremely politically angry, and yet one of the sources of their anger, quite frankly, is their inability to impact that which they obsess over.

And it's a helpless angry feeling. I know you have your podcast, The Good Faith Podcast, and you also were doing The Dispatch. Is part of the type of writing you're doing to try to give this kind of people in the middle a place to go to get more objective journalism that does take the temperature down? I mean, is that part of your goal? Yeah.

Well, I think a better way to put it, because sometimes the temperature should be hot. Right. Like, we should be really concerned that there's a large land war in Europe right now with a dictator who has threatened the use of nuclear weapons. Right. Hey, everybody.

That's something to be and I'm reminded of, did you ever see the movie Ratatouille? No. I didn't see Ratatouille. It's a Pixar movie. It's fantastic.

And, anyway, there's this point where this food critic comes in, and his food order, and he's giving this restaurant run by a rat, but that's it's it's Pixar. Hang with me for a minute. And the food critic named Anton Ego comes in, and he orders his dish. And what he says, I would like a dose of perspective, please. And the guy's like, perspective?

What do you mean? I want perspective. And I've always listened to it, played that in my mind, and I think that is what I think of my readers or listeners are ordering. I want a dose of perspective. Not just, is this important, but how important is it?

And that's a really sometimes a hard thing to know. You know, is this something that I need to lay away and worry about? Or is this something that is just part of the normal churn of politics? Is America really gonna fall with a new election or not? What could possibly happen in the confrontation with Vladimir Putin?

And so in those areas in which I have experience and, you know, some degree of expertise, what I really try to do is not just provide facts, but also perspective, analysis. Some things are more important than other things. And trying to figure out the difference between that which is urgent and that which might be important but not urgent, and then that which is not all that important at all. Do you know Stephen Covey's work, like, the seven habits of highly effective people? Yeah.

Mhmm. I mean, he talks about that. And when you were talking about this notion of what do you have impact over, he talks about sphere of influence and stuff, or urgent trivialities versus urgent. We have this amazing computer. Right?

This mind. And the question is, do we all learn to work with it better and to realize that we can take more control? And when these thoughts come at us and these texts come at us and these tweets come at us, can we take the temperature down a notch and do exactly what you said, which is really get the right perspective? And it's a challenge. It's a challenge because you have all kinds of competing voices saying, this is important.

No. This is important. No. This is important. And it's interesting, my dispatch colleague, Sarah Isker, has this great sort of explanation as to why that is, and that is the rise of small dollar donors as a primary engine driving American politics.

And a lot of times when you think small dollar donors, you think, Oh, regular Americans. Nope. Nope. Small dollar donors are a very small percentage of Americans. They're the most committed.

You know, they might be the angriest. And so political fundraisers know their audience, and they will target this very committed, very angry, small core and milk them of their money, dollars 15, dollars 25, dollars 30, dollars 50, dollars 100 at a time. So it's constant temperature raising. I used to raise money in my nonprofit civil rights litigation days, and I will tell you, you know, one of the things we tried to do is raise money through inspiration and hope. Like, if you give us money, we win.

Right. We expand the sphere of liberty. We win free speech cases. We win religious liberty cases. And it does work, but it's harder work.

It's harder work to raise money by hopes rather than fears. And so time and time again, people are doubling down on fear to raise money, which breeds that constant lack of perspective and that constant catastrophic thinking. Will you recommend movies and things that I religiously watch, by the way? And I use the analogy of Star Wars a lot, which is the force versus the dark side. I do think that good leadership calls on our better angels and reminds us of the shining city on the hill or that when we're united, we can do anything.

To me, that is what is immortal, so to speak. That light does ultimately win over darkness. Yeah. But even you related to this on the podcast when you were talking about idol worship. I mean, I do think that darkness and idols, it can be very powerful because it can lead you down a certain path.

But, ultimately, I think that light and that the leadership that does lead you to hope and inspiration, I ultimately believe that wins out. Yeah. I mean, I the idolatry of the sort of, the worship of the evil leader, it is a kind of an omnipresent part of human history because these guys do connect with a longing that we have. You know, we talked about this longing for purpose, this longing for identity, to feeling a part of something great. They will connect with that, but they're providing a counterfeit version of it, ultimately.

That's why these guys are always rising and then falling in the most awful fashion is because the counterfeit nature of what they're offering to humanity is exposed. Whereas those figures throughout history who have connected with that human longing in a virtuous way, you know, who've connected with that human longing in a way that raises hopes rather than fears, that is based in love rather than hate, that is enduring. You know, if you take when Jesus was born, Caesar Augustus reigned supreme, And now Caesar Augustus is an answer to a trivia question. You know, who was the Caesar when Jesus was born and yet Jesus who offered an incredibly different model of leadership? The last shall be first.

That kind of leadership, and even to the point of giving yourself for others on the cross, that level of leadership has endured in human history as an inspiration, and the Caesar Augustus has been imitated many times, but always with the same fate. And, again, you refer to Zelensky as this, quote, actor that I think everybody expected to get on the next plane out of Dodge. I don't know when the last time I heard that the the captain will go down with the ship. Yeah. But the question is whose glory, who are you leading?

In other words, are you doing it for your own self in grandiosemen? Mhmm. Or are you doing it for a higher purpose, whether or not it's God or whatever your religion is? But at the end of the day, if you're staying there with people and you're feeling their pain and you're putting something higher than yourself. Right?

I mean, Duslinski was just interested in himself and his family. He could've got in the next plane. Yeah. But by staying there and risking his life and being on a Zoom with everybody from his bunker where everybody's sitting there safe with their tie Yeah. His life becomes that message.

Well, you know, with Zelensky, what's so powerful about it is when he's with you in the suffering of the moment, what that communicates more than words can say is that he is doing what he is doing out of love Right. And not ambition. Okay? Because you can't progress when you're dead. Right?

You can't move on to the next thing. But if you're willing to lay your life on the line for this nation and the people that you love, that communicates powerfully. And there's this interesting question, I think, that we need to ask, and that is, you read about Winston Churchill standing on the roof when the bombs were falling on London, or George Washington at the Battle of Princeton when he goes within 30 yards of British muskets, and one of his aides even puts his hat over his head so that he doesn't have to see Washington fall. And part of you is saying, there's a fine line between bravery and recklessness. Right?

What would have happened if Churchill had been hit in a bombing raid? What would have happened if a British musket ball had hit Washington? But there's another question, and that is, can great nations be built without such courage and connect with this sort of virtuous legacy without that kind of courage? And, you know, I think that that's a question worth asking, and that is why Zelensky connects. And how much can you have a difference between these pictures of Vladimir Putin at these long conference tables 30 feet from the nearest other human being, and Zelenskyy's with his entire core team in physical contact with each other, you know, taking a selfie video on the streets of Kyiv while it's a city under fire.

It's such a profound contrast, and rarely in life, quite frankly, do we see such profound contrast. Often we're living in a lot of shades of gray, but here we have this remarkably clear moment of black and white, and quite frankly, it's rallying much of the world behind a virtuous model of leadership as opposed to the goal of Putin, which was to intimidate the world behind his raw power. And it's one of the more clarifying and important moments of my lifetime, historical moments of my lifetime. You can say it in a lot of different ways, but I do think that it's sometimes it's easy to feel sorry for yourself without looking around and realizing, as you said, that we are living better than kings and queens. Oh my goodness.

We have so much to be grateful for, but we are inundated with a lot of things, and we are often made to fear. And I think it's a great time to remember that we have so much to be grateful for and worth fighting for. Yeah. You know, there's a super poignant scene. I don't know.

A lot of people did not like the movie Don't Look Up Right. That was on Netflix. Satcherical movie, and a lot of people thought it's too ham handedly political. But at the very end of it at the very end of it, there's this just really poignant moment, which it turns out that Leonardo DiCaprio had more or less ad libbed or improvised, where right before everything just is blown to smithereens, they're holding hands around the table right after a prayer. That was a beautiful prayer, by the way.

He says something like, you know, we really did have it all when you think about it. And I just feel like a lot of us are living our lives in a state of rage and fear, in a moment of extraordinary prosperity, extraordinary peace, certainly in The United States, extraordinary peace in much of the world until the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and tearing each other to shreds. And one day, we'll look at all of this and look back at it and say, you know, we really did have something good, and we just couldn't see it when it was right in front of our faces. That's one of the things that I truly worry about, you know, that we're in this endless cycle of rage. Yeah.

And again, I know we're running short on time here, and I wanna wrap up. But I will say that your Ted Lasso recommendation and your Station Eleven recommendation, which I think both talk about hope and the joyous side of life. And again, Station 11, I'm not sure what you loved about it. But at the end, for instance Yeah. And I don't wanna ruin this, but the love in that and the the selflessness that you see with some of the characters is very inspirational.

Oh my gosh. I mean, Station 11 was like a tonic for the soul in a way because it so emphasized that sort of human need for connection and affection and sacrificial love. Right. It's one of the more unique shows I've ever seen, by the way, because the last thing that I would ever voluntarily turn on unless everyone had told me to watch it is follow a post apocalyptic theater troupe Right. Through the Upper Midwest.

I'm like, wait. No. I don't think so. Even though I told my wife it was your recommendation, I wasn't able to get her to watch it for exactly that reason. Yeah.

Well, I will say this as we end. I do urge our listeners to check out the dispatch and actually your good faith podcast as well because regardless of whether or not you're on the left or you're on the right, I think getting the truth and getting objective things from people of good faith and good character is extremely important. So I thank you, David, and I urge everyone to check you out in what you're doing because I think it's wonderful and the world needs more of it. This has been a great conversation. I really appreciate it.

I am truly hopeful in this moment of crisis that we can get that perspective right now. And we can start to sort of dial down our apocalyptic rhetoric here at home and continue to rally around people who are experiencing what it truly means to face the extinction of their country, an existential threat in reality as opposed to sort of as a rhetorical trick. Thanks, David. Thanks, Jim. Appreciate it.

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