The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg The Dispatch

Fair warning: Eating styrofoam may prove more constructive than listening to today’s drive-time Remnant, which contains even less substance than your average Seinfeld episode. Jonah (scourge of baggage agents across America), Ryan (softball hero of the think-tank league and true retainer to The Remnant’s legacy), Guy (who contributed nothing to this episode because “Talkin’ Softball” was stuck in his head), and Nick (full-time Renfield to Jonah’s Dracula) reunite to explore the pointlessness of various government departments, kooky conservative reactions to making Juneteenth a federal holiday, and political blogging in the dark ages of the internet. The quartet also has sad news to impart: Beginning next week, Nick will no longer be serving as Jonah’s research assistant. To mark his departure and celebrate his legacy, the guys talk about absolute guff for about an hour, and then retroactively stick some newsy things onto the front of the show.

Show Notes:

- The enduring strangeness of Jackie Butts (sorry, Jack)

- Darkest drilling

- The 2001 shoe bombing attempt

- Tucker Carlson outcrazies himself

- Andrew Egger on the latest January 6 conspiracy

- Charlie Kirk confirms his genius

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After several years worth of appearances, David Bahnsen (managing partner and chief investment officer at the Bahnsen Group) finally comes on to talk about his main gig: how money works. It only took five whole shows for Jonah to stop asking him about the postmillenial view about how the world’s going to end. But what better time to start asking about the economy than now, as the national conversation turns to taxing the rich, reopening the economy after a year and a half, and whether or not we’re entering an inflationary spiral? Oh, and David’s in the Five-Timer’s Club now.

Show Notes:

- That time that David Bahnsen started COVID

- David sub-hosts for Jonah, talks to David (the other one)

- Remember “flattening” the curve?

- David recognized a COVID/obesity connection in May 2020

- Jonah on the ProPublica story

- David’s somewhat mistimed book on Elizabeth Warren’s campaign

- David in Commentary on wealth tax proposals

- Larry Summers doesn’t like wealth taxes

- “Sticky wages”... gross

- Lacey Hunt thinks inflation ends with a whimper, not a bang

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While it’s true that Chris Stirewalt came to perform an autopsy on the GOP’s 2020 election strategy and results, it’s worth pointing out that “the GOP” as a rule didn’t do all that badly in 2020 – the real problem was Donald Trump. Given this state of affairs, Chris decided to reverse course momentarily by speaking to Parker Poling, the 2019-2020 executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee and one of the primary architects of the GOP strategy for congressional elections in 2020. Parker helps to give us a better sense of why Republicans entering the party without Trumpian baggage were able to outperform the president in their own state and local elections and what it was like to make such strides in diversifying the GOP cohort to include more women and racial minorities at a time of revanchist populism. Parker even gives us her advice for freshman members of Congress (Hint: Most of them don’t follow it, even though they should).

 

Show Notes:

-Parker’s time in the GOP

-Patrick McHenry’s unexpected congressional career

-Congressional Republicans outperformed Trump

-Florida’s 27th Congressional District had an unpredictable election

-Iowa’s 2nd District, and the election with a six-vote margin

-A hint of what the NRCC could’ve run on before January 6

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Recorded in anticipation of the change of government that Israel has undergone, Jonah brought back one of his oldest friends Tevi Troy, now a fresh face at the Bipartisan Policy Center. The pair discusses the differences between our chaos-filled presidential system and Israel’s chaos-filled parliamentary system, Bibi Netanyahu’s legacy, and why, in a world filled with limitless technological delights, Hollywood’s blockbuster movies are just so bad.

 

Show Notes:

-Tevi’s new gig

-How do different democracies pick their head of state/government?

-“Jimmy’s my Jewish friend”

-Tevi describes what to expect from a Democratic White House’s relationship with Israel

-New coalition government ousts Netanyahu

-Recent antisemitic attacks look like images from Europe, not America

-Bari Weiss’ book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism

-Jonah on structural antisemitism

-Tevi’s case for optimism

-The Fish of Monte Cristo

-Tevi’s book, Shall We Wake the President?

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Jonah returns to the classic Ruminant format for the end of the week, which turned out to be a rather newsy, strange sequence of days. From Jeffrey Toobin’s seminal moment (not the one you’re thinking of), to Kamala Harris’ Skeletor-like tactic for dodging questions, all the way to a story about taxation that Jonah thinks has more going on in it than most people think (it may even break “one of the most sacred compacts of government”), this episode brings us reeling back through the mists of time all the way to… last summer, when Jonah was doing this every Friday.

Show notes:
Jeffrey Toobin continues to help himself on CNN, in spite of our protestations
Politico’s Playbook, and their analysis of Kamala’s Guatemala visit
“Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”
The painfully awkward Lester Holt/Kamala Harris interview
“Some of his sentences give me the same sensation as falling backward in one of those ‘trust’ exercises, in which you just have to hope things work out.”
Texas bans COVID vaccine passports
A black-owned bus company helped to fight segregation
.The ProPublica tax… thing
De Blasio thinks there’s enough money in NYC - it’s just in “the wrong hands”
The Remnant with Brian Riedl
“The Hop Bird”
The Wednesday “news”letter
Audrey Fahlberg’s piece on the Maricopa County “audit”

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The Remnant gets rank today as Josh Kraushaar, one of Jonah’s favorite party-obsessive pundits, returns to discuss everything electoral. As Jonah has mentioned more than a few times in recent months, America now has two minority parties, both of which seem to be trying to out-crazy the other. In distinctly wonky fashion, Josh explores why this is the case, and what the future holds for a country with two moons and no sun. Will the GOP ever be rid of Trump’s influence? Why do Democrats keep using “Latinx”? And will Jonah finally learn to stop worrying and love primaries?

Show Notes:

- Josh’s page at National Journal

- Josh’s podcast, Against the Grain

- North Carolina’s Senate race gets Trumped

- Josh Mandel burns a face mask

- Trump’s gun control flip-flopping

- “Please clap.”

- Josh: “Trump is Sabotaging the GOP’s Senate Prospects”

- April’s career-ruining Remnant with Mike Gallagher

- No one uses Latinx ...

- … except Elizabeth Warren

- Jonah: “Abolishing Police Departments is Insane”

- New York’s impeccable vote-counting

- March’s primary-bashing Remnant with Elaine Kamarck

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