Hello and happy Saturday. Thank you to everyone who made it all—or even most—of the way through my review last weekend of the first five years of Dispatch content to highlight the big anniversary we celebrated this week. I hope that you saw Steve’s note to our readers. We’ve enjoyed hearing from all of you this week, and we appreciate your encouraging messages.
We take pride in delivering so much straight reporting in an age when so many publications do only opinion and commentary. You can be sure when you’re reading The Morning Dispatch or Dispatch Politics or one of our explainers that you’re getting just the facts. One area I don’t highlight enough in this newsletter is our fact-checking operation. A lot of the misinformation we address is fleeting, or it can even feel too silly to bring up. But for the last few weeks, we’ve been dealing with a very pernicious strain of misinformation.
Just about every fact-check we’ve published this month has been about Hurricane Helene. (No, we haven’t addressed whether “they” can control the weather, as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has claimed. Where to even begin?) And there’s a consistent theme to that misinformation: that the federal government isn’t coming to the aid of Americans who lost their homes, but it is handing out thousands of dollars and other goodies to illegal immigrants. Not true, as we noted here and here. It’s also not true that FEMA spent disaster relief funds to house illegal immigrants. Well, at least not during the Biden administration.
Over the next few weeks, even as hurricane-related news inevitably cycles out of the headlines, we aren’t expecting claims about immigrants to die down. Nick isn’t one of our fact-checkers, obviously—he’s an opinion guy—but he did an important edition of Boiling Frogs this week calling out Elon Musk for using the platform formerly known as Twitter to spread claims that Democrats are not just encouraging illegal immigration, but funneling migrants into swing states specifically—maybe not to vote in this election, but in future ones.
“Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it!” Musk tweeted on September 29. He went on: “The Biden/Harris administration has been flying ‘asylum seekers’, who are fast-tracked to citizenship, directly into swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Arizona. It is a surefire way to win every election.” The idea, supposedly, is that these migrant usurpers will become naturalized citizens—like Elon—before the 2028 election and will use their votes to paint the map blue for Democrats.
But even if his claims are about 2028 specifically, that doesn’t mean Elon isn’t thinking about this election. As Nick continued:
Elon is planting the seeds of doubt early by suggesting that plans are afoot on the left to reshape the electorate in swing states in 2028. It’ll be easy for him to claim in November after a Trump defeat that perhaps the plan was further along than anyone knew and that the reshaping has already begun, through nefarious means.
We’ll be paying close attention to how disinformation is being wielded ahead of the election over the next month, so stay tuned. Thanks for reading, and have a good weekend.
We didn’t necessarily intend to make Kevin a roving correspondent on the disinformation beat, but here we are. Rested up from his trip to Springfield, Ohio, after J.D. Vance accused immigrants of eating cats, Kevin trekked to Asheville, North Carolina, to see how the city was responding to devastating flooding in the wake of Hurricane Helene. He had heard “tall tales about FEMA refusing supplies or roving gangs pillaging them” and “reports of shooting sprees in the streets and gunfights at the gas stations.” What he found was a little different: trucks delivering water and fuel, a brewery cooking up and serving food for free (but pay for your beers, folks!), and residents maintaining a positive outlook despite anxiety over the tourist destination’s recovery. He talked to a Presbyterian pastor, Duff James, whose beard and tattoos put him right at home in the hipster-ish city. James’ church was handing out food and water, and he was coordinating supply drops from other congregations. “If you want to know why that shadow that sometimes falls across this wobbly republic has not yet deepened into the real darkness [of fascism], go get yourself a cold beer with the hipsters and Presbyterians in Asheville,” Kevin wrote. “It’s not pretty, and it’s not perfect, but they’re doing the best they can, and that is really what holds this all together, what makes this country the real and vital power it is rather than a mere parchment republic.”
Earlier this month, Charlotte traveled to Nir Oz, a kibbutz near the Gaza Strip, to talk to survivors of Hamas’ invasion one year ago. She spoke with a woman, Bat Sheva Yahalomi, who, along with her husband and three children, was taken hostage by Hamas terrorists on October 7. Yahalomi escaped with her daughters, but her son was held in Gaza for nearly two months, and her husband remains there. Charlotte also interviewed Yifat Zailer, whose cousin Shirri and her family have become “the public face of the hostages’ plight” after appearing in videos released by Hamas. Shirri was shown holding her children in one video, and another showed her husband, Yarden, being beaten by crowds in Gaza. “I ask myself if Ariel and Kfir remember their father,” Zailer told Charlotte. “I ask myself if they’re even alive. No one can give us that answer.” Also, in our Monday Essay, Kenneth M. Pollack examined what a year of war has taught both Israel and its foes about the military balance in the Middle East.
If you don’t live in Texas or various points in the South–or if you’re not a Midwesterner who piles the kids into the family truck for summer vacations on the Gulf Coast—you might not have encountered a Buc-ee’s. Imagine a gas station and “convenience store” the size of a supermarket—with clean bathrooms and decent barbecue—that happens to have a cult following. In his latest Capitolism, Scott used Buc-ee’s as a foil to the International Longshoremen’s Association, which just conducted a brief labor strike to argue for higher wages for dockworkers and oppose any automation at U.S. ports. How are the two related? Well, Buc-ee’s pays its employees well while maintaining high profit margins by maximizing productivity. In short, Buc-ee’s is efficient, while our ports—where unions have long opposed automation used in other nations—are not. But it’s not just the automation. “The productivity issue at American ports runs a lot deeper (pun!) than just their relative lack of automation,” he wrote. “Much of it stems from other union demands that further sap productivity.”
And here’s the best of the rest:
- GOP candidates up and down the ballot are facing the same question again and again: Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election? Yet four years later, it still manages to stump them. In the G-File (🔒), Jonah found fault with not just the poor ways that Republicans have been responding to the inquiry but the way interviewers have been posing it. And in Boiling Frogs (🔒), Nick called it “a question that any reasonably well-informed 5-year-old could answer without difficulty.”
- Vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s reserved demeanor and sunny disposition during the vice presidential debate earlier this month drew some deserved skepticism given his history of incendiary comments, but Patrick T. Brown argued that Vance’s messaging could offer a way to make conservative populism appealing to a wider audience.
- David M. Drucker and Mike Warren drove across the must-win state of Pennsylvania this week, talking to people in Pittsburgh about which issues will inform their votes, going to a Trump rally in Reading, and spending some time speaking with canvassers in Northampton County.
- We asked some of our most trusted national security experts how they think Donald Trump and Kamala Harris would handle the various challenges they would encounter if they are elected, and none were feeling particularly optimistic about either option. This was the first in a series, so be sure to keep an eye out for our coming pieces on social and economic policy, immigration, the regulatory state, and more over the next few weeks.
- On the pods: The Dispatch Podcast marked the anniversary of October 7 with a special two-part episode. In the first, Jamie was joined by Adaam, our podcast guru and a native Israeli; Charlotte, who has been based in Tel Aviv for the last year; and Jonah, who had lots of thoughts about the war and what it means for American Jews. In the second episode, Jamie interviewed Dan Senor, author of a book on Israel and host of the “Call Me Back” podcast. CBS News has been making headlines this week for all the wrong reasons, and guest host Christine Rosen welcomed Eliana Johnson, editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon, to The Remnant to discuss the network’s bumbling and stumbling. And on Advisory Opinions, David and Sarah traveled to Duke University School of Law to interview Judge Roy Altman about Israel and the legal troubles it encounters in defending itself.
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