Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

We need to stop teaching kids to despair.

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In this interview only episode, Eli talks to Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast and a founding editor of the Dispatch. They discuss the inevitability of a GOP Trump nomination and the recent warnings that a second Trump term will bring the end of democracy.

Note: This episode originally aired on The Re-Education with Eli Lake

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Comments (46)
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  1. Fwee.Fiore

    Really enjoyed the podcast with Eli Lake. Lots of great insights, but the one that caught my ear was the discussion on Milo and conservative campus reaction to having the system "rigged" against them by behaving akin to the liberals who oppose them and the consequences of giving up on good conservative arguments in the hard work of convincing minds and hearts. A religious analogy came to mind that summarized the way forward for me.
    Keeping in mind that "Strong mem make good times.", Democracy requires good arguments in good times and in bad time to keep maintain democracy. As the times get worse and the arguments fall increasingly on deaf ears, you need to hold fast to the arguments and include predictions of what the bad policies of the bad times will bring. As times get even worse and even the the realized predictions are ignored and ridiculed, you need to hold even more tightly to the arguments and live the principles and suffer the consequences so that the figurative "blood of the conservative martyrs", those canceled and censored and prosecuted and oppressed can water the arguments. When the democracy collapses and the lost begin to look for a way back, it will be those arguments and predictions and the sacrifices along the example of the remnant that will guide us back.
    But that's really the end-game of your point that the argument is the only way to convince people. But when they are really lost and won't be convinced, the argument won't be sufficient. It may take the sacrifice and the example when truly bad times are here that its required. Then, its only the strong men that can bring back the good times. We need to be the strong men all the way through this.

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  2. Todd.S.Boyce

    This was one of the worst, IMHO. I know nothing of Eli Lake—but his whataboutism is stronger that the Force in Skywalker. It was quite remarkable—from the documents case to Hunter Biden, the most he could muster was an “irresponsible” label to Tucker’s “there will be blood” comment. For more than 20 minutes, he complained. I’m still not sure whether he thinks Trump did anything wrong.

    Normally, I get a great deal out of these. This was an hour misspent.

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  3. Stcyrn1

    Fantastic episode!

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    CynthiaW

    That was an okay talk.

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    1. Stcyrn1

      Just okay?

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        CynthiaW

        Yes, just okay.

        I thought that, on the one hand, there was too much similarity in their points of view and topics of interest for it to be an interview with new information or opinions, while, on the other hand, when there could have been an occasion for a real argument, there was, instead, friendly shrugging and, "Well, okay ...," and they moved on.

        Thus, the rating of "okay," which is 5.5 or 6 out of ten. Likeable, no serious objections.

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          Me_and_mike_d

          If you treat it more like a Ruminant, but with more emotion and enthusiasm, I think it was closer to an 8. Jonah had about 80% of the mic time and none of the “how did I get here?” guilt.

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            CynthiaW

            That's a reasonable point of view.

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        2. Ken Motamed

          I agree. Some disagreement is necessary in a meaningful give-and-take.

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    Rev Snow

    Jonah's made the point before and makes it more forcefully in this episode that the "Flight 93" style of politics is damaging in itself and also false. Losing an election really doesn't mean losing the country. I agree with this.

    Still, something I would like to hear from Jonah would be a candid and detailed assessment of what he believes a President Hillary Clinton term from 2017-2021 would have brought about. "Bad within normal parameters" is a great P.J. O'Rourke quote, but put the meat on the bones. Top of the list is a SCOTUS with at least 5 seats occupied by the ungrounded left (assuming Kennedy stays put still waiting for his chance to usher in successor Kavanaugh). Certainly no Dobbs. We probably get some form of TPP done. She's probably better suited than Biden to resist the most radical of the progressive aims, due to both temperament and identity. How she handles a pandemic? Wars and threats of wars?

    But Jonah's assessment, not mine, is what I'm interested in hearing.

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    The Bell Tower

    This whole discussion can be summed up simply:

    Where’s my off-ramp?

    I voted for Trump in 2020 and I’m not at all ashamed of it. You can go over and read my painful explanation below (I did not vote for him in 2016):

    https://thebelltower.org/blog/f/the-conservative-case-for-donald-trump

    And now, of course, feel like Robert the Bruce:

    https://youtu.be/FK1bUzjVwDE?si=zFu0DfKduN0m1QGP

    After Trump’s refusal to concede, he lost me. To be fair, he never really had me but I was OK with choosing him as a lesser of two evils. He wasn’t a great president but he was far from the catastrophe so many want to make of his years in office. I understood his instincts well enough but I also understood Biden.

    January 6 was the catalyst but the riot was only a symptom of the true crime: his refusal to accept the results of an election he so clearly lost. His instinct to try and seize power rather than concede is the most un-American thing I can think of any president ever doing. I knew he had it in him but like Heston pounding the sand in front of the wreckage of NYC, I can’t believe he really did it.

    I agree that he represents a threat - not necessarily an existential threat - but a threat to republican government. If he had just followed Al Gore’s example - a man with a far greater argument about a stolen election by the way - he would probably be leading the general election polls by double digits and there probably wouldn’t be even the charade of a Republican primary we’re having. Democrats might have been forced to punt Biden.

    Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world. What reasonable Democrats don’t seem to understand is that someone like me is never - ever - going to just vote for the Democrat as the better alternative. I won’t vote at all or I’ll write in Clayton Kershaw or Jonah Goldberg.

    No Democrat is even trying for my vote and I pay very close attention to politics. There are probably millions like me who don’t pay such close attention and the danger is that those people probably care much less about Trump’s treason than I do. This is an inside the beltway type of thing however much Trump haters wish otherwise.

    These culture things that DeSantis seized upon: gender baloney, DEI, immigration, open Jew hatred…. I may not agree with what someone like DeSantis is always doing about these issues but he’s doing something and he also isn’t enabling it the way Biden is. The president is in a great position to condemn or address that crap but he’s so afraid of the left that he won’t. Is Pramila Jayapal really so terrifying?

    Biden and Pelosi before him want to have their cake and eat it too. They think they can shut out and reject the right completely and still win elections.

    I can tell you right now: they won’t. You’re gonna get Trump again because guys like me will never support Democrats even if we don’t support Trump. And there are plenty of people I know who will certainly support Trump over Biden’s weak, leftist bullcrap.

    Give us an off-ramp. Find the center. The right is dead to me but the left has always been dead to me. In other words, I have no party. Someone hand me a fiddle.

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      Dusty

      Just for the record, I could’ve written every word of this myself - other than the Clayton Kershaw bit. I too did not vote for Trump in 2016 but did vote for him in 2020 for the exact reasons you did, and won’t vote for him in 2024 for the same reasons, but also won’t vote for the Dems. So, you’re definitely not alone in this, even in a Never Trump neighborhood like TD.

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      Dan Baldwin

      I won't handle you a fiddle, I'll hand you a cold beer and we can sit down and commiserate. You share a lot of the same frustrations I have about Biden and the Progressive Left (and I'm a Democrat). I won't ever vote for Trump--I understand why you made your 2020 vote and I don't have a problem with it. I desperately want Nikki Haley to somehow find a way. I could even tolerate DeSantis. I'll hold my nose and vote for Biden even though he's broken his promise to be a one-term "transitional" president. But I desperately want a moderate Republican to win so that the Dems can find time to build their rosters and refresh their ranks.

      Sanders, Clinton, and Biden basically cleared the entire slate of a generation's worth of promising politicians (other than Obama). We need time in the wilderness to regroup and fight our own internal civil war between Progressives and Liberals.

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        HappyCow

        in 2020 when Democrats appeared set to nominate Bernie you could almost feel the "oh no you don't" moment that propelled Biden to win in SC. Everyone cleared the path and Biden went from being on life support to easily winning the nomination. Nikki Haley is the Joe Biden of 2024. If Republicans could do what Democrats did 4 years ago, they'd crush Biden. And I, someone who's never voted for a Republican presidential candidate, would help them.

        As to your lament about Democrats in the wilderness, I think they're not nearly as far gone as the GOP. Democrats tossed out progressive DAs in 2022 and there are center-left primary challenges to members of The Squad. It's not enough, but it's a sign that Democrats as a whole have a limit to the BS they'll tolerate. I don't see anything similar on the right save for a few isolated cases.

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        The Bell Tower

        Definitely fair and I’m fully aware that Republicans aren’t offering a damned thing to frustrated Democrats either. The difference to me is that Biden is one dude while Republicans are capture by an entire army of jackwagons. I will be voting for Haley or Christie for sure, whatever good it will do me.

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        1. Ken Motamed

          Biden is one dude? You must have forgotten about the army of radical left-wingers to whom he genuflects.

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          Dan Baldwin

          I'd forgotten about Christie--I'd vote for him in a heartbeat as well. I know what I'm getting with him: a man hellbent on redemption, Jersey-style. He'd irritate me to no end, but I'd be able to sleep well knowing the country is under his watch (same as with Haley... DeSantis I have my concerns over, seeing how easily he wandered down the culture warrior path trying to out-trump Trump).

          I do not believe that Trump is an existential threat to the public. Every legal victory or delay he wracks up is a defense that all his enemies can use under his administration. I would be far more concerned about the aides in a second Trump administration, like Stephen Miller using the power of Homeland Security to skirt right up to the line that separates deportation centers from death camps, and then seeing how he can inch over.

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    Mkapnick

    I don’t like Eli as much as Jonah does, but I hear him from time to time on Commentary and he’s fine.

    I did not understand, though his comment about how Trump being indicted somehow indicates that Joe Biden has weaponized the DOJ.

    First of all, Joe Biden’s Department of Justice has indicted Joe Biden’s son, which would seem to argue against what Eli like is arguing.

    Secondly, what are we to do about a law breaking Trump? Should we ignore his transgressions? The GOP, by supporting Trump, has put the Biden Department of Justice in a lose/lose situation. In fact they put the entire country in a lose/lose situation. Is that an indictment of the Biden Department of Justice or the GOP?

    In my mind it’s an indictment on the GOP. I don’t think that point was made to Eli.

    In any event, I got to meet Jonah in person up in Bellevue. And Kevin Williamson! What a treat! Let me tell you people something, I don’t care what Donald Trump says, Jonah Goldberg knows how to pick out really nice pants. I saw it in person!

    Late…

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    1. Ken Motamed

      We shouldn't ignore Trump's law-breaking. But the prosecutions by James and Bragg are clearly politically motivated: No one not named Trump would be facing those charges.

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        Mkapnick

        I hear you on Bragg and maybe true of James but still, with respect to James, he is being charged with trying to use fake electors to steal the electoral college votes he had fairly lost in GA. It's not clear to me that he should be able to do that and not face any consequences. All that said, if he had a healthy political culture, I agree this would not be resolved legally but politically with Trump being utterly denounced by 90% of the electorate in both Parties. But since the GOP insists on being so irresponsible, it's not clear to me Trump should not be held accountable for his lawlessness.

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    2. VV

      Yeah, I don’t see how prosecuting someone who is a high profile politician is inherently political but refusing to prosecute that same person because they’re a high profile politician is not political.

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  8. Randall Briggs

    19:40 into this, and Eli Lake has done nothing but say that the Democrats are guilty too, if not worse. He is a disappointment to me.

    37:15, and Eli has been whining about how he is outnumbered by people who disagree with him on college campuses. The notion that the campus is dominated by the Left, and that the dominant Left is in many ways illiberal, is true, and has been true for a long time. So, what does that tell us about how to deal with Trump?

    Strong closing 20 minutes by Jonah. I think he brought Eli around with some of his arguments.

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    BaltoJohn

    This discussion was very thoughtful except for one crucial element in the situation. It assumed the danger was solely Trump. It isn't. 1. Trump isn't Nixon, who was willing to forego challenging the Illinois results for the good of the country. No one can imagine Trump doing that even before January 6th. 2. The Congressional GOP isn't the GOP of 1974. No matter the evidence, there was never going to be a delegation of GOP Senators to the White House to tell Trump it was time to go. 3. There is no comfort in the judiciary's record of swatting down all of his lawsuits in 2020. His favorite predecessor is Jackson, who supposedly said, "Justice Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it." 4. By every account, in the first Trump term, cabinet secretaries and such were willing to resort to subterfuge to thwart illegal or wildly foolish actions. No one in a second term would refuse an illegal order, in fact, would probably carry it out with enthusiasm. The one hope I have is the possibility of a revolt among career civil servants similar to what happened in the Justice Department when Trump schemed to install his lackey as Attorney General.

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    Anne W (Raw5254)

    Really enjoyed this. I like Eli Lake, and I did subscribe for awhile. I listen to a lot of podcasts, so every now and then I switch some out or just become overwhelmed. Great conversation from two very smart men.

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