On Saying What You Actually Believe, Even If Your Tribe Dislikes It

Also: were the ABC moderators unfair in the debate? It depends on whether you measure fairness . . . fairly.

Above: some critics think that by endorsing Ted Cruz’s opponent, this woman is hurting her credibility, by upsetting Republicans. I say: nonsense.

Last week I wrote about Jonah Goldberg’s criticism of David French for announcing that he was going to vote for Kamala Harris. I argued that his criticism was not just incoherent, but worse, appeared to advocate a sort of audience capture. Specifically, Goldberg told French that he ought not say he was going to vote for Harris, because that would make it more difficult to persuade conservatives not to vote for Trump.

My problem was not so much that Goldberg favored tailoring an argument to the audience, which we all do, to some degree. My concern was that Goldberg appeared to be urging French not to say something he actually believed because of the audience’s anticipated reaction.

That is audience capture. It’s not something to advocate. It’s something to avoid.

After my piece was published, I noticed that I had missed a Goldberg essay about Liz Cheney’s endorsement of Harris, titled There’s One More Thing Liz Cheney Could Do to Thwart Trump. As I read it, I initially thought I might have been unfair to Goldberg by accusing him of a form of audience-capture-as-strategy. Because the opening part of his essay appeared to offer a different spin on what Goldberg meant by “strategy”:

But I do have misgivings about her approach, particularly her claims that Harris is essentially a centrist whom conservatives should feel comfortable supporting. 

“I think that she [Harris] has changed in a number of very important ways on issues that matter,” Cheney told ABC News’ This Week on Sunday. “And I … would encourage independents to look at where she is on these policy issues today.”

I think Cheney should acknowledge the discomfort that comes with supporting Harris.

. . .

Why not acknowledge that? If Cheney and other anti-Trump conservatives are going to face the charge that they’re just born-again left-wingers, why don’t they criticize Harris’ progressive politics while saying they’re going to vote for her anyway because supporting Trump isn’t an option?

At first, I thought Goldberg might be offering a different spin on his criticism of anti-Trump conservatives who endorse Harris. Remember, Goldberg said that it would have been better for French to say: “I think Harris is pretty terrible for a slew of reasons, but a Harris presidency would be the lesser of two evils for the following reasons.” Maybe all Goldberg meant by advocating “strategy” in these endorsements was: be more forthright about your criticisms of the person you are endorsing! (As we will see, this is not all he meant. But we’ll stick with this argument for now.)

In theory, “if you endorse a candidate whose policies you don’t like, you should still be forthright about your policy disagreements” is a more defensible argument than telling someone “don’t make an endorsement of candidate x at all, because conservatives won’t like it.”

But just how far does Goldberg want Trump critics to go with their criticism of Harris? Because Goldberg has either missed, or failed to tell his readers about, the fact that Cheney does say she disagrees with Harris. In the very same interview that Goldberg quotes, Cheney says that explicitly:

You know, you look at national security policy -- and again, there are certainly areas where I disagree with Biden administration, national security policy, where I’ve disagreed with Vice President Harris's position on issues.

But when it comes to fundamental alliances, when it comes to the importance of NATO, for example, and how important it is for the United States to lead in the world, we've seen a sea change. We now have a Republican Party that is embracing isolationism, that is embracing Putin.

That, you know, we've seen just in the last week, the Republican vice presidential nominee willing to appear, willing to be interviewed by Tucker Carlson who is platforming pro-Nazis, is himself pushing pro-Nazi propaganda.

That is not the party of Ronald Reagan, and I believe strongly that if you're talking about a national security set of issues and you care about America's leadership role in the world, a vote for Vice President Harris is the right vote to make this time around.

So Cheney does note her disagreement with Harris’s progressive policies. She just says policy is less important in this election. Either Goldberg missed that, or he is upset that Cheney is not attacking Harris’s policies more aggressively.

If the latter is his position, my question is: what’s Cheney supposed to do, according to Goldberg? Make a long speech about all the ways Harris is terrible on policy? It seems almost as if Goldberg wants Cheney to issue a screed about how awful Harris’s economic policies are, how bad Harris is on this issue and that issue, and basically make a commercial for Trump . . . and then to say “but I’m still endorsing Harris.” In other words, maybe Goldberg wants Cheney to make half of her “endorsement” into a rabid attack. If so, that strikes me as a very silly demand, which would have the effect of making Cheney’s endorsement positively counterproductive.

Goldberg might reply that he simply wants an acknowledgment that endorsing Harris comes with some “discomfort” or awkwardness. He might claim that he would advise Cheney: Don’t just say you disagree with Harris on some policy issues. Also say it is difficult for you to support Harris because of those disagreements, but you do support her despite how difficult it is. He could point to this sentence from his piece:

I think Cheney should acknowledge the discomfort that comes with supporting Harris.

But in truth, Goldberg wants more than a simple “acknowledgment” of a feeling of awkwardness from Republicans endorsing Harris. How do I know this? Because of the way he reacted to Adam Kinzinger’s speech at the DNC.

After all, Kinzinger opened his speech with exactly that sort of acknowledgment:

I’m Adam Kinzinger, and I am proud to be in the trenches with you as part of this sometimes awkward alliance that we have to defend truth, defend democracy and decency. 

Was that good enough for Jonah Goldberg? It was not. On the Dispatch podcast Kamala Takes the Stage, released August 23, 2024, the following exchange took place at 13:15 concerning Kinzinger’s speech, and his failure to lecture Democrats at length, at their own convention, about how they are wrong on policy:

ISGUR: It’s like a reverse Sister Souljah. You were given an opportunity to speak to the Democratic National Convention in prime time as a Republican who cannot support Donald Trump? And he, in his speech, basically talked about why Donald Trump is not a Republican, not the Republican party he was from, etc., and like how Republicans should embrace the Democratic party and that they could feel comfortable in this party. Fair enough. What a moment it could have been—what an opportunity—to say: “And Democrats? Here’s what you need to understand about why conservatism is morally correct, and the policy choices that you make on x, y, and z, are also politically disadvantageous to you and like, this is a moment where we could, yada yada. “

I can’t keep quoting that without stopping to observe how utterly ridiculous this proposed scenario is. Onward:

ISGUR: Instead I felt like he only did half of that, and pleased the crowd, instead of, like, if your argument’s going to be that as a conservative, you are more comfortable in the Democratic party then I think you, he, had an opportunity missed to actually speak to conservatism and where the Democrats aren’t doing that.

Yeah, go figure that in a speech just before the nominee gives her speech, the DNC would want a speech that pleased the crowd! What was Goldberg’s reaction to this absurd proposal? He agreed with Isgur—and noted that, in his view, it would have been better for Kinzinger—not for Kinzinger’s argument, mind you, but for Kinzinger himself “in the long run”—to do what Isgur had proposed:

GOLDBERG: Yeah, I think that would have been better. I agree with you. It would have been better for Kinzinger in the long run.

ISGUR: Yeah.

GOLDBERG: My suspicion is that he had to have his script pre-approved, and the sort of “tough love for the Democrats stuff,” if it ever existed, was redlined pretty quickly.

Keep in mind: Kinzinger acknowledged the awkwardness involved in being a longtime Republican endorsing Harris. That wasn’t good enough for Goldberg. He clearly wants Cheney and Kinzinger and all other Republican critics to be going after Harris on policy, hammer and tongs.

That would be better, he says . . . for Kinzinger. In the long run.

But Cheney is not going after Harris aggressively on policy grounds exactly because she thinks there are more important principles at stake. To be sure, in the interview cited by Goldberg, Cheney discusses policy to some extent—noting not that just that Harris has moderated her policies, but also that Trump’s policies are disastrous, such as his proposed massive tariffs that, according to Cheney, “will, in fact, kill the American economy and the global economy.” But in the end, Cheney’s position, viewed in the context of the entire interview, as well as everything Liz Cheney has been saying for years now—is that Donald Trump is a danger to the nation. This is not about mere policy for Cheney. In her interview with Jonathan Karl, Cheney makes this very clear up front:

KARL: [Y]ou've made it abundantly clear that you have had policy disagreements with Harris. You still have policy disagreements with Harris. But she has moderated her positions on a whole range of issues from where she was just, you know, just a few years ago.

Did those moderations and the efforts to present kind of a moderate face at the—at the Democratic Convention, did that make the decision to endorse her easier?

CHENEY: You know, the – I have never viewed this as a policy election.

She goes on to say, later in the interview:

[T]he Republicans have nominated somebody who – who, you know, is depraved. Somebody who shows us every day that—that, you know, he has tendencies and he's willing to embrace things that are fundamentally a danger to—to this nation and to our Constitution. So, the choice, in my view, is not a close one.

Like me, Cheney places a lesser importance on mundane political policy issues like tax rates, and a greater importance on issues like: whether the person holding office was actually the person elected by the American people; or whether one candidate is a Putin-loving ignoramus who makes up a huge percentage of the things he says. (More about that below, in the section for paid subscribers.) The question is not about Harris or how well (or poorly) thought out Harris’s policies are. The point is that Trump is 50,000 times worse, in every way.

If you want to read more along the same lines, but with more jokes, you could do worse than to peruse a recent post at Jeff Maurer’s Substack, titled It Would Be Funny if Harris Called Bret Stephens' Bluff. Maurer here is responding to the very silly New York Times piece by Bret Stephens, in which Stephens whinges that Kamala Harris has not earned his vote. Why not? Stephens says that Harris has failed to clearly articulate her views on a range of policy issues—like, say, how she would handle the Houthis. Maurer says: sure, it would be wonderful to get such answers from Harris . . . but given that the alternative is Donald Trump, Stephens’s piece seems like concern trolling. Maurer suggests Harris give Stephens the following answer to such a question:

The first thing I’ll do about the Houthis will be to read the briefing paper that my staff gives me about the Houthis. This would differentiate me from my opponent, who famously responds to briefings the same way that a dog responds to taking its earworm medication. My next act would be to turn to an adviser and say “thoughts?”, and that adviser will be some glasses-wearing egghead who was on everyone’s short list of Stodgy Foreign Policy Dweebs. That adviser will not be Omarosa or Laura Loomer or Rudy Giuliani or Linda McMahon or Jared Fucking Kushner or God knows who else — that “black Nazi” porno dude in North Carolina, perhaps? I’m not quite sure what will happen after that, but my administration will already be on a trajectory towards a sane decision that the clown car of dyspeptic freaks that my opponent will assemble could never replicate.

The whole piece is gold, and has several more examples of proposed answers to Stephens’s Very Serious Questions That Harris Has Not Answered, like “what are the limits to your support for Ukraine?” That proposed answer includes gems like this:

What are the limits to my support for Ukraine? I don’t know! But a better question might be: Why is my opponent stumped by one [of] the easiest moral questions of our lifetime?

Why indeed?

The glaring difference between Harris and Trump, and the former’s clear superiority to the latter, is the part that Goldberg (and, as I wrote for paid subscribers in my most recent Substack, Steve Hayes) seem to have a hard time getting through their skulls. Harris might be avoiding some questions, it’s true. She might even be something of a lightweight in the eyes of some. But if you can’t see that Trump is far worse, by orders of magnitude, you need to get your eyes checked.

And in light of that fact, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger don’t need to spend all their time lecturing Democrats about how they’re not the party of conservatism. All Cheney and Kinzinger need to do is what they’re already doing: be honest that they have policy differences with Harris, and make the case that for this election, that really doesn’t matter—because the key issue, for now, is voting for something better than Donald Trump and his election-stealing band of merry fraudsters and pro-Hitler creeps.

Speaking of Election Stealers: Why Is Goldberg Mad That Cheney Is Endorsing Ted Cruz’s Opponent??

I’d like to return to Goldberg’s piece about Liz Cheney, because we’re now getting to the part where I learned that I had correctly diagnosed him with a case of arguing for “audience capture.”

In the same piece I discussed above, Goldberg complains that Cheney endorsed Ted Cruz’s opponent:

Asking conservatives who dislike Trump—and there are millions—to simultaneously defenestrate their party’s nominee, their party and their principles is too much. What they seek is permission to make the best of a bad situation while still being able to identify as conservative and Republican. 

Cheney recently endorsed Democratic Texas Rep. Colin Allred in his bid to defeat Sen. Ted Cruz. She has her reasons, including Cruz’s defense of Trump’s scheme to steal the 2020 election. But giving conservatives and Republicans another reason to think she’s not one of them anymore undermines her efforts to persuade them that the former president is such a unique threat that they should vote for a liberal Democrat for president.

I’m sorry that people have a difficult time defenestrating their party and their nominee—but when it comes to their “principles,” then yes, I do ask them to place country above tax policy. As for their being able to “identify as” conservative “and Republican,” well, I’m reminded of what Nick Catoggio said on July 16, 2024 in his piece A Party of Bootlickers. Speaking of J.D. Vance, Nick wrote:

Everything you need to know about the new prince can be reduced to two sentences, elegantly stated by the Wall Street Journal’s Kyle Smith. “The pillars of conservatism are limited government, economic freedom, and the rule of law. J.D. Vance seems to have contempt for all three,” he wrote. Liz Cheney elaborated in a separate post: “J.D. Vance has pledged he would do what Mike Pence wouldn’t—overturn an election and illegally seize power. He says the president can ignore the rulings of our courts. He would capitulate to Russia and sacrifice the freedom of our allies in Ukraine.”

“The Trump GOP is no longer the party of Lincoln, Reagan, or the Constitution,” she concluded, obviously correctly. So what is Nikki Haley doing at its convention?

Jerry Seinfeld has a famous joke about how being a fan of a sports team is tantamount to “rooting for laundry.” Because your loyalty is to the franchise and not its personnel, you might cheer wildly for a player one season and give him the McConnell treatment the next, after he’s traded away. Ultimately you’re rooting for whoever wears the team’s uniform—for “laundry.”

If you want to continue to identify as a White Sox fan even though half its players are changing in one year, that’s your right—but you’re rooting for laundry. If you want to identify as a Republican even as the party casts aside core concepts like a strong national defense, pro-life policy, free markets, the importance of military alliances, skepticism of countries run by dictators, and fiscal responsibility (OK, some of these core concepts were always for show, but still) . . . if you want to support this new totally different party because you want to “identify as a Republican” then you can do that, of course, but you’re rooting for laundry.

And you already defenestrated your principles long ago. Or, the party defenestrated them for you, while you looked the other way.

As for Cheney endorsing Colin Allred? Here’s where Goldberg gives away the game, and vindicates my analysis from my last Substack piece: Goldberg is, in fact, advocating others like David French and Liz Cheney to submit to audience capture for so-called “strategic” reasons, which here involve persuading people not to vote for Trump.

If you did not read all 18,000 words of my last newsletter—and if you didn’t, how dare you!—then I’ll give you the central thesis of this “audience capture” concept:

[W]hat Goldberg is arguing here is a form of audience capture. He may not think of it that way, but it is. Goldberg is saying: if you come out and say you plan to vote for a Democrat, people see you differently. And those people will tune you out. So therefore, you should not say you are going to vote for a Democrat.

That’s exactly what Goldberg is saying here about Cheney endorsing Cruz’s opponent Allred! Look again at what Goldberg wrote in opposition to Liz Cheney endorsing Ted Cruz’s opponent:

But giving conservatives and Republicans another reason to think she’s not one of them anymore undermines her efforts to persuade them that the former president is such a unique threat that they should vote for a liberal Democrat for president.

It’s an argument that Cheney should not endorse Cruz’s opponent because of the way “conservatives and Republicans” will react. The endorsement will simply alienate them, Goldberg says.

But isn’t that audience capture?

And anyway, how can Goldberg not understand why Cheney would be opposing Cruz?

He’s not alone. After Cheney endorsed Allred, Charles C.W. Cooke at National Review complained that Cheney had allowed her dislike of Trump to cause her to change her “policies” and her “worldviews”:

I found that to be an attack wholly without any basis in fact, and I said so in these two tweets:

When Noam Dworman praised Cooke’s tweet, I repeated that it was baseless and unfair:

Cooke, who is not shy about calling me out on Twitter when he thinks has a good point to make, never responded to me.

But the person who most clearly explained the deficiency of the reasoning espoused by Cooke and those like him was, unsurprisingly, my favorite writer: Nick Catoggio, who wrote:

I can’t speak for Cheney, but I can tell you why I’m voting for Allred over Cruz—and it has nothing to do with policy or burning anything down.

Since January 6, the threshold question I ask when considering whether to vote for a Republican is how that candidate responded to Trump’s coup attempt. There’s a spectrum of behavior on that point, with Cheney and Kinzinger on one end, Trump himself on the other, and the mass of congressional Republicans somewhere in between.

At the two extremes of the spectrum, policy doesn’t matter to me. Policy debates are things you get to have when everyone agrees on the rules of the game. Rewarding those who defended democratic norms and punishing those who undermined them is more important.

Catoggio goes on to note that Cruz was “Trump’s chief co-conspirator in the Senate after the 2020 election.” Cruz was a ringleader of the January 6 scheme to impede the certification of the American people’s vote for their next leader. Cruz did this “knowing full well that Trump was and is a loon and that egging on Americans to doubt the fairness of their own elections will destabilize the country long-term.” Catoggio finishes: “It’s frankly amazing to me that so many conservatives have been left struggling to understand Cheney’s endorsement of Allred.”

It’s also frankly amazing to me that anyone would criticize such an endorsement on the grounds that conservatives and Republicans won’t like it.

I think it should be far easier for Goldberg and Cooke to understand Cheney’s endorsement of Allred. And if Goldberg thinks Cheney shouldn’t make that endorsement because it will make her seem like a Democrat to most Republicans . . . then yes, he’s endorsing knuckling under to the audience.

In all honesty, these arguments don’t sound like the Jonah Goldberg I know, or thought I knew. I’ll repeat what I said from my last newsletter: I respect him very deeply. He has earned my respect over the course of years.

But these are bad arguments. I hope he reconsiders them.

Did ABC Moderators Unfairly Fact-Check Trump in the Debate? It Depends on How You Count It

One other thing I’d like to talk about today is the oft-repeated claim that ABC moderators were obviously biased because they fact-checked Trump a couple of times and did not fact-check Harris.

That argument really annoys me. I gotta a lot of problems with this argument, and now you’re gonna hear about it.