Matt Welch
speaker
460 appearances
11 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Matt Welch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, and I haven't read the book yet, so I feel a little bit at a disadvantage trying to comment on it, but I do plan to. And as the guys have mentioned, we've talked to Alex about this a number of times during the period when he was getting a lot of criticism from outside.
I mean, it's hard to understate the consequences of groupthink and its ability to make you not see things that you don't want to see anyways. So that is almost certainly a huge part of what happened in D.C.
But from the excerpts that we read already, the coordinated effort on the part of the Biden administration to try and obscure the fact that the president was in fading health and just kind of waning in terms of his his actual capacities towards the towards the end. But really throughout his administration is one, again, not surprising to us, but is really revealing.
to kind of read out in the open like that. The disagreements between George Clooney and others, the kind of exercise of going through writing that letter, the fact that people were privately saying one thing about Joe Biden and what they knew was wrong and publicly saying quite another thing.
It's not just politics as usual, or perhaps it is, but that should make one very cynical and deeply concerned. I think there's been a lot of kind of suggestion that the blame here is with the party who lied or with the administration who lied. But As we've all pointed out already, a lot of the blame is with the mainstream media who just did not do their jobs for whatever reasons.
And those reasons are often complicated and can't simply be boiled down to, I don't think, contempt for Republicans or conservatives more broadly. It's a little bit more complicated than that, I think.
Well, there's so much culpability to go around here. I mean, you could talk about Joe Biden's responsibility and the fact that he shouldn't have run and that his administration tried to protect him. But Schumer and other prominent Democrats were well aware of Joe Biden's deficit. Totally. Very, very early on. We were having conversations about this back in 2016, to be totally frank.
There were questions about his ability to keep up with this job, to do this job, to run an effective campaign. He did manage to squeak one out prior. But four years later, no one was surprised when he couldn't really do it. Had Schumer had the courage to say something, the opportunity to field a better candidate wasn't after a debate. It was during the primaries. And they didn't do anything.
You heard radio silence from prominent Democrats. I don't want to hear any of the nonsense about, well, he's the president. He gets to make the call. You people are supposed to be in leadership positions. You're supposed to be dedicating yourselves to a life of service.
And if you see someone who is clearly incapable of doing the job in a meaningful and serious way, fielding this person anyway is going to have consequences for your party, as it well should. You should be out of power. You should find yourself in the wilderness for a period of time, and certain people should probably get fired.
You know, one thing I think is important to mention here with respect to like the Correspondents Association and the speech that Alex gave there is that them finding religion and him saying clearly we missed the mark here. We made some mistakes. It's not obvious. They don't have to do this. There's a world where you just try to ignore this, where you just don't talk about it anymore.
That's the world that we live in when it comes to a lot of the mistakes made during the pandemic. That's the world that we live in when it comes to the insanity of 2020. That's true.
on through the end of the year. In fact, right up to January when we had some similar craziness on the right, which we seem to imagine happened in a vacuum. But no, we all kind of lost our minds there. And we do not talk about it. We don't talk about the political failure. We don't talk about the failure of the media during those periods.
Those are things that happen and have still continued to happen. So the fact that people are actually talking about this, that some of them are even willing to look in the mirror, accept some responsibility for having gotten this wrong, is important and worthwhile to bear in mind.
And again, it's why I say that I think that's a little more complicated than just saying, well, it's obvious, you know, political bias is what motivated this. Well, political bias is motivating that other thing too, at least in part, but we don't talk about it at all anymore.
So I do think that, especially that what you suggested earlier, Megan, an actual inquiry from this officially, formally, something bipartisan and trustworthy, something that's transparent, that's more interested in getting at what the hell happened than just finding someone to blame is really valuable and would be valuable for all of the aforementioned things.
Oh, man, I've never seen that. That's incredible.
They're just watching Joe Biden implode and cannot believe it. They had a human reaction first.
I remember wondering if he might die on stage. It was that bad.
Interestingly, a virtue that I don't know that I've ever attributed to Donald Trump before in this particular context is modesty. The foreign policy disposition here appears to be that I understand that interventionism in the foreign policy context is going to be of kind of limited potential and has very recently resulted in pretty profound failures. We probably need a different approach.
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