Isikoff & Klaidman On Trump’s Trial In Georgia

The reporters have a new book on the conspiracy case.

Michael Isikoff is the chief investigative correspondent for Yahoo News, where he is also editor-at-large for reporting and investigations. Daniel Klaidman is the editor-in-chief for Yahoo News. The veteran reporters have new a book called Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election. We had a lively chat!

You can listen right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — the violent threats spurred by Trump’s conspirators, and the hero of the Georgia case — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: Mike as head of his college paper during Watergate and then working at the WaPo; Dan growing up with his dad at the WaPo during the WoodStein era; his mother a Holocaust survivor; Georgia as “ground zero for the most undemocratic plot in US history”; the Hugo Chavez conspiracy theory; Sidney Powell plotting a break-in and offering the henchmen preemptive pardons; Giuliani “drunk out of his mind”; the cyber-heist of Dominion software and voter data; Lin Wood and QAnon; the absurd Eastman memo; knowing the 2020 lawsuits would fail but nevertheless pressure the Electors; unfounded claims of ballot stuffing; Ruby Freeman and her daughter; Giuliani’s “racial dog whistles”; the infamous call to Raffensperger to “find votes” and “recalculate”; Stacey Abrams; whether Trump cynically or sincerely believed the election was stolen; Mike Flynn; whether the transfer of power was ever really in jeopardy; the principled Pence; the courts holding firm against Trump; autocracy as a “gradual slow burn” (e.g. Hungary); Fani Willis; her Black Panther father who dated Angela Davis; Fani’s sexual relationship with a prosecutor in the Georgia case after she hired him; the terrible optics of it all; the tough-on-crime campaign she ran in 2020 and getting endorsed by the police union; Barr and Esper keeping Trump from using the Insurrection Act; Trump fundraising off his mugshot; and whether he will have the same guardrails in a second term.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Nate Silver on the 2024 race, Christian Wiman on resisting despair as a Christian, Jeffrey Rosen on the pursuit of happiness, George Will on Trump and conservatism, and Abigail Shrier on why the cult of therapy harms children. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other pod comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a big fan of our latest episode:

I just reached my first-year anniversary as a paid subscriber! Very glad to be renewing for another year. I just finished listening to the episode with Justin Brierley, and I think it might be my favorite episode yet. Incredible guest and great conversation, which helped me with my own struggles with the faith.

On a more urgent note, I have a few people in my life who are struggling much more than myself — for example, my brother who is a recovering alcoholic, in and out of jail and rehab for over a decade. The bits near the end of this episode where you guys spoke about the “meaning crisis,” and the need for people to find God more than ever — it really resonated with me when I think of my brother and others who are in very real danger of losing their lives because of a lack of meaning, a lack of God.

Another also “really enjoyed your conversation with Brierley”:

As a committed atheist, I resonated with the nuanced way in which you discussed Christian faith as something between literal and metaphorical. The idea that humans have a religious impulse that will express itself one way or another is something I have come to accept as well.

Your discussion about the New Atheists, however, was overly dismissive. I strongly recommend you invite Sam Harris on the Dishcast. While I understand that some atheists sound as dogmatic in their lack of belief as the faithful do in their belief, Sam has done a great job of articulating ideas around developing an ethics and moral compass without belief in God.

He is also the best person I know to discuss non-Western traditions like Hinduism and Buddhism that preceded Christianity by 100s of years (and maybe by over a millennium). While many believers in the Abrahamic religions dismiss Hinduism as “idolatry”, that is not quite the case. And the idols are better understood as symbols, just like the crucifix is in Christianity. These religions have a very rich ethical framework around right thought, action, and duty, which have several things in common with Christian tradition, but perhaps some important difference as well.

Thanks always for the fun and entertaining conversations. I am a very happy subscriber.

If you’d like to join him, subscribe here. Sam Harris has been on the Dishcast before — on Trump, wokeness, and the 2020 election — but maybe we’ll have him back to talk religion and fundamentalism. (He and I debated the topic 17 years ago in a long back-and-forth over email.) I should add that I have every respect for Buddhism, and for meditation.

Another listener on the “meaning crisis”:

I came of age politically in the early 2000s and had a deeper hostility to religion than almost anyone I knew. I longed for a time when we could shake ourselves of those silly superstitions and the intolerant views they led to, and transition to a golden age of logic and reason. I also despised what I regarded (and still regard) as a largely insincere and cynical attempt by the Bush administration to use religion to advance its indefensible positions, splashing in a few Bible verses into speeches.

It did not take me long, though, to realize that the absence of religion in the West does not lead to an increase in rational thought. On the contrary, people are so often left with a giant void from which to derive meaning, purpose, and a way to explain the mysteries and injustices of life. They turn to substitute religions that are often much more fanatically held and impervious to doubt. Many of them are far more dangerous, because they need a fundamental reorganization of society, instead of a private observance of a higher cause. For example, there is no concept of “live and let live” when you believe the destruction of the Earth is imminent due to human activity.

More importantly, I came to realize that many of the most basic ideas and values I took for granted as being part of Western civilization might not exist in the absence of Christianity and Judaism. I’ve asked some nonbelievers why murder is wrong, or why human life is more valuable than animal life, and find that almost none of them have a good answer. Kind of big issues!

What made me change my thinking most are the developments in the MAID program in Canada. In less than 10 years, the country has gone from allowing assisted suicide in cases of unbearable suffering and imminent death that cannot be relieved by medical means, to seriously considering it for poverty, mental health problems, and minors. Some people might not consider MAID radical and dystopian now, but what will the program will look like in 50 years, once the West has further secularized and shed its general Christian ethos?

To me, the main reason anyone has even pumped the brakes on MAID is that the West is still living off the fumes of Christian values and structures. Because it’s all they have ever known, many people assume that matters like the inherent value of human life will always be regarded as such.

The Dish covered the MAID program here and here. Another listener dissents over the following clip:

What are the odds of life emerging in the universe? Come on — that has to be the least convincing argument possible. What are the odds that there’s somebody up in the sky that listens to the things we say and answers our prayers? What are the odds that there’s something out there that snapped its fingers to create the entire universe?

I do, however, love the conversations you have on the Dishcast and appreciate the opportunity to hear both sides.

Another dissent:

While this atheist finds a lot of your discussion of the existence of God circular and deeply flawed, I won’t bother with detailed rebuttals. It’s well-trodden ground: many of the particulars you and Brierley discussed were long ago tackled convincingly by your friend Hitch — not only in God Is Not Great, but also in the conversation with him that you aired on the Dishcast. I can’t thank you enough for that, and given last week’s topic, it’s worth recommending to any newer listeners who enjoyed the Brierley chat.

I do, however, wish to challenge a few notions you raised with Brierley.

First, while I recall a sense of ferocity from the New Atheists and agree that the air of preachiness — real or perceived — has dissipated, I’m not sure that New Atheism was “killed.” Rather, I suspect there is a sense it’s been rendered moot. Despite media events like Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s public conversion, Christianity continues its fall in popularity, and people who self-describe as “not religious” continues to grow in the US. Why should any of us steer the dinner table toward animosity when the fight against superstition and dogma seems largely won?

But to agree with Brierley, atheists clearly are not rejecting Christian values. All of Western civilization is shaped by Christianity — from more progressive (or at least less regressive) attitudes toward women compared to cultures rooted in Islam or Confucianism to the very value of an individual life. And I am glad to have been raised in that tradition.

You are also quite right that rejecting religion alone doesn’t help people find a sense of belonging, or any armor against the emotional ravages of the worst life has to offer, especially in today’s coldly consumerist world. But as Hitch once said, “Religion was our first attempt at philosophy.” And I suspect Christianity’s role in our future is best understood along those lines.

While Christianity is no longer as widely embraced in the US, it’s also true that other forms of philosophy, inquiry, introspection, and searching are also scantly taught in homes or schools. A great promise of Enlightenment experiments like the United States is to deploy inquiry and reason to pluck the best of all traditions — yes, Christianity, and also Buddhism, stoicism, the ancient Greeks, Confucius, and whatever else seems to promote human flourishing and our evolving Western values.

There’s ample evidence, I think, that the selflessness and humility of Christianity is a net good for human beings, both in terms of societies and individuals who embrace it. Conversely, there’s increasing evidence that nation plundering, consumerism, social media, and other expressions of selfishness and narcissism are a net negative. Your Christian tribe guessed this correctly in 100 AD, but we now know it — not because God revealed it to anyone, but because humans watched that experiment unfold.

To again paraphrase your departed friend Hitch, I’m truly happy for anyone who finds stability and comfort in faith so long as they keep it away from my government, my kids, et al. As a final aside, your friend Jonathan Rauch commented recently on Sam Harris’ podcast that he was writing a book on the value of Christianity in society from his perspective as an atheist. (Even before your Brierley episode, I had visions of you and the two of them in dialogue on the very topic of this dissent.) Here’s the episode:

Another quick mention of Sam:

I’m a subscriber who found my way to the Dish via your appearances on Sam Harris’ podcast. I want to thank you for pushing Justin Brierley on the metaphorical vs physical nature of the Biblical story. There are many of us who witness the deep role Christianity plays in the lives of those around us, and it would seem possible to access the message Christianity offers without casting away physics. I very much appreciated hearing this notion being articulated by someone of Faith.

There are more of us than many atheists believe. Here’s a more detailed look at the Biblical story:

You asked Brierley about Bart Ehrman’s assertion that the Christian account of the virgin birth and the death and resurrection of Christ are not unique. That was also a difficult issue for C.S. Lewis, until Tolkien explained to him (while walking together on Addison’s Walk at Magdalen College, no less) that myths are often God’s way of planting deep truths into the minds of humans, and that none of this detracts from the truth of the Christian account. To quote Lewis:

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’.

Christians also need to be reminded … that what became Fact was a Myth, that it carries with it into the world of Fact all the properties of a myth. … We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology.  We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘Pagan Christs’: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t.

I’ve never understood the materialist view that reality is defined by what humans can sense and measure. What basis is there to assume that our senses, measuring abilities, and intelligences are sufficient to fully understand ultimate reality?  Perhaps we’re merely like fish swimming in the dark of the ocean, without any direct access to, or ability to understand, the vast worlds and phenomena outside the ocean. How can a materialist rule out that possibility? Indeed, the only reason to assume that human capacities are matched for comprehending all of reality would be an assumption that we were created by a God to have such an ability.

Next up, a listener who was “raised in a ‘seeker-sensitive’ Evangelical environment and converted to Eastern Orthodoxy”:

I appreciate the need to keep Christianity a little “weird,” as Brierley put it. I just want to comment on one thing: you said there’s a contradiction between the resurrected Jesus passing through closed doors (as per John 20) and the resurrected Jesus needing the stone to be rolled away from the tomb so that he could get out of the tomb. But the Gospels don’t actually say that he needed the stone to be rolled away; in fact, they don’t even describe him leaving the tomb. Three of the Gospels simply say that women went to the tomb and found it empty, with the stone rolled away, while Matthew 28 adds the detail that an angel rolled the stone away and scared some guards who were there.

When Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ came out 20 years ago, it showed Jesus waiting in the tomb for the stone to be rolled away so that he could walk out of it, but I know of at least one Orthodox priest who objected to this scene on the grounds that the stone was not rolled away to let Jesus out, but to let us in — that is, to let us see that the tomb was empty. I don’t know if that addresses your concern, but thought you might find it interesting.

It’s interesting all right. My point was that it’s dumb to think of the Resurrection as a zombie story. It’s a lot more mysterious than that.

Another listener has a guest rec:

I look forward to the Dishcast each week, partly because your Catholic faith always lurks just below the surface. So I clearly enjoyed your conversation with Brierley. Your discussion of the degree to which Christianity transformed our world reminded me of the gospel story of Jesus and the Roman centurion in the 7th chapter of Luke. Upon meeting the centurion and receiving his request to heal his slave, it was a radical step for Jesus not to reject this Roman outright as an enemy or nonbeliever. He heals the slave but, interestingly, makes no effort to free the slave. Challenging the institution of slavery might have been too radical even for the Son of Man in his time. That today we view slavery so very differently is a sign of the transformation He causes that transcends time and place.

Should you wish to have another wonderful conversation about faith and reason, I strongly recommend having Bishop Robert Barron on the Dishcast. He’s really great, and you two would be fabulous in dialogue.

Another pitch for the bishop:

Barron created and leads the Word on Fire Institute, of which I am a heretical member (being a devout Christian but weak Protestant). He holds a theological stance similar to your political stance of moderation, and is a regular commentator on modern culture. The most recent episode of his podcast discusses this stance, where he wishes a “plague on both your houses” to the liberal and conservative branches of the Catholic Church. I thought he would make an interesting guest for your show.

You also might be interested in a sermon by Alistair Begg:

Begg is a thoroughly conservative Baptist minister who was asked by a grandmother how she should respond to her granddaughter’s lesbian marriage that they both strongly opposed on theological grounds. He recommended she attend the wedding and take a present. He believes Christians should engage with those they disagree with. It’s good stuff, and if you listen to nothing else, just listen to the part beginning at 23:57 where he talks about the cultural differences between European and American evangelists.

Grateful for the suggestion. Another rec:

I very much hope Brierley is right about people reconsidering the Divine. I am absolutely certain there is a God — for lack of a better way to describe That Which Is Ineffable. I had a life-changing spiritual experience when I was a young man intensely meditating and reading quantum physics books. It changed my life. (There is actually an organization that collects and studies transcendental, spiritual experiences: The Institute for Mystical Experience Research and Education.)

Let me suggest you have on Lisa Miller. She is a psychologist who bucked the materialist approach in her field, having learned that so many depressed patients were deeply spiritually malnourished and the way to health was spiritual awakening. What I found so wonderful from reading her book, The Awakened Brain, is that she states that spiritual people don’t merely “believe” but “discover” the spiritual truth that exists within our day to day world.

One more rec:

You might enjoy chatting with Jennifer Frey when you’re in the mood for a Thomist. (She’d probably not approve of your lifestyle — or mine.) According to this video’s caption, she’s a “former atheist whose study of philosophy led her to the Catholic Faith”:

She’s also a Flannery O’Connor scholar, and I love to tout O’Connor whenever I can. If you haven’t read “The Lame Shall Enter First,” do so. O’Connor nails woke-ism already in 1960. I used this in the class I used to teach on the problem of faith, and I’m in awe of O’Connor’s humor and literary style. And she’d probably think I’m going to hell as a gay man. Sigh. But who knows? Maybe she would have mellowed by now.

BTW, don’t make fun of New Age, silly as some of it is. Not everybody gets the feelies in a Catholic Church. You get them when you can. I got them in a cave in Crete looking up by the light of candles at a stalactite carving of Zeus. It was the first time that I really “got” that paganism was a real religion.

And, for heaven’s sake, even as an orthodox Catholic you can believe in the resurrection of Jesus without believing in the literal truth of everything in the Resurrection accounts. Paul speaks of a “spiritual body,” and the medievals had to hash out what “spiritual body” meant while debating the Eucharistic presence. “In sacramento, non in loco,” Aquinas said of the Real Presence. Hah! Take that, Protestants! (But wait — what does it mean?)

One thing I used to tell my class is that my intellectual life is a struggle between Jesus and Nietzsche, and it still goes on. One of them is wrong. But think of this: the eruption into classical culture of the unmanly man who allowed small children to sit on his lap and told us that it is better to turn the other cheek and love our enemies was not completely alien. It is better to suffer an injustice than perpetrate one is an idea in Platonic thought. It lacked the note of universal compassion for the weak, sure, but Christian ideas were not totally alien concepts — something the church fathers understood when they embraced Plato and when the medievals labeled Vergil as being “naturally Christian.” Haud ignora malis, miseris succerere disco.

Loved this email. All good points. I’m a bit leery of talking religion with converts, though. The zeal and certainty can get in the way.

Shifting away from the God stuff for now, here’s a quick dissent over President Biden’s prospects:

I know his numbers have been underwater for so long that everyone figured he was drowned, including me. I held on only because I am so anti-Trump. But the most recent Quinnipiac poll has Biden significantly ahead. Is it due to a surge in support from women as they become more Roe-focused as the election approaches? Are the persistently strong economic numbers finally sinking in among the electorate as inflation worries fade? Is the decisive lead among the all-important Independent vote the reason? Does the UAW endorsement matter?

Probably some of all of it. But it’s the first sign that election-year spring may have sprung. And I realize one poll does not a trend make, but since you have highlighted the bad Biden prospects, I hope now you’ll note the positive.

The economy is doing well, it’s true. The infrastructure bill was a real achievement. Always happy to note the positive — but also, here’s another new poll:

Among the [NBC News] poll’s respondents, 37 percent approved of Biden while 60 percent disapproved, representing his worst approval rating in an NBC poll since taking office. Similarly, the poll represented his lowest favorability rating in a survey from the network, with 36 percent reporting very or somewhat positive feelings toward him and 54 percent holding very or somewhat negative feelings.

Vice President Kamala Harris also saw her worst favorability rating in NBC polling since before she took office. Twenty-eight percent had a very or somewhat positive opinion of Harris, while 53 percent had a very or somewhat negative opinion, her worst showing in an NBC poll since August 2020.

Another reader says of my latest column, “Speaking of meaningless incoherence, you forgot to mention the Progress flag!”

Oh God yes. This aesthetically excrescent mess is classic LGBTQIA+ bullshit. The black and brown lines are essentially an endorsement of BLM; the pink, blue and white are trans; the circle is for people who don’t have sex at all; the yellow is for Asian gays; the green for Irish; and the dark purple is a subtle invocation of Kaposi’s Sarcoma. (Just kidding on the last three.)

Why not stick with the rainbow metaphor — which means including everyone? Because this new “progress” flag is not about inclusion; it’s about leftist ideology, claiming all gay people for the woke left, and then using the flag to mark territory and to intimidate heretics. Everywhere it flies, it tells the non-woke that they are unwelcome; and that most gay men and lesbians need to be put in their place as “genital fetishists” who are also definitionally racist as white people. It’s a left-authoritarian flex, and I despise it, and anyone who flies it.

Another reader gets personal:

I thought about writing you after your Oxford/Saltburn column, but decided against it. I concluded that it was somehow a violation of the reader/writer relationship to ask for personal advice. Then your column on “The Meaningless Incoherence Of “LGBTQ+” hit the same note in my psyche, so I’m compelled by the love for my son to ask if I can seek your counsel in a way you totally don’t owe it me to provide.

My 15-year-old son is gay, and when I read about your experiences at Oxford and hear you refer to a gay boy who “finds himself isolated among his peers,” my heart aches for him. I can’t imagine how isolating it can be for a young man to have that dichotomy in himself where he is a boy and yet not like other boys. I worry for him also because I really don’t want him to fall into the woke trap and start thinking of himself as his identity and not as an individual.

So, if you’ll forgive me for this request, what do you think I should strive for as his father to help him through?

I can keep offering unconditional love, but I want to do more. I want to learn how other gay men have navigated high school and college and come out on the other side with self-esteem, manhood, a level head, and a sane outlook on the world. Were there things that helped you? Do you know of any colleges where gay conservatives have thrived? Are there groups for young gay men who reject wokeism? What do you wish your father had provided for you at this age? (Or what did he provide that helped?) Any advice would be appreciated.

As far as my own father, I talked about coming out to him in this video:

If I were to offer advice, it would be to keep doing what you’re doing. Unconditional love is the most powerful force on earth, and it seems to me you’re deploying it. In the actual gay world — not the queer fantasy the MSM constantly hypes — there are plenty of different types and norms and cultures and politics. Let your son figure it all out for himself, over time. No need to be a helicopter.

Now let’s hear from one of the Bs:

As a bisexual man who devoted a large part of his life to fighting for what we used to call “gay rights,” I sadly agree with you that the time to disband the LGBTQ-whatever community is long past.

Bisexual men have the most poverty, the worst health outcomes, are the most stigmatized, and are in the most vulnerable position, which of course leads them to being exploited in gay spaces. The term “gold star gay” is ascendant — the distinction of being so pure in one’s homosexuality that you never even kissed a woman. My experience has been whenever I have tried to enter gay public spaces, I’m harshly interrogated, told I’m in denial and actually gay … and then the touching starts, faces turn, and voices become bitter and angry. I’m in their space now and they own me.

If only I could get a room of 100 bisexual men who have lived in the Midwest together, they would nod vigorously in agreement with these statements.

I don’t doubt this. The idea that there is an integrated bi part of the gay world is just untrue. No group is more suspicious of bi men than gay men. Another B:

As a technically bi woman in a relationship with another woman for 46 years (am I a lesbian yet?), I strongly agree with your column. In fact, I think that trans activists have not only coopted the gay movement, and are not only anti-gay, but essentially sexist and heterosexist. And bullies, if I might add.

Another reader scrutinizes the MSM:

I want to draw your attention to an “opinion” piece that recently came out in the NYT called (in the infuriating movie-trailer style that the paper has recently adopted, at the expense of lucidity): “As Kids They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do.” It’s about detransitioners, of course, as well as the inability of parents, caregivers, teachers, counselors, and medical professionals to speak out against an increasingly rigid therapeutic orthodoxy.

I was gratified and frankly surprised that the NYT would run such a piece. But as I read the piece by Pamela Paul, I noticed something odd: it’s quite evidently not an op-ed. It is written with distant objectivity, reliance on first-hand accounts, structural and formatting decisions, and input from experts that characterize the tone and tenor of fact-based journalistic articles. It is also quite long. At nearly 4,600 words, it is roughly twice as long as the occasional opinion essays the NYT publishes, and it’s nearly four times the length of the paper’s average op-ed. I cannot truly know what motivated the editors to mislabel what is clearly a diligently researched news article, on a subject of profound importance and cultural currency, mere “opinion.” But I have some guesses.

So do I. It was as thoroughly fact-checked as any news story. Pamela was able to present neutral information precisely because she is an opinion columnist. I doubt any actual NYT reporter would cover detransitioners — because of the inevitable, internal blowback and bullying that would follow.

Another reader recommends “this new piece from the Manhattan Institute that’s right on the money: ‘A Rainbow-Colored Cage: Transgender ideology is sustained by scholars’ unwillingness to challenge its contradictory premises.’” One final rec:

Jesus, Andrew, right after reading your fantastic piece on LGBTQi+, I found a piece — linked on Drudge! — about the sketchy “proof” behind the trans ideology and what it’s doing to kids. One of the most balanced pieces I’ve seen, calling out the right for being the real threat to trans kids but also calling out the left for its dogmatism, its emotional blackmail, and unwillingness to reassess even as Europe does so.

As you’re fond of saying, know hope.

Thanks for all the emails, and you can send yours to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

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