I'm ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention?

Greetings, you're listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of The Remnant Podcast, brought to you by The Dispatch and Dispatch Media.

It's nice to do one of these solos from home, as you might recall last week was a little phoned in and weird, also plagued by meteorological challenges.

And now I feel like I haven't talked to you guys in a million years, so much stuff going on. So where to begin.

Let's start with my conversation with Annie McCarthy. I got less blowback. I mean, I got some nasty emails and all that kind of stuff.

But the comment section was generally pretty supportive, and that was nice and appreciated.

I'm glad that people recognized that I was trying to be skeptical on parts while also giving Andy plenty of time and space to make his case.

And a friend of mine sent me an email about it saying it was a great interview, a great conversation, and he summarized his view of Andy's position as persuasive, if not necessarily convincing.

And that's sort of where I come down. I think he makes good arguments, defensible arguments, and unlike Ken White's position, sincere arguments.

But, you know, there's a lot of flex and sincerity, you know, people like, this is not a point I'm naming it at Andy. I'm just saying that like, I think people go way, and I have a tendency to do this too.

And I get into fights just because it's very difficult for me to imagine that some people don't know better. I think it's a natural human response to when somebody makes an argument that's outside of your own reality is to assume they're lying when in reality is you just see things differently.

And you have different biases that are playing in to your word view. And I'm not saying that people don't lie out there.

I'm just saying that it's less often an explanation for people's positions. I mean, I can say when my first book came out, the number of people reviewers, panelists, you know, I do panel events with that kind of thing who would just flat out say I was lying or I was being dishonest in my argument.

It was just huge. And I can't, I can't remember now, but there's this line from Homer Simpson where, you know, he would say, you know, call me a traitor. I'm completely butchering it, but it was something like call me a traitor, call me a murderer, but don't call me a porn star or something like that. And I, that's sort of how I felt.

It's like I, it's sometimes I guess this has been a hang up of mine for a very long time is like I really when I'll argue with you, I'll take a fence if you call me bad names and all that kind of stuff.

But I, there's something that really bumps, it pisses me off when people assume that I'm lying, right, that I don't have the integrity to actually say what I believe to be true.

And I think that it kind of explains my reaction to a lot of the last 10 years, but anyway, getting back to Andy, I think he's, you know, I think it is just wrong and unfair to him to accuse him of arguing in dishonesty or bad faith.

But I also think that he is emphasizing arguments and criticisms and facts that I just don't feel exhaust the realm of good faith interpretations or understandings of the issues that play.

And so I think his argument and his predictions about what the court will do or could do and all that kind of stuff or why.

And certainly I think his arguments about why Smith should have thought twice about bringing some of these charges.

I think they're all persuasive in their own right, but not necessarily convincing.

And we'll see, you know, my hunch is, is that Andy will be proven more right than a lot of the people screaming, you're lying, you're making it up, you're, you're insane.

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