Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host Sarah Izger with Jonah Goldberg, Steve Hayes,

and David French. Lots to cover today. We will start with the vaccine mandate. Bob Woodward's

new book and what Steve's calling GOP Popory and finally the California Recall election.

Let's dive right in. Jonah, the president's vaccine mandate.

Yes, so on the eve of the 9-11 anniversary, the president of the United States came out with his

six point plan. He had a lot of different things in it. Some of which are fairly uncontroversial.

One thing is very, very uncontroversial. It's very controversial, which is his mandate on

private businesses, playing over 100 people, to get vaccinated. And you can get out of it.

If you, some people are saying you should really think of it as a testing mandate rather than a

vaccine mandate. And that the way to get out of the testing mandate is to get vaccinated.

We can talk about that. But if you want to go even deeper into the weeds, I highly recommend

our niche legal podcast, advisory opinions. And also I had my friend Shannon Coffin, former DOJ

official and White House lawyer person on. And we talked about it a good deal as well.

But let's stick with the politics here. Sarah, some hard-hearted cynics, including yours truly,

would argue that a major point of this whole initiative was to simply change the subject from

the Afghanistan narrative, particularly going into 9-11 weekend. Do you think that's fair?

And regardless of whether you think it's fair, do you think it had that effect anyway?

No, and not really. So first of all, okay, so you're wrong, David. In terms of turning the narrative,

the White House was sending muffin baskets to the Texas state legislature. They were the ones that

really shifted the conversation from Afghanistan to the Texas bounty hunting abortion law.

In terms of the White House wanting to shift some of it itself, look, COVID is a major news event.

That has been a major news event through Afghanistan as well. And it's not like it's the thing that

...