Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm your host Sarah Isger, joined as always by Steve

Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French. This podcast is brought to you by the Dispatch.

Visit the Dispatch.com to see our full slate of newsletters and podcasts, and make sure to

subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. Today, we're talking re-opening in the

states and protests in the states, ramping up testing the president's immigration announcement,

and albums that give the guys joy to bring joy to our lives music. Today's episode is sponsored

by ExpressVPN, but we'll get to that a little later.

There is lots of talk about re-opening the economy, re-opening states, ending state at home orders

this week. There's also been several protests around the country, notably Pennsylvania, Colorado,

Michigan, Texas. Some have raised from a few dozen to there were several thousand in Michigan.

Of course, as the spokeswoman for Governor Hogan of Maryland said of their protests there,

quote, there was more media inquiries about this than there were participants. Jonah, how

real are the protests? How real is the rush to reopen?

I think there are zero to ten, the Glockman style, ten being absolute adamantine metaphysical

reality, and our physical reality and one being total abstraction. I'd say there are seven.

I think that they definitely started pretty astroturfy, and the problem with a lot of

astroturf things, and this is not contrary to the media coverage, simply a phenomenon of the right,

is that it turns out as a metaphor, as this may sound, astroturf can lead to real turf,

and if you start covering this stuff like it's real enough as a remarkably large number of

media outlets, this thing is just basically catnip for the cable news networks that need something

to fill today. The MSNBCs and CNNs get to say, oh my god, look at these yatches with their,

you know, their assault rifles, couldn't go to assault rifles, and their gads and flags,

...