Pleading Insanity | Interview: Emmett Rensin

The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg

The Dispatch

Politics, News

4.6 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2025

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Emmett Rensin, author of The Complications: On Going Insane in America, joins Jonah Goldberg for a candid conversation on the state of our mental health institutions, the history of the insanity defense and his own challenges navigating care while living with schizoaffective disorder. Show Notes:—Rensin's essay for The Dispatch The Remnant is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of Jonah’s G-File newsletters—click here. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention.
0:18.0	Can you digger?
0:27.5	Greetings, dear listeners, this is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant podcast, brought
0:31.2	you by the dispatch and dispatch media.
0:34.3	Because I am nothing, if not a servant to my podcast overlords here at the dispatch.
0:41.1	I am recording the intro to today's podcast after I've already had the conversation, so I can
0:48.5	better communicate why you should listen.
0:50.5	But you really should listen.
0:51.5	We had Emmett Renson on, who wrote a really great
0:56.4	piece for us called The People versus Insanity, which is a long-form essay that he did that starts
1:02.5	with a description of a mentally unwell person who killed a bunch of people and then gets into
1:08.9	the history of the insanity defense, then gets into the
1:12.1	history of de-institutionalization of the mentally ill. And then the real kicker at the end of the
1:17.7	piece is a full and frank accounting, I shouldn't say full, but a frank accounting of his own
1:24.9	struggles with mental illness, bipolar disorder, or whatever the correct
1:29.8	description of it is. We had a wide-ranging conversation. There are some things listeners will
1:34.9	note. I did not take the bait on that would have gotten us into a more partisan kind of argument.
1:40.3	Emmett is a person of the left, to be sure. But there's something in there for everybody. Let's get started.
1:45.0	Our counter programming month continues by not being directly on the news,
1:51.0	and instead sort of going deeper, wider.
1:55.0	We're recently at the dispatch, we had this essay that kind of blew up,
1:58.0	and people were really interested in it and we're talking about
	...

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