Political Gabfest - Another Treaty of Versailles
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 18 June 2026
⏱️ 61 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz discuss what the U.S. is getting and what it is giving up with the deal to end Trump's Iran war, how Trump's UFC fight at the White House intentionally used the symbols of the presidency to divide rather than unite Americans, and the intensifying conflict between the government and powerful AI companies.
For this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode, Emily, John, and David discuss today's narrow Supreme Court ruling in the case of United States v. Hemani. The hosts talk about the court's decision on guns and marijuana use, but also, thanks to Justice Gorsuch's focus on the Founding Fathers as "habitual drunkards," veer in a surprisingly philosophical discussion about history and its role in modern legal reasoning.
In the latest Gabfest Reads, John Dickerson talks with Bloomberg columnist Adrian Wooldridge about his new book The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism. In a moment when American democracy is under assault from authoritarian populists and dogmatic progressives, Wooldridge argues that liberalism itself offers the most resilient framework for pluralistic, self-correcting societies.
Email your chatters, questions, and comments to gabfest@slate.com. (Messages may be referenced by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Podcast production by Nina Porzucki
Research by Emily Ditto
You can find the full Political Gabfest show pages here.
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Find out more about David Plotz's monthly tours of Ft. DeRussy, the secret Civil War fort hidden in Rock Creek Park.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest. |
| 0:06.5 | June 18th, 2026, the Another Treaty of Versailles edition. |
| 0:21.4 | I'm David Plotz of CityCast in Washington, D.C. |
| 0:23.5 | I become a homeowner today. |
| 0:24.9 | That's exciting. |
| 0:26.6 | From Substack via New York City, the unquenchable John Dickerson. |
| 0:32.7 | Hello, John. |
| 0:34.0 | Hello, David. |
| 0:34.8 | Bill Pulte is coming after you now that you're a homeowner. |
| 0:37.8 | Oh. Man. Nobody didn't lie on any of my documents. That laugh is the slightly quenchable |
| 0:46.2 | Emily Bazel from the New York Times Magazine in Yale University Law School. Hello, Emily. |
| 0:50.6 | Hey, David. Hey, John. This week on the Gab Fest, the Iran War is probably over, and we sure did not win it. |
| 0:59.5 | Then the grotesque, bloody and deeply depressing and corrupt fight night at the White House. |
| 1:06.5 | And then Anthropic versus the United States who should win that fight. |
| 1:12.7 | Plus, we'll have cocktail chatter. |
| 1:27.0 | We have a kind of Schrodinger's cat situation of an Iran deal. |
| 1:31.9 | There is a peace agreement. |
| 1:33.2 | It's maybe it is signed. |
| 1:35.1 | Trump signed something. |
| 1:36.9 | It was finally published. |
| 1:39.0 | But there is an insistence from American officials that there are actually a lot of key |
| 1:42.9 | elements that the Iranians have |
... |
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