Tangle - PREVIEW - The Friday Edition - The conservative view: Things are still bad.

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

Today, we are going to fulfill the promise we made with a criticism of what I wrote, penned by Associate Editor Audrey Moorehead. Audrey is a fantastic writer, great thinker and awesome colleague, and I enjoy debating with her as much as I do anyone on staff. I’m proud to publish her piece here in Tangle as a continued commitment to self-reflection and viewpoint diversity as an organization. Ad-free podcasts are here!To listen to this podcast ad-free, and to enjoy our subscriber only premium content, go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was written by: Audrey Moorehead and edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Jon Lall.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Lindsey Knuth, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, everyone. This is Tangle Associate Editor Audrey Moorhead. Today's podcast is a piece that I authored responding to Isaac's piece from last week. I hope you enjoy. I found Tangle in the aftermath of the 2020 election. At the time, I was a time, I was a lived in deep red Lynchburg, Tennessee, and my community was awash in anger and speculation about a stolen election. I was alarmed by the various theories in my conservative media bubble, but the concept of a massive conspiracy to obstruct democracy was too much to take at face value. A stolen election would completely alter the way I saw the country I love. I knew these were serious accusations, and I didn't want to trust them blindly. But to my chagrin, when I tried to seek out different sources, most of the mainstream media seemed far too dismissive of fraud claims, treating them as self-evidently ridiculous and

anyone who believed them, like my family and friends, as ignorant or stupid. I was predisposed to distrust these outlets, and they weren't doing themselves any favors. Luckily, I came across Isaac's excellent work, chronicling most, if not all, of the major election fraud claims. Instead of starting from a place of complete skepticism and dismissal, Isaac presented the strongest arguments in favor of fraud, and then used evidence to prove them wrong. He had won my trust and piqued my interest in his product. Could I really see both sides of the conversation in one place, alongside fact-based reporting in Isaac's take,

which promised to be nuanced but honest? Fast forward to now, and I'm pleased to report that reading and working for Tangle has challenged and invigorated me. I'm grateful to be exposed to alternate viewpoints. Sometimes I've changed my mind, while other times I've learned how to better articulate my beliefs in the face of opposition. I truly think Tengel's culture and approach are a model for bridging the partisan divide,

and I feel honored to spend every day doing such important work. When we were preparing last week's Friday edition, the team, as usual, engaged in lots of debate. And while I absolutely believe Isaac was right to voice his concerns about the direction he thinks were headed, I also thought his piece wasn't properly attuned to the conservative perspective on modern politics. I wanted to offer a counterpoint to his perspective, to explain how Trump isn't the only one to blame for the erosion of our political institutions, and why so many in the conservative movement are willing to stomach Trump or even fully embrace him. To be quite clear at the top, I'm not speaking for all or even most

conservatives. For one thing, I have never been a fan of President Trump, and my trepidation has only grown over the course of his second term in office. In fact, I commend many of the principles Isaac was vouching for, and some developments in the modern conservative or mega movement alarm me as a young conservative, even more than they do him. For example, the recent textuals, and the subsequent intra-movement discourse worried me far more than they worried Isaac when he wrote about them. White supremacist extremists have been part of the right throughout my lifetime, just as communist anti-American revolutionaries have been a fixture of the left. But those extreme views are clearly growing more influential in the GOP, and I felt like Isaac's take on the leaked

texts underrated those dangers. Furthermore, I'm much more in line with old-school American conservatism, uplifting the benefits of traditional social structures like the family and religious communities, while also emphasizing a limited federal government and personal freedoms. I think sincere religious faith and family formation are the keys to living a good life. But I also think the law should allow you to disagree with me and live the life you want to live, so long as you're not overtly harming yourself or others. Yet rising stars of the GOP seem to reject this religiously informed tolerance, in favor of coarser barstool conservatism, which abandons traditional social values in favor of

uninhibited personal freedom and forgets about the social harms that can form. follow. Or, more overtly religious post-liberism, enforcing narrow, often specifically Catholic values, by outlawing other lifestyles. As such, while I've never felt wholly at home in the Republican Party, I've begun to feel that it has completely cast me out. And yet, despite being disturbed by what I see as a shift in the party's ideology, I can still understand my friends and family who find the Trump administration the lesser of two evils. I myself even felt that way during the election. Well, I think major play-refer. in the Trump administration are acting in openly authoritarian ways,

I don't think all or even most of the GOP base supports this approach to government. In fact, I think their support of Trump and the GOP is driven by conservative sense that the left has been trending toward authoritarianism. Understanding this feeling, even if you think conservatives are wrong to feel that way, is essential to moving forward from the moment we're in and reuniting our increasingly divided nation around the same common ideals. I contend that the left has similarly eroded political norms and overstretched its power, if less extensively than Trump, still more than is acknowledged in mainstream media,

and even by many Tangle readers who wholly endorsed last week's piece. Furthermore, the left has been uniquely capable and effective at using its dominance in our cultural institutions to attempt to enforce ideological uniformity socially, and the backlash against this hegemony has led so many to Trumpism. We'll be right back after this quick break. First, I want to address the governance. Democrats' erosion of our political norms may seem irrelevant compared to what we're currently experiencing,

but analyzing their actions allows us to understand this administration. Democrats have paved the way for contemporary politicians to increasingly take advantage of slim electoral majorities and dubious presidential powers to attempt actions that, in previous years, years might have been unthinkable. Our modern politics have been embittered for decades, going back to Newt Gingrich's culture wars of the 1990s. But Democrats set off the erosion of governmental norms that they now blame Republicans for with the abolition of the filibuster

for presidential nominees. You may know the story. Senator Harry Reid, upset at Republicans blocking Obama's nominees for executive positions in federal judgeships, spearheaded an effort to remove the filibuster for the nomination process. But after using the remaining Scotist filibuster to block Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland, Senate Republicans responded in kind, removing the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees and ensuring a conservative supermajority on the court for the foreseeable future. When Democrats have held the presidency or congressional majorities, they've championed ending the filibuster completely. But as conservatives and even other Democrats have pointed out, they have not made the same call from the minority. And if you ask most

conservatives, Democrats started the tit-for-tat hollowing out of the filibuster that has led us to where we are today, with President Trump's calls to abolish the filibuster. Additionally, Democratic presidents haven't exactly been bashful about using sweeping executive power. They may not have been aggressive as President Trump, but that's typically how the Overton window moves, one side advances, and then the other side responds in more extreme fashion. Democratic president's use of the office has certainly been enough to constitute a lead-up to the current administration. Both presidents Clinton and Obama used executive orders more aggressively than their predecessors. And President Biden was responsible for several overreaches of

power, his student loan forgiveness plan, his eviction moratorium, and his employer vaccine mandate, to name a few. While the courts struck down these actions, and President Biden obeyed the orders, just as Trump begrudgingly has so far, they still attempted to use the executive branch to unilaterally impose controversial policies, bypassing Congress to do so. These examples might not seem as expansive as, say, Trump's tariffs and attempts to end birthright citizenship. but that's kind of the point. Student loan forgiveness, COVID-era eviction bans,

and vaccine mandates felt like shocking overreaches to most conservative Americans and many independents, too, in ways that motivated an equally shocking response by electing Trump. And even if you supported those Biden policies, the former president still pursued them

from the top down without congressional debate or judicial approval. To put it more directly, Trump is obliterating the Overton window. But Biden shifted it himself during his term and against warnings that doing so might tee up a future leader like Trump to go even further. On an even more sobering note, Democrats haven't eroded just domestic policy norms. As managing editor Ari Weitzman made clear a few weeks ago,

Trump's extrajudicial strikes on Venezuelan drugboats follow precedents set in the Obama administration. Obviously, extrajudicial actions can be traced back to U.S. involvement in Vietnam or even further, and more recently, through President Bush's post-9-11 actions. but the justifications for President Obama's extrajudicial drone strikes are eerily similar to the Trump administration's arguments about its rights to strike the Venezuelan boats. The Obama administration argued that it didn't have to provide evidence to courts proving its targets were guilty of terrorism in order to carry out strikes.

Justice Trump has not provided evidence to the public that the boats he struck were carrying drugs. While declaring these individuals as narco-terrorists is novel, it's only an escalation of the philosophy President Obama used in the Middle East. Each of these examples highlights how Democrats before Trump started to play faster and looser with long-standing traditions of governance and military power. Any of these individual actions might feel justified by anyone supporting the Obama or Biden or Trump administration's goals.

But as we've seen, no party has yet retained complete control over the government in perpetuity. When each party governs like it'll never lose again, it only becomes easier for the other side to do the same, and the constant erosion only makes the slope more slippery. Next, I want to discuss the issues. So much of what Isaac focused on in his piece were the ways in which Trump is eroding institutional norms or pushing the boundaries of the law. But he did very little grappling with the democratic politics of the last two decades, which have enabled Trump to violate those norms with little political blowback.

Democratic cultural and policy positions in recent years, have increasingly alienated moderate and conservative voters who perceived these stances as shifting too far to the left. In response, these voters have lost trust in broader institutions, even those that should be neutral, which is why we now have RFK Jr. running the CDC and the Trump administration cutting grants to higher education. While moderate and conservative voters trust Republicans more than Democrats

on a host of issues, a few are more salient than others, immigration and the wokeness movement on gender and race. First, let's talk immigration. Perhaps the most sweeping, consequential actions from the Trump administration have been through its immigration enforcement, which is genuinely the set of actions that worries me most. Even so, I think it's important to remember exactly how we got to this place and to keep our heads about the real possibilities of escalation. Isaac has pointed out before that the Biden administration's immigration policy really did contribute to a crisis. Biden oversaw an unprecedented wave of immigration and his policies directly contributed to the rise in both total border encounters and the number of unauthorized migrants. entering and staying in the country. As a result, local governments were overwhelmed and

communities suddenly inundated with so many new people, and that influx sparked an alarm on the right about a loss of national identity or cohesion. This massive, unmitigated immigration required a response. Obviously, ICE agents wearing masks on the streets, rounding people up indiscriminately, and catching U.S. citizens and legal residents during that response is terrifying. And it's easy for me to imagine this enforcement quickly being turned into a much more sophisticated operation to take down political enemies. Furthermore, it's quite clear that White House immigration policy is being set by actors like Stephen Miller, who are using real anxieties about illegal immigration to push a far more insidious agenda, directly connected to the rise of adherence

to white nationalist views like the Great Replacement Theory. Obviously, a reaction to immigration often carries with it allies to the cause motivated by racism or nativism. I'm reminded of the controversy during the lead-up to the election last year over the influx of Haitian migrants to Springfield, Ohio. Bad actors used that situation to levy baseless claims against a vulnerable group, trying to stoke nativist sentiments. Yet the presence of bad actors shaping policy shouldn't obscure the fact that broadly, deporting illegal immigrants, regardless of their criminal record, remains a popular position, held by about 54% of Americans. This position in and of itself isn't born out of the same racial animus that motivates the worst on the right. It's driven by

legitimate worries about overwhelmed social structures, as well as the effects of rapid cultural change in small communities that are most impacted by the influx of immigrants. For many people, the question is not a judgment on, is Trump acting legally? But would I rather have what we had under Biden or what we have now? It's unchecked illegal immigration versus unchecked executive power. And for many who are so alarmed by Biden, the latter is preferable to the former. A hardline stands on immigration to temporarily stem the flow and remove unauthorized migrants, especially those who have committed crimes, even if that number is small, could be a necessary response to the excesses of the Biden administration.

And by and large, the public perceives the Trump administration's policies as getting us closer to a sustainable immigration system than democratic policies have. Next, I want to talk about the elephant in the room, wokeness. Perhaps the most important social and cultural event that drove, people to talk with me. Hey, everybody. This is John, executive producer for Tangle. We hope you enjoyed this preview of our latest episode.

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Have a great day, y'all. Peace. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Lull. Today's episode was edited and engineered by John Lull. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Kback and associate editors Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Saul, Lindsay Canuth, and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75 and John Lull. And to learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at reedtangle.com.

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