The Bulwark Podcast - David Frum: Villains and Monsters

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

After the decade we've been living through, we will remember the people like Liz Cheney, who have made the choices that really matter. Meanwhile, will the MAGA influencers who say they were unwitting Russian propagandists give their millions back? Plus, Tucker's praise and promotion of Holocaust denialism, Vance's pathological feelings about women, and the continuing tragedy of guns everywhere in America.  David Frum joins Tim Miller. show notes: Frum's recent piece on the Gaza protesters

Hey, Hotels.com here. Tired of the everyday? We know a hotel that's ready to unwind this weekend. Book hotels with spas in the Hotels.com app. Find your perfect somewhere. could be yourself, like you were hiding behind a mask. BetterHelp online therapy is convenient, flexible, and can help you learn to be your authentic self so you can stop hiding. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelpHELP.com. Hello and welcome to the Bullwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We are back today with Ring of Fame Bullwark Podcast guest David Frum. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic, author of 10 books, including Trumpocalypse and Trumpocracy. What's happening, David? Hey there. Hello from Toronto. It is good to hear from you. And naturally, on the podcast home of the Never Trump movement, we will begin with Liz Cheney. Yesterday at Duke University, Bill Kristol is reporting in this

morning's Morning Shots that her official announcement that she was going to be supporting and voting for Kamala Harris was not an accident or some leaked video, but that she'd seen some of her fellow Trump skeptical conservatives shying away from actually endorsing and wanted to make her position clear. So let's take a listen to what Liz Cheney said yesterday at Duke University. As a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this. And because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris. So now there's a little bite in there where she says, I don't believe we have the luxury of writing in candidates' names. Which just felt like a very pointed comment. David, what did you think?

There's a line in one of Sherlock Holmes' stories where the great detective explains how to solve a mystery. And his answer is, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the correct answer. And so I think that process of elimination is going on for a lot of people. The writing in names is a way of absenting oneself, but it's not a way of affirming a meaningful choice. And so Liz Cheney has always understood that politics is about the possible, politics is about the effective, is asking that question. And I don't think she is denying the very important differences that she would have with Kamala Harris. She's probably assuming that there will

be many opportunities in the future to cast votes on the issue she cares about. I think one of the things we've all explained to many of our current coalition partners is, should the day come when the most important questions are the size of the state, the cost of the state, how the state is financed, how much debt is acceptable versus how much should we reduce spending? All of us in the never Trump world, most of us have held on to traditional views on those questions. But those are not the most urgent questions of the moment. And anyway, those are questions where the Trump alternative is never better and often worse than the Democratic alternative. Meanwhile, we are confronted with America's role in the world, the trade system, the Constitution at home. And the basic question is, if you lose an election, should you surrender power?

Yeah. And Liz got into that a little bit yesterday as well. You know, talking about the fact that, like, even if the question comes to the policies i like this is absurd right like donald trump you know is raising the debt more than anybody to use that example that you just laid um the tariffs that he's putting forth the foreign policy i think that it's important that somebody like this cheney who has been a doctrinaire conservative not a squish like me and kind of you though you're squishing a different way than me a doctrinaire conservative is out there saying no reject the talking point says, if you're looking at the policies and you put character aside, that Trump is the right answer. She says no to that. Kamala Harris is

still the correct answer. Economists have a concept called revealed preference. And the concept is to illustrate this basic notion, which is we have lots of preferences and they sometimes come into conflict and we don't always sort them out in advance. So somebody might say, I want to eat healthier, but I also don't want to spend more than half an hour preparing the meal. And I don't want to spend more than a certain amount of money. So those are three different sets of preferences. And we don't know which is going to come out on top until you're actually confronted with the moment of choice where you have to stack, eat healthier, spend more time, spend more money. And then you reveal what your truest preference is. And I think this has been very much a story of the Trump era. You

know, you want a low tax government, you want a low spending government, you want free trade, you want to maintain alliances, and you believe in the democratic and constitutional system. And you've never had to worry before that those things might come into conflict. But what if they do? And one of the things that has been very disappointing about many of our former allies in the conservative world is their revealed preference does not put defending the constitutional democratic system at the top. They have other things that they value more highly. And look, that's their right. But you don't have to applaud when people exercise their rights in ways you disapprove of. Thinking about people that are a little bit disappointing, like what say you to some of your fellow colleagues for the Bush era? You know, we both worked for different Bushes, but Condoleezza Rice was out on Fox this week talking about the perils of isolationism. She talked about the

four horsemen of the apocalypse, isolationism, nativism, populism, and protectionism. And I'm going, who are you talking about there exactly? But she managed to go on Fox without saying the name of who shall not be named. Why is that? Why are so many of these people so conscious? I get it if you're Nikki Haley and you're fantasizing that you have a future in politics that you don't have. But Condoleezza Rice is 70 years old.

Like, where are some of these other folks? Look, Condoleezza Rice didn't get to be the person who she is today by taking any kind of chance at all. She has always been someone who was about ingratiating herself with people with more power and concealing her true views. So why would that change now? The reason you and I are not sitting on boards at Davos is because we speak our mind. So she was Secretary of State while we're podcasters or failed speechwriters because of this various trade. Got it. Exactly.

Exactly. So I don't know how profitable it is to reproach anybody else for what they do or don't do. I mean, the thing we all need to focus on is what are we going to do? What are our choices? What are our decisions? And we thought this moment of the end of the Trump era would come long ago. This really does seem to be the definitive moment. The choice is presented now in its most excruciating form. We all can see what the cost of a second Trump president will be. It's a collapse of the American legal system

as Trump uses the powers of the presidency to defeat the many criminal and civil indictments against him to try to uproot state as well as federal legal systems. It means the abandonment of Ukraine. It means the end of the world trade system. It means the end of alliances. It also means, by the way, an incredibly profligate and irresponsible economy at home. Not that that's equivalent in concern to those other things, but it means that too. And it means just generally impulsiveness and fecklessness and bad temper and corruption, massive taking of bribes. And that's what we're confronted with. And so you have to say, you know, will you say yes?

Will you say no? Or will you say present? Just to be clear, I'm the failed strategist. You were a successful speechwriter. You were at least in the White House walls. All I had was L's on the way there. I expect we'll see more from Liz Cheney on this very point. I guess just my final thought on this is that I think that this is not going to be a, I was on a panel at Duke, and that's good enough moment for her. And I do think that's worth

noting. I've been thinking this for a long time. In a way, one of the responses we can have to the Trump era is one of gratitude, that it's not always true that your political choices matter that much. In fact, the healthier your democracy, the less the choices do matter. When a democratic system is working well, you know, it's the Christian Democrats against the social Democrats. It's, you know, slightly lower taxes versus slightly cheaper bus fares. That's a healthy democratic system. And people are constantly making these move the ship of state slightly to this side or slightly to that side choices. That's successful, but it also means that the individual choice doesn't matter that much. In this moment we've been living through for nearly a decade, your choices really matter.

And we will remember the people who made good choices at tremendous sacrifice, as Liz Cheney did. And we will remember the cowards and the time at tremendous sacrifices, as Liz Cheney did. And we will remember the cowards and the time servers. And we will, of course, remember also the villains and the monsters, because we've had no shortage of those. Speaking of the villains and the monsters, we have the latest in the Russia hoax. You've heard a lot about the Russia hoax. A few consume MAGA media, or even just some of our old regular Fox, old regular old conservative media have now bought in on the on the Russia hoax hoax. But yesterday there was an indictment.

Federal officials are alleging that Russian nationals funded and directed a scheme that paid MAGA influencers through the tenant media company was organized in part by a woman, Lauren Shin, who's an internet personality, if you spend any time on the internet. Among the people that she got to partner with her were Tim Poole, very successful podcaster on the far right, Benny Johnson, former colleague of mine, and he works with TPUSA and Charlie Kirk, Dave Rubin, kind of more of a heterodox center-right podcaster, Lauren Southern. The partners claimed that they did so unwittingly. Let's just listen to one clip from their output. Here's Tim Pool talking about the Russia-Ukraine war. Ukraine is the greatest threat to this nation and to the world. We should rescind all funding and financing, pull out all military support, and we should apologize to Russia. That's subtle. David?

Well, whether they were unwitting or not 48 hours ago, they are not unwitting today. So my question to all of them is, now that you know, how indignant are you? Are you keeping the money, for example? Because one of the things, I think it was obvious at the time, but it's certainly obvious in retrospect, is the finances of these companies, and I don't think Tenant is the only one, don't make a lot of sense. I work at The Atlantic. We have a million paid customers. We know what our revenues look like. We know what we're able to do. You are as intimately familiar with the economics of the bulwark. Then you see these other companies. It can't be true. You can't have these resources from the actual earned honest revenues you get from your listeners. So the money must come from somewhere else. And aren't you curious where that somewhere

else is in this world of dangerous, dirty money? Aren't you curious? Okay, so maybe not everyone who worked at Tenant Media was a genius. And often people choose not to be curious about things that they decide it's better not to know about. But they know now. They know now. And so while you can say someone was an unwitting Russian agent the day before the indictments filed, the day after, they are a witting recipient of Russian money. And I imagine we're going to discover that this ramifies all through the MAGA influencer world. And not every MAGA influencer is a Russian apologist. Some are neo-Nazis, although those often do converge. MAGA has pretty obviously been a non-organic phenomenon. It can't exist with its own resources of votes, of money. It draws from other places and we're getting some idea of where it's drawing from. Just some anecdotes on that point about how the money

doesn't make sense. Tim Pool was making $100,000 per video. Speaking of pools, I'd be able to have one at my house if that was the kind of money videos are paying. Benny Johnson was making 400,000 a month. Some of these videos weren't even getting that many views. And I mean, these guys also have their own media companies, right? So they, they're familiar with the economics of, you know, video media and of the kind of content that they put out. And to your point about who they're mad at and revealed preferences, they're out there on Twitter today mad at the people that are pointing fingers at them, right? Not mad at the people that duped them. One other person that was just tangentially part of this that's worth noting, Don Jr. was among the people that was interviewed for tenant on the actual tenant

platform with benny johnson but then he was also interviewed separately with tim pool and i want to listen to that one what's your opinion on the solution to the ukraine war cut off the money it's the only way you get them to the table right as long as i mean we're literally creating the oligarch class of billionaire in ukraine with's being siphoned off, whether it's Zelensky, whether it's this, while they send young men to die as cannon fodder on the front lines because they couldn't care less. It's fucking disgusting what's going on there, that it's allowed to happen, that we shut down anything. It's so obvious. Nothing's ever going to change there if the money keeps flowing. My father would have been like, hey, you got like one more month of this and if you're not at the table, it's done.

I mean, are we going to split hairs here? Like the Trumps are part of the Russian disinfo op. What we also need to do here is jump the brain barrier into the world of electoral politics and to understand a vote for Trump is a vote to betray and abandon Ukraine, which is a vote to blow up NATO. It's a vote to abandon self-defense. It's a vote to abandon Taiwan. Because there are people in the Trump orbit who will say, look, the reason we want to abandon Ukraine is to hoard our money, so we have extra money to defend Taiwan. And that's like someone saying, look, I want to impress my mortgage company. And so to impress them with my creditworthiness, I'm going to not pay the utility bill, not pay the cable bill, not pay any of my debts,

and that way I'll have more money to pay the mortgage. Won't they be impressed? Mortgage companies say, we want to see that you pay all your debts. We don't believe that a person who defaults on many of the debts is going to pay the debt to us. We want to see them paid to all the debts. The defense of Taiwan begins in Ukraine and vice versa. When we are credible in Taiwan, we are more credible in Europe. And I think one of the things, I mean, for those of us who have Israel as a special place in our heart, the Trump people are always trying to assure us that Israel will be the exception, that that will be the one ally they would never betray. But when you look at the degree, and this is another thing you want to talk about today, in which paranoid and even murderous anti-Semitism is part of the intellectual furniture of the MAGA world, I don't think anyone who cares about Israel should be confident that the people who want to abandon Ukraine, abandon Taiwan, abandon Europe, abandon every ally everywhere are going to have a carve-out for Israel.

Yeah, let's talk about that. So this is all related. So Lauren Chin, who is the organizer of those influencers, people who do not exist in this world are going to need me to create a map for them. She also has dabbled in some anti-Semitism stuff with Candace Owens. And then we had, over the weekend, Tucker Carlson interviewing this fellow, Daryl Cooper, who's a historian that was arguing that Churchill was the villain of World War II. And J.D. Vance is also tied up in all this. But just first, where are you at on that, on Churchill being villain of World War II?

Do you know on that? I know on that. What I'm struck by is World War II is a very studied historical phenomenon. And even if you're an amateur, in the clip that everyone has seen, Daryl Cooper is trying to make the point that the Nazis were somehow victims of their own success, that they had no plan for, and he's very vague about whether he's talking about Jews or Russian civilians or Soviet citizens of war. The Nazi crimes included the mass starvation of Soviet POWs. And indeed, some of the first people who were victims of Gassen were Soviet POWs, soldiers captured in

June and July and August of 1941. Now, if you have read like a book and don't get all your information from YouTube videos, you'll know that the Nazi plan to use starvation as a deliberate weapon, not against Jews, but against Soviet civilians of the Soviet army, was put in writing in May of 1941, a month and a half before the military campaign against the Soviet Union started. You can read about that in such best-selling books as Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies. So what's going on here is kind of intentional lying or casual and negligent lying. But I'm ashamed almost to get into these points because what is going on here is, as the person who was interviewed has made clear in other contexts, he is motivated by merciless, murderous anti-Semitism. The Jews

rejected Jesus, and they have brought all their troubles upon themselves. And this has not been mainstream Christian theology for a long time, but it flourishes in the crackpot world, and it flourishes in places where Tucker Carlson would not have been surprised by what this person was saying on his podcast when the person came on. And he certainly wasn't shocked or displeased. He chose to take someone who was a smaller fish in the internet world than Tucker Carlson is and make him a bigger fish. And then Elon Musk made them both bigger fishes than ever before.

Some of this may be in service of other kinds of goals. But one of the jokes, grim jokes I often make is, of course, I'm Ashkenazi Jewish on both my father's and mother's side. I say there are very few Ashkenazi optimists because we are genetically engineered for pessimism. The optimist stayed, the pessimist left. The optimist didn't have grandchildren, the pessimist did. So you just get a very good sense for who, you know, that remark, was that funny or is that danger? You had a good sense for that. And I don't know how you spend any time in the Mago world as someone who's serious about Jewish heritage or Jewish faith and not say, I just feel danger

everywhere. And, you know, some people might say, okay, well, look, Tucker has become a crank. He's off Fox. He's on the sidelines. And his reach certainly has been limited. But I got to tell you, like the scariest part about the whole thing to me and the seriousness of this is I'm pretty deep in this stuff. I've never heard of the Daryl Cooper guy. on like the apple podcast charts tucker had the number one podcast on the charts overall until he was surpassed by daryl cooper's random crank podcast because after he after he platformed him i guess tucker's listeners went and went and found that guy's podcast and and listened to it so now they are one and two on the charts meanwhile jd v had, a couple years before he was a VP nominee, had quote tweeted this guy, whose Twitter handle is MartyrMaid, who did some long thread defending the Stop the Steal stuff. And J.D. Vance had quote tweeted him saying, like, this is a thoughtful

thread. Will my liberal fans even listen to this? So, like, there is no seven degrees of Kevin Bacon here between the president. Get close to me. Here's something where this really does jump the barrier from the world seven degrees of Kevin Bacon here between the president. It gets closer than that. And here's something where this really does jump the barrier from the world of the internet to the world of active politics. So you've got this crank Holocaust denier and anti-Semite. He gets promoted by the Tucker Carlson podcast on what date was that? September 3rd? On September 21st, Vice Presidential Candidate of the Republican Party, J.D. Vance,

is scheduled to do an event in Hershey, Pennsylvania, with a man who promoted and praised a Holocaust denier and anti-Semite. And so in the world of normal politics, look, people get past the barriers of a campaign all the time, as you know. But in normal politics, when one of these intruders gets past the barriers, the klaxons start sounding, the red lights start flaring, and they isolate, they move the candidate away from the crackpot. And then sometimes apologies have to be issued, sometimes individual staffers have to be disciplined or fired. How did that happen? But I think it's going to be a valid question on the Trump-Harris debate on September 10th, that your vice president, your vice presidential candidate, is, as of the day we talk, September 5th, scheduled to do an event on September 21st with someone who praised and platformed a Holocaust denier. Are you comfortable with that?

Because it's not just about what is on the Internet. It is not just about podcasts. J.D. Vance is the running mate, in great part, because of Tucker Carlson's influence. Maybe Tucker Carlson is more than anybody else. So this is not just about what cranks and kooks are hearing on the internet. This is about who's going to be the next president and vice president of the United States. And are we going to have this kind of craziness and this kind of bigotry? We've had it once, but the version we're getting 2., is a much more highly refined version of this particular methamphetamine. Which, again, kind of brings us back to the kind of he's in the pet to me is the world.

When I was talking to Margaret Hoover on Friday, last Friday's podcast about Joni Ernst and how there's still some delusion among some in that crowd that more traditional national security types will be around Trump or whatever. And it's like literally the president and the vice president nominees, like the ticket, they are palling around with the Holocaust deniers, with the people that are on Russia's payroll. That is the reason why J.D. Vance was selected. How could you possibly still be deluding yourself into thinking that somebody like know, somebody like H.R. McMaster will have any influence in a second Trump administration? I mean, I haven't finished reading H.R. McMaster's book, but one of the things that he is forced to concede about himself in sometimes between the lines is he was not, H.R.

McMaster was not very effective. And indeed, H.R. McMaster was not the hero that he makes himself out to be. He has a lot of complaints about the Mattis-Tillerson alliance that promptly formed. Those guys really were the heroes. And, you know, both Mattis and Tillerson have talked about this publicly, that Mattis, they approached each other and realized, we are in charge of the foreign policy of the United States. We need an unbridgeable alliance. State and defense historically don't get along that well. And they would have breakfast once a week. Mattis referred to Tillerson as St. Rex. That was his nickname for him. And they just,

they formed a pact. And one of the things that was so important about that is I've observed some of these simulations that some good government groups have run about what would happen if Trump did this or what would happen if Trump did that. And one of the things that you see in the simulations is obviously people in the line of fire have to obey a lawful order from the president. But many of Trump's orders were impossible or illegal. And at that point, a question comes up, do you help him solve the problem or not? You get a very different result when the person who receives the illegal or improper or impossible order says, sir, we cannot do that. Period. All stop. Silence. Like the immigration regime in the Trump at first administration, for example, versus

what some of the other people did. Yeah. Well, that's what the immigration regime, the Supreme Court did help him. The Supreme Court said, okay, what you're asking here is illegal, but here's how you could rewrite it so that it would be legal. And after three rounds of litigation, Trump finally got the message, here's how to do it. To me, the great example of this is Trump's military parade. Trump goes to Paris in the summer of 2017, and he sees the big Bastille Day parade that the French have. It's a strange custom from an American point of view. It feels very undemocratic, but it goes to deep traumas in French Hill history. I think it started after the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

So they do it. And Trump says, wow, that's fantastic. We need one of those. And the U.S. military desperately wants not to do it. They want to not do it because, first, it's extremely expensive. But second, above all, it looks very political. Because this is not a custom in the United States, it's never been done before. If Trump orders it, it looks like the armed might of the United States is being deployed

at the personal behest of the president, i.e., you know, that he's not just commander in chief under the Constitution. The Constitution is what the soldiers swear an oath to, not the president. But somehow this is his armed force. And so they found ways, they kept finding ways that they couldn't do it, and they didn't help him solve the problem. And he would say, you know, I want you to do it. The military would say, if we take tanks down Pennsylvania Avenue, we will rip up Pennsylvania Avenue, and we don't have budget to repave Pennsylvania Avenue. And Trump would say, I've got a report

here that says it'll only cost $2 million. The Pentagon would say, we have a report that says it's $80 million. And you can read it because we've just given it to the Washington Post, and they put it on the front page. And finally, a compromise is achieved where on Trump's, I think, last Fourth of July as president, the military does a flypast instead of a parade because, look, we do a flypast for the Ohio State game. We can do a flypast for the president, but we're not putting tanks on the streets of Washington, D.C. We are not doing that. And they didn't and they didn't help him. So Tillerson and Mattis were the architects of the don't give him alternatives strategy.

If he gives an order, if it can be done, it has to be done. But if it can't be done, it can't be done. And you don't help him. In term two, he'll be surrounded by people who want to help him, who want to anticipate and who will want to guess what he wants and go farther. And that's going to be a very different world. There won't be Mattis's, there won't be Tillerson's. Including JD, and you mentioned that the September 21st event with Tucker, you wrote in 2022 about the JD Vance that you knew, like he was an anonymous blogger on the

forum for a while. I'm just curious that we've had now two months of him. I mean, it has to be even worse than you would have imagined. I'm just wondering what your impressions are of what is going on with J.D. Vance. I forget who's the author of the saying, sooner or later we become what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful about what we pretend to be. I think it's Vonnegut. I mean, I think he's ultimately, or he began as ultimately a very hollow person, very interested in exploring the possibilities that were open to

someone of his genuine talents and gifts, but without a lot of core beliefs. There's this kind of lock-in that he spent a lot of time in these chat rooms. He's developed a lot of anger and resentment. The feelings about women really are pathological. One of the things I'm struck by again and again is his ability to take something that you could phrase it in a way that everybody would find reasonable. You could say, you know, obviously the birth rates are down. Many American young people are not able to have the children that they want, and we have to figure out ways that we can help them do that. It's an important goal of government policy. And you could say, however much joy and fulfillment

you get from your career, let me tell you as a parent, nothing is equal to the joy and fulfillment you get from your children. And the resources of government should be available to help you. Great statements. I agree with all of that. Yeah an apple pie also good the flag for that how do you screw up that statement and make it a statement of aggression and contempt yeah but he's somehow able to and he's saying things that ought to be the most basic and universally acceptable things in the world and he makes them ugly in ways that are just startling where does that come from it comes from the chat rooms yeah and that's what you're saying it comes from these influence comes from this building bitterness and grievance and people talk themselves into these sorts of things like if you're just online

and you're sort of having these conversations like yes yes it is the childless women's fault you know it is the condescending person that i hated when I was trying to turn my book into a Hollywood treatment. And I had a couple of people that were condescending and mean that were coastal elites to me. It is them. It is them that is the problem. There's a lot of rage. It's a genuine issue that young people are not finding each other. And romance is becoming more difficult, especially between the sexes. There are barriers and mistrust, and it's got complex social causes, and maybe the internet is making it worse. One of my children is married, but my children are in the marriage market, so I see all of this and all these problems. But there is something about the mega world where they speak to young men who somehow think that their entitlement to women is being thwarted by the women.

And I'm kind of a skeptic of American self-improvement culture. But one of the good things about American self-improvement culture is its message is always the problem is you. Problem is you. Go fix you. Maybe society is a little bit to blame. You know, maybe if there are like some kinds of income support, that might help. But so we have this excessive, almost called like the Tony Robbins, unleash the tiger within. Well, what if I'm not really a tiger? The gorilla nine sets, Mike Cernovich. The one thing it does that is good about American self-improvement culture is it sees the danger

of blaming others for one's own problems. And whether or not it's entirely true that you are capable of infinite self-improvement, it's a better way to approach the world. And megaculture is just the opposite. If you don't get a date, it's women are holding out on you. And at the extreme, that can lead to murder and certainly leads to a lot of violence. And certainly it's not attractive, I got to say. People who are gripped by the idea that women are holding out on them are going to find

that the women continue to hold out on them because women are highly, just as Jews are highly sensitive to paranoid anti-Semitism, women are highly attuned to men who might want to hurt them. It's not even just his tone. It's also the policy. He was with Charlie Kirk yesterday, and they're having some kind of interview at a live Turning Point USA event. Let's just play the audio. What can we do about lowering the cost of daycare at Hayden? Obviously obviously a working family, and it's very hard for working families to get by. How will we lower the cost of daycare? It's such an important question, Charlie.

I think one of the things that we can do is make it easier for families to choose whatever model they want. One of the ways that you might be able to relieve a little bit of pressure on people who are paying so much for daycare is make it so that maybe grandma or grandpa wants to help out a little bit of pressure on people who are paying so much for daycare is make it so that that you know maybe like grandma or grandpa wants to help out a little bit more or maybe there's an aunt or uncle that wants to help out a little bit more if that happens you relieve some of the pressure on all the resources that were spent in a daycare now you talk about just daycare let's say you don't have somebody who can provide that extra set of hands what we've got to do is actually empower people to

get trained in the skills that they need for the 21st century. I thought he was supposed to be the working class Reformacon candidate. Anyway, there's so much to unpack there. I'm just curious your thoughts. What you could see there was he's read an article. What if there were a refundable tax credit for child care that you could give to a family member? That's an idea. I haven't thought about it enough to know whether it's a good idea or bad, but that's an idea, and people have written it. And so he's got that on the tip of his tongue, but he also understands, wait a minute, that means spending money, and that's going to be a no-go area for some of the people who are listening. So what he makes it sound like is that he's got an idea, but he doesn't quite dare say it, and then he hastily skeeters on. And the impression he leaves behind is the whole question of, well, how will children be cared for? Which is kind of an imperative question.

It's the kind of thing that every young family struggles with, and not just children, by the way. And one of the things I think that is a real area of public policy we need to be thinking about is how do we care for the rapidly growing population over 80? If we had healthier politics, it was not about how do we get away with overthrowing the Constitution. One of the things that the party should be arguing about is people over 80 need more care. They're growing incredibly fast, which is a triumph of human flourishing, but raises some costs. How will those costs be met? It's a rich society. There are a lot of ways to answer the question. We have philosophical differences. So, there are a lot of things to debate, but you can have a productive debate and not just skip past, skip past the hard question on your way to pointing fingers and

blaming people. I enjoyed the little aside about how we should encourage different types of family formations. It's not thinking about gays, by the way. Let me talk about that. The different types of family formations is, yeah, maybe you can have your uncle come in and help raise the kid for you. Good luck. But you know, J.D. Vance would once upon a time have actually acknowledged that.

The 2015 or 2016 version of J.D. Vance would have had some room for that. And sometimes just saying something, it opens the door. So when George W. Bush was campaigning for president in 2000, one of the things he always made a point of doing was saying, churches, synagogues, and mosques. Now, he didn't have any particular policy. He was just saying, you're part of America. Part of America. I don't have an offer. I'm not even sure there's a question. Just being minimally welcome actually is a step improvement over tearing down and saying that actually, you know, you're less than if you're a single childless cat lady, you know?

And like a lot of people say, actually, like the single childless cat lady said, I don't necessarily even want anything from you. I don't have an ask. I just want not to be insulted. How hard is that? Very hard for J.D. Vance. All right. I want to end this question, but we haven't done any Kamala. I'm curious, just David Frum's top line impressions of her over the past six weeks, seven weeks, and any concerns you have policy campaign wise, otherwise. In 2004, in the Bush-K bush carry race i had a friend who was working on the carry campaign and i i said you know what's what's your message and his his messages he'll do

i sort of feel like i am not enthusiastic about the coming harris presidency i know they're gonna do it's gonna be more protectionist than i like and it's going to be more protectionist than I like, and it's going to be more expensive than I like. There are going to be all kinds of, you know, petty things they're going to do that are going to bother me. And that's tomorrow's problem. That's tomorrow's problem. Today's problem is you have to save the Constitution, save NATO, save trade, save American leadership in the world. You mentioned about Israel having a special place in your heart. I do think it's been interesting. There was, based on kind of nothing, there was like scuttle that Harris was maybe not as supportive of Israel as Biden had been, which is interesting, giving her husband, Doug Emhoff, being Jewish, having spoken out on anti-Semitism.

Since she's been the nominee, she's shown no evidence of that. But I know you have people in those kind of circles who have concerns about her policy there. Is there anything that has jumped out to you, good, bad, or otherwise? One of the things I argue with some of my friends in the more conservative Jewish spaces is Biden has done more for the state of Israel than any American president ever and by an enormous bound. And I think people sometimes forget what the historical relationship between U.S.

presidents and Israel was like. But there has never been a degree of support that Israel has gotten from an American president since October 7th, as compared to what it's gotten since October. Two presidential visits, twice as much in material aid as Nixon sent in 1973. There was like 25,000 tons of aid, 50,000 days, limitless intelligence help, backing for extended periods of time. Israel always has a very strict time limit on its military operations. This one, there has been no time limit. And Biden's had comments that were differed from the Israeli government's views, but given the degree of support, given the fact that American carrier

groups have been deployed to protect Israel, and then American weapons have been fired to intercept missiles heading Israel, you get a right to some opinions after all that. So will Harris be as pro-Israel as that? I don't know. I think sometimes when someone breaks the record, the record stays on the record for a while. And let's also hope that no one ever needs to be as pro-Israel as Biden has been because nothing as terrible as this ever happens again. My guess is that when you look at the people around her, they are even more cautious than the people around Biden, even more risk averse than the people around Biden have been. So I'm guessing there'll be some kind of drawback.

But, you know, that question of does she take Israel's security seriously? Does she understand the need to defend the security and survival of the world's only Jewish state? Yeah, I don't see any reason to have any anxieties about any of that. I also enjoyed your criticism on the other side in The Atlantic recently of the lefty protesters that defeat Harris, get Trump politics of protest. I think at the Democratic Convention, there was this push to have a pro-Palestinian speaker. I think Harris probably wanted to say yes, but sometimes you're dealing with people who don't want yes. Don't want to take yes for an answer. Yeah. So if you say, look, all we're looking for here is a speaker who's Palestinian or oriented to the Palestinian cause, who has no previous record of incitement of violence. If you can find us one, oh, well now, now you've spoiled everything.

And they wouldn't do it. And this proposal, by the way, comes up like on, it's six months of saying, we're going to destroy your convention. We're going to cause riots. We're going to provoke the police. We're going to make the thing a shambles and use the convention to elect Trump. And then when all of that fails on the third day of the convention, you say, oh, by the way, can you schedule time on the fourth fourth day the nominees day for one of our people and we'll try to find someone who doesn't have a record of inciting violence so so she was trapped i think that she handled quite deftly and i think that the people are expecting so much worse from those protests and they completely fizzled and i think that there were there are obviously people in the audience that have genuine

humanitarian concerns about what is happening in Gaza. And that concern was reflected in several speeches and was received well in the room. And I think that was totally appropriate. I wrote in April of 24 that this fantasy that there was going to be a replay of Chicago 68 was crazy. And I actually did some real work on it. I talked to people who had been there at Chicago 68 in the Democratic Party. What lessons were learned. Security in 1968 was delivered by the Chicago Police Force, which was a poorly trained,

poorly motivated force driven by people full of cultural grievances. So security is now a $50 million federal grant to each convention. Security is organized or planned by the Secret Service. It's super professional. Every branch of the federal capability is there. And the whole principle of how do you protect the right to peacefully protest while also honoring the business of the convention, there are zones for protest where it's allowed and people can go there. And the creation of the zone means that if someone

steps outside the zone, they don't have to attack a police officer before you're allowed to arrest them. If they're outside the zone where they're allowed to be, you can arrest them and not send them to prison, but give them a ticket, detain them and say, you broke the rules that have been in place for every convention since 68. So the final topic, there was a school shooting in Georgia at Appalachee High yesterday, 14-year-olds in custody, four dead, two students, two teachers. He was on the radar of the FBI for making threats at the age of 13. You know, to me, this relates to what we were talking about, about the angry young men online. These stories just always enrage me as they do everybody.

But I think back to the, again, to the shooter that tried to assassinate Donald Trump. And he's not 14, but he's 20 and had access to weapon, access to bullets. And yet all the conversation after that attempt was around rhetoric and what the pundits were saying. And it's just like, how many times do we have to do this when it's the same story? It's the same story over and over again. I don't know.

I know that you have thoughts on this, so I'm just curious. I've written a lot about this a lot. And do they have angry young men in South Korea? They do. Do they have video games in Japan? They do. Do they have marijuana and other drugs in Germany and Korea? They do. Do they have video games in Japan? They do. Do they have marijuana and other drugs in Germany and Sweden? They do. When you're solving a problem, when the

United States is unique in one regard, you look for the variable where the United States is different from other peer societies. And the answer to why the United States has so many of these terrible events, it's so obvious. And the amount of ingenuity that goes into denying the obvious thing, there's a kind of willed stupidity where you say, well, it's video games. Are there video games in Japan? It's angry young men. Are there angry young men in South Korea? How is the United States? There's only one way the United States is different from every other peer country. And that's that there are at this point, something like 450 million weapons floating around the country. Huge increase just in the two years, 2020 and 2021. Anybody can get them. The majority of gun owners do not store their weapons safely, so weapons are stolen. And people

say, well, it was an illegal weapon. The way every illegal weapon, or almost everyone, started as a legal weapon that was improperly stashed. Somebody stole it, and it went into the channels of illegal commerce. The country seems really determined not to notice the obvious answer and not to do anything about it, and that's tragic. And there will be more of these terrible, terrible events until one day Americans decide, we don't want to live like this anymore, and then it will be stopped. Because it can be. Everyone else stops it.

And there are other deterrents. Like, you know, we've cut down on drunk driving, and there's still a lot of beer in the country, right? There are other ways are other deterrents. We've cut down on drunk driving, and there's still a lot of beer in the country. There are other ways to do deterrence. The FBI, I think, showed up to the house of the suspect last year and talked to the father. The father said, yes, I have guns, but the child is never around the guns by themselves. I'm like, here we are. And I mean, there are ways to punish that father. There are ways to make sure that young people can't carry guns outside the home at any time, that it's punishable by law, just like an open container is all this.

You can't do it in a context of a society where the default rule is guns everywhere. Canada, where I am now, has a lot of guns, probably about half as many per capita as the United States, but the guns are overwhelmingly long guns, and they're overwhelmingly hunting pieces. It's very rare for Canadians to have handguns, and almost impossible for them to have AR-15s and weapons like that. And I live in a part of the world where probably almost all of my neighbors own a long gun of one kind or another.

Long guns fire single shots at a time. They're not very useful for school massacres. The weapons that are useful are difficult to get. So I tell Americans a story about what is one of the differences in the gun process in the two countries. And again, a lot of guns in Canada. And Americans flip out, and this I think reveals a lot of what's going on. If you want a handgun in Canada, part of the process is anyone you have lived with in the past five years, any domestic partner, must fill out a form in which she, because it's usually a she, says, I am unbothered by having a gun in the house. And if the police read that form and have any reason to doubt that this was given freely and

sincerely, they will interview the partner. And I say, are you quite sure? Because the overwhelmingly most probable use of a firearm in the United States is to threaten domestic partners. And when I tell them that the police would come and interview your wife or girlfriend and ask them whether she feels comfortable with you having a weapon. Yeah, that's how you get gun safety is by making sure that the kind of person whose wife or girlfriend is afraid of him doesn't get the weapon. That's a great, great start. But Americans regard this as like as if Canada were operating concentration camps. whose wife or girlfriend is afraid of him doesn't get the weapon. So that's a great, great start. But Americans regard this as like, as if Canada were operating concentration camps and they would ask a wife or girlfriend,

are you comfortable with a weapon in your house? In your house too, by the way, the house you live. David Frum, wanting to bring Canadian style statism to America. I appreciate you very much. Thank you as always for coming on the Bulwark Podcast. Tomorrow, we're going to be live in Dallas tonight. I've got Kinzinger, Crystal, Sarah Longwell. We'll be playing the show for you guys tomorrow. Thank you, as always, for coming on the Bullwark Podcast. Tomorrow, we're going to be live in Dallas tonight. I've got Kinzinger, Crystal, Sarah Longwell.

We'll be playing the show for you guys tomorrow. Check it out then. I'm interviewing Colin Allred on Saturday. You'll get that over the weekend or on Monday as well. We'll see you all then. Thanks for listening. Peace. Thank you. I don't even know what But he's coming for you Yeah, he's coming for you

All the other kids with the punked up kicks He's better off, better off And I don't run my gun All the other kids with the punked up kicks He's better off, better off Faster than my bullet All the other kids with the punked up kicks He's better off, better off faster than my mother. All the other kids with the pumped up kicks. He's better off, better off.

I don't run my gun. All the other kids with the pumped up kicks. He's better off, better off. Faster than my mother. Daddy works a long day. He's coming late. He's coming late. And he's bringing me a surprise. We'll be right back. I love you. The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.