The Bulwark Podcast - Jonathan Chait: Trump Broke the Scales

Episode Date: April 12, 2024

Pound for pound, the media treats Trump better than any Democrat. Plus, talking about abortion in a way that wins the most votes, NPR and identity politics, Biden gets too little credit for bipartisan deals, and the first big sign of softening support for Israel on the populist right. Jon Chait joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod. show notes VOTE HERE for Will Saletan's 'Corruption of Lindsey Graham' podcast O.J. verdict live on Oprah The guy behind the 1864 Arizona abortion law Tim’s Playlist Goose x Vampire Weekend 

Hey, y'all. I had a great weekend pod with Jonathan Chait. We went long, though, so there's no mailbag this week. But as always, we got that Spotify playlist with the outro songs in the show notes. And while we're doing music, if you are a Vampire Weekend or a Goose Lover, they did a crossover last night. And I'm also going to put the YouTube link to that in the show notes for an elder millennial white. That's kind of like Nirvana. So anyway, I hope you enjoy that. I want to pimp out also Beg to Differ with Mona Charon every week. That is coming out as well as the focus group. You can get both of those on our YouTube page. Focus group this week. It's going to be a little interesting. So I would recommend you tune into both their offer and I think different stuff from what you're getting on this podcast. And we love and appreciate Mona and Sarah. Finally, Will Salatin. We've got one more week left to vote for his podcast about Lindsey Graham. We'll put that link in the show notes as well.

Crowded show notes this Friday. So check that out. Go vote for Will Salatin if you haven't. And up on the other side, New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait. Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It's Friday. It's the weekend. Well, actually, it's Thursday for me. We're taping this Thursday afternoon because I am officiating my little brother's wedding this weekend. So if any big news happens on Friday morning, that's why we didn't get to it. So I'm delighted to be here today with Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine, who I love to read,

who I find to be almost always right. And yet, for some reason, you're deeply loathed on the internet. Sometimes people get very mad about Jonathan Chait, the center left progressive Democrat. I want to start there, Jonathan. Why? Can you give us some self-analysis? What is it about you that draws so much ire on the internet? It's hard to answer that without being flattering to myself.

Please be flattering to yourself. Look, I think there's an assumption that you're supposed to be a team player in this business. And I think increasingly people are held to the standards in journalism that are applied to political activists, which is that incredibly strong incentive to be counterintuitive, to show that you were a tough, independent-minded liberal by punching at your own team and to show you weren't just a hack. And I felt pressure to do that when I didn't want to do it, and I resisted that pressure. And I feel like that incentive is completely flipped around in progressive journalism to the point where you really stand out more if you're a liberal who's willing to disagree with other people on the progressive side. So when I think you're talking about hate, you're talking about people on the left who hate me. I mean, I've always had people

on the right who's hated me. That's been consistent, but it's been a real increase in people on the left. Yeah, you have a pretty broad brush of people that dislike you, I notice. We share the anti-anti-Trump folks. Yes. You know, it's the, I notice. We share the anti-anti-Trump folks. Yes. You know, it's the narcissism of small differences. The anti-anti-Trump folks really hate us. Really hate us. And then kind of hate you. And then, like, they have to pretend to hate, like, Bernie and stuff at this point.

They don't even really hate them anymore. And then the far leftists really hate you. A lot. And, like, sometimes they get mad at us, but not really as much. So, you know, it's kind of, it's the family feud thing. Okay, well, you flattered yourself. We have a lot of policy we want to get into but before we do policy i want to flatter myself a little bit because the last three podcast guests we've had none of whom were old enough to remember the oj car chase so i'm starting to like feel like i need

a walker and so i'm hoping that you can make me feel younger by telling me what you remember from the late oj simpson maybe his football career or something football career you think i remember his football career i do not remember his football career i was born in i was born in 1972 i don't know when was his football career i think he retired in like 1980 or something okay you were eight i thought maybe i remember his football career i remember his i remember the car chase interrupted the NBA finals in 1994. So I was old enough to remember that. And where did you fall in the murder? Because that was something.

I did not commit the murder. That was an inter-left. I was not in that part of the country. I have an alibi. The likelihood that OJ committed the murder? Pretty high for you? Oh, OJ, yeah. No, I definitely thought that OJ committed the murder. Were you writing for TNR at the time? No, I was

in college. So I graduated, so I actually was out of in the professional workforce when the trial happened. But yeah, no, it was similar to Trump in some ways, right? I mean, Trump is kind of OJ for white people, right? I mean, I'm not saying that there's an equivalent legitimacy of the grievances. I mean, I'm not saying that there's a equivalent legitimacy of the grievances. I mean, I feel like black people had extremely legitimate grievances with the LAPD and cops in general. But also similarly, OJ was very weird vessel for their grievances. Like Trump is a weird vessel for rural whites grievances. Right. Totally wrong grievances. Right. So you had

with African-Americans, you had like completely legitimate fair grievances about police abuse and not trusting the police for valid reasons. And so then you have a guy who's come along being charged with murder and large numbers of black people think he's innocent or support him in some way, even if they at some level know he's not innocent. And it was really mystifying, I think, for a lot of white people as to why this was. I mean, I think it took us a while to kind of understand the depths and the pervasiveness of police abuse as the cause of that response. Yeah, I do. I agree with that. There was definitely some legitimate grievances. I will say, if you think that our racial and our kind of political dividing lines are intense

now, I'm going to put in the show notes. I just watched the Oprah. Do you remember this? Oprah's audience watched live the OJ result. It was a bad call for Oprah. Let's just say, when you look at the response in the crowd, and it makes me uncomfortable just talking about it. But if you're curious, people can watch that in the show notes. All right, let's get serious. Policy stuff. Yesterday, the Department of

Justice is going to finalize the rule that was part of the 2022 bipartisan gun deal that President Biden signed. One of the elements of that was closing the gun show loophole. And it was so important to bring up because the first time this was really, and it had been discussed in many circles forever, but like where it became a hot button politically, it was introduced to Congress, was after Columbine in 1996. We're doing a late 90s theme here with OJ and Columbine to start in 1996. So here we are, a quarter century later, and it finally gets done. Anyway, I think there's a lot that can be learned from that. And it also says a lot about Joe Biden that he doesn't ever get credit

for these kinds of things. Just kind of wondering your reaction to the gun show loophole and that gun deal, and then just generally what it says about the Biden presidency. Yeah, I mean, I would say compared to what I expected after Democrats had Senate control, so full control of government, albeit narrow full control of government in early 21. Biden has produced less in the way of liberal legislation than I hoped and expected in terms of changes to the welfare state. Really? Yeah. Okay, let's go through those. What did you hope and expect more of? I really thought they could get a permanent expansion of the child tax credit. JVL writes about this yesterday in the triad. This is like, I wouldn't even,

I barely called that liberal. That was like a Reformacon conservative thing. I mean, both sides wanted it, but like that was a Marco Rubio platform provision in 2014, right? And so it is kind of crazy that that didn't get made permanent. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, I didn't really buy the conservatives. I mean, I didn't really buy the conservatives. I mean, that's redistributive and conservatives hate redistribution. So I thought in terms of major redistributive changes to the welfare state, that was to me like a minimal expectation that they didn't get, you know, maybe like a child care program or some kind of social safety expansion for children and families.

Paid leave kind of thing. Paid leave, right. That sort of thing. They didn't succeed in getting that. And that, to me, was a disappointment. Where he's exceeded my expectations was in his ability to get bipartisan legislation. Now, those things don't exist at the same scale as the kind of liberal welfare state changes.

But I was pretty cynical when Biden said I would get this town working again. I'll work with Republicans. We'll get some things done. We'll get, you know, we'll get some small things that we agree on. I thought, no way. But he did it. And I think the gun show loophole is a good example of a really solid expectations beating record in that department.

Yeah. I've heard a lot from people in the gun safety movement, in part because my status as a former Republican for whom this is an issue that I'm passionate about, that is, you know, in line with progressive folks. And given the scale of the problem of gun deaths in this country, right, it can seem small, but like, when you just think about the mass shooting problem, right, as opposed to the, you know, handgun crime. Much larger problem of endemic shooting. Exactly. Just limiting the ways in which those radicalized, oftentimes young people, can get guns is very

important, right? And this was like one of the easy ways for them to do it. So it was good, meaningful in that sense. And radicalized old people. I think that the Biden expectations beating, though, I feel like he gets very little credit for the expectations beating on the bipartisan side of things. I think in part because maybe some of the left don't want to acknowledge that there are a handful of normal Republicans left. I don't know. I feel very comfortable saying that the Republican Party is totally radicalized and

yet Joe Biden still managed to make a couple of deals with them. I don't think that those two things are in conflict. I think sometimes people do feel like they are. And so they don't want to say it. Yeah. I mean, I think the mechanism by which a lot of these deals get made is just to take them out of the news. So, you know, there's this phrase that's used secret Congress and some of it is secret Congress,

right? We're like, literally Congress will just emerge. Like we, we hammered out this deal. No one knows about it. And here's the bill and we're voting on it today. Some of these deals aren't secret Congress. The bipartisan infrastructure legislature wasn't secret Congress, but it wasn't heavily covered. And that's why it passed, right? Because if it becomes a big part of the news, then it becomes enmeshed in political conflict. So if you really do it on the down low, that's how you get some of these deals done. So the flip side is that's how you get them done,

but at the cost of getting a lot of news coverage. It just kind of comes and goes without getting a lot of attention. It's the conflict. It's the stories that pit the parties against each other that really lodge in people's memories. Or if it comes and goes and you have it done and then Donald Trump decides that, you know, the Republicans aren't allowed to do it, as we've seen a couple of times recently. That's true. That's true. Then no, Trump can actually sort of raise the salience of some of these issues. As somebody that's a pro-choice kind of from the left, you wrote about Carrie Lake's embarrassing abortion flip. Yeah. We've been kind of discussing a lot from our sort of

perspective. I'm always encouraging the Biden campaign and the Democrats to kind of embrace Biden's kind of reluctance on this issue. Actually, they should campaign on it aggressively, but that the rhetoric should be aimed more towards a broad audience. Some pro-choice folks don't love that. I'm curious what your take is on, I mean, the Carrie Lake thing is just so embarrassing and how Democrats should best be able to leverage it. Let me start with your first point because I've written about that as well. The pro-choice groups, like a lot of progressive groups, have a mission to push public debate as far left as they can. So as part of their mission, they have lobbied Democrats with enormous success to stop talking about abortion the way Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for a while talked about it, right? Safe, legal, and rare.

We respect the rights of religious people that disagree, but the state shouldn't be intervening. Instead, they want people to talk about abortion in the most positive, unambiguous possible terms. So it's a kind of Overton window play of pushing the public debate, but that comes at a cost of those politicians being able to build the broadest possible coalition. So if you're Joe Biden, yes, you could talk about abortion like your audience is pro-choice activists, but that comes at the expense of your ability to actually win those marginal undecided voters. And he's instead talking about it the way he always has, you know, as a kind of Catholic who's conflicted about abortion. I don't love abortion, but I don't want the state making these decisions for us.

And he's taken incredible amounts of flack from the pro-choice groups for doing that. And here's where they really have a choice between, do you want Joe Biden to win? Or do you want to just focus maniacally on this long-term plan to change the contours of the abortion debate? I understand why they're doing it. I would like to change the contours of the abortion debate, but I really want to win the election. That should be the number one goal and that should be their number one goal, too, and I think they should get off his back. I have to say, if I had to add, the first one, they put out two this week on abortion, but the first one featuring the woman in Texas, this one I thought was so powerful, because

I'm looking at it, I'm like, this appeals to people in my life, like me, who are pro-life. I kind of hate calling myself pro-life at this point, because now it's like, to say you're pro-life, it's kind of like the word conservative, it means that you you're on board with the zero week 1864 law, which I never was at any time. But yeah, but that one to value an unborn child's life. Right. And his ad this week was featuring this woman that like wanted to have a baby. We had a miscarriage, was unable to get the procedure because of the draconian Texas laws, which are disgusting. And those laws are going to maybe prevent her from having another baby.

So that, that it brings in the maximum number of people, right? So pro-choice people are rightly outraged about that woman's situation. But even people who are like fully pro-life could look at this ad and be like, this situation is terrible. This woman wanted to have a baby and she needed a lifesaving medical

procedure and she wasn't able to like Like, we need to fix that. Yeah. I mean, I hope you're just going to continue to see these ads everywhere between now and November because it's unbelievably powerful. I mean, it almost takes your breath away to listen to these horrible stories of what's happening to women and is going to continue to happen to women around the country. And Republicans, I think, are just in denial about the fact that their policies produce these outcomes inevitably, and they have no way to stop those awful tragedies from happening over and over. And they have no way to talk about it, as mentioned by Carrie Lake this week. Right. Carrie Lake, you're right. So in case you missed it, Carrie Lake earlier, two years ago in 2022, was saying the abortion law she had is the 1864 one. She cited

it by name. It was AR 313-. She cited it with incredibly specific reference to the statute. And then this week, she said, oh, that wasn't the law I meant. I meant something else. But she cited the case number. It was hilarious. Did you see, I need to put this also in the show notes. I'm pulling it up. I gotta get this guy's name. Did you see the story of the person who actually authored the 1864 territorial abortion law, William Claude Jones? No. It's really amazing. We'll put it in the show notes.

William Claude Jones abandoned his first wife and three children in Missouri. His second wife was this 12-year-old Mexican girl who he abducted. Wife. And then when that was revealed revealed he had to resign his job then he moved again had a third wife 15 year old girl obviously women couldn't vote at the time his Wikipedia page William Claude Jones was

a American politician fabulist and quote pursuer of nubile females oh wow that's that's Carrie's man that's Carrie's man in Amsterdam right there that's unbelievable I didn't know that's that's carrie's man that's carrie's man in amsterdam right there that's unbelievable i didn't know that yeah it's really good you had an article recently you have many you have a few that caught my attention i'm just going to pop through them all here the first one

was about schumer this was a couple weeks ago now but it was when chuck schumer essentially called for israel and said that israel it's time for them to move on from the netanyahu government. This is why I like to read John Chait because I'm always like, I don't know what John Chait's position is going to be on that. I could have seen you coming down on either side of that controversy because it was an intro left controversy. Jared Moskowitz was on this podcast that he didn't like that Schumer said that. You were on the side of saying that, yeah, if Israel wants what's best for its people, it should be listening to Chuck Schumer. So talk about that. Yeah. So, you know, Schumer is basically trying to let the Israeli public know that the American alliance isn't going to last forever if they want to follow Bibi Netanyahu's one state course. It's gone on for a while, but I think that essentially they

should have the information that if Israel wants to be a one state ruling over the Palestinians without any serious effort at a two state solution, in the long run, it's going to be isolated. And to the extent it has an alliance with the United States, it's going to be an alliance with the Republican Party, you know, that's intermittent and depends on Republican control of government. The Democratic Party can't last with that kind of Israeli policy. And a lot of Israel supporters, not all of them Republicans, objected by saying, how dare you tell the Israeli people how to vote? Because what he did was he said, you need to get Netanyahu out of there. You need to get new elections. And he said, you're interfering with their elections. But I think he's doing a favor for the Israelis, because I'm not sure that all the Israeli people understand how precarious the situation Netanyahu has placed them in vis-a-vis the United States, that Netanyahu really has placed them on a course for a solely Republican-focused alliance with the

United States. And Israel's ability to have a bipartisan support from the United States is fracturing and can't last much longer than Netanyahu. They deserve that information. I think Netanyahu has been lying to them about that. He's been convincing them forever that he can manage the American alliance just fine, and that's not really true. What would you say to critics from, you know, kind of the pro-Israel left, Zionist left that would say, okay, but a lot of the threats from the left to Israel are based in anti-Semitism, that they are not credible, that they are, saying that, he's basically throwing in with those critics and kind of undermining the credibility of people on the left, in the West, in America that want to work constructively with Israel. He's only throwing in with those critics if your conceit is that there are only two positions on the issue. And if you think there are only two positions on

the issue, then yes, you have to pick one side or the other. But if there are only two positions on the issue. And if you think there are only two positions on the issue, then yes, you have to pick one side or the other. But if there are only two positions on the issue, then we're dead. The whole idea of liberal Zionism is completely distinct from the left-wing radical critique of Israel that's in vogue now among young left-wing activists and the one state fetish on the right that completely disregards the needs and humanity of Palestinian people. I think there's one other weakness potentially with the argument that you're making from the other side, which is that Netanyahu is assuming that he will have support for the one state solution on the right. Because I mean, I think that the support for Israel right now is weakening on the activist right. And, you know, I think that you see that with Tucker Carlson.

Tucker Carlson. Yeah, that was fascinating. I mean, it feels like I've been spending my whole career waiting for the far right to look at his pro-Israel policy and say, wait a second, those are Jewish people that we're supporting. Why are we doing that? We don't support Jewish people in other contexts. And I mean, I'd be glad it hasn't happened yet, but I feel like anti-Israel slash anti-Semitism is the natural resting home of Tucker Carlson style populism. Yeah. And I think that the Republican class that feels more pro-Israel, that are more in line with what Likud is doing, I think a lot of times has blinders on to the potential threats from their own side on this. And one example of that is Donald Trump. I don't know. It's interesting. If you actually listen to Donald Trump talk, he doesn't sound as strong in Israel as the Donald

Trump apologist types present him as when they talk about Donald Trump's policy. You wrote about this exchange with you, Hewitt. Let's listen to a little bit of it. And I'm not sure that I'm loving the way they're doing it because you got to have victory. You have to have a victory. And it's taking a long time. And the other thing is I hate they put out tapes all the time. Every night they're releasing tapes of a building falling down. They shouldn't be releasing tapes like that. That's why they're losing the PR war. Israel is absolutely losing the PR war.

That's how I read your interview. I read your interview saying they're losing the PR war. They've got to stop releasing bad video and win the war by going into Rafa. They're releasing the most heinous, most horrible tapes of buildings falling down. So two places we can go with that. The first one is one you wrote about, which is that he does seem to have a lot more empathy for the buildings than for the humans. Right. He's a sociopath who's unable to feel any kind of compassion for human suffering. So most of us see people starving and dying and we feel bad for those people, but he can't feel that. But he does see the buildings coming down. And I feel like as a developer, that really just gnaws at him. The waste of capital, someone's investment has totally collapsed. A well-constructed building thrown to waste. Right. I mean, think of the rents that could have been collected. It's awful, the landlords.

But, you know, also that's Hugh Hewitt trying to feed him a line. Like, you're still an arch-conservative Zionist. You're still an arch-conservative Zionist. And he's just kind of wriggling away. And I think it's because he understands that the left is tearing itself up over Israel. And he just wants to stand to the side and let that happen because he's definitely collecting votes or if not votes, the absence of votes for Joe Biden from people who are to Biden's left on Israel. And that's a part of his

constituency, especially in Michigan. And he doesn't want to raise the salience of his own thinking on the Middle East and wants it entirely focused on Biden. Well, and the anti-Semites in his constituency, which Donald Trump is Trump is Donald Trump, who like consistently says things about Jewish people that if they were said by a member of the squad would, you know, have Mitch McConnell marching in the streets demanding their resignation. Right. Like, you know, you people know about money and, you know, you people follow your leader, Bibi Netanyahu. It's just like the grossest stereotypical stuff, right? I mean, he's always been around Jews, but like, you know, he respects Jews, you know, as people who count his money. And, you know, he thinks Jews are smart and could be his lawyers.

But, you know, he is in some ways like a real 20th century anti-Semite too. Yeah. And this is a very frustrating thing for me. So you wrote about the Republican billionaires who are no longer upset about the insurrection or coming back on board to Trump. You mentioned Alan Levine. We've talked about a couple of times in this podcast, Nikki Haley donor that I had to

exchange with on MSNBC and in the green room. And he had said he was not whatever Trump would now come back around. But you're hearing this a lot. I've seen now Dan Senor say this on social media. I've seen Jonah Goldberg say it on social media. Both people that I respect, I think have fair critiques of Joe Biden's policies at times, but they're all saying that there is frustration in this, whatever you want to call it, neocon class. It's not all Jewish people. It's also pro-military, kind of traditional national security conservatives. So people in that class are mad at Joe Biden for the ways in which he's distanced himself from Israel's offensive in this war, even though Joe Biden was stalwart with Bibi for many months longer than I expected

him to be. And there have been other pro-Israel people like Richard Haass or the pro-Israel centrists, folks who have said, you know that the suffering is just too great, like something has to happen here. And we're finally seeing some alleviation of that a little bit with aid finally getting into Israel. But the question I have is with these guys, it does seem like they just have total blinders on to what Donald Trump actually thinks and says about this. Like this notion that Donald Trump is certain to be a more reliable partner seems like preposterous to me. I don't understand what it's based in. Well, it's certainly based in the fact that he has no humanitarian sympathy for the Palestinians. He definitely is aligned with them on that.

Yeah, that's true. Right, like Joe Biden's torn between his support for Israel as a Jewish state and his desire for Palestinian people not to suffer. Now, how you come down balancing those things is really difficult. So he's torn. He's cross-pressured. Donald Trump isn't cross-pressured that way, in the sense that like Donald Trump doesn't care what happens to the Palestinians. But it's also true that he's not committed to Israel's security also in any kind of principled way, as Joe Biden is, right? He's totally transactional. He's totally immoral that, you know, like if you told him he could gain, you know, like a million dollars for like Israel to disappear forever,

but the million dollars would be in his pocket. He would take the million dollars, right? He doesn't, he doesn't care about Israel. He doesn't care about anything. And, you know, he's also in some ways, you know, financially in, in hawk to the Gulf kingdoms, which are willing to deal with Israel in a lot of ways, but also aren't exactly Israel's best friends in the world. I just want to clarify, because I don't want to misrepresent what Dan Senor and Jonah Goldberg had said. They were making the case that it was not, they weren't speaking to themselves, but that a lot of folks in their world, in their orbit, were saying that they were starting, you know, lean back towards Trump and become more Trump sympathetic because they were so upset about Biden's handling of Israel.

Anyway, I find that preposterous. I've seen more often it's less of a criticism of Biden than they seem to be reacting to the left. Yeah, the campus left. Yeah, right. I mean, Levine's essay is all focused on the campus left, which is amazing. Like 75% of his message of why I'm voting for Trump is citing people who hate Joe Biden. Who hate him. Who hate him, who are literally- Who call him Genocide Joe Biden. They call him Genocide Joe. They're literally attempting to stop him from campaigning.

Like the only reason that Joe Biden is able to campaign at all is that he has security that's able to stop those people from disrupting him. Like they would not let him utter a word in public if they could. They despise him. And they're saying those people as if they're advising Joe Biden in the Middle East. It's crazy. This is the thing that makes me pull my hair out more than anything. There are plenty of ways to rationalize voting for Donald Trump, and we can go through all of them individually and knock them all down.

The most galling to me is that I will not vote for Joe Biden because there are campus leftists who literally would be happy if he died, like who want him dead, like that hate Joe Biden. Who want him dead. Many of them want Donald Trump to be president. I hate the campus leftists, so I'm going to join with them. And I've joined with them to get the exact same election outcome that they are trying to engineer. Yeah. If you just watch these TikToks or watch these videos that go viral of far leftists, they're basically saying, I hate the neoliberals and I hate the liberal left so much that I want to see them punished. And who do they hate?

Donald Trump. And so Donald Trump winning will make them so sad that I will go along with that. And that will be their punishment for being complicit in this genocide. So these rich, you know, folks that live in, you know, the pockets of prosperity throughout this country are going to donate to Donald Trump, because they're so mad at people who, who share their dislike for Joe Biden, just for different reasons, it makes no sense. And they're not mad. And for some reason, Donald Trump is on an all-held account for Tucker or Nick Fuentes or people that he dines with. I mean, they're people that go to his rallies that are anti-Semitic, that hate Jews, that don't give an F about Israel. And they're wearing the red hat and they're at the

rallies cheering, but yet Donald Trump isn't held accountable for them. But Joe Biden is held accountable for the kids on UCLA's campus that are protesting. Right. One of the important lasting changes Trump has made to American politics, and I've written about this a number of times, is that he's activated white nationalists as part of the Republican Party coalition. Before Trump came along, those people were totally locked out. They had no place on the right. Partisan politics didn't interest them, right? As far as they were concerned, it was a uniparty. Both the parties were terrible.

They had no investment in partisan politics. Donald Trump finally was speaking enough of their language for them to say, we care about this guy. Now, he wasn't giving them everything they wanted. He wasn't speaking entirely in their terms, but he was giving them something. He was giving them an investment in the two-party system. And they are now in the door. They're part of the coalition. They're on the team. And that's going to last after Trump. I mean, Ron DeSantis has been afraid to alienate Nazis during his campaign. He understood that he could only go so far in terms of alienating those people because they're

part of the coalition. And it's not like, oh, there weren't racists or whatever. You know, there wasn't dog whistle messaging. I got all that stuff happened. But like, being actually part of the party infrastructure and feeling like you're part of the team and getting engaged and organizing within the party apparatus. Like it is different. I mean, like this is happening. We tellaac arnstorf on on thursday's pod and it's like you see this at the local level in miami-dade people that are going to the meetings now are part of the three percenters are part of these racist groups i knew i still see it in social media it happened overnight where i was very active in right-wing

social media you know for years and then all of sudden, Trump comes on the escalator in 2016. And 17, you see these people that are like, white genocide, you know, 420 is starting messaging you and the Pepe account. So he galvanized and activated that group to make them feel like they have power, and they still do. I'm not speaking as someone who admired the Republican Party before 2016. I was an extremely harsh critic of the Republican Party. But you have to recognize degrees of bad. They have a totally different way of thinking about racism and anti-Semitism now than they did then. I have a media roundtable I want to do with you.

I don't love broad media criticism, but I do like talking about specific media figures. Individual people. And yeah, and their motivations. I have a couple of articles that you've written, but I want to start with an article that was in the Free Press, which is Barry Weiss's outlet. It was written by a longtime NPR reporter. It was titled, I've been at NPR for 25 years.

Here is how we lost America's trust. One of the lines that I pulled out of this, race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity and had to enter it into a centralized tracking system. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to start talking about race. Monthly dialogues were offered for women of color, men of color. I was interested in the piece.

That was what I pulled out because I think that that is like pretty blatant for anybody who listens to NPR, just like the degree of change to which every story they have has to have kind of some identity lens on it, which I think is concerning. There were some other things in the article that I thought were like,

the other guy, he criticized NPR for taking the Russia threat a little too seriously. So there were some parts of the article that made me think the guy had been a little bit red pilled. And I didn't agree with all of his criticisms of NPR for taking the Russia threat a little too seriously. So there were some parts of the article that made me think the guy had been a little bit red-pilled. And I didn't agree with all of his criticisms of NPR. But I'm wondering what your thoughts are. I mean, he led by saying that Mueller found no collusion, which is just wrong. That's like, do we have any editors here? Right.

I mean, what a terrible example to hook your argument on. I do think he has a broader point. And I do think his critique about social liberalism is true of a lot of media. I mean, media bias is a really complex subject. And I feel like we could just get sucked into an endless discussion with endless caveats, you know, yes, but yes, but I think on the whole, I would say siloed identity politics coverage is very, very left wing in the mainstream media. So like all these organs have, not all of them, but most of them have dedicated beats, you know, race, gender, things like that. And those beats tend to basically just regurgitate talking points and themes from progressive activists and treat them as authority figures and not apply any skepticism to their claims at all. Traditional political journalism, I think, still works pretty much the way it has for the past however many decades. It's still the same

kind of structure in the Times, in the Post, and even in the NPR story about some bill in Washington. You're going to introduce the topic. You'll say, here's what the Republicans say. Here's what the Democrats say. You'll try to be objective. I don't think it's changed a whole lot. I think conservatives tend to lump it all in one big brush and treat the media as if it's as biased as Fox News. It's not as biased as Fox News. There is some bias there. I don't think they're very careful about distinguishing where the bias exists and where it doesn't. I agree with that. And I don't even want to quibble with the political side of this. You could go around all day on the political criticism. I think the criticism of places like NPR,

the part of the article that rang true to me is that at times it feels almost alienating. We're like, I'm pro-identity politics. I gotta tell you, I got woke, you know, I have a black daughter. I definitely did the thing where it's like, oh man, I can't find a black ballerina at the toy store. And like all that sorts of little things that I might've thought in the past

were kind of minor complaints, like started to hit home. And I was like, oh man, I really overlooked some of this. And obviously there are much more serious examples of that. And so I'm for lifting up diverse voices, being conscious of that. I'm trying really hard about to do that on this podcast, but the NPR thing, there's balance in all things. And it's like, there's the whole thing where it's like, there's an oil spill. And rather than talking about the impact on the oil spill to the whole community, it's like, we're going to talk about the non-binary indigenous, you know, and everything has to be

through a specific identity lens. And I think a lot of times the left criticism of this that resonates with me is that sometimes it's like, no, actually the problem is the poor people are getting screwed. The problem is like one specific identity that's getting, you know, and so I don't know. I think that's a fair criticism of NPR. And it seems like this guy tried to speak to that and was, well, it's kind of brushed aside. Yeah, no, there's certainly the rise of the idea of that as a totalizing frame that can explain everything that's happening in the world. And it's a really, you know, a reductive way of looking at the world, where you're not just opening yourself up to critique and say, hey, maybe we've been looking at this from the perspective of white people and we need to expand our vision and see how some of these stories look from other perspectives and see what we've been missing. But using race and identity as totalizing lenses to explain everything that's happening and just to have a kind of moral binary approach.

So I think that's a fair critique of NPR and other media outlets that have used too much of that kind of way of looking at the world in their coverage. But I think especially in these siloed identity beats, that's where it's really most pronounced. Yeah. So the article was in the Free Press, which was an outlet you did a profile on a while ago, Barry's outlet. Her outlet is having extreme success. It's at the top of the charts on Substack. I think that, you know, we're number three. We're doing pretty good here at the Bulwark, but she, you know, has a lot of readers. It's had a lot of success. There's one big complaint I have about it, which I think is the one that you have, but how did you assess it after spending some time with the free press? Yeah, it was a mixed assessment. I think they do some good work. And I think there needs to be conservative journalism. That's real journalism. It's not

just conservative movement. Right, right. Takes in just like conservative movement activism, just communicating through quasi journalistic means. Yeah. Disguised as a news, disguised as a news opposition research shop. And I wrote about this a lot and why we did it. Like what exactly was the difference between America rising, the opposition research firm that I started and like the Washington examiner, like not much, actually,

they got the credibility for being a news outlet and we were a political outlet was basically the only difference. Right. No, you need like, you know, a place for people who are journalists and think like journalists and have conservative views because they can find stories that a lot of coverage of the Republican Party and Trump is just is more hackish. It's more partisan than it ought to be. And I think that's they're not finding stories that the liberal media is missing. They're just kind of regurgitating the same kind of Fox News tropes in those areas. So I feel like it's really uneven. I describe it this way. I think that whether you're on central, left, center, right,

anyone in this contrarian center, like I only get to tie you be next. He fits in this in this role. If you look at the world, if you look at America right now and you assess that the biggest threats are from left wing progressive activists activists who are, you know, getting into various institutions and making people put their pronouns in bios and using Latinx. Like, if you think that is the biggest threat to America, then you're going to spend most of your time talking about that and the associated problems with that. If you think the biggest threat to America is the looming authoritarian threat coming from Donald Trump, a lot of those things, those complaints start to look pretty silly, like even if you think the biggest threat to america is the looming authoritarian threat coming from donald trump a lot of those things those complaints start to look pretty silly like even if you agree with them and like that is i think my main frustration with them is sometimes

you go to their home page you know we have an 1864 abortion law in arizona we have a racist lunatic that is tied in the polls and wants to turn the country into something ranging from berlusconi to mussolini. And that seems to be an urgent national matter. And that doesn't even appear on the page. But we're going to spend many, many articles quibbling about what is happening on college campuses. That starts to look like just a totally wrong judgment to those of us who view the second group as the bigger threat.

Yeah, we're in agreement on which is the bigger threat. As you noted at the outset of this, I do criticize the left from time to time, probably 20%, maybe 25% of my arguments are directed against the left, you know, 75, 80% against the right. I do think it's important to criticize the left. And the reason is that the right went crazy because the mainstream conservatives didn't stop the far right from taking over their party. And once they became alarmed at it, it was too late. They had too much power. You actually have to have those arguments and you have to have those arguments before it's too late, before they take over. You know it's like i i get complaints from people on my side you know saying like why are you complaining about the weeds in our garden when the other side the other lawn of the guys across

the street is nothing but weeds just because i don't want our lawn to look like their lawn there's like a chupacabra walking through, like wading through the weeds, like grab, I'm trying to like make the, make the metaphor even worse, right? You know, there's some, there's a alligator hiding in the weeds, ready to jump out and eat people. Yeah, no, it's, I mean, weeds, weeds may not be the strongest, the strongest metaphor I could, I could use, but you've got to have those arguments before it's too late. And, you know, I wrote a piece in New York Magazine about the rise of the illiberal left in 2015. And the most common response I got, other than, oh, you're a white man, and you're just angry about your own privilege, was, oh, who cares? It's just a bunch of left-wing college kids. They have no power. But now, pretty much those same people are

saying, Biden has to listen to these left-wing college kids or he's going to lose the election. So we've gone from they're too small and powerless to be reckoned with to they're too big and powerful to be argued against. Overnight, there was not even like an hour in between when they were not neither too big nor too small and we were allowed to argue with them. So these are really disingenuous arguments people can make about ignoring problems on your own side. And the reason they make those arguments is they want to just smooth over the whole coalition and keep peace on their side. And that's fundamentally what Taibbi's doing.

When he says the Republican Party has no institutional power, he can't possibly believe that, right? I mean, he understands they control the Supreme Court. They've controlled the Supreme Court for 50 years. I don't think so, actually. I want to get to Taibbi because they're coming from different places because Taibbi comes from the left and Barry is more, I guess, from the center or right, whatever you want to call it, the free press. I think it might be genuine that they both look at, they think Donald Trump is a clown and that they live in liberal environs. Barry lives in LA. Taibbi, I think, lives in New Jersey. You know, they're wealthy.

They're successful. Everyone around them is a liberal. Donald Trump is preposterous to them. They survived the first four years of Donald Trump. They're not a poor woman in Alabama that needs an abortion. They're not an immigrant coming across the border that is trying to flee terror. And in their worlds, there really isn't that great of a threat. I don't want to sound like, oh, you have white privilege thing, but it's like, they do. They live in like a cloistered

bubble where the things that bother them and that threaten them are from the left. And some of them are legitimate. Some of them are absurd complaints, but they look at Trump and I think that they think that, oh, the Republicans, they don't have any real power. Like the big corporations don't even like them anymore. Taibbi's actual line that he wrote was, the Republicans have very little institutional power nationally. That's absurd. Like, how do you write that sentence? How do you write that sentence?

I mean, I understand what he's saying about culture. They control the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court. Right. Like, he's smart enough to understand He controls the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court. Right. He's smart enough to understand that the federal government has power, that the judiciary has power, the House of Representatives, branches of government like the United States government has power. That's not a new idea for Matt Taibbi. What about the statement I think that both Taibbi and Burry would say, which is, all right, I might have overstated it by saying the Republicans don't really have power. And Donald Trump is kind of a clown. I do believe that. But what I'm really talking about is that there's all these journalists out there, NBC, ABC, AP, you know, CNN, and they're

all focused on mean, bad orange man. And so and there needs to be a counterbalance to that. And so we're just going to ignore bad orange man, and we're going to focus on bad liberal prosecutor DA. I mean, I think that would be a good argument if conservative media didn't exist. And I feel like a lot of conservatives live in this mental world in which conservative media doesn't exist, because they talk about the media like they're only talking about the non-conservative media. But conservative media is enormous. Fox News is by far the biggest television network, by far. That was Tybee's

other argument is that, well, no one's out there holding the Democrats and the left accountable, like other than the biggest network in the country. So again, that also just absolutely makes no sense whatsoever. It really is wishing or imagining the entire conservative apparatus from its media to its political arms totally out of existence. It's fantastical. And also who took down Andrew Cuomo and Bob Menendez? And I think that's the other thing. Like, sure, yes, I will stipulate that on balance, the mainstream media is focused a lot more on Trump corruption for good reason, by the way, I don't know, I'm always like, I think it's very hard to be the New York Times. Because like, if one of the major parties is run by somebody that lies every day, and is a criminal,

and is a bigot, right, then that in some ways is like the only news every day, right? It's sort of like, what am I supposed to do not talk about this. So I do think it it presents a problem. But like, Tucker Carlson didn't create a right wing New York Times, despite the fact that he said he was going to, right? It's not Fox that's breaking these things. Every once in a while, Fox will break a story, but not really. Fox has fired most of their actual reporters. It's the liberal, like most of the bad things you know about Democrats were uncovered by the mainstream media. Absolutely. And Donald Trump still benefits from a lower standard in the mainstream media. He's still treated better, pound for pound, than any Democrat. And the reason is because he has so many scandals, lies, and offenses that

he's just completely broken the scale, right? It's like, you know, as you've discussed many times, right? It's just impossible to hold him to normal standards because he's so far outside the realm of normal that it's just that there's not enough space. There's not enough superlatives to capture the epic nature of his corruption and evil and racism, et cetera, et cetera. And then meanwhile, there's also no comparison

between the way Fox handles him and how the mainstream media handles Democrats. It's like Mike Pence comes out against Fox. It isn't even mentioned. I did not monitor Fox. I'm basing this on someone else's report. But assuming the report is accurate, Fox said abortion like three times yesterday on the day of the Arizona 1864 law. They just ignore bad news in a way that like, you know, Lester Holtz would never.

Kamala Harris came out tomorrow and was like, I can't support Joe Biden it's not like ABC would be like, we're not going to talk about this one today, guys. We've got to keep our team on side. It's preposterous. Right. Let's talk about systemic racism somewhere. Let's interview an English professor at Oberlin. We're going to end with a little dessert. Our favorite topic, our mutual favorite topic, Rich Lowry, the National Review. You started a series at New York Magazine. I don't know if I've mentioned this. People should be signed up for your newsletter at New York Magazine, by the way. It is awesome. You started a series, the Insurrectionalizers. I came up with the word myself. What do you think?

Insurrectionalizers. It looks better on paper. that's the first time i've said it out loud it's a little harder to say than i thought actually it was gonna be but i got it so it works okay um a series about conservative critics of donald trump who justify voting for him anyway the prototypical figure you had in mind was rich lowry and you guys got into a back and forth about something that flummoxes me a lot about these guys which is that they you know will know, will say, oh, yeah, it was kind of bad. The stop the steal thing was bad. But the Democrat, the media, these guys that say that democracy is in threat, now they're just, they're really overstating things. I mean, Donald Trump, he'll go away, right? So explain your argument what Rich's pushback was. I tried to go through every piece of his argument. It was one of the longer pieces he's written in a while.

So he made a lot of arguments. And I don't want to bore your audience by going through them piece by piece. But I feel like the overarching failure that he made was that he was like trying to define specific ways in which Trump could be an authoritarian danger and say, well, this probably couldn't happen because he would be stopped. And this couldn't happen because the Constitution and that wouldn't happen because Republicans. And I think most of his arguments were just wrong on the specifics. But the overarching failure is that the man is an authoritarian, right? If you put an authoritarian in a position of executive power, you don't know what he's going to do, but it won't be good. He can't be trusted. It's like, you know, we're going to bring a murderer to babysit our children. And they say, well, you know,

he's not going to shoot them because we don't have any handguns. And he won't, you know, he won't poison them because we took all the poison out of the house. But like, he'll probably think of something dangerous. You can't put him in that position. And he's just not even thinking of the overarching dangers of putting someone who obviously can't be trusted with power in power. Yeah, I liked the his argument that was, well, he would have to leave in 2029. And even if even if he did, even if these Trump derangement syndrome people are right, and he tried to stay institutional Washington and the military would take care of that i was like that

sounds horrible okay like that sounds like europe knew that there's a one percent chance that donald trump will stay in power and that the military will have to prevent him from staying in power that is a nightmare like that is end of america shit yeah yeah it works in latin america they don't have any problems with that and And so it's just like that. I mean, I just don't know how you write that sentence and you're like, yeah, okay,

well it's all right. This might happen. It could happen that we might, we might require the generals to prevent Donald Trump from staying in power. But, but after that little, after that little kerfuffle is over, we'll just be back on the,

back on. Not to mention the fact that he's basically trying to put Michael Flynn type lunatics in charge of the military so that that doesn't happen. Right. Well, like when he uses the Insurrection Act that they'll say, you know, who do we shoot and when not? Maybe we shouldn't be shooting people. Anyway, hopefully we can win some of these people over, Jonathan. I thought it was going to be dessert to dunk on Rich Lowry, but it's kind of a bittersweet dessert.

It's a bittersweet chocolate. Thinking about the fact that there are people going along with this argument uh jonathan chad new york magazine thank you for coming back to the bulwark podcast i hope to do it again soon i appreciate you very much thank you all right we will see you back here on monday uh with bill crystal and maybe ben with us too talk Talk to you then. Take a seat. Right over there. Sat on the stairs. Stay or leave. The cabinets are bare and I'm unaware of just how we got into this mess.

Got so aggressive. I know we meant all good intentions. So pull me closer. Why don't you pull me close? Why don't you come on over? I can't just let you go Oh baby, why don't you just meet me in the middle? I'm losing my mind just a little So why don't you just meet me in the middle? In the middle Baby

Why don't you just meet me in the middle I'm losing my mind just a little So why don't you just meet me in the middle In the middle Oh, take a step back for a minute Into the kitchen floor, so wet And half-sister run and dishes are broken How did we get into this mess?

Got so aggressive I know we meant all good intentions So pull me closer Why don't you pull me close, why don't you pull me close? Why don't you come over? I can't just let you go Oh, baby Why don't you just meet me in the middle? Oh, yeah, I'm losing my mind just a little

So why don't you just meet me in the middle? Oh, in the middle. Baby. Why don't you just meet me in the middle, baby? I'm losing my mind just a little. So why don't you just meet me in the middle, middle, in the middle, middle? The Borg Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.