The Bulwark Podcast - Thomas Chatterton Williams: How MAGA Learned to Love Cancel Culture

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

Cancel culture lives on, but it's taken new turns, especially among some of the loudest opponents of woke culture who simply can not abide one word of criticism about Charlie Kirk or Israel. Meanwhile, the vice president of the United States is actively encouraging his kind of Americans to rat out their neighbors. Plus, how authoritarianism and corruption go together, the challenge for academics who don't adhere to views on race they're 'supposed' to have, and Trump's talent for exploiting grievance will be studied for years. The Atlantic's Thomas Chatterton Williams joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod. show notes Thomas's "Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse" Thomas's recent Atlantic piece The Harper's Letter Tim's playlist Bulwark Live in DC and NYC at TheBulwark.com/events.  Tix for a second Toronto show go on sale for members Tuesday at noon and for everyone else on Wednesday! Go to https://zbiotics.com/THEBULWARK and use THEBULWARK at checkout for 15% off any first time orders of ZBiotics probiotics.

Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I'm delighted to welcome yet another staff writer at the Atlantic. His new book has titled Some of Our Discontent, The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse. It's Thomas Chatterton Williams. What's up, man? Hey, how you doing, Tim? I'm doing well.

I got to put cards on the table with you for a second here at the start, before we get into the terrible news. And that is we went through a period of time where you kind of annoyed me. We don't know each other, actually, but your social media presence did because I was of the camp, obviously, here at the Bullwark, who was like, the Trump thread is so great. We have to focus on this. There are these guys over here that are worried about Landon and Wesleyan having to suffer a woke pile on, and that that's the big problem. And I think that, like, with the benefit of

hindsight, future has kind of proven both of us right in a weird way. But I wonder what you would have said to me had we been podcasting then about that critique. I think we would actually agree on much more than we would disagree on. I would concede that those were low stakes kind of arguments that shouldn't have been given the attention they were. And that one of the reasons why I thought it was really important not to have those kinds of arguments and not to be so excessive in the desire to impose a kind of set of newfangled values and norms, was that it actually was going to create quite a backlash, which I, you know, I admit is much worse than what preceded it. But, you know, one of the things I'm really trying to do, and it's very difficult

these days, is to make sense of how what had preceded Trump's return to power became so attractive to enough Americans that they decided, knowing everything about Trump, they preferred his vision to what had been on offer before that. I feel like sometimes there are these, it's the narcissism of small differences, you know, where I get a little bit more mad at people, like, that I probably do agree with on like 90% of things, right? But it's like, a lot of times people that were really focused on the excesses of woke culture, most of them didn't like Trump either, right?

And it was just like, it was just like, I'm going to spend it all my time talking about Trump and I was annoyed that they were talking with the other. And then vice versa, you know, you get the resentments that go and vice versa. So anyway, we, we can hash that all out once we get through the news. But the right wing cancel culture, as you mentioned, the backlash to the low clash seems to be in full effect right now. I guess I'm wondering your initial reaction to Kimmel and then we'll kind of run through some of the other stuff that's out there. I find it terrifying. You know, the blatant disregard for a free press for people to be able to even to make mistakes on air, you know, the idea that everybody has to kind of be aware that if

they insult the dear leader, that they could get their FCC license revoked or it could hurt their shareholders bottom line. I mean, this is unprecedented stuff in my lifetime. So I find it very alarming. I know people privately saying that they're not sure if they want to go on, you know, cable news appearances or things like that. It's just not worth it to potentially criticize Donald Trump. That's a new kind of thing that I had never heard before. And so there's a kind of self-censorship that this immediately imposes. We only talk about the cases that break through the actual cancellations, but with all cancel culture, there's that kind of larger onlooker effect that really stifles debate, and that worries me quite a lot.

The thing about the Kimmel element that I talked about this a little bit yesterday with Brian Stelter, but it kind of is this Frankenstein monster of the populace right, where in addition to just the straight free speech threats to it, it's also a straight corruption and it's a kleptocracy right right like it's the the of these local affiliates you know that want to merge and create like essentially a quasi monopoly of local affiliates i think that if the merger happened they would own like 80% of the local TV affiliates and and they were the ones that car suggested strongly should act on this and they were the ones that did act first and then that that eventually kind of bubbled up to to disney and that is kind of related to the

to what we saw from CBS as well. Well, like authoritarianism thrives amidst corruption, right? That's what you see in Russia. That's what you see in all these regimes, is that once neutral procedures are swept aside, then, you know, you have consolidation of power with the leader. I want to play for you, the vice president, a couple of things that he said recently. This was him. It was on Charlie Kirk's podcast.

So after Kirk was assassinated, the vice president, did a guest, whatever, hosting appearance on it. And here's something that he said about the people that had been saying untoward things about Kirk after he was killed. Civil society, Charlie understood this well, is not just something that flows from the government. It flows from each and every one of us. It flows from all of us. So when you see someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out in hell, call their

employer. We don't believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility. That is crazy. And there have been plenty of examples of Democrats trying to go after, you know, criticize speech or, you know, do things out that I thought were inappropriate. But like, I can't think of any precedent of somebody being that direct about it. Yes, it's one of the most hair-raising things I've heard from an elected politician, the vice president telling Americans to inform on each other. you know that's actually something that didn't think could happen framing that is what civil society should be like that is that is fascistic that is crazy yeah i mean that's what you see uh the precedents for that type of uh idea are in germany in east germany and in the soviet union you know this

kind of this kind of mutual condemnation which of course you know inspires all types of terrible incentives but that's a kind of change in american culture that happened much faster than I would have predicted a few weeks ago was possible. Even after the election of Donald Trump, I didn't think stuff like that was actually possible. Things are moving so fast now. It's alarming. I don't think that that got nearly enough attention either when J.D. Vant said it was swept up in a lot of other. You know, Pam Bondi was a bigger story in what she said about hate speech. But what J.D. Vance said was actually more disturbing. It's worth talking about those two things because what Bondi was suggesting was more of a direct affront to the First Amendment, right? It was

like that the Department of Justice would go after you for hate speech, which is I think why maybe that ended up becoming more of a lightning rod for people. What J.D. is suggesting is this kind of soft or soft stifling of speech, that your neighbors should stifle your speech, that you should be worried, that you might be ratted out. And I was listening to you, oh, shit, I listened to a couple of different interviews recently before this. I forget which one it was. But you were talking about how, I think it was John Stuart Mill, said that it was like that type of threats to speech is actually more alarming, right? And those threats are potentially greater. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, that's really interesting.

And on Liberty, Mill makes the distinction between the kind of state sanctioned limits on speech that I guess Pambandi would represent, but says that actually the kind of informal censoriousness that comes from the bottom up amongst your fellow citizens is actually much more pernicious because there's actually fewer spaces that you can escape from it. The state actually can't reach into all the spaces that your neighbors and your coworkers can. And so when you get a kind of situation that Vance is actually explicitly encouraging of kind of self-policing and reporting on each other, that becomes much more difficult to overcome. I want to play another audio from Vance that has gotten even less attention than the suggestion that people

should rat on their neighbors to their employers, but that I also want to get your opinion on. We know Joe Biden's FBI was investigating Charlie Kirk. Maybe they should have been investigating the networks that motivated, inspired, and maybe even funded Charlie Kirk's murder. If they had, Charlie Kirk might be alive today. I mean, that's insane. In addition to wanting people to rat and tattle on their neighbors for wrongspeak and get them fired for their jobs,

the vice president wants, I guess, is essentially fabricating a conspiracy of what was behind to the Charlie Kirk assassination and wants to use federal law enforcement to target political foes under the fake pretense that they motivated or even funded potentially this killer when there's no evidence for that. I mean, that's one of the things that's so disturbing. I mean, what day was that clip from the evidence? We don't even know all of the evidence involved in the shooting, and they're so quickly. It was after we saw the text messages, right?

do we know enough about the kid, but yeah, I think it was from a couple days ago, yeah. They're so ready to already use this event to consolidate power and to crack down on who they view as their opponents. It's quite alarming. The speed with which the event is being utilized for political ends, irrespective of what the particular motivations of Tyler Robinson were. There's another news story today that's related in a way. And by the time this is published this afternoon, it's possible that this will be official. But we have really credible reporting. administration is preparing to fire the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia today over his refusal to bring charges against New York Attorney General Tish James.

Obviously, they brought charges against Trump. The career prosecutors don't believe any charges are warranted. And I bring that up in combination with this because it's like this weaponization of the Justice Department to go after political foes, weaponization of the FBI to go after political foes, even on, excuse the pun, like trumped up pretenses, is we're going back a half century or more for any precedent to this, yeah. What's so alarming to me is how you can kind of list all of these abuses that are happening. And there are so many people, and I know Twitter isn't real life, but there are so many people that you see, and some of them have large followings who embrace this.

And I've been thinking so much in recent days about how Trump ran explicitly on being your revenge. And his campaign was predicated that he would come and he would start punishing people and institutions that it seems quite a lot of Americans are fine with being punished and don't really want to stand up for and protect. This stuff doesn't actually bother an enormous amount of our fellow citizens. So we talk about it over and over again on podcasts and we write op-eds against it. But when you go on X, you see a lot of people say, I welcome that. It's about time. Tishames deserves that, you know. It's actually not unpopular. I guess that's maybe true. I guess the question is, is that true? Or is it because this stuff is not getting attention outside of a certain

type of whatever elite college educated liberal bubble? You know what I mean? Like not to not to undermine the thinking powers of our fellow Americans, but can't people be made to be riled up about things, right? If you think about kind of people with big platforms who in a different world five, ten years ago before the 2020 summer you read about in your book would have been outraged by this, your Joe Rogans, your Elon Musk's, people with huge platforms that were civil libertarians, expressed general civil libertarian views. You know, if they latched on to this and treated it with the gravity that some of us treat it with, I don't know, don't you think that might change? Or do you think inside the American people there is a desire for authoritarianism?

I do suspect there might be more of a desire for authoritarianism than I would have thought. But I also think that one of the things that like authoritarian is really profit from is this idea that everybody does it. So whatever they're doing is actually you can find the same thing being done before. So, you know, there was such a sense, I think, that the Biden administration had also targeted enemies. You know, there's a sense that Trump had been so unfairly targeted. And, you know, he was kicked off Twitter and he was with, you know, with some questionable criminal cases, and there's a sense that, you know, turnabout is fair play. And I think a lot of people that don't spend their lives thinking about politics all the time probably end at that, that just everybody does this. And Trump is just doing what politicians do. And that's fundamental to Trumpism. Yes. And Trump was laying the groundwork for that before they even went for him, really. I, like, during the campaign, I remember Scarborough was interviewing him. This is such a different era. That this was when he was getting the, I can call into Morning Joe treatment from Scarborough.

So this is many years ago. So forgive me if I don't get the quote exactly right. But Scarborough was actually about Putin and Russia. And Scarborough says something in effect of Putin's a killer. He's a murderer. You can't, like, trust him. And Trump says something to the effect of like, oh, are we any better? Like, we're all killers.

Look at what we've done in the past. So that premise of like there are no real like principles or values we need to aspire to. It's all just the most base Hobbsian real politique. And that was what Trump pitched initially. And I guess your point is that that worked. I mean, that stuff plays well. I think it goes over well with a lot of Americans. It's surprising how, you know, if you kind of disregard the idea that there are higher ideals,

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Orleans so I appreciate that dad for listening and for supporting our sponsors go to zbiotics dot com slash the bulwark to learn more and get 15% off your first order when you use the bulwark at checkout zbiotics is back with 100% money back guarantee so if you're unsatisfied for any reason they'll refund your money no questions asked remember to head to z ibiotics.com slash the bulwark and use the code of the bulwark at checkout for 15% off. I want to get into just a little bit more of the kind of direct parallels to the cancel culture. And I think that we sort of both agree that the Kimmel and Vance situation is really a category difference from kind of the left wing cancel culture, right?

Given the structure, the government and the financial stakes in it, et cetera. Yeah. You wrote a piece on it this week in the Atlantic titled The Right is Changing the Rules of the Culture War for Conservatives. Cancel Culture is in about what you're already seeing. This is kind of before this, you know, Kimmel Bruhaha from the right, from people like Chris Rufo and others who are engaging this kind of material. We talked about that a little bit. Well, even prior to the, this horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk, you know, Chris Rufo had spent the month of August digging up 10-year-old. tweets by the New Yorker staff writer Dorian St. Felix and tried to do a kind of classic textbook, a cancel culture campaign to get her fired, presumably, for having written just a kind of article about Sidney, if you remember that controversy, that you might roll your eyes at, but that had said that she was being made into an Aryan princess of the rite. And so I wrote this

response to that, just saying that, you know, this is really rich, you know, people who had spent a decade or more railing against exactly that kind of cancel culture coming from the left are now openly and explicitly embracing the very same techniques. And essentially saying, you know, one of the things that I do credit Rufo with is that he actually doesn't dissimulate. He tells you straight up, this is what I'm doing. He writes in City Journal that actually now, actually, it seems like it might be more expedient for the right to just do away with high ideals and just embrace cancel culture explicitly because we have the upper hand and we have the power. I think some conservatives still try to say that they don't want to actually replicate the worst excesses

of the social justice left, but in point of fact, they were already doing it before Kirk was killed. I guess what does that make you think about the outrage, like the initial outrage, like whether it was genuine, is this really a tit-for-tat thing, or was it power politics always? And, you know, and obviously it's probably different for different people, but just as far as the broad trend on the right, Does it make you reassess how serious they were about, you know, cancel culture critiques in the first place? I've thought a lot about this. And I do think that different people have very different relationships to this.

But I think that one thing, when I talk to liberals and people to the left of liberals, I think one thing that's really important to appreciate is how much resentment and anger had been festering. I think a lot of people who basically, already agree on certain values. Don't understand how upsetting it was for people in institutions to, you know, for example, if you were hired at a university and you had to sign a DEI statement and you were compelled to certain kind of to embrace or espouse certain orthodoxies. That's upsetting. I think people saw people not being able to say what they really think for years. So, you know,

we have so much evidence of preference falsification. It's why every time in the past three elections, Donald Trump got more votes than people had expected him to get, or he grew his coalition with blacks and Latinos, because no one was actually saying what they really think, because there was a kind of sense that there were real repercussions if people thought that you had the wrong views. I think that that built up so much ill will and frustration that a lot of people, what I'm seeing is a lot of people say, I don't like this on the right either, but they're getting a taste of their own medicine, and I'm not completely mad at that. So it's kind of complicated. I think it's very difficult for most people to completely live in accord with principles. And I don't know that everybody outrightly celebrates this idea that this is fine what the right is doing. But they think that it exists in a kind of context where it's not irrational that people, once they would be able to pick up the weapon they've been being beaten with, would try to lash out with it against their opponents. I don't object to the notion of that resentment existed, that people felt that resentment towards, whatever you want to call it, left-wing elites, you know, who they felt like were

kind of bullying and hectoring about various views. I think that definitely existed. And I also think, as I just said before, that particularly in the professional right, a lot of the outrage was performative for, you know, engagement purposes and power politics. I do wonder, though, like, how much of that, you know, this, and I guess this is more of a sociological question than anything, but, like, a lot of it was people tricking themselves, into thinking that they couldn't have said stuff, like, in some ways, right? That they were, that they were self-censoring for reasons that were, like, not really

necessary, maybe because people don't like to be criticized. I feel, as somebody who's putting myself into the public all the time, I feel myself, like, get my backup when, like, somebody, when I, like, a comment comes across something, and I think it's, like, an unfair judgment upon my view or upon my, you know, my values, and I get my backup, but, like, there was no harm done by that, like, no actual harmed was done. To me, my feelings were hurt a little bit, right? And I kind of think to, like, there was this interview I've brought up a couple times because it just really struck me. It was Malcolm Gladwell said recently that he felt like he had to self-censor his view about

girls in trans sports. And I was like, no, you didn't. I don't think. You were a contrarian, you're kind of a contrarian heterodox thinker who has tens of tens of millions of dollars, sold lots of books. That was a view that was like pretty popular. It's at least mixed views out there in the public. It wasn't like this was that unpopular of an issue to say it to say that you had questions about the ability of trans girls to play in girls sports. And yet he claims that he was self-censored because he was scared. And I was like, that fear is pretty irrational, I think. I feel like the worst case scenario for him would have been people sending nasty tweets at him. I guess maybe he made that his central issue of his life. Like if he written a book

on that already done with J.K. Rowling has done like tweeted about it constantly. I think potentially there could have been some repercussion. But like, To express that view on a panel and have that fear, I think that that fear was irrational at some level. What do you make of that? Right. We're social creatures. So social opprobrium really does actually carry a cost with it. You know, I think a lot of people don't have the appetite to really endure stigmatization the way that someone like J.K. Rowling has been able to. Malcolm Gladwell and J.K. rolling are really in very particular situations where they're essentially uncancellable economically, as you point out. But, you know, Malcolm Gladwell is probably saying something that is much

more relevant to a lot of people like in my situation or even people with less of a kind of platform than I have who really couldn't afford to be iced out in their workplace or to not get a certain type of promotion or to lose out on a book deal. And, you know, not everybody works in publishing or in media for sure. But, you know, if you said what Malcolm Gladwell said, he didn't feel he was able to articulate a few years ago, I'm pretty confident if you weren't the author of Blink or something like that, you might not get a book deal. I'm very confident that things like that could, you know, your professional opportunities could be circumscribed in ways that most people don't have the ability to endure. And so it's kind of helpful that even that someone like him

would say that because it might be hyperbolic for him, but he's articulating something I think that resonates with a lot of people that you really couldn't say or be perceived to think certain things. I'll speak from my own experience. Like, I know I've lost out on opportunities and I don't even get into the gender stuff, but because I don't have the views around like the racial discourse that one is supposed to have in my position. The only thing that I think that has actually prevented me from full out having professional consequences, I couldn't recover from is that I am descended from African slaves. So I'm not actually speaking against the identity group that I'm, do you see what I'm saying? That actually is like the one safety that

ironically, you know, that kind of identity politics saved me from a kind of cancellation that I would have had otherwise, I believe, and I've seen enough evidence. You mean, I just give you all some context because you have talked about, I guess, some of the overreach of identity politics and in particular, like, you know, sort of excessive focus on blackness and, et cetera. And you're saying, has you been a white writer writing that, then you would have suffered professional consequences for that, is essentially what you're saying. Yeah, I really do think so. I wouldn't be given the very kind of like small benefit of the doubt that I've been accorded.

I think it's really high stakes, and it was something that, you know, in 2020, 2019, 2018, there are orthodoxies. There are ways you speak about certain issues. You know, I've been in spaces, I won't name an institution, but, you know, where I'm unable to be platformed or my course is unable to be listed because it can't be that I am the only black point of view because it's the wrong black point of view. That's just my personal experience, but people have felt this stuff in many circumstances and many institutions. And I think what we're seeing is that there is a kind of exploitation of the grievance that many people have. felt that, you know, J.D. Vance and Donald Trump are using to consolidate their own power, but that is coming from a real and genuine sense of unfairness that had obtained during

this social justice era. Hey, everybody. You've probably heard me mention that the bulwark is headed back on the road this fall, but we've got some big updates that I want you to hear. First, most importantly, we are adding a show in Toronto. I told you, Canadians. I was doing my best to make it happen. We've so, I'm so thrilled by the response we've had from our Canadian friends and wanted to make sure if you wanted to be able to come, you could. So we added a matinee, a brunch show, whatever you want to call it, maybe a drag brunch. Don't tell J.D. Vance the next day. No promises on drag queens there, but, you know, maybe the spirit of a drag brunch.

And so that will be Saturday, the 27th. Go to the bulwark.com slash events to get all the details and to get your tickets for. that encore show in Toronto. Also, New York, that's going to sell out here any minute. So if you want to see us in New York on October 11th, get your tickets ASAP. There's still a bunch of tickets left for DC on October 8th, but we've got some exciting guest announcements coming soon. So if you're interested in coming to DC, get on that as well. All of information available at the bulwark.com slash events. It's me, Sarah, and Sam up in Toronto. Me, Sarah, and JVL and some of our other bulwark friends and a special guest in Washington, D.C.

Look forward to seeing you all out on the road. We'll catch you soon. Get those tickets now. I do not. We're way afield from what I wanted to talk about today, but that's great. I'm sorry, too. No, no, no. That means it's an interesting podcast.

Folks who just want, you can go to the bulwark take speed if you want more on Jimmy Kimmel. I've done like seven tickets. I think that that resentment is real, right? And I think that those things happened, right? like obviously right like the idea that you know there was racial quotas in higher education for various things and that people like didn't you know what it was it that somebody said recently that like if you look at the fiction submissions to the new yorker like there's not been a white

male fiction submission accepted to the yorker in 20 years or something i'm making that up but it's some like insane oh white male under like like my age or younger like like mid 40s or younger there hasn't been in some some in decades you know something crazy Because all of there were a ton of white male writers in New Yorker forever and they needed to bring racial balance to it. And so the door was shut for anyway. So there are these niche areas where that has happened. It happens in work. I get it.

Like, you know, we've all seen the White Lotus, you know, episode where the mom's worried about her white son not being able to get into good school because of other because of quote, affirmative action. And I think those resentments are real. I also just think on the canceled culture stuff, though, that now like the complaints about that have gotten so. intense that there is now a, once again, a backlash to the backlash? Like, from where I said, I'm like, okay, man, but sure. But you, had you really wanted to lean into your, you know, anti-BLM views, like, you could have got a Fox show probably or been on the federal list or the free press or like, there's no shortage of like places for that position to be published right now. It's not 1980. It'd be ghettoized to Fox. Sure. I mean, people could say,

you're ghettoized at MSNBC. Right now we're just a belt. We're just a series of ghettos now in one sense, right? Everybody's in their own bubble, you know? There's not a lot of monoculture. And, you know, you look at the comedians who complained about this, for example. I remember when I was, I was thinking about this couple years ago because I was driving into New Orleans.

I was moving into town and like at the basketball arena on the, you know, they're promoting who is coming. And it was like, Joe Rogan is here in three weeks. And then Dave Chappelle is here in two months. And then Theo Vaughn is here in three months. And I'm like, I don't. know it seems like the people with contrarian views and comedy on that moment are doing pretty well and like the woke comedians are playing at house of blues and nothing wrong with that but

i i guess my point is that while in micro the grievances are legit and like macro we've seen people with contrarian heterodox sometimes noxious views like celebrated and and they succeed our whole fucking government is run by these people now unfortunately our whole whole government is being run by, like, kind of trolls who got back in power, internet trolls. And they govern for the kind of edge lord wing of Twitter. But, you know, I don't want to beat a dead horse. And, you know, I largely agree with you. But I think that I don't want to give short shift to the power of the onlooker effect. Dave Chappelle is the greatest comedic talent of his generation. He's not going to get canceled. But when you see the way that Dave Chappelle

is criticized, it might actually affect the way up-and-coming comedians engage with culture and what they feel like is possible to say. I know that that's the case with someone like J.K. Rowling and up-and-coming authors and women without her platform thinking what they can say. The Overton window has really shifted on that, and people's lives were ruined for saying things that now are acceptable to say again. I don't think that we give enough weight to what it means for one person to have their life ruined for making a point that is considered cancelable. In 2020, some friends and I, we wrote an open letter that was published in Harper's magazine and we got a lot of people to sign it.

And we were simply trying to say then that, you know, Donald Trump represents the greatest threat to liberalism in this country, but there is a creeping censoriousness on the left as well. And if you don't actually allow, you know, a diverse array of viewpoints and if people are afraid to say what they really think, this is going to further empower the kind of illiberalism on the right that we all oppose. We were really trying to sound the alarm. We thought we were doing something. It was a kind of anodyne statement that angered the left to such a degree that to this day, people still bring up that they can't engage with somebody's ideas because they signed the Harper's letter. You know what I mean? I just want to say I wasn't invited then. My podcast was lower in the

rankings but I would have signed the Harper's letter had I been invited oh well we would have to have you'd still be dealing with people criticizing you for doing it if had you done it Malcolm was on there by the way our friend Malcolm Gladwell was too scared to give his opinion on trans rights apparently wasn't too scared to sign the letter so there you go it's funny so when I was teasing at the top I agree with your point and I hope that listeners I don't agree with it at least sit with it a little bit which is that the part that you were right about was that this

censoriousness and wokeness and a liberalism on the left, I use that's kind of whatever, pejoratively. Obviously, there's some good elements of it. Empowered Trump. Oh, 100%. Period. And I'm not doing the Nazi meme thing where it's just like, oh, you called me a Nazi,

so I have to become a Nazi. I'm not doing that. There is a lot of fake shit on the right where they blame the left for their own cruelty and foolishness and horrible behavior. I'm not doing that. I'm talking about how how people who are not that politically engaged, not, didn't read the Harper's letter, frankly, right, who listened to Theo Van Show or whatever, who had been, who had been Obama,

Democrats, just did not like the oppressive culture that they felt that they were in. And I can say that maybe that was stupid, but it was real, right? And their feelings were real. And Donald Trump preyed on their grievances, like, very successfully. Yeah, he's got a kind of, you know, he'll be studied for a long time, his kind of political instincts and how to exploit resentments and grievances and how to find whole new groups that are aggrieved. You know, I think that it's really interesting, though, and we should talk about how he was able to make such gains with Normie and, you know, non-college educated blacks and Latinos who, I think felt extraordinarily alienated from the kind of social justice etiquette and manners that was gatekeeping on the left. This idea that he just swept back into power off of white racism is

really not nearly sophisticated enough of it. He did. The white racism was a lot. It wasn't not saying it didn't exist. But like it was not that yeah, that's not that wasn't the key ingredient. It wasn't sufficient. It was necessary but not sufficient. He had quite a lot of people like I got two buddies back home who were attracted to his kind of open disregard for the kind of elite manners that they felt excluded from, two black friends from back home, Scotts, Plains, New Jersey, you know, who I text with. And texting with them, I thought, in the summer leading up to the election, that is really crazy. He is, the way they're talking about him, I don't think that, you know, Democrats are going to be able to win. And then you see that he actually

increased his, what is it, 25% of the black male vote. he got. This is the least racially polarized election since the 1970s. He has a multi-ethnic coalition behind him. It just happens to be more of a non-elite coalition of blacks and Latinas. Are your buddies changing their tune at all? I don't think so. Can we text them right now? Can we text them right now and see if they answer about the end of the show? Let me do that. Let's text right now and see if they answer by the end of the show. What do they think? Nine months in. Just open, open-ended. We'll do a quick focus group. but yeah unscientific but my two twin brother friends from back home yeah man why not we are saying

some of that with Hispanic voters and I do again I think sometimes people like conflate like what should be and what is you know and it's important particularly in politics if you want to win to like live in what is and I think that's been a mistake that the left has made a bit over the last decade and not to beat a dead horse on this but the real example of that is what ought to be is that we should have a society where nobody is brutalized by police. What is that we have a society where neighborhoods where people are unfairly brutalized are also, sadly, neighborhoods where people are brutalized by their neighbors and by teenagers who are holding the whole community hostage, and that those people living there are both upset with the kind of heavy-handed policing they have to endure,

but they also need police officers present because they're the first victims of the violence that would explode were we to actually abolish police departments. And so there's this kind of tension between this ideal left utopia and the facts on the ground. And so you have this crazy situation where community members in Minneapolis are actually insisting that they don't abolish the police because it's kind of nice-sounding idea in theory that we actually saw what happened when the police, when they pulled back a bit, homicides exploded within six months. So this idea that, you know, I think that Raymond Aron, the French sociologist of the 20th had the best point, which is that a lot of these kind of like utopian projects are disproved

by their successes more than their failures. When you actually implement a lot of what the social justice left advocated for, whether it's abolishing or defunding police departments, whether it's getting rid of meritocracy and standardized exams, what actually follows is so disreputable that the whole program is invalidated. And then you have people moving over towards Trump who says he's going to fix it and he makes it worse. It's kind of crazy. the degree to which the whole program was invalidated so quickly, actually. Yeah. And like almost nobody is for defunding the police right now.

Yeah. Like, honestly. And you go back to that 2020 Democratic presidential debate and like some of the views that were being expressed on that stage will be verboted in 2020. I assume, God willing, we have free elections and real debates and free speeches. Like, you know, and J.D. Vance's vision for an authoritarian America isn't realized by 2028 spring but if so the Democrats and the Democratic debate stage are going to sound very different on a variety of these issues I asked Susan Rice about this earlier this week and she really

didn't didn't want to talk about it which is totally her right and I appreciate it so she might be smarter than me if I answer yeah right I don't know yeah it's it's cool I was like this a podcast you can we can pod on this stuff or we can whatever we can pot on some I'd rather I always tell guests when they're coming on I was like I want to make good pod I want to pot on stuff you are you have interesting things to say about you are engaged and passionate about. So I respect her right to abstain for this question. But I want to ask you about it because I heard you talk about this too. Around this whole in the wake of Kirk, right, like there's a discussion that's happening about kind of the origin of our, of this just extreme, you know, partisan anger, right? And

it ties into what we've just been discussing on race and like kind of how we went from like the Obama 2004 speech, which was. was just kind of about trying to erase some of these lines and trying to unite more to like where we are now. And Ben Shapiro, who show you that you're a rare person to appear on both of our programs.

Try to talk to everybody. Yeah, man, kudos to you for that. Ben Shapiro was with Ezra Klein earlier this week. And I was like, I was struck by what he said about this because I find it to be to be bullshit. But I think you agree with it. So I want to hash it out together.

And here is Ben Shapiro explaining why he thinks the right was radicalized during the Obama era. And my son could have been Trayvon. And people on the right saw that as like, well, but that's not true. You are an upper-class black man who is living in the White House. And unless your son was mistaken for a prowler going around at night in a neighborhood, then no, that actually wouldn't happen.

I kind of feel like that sentence is self-refuting. Like, Ben Shapiro on the one hand is like, I'm mad, I'm mad because Obama mentioned that Trayvon could have been his son. And the next breath is like, we couldn't have been your son because your son wouldn't have been mistaken for a prowler, galking around the neighborhood. And I was like, I want to, I'm like, I want to do the, that's racist meme. I'm like, why, well, why was Trayvon mistaken for a prowler? Like, you wouldn't have been mistaken for a prowler if he was Ben Shapiro's son. I don't, I don't believe. I guess how do you adjudicate that fight?

Because to me, I'm very unsatisfied by the fact that our rancor was driven by like a stray comment the Barack Obama made out of a place of human empathy and the fact that he had to have a beer summit with a cop and a professor. That feels so quaint compared to where we are and too quaint to accept. But what do you make about it? Yeah, it was almost as scandalous as the tan suit, right? This is a really controversial president. No, but I think about this a lot because I tend to agree with you, and I write about this in my book. I understand the sentiment Obama was saying, but I think he was specifically in a bad position to do this. And, you know, in retrospect, it becomes much clearer than in the moment. Barack Obama was elected with extraordinary enthusiasm on the promise that he was going to help usher us into a post-racial American future where these situations would be. adjudicated without reference to identity of politics. That's not to say that racism was solved. That's not to say that identity doesn't matter. But it is to say that the first post-racial president

was not supposed to take the instance of something happening and frame it through the lens of identity. Whether that's fair or not fair, that seemed to have been a breach of the bargain. Well, I mean, it is not fair. Like, here's my problem with it. Like, just as a human, like, Barack Obama was human, we're humans listening to it. Everybody in a partisan place is humans. We can all, look, let's just not be, let's not be crazy about all this. Like Ben Shapiro responds more emotionally to anti-Semitic crimes. He just does.

That's fine. I've had many people telling me in my comments that I've been too emotional in response to Charlie Kirk's death because he's also a podcaster and I could vision myself getting assassinated. That's true. I was much more responsive to the issue of the gay hairstylist from Venezuela that we sent to a gulag because he was gay and I could imagine as a gay man what that would have been like. That's just human. We relate to people that we have connection with. It could be about

race or religion or life experience. If somebody's from Denver, I probably would have a little bit more of emotional reaction to their tragedy than if they were from Chicago. So like, it was a throwaway line. And Barack Obama barely talked about his race, like in the grand scheme of things, talked about a lot less than his advisors wanted him to. That's true. And I think that he had no latitude. I always stress this. I think that he was in an impossible position, actually. And I think he really conducted himself extraordinarily well, all things considered. But let me ask you just because I do wonder what you think about this. If when Lake and Riley was killed in Georgia, right, by this undocumented immigrant, and had Trump said, well, he has many children, but if I had a daughter with Melania,

she would look like Lakin, Riley. Was Lakin'Or? And I don't remember what kind of makeup she fell. I'm sorry, I don't need to be real. Had I had a daughter with a Cheeto, she would, no. That would have been very strange because it would have shown, it would have been Donald Trump showing empathy. When he was asked about Charlie Kirk's death this week,

he started talking about the new dining room that he's building. Right. I hear what you're saying. I know where you're going with this. I think that there's some, for some good reasons, there is a little bit of a social stigma about white identity politics. particular. There used to be. Yeah, right. And maybe, whatever, we could probably do a whole podcast and hash this out on whether that created a backlash, and maybe we should have let white identity

groups proliferate. I don't think that would be good. I don't think we should have. I don't think that, and many of us did warn about this, Glenn Lowry did for years. I do think when you have a situation in which every single identity is foregrounded and is told that this is the lens through which you need to interact with the world, except for one identity. And that identity needs to be quiet, just to listen, be an ally, reflect on its privilege. I think that that can't help but create a kind of explosive reaction down the road. And I think we're living through exactly that. There was an identity fetishization for every other group.

I'm with you on the identity fetishization. I'm against it. I guess I'm just saying that to your point of why that would have been weird for Trump to say that about Lake and Riley, is I just, I think that it's okay to have like a specific social stigma in this country around engaging with people over their skin color, just solely based on their skin color if they're white. Like a different example of that would have been like, I don't know, if a Catholic kid had been murdered and John F. Kennedy had said something about it. You know what I mean? I just, I think it would have been accepted. You know what I mean?

Like there's something specific about the white identity element of that that does make it a little uncomfortable. That would rankle us. Yeah, for sure. And it would, and it also would rank us, I think it's fair to say, particularly coming from Trump, who said a lot of racist shit about other races, right? You know what I mean? Like, again, I think it was an empathetic white president if it was Joe Biden, and it was back when he was more coherent. He did a lot of gaffes, right? If it was Joe Biden, you ain't really black. Yeah, he has a lot of eulogies. If he was eulogizing, you know, and he eulogized people of all races and during a eulogy of a young white girl,

he had said something like that, I'm sure there would have been some tweets about it, but I don't think we'd be talking about on a podcast 10 years later. You know what I mean? I think there's context that is appropriate. I agree. I think that Obama really, there was a tragedy to his presidency. I didn't see it at the time. To me, it felt like the most extraordinary moment to be alive, actually.

You know, when I was in my early 20s and I was canvassing for him in 2008, and I thought that, you know, I'm actually alive at the moment where I can see the curve of the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice. It felt overwhelming and in retrospect it was tragic because I think he showed us a vision of the country that I believe we will be but he was ahead of his time.

Clearly we were not a post-racial country yet or we took the wrong turn when we had the opportunity to become one. I think back to the Obama part and I wrote about this. I was voting for McCain but I remember I was living in D.C. at the time and I was going to vote and I was

voting at a school. I was mostly black kids at school. And it was the morning, you know, and that school hadn't started yet. And the kids were out there playing on the basketball hoop. And like, just for kicks, like I shouted through the fence at him while I was waiting in mind. I was like, who should I vote for? And like, they all go, everybody yells. Obama, Obama, Obama. And I just, like, I thought about how cool that was and how great that moment was. And while I hear, well, like, I understand why there were a few things during those eight years that rankled the Ben Shapiro's of the world and the right. I just think that they pale in comparison to like the overt efforts by his opponents

to divide the country along racial lines and to and to weaponize the fact that he was black and to go after him and extremely racial terms in ways that the responsible Republican politicians at the time that presidential candidates McCain and Romney resisted but that their allies didn't. And I just, I look back at that and I'm like, I'm sorry. I'm like Ben Shapiro. I think was you, actually, that it was to blame. I don't think it was Barack Obama's beer summit with Henry Lewis Gates. And I don't mean Ventro in particular, but like him and his ilk. And I was a Republican at the time. And so I'm indicting myself, but I just like look back on it. I just, it's hard for me to see it another way. I mean, I think that in the post-Obama era, I think that

there's some legitimate complaints about the forefronting of racial identity to a degree that was maybe unhelpful during the awokening. Right. That is a critique that I both will listen to and not entirely, but agree with in large part. But I think the Obama critique is just this post hoc rationalization for fucking right-wing racism is really what I think of this. I mean, I tend to agree with you. I trace the kind of the failure of the Obama era, not specifically to Barack Obama himself,

but to the kind of, in retrospect, inevitable disillusionment that bloomed on both the left down the right that in fact this you know this was supposed to be the culmination of like kind of the liberal project in many ways you know like we were supposed to for on the left we were supposed to have you know elected a black president and that would fundamentally remake our society and then you have the proliferation of videos of unarmed black men being killed and that you have a kind of dissatisfaction that we didn't get the change and the hope and all of these the society is still the same society that we've been in, and it still is bedeviled by racism. And that was on the left, and then on the right, I think you had this kind of, maybe we have to be very honest about the fact

that even people that voted for Barack Obama and were optimistic about moving towards a post-racial, multi-ethnic society, liked it more in theory than they liked it in practice when he was actually in the White House governing them. Maybe there's some of that. I think you can't discount the fact that, you know, the person that was supposed to radically transform our society also just kind set up Hillary Clinton to succeed him in a way that I think really wasn't very hopeful to many Americans coming out of the financial crisis and who didn't want more of the same, right? So this kind of disillusionment started in his second term. And, you know, I don't think we ever recovered from that. Two other things I want to get too far, let you go. Well, one is

just circling back. We got way, we got way way laid. But I did, I did want to get back to kind of what is happening on campus now and it's kind of the right wing cancel culture stuff and the kind of conversation about that there's news this week that um texas a and m's president is stepping down after turmoil that was a children's literature course again it was a course for college kids but about children's literature that had some views on there being more than two genders the president's been kicked out after this brouhaha is mark welsh she is a 72 year old former Northrop Grummond, former the board of directors of Northrop Grumman,

chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force. I don't know. He doesn't really look like a woke person to me. He was the dean of the Bush school. To me, it is crazy. Like, the degree to this stuff has happened. And there was some discourse that was going around in the wake of all this about how in order to balance the scales,

we now need conservative affirmative action at schools. And, like, be an effort to get rid of these liberal professors and students. Molly Hemingway at the Federalist. With the free press said this. Jerusalem Dempson's the argument who's been on the show kind of expressed like maybe some openness to that, not to the canceling of the A&M professor,

but the fact that colleges should be more thoughtful about bringing in different viewpoints. What do you make about that kind of whole, you know, where the debate has gone as far as campus politics? It's crazy. We're going to have ideological litmus tests in hiring. I've been opposed to that my whole life. And, you know, I'm talking as somebody who is on campuses where my viewpoints are not always

welcome. But how does that work in practice? How do you actually identify and promote conservatives and how do you guarantee that 50% is Hemingway of the Federalist angrily suggested on Twitter? How do you guarantee that you have at least 50% conservatives? Who defines conservative? I think it's just this desire for revenge. It really is. It's a sense that that is actually not completely irrational, that these spaces are extraordinarily intolerant to views that are not even conservative, but are even, I would say, just fundamentally liberal sometimes. And it's a desire to force people who have been in control to feel what it's like to be dictated to. There's a desire for punishment and revenge. I think it's really unhealthy. I'm not in favor of any type of

litmus test, full stop. The other thing that we've seen, it's been interesting. Like some of the biggest, most prominent proponents of the backlash against woke culture, you know, at the New York Times and on college campuses and elsewhere, other folks over at the free press and Barry Weiss, et cetera. Again, like I said, I agreed with a lot of their critiques at the time. They started on a new college spinoff over this, like concerns about cancellation, at people's ability to speak freely on campus. They started University of Austin.

And yet we've seen this year, 2025, like, Like one of the big areas where there's a crackdown on speech is on the Israel-Palestine issue. And a lot of the same folks have been cheerleading that, you know, both when it comes to, you know, whether it be Romana Aztark, getting detained or Muckman Khalil, getting deported. Marco's now new plan to get a green card. You can't have bad speak about Israel or Charlie Kirk on your, you know, in your social media history. What? I guess is my question. What?

How are these the same people? I mean, my position has always been that you have to be against these things in every situation. If you're against cancellation, if you're against purges, if you're against litmus tests that has to apply even when your preferred group is poised to benefit from using these techniques. So I think that it's actually one of the things we've seen as the kind of pendulum swings back and forth is that there are not as many people who are willing to defend their opponents for the sake of a principle as we would have hoped. I've been seeing that left and right.

Even the most prominent advocates, though. I guess that's my point. Like, the most prominent advocates for this. I like the whole premise of the news outlet, the free press, and the College University of Austin was that people should be able to freely debate. I'm not a spokesman for either of those institutions. I have seen them argue among themselves in those institutions. I think that, you know, there's a kind of very human tendency that is the job of people like yourself, and it's the job of, I think, the type of like center-left and center-right, broadly speaking, liberals to call out. You know, there are people that are, you know, very clear on abuses when they can see it in their opponents, but it's

very difficult for them to apply that same type of rigor to their own identity group, because it seems like an exception to them because this issue is so urgent. This issue is so pressing. And that's why I think it's always important to exercise restraint and to be as objective as possible. It'd be like me saying we get to deport, if we get back in charge, we get to deport homophobes. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Like, we need to make sure that if anybody comes into this country at a green card, they can't have a view of tradition, of marriage different from mine or whatever. And that would be insane. But like, that's what the policy of the country is right now. But that's why it's so difficult to be a centrist because you're not actually on a team and no one protects you when they're advocating specifically for their own team because your job is actually to advocate for no teams. The numbers are small in this position, but you know, you know that very well.

My team is against the illiberals. Unfortunately, that's mostly in one party, they're in charge of the party. And in the other party, they are at the grassroots level. So that makes it easy, I guess, in a political. right now, for me, in my position, I feel like, in the straight campaign politics sense. But it is a little more challenging in the broader cultural debate. It can be. May I share with you one of my friends' respects? Yes, I was actually going to end with it. You did an interesting tweet. We'll have to do it another time, which was we're lucky not have social media at 9-11.

What a cancer on society. Full stop. We're all complicit. I'm just going to leave us in a pin on that. Next time you come on, we'll do a whole social media conversation about what we're going to do about that. We don't have time to do that. So let's close with what your friend said. What do we learn.

And next time we can talk some basketball too, I hope. Oh, yeah. Well, let's do that. We can do that right now. So he says, I was never pro-Trump. I was vehemently opposed to everything Democrats was doing and saying, I would have voted for Dick Cheney based on how Democrats were moving. I was more anti-Kamala than pro-Trump.

All right. So that's what I mean by. The Democrats and the kind of the way they allowed themselves to be captured by a social justice activism that was so unattractive that people that weren't even necessarily predisposed to love Trump found him more, his vision, more attractive than to reproduce that activism again. On the one side that's very frustrating, on the other side that I'm going to spin it because it's Friday's show is hopeful because that person feels getable. The first it feels getable against Trump, to be honest. And so there you go. All right, well, give me a basketball hot tag. Let's close with basketball.

What's your NBA finals preview for this year? Oh, the finals preview. So I've got a seven-year-old son. He's being raised in Paris, and Wembenyama is his idol. And so I just want the Spurs to be as competitive as possible. I'm a Spurs fan now. Wembe is unbelievable. Well, we should take the kids of the game.

My daughter's seven, and we just put up a hoop in the backyard. And so, you know, who knows? We're kind of hoping for an Angel Reese future there. We'll see how it turns out. And hopefully better at layups, actually, than Angel Reese. She loved, I took him to her to Wemby's first game here in New Orleans. Oh, really? Yeah, just because it's like so crazy.

Yeah. And it's like, he's unbelievable. Like, he looks like a mutant. He literally does not look like a full human, just that his size and proportions and how smoothly he moves. And how he talks about black holes and plays chess in Washington Square Park. I mean, the guy's a class act. full stop he's amazing his interviews are on level too like he disappeared for a while to be like

to do some monkish stuff this summer for a couple days and uh but no when you watch him on a court it's just um it's not like minute bowl or yow ming one of these other old school tall guys like he just flows his flow he just looks so natural and so i hope you just got a cheek code i don't know the first i ever saw wendy clip that's when he's playing in the french league whatever team he was yeah yeah it was like somebody sent me the clip and you're and i you watch it i started on my phone and it's like he's so tall and long that he wasn't even in the screen on the beginning of the I was like which guy is him and then like out of nowhere three seconds in like he comes into the screen an arm emerges under the screen all right man well I appreciate the time I appreciate

coming on yeah you too Tim and hope to do it again soon all right cool and I just it's a testament to talking with people you hated me on Twitter we talked now we're going to take our kids to see a basketball game together hated was wrong hate it was wrong I was like are you annoyed and like whatever man you are not like it's easy to be annoying i'm sure people i annoy people on twitter you know if you're not looking for trump derangement syndrome on twitter then you probably don't like my material either so i get it now man we're all good i appreciate you going on and everybody else will be back here Monday for another edition of the bowlwork podcast see you all then peace

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Don't you close your eye The Bullwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.