The Daily Beast Podcast - Why It’s Totally Possible for Jon Stewart to Be President

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur can’t stand Republicans and can’t stand Democrats. So who can he possibly see as a viable progressive presidential option for 2024? asks host Andy Levy in this episode of The New Abnormal podcast. Uygur’s top pick: Jon Stewart. The two chat what that would look like, then Vox’s senior politics correspondent Andrew Prokop shares everything we need to know about far right political blogger Curtis Yarvin. The guy not only wants to replace American democracy with a monarchy, but also has ideas on how to make Jan. 6 better “next time.” Plus! Andy and guest co-host Beast opinion editor Anthony Fisher review the biggest political news of the week: the attack on Paul Pelosi and Don Jr’s “gross” response to it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. And I'm producer Jesse Kennett, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some great guest co-hosts, as well as some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try to make some sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What an excellent show we have today.

First we're joined by Jank Yugar, host of the Young Turks, and we'll talk about a host of issues. Then we're joined by Andrew Procop, who's a senior politics correspondent at Fox, and he's going to talk to us about Curtis Jarvin, who's this strange new influential figure on the right. But first, we have Anthony Fisher, who's the senior opinion editor at The Daily Beast.

Joining me now as guest co-host is Anthony Fisher, senior opinion editor for the Daily Beast and writer of The Calling Balls and, writer of the Calling Balls Strikes newsletter on Substack. Anthony, thanks so much for joining us. Delighted to be here, Andy. Thanks. I appreciate you filling in as guest co-host. So let's get right to the news. Obviously, the big story that happened over the weekend and is still going on in terms of coverage is the attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul Pelosi. I guess it was on Friday morning, a guy broke into the Pelosi's home in San Francisco and apparently had duct tape, he had zip

ties and according to some reports he yelled out where's nancy law enforcement says he was definitely looking for nancy pelosi she was not there and he then proceeded to beat paulosey with a hammer putting him in the hospital for i believe a fractured skull obviously a horrible attack and fairly obviously politically motivated unless you are one of those people who is wrapped up in the conservative media ecosystem, in which case it was apparently, Anthony, from what I'm hearing, it was a gay sex thing gone wrong. Mr. Pelosi's recent history of driving under the influence and other things like that, apparently being used as evidence that any other explanation other than a gay sex tryst gone horribly wrong is the only reasonable explanation. Yeah, the guy has been, obviously he was

arrested. His name is David DePape. He's got a fairly large, like it would be the mild way of putting it, internet presence, and it's all, it's just your bog standard right-wing lunacy. It is, you know, the standard anti-Semitism. It is, it's very QAnon. It's very Trumpist. It's all of that. So, of course, people on the right are talking about how, oh, but he was a nudist in Berkeley. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, come on, Andy. Like, you know, wake up, sheeple. You know, there can be no other explanation. Here's the thing. I want to be very cautious. We're recording this Monday afternoon. attack happened very early in the morning, Friday, and they're still considering how much time has passed very little hard evidence we know. So I'm only kind of going by the official reports from

things that the police have been willing to say out loud, not just like through sources, because we should all know better than to trust anonymous sourcing through police. Yes. And official sourcing for that matter. Sure, yeah. Be skeptical at all. But I'm only going by the stuff that is actually being said out loud. There's been so much stuff, which I'm sure we're going to get to, which has trickled through not even back channels, but very much the forward-facing channels on Twitter that are based in absolutely nothing. And so I don't, I haven't done enough in homework to know how deeply involved in the Berkeley nudist community this person was. Or if this person once voted Democrat before they went down the Q&on rabbit hole, that is not an impossible thing. There's

plenty of those people that exist. Look at Roseanne. Rosanne was once a gay rights icon for her on-screen kiss with Sandra Bernhard, I believe, or Laura Dern, whatever. But she went down the hard conspiracy theory trumpist rabbit hole. It can happen. I don't know enough about David DePape and his motivations to speculate on where he came from or how he got into this particular position. But as you said, what we do know about him is that he is prolific online, spreading particular ideas that are very much of a piece with the Trump-Q-Anon-Big Lie COVID-vaccine conspiracy theory. et al kind of political face. So that's what we're working with right now. And until I hear otherwise, that's kind of where I'm going to suspect this person's motivations lie. Yeah, absolutely. I mean,

at this point, it's, you know, it's Occam's Razor. But what we've got here is, and it really is unbelievable, because there was a time when all these conspiracy theories would stay in sort of their own little insane bubble. And post-Trump, that is not the case. And post-Trump, what we see is a Republican party increasingly captured by these theories and a Republican Party that amplifies these theories. And as one example, Congressman Clay Higgins, who is in line to, I believe, be the head of the Homeland Security Committee, if the Republicans take the House back. He tweeted and has since deleted, but he tweeted a picture of some weird picture of Nancy Pelosi's hands pressing against her forehead. And he captioned it, that moment you realize the nudist hippie male prostitute LSD guy is the reason

and your husband didn't make it to your fundraiser. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, this is the guy who is going to be chairing if the Republicans take the house back. He's going to be chairing the Homeland Security Committee. You know, you can't even console yourself or fool yourself, I guess, which is what we used to do, by saying, ah, these people are, you know, they're just crazy. You spend too much time on Reddit. You spend too much time on the chans.

You spend too much time online in general. And nobody in the real world believes this kind of shit, because it ain't true anymore. I mean, yeah, for all the bad takes that might come from Democratic politicians, you'd be hard pressed to find somebody at this level of influence and power kind of going this route. Like take the worst kind of root brain internet id and broadcasting it for all to see. Days after the speaker's husband survived an assassination attempt, really. Yeah, I mean, look, till I'm shown otherwise, I'm not going to come straight out and say this was an assassination attempt on Nancy Pelosi. because as you pointed out, we don't know everything yet. What we know so far, if it can be believed, is kind of pointing in that direction.

But we just don't know. And then you have people like Donald Trump Jr., who at least had the bottom baseline of common dignity to say that the attack on Paul Pelosi was a terrible thing. And then he went on to, of course, blame it on the rise of crime in American cities. and the fact that all these cities are run by Democrats. So he couldn't just let it be. He had to go and say other stuff, which, by the way, also isn't true. Sure.

I don't know if you saw just this morning, he shared like an image from South Park of two characters having gay sex and I don't even remember what the exact meme on it was, but it was a Paul Pelosi joke. I believe he shared it to Instagram. Like, this is where we're at. This is former president's son,

possibly future president's son, while coughing out of one side of his mouth, like, it's a shame that this kind of thing happened is going this deep into this. conspiracy theory and, you know, really just gross on a billion different levels. Like, it's homophobic. It's disgusting on so many different levels. I feel like we're kind of like bashing into the ceiling on like disgust because there's so many different things in this soup right now. And the only thing that I'm certain of is that this could get worse. It's only Monday afternoon, you know, again,

to reiterate, there's only so much we know. And yet the conspiracy theorizing, the kind of slanderous insinuations that are being made out there, these are going to cement them. into the mind of the body politic. It doesn't matter what's corrected later. It doesn't matter if Donald Trump Jr. deletes one or two of these social media posts or whoever else does. The stuff is out there. It'll stay out there forever. You know, I don't want to jump the gun, but Twitter's new boss was a part of this, the spreading of this. Yeah, well, and that's another thing that we can talk about. So Hillary Clinton over the weekend tweeted out about how awful this attack was. And Elon Musk, proud new owner of Twitter, decided that he needed to reply to her saying,

there is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye. And he then provided a link to a piece from the Santa Monica Observer that basically ran through all of these fucked up conspiracy theories that we're talking about. And as other people were quick to point out, the Santa Monica Observer is most famous for publishing a piece that Hillary Clinton was actually replaced by a body double in her debates with Donald Trump back in 2016. And Musk, you know, Mr. Free Speech Guy, since deleted his tweet, which has of course angered some people on the right, powerful figures on the right, such as at cat turd two, for our listeners who don't know, I'm not joking.

And he actually is kind of a powerful figure in this weird right-wing dystopia that we find ourselves in. But yeah, he, you know, he couldn't help himself but to jump in. And even, again, it's the way they couch it. Like, there are the people who just go straight to the conspiracy theory. And then there are people like, well, there's just a tiny chance. and it's the, I'm just asking questions. Yeah, I mean, and, you know, there's a lot to unpack here. I just want to start with the Santa Monica Observer. Elon Musk is definitely a hero to a lot of the people who are the,

I do my own research. I do my own research on the COVID vaccines. I do my own research on voter fraud. These are the people that were sharing a thing called Benford's Law, I believe, like two days after the 2020 election, which they claimed was a mathematical theory that proved that there is absolutely no way that Biden could have won the election. They were, they leaped on this stuff. Elon Musk, in doing his own research came across this low-trafficked, even among conspiracy theory websites, sort of fringe website. And not only did this come across his transom, he shared it to the former First Lady, former Secretary of State, former Democratic presidential candidate as a way of kind of shaming her. Like, he's the one who's actually doing the research. He's the one that's actually trying to find

the truth, whereas she's the one mindlessly repeating propaganda. This isn't to say, oh, look at Elon. a hypocrite, which he obviously is. Of course. It's more to say that it's more a glimpse into that mindset, a mindset that clearly Elon subscribes to and a shit ton of his fanboys and fan girls and fan they's subscribe to, which is that the regime media, or as I've also heard it put, the cathedral, you know, the enemies of the people, they all are pushing this one narrative to question that narrative is to be a thought criminal. And only by digging into, you know, lesser trafficked sites like the Santa Monica Observer and to be brave enough to, you know, seek these things out and then share them, of course, without vetting them in any way. Only those people have the real inside scoop on

the truth, which is, you know, frightening in a lot of ways. But, you know, this is kind of the natural next step to the idea that because mainstream media gets things wrong sometimes and there's an echo chamber and there's self-censorship, which is all true, you know, the mainstream media can, you know, its own worst enemy, people who insist that there is one quantifiable truth and that it's being held by the guardians of journalism. These are people that are giving all the ammunition they need, all the ammunition that the Elon Musk class needs. But it doesn't change the fact that Elon and these people are digging into crap websites, sharing them completely credulously. And no matter what happens after that, the deleted tweet, any of that stuff, it all is going to stay in these people's brain.

It's cemented forever. For those of our listeners who are curious about a term that Anthony just used the cathedral, keep listening because coming up on this podcast is an interview with Andrew Procop, a writer at Vox, who talks about Curtis Yarvin, who is the person who created that expression, the cathedral, and he explains what it means. So I just want to do a little self-plug there. But, yeah, getting back to the story, no, you're absolutely right. And it's just, it's, look, Ted Cruz, who,

You know, podcaster Ted Cruz, who I guess is also a senator. Worse, he's an Astros fan. He's out there tweeting, you know, Matt. God, yeah. Matt Walsh, who a writer for something for the Daily Wire, tweeted a whole thing, you know, I do know that trying to paint a hippie nudist from Berkeley as some kind of militant right winger is absurd and will always be absurd. And Ted Cruz retweeted that or quote tweeted it and wrote,

truth. And it's like, it's not truth. But as you said, truth doesn't matter. Truth hasn't mattered in a long time. Facts hasn't mattered in a long time. And so even at the point where we have this absolutely horrific incident where an 82-year-old man was attacked with a hammer, and this is this is the shit that we have. This is the shit that we get. Yeah. That we're even like, think about this. Like we're, we, we know very little. So much hasn't, you know, been released by law enforcement yet. And but this is, the conversation's moved to this part. We're not even talking about the perpetrator anymore.

We're talking about the interpretations of what happened, you know. That's, that's where the, you know, the, the, the, the, the conversation immediately leapfrogs beyond, beyond just adjudicating a crime and it's perhaps, and it's possible intent. But it's the interpretation of it. It's the political interpretation. Like, what does it mean? You know, it's been. that we're in the post-truth world.

And for every unhinged Rachel Maddo segment that, you know, professed to have the smoking gun behind Russiagate, 500 of these right-wing fever dreams type of conspiracy theories are born. And I'm not saying that A equals B, like one is the cause of the other. Both sides, all sides, are really not placing enough of a primacy on stamping out complete and total bullshit on their own side, saying like, you know, you got it wrong. you completely got it wrong, just completely own it. And I would say absolutely that it's worse on the right right now. Or, you know, people like Musk, I think, would insist that they actually aren't right, but they're just, you know, left to the left or the left was a bigger threat or whatever. You know,

it's all, you know, all bullshit. But they are monetizing and, you know, otherwise capitalizing on a thing that's, you know, a real thing that's been percolating forever, which is like distrust in the elites. And that is a bipartisan thing. But in this case, like literally anything that might come from an authority figure that isn't what they want to hear is obviously something that came from above, from the cathedral, and must immediately be shot down and mocked viciously. That's where we're at right now. That's the new era of civility. Joining me now is the host of the Young Turks, the largest online news show in the world, or so he claims, Jank Yugar. Jank, thanks so much for being in here. Great to have you. Interesting intro.

Look, I haven't had the time to do my own research and as a free thinker and a heterodox thinker, I will not accept anything as fact until I do my own research. So all I can do is say that you claim this. God bless. God bless. No one is, by the way, you're not the only one. Everybody's skeptical of it. And then whenever I asked, hey, name me a larger show or online network. I've never gotten one yet. Okay. You've convinced me, by the way. I now am fully on board. I also want to point out before we start that I am a quarter Turkish.

Oh, okay. Well, so then we're definitely going to agree. Okay. Excellent. At least 25% of the time, we will agree. That's right. Before we get to the news of the day, I did want to say you tweeted something a couple days ago I thought was interesting. He said, here's what we need in 2024 to save the country. One, an outsider. No one inside the system can or wants to change the system. Two, someone really smart. so that eliminates entire Republican Party. Three, someone for once with good intent. Is there one such person in the entire country? I thought that was interesting, and I know that I'm assuming at that point you knew you were coming on here, and you don't need to suck up to me like that.

But I do appreciate it and don't think I don't. But no, I actually thought that was a very interesting tweet. You're completely gone on the idea that anyone in the system can do anything at this point. Yeah, 100%. First of all, the Republican Party is not just useless. It's awful, counterproductive, is dead set on destroying democracy, which we'll talk about in a little bit. So that's obviously not anything that any reasonable person had ever entertained.

So that leaves the Democratic Party. Well, the problem with the Democratic Party is that they suck. They're terrible at running elections. They keep losing to monstrous Republicans. And the Republicans aren't that bright. I mean, Donald Trump's IQ is barely in double digits. And right now he's probably. the favorite to win again. The Democrats are completely incompetent. They are in the compliance business.

The problem is when fascism comes along, they comply. They're a corrupt party, an incompetent party, and so, and they will not allow reform from within the party. One thing that they are really good in is attacking and destroying progressives in primaries with honestly the help of mainstream media. that is they view progressors as their number one enemy, like by far and away, way, way bigger danger than Donald Trump. And that's because they're corrupt. And so, no, I'm not interested Biden or Kamala Harris or any of these lukewarm, useless politicians. So I know you ended that tweet with a question. Is there one such person in the country? Is there? Is there anyone you can think of who might fit that bill? Well, that's the difficult part. And hence the tweet. Did you get any good responses at least?

You know, I hadn't thought of this one guy and I thought, oh, that's kind of interesting. John Stewart, I was like, it's not impossible, right? So, oh, he's a comedian. What are you talking about? Zelensky's a comedian. Donald Trump is a literal clown. I think he has a red bulbous nose of floppy shoes.

And Stewart is super smart. I think he's progressive. I'm not positive, which is good news. Right. Then he'll have quote unquote credibility in mainstream media. And if he is a progressive, I would count. counsel him to keep that quiet until later, so that he's not banned from all of media. So it's not impossible. Honestly, and this is kind of a really, I think people would view it as an ironic statement,

although it isn't. I think that a businessman could be an interesting possibility, but they got to be progressive. And that's why I think people think it's ironic, but it's not. There's a lot of great business owners that are progressive. Just someone who knows what they're doing is strong and smart and progressive and populist. So it's a tough bill because media tells us who the powerful people are. Right. And they never allow progressives on. So no one has built up enough power and name recognition to take that role on. But we need it because we can't have an insider. An insider is never going to change the system. An insider got to the top within this system. They love this system. And this system's killing us. So it sounds to me like what you're looking for is a Ben and Jerry ticket.

Kind of. So not those particular folks, although they're wonderful folks, but something along those lines. And is that possible? We'll see. Yeah, I'm not entirely sure that Stewart fits the progressive mold. Most of the lefties I know are not huge fans of his, but not that they set the tone for the party. But I feel like in a lot of ways, Stewart is thought of more as a not quite establishment liberal, but closer to that than to the progressive way. So if we have disagreements on policy, that's actually totally fine. I don't mind that. I'm not doctrinaering on that at all.

The reason why I would be worried about an establishment liberal is because of the mindset, not because of policies. Right. Right. The mindset is we shouldn't fight Republicans. We should be civil. We should whisper because NPR told us a whisper. We should support money in politics because corruption is awesome.

So even if Stuart was more of a moderate than I am within the party, as long as he's not corrupt and there's no reason in the world to think that he would be, then it's game on. Thrill to have it. People have a view of the left as being very ideological and doctrinarian. And that's not exactly right. And it's not completely wrong, neither. It depends on what part of the left you're talking about. Well, it's definitely right on Twitter. Yes.

There's no doubt about that. Yeah, I mean, look, guys, I've been attack slash canceled by everywhere. of every party. And there's a reason for that because I don't say standard things. Find me a thing I say that 70% of the country doesn't agree with. For example, I think almost all the politicians are corrupt. Well, 90% of Americans agree with me. Zero percent of the people in power agree with me. So, okay, am I a radical because zero percent of the people in power agree with me? Or am I a moderate because 90% of the American people agree with it. And so when it gets to some portions of the left, are they dissatisfied with me? Of course. Because I won't follow

standard ideology. My co-host Anna Kasparian won't follow it. Nobody in our network will follow it. We're independent thinkers. So if you give us an idea and it's great, I don't care where it came from. And if you give us an idea that's not working, I also don't care where it came from. And that really pisses people off, especially on Twitter. Yeah. Twitter is not, you know, for our listeners who are not on Twitter. It's not in the top 150,000 nuanced platforms in the world. I think it's fair to say. So speaking of Twitter, we had two things like perfect story. storm type things over the weekend. First was the horrible attack on the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Paul Pelosi, and it quickly became obvious that the attacker, this may have been

an assassination attempt. We don't know that for sure, but the reports are that he shouted, Where's Nancy as he entered the house? And he certainly had the views of someone who would want to do something like assassinate Nancy Pelosi. At the same time, Elon Musk had just taken over Twitter, which was causing a complete shitstorm on Twitter and probably not anywhere else in the actual world. But then he decided to insert himself into the Pelosi story by retweeting an article. It was in the Santa Monica Observer, a paper that had previously published about how Hillary Clinton, I think, had been killed and replaced by a robot, which, you know, but he ironically did this in replying to a tweet by Hillary Clinton. And he basically was like, well, it's possible we don't

know the full story here, and it linked to this just ridiculous piece about what has now become, it seems, a standard right-wing talking point, which is that the Paul Pelosi attack was actually some sort of gay sex thing gone wrong. So we sort of had this coming together of this horrible political story and this story about what is going to happen to Twitter. And it just seems like the same few exceptions that we see every time now on the right, which is basically like people at the bulwark or something like that, they're all over this. conspiracy story or something seems off here. Ted Cruz has tweeted it. Elon obviously has tweeted it. Clay Higgins put up a tweet, which he's since deleted. What do you make of this?

Yeah, there's a lot of issues here, and they're all probably the most important issues in the country because it's going to affect who's going to win in 24 and whether we're going to have a democracy or not. And that is not at all hyperbolic. We are headed straight towards an iceberg. And as much as people in power kind of talk about it around the edges, I don't think they get it at all. I don't think they realize how close we are to losing the country. And I don't mean losing it like, oh, the Republicans won and the Democrats are out of power. No, I mean losing it as in Trump wins and we never have another election. Right. Or we have fake elections going on. And I mean, the last time they literally had fake electors.

And so, and now secretaries of state are running that say, yes, next time we will do fake electors. And next time we'll do the actual freaking coup. And so the rioters on January 6th were not the coup. The fake elector scheme, dreamt up by Eastman, Navarro, Bannon, and supported by Donald Trump, that was the coup. And so how it relates to this is for the right wing is lost. Now, I'm going to get back to the mainstream into the establishment and how they have a huge culpability in this play, okay? But first, patience zero is the right way. And patience is the right way of putting it. All the way through Elon Musk, they have lost their goddamn minds. We need clarity on it. It's not 50-50.

It's not at all 50-50. I cannot have a debate with a lunatic. Okay, there is no, like, I can't stand Hillary Clinton. I think she's establishment 101. I think she's an epitome of corruption. She does not have a body double. She didn't die. She doesn't do anything in a basement in a pizza shop.

You guys are lunatics. You've absolutely lost your minds. You're detached from reality. Let's be absolutely clear. If you're in that camp of the Republican Party, you must get a therapist. I swear to God, you're in a cult, you can't see straight. They've brainwashed you, and you're in a very, very dangerous cult.

They're totally detached from reality. And guys, Q&N, let alone the entire Republican Party, but Q&N is 45 million people. I know. It's so scary. They think the Democrats drink the brain juice of children. Just sheer lunacy. So you see the panic in my voice.

right? You see the urgency in my voice. Do you ever hear that from the goddamn Democrats? Get up and fight back. You've got to fight back. I mean, for example, what right now, they have nowhere near the testicular fortitude needed for this job. Biden, the minute must does that, Biden should be out there going, apparently the richest man in the world has lost his goddamn mind and just take the fight to him. Proverbally, not physically, we're not right wing. Punch him in the face, right? Punch him in the face proverbially, politically, rhetorically, rhetorical. right for god's sake get in the goddamn game right they're just sitting on the sidelines so we have a massive danger and so once you've lost track of reality your inches from fascism and then what i've been

warning on on the young turks and t yt the entire network for two years straight now and everybody was like oh yeah yeah yeah that's a concern and i maybe maybe and stuff and i was like no no you don't understand guys the bottom line is anti-semitism so whenever we talk to qanonan guys and i because we're not mainstream media. We don't care about stupid platforming issues and stuff. No, we've got to go talk to them to find out what's going on in their crazy heads. And what's going on is whenever you get past the Latinos, the Muslims, blacks, it's gays, et cetera, they don't care about any of that. That's just window dressing. That's just fun hatred for them. The bottom line is they all say the same thing. The Jews are on the country. And so when you get to anti-Semitism, not only is it grotesque in

of its own right. Not only does it portend horrible things for the country, et cetera, but it's also the very last step before fascism. And now anti-Semitism is here and raging. And can I curse? Yes. Fuck Kanye West. Fuck him. Okay. Because he opened up that Pandora's box and now everybody, all the ghouls and goblins are flying out, right? And of course, what did Trump do? He instantly jumped on it, instantly did an anti-Semitic rant of his own. He's been an anti-Semite for a long time. Oh my God. His daughter married a Jewish guy. Who cares? Everything he says is anti-Semitic. He said that there were good people on both sides when there was a

Nazi march. How does, how could it be any clearer than that? And yet our feckless leaders are sitting there with a thumb up their ass and not barely fighting back. So that's my take on the right wing. I'll pause here before I'm level of establishment. That is a 100% fair take. If anything, I think maybe you undersold it. But yeah, I think you're right about the anti-Semitism because that is, just historically, that is always the underpinning of these movements. And again, it's not that they're not also racist. It's not that they're not also homophobic and transphobic and everything Islamophobic

and just every other thing that you can name. But it is always the anti-Semitism that underpins this. And for the exact reason you said, because it's the protocols of the elders of Zion. I was just reading a book, a fiction book that had to deal with the protocols. And I remember thinking when I was much younger, how did anyone believe that the protocols were not a forgery? And I don't think that anymore. It's very obvious how people believe that because they still do. And you see it all day long on places like Twitter. You see it all day long from Republican politicians. And like you said, Donald Trump has a Jewish daughter. And it's an

insidious form of anti-Semitism because it's not even necessarily a sort of, I hate you or I don't like anybody who's Jewish. And Donald Trump can, in his mind, he can have a son-in-law who's Jewish and have grandchildren who are Jewish. And that's okay with him. But at the same point, he absolutely believes the central tenets of anti-Semitism, which is that Jews run the world. And what we get is this thing that unites people like Kanye West and Donald. Trump. And Tucker Carlson is one of the people who won't come right out and say it, and the he'll use George Soros as their sort of stand in. But you know damn well that that's what he thinks. And it is this overarching belief. And look, it's worked. Unfortunately, it has worked historically. And it

leads to horrible things, as we know. And that is consistently where they go. So you are 100% correct in identifying anti-Semitism as sort of the root of all of this, I think. Yeah. So I know Tucker Carlson a little bit. I debated him at Politicon. We talked before, we talked after, and he never said anything to me that was directly anti-Semitic. So I'm being fair here and honest. But the things that he did say made me think, hmm, and this is now, remember, like three years ago at least, so this new rage of anti-Semitism had not popped up yet. Right. And I walked away thinking, this guy could be dangerously anti-Semitic. And for the listeners, they have to understand. Nowadays, everything is called bias. And so if a Jewish person says this, they'll say, oh, it's by your biased. Well,

you're biased in favor of wanting to stay alive and not be discriminated and hate it against, et cetera. So rest assured, this is not biased. I grew up Muslim. And by the way, look at what happened. What did Donald Trump do? First, he came for the Latinos and said they were criminals and rapists, and nothing happened. Then he came for the Muslim. And he said, we should ban all Muslims until we figure out what the hell is going on. News flash, he's never going to figure out what the hell's going on. He's an idiot. Okay, we didn't do anything. Then he came for the Chinese. We didn't do anything. Then he came for trans folks. We didn't do anything. And now we're at the end here. Anti-Semitism is the end. And so it is the most toxic of all of these. The right wing knows in

their gut that the guy who crossed the border doesn't have a dollar in his pocket. He can't control a damn thing. They know it. They know it. And when they think about the elites, they don't know reality. I went to Wharton. I went to Columbia Law School. I know I've got money from private equity, et cetera. Who is in the upper echel? In fact, you could look it up. You could look at the partners at the top private equity companies in the world. Those are the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world. And you know what they are? They're Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, black, white, Asian.

It has nothing to do with race. It has nothing to do with religion. It just has to do with, hey, the incentives and this incentives that led to those particular people being at the top. And so for the simplistic mind, they think, no, it's a group of people because humans are tribal. And then you can't talk sense to them. Okay, well, if Jews are on the world and they're not, they're not. they're all super powerful and super rich. How do you explain Israel where there are wealthy Jews,

middle class Jews, and poor Jews? How come the poor Jews aren't running the war? How come they're not part of the Kabbal? No, logic not required. And so once you lose the threat of logic, we're all screwed because that means you can get them to believe anything. Well, and the other thing is, I mean, if we're running the world, boy, I mean, we've been nothing but persecuted for thousands of years,

almost wiped out during World War II. We are really, really shitty at it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, but that's the thing. guys, once you lose track of logic, there's no end to it. If the Jews were running the world, why did they let six million of them die? Right. And then of course, they're immediately going to go to, no, they didn't. Right. And by the way, I give ADL anti-deformationally tremendous amount of credit because when Trump came for the Muslims, they actually stood up and said no. So they were

wonderful in helping Muslims and other Americans. And all of us right now should be deeply, deeply concerned about anti-Semitism, whether you're Jewish or not. All right. I think because of time purposes, we're going to have to end it right there. But, Jank, thank you so much for coming on. This was an absolute pleasure to talk to you. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. Next time, I will be just as harsh on the establishment. Excellent.

Pointing me now is Andrew ProCop, senior writer at Vox. Andrew, I swear we're not having you on because I've basically had someone on named Andy or some form of the name Andy every week's I've taken over. I swear that's not why I'm having you on. I'm having you on, I wanted you on, because you wrote a really good article at Vox about a guy who has somehow become sort of quietly in the sense that he's not a household name, a very influential person on the right. And the guy's name is Curtis Yarvin. Tell us about this dude. Yeah. So, first of all, thanks so much for having me on. I got interested in writing about Curtis Jarvin because

I kept kind of seeing his name come up in the context of this year's midterms. There was a great article in Vanity Fair by James Pogue that delved into a little bit of this how two now Republican Senate nominees, J.D. Vance and Blake Masters have actually referred to this guy's ideas on the campaign trail. And they are, of course, both also funded by the billionaire Peter Thiel. And Teal is also also a fan of Yarbon. So I began looking more into what he's been writing about and saying. And he is a very unusual figure in American political commentary because he is explicitly, outwardly, anti-democracy. He thinks democracy is a bad system. He thinks it should be abolished in the United States in favor of a monarchy or some kind of one man.

rule system where one person has absolute power to do what he wants and essentially getting rid of both, you know, the voters and the separation of power that exists in the current American system. So pretty far out there. And so I thought it was really interesting. I don't want to lead anyone to believe that Vance and Masters are fully on board with this plan. They more view YARVIN as an influence on their thinking because Yarven has had a critique of what's wrong with America that's gotten more and more traction on segments of the right. I agree that this doesn't necessarily mean that Masters and Vance are pro-monarchy or pro-one person rule. On the other hand, I don't think either of those guys would have a problem with that if they were the one person. Blake Masters was asked about this. He says,

I believe in democracy. I believe in the Constitution. I believe in our republic. But the reason he has caught on among them is he started writing a blog back in 2007, 15 years ago, under the pseudonym Mincius Moldbug, a very interesting moniker. He kind of presented his whole theory of how the world works right then. He looks at America today and he says, this is what's wrong. The American government no longer works. The president has no real power to achieve what he wants. There's the deep state and Congress and the court are all hemming in the president and our political leaders just can't do anything. It's too dysfunctional. Then he also has a critique of kind of the culture. He talks about what he calls the cathedral, which is what he believes to be the elite academic and journalistic

institutions that set the boundaries of discourse in America and rule certain ideas okay to talk about, other things not okay to talk about. This very much caught on with conservatives in recent years, conservatives who are very exercised and angry about, you know, wokeism or the woke, who feel that everyone is trying to cancel them for their views on race or gender or whatever. It's a sort of theory of why this is happening, that like the media and academia are pushing everything so far to the left. This helps explain the world to them. So he has caught on among people like dance, people like masters. Tucker Carlson, had him on a Fox streaming show and talked to him for over an hour about his ideas. Yarvan is also

noteworthy. If you're very online, you've probably heard of people talking about being red-pilled or pilled. That's a reference to The Matrix where Neo is offered the red pill, which will let him see reality clearly for the first time, or the blue pill, which will let him remain in a fantasy. And Yarvin is actually the person who first popularized that metaphor, which is now kind of everywhere, especially on the right, with regards to politics, with regards to this idea that, you know, what you see around you in the media, what you hear from your political elites, it's all fake to a certain extent. And then there's this real reality of how the world works that he's going to show you. And so he helped show J.B. Bans and Blake Masters these things. They cited him as a big influence. in their thinking. Yeah, and you point out in your piece, you even say that Vance has used that language. He said he's been red-pilled. Yes, in a conversation when he was referring to Yarvan specifically. So, you know, that's the background on Yarvan, but the real reason I thought this was super important is that not only does he theorize about, you know, why democracy is bad. Like any

political theorist could come up with reasons for that, and it would be an abstract thing, and it wouldn't be a big deal. But he also has a bunch of very specific ideas about what could be done to topple American democracy. Even that could be viewed as a theoretical thing until the 2020 election in January 6th, which suddenly makes what seemed to be sort of far-fetched fantasies a little closer to reality when you have the president trying to overturn the outcome of the election to stay in power, when you have a mob of his supporters storming the Capitol. Like, this is pretty close to the kinds of things that he's been wanting to happen for some time. And he has a bunch of proposals for how to essentially do January 6th better next time,

how to make it work for the forces who do want to overthrow the American government. Yes, it's pretty scary stuff. And, you know, there's an interesting thing going on here where in the old days you sort of thought of, Republican strategists and people like that, you thought of like a Lee Atwater, like rough and tumble brawler type, which I don't mean as a compliment to Lee Atwater, believe me. But now you have someone like Yarvin who is, like you said, a lot of what he says sounds a lot like what I remember from my college philosophy courses. It's sort of, you know, they even have a, isn't there a phrase that the dark enlightenment?

Yeah, that was used to refer to sort of the movement he's helped. start. There are a couple other people, bloggers, online writers associated with it. It's called the Dark Enlightenment or sometimes Neo Reaction. That kind of became the term associated with it in the early 2010s. And he was always one of the leading figures here. And that's when his ideas first got some attention and some notoriety, especially in tech circles. He is a computer programmer who lives in the Bay Area, he has a very kind of startup tech guy trolling, almost mindset of looking at the world that did appeal to by no means most, but certainly some people in the tech world who didn't really buy into liberalism or progressivism who don't like what they

refer to as the social justice warriors or the woke. He was already kind of catching on in the early 2010s. And he got some attention. His identity was. was revealed by journalists at the time, and he got some real world blowback from that as he would try to speak at some conferences for his startup, and there would be big protests. His invite got rescinded to one. A lot of advertisers pulled out of another one. That was kind of his first brush with infamy, so to speak. And he sort of disappeared from the radar screen for a while.

He closed down his blog. He went on hiatus in 2014, shut it down in 2016, to focus on. on the startup that he had helped found. But then he left that in 2020 and has kind of returned to the political scene and now appears to be more influential than ever on the right and specifically among what has been deemed the new right. You know, we started talking about neo-reaction

and the dark enlightenment. But now we're getting into the post-Trump ideas conversation on the right. And of course what Trump did was he essentially, essentially repelled a bunch of the existing conservative intellectuals and people, like, there were a lot of, you know, conservatives who might have had far-right views on tax policy or whatever, but who did believe in liberal democracy and were kind of appalled at Trump's behavior. And they all sort of left, most of them left the party or got purged or just kind of quit. You can see this with like people leaving national review and going to found their own publications. And in the sense, with people getting primaried or retiring and so on. And so there's this new intellectual space on the right where the ideas that are in play are much further in this kind of challenging democracy space than has certainly existed in my lifetime as far as I'm aware of.

Like all sorts of things that were previously on the table or deemed taboo are now being discussed. And this is this is the new right. There's another great piece in the New York Times magazine about the Claremont Institute. They're kind of the main think tank affiliated with this, and they helped kind of welcome Yarvin into the fold. They started running his essays in 2019 and 2020. And now he's all over this kind of new right podcast space, laying out his ideas. And yeah, he's really in the mix. And his influence seems to have risen.

So you mentioned Peter Thiel earlier. And, yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, YARVIN has influenced Teal, and this is probably not a surprise, since he sort of floats from one weirdo, techno-libertarian theory to another, it feels like anyway. And, you know, then you mention people like Blake Masters and J.D. Vantz, both of whom are funded by Peter Thiel. And so is that the pipeline now? Is this the, is it the YARVIN to Teal to candidates pipeline? I would have to track exactly how that happened. There was a good report in Mother Jones that I linked to in my story that Blake Masters was reading Yarvin back in 2012 when he was, I believe, in business school or law school at that time. He was kind of getting interested in Teal around the same time, but I wouldn't be able to say who is responsible for, you know, somebody reading him. What I do know is that Teal and Yarvin are pretty close. started funding his startup about a decade ago, and then emails were later leaked that confirmed that Yarvin attended Teal's election night watch party in 2016 for the presidential election. Later, Yarvin was emailing another alt-right figure, Milo Yanopoulos, and Yarvan wrote,

Teal is fully enlightened, but he plays it very carefully in public. So we don't know exactly where Teal is putting his money and how it may or may not be spreading Yarvin's ideas specifically or are ideas that are like his. But we do know that Teal said back in 2009, he no longer believes that democracy and freedom are compatible. He was disillusioned with the state of democracy. And again, he's interested in a lot of these strange intellectual characters on the right. But his relationship with Yarvon specifically has been a long-lasting thing. This has not been a momentary flirtation, if you will, with Yarnan, I thought. They're pretty close.

And I don't think the full extent of their relationship is fully understood at this point, but there's something there. This seems like it's a lot more than sea-steading, for example, which was another Peter Thiel. Interest, yeah. Yeah, for like a year or two or whatever. You wrote this in the piece, if I recall correctly, that Yarvan doesn't like being called a fascist. and he prefers something closer to a monarch. What is the distinction there in this philosophy? Is there a one?

This is a controversial question because his critics say he's a fascist. Like this is obviously fascism. And he argues that fascism was a specific 20th century phenomenon that arose kind of in response to communism. It was this mobilization of people on the rights to take power. various countries. You know, monarchy existed long before fascism existed. It was kind of the default system of national government for centuries before anyone dreamed of democracy. So he argues that, you know, monarchy is just a broader category than fascism. Now, when you dig into his specific

ideas of how to get to that monarchy, they certainly start to sound kind of fascist. Like at one point, he was talking on a podcast with actually a former Trump. Trump administration official Michael Anton about, you know, ways that January 6th could be done better next time. And he said, you know, Trump has a lot of support among the police department, the security services. How about we start having the Trump supporters among those, start wearing special armbands. So everyone knows. Come on. So he likes to play with that. He likes to, you know, say, oh, I'm not a fascist, but, you know, here are these things that might be a good idea, and everyone sees them as well.

That certainly sounds pretty fascist. I'm not a fascist, but let's bring back the brown shirts. Yeah, yeah. And honestly, I, you know, I feel like it's the liberal and progressive kind of conversation about the far right in recent years. There's just a lot of energy put into whether to use the terms racist or fascist to describe them. What I tried to do in this piece was focus on what he's, was specifically arguing and proposing and kind of let that speak for itself, which I think it does

without like getting into this like interminable dispute over what term is appropriate for this or is not appropriate. I think like we can have an abstract academic discussion about language all day. But what I think is most interesting is that he has these very specific ideas about what could be done in the near future to overthrow the American government. So you can call that fascism or you can call that whatever you want, a right-wing coup. But let's talk about this stuff that is out there and being talked about on the right now and being considered in some form. And I think it's important, too, for people who are not on the far right, to just be aware

that these conversations are happening. And to remember after January 6th that these things may not be so abstract for forever. Yeah, so his stance is sort of, it's basically not all autocrats are fascists. Yes. Okay, so we need a hashtag, hashtag not all autocrats, I guess. So before I let you go, Yarvan has become sort of this, it's this weird cultural figure where he pops up at like these in the hipster scenes, even here in downtown New York, he goes to parties.

How did that happen? Yeah, and that is definitely a very strange development. that I will admit I don't fully have my handle on. I'm in Washington, D.C. I'm going to leave that to the New Yorkers to kind of figure out because I don't totally understand what's happening there. But what I do know is that he has explicitly said that his strategy going forward, what he thinks is most important is to sow seeds of doubt of democracy in the minds of people on the left, that he wants everyone who is on the left, liberals, leftists, what have you, socialists, to all become convinced that democracy is failing.

We barely have democracy anymore. Why is this even worth saving? What is the point of this? So he has been focusing lately on topics where he could actually find some agreement on the left because a lot of people on the left are concerned that our government has become a bit too sclerotic and ineffective, that there are flaws in the Constitution. The president isn't strong enough to get the legislation he wants passed, that the Supreme Court is too powerful.

Now the left is very concerned about the Supreme Court. I think accurately. And just that politics has just become this endless slog of warfare against the other side. And he's trying to sort of disillusion people on the left with the system as a whole, because he believes once that disillusion spreads enough, that will pave the way for a right-wing, like, leader to take over with minimal resistance. So it's basically taking sort of the left-wing Bernie Sanders, the system is rigged, you know, energy and trying to harness that. Yeah, or at least spread that feeling, but rather than have it channeled towards something positive like electing Bernie Sanders, have it just end in a slough of disillusionment so that people won't even bother to try to save the government or democracy that we have to pave the way for the people he wants to take over. Andrew, thank you so much for being here.

I encourage everyone. There's so much in the article that we didn't have a chance to touch on. I encourage everyone to go over to Vox.com and check it out. Andrew, again, thank you so much. And thanks for writing this. I learned a ton from it and was all really interesting. Thanks so much for having me. This was a great chat.

Anthony Fisher. Andy Levy. All right. So this is the time on the show when we not only dance, but when we do the segment called Fuck That Guy. And we're going to do something a little special today. And we're going to share, well, this doesn't sound right. We're going to share a Fuck That Guy.

guy. It is one of the absolute dumbest people on the planet. I don't think that's hyperbole. I think that is actual truth. I've said before, I believe that when he tries to get dressed in the morning, he is absolutely defeated by buttons. His name is Charlie Kirk. And he had this to say about the attack on Paul Pelosi. For example, Politico says top Republicans reject any link between GOP rhetoric and Paul Pelosi assault. Of course you should reject any link. Why is the Republican party? Why is the conservative movement to blame for gay schizophrenic nudists that are hemp jewelry makers breaking into somebody's home or maybe not breaking into somebody's home? Why are we to blame for that exactly? And why is he still in jail? Why has he not been bailed out? By the way, if some

amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out. I bet his bail is like $30,000 or $40,000. Bail him out and then go ask him some questions. So, Anthony, what do we have here? We have a guy, first of all, calling for, he says so many just ridiculously dumb things in this thing. It's hard to even know where to start.

But I guess let's start with he wants someone to be a hero and bail this guy out. The thing that jumped out of me is there's a lot of criminal justice reform talk in there. and he's talking, he says that you can commit murder and be out in a day in Chicago, which Chicago's got a lot of problems, but that's not true. Yeah, so whatever the motivation of the perpetrator, you'd think that a violent assault on a person in their home would beg the kind of response from a conservative like Charlie Kirk, which would be more like, you know, if you must make fun of the Pelosi's, be like,

this is why they're dumb. They should have been armed to the team. teeth with, you know, automatic weapons pointing at every inch of the sidewalks of this guy never got near them. That's, that would be the, you know, kind of principled, logical Charlie Kirk, right-wing take. But, uh, there is no principle and there's no logic. So it has to go into, uh, this guy is a hero. This guy, we, we, this is the kind of, uh, crime that, uh, is okay. In fact, laudable. He's a, he's a hero. We must bail him out and, and take advantage of, uh, I guess San Francisco's lax bail laws.

for potential political assassins, which also isn't a thing. Yeah, and again, there's so much more. He talks about, he read some headlines that mentioned that the, you know, GOP denies any link to the attacker. And he's like, well, why would the GOP have to deny that? Why would conservatives have to deny that? And I'll tell you why, Charlie. And it's real easy.

Because as we discussed in the main section of the show, this guy has a huge internet footprint. and he is spouting, he spouts a lot of things that have become mainstreamed by the Republican Party post-2016. And this gets me to something else like that Rana Romney McDaniel said the other day. And it was sort of the same thing. And she's like, why you can't blame, you know, Republican attacks on Pelosi, you know, verbal attacks on Pelosi. You can't, you can't draw a line between those and what happened here. And the answer to that is, in a sane world,

you absolutely couldn't. But in the world we live in now, you absolutely can. And particularly on the Republican side or on the right, because you know that we saw what happened on January 6th. We saw how words led to violent actions. And we've seen it time and time again. And Republicans know this. And they know that there is a fairly large segment of their support is coming from people who are to not to put a fine point on it unhinged. And they know. what these words mean to those people. So yes, in a totally sane world, you could say, hey, us going after Nancy Pelosi, that's just politics. And yes, it is just politics, except you know exactly what you're doing. You know how this, if you want to get Manchurian candidate

about it, you know how this activates a certain segment of your people. And you either don't care or it's what you want. And this is strictly my opinion. Please feel free to tell me I'm being stupid year. Not to introduce another fuck that guy candidate here, but just the other day on Friday, John Cardillo who's a right-wing commentator ex-Nypd cop, friend of Ron DeSantis, invited guest of Ron

DeSantis several times. He tweeted, I'm going to say it. I couldn't care what less what happened to Paul Pelosi. He and his wife are evil motherfuckers who have raped and pillaged this nation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, damn. Who could possibly hear that kind of rhetoric and take it to its most extreme endgame, right? And, you know, it's often

been pointed to that there have been left-wing incidents of this. Like the guy who shot Steve Scalise and at the practice for the congressional baseball game, this guy attempted a mass assassination of Republican lawmakers. And if it weren't for the Capitol Police being there because Scalise was there as the third Republican in line, it would have been a massacre. And, you know, I honestly do think that story is a little too easily forgotten. But here's the huge difference, all right? When people pointed out that this guy was a Bernie Sanders supporter, Bernie Sanders immediately and unequivocally denounced it, denounced violence,

sent his sympathies to the, you know, to Scalise and anyone else who was in danger. I don't even think on the most commie, tanky, edge lord Twitter accounts around that time, was there anybody kind of capitalizing on it, like going, yeah, assassinate all of them? I don't think that really happened. Whereas here you have, let's say it, mainstay. extreme conservative commentators basically saying they're evil and they had it coming. Yeah, exactly. Bernie Sanders, there are people probably a segment of our listenership doesn't like Bernie Sanders. Like him or not, there's nothing Bernie Sanders has ever said that would

resonate as a call to violence. There is a ton of things that have been said by multiple people on the right that could easily be read as calls to violence. And again, I'm not, you know, I want to make it clear, I'm not saying that anything that these Republican people said was illegal. I'm not saying that they shouldn't be charged as accessories to this crime or anything like that. But the point is, they know what they're doing. They know what they're doing when they do these sometimes veiled, sometimes not, calls for violence, when they accuse Democrats of being treasonous, when they accuse Democrats of being murderers, when they accuse Democrats of wanting to kill Republicans. etc. They know exactly what they're doing and this is what happens and they know that. That's my point.

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