Chris Rufo Thinks the Right Can Control This. I Don’t.

Christopher Rufo is arguably the most successful activist of the MAGA era. He rose to prominence fighting D. E. I. initiatives and critical race theory. In President Trump’s second term, he’s had a huge influence on policy, from Trump’s executive orders against D. E. I. and the attacks on the Department of Education to the ICE and C. B. P. deployments to Minneapolis. Rufo, helpfully, calls his shots. He has published a guide, “The New Right Activism: A Manifesto for the Counterrevolution,” in which he argued for the value of “agitprop” and counseled that “political life moves on narrative, emotion, scandal, anger, hope, and faith — on irrational, or at least subrational, feelings.” But more recently, in his writing and on the podcast he co-hosts, “Rufo & Lomez,” he seems worried about the new right he has helped build: its attraction to conspiracy theories, its racialist thinking, its internal fissures. So I wanted to have him on the show to talk about the problems he sees on his side, but also to interrogate whether he may have scored short-term victories while seeding profound long-term problems. Rufo is a senior fellow and director of the initiative on critical race theory at the Manhattan Institute. He’s a contributing editor of City Journal and the author of “America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.” This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: “The New Right Activism” by Christopher Rufo “The Number” by David D. Kirkpatrick “The unraveling of a cat tale” by Jacqueline Sweet Book recommendations Unmasking the Administrative State by John Marini The Revolutionary by Stacy Schiff The Managerial Revolution by James Burnham Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Julie Beer. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Mixing by Pat McCusker, Efim Shapiro, and Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Kate Wilkinson and Marlaine Glicksman.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:26Ezra Klein?

  You could really make a case that Chris Rufo is the most successful activist, certainly on the right of this era. He initially rose in prominence as the central strategist in the right's counterattack on DEI initiatives. He's very much behind a lot of the demonization of critical race theory.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Critical race theory has become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  He claims CRT is actually a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.

• 1:03Ezra Klein?

  And he built that into a series of campaigns. They've actually changed policy. It's very influential in Ron DeSantis's governorship and kind of running Claudine Gay out of Harvard.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Pushing out Claudine Gay, toppling the president of Harvard for a journalist like me is a big win.

• 1:18Ezra Klein?

  Then in Donald Trump's second term, quite a lot has come out of Rufo's work for better and from my perspective for worse. From a lot of Trump's early executive orders.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  We've ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government and indeed the private sector and our military.

• 1:42Ezra Klein?

  To some of the work that led to the ICE and CBP deployments to Minnesota.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  This week I published an exclusive story exposing the Somali fraud rings in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which are stealing billions of dollars from American taxpayers.

• 1:58Ezra Klein?

  Whatever else you want to say about him, Rufo has quite significantly affected the world we live in. He's also, if you listen to him, and he's a very, very smart and often quite honest analyst of his own side. One thing I appreciate about Rufo is he always says what he is doing clearly and in public. He seems uneasy.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Gone are the days when Tucker Carlson's nightly monologue set the agenda for the entire right.

• 2:22Ezra Klein?

  You can feel a sort of disquiet, a sense that maybe the right, this right, is not becoming what he hoped it would be.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Now we find ourselves in an escalating war of influencers, trading conspiracies and counter conspiracies.

• 2:35Ezra Klein?

  That its attentional and informational sphere is polluted.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Driving the right into all different kinds of rabbit holes and dead ends.

• 2:44Ezra Klein?

  That the administration is not getting as much done as he had hoped, intended, tried to help it do. As I wanted to have Rufo on, not because we agree on things, we obviously don't, you'll hear that, not because I'm trying to talk him into my way of seeing things, I'm not going to do that. But both to understand how he understands what he is doing, and also to interrogate it, to ask if the tactics he is using are actually working, or if he's scoring short-term victories at the cost of helping to seed profound long-term problems. Rufo is a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute. He's a contributing editor of City Journal.

• 3:28Ezra Klein?

  He is the co-host of the podcast, Rufo and Loméz, and he's the author of America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. As always, my email, [email protected].

• 3:46Ezra Klein?

  Chris Rufo, welcome to the show. Good to be with you. So I want to begin with a piece you wrote in early 2024 titled, "The New Right Activism: A Manifesto for the Counter-Revolution." And there are a lot of interesting things in there, but the one I wanted to begin with is you write, "No institution can be neutral." So tell me why.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's an obvious reality if you think about it for longer than a minute. And I think it's important to say because there's this mythology that we have in the United States. And it's a small L liberal mythology that institutions can be kind of neutral arbiters, that they could be valueless vessels that achieve some kind of pragmatic or instrumental ends. And my point is that, no, in practice, institutions always have values, whether they're implicit or explicit. And for those of us who are on the outside of many powerful institutions, it's there's a lot of value in simply revealing the underlying reality.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  And in fact, political fights are at heart, the fight for who determines the values, what values are installed in an institution, and then therefore, what kind of decisions get made.

• 5:01Ezra Klein?

  So I always take a lot of the arguments about institutions, particularly within the broad philosophical tradition of liberalism, to argue that they can have neutral treatment. They can have neutral rules. And a lot of, for better and worse, procedure in these institutions, everything from notice and comment periods to different ways that they have to create transparency, are about trying to create that capacity for people to be neutrally treated. Do you think that's possible?

• 5:26Speaker 01

  No, I think neutral is the wrong word. I think what we're looking for is impartial. And I would agree with that. Everyone should be treated equally as an individual under law. But that's impartiality, not neutrality. So in a criminal case, if you sentence somebody to the death penalty, you're not treating them neutrally. You're actually taking their life because the underlying law is a kind of moral code. And so I think neutral and impartial are similar, but in this case, critically different.

• 5:56Ezra Klein?

  So another argument you make in that piece is you say, the popular slogan that "Facts don't care about your feelings" betrays similar problems. That slogan being Ben Shapiro's slogan. In reality, feelings almost always overpower facts. Reason is a slave of the passions.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true. And we'll caveat, we love Ben Shapiro. We're Ben Shapiro fans, of course. But I think that he's very wrong on that. And I think conservatives have made a fundamental error in latching on to that. And really what it is, it's It's a rationalization for losing. It's like, yes, we may have lost the great political question which operates on emotions or passions. But you know, we have the facts on our side. And if only people would read our, you know, white paper, our kind of regression analysis, our rigorous logical argumentation, then we would be vindicated.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  But, look, while we should have the facts on our side, while we should use logic, by itself, it's insufficient. And in fact, politics operates on a deeper level, an emotional level. And politics occurs on the field of sentiment and public opinion, much more on the field of, you know, kind of abstract argumentation at the top.

• 7:17Ezra Klein?

  So, and then you go on to the same piece to make an argument for agitprop. So agitprop, old Soviet Union term for agitation and propaganda.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:24Ezra Klein?

  Mashed up together. And it doesn't have a great reputation. Agitprop is usually not a term of endearment, but you say, agitprop doesn't mean sacrificing the truth, but rather channeling the truth toward victory. So how do you define what agitprop is? And what are you trying to explain to your fellow conservatives about how to use it?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  So, right. I mean, if you're obviously, if you're conducting, say, propaganda on behalf of a falsehood or evil or an unjust cause, it's bad. My point is that that's not always necessarily true if you are pursuing a cause that is good and true and beautiful. If you look at the word propaganda, the original meaning, it comes from the Catholic Church, and it was the propagation of the gospels, the propagation of the truth. And so, these are concepts that we can recover, because the reality is that all politics and the age of the printing press and onward depends on propaganda.

• 8:27Ezra Klein?

  And how do you define what propaganda itself is?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Propaganda is simply the method of communicating a political narrative. Again, we're using neutral, I'm gonna say a true narrative, to a mass audience through the means of modern media. It's a rhetorical argument, intended to persuade the majority of people to cobble together a majority of public opinion.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  And look, this is again, for conservatives especially, not new. You know, the founding fathers of this country wrote to each other about this. They wrote in public about this. We seem to have forgotten some of these lessons of how politics actually works. You have to persuade people. What is persuasion? It's rhetoric. What is rhetoric at an industrial scale? It's propaganda.

• 9:19Ezra Klein?

  You've been connecting the question of propaganda to whether or not the end it is aimed at is true. How do you think about when you have untrue propaganda unleashing intense passions?

• 9:31Speaker 01

  That's bad.

• 9:31Ezra Klein?

  Towards a true aim.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, I don't think that that's good. I think that Aristotle has a great line in his book on rhetoric where he says, "The truth has a tendency to prevail." I love that. I love that because it's like, the truth doesn't always prevail. We can look through history. We can look at history, you know, and sometimes lies prevail. I think in 2020 and to 2024 during the woke era, many lies prevailed. But what is so interesting about that line is the truth has a tendency to prevail. And what I take from it is that therefore, you always want to be on the side of the truth, even for your own pragmatic political ends. You always want to be on the side of the truth.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  And so, look, certainly there are untrue elements or narratives on the right and on the left. I think a political movement to succeed has to have the discipline and integrity to go after it, but always to remember that if the truth has a tendency to prevail, that's where you want to be.

• 10:33Ezra Klein?

  And then your piece builds to this idea that, quote, "In order to realize the ultimate promise of the political, there also must be something higher, a telos, which is the Greek word for something like an ultimate end."

• 10:44Speaker 01

  A final cause.

• 10:45Ezra Klein?

  A final cause. So, one reason I've been focusing on this piece is to understand the way you do your work and what your work is. So what is your telos?

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Politically speaking, let's say, let's leave it at that.

• 10:58Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I don't mean your family.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think I want to have a restoration of the principles of our republic. And so if you're thinking about our republic, you're thinking about those guiding principles where they have strayed over the last 250 years.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  I want to have a restoration of that. And so I'm constantly looking backward at the founding and trying to understand it better and understand how to bring those principles forward. And so you want to have the principles of liberty and equality. You want to have a functioning, healthy republic. And you want to have a culture that is organized according to virtue. And in particular, you know, the virtues of our Western Anglo-American civilization. And through my personal observations around the world, as well as my study of the past, I think the Anglo-American civilization, the principles that have animated our republic for the last 250 years are still the best that we could hope for.

• 11:57Ezra Klein?

  So from that perspective, we're 17 months into Donald Trump's second term.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Is that all?

• 12:04Ezra Klein?

  It feels like longer. Tell me about it.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  It feels like longer for you guys.

• 12:07Ezra Klein?

  Is this administration building the kind of country you want to see?

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. And here's how I would, here's how I would assess it. On the elements within Article Two, so the executive power, I think Donald Trump has done almost everything he could do. Great people with the administration have done almost everything they could do to advance this kind of vision of the country.

• 12:32Ezra Klein?

  Liberty, equality, virtue.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Yes, and, and I think that the momentum was strong year one. I think it's trailed off in year two. And, you know, could that be the executive has lost some of its energy? Yes. Could it be that, you know, public opinion has, has, has softened? Yes. Could it be some of the foreign adventures or misadventures, depending on who you talk to, have distracted focus? I think yes. But ultimately, the problem is that the president has a majority in Congress, but not 60 votes in the Senate. And so fundamental transformative legislation that I would like to see is impossible.

• 13:11Ezra Klein?

  Make the case to me that Donald Trump is restoring virtue.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  This is a hard case because what you're gonna say is that Trump does not exhibit the kind of Christian virtues in his personal life, right?

• 13:23Ezra Klein?

  I'm not even thinking about his personal life. I'm thinking about his public life.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Okay, well, you tell me.

• 13:28Ezra Klein?

  I didn't claim he exhibits virtues. So you said that they're doing a pretty good job bringing back liberty, equality, and virtue.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 13:38Ezra Klein?

  Make the case to me.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Sure, I'll make you the case and I'll make it through the particular example that I'm most familiar with. So, one of my big campaigns the last couple of years was the fight to abolish DEI. And so DEI was this idea that had been kind of germinating in the 90s and the 2000s, but really exploded into public life with universal adoption by most large institutions after 2020. And it was this idea that's very simple, that there are oppressor groups and oppressed groups in the United States because of the historical realities of our country, and therefore to achieve, to move towards equal outcomes, you have to treat individuals unequally according to their group identity.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  And the president on day one issued an executive order that was very much in line with the work that we have been doing, to go and kind of wipe out the DEI bureaucracy throughout the federal government. And so in that case, I think that you could argue that the principle of equality and impartiality, as we were discussing earlier, had been restored. Not totally, we still have some problems with the underlying statutory law. Just recently, in the last couple of weeks, the Department of Justice has taken a buzzsaw to so-called disparate impact doctrine. Same idea. If there are unequal outcomes, it must therefore by definition be because of discrimination, therefore you have to remedy it by treating people unequally.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  And so, in this case, I think, you know, and because this is the issue I've worked on and have been passionate about, I think that you can make an argument that liberty, equality, virtue have been restored. Are there other problems? Of course. Are we all the way there? No. But on the issues that I personally care about, that I personally have worked on, I think the country is in a much better place than it was two years ago.

• 15:35Ezra Klein?

  I guess one thing I think about when I think about Donald Trump and virtue is corruption. So I see Trump taking Luxury aircraft from Qatar. I see his family getting involved in all kinds of crypto schemes where the investors in their crypto schemes, in many cases, seem to be people who have business before the family, business before the country. The New Yorker sort of did a, I think, a quite conservative tallying up of how much money the Trump family and Trump have made, or how much the net worth has increased that has been connected to the presidency. The number was about $4 billion in this term. It doesn't, when I look at it, look virtuous.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Look, here's my general perspective, and I'll lay it out to you as honestly as I can.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  There are the issues that I work on, that I'm passionate about, that I feel like I have some control over or influence over, and there are the issues that I don't. And I think I've been very straightforward in the areas where I think the administration has fallen short. And certainly, the perception, and we'll see over time, I'm sure that there will be, you know, inquiries, investigations, et cetera, into these business enterprises, is bad. You're not going to get me to defend it. I'm perfectly happy calling out the administration where I think it's strayed or erred. And this is one of those places. I mean, I remember the crypto launch, it was during the transition, I think, where they launched the Trump coin, right? And it's like, I don't like this.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  I don't want to see this. They shouldn't be doing that.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  And yeah, you're not going to get me to defend it.

• 17:15Ezra Klein?

  Well, one of the things I'm touching into here is, I've been watching a show, and I see a growing vein of discomfort from you on at least what parts of the right are becoming.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 17:26Ezra Klein?

  So in December, you tweeted, "The right's media apparatus is how the right teaches its followers how to think, and it's currently getting consumed by conspiracy, psychodrama, and tabloid conflicts. If left unchecked, it will turn the audience into the equivalent of a third-world click farm." So what's, tell me about that. What's been alarming you?

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that, yeah, sometimes, man, you hear your quotes back to you, you're like, oh, that's kind of very, yeah, very, very, very lively language. Yeah, this is a huge problem. And I don't, okay, so I'll, I'll, I'll put it this way. There's a growing split between the institutional right and the online right. The institutional right, I think, actually deserves credit for gatekeeping some of these kind of bad tendencies out of our institutions. And, and I think that's good. However, the online-

• 18:17Ezra Klein?

  It's just right being like Fox News and-

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:21Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Conservative think tanks, you know, the Manhattan Institute, all, all, all of the kind of the institutional layer of the professional right, let's say. I think it's done a very good job at gatekeeping some of these bad psychological and political tendencies out of our institutions. The problem that we're grappling with, though, is that the traditional way of thinking about political media is always as an outgrowth of institutions. So you'd have your, your magazines, your newsletters, your think tank, you know, policy papers. The internet has created, you know, kind of benefits, costs and benefits. One of the benefits is the kind of ease of communication with a large audience. But one of the negatives is

• 19:05Speaker 01

  that you have the proliferation of insanity, madness, psychopathology. And on the right, I think this went into hyperdrive after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Was bubbling up before then, but really then took a turn. And so you have this tendency on the right, historically. You have like a kind of bircher tendency in the post-war era, and then it kind of waxes and wanes over time. And right now, you have, in the online right, someone like Candace Owens, who has like departed so far from reality, and yet has a massive audience. And I think that it's doing a disservice to the public, and even more, say, kind of

• 19:50Speaker 01

  self-interestedly, doing a very grave disservice to the right, because- If you can't teach your audience, your followers, your political base, how to think properly, they're not going to behave properly and you're not going to have proper outcomes. And so I think it's important for us on the right to have this internal fight, which is to say, if you think that, you know, Israel assassinated Charlie Kirk, or, you know, whatever kind of handful of conspiracies you have, you know, you're on the outside, you're not within the movement. And, uh, and this is a fight that is happening now. And I think, uh, given sufficient amount of time, I think we'll win.

• 20:28Ezra Klein?

  Why do you think you'll win? Because I look at the right and I see Tucker Carlson and his current guys, which is a much more conspiratorial guys than he's had before, has become more and more dominant figure. As you note, Candace Owens' success has been startling.

• 20:46Ezra Klein?

  I guess I'd ask this question in two dimensions. What is the audience demand that they are meeting, right? What is it that they are providing that people want? And then I guess the second question is, why do you think you'll win?

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, great question. So first of all, the audience for conspiracy theories is enormous. Before his kind of legal troubles, someone like Alex Jones was making apparently millions of dollars selling vitamins and survival supplies. And, and, uh, if you think about it, to generate that kind of revenue requires a massive, if kind of quiet, under the surface, audience. And so I, I think they're really tapping into that side of the audience. It's right wing, but not exclusively right wing. And in fact, a lot of the people who have come over to these conspiracy theories are in that part of the horseshoe where their politics are, you know, let's say, sub ideological.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  They're more of a feeling, a perception, um, a set of resentments. Second, how do conspiracy theories work? Conspiracy theories work, um, for people who want to forfeit agency, for people who do not see the possibility of constructive action in their personal lives or in public life. And therefore the conspiracy theory gives them the rationalization and justification for their nihilism. It's, you know, put, insert here, right? It's this group, it's that group, it's, it's this other group that is, that is controlling the world, making everything impossible, assassinating our, our, our heroes. And this gives them a psychological key, right? That is self-reinforcing because a conspiracy theory for conspiracy theorists can never be debunked, right?

• 22:26Speaker 01

  It's just one layer of the onion that gets peeled. And I'll tell you why I think we're going to win. Because I've noticed this, even for people, let's say, in my kind of one degree of separation, conspiracy theories, and I think in particular antisemitic conspiracy theories, eventually fry your brain. And so I think that we'll see a lot of these personalities, a lot of these psychological tendencies kind of burn out on their own. And on top of that, as a kind of extra layer of confidence.

• 22:59Ezra Klein?

  That is an optimistic view on the history of antisemitism right there.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, okay, I'm saying in, in the near term, these things kind of wax and wane, but I think what I've seen in the United States is a greater set of antibodies than you might find elsewhere. And then institutionally for our side on the right. I, I, I think that, look, the people who run institutions are aware of the problem, they're confronting the problem, we're dealing with it. And to me, this is inevitable. Political coalitions are going to have some kind of mixture of, of the good and the bad. And the question is, who's in a position of leadership? What kind of courage and integrity do they have? And can they succeed? And so I, I think that when I look at the field as it is, I think the, I think this,

• 23:42Speaker 01

  say, faction is less powerful than it was six months ago, a year ago, and I hope that trend continues.

• 23:50Ezra Klein?

  I think there's an interesting question on institutions in the right here. You, I forget if it's a Chesterton quote or a C.S. Lewis quote, but he says, one of them says, that when men stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing. When men stop believing in God, they believe in everything. And I do think there's a dimension of that around institutions where the right has become much more anti-institutional. I think the view that institutions cannot be neutral and largely cannot even be impartial is much more widely held. And there's been a sort of coordinated attack on many of the institutions in American life. But but sort of new ones haven't emerged, right? You could imagine the right and the left having parallel institutions that have different core values, because I do agree with you,

• 24:34Ezra Klein?

  actually, that institutions almost, they do always have values at their heart. And when you don't think they do, it just means you don't know what they are.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 24:43Ezra Klein?

  But I think a lot-

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Or they're being deliberately obscured, right?

• 24:45Ezra Klein?

  Or they're being obscured. But I think sometimes about, I think Tucker Carlson is an interesting figure here, somebody who came up institutionally. I think sometimes about this speech he gave at the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference.

• 24:57Speaker 04

  And I saw conservatives create many of their own media organizations, and I saw many of those organizations prosper, and I saw some of them fail. And here's the difference. The ones that failed refused to put accuracy first. This is the hard truth, and conservatives need to deal with this. I believe this. I'm as conservative as any person in this room. I am literally in the process of stockpiling weapons and food and moving to Idaho. So I'm not in any way going to take a second seat to anybody in this room ideologically. But I will say, honestly, if you create a news organization whose primary objective is not to deliver accurate news, you will fail. You will fail. The New York Times is a liberal paper, but it's also, and it is to its core liberal paper, it's also a paper that cares about whether they spell people's names right, by and large. It's a paper that actually

• 25:42Speaker 04

  cares about accuracy. Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions that are, that's, that's the truth. You don't believe me?

• 25:52Ezra Klein?

  So put aside, put aside the special pleading for the New York Times here.

• 25:58Ezra Klein?

  Carlson tried to build his own media institution, the Daily Caller.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 26:01Ezra Klein?

  I would say it did not, my impression of it is that it did not become a place that put accuracy first and became a kind of conservative New York Times.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  It did not become a conservative New York Times.

• 26:14Ezra Klein?

  Over time, he went in darker and darker directions as he chased the audience. And now he's fully without institution. And has, I think emerged, I'll put it this way, into a form, I think, when I listen to you, you find more concerning and problematic. So what do you think went wrong there?

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it, look, this is a long-term trend. This didn't emerge in 2009 or 2020. I think of it this way. The left is over-institutionalized and the right is under-institutionalized.

• 26:48Ezra Klein?

  I save us all the time, man. Left is overformed by institutions, the right is underformed.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Correct. And so we have kind of opposite, opposite problems. And I think of it also in this way. I wrote a piece about this, I don't know, a long time ago, and I think it really, it really holds up. The left is organized as a capital P party and the right is organized under a capital P prince. So you have, Donald Trump essentially sets the direction of the right, for better, for worse, through personal charismatic power and his relationship with the conservative base. There's really no mediating institutions in the kind of way that you would see elsewhere. That's where conservatives have figured out this formula, for at least the time being, to achieve political victory.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  It has benefits, it has, it has problems. The left has the opposite problem. The reason why I think you get like presidential candidates on the left that seem to be like devoid of traditional charisma is because it's organized as an institutional apparatus or a capital P party. And so conservatives have a problem with institutions, conservatives have a problem building institutions. And, and this is the deepest irony, right? It's that conservatives in a healthy republic would be the ones that are. Preserving the institutions, restoring the institutions, maintaining the institutions. But conservatives have found themselves on the outside of institutions.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  And so when we're talking about this concept of counter-revolution, it's a paradox, right? Because a counter-revolution is not necessarily a conservative impulse on the top. You can have a conservative mission or goal that drives it. That's why it's a counter-revolution rather than a revolution. But conservatives are in this really interesting position where you have a lot of people on the intellectual right. They attend the black tie galas, they attend the events at the country club, they eat the, you know, salmon dinner at the whatever Hilton, you know, ballroom. And I'm always looking around at these, I, you know, don't like these events because I'm always looking around and saying, you guys are out of your minds.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  You guys are operating as if, you know, the Elks Lodge was still the formative institution of the United States. You're living in a fantasy. You're living in a nostalgia that isn't actually grappling with the fundamental problems in the country and is totally out of step with the very voters that you claim to represent. And so, look, this is, this is a problem. I, I don't, I can't say that there's a snap your finger solution. And so you have to start where you start. You know, I, I work for an institution that I think is, you know, the best in, in the business, the Manhattan Institute. I think we do good work that has a high degree of accuracy and rigor and intelligence.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  And I think that we've put up practical political victories in a way that few others have.

• 29:47Ezra Klein?

  Another version of this is a line I like, is that the personality type of the left is bureaucratic and the personality type of the right is autocratic. And I don't think that was always true.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  I don't think so. Well, I don't think so.

• 30:01Ezra Klein?

  I think in the Trump era it is.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Okay, well, make the case, make the case.

• 30:05Ezra Klein?

  There is a falling in line behind Donald Trump. So here is my view of the two coalitions right now. The genius of Donald Trump in the 2024 election was he collapsed the multi-dimensional test of party loyalty that existed in the previous Republican Party, where you pro-life, did you believe in low taxes, you know, what was your foreign policy, et cetera. And certainly the multi-dimensional agenda test you see on the left, down to a single point of loyalty. Did you support him personally? If you did, there was actually room for a wide variety of other opinions. You could be a techno futurist.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  A podcast, bro.

• 30:46Ezra Klein?

  Elon Musk. You could be a Christian traditionalist. You could be RFK Junior, who'd been running as a Democrat just a year or two before. But also you could be Ted Cruz. And what held that together is that the line that you could not cross was Trump himself. But as long as you're useful to him, you could be on the team. Now, that has obvious issues when you move into governance, and I think some of them have have emerged. But it gave him and them a freedom of movement across other issues where, you know, Kamala Harris, a Tim Walz, Joe Biden were much more box checking, right?

• 31:28Ezra Klein?

  The sort of multi dimensional loyalty test that the left uses. And so on left, you end up with, and I mean here, the left, not like the democratic social stuff, but the left coalition in this country, the broad democratic party. You end up with people who have sort of all of the right views and have an institutional personality, right? Are somewhat risk averse, are worried about getting in trouble to meeting. And on the right, you have people who they'll go crazy in a meeting. You can be Bill Pulte. But as long as the boss likes you, you're safe.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, I think that there are elements of that that are true. Prince versus party. It's a method of political organization, psychological organization. Certainly one of Trump's kind of the great litmus test for him is personal loyalty. Like, we've seen that. You're with Trump, he's with you, you cross him and he'll attack you.

• 32:24Ezra Klein?

  You could be Kim Jong Un and be a friend in good standing.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  It was like a nice buddy comedy. I feel like there'd be a buddy comedy.

• 32:30Ezra Klein?

  He likes Kim Jong Un more than he likes Mark Carney.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, um, fair enough, and as personal chemistry goes. But yeah, I think there's some truth to that, but I wouldn't therefore, I think your conclusion is is overdrawn. I don't think you could say the right has autocratic personalities. I mean, I deal with conservatives all the time. I don't see that as a psychological tendency with the people I work with, the people I talk to, my friends and neighbors.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  But so, yeah, I think it's overdrawn. I think this is just a question of political organization from the top. And I don't think it's total just loyalty, personal loyalty. I mean, Trump wants immigration restrictions, strong national borders, build a wall. He wants kind of American national interest-based foreign policy, although that is kind of a little bit on the outs. And then he represents, or at least championed, a lot of the causes that I cared about, care about, you know, on DEI, on higher education, on cultural institutions, you know, and a whole host of other sub-issues that he really grabbed on to. And, and look,

• 33:42Speaker 01

  this is good. You kind of have to work with what is there. You want to, you always want to plan for the future, build for the future, but ultimately, you're faced with decisions in the moment. And look, on the whole, I think in those areas where we have had more freedom of movement, more ability to execute policy, I think things have been going quite well.

• 34:27Ezra Klein?

  I'm gonna go back to Tucker. So I've seen you talk about your take on his evolution. And something you've said is that the Tucker Carlson of the Fox News era, when he was given his 8pm monologues, that in that era, they were a unifying script for the right, that Fox News was this institutional structure around him that maybe contained him to a certain point. And that created a

• 34:54Ezra Klein?

  Unity, a coherence that has now dissolved, not just around him specifically, but around the right more broadly. Now, the liberal take on Tucker in the Fox News era is that he was beginning to bring a white national strain into centrality in the Republican Party. That, you know, there were all these Daily Stormer articles about how much he was saying exactly what they thought. He was talking about great replacement theory.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  And you've got to ask yourself, as you watch the historic tragedy that is Joe Biden's immigration policy, what's the point of this? They are flooding this country with immigrants in order to change the demography to maintain political power for themselves, to change the racial mix of the country. That's the reason, to reduce the political power of people whose ancestors lived here and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the Third World. Now, I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term replacement, but they become hysterical because that's, that's what's happening, actually. Let's just say it, that's true.

• 35:58Ezra Klein?

  He had already, in our view, become quite conspiratorial. And that what he is now and what he is then are a straight line from each other. And that the, the sort of passions he was unleashing, right? Reason, of course, being a slave of such passions, that it was always going to go in one direction. And that celebrating what he was at that moment and then being confused by what he is at this moment is a kind of, like a strange unwillingness to either grapple with one or the other. So tell me how you see it.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I don't see it that way. I mean, when Tucker was on Fox at that 8:00 PM Eastern time, 5:00 PM Western time for me, it really did feel like a shelling point for the right. It was like a quarterback calling the plays every night at 8 o'clock in that first, you know, five to 10 minutes, where Tucker kind of condensed the opinion, represented the opinion, reflected back the opinion. And then everyone had a central point, a central coherent point to, to think about, to talk about, to, to, to mobilize on. And it was very effective. So even in my own experience, when I first started reporting on critical race theory in the institutions.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Went on Tucker, gave a kind of opening monologue with Tucker. President Trump was watching it. Got a call from the White House the next morning. Hey, the president saw you on TV. He wants to take action on critical race theory. Come to the White House. Let's get this thing done. And so that mechanism that even in my personal experience, the loop on that was like less than 12 hours.

• 37:36Ezra Klein?

  Very tight loop.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  A very tight loop. And I think also what I've learned about Fox News is that Fox News has, and this is to its great credit, Fox News has a kind of disciplinary function. And I think especially after 2020 has become even more cognizant of, okay, message discipline is important. Moving the message forward is important. Here's the kind of guardrails for the narrative. And this is a function of institutions, a function of technology.

• 38:07Ezra Klein?

  Yes, but what I'm talking about is what the narrative itself is. I agree with you that Tucker played this role when he was on Fox News. But the thing that many of us who, I mean, I knew Tucker before. Many of us who had watched him for a long time from a good time libertarian.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  But what specific you, you, I can't, you're invoking like the daily, it's like, I don't know anything about the Daily Storm or beyond.

• 38:26Ezra Klein?

  He talked a bunch about great placement there. I mean, this has been, hold on, this has been exhaustingly documented. I mean, there are biographies of the guy. The Times did a bunch of work on this. The bringing in of a macro narrative that there was a function, I would call it a cabal of elites importing brown voters to replace you. That you were being betrayed by elites representing foreign interests and foreign people to sort of alter the culture of this country to their benefit with something he hammered all the time.

• 39:04Speaker 02

  Fox News is reporting tonight that the administration awarded $172 million grand to a George Soros-linked organization, which exists to, quote, "help young border crossers avoid deportation."

• 39:17Speaker 02

  Now, why is some foreign-born billionaire allowed to change our country fundamentally? That's the big question.

• 39:24Ezra Klein?

  Right, a relentless focus on crime from immigrants, a relentless focus on George Soros. And so to me, I see Tucker now and I see Tucker then. And I agree, the shackles are off a little bit. But I see him calling the same play. He's just had to turn up the dial a little bit because he doesn't have Fox News.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't think that's right. And I think it, let's take the, you're presenting it in a way that is very charged. I, I don't think quite fair, but let's take the underlying.

• 39:52Ezra Klein?

  Tucker's a charged figure.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  But let's take the, but, but the narrative that you're, that you're portraying. I, I don't think that that's exactly, uh, you know, how I would put it certainly. But the underlying facts are either true or not true. And in this case, um, demographic change, mass demographic change has been and is a reality in the United States. And I think it's fair to talk about that politically. We've been talking about it politically for, for 10 years. And you could do it in a way that is, exemplifies bigotry or discrimination, of course. But you can also do it in a way that isn't, isn't an expression of bigotry or discrimination. But in fact, it's just a basic question. A question that, that people in the United States have been asking since, uh, since the 1770s.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Who are we? What is an American? And if we are a sovereign nation, we have the, not just the right, but really the obligation to determine these great questions of who comes in, who doesn't come in. And, and so I, I don't think that it is, it is right to say that someone who is concerned about rapid and large-scale demographic change is, is, is kind of a white nationalist. That, that seems like a kind of, the kind of smear.

• 41:08Ezra Klein?

  No, I'm saying that the reason I think Tucker is a white nationalist is due to all the white nationalism.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Well, let me ask, let me, let me ask the question. Hold on though. Let me ask the question fairly clearly. No, no, no, no, no. Because that, that, I mean, that is a huge charge.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  And, and, and I, I just, again, like, what is the evidence of that? You could be concerned, can you be concerned about mass demographic change without being racist? I, I think the answer is yes.

• 41:30Ezra Klein?

  How do you define a white nationalist?

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Well, you, you make the charge, you define it and substantiate your, your point.

• 41:35Ezra Klein?

  So I think that Tucker's view is that. The

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Tic Tucker out of it, just making an in general argument.

• 41:41Ezra Klein?

  A general argument of what?

• 41:42Speaker 01

  And then you can kind of layer in Tucker.

• 41:45Ezra Klein?

  So I think that there is a straightforward view in white nationalism, that there is such a thing as a white race. That race is fundamentally European, came here and founded this country. That race has, depending on the variant of white nationalism we're talking about, genetic advantages or cultural advantages, and that that race deserves to have, should have dominance practically over this country. There are harder and softer versions of this, right? In some versions, Jews are included in that white race.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 42:18Ezra Klein?

  In some versions, they are not included in that white race. In some versions, we are talking about something I would describe primarily as a kind of nationalism, right? The, you know, if you have too much of a country not sharing a common heritage, you lose solidarity. In some cases, we're talking about something much darker than that. Right? There are people who just don't like the way their community is changing and there's the KKK. Right? Everything exists on a spectrum.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  But, but would you say someone who is like, for example, hesitant about rapid, large scale demographic change is just a kind of 1% white nationalist? Yeah. Because that would be like the majority of the country.

• 42:58Ezra Klein?

  Yes. I don't think it is a problem or unfair, or even wrong to worry about large scale, rapid demographic change. So to maybe to be more specific about Tucker. So you just had on the right wing writer, Scott Greer. He's got a book coming out on the online right called White Pill. So Greer was a former deputy editor at the Daily Caller. He left in 2018 after past writings for white national site were dug up. And he once said of Tucker, so this is Greer speaking. Tucker is ultimately on our side. He can get millions and millions of boomers to nod along with talking points that would have only been seen on VDARE or American Renaissance a few years ago. These are both white national sites. So I guess, what do you make of that?

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'll tell you what I make of it. And here's what I think is really interesting about some of these figures who were on the once kind of fringe elements of the right, who have in some ways seen the errors of that way of ideological thinking. And to me, you always want to leave people room to to grow up, room to leave bad ideas behind, room for kind of critical self-reflection, and then to integrate back into the kind of mainstream thinking. And I think, you know, Scott Greer is interesting, and one of the reasons why we interviewed him was to kind of chart out this trajectory, which there's a lot of people that had more radical politics, and then they moderate over time.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  And so I was very interested in understanding that process of kind of ideological development and growth, and then and then really scrutinizing. You want to actually try to figure out, all right, well, what's the way out of that? What's the way to to demystify, to defend, to to kind of delegitimize that way of thinking? And I think it's interesting to talk to people who once had those ideas.

• 44:51Ezra Klein?

  So I'm not against you talking to him at all. Right? What I'm saying is not that you shouldn't interview Scott Greer.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 44:57Ezra Klein?

  I think many people change their politics dramatically, and one of the big problems that the left actually has is not giving people space to change.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 45:05Ezra Klein?

  And putting people into a a box where they're held in who they were as opposed to who they may become. My problem is not with you interviewing Greer. I'm saying that I looked at Tucker in that period and thought, huh, he's going in this direction that I understand this to be the argument of, you know, a vider of a and they all celebrated him. But I guess the question is whether, to to phrase a question precisely, which maybe I haven't yet, whether

• 45:36Ezra Klein?

  One of the lessons of where he has gone and where some of the right has gone is that people like you on the right were a little insensitive to when something wasn't just a breaking of a liberal taboo, but was a movement towards a politics that was much more, let's call it white identity focused.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Look, okay, huge point. I would break it down in a couple of ways. One, I don't think that's, that's quite accurate. I actually think that the, the, the statement you're, you're reading, and you could probably read it from a number of other people, right? If you remember in 2016, Richard Spencer famously held like some sort of conference or, or group, and he said, oh, yes, Trump has, has adopted, you know, Trump is a creation of the alt-right. It was completely delusional, a totally self-serving and, and a product of narcissism that I wouldn't take at face value. And so I think a lot of the radical elements you're talking about overstate, overstate this relationship because they

• 46:41Speaker 01

  desperately wanted to believe it. And I think that, you know, someone like Tucker, I don't, I don't think it's accurate to say that Tucker on Fox in, in, you know, 2021 was laundering in, you know, talking points from, you know, American Renaissance. I just, I don't think that's true. I think it's conflating a kind of maybe superficial opposition to immigration. And, and the conflation game is, is really, really, really, I think dishonest. And unfortunately, for a lot of time, it worked. And so I think that in fact, we're in a much better place than in the past. And I remember some of these groups like ADL, SPLC, Media Matters,

• 47:25Speaker 01

  you know, they came after me with many, many smears, trying to destroy my reputation, trying to get me deplatformed from social media, trying to, to kind of eliminate me from the public sphere. None of it worked, thankfully. ACLU, I would also add. And in fact, as I look back, the arguments that they were making were, were preposterous, and they only succeeded because people felt fear. And so I'm glad that we don't live in that condition of fear anymore. And today, we can talk very reasonably across a table, which I think is good. But I'm certainly not going to forget the emotional tone and the political vulnerabilities of that era. And again,

• 48:10Speaker 01

  the SPLC that was coming after me because of god knows what was at the same time giving money to neo Nazis and white nationalists to keep them afloat. And what that shows me is that the supply of racism in the United States and including racism on the right in the United States has dwindled to such a small degree in real life that it took the SPLC to actually inject cash into that ecosystem merely to keep it alive. And so I just, I just, I just don't, yeah.

• 48:43Ezra Klein?

  You ever think about? One way of thinking about that period that I think is how I think about it is that two things were sort of true at the same time.

• 48:52Ezra Klein?

  So one, there was way too much speech policing. There was too much cancellation. There was too much that instead of being willing to have arguments, people just tried to make the arguments unhavable. That all happened, right? I don't deny any of it. And on the other hand, a lot of what people more on the left in that moment were afraid of, or what they predicted also happened. The alt right moved much more from the fringe to the center. I always think about.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  The alt right was totally destroyed after Charlottesville.

• 49:29Ezra Klein?

  I, I, I, I think maybe we have a different view of what the alt right represented. Which is fair enough, but I think a lot of ideas that were very, very, very far from the center. I think about Elon Musk and him writing. And I mean, later he had to like, try to figure out how to apologize for this and but when somebody basically said like, the Jews have been funding the grace replacement.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Did Elon say that?

• 49:53Ezra Klein?

  Yeah. No, Elon didn't say that. What he said was underneath that. He said to whoever had tweeted that, you have spoken the truth. And then he had to go tour Auschwitz and things like that.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Okay, the Auschwitz, uh, yeah.

• 50:07Ezra Klein?

  The Auschwitz apology tour. So, but you know, even now, Musk is very conspiratorial. And where he is in 2026, now the world's first trillionaire owning, you know, what used to be Twitter.

• 50:21Ezra Klein?

  And the things he like, kind of pumps into the attentional stream would have been considered incredibly marginal, even in Trump's first term. So two things I think were true, right? I think there are many ways which left went too far. And the thing, the forces the left were, was worried were there are much closer to the center. Yes, there are parts of the alt-right that are not significant today. Richard Spencer is not a significant figure. Nick Fuentes has a bigger audience than Richard Spencer ever did.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 50:50Ezra Klein?

  And there is, I mean, when I'm on X and other places, the amount of just constant antisemitism and anti-Indian racism I see just happening in people's mentions is wild to me. And I mean, I don't think he'll win, but you look at Fishback, who's running for governor in Florida. It's sort of almost unimaginable to think of somebody like him being a figure in Republican party politics who would be commanding the support of practically anybody. And I think the reason that people worry about him is they don't think he's going to win, but he seems to be doing very well among the young right.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 51:25Ezra Klein?

  And so I think you can hold your view, which I at least partially share, that there are many ways in which the left and the speech policing and the, um, you know, boundaries went too far. And also, a lot of the people who were most hair on fire in that period had a point and some of their more kind of wild predictions. I was thinking about like, if you had told me that Trump was going to make RFK Jr. HHS secretary and Tulsi Gabbard DNI, um, and try to make-

• 51:56Speaker 01

  The triumph of bipartisanship.

• 51:57Ezra Klein?

  And try, and try to make Matt Gaetz Attorney General. I would have thought that was like an unhinged, like resistance substack take. And then it all happened. So it's like, the fact, you, you can have these things be true at the same time.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Yes, I think you're kind of understating the dynamic on one side. I mean, it wasn't just about speech policing. After 2020, the left maintained an apparatus of social annihilation. And I went through it myself. I had the ACLU subpoena me and harass me with a lawfare campaign that cost me a lot of money. I had the SPLC and the ADL put me on some sort of hate list that was totally bogus, trying to destroy my reputation. And so I had people, you know, threats of violence against me that were very credible at the time. And so, you know, people trying to get, you know, going after my family, my kids.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  I mean, we shouldn't forget just how awful that period was and how insane that period was. And unfortunately, while I think that many of the institutions on the left have learned, after having suffered some consequences for enabling that, the movements that they have sparked are in fact alive and well. And, look, I think the difference that maybe you're not seeing is that the radical nihilistic and violent left-wing movements have the full support of the left's institutions. And what we're talking about is a radical nihilistic movements on the right

• 53:40Speaker 01

  do not have any institutional support. And our bubble up in your Twitter comments, which again, don't agree, but is different in kind, not just in quantity. And in the case of someone like James Fishback, I think it's a great test. Fishback is very charismatic. I think we would all agree on that. I talked with your colleague, Michelle Goldberg, about this. But even with a kind of individual charisma, if he is like the Groypur candidate for governor of Florida, which is again, like, kind of a crazy thing that is happening. I want to see the actual vote tally because that's going to show me where he is, where he stands with the actual conservative population, the conservative voter, the conservative

• 54:23Speaker 01

  movement as a whole. I suspect that he's going to get absolutely trounced. It happened with Vivek running against a guy Casey Putsch in Ohio. He got blown out by, I don't know, 60, 70 points. And so by contrast, you look at something like the kind of trans ideological movement that I think is both kind of a lie. It's grounded in a series of falsehoods, maintained this suppressive, threatening, censorious power in the kind of pre Elon Twitter days and in the general kind of woke years. And then, look, another uncomfortable fact, per capita, has committed more mass violence than any other group. And so I am willing to indulge

• 55:08Speaker 01

  in, and I think it's important to have a kind of criticism of, let's say, you know, elements of my own side. But I also think that if we were to just measure it out, to put it on a scale, you know, it's looking a lot more like this assassination's attempt against President Trump, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the kind of security posture that's required for conservatives just to go on a college campus. That's how I measure it. It's like, I'm looking at it, I'm feeling it, I'm seeing it with my colleagues. After Charlie Kirk was killed, I called all the people, friends and colleagues in the business, and I just like was completely distraught for weeks. And again, like, while I don't support, you know, James

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Fishback for governor, again, I think that it's kind of an empty symbolism. Whereas on the other side, it feels like these ideologies have the support of the institutions, they wielded power irresponsibly in the past, and still have the kind of ultimate political threat, threat of violence that I know everybody in my world, you know, has seen, has experienced, has feared. And so, I mean, that grounds me. Do you not see that?

• 56:21Ezra Klein?

  I don't have the same view of it, but let me hold as saying that your experience of it, I understand, right? And as somebody who also, you know, sometimes deals with threats of violence and other things of that nature.

• 56:35Ezra Klein?

  I think the way this often looks to people on the left, pretty looks right now, is that when you say these nihilistic, I think you call them ideals, ideas are not held at high levels of the right, they're only supported institutionally on the left. I see it the opposite way. Really? I see it the opposite way, and I'll explain why. I don't see the SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, as like a powerful, potent, left-wing actor. Really? They could, 10 years ago, they could nuke you. I'll go through, I'll go through my thing. ADL, I don't even see as on the left, which is a different question. I understand.

• 57:16Ezra Klein?

  But I see the Trump administration as powerfully and potently extreme and willing to use the power of the federal government from, you know, deploying ICE and CBP agents to different cities, to directing the DOJ, who to investigate and go after, to after Charlie Kirk's murder, trying to get people fired, who are just sort of random people who had done shitty tweets. I do not see a world in which there is this huge separation between the extreme elements of the right and this administration. I keep hearing from people like you, right, who I think has talked about this, that there's a huge number of gorgers working in House and Senate offices in Congress, that, you

• 58:01Ezra Klein?

  know, Bronze Age pervert is one of the most popular people to read if you're a Trump staffer. And I see those things actually moving into things like national security strategies, you know, about the civilizational suicide of Europe. Now, I recognize we're not going to agree on all this, right? This, this part, I'm not going to try to like, bridge the gap. What I will say is that the, the other thing I think people on the left see has been a sort of movement from, you know, 2016 to 2024, where it's almost unbelievable how far things have gone, right? Even Trump I to Trump II are very, very different beasts. And so, all of a sudden, it doesn't look impossible to imagine that Fuentes and Carlson and Fishback.

• 58:47Ezra Klein?

  Are the future, not the fringe. I think a lesson that has been burned into many of us is it. It is dangerous to dismiss something that seems to have a lot of energy around it as a fringe, because what is today's fringe is tomorrow's. Maybe not center, but much more live and potent political force.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  And would you say that you saw that that happened on the left between, you know, 2014 and 2024?

• 59:17Ezra Klein?

  Absolutely.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:19Ezra Klein?

  Yeah. In part, I think you guys are about to learn some lessons we learned.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, maybe so, but I would argue that actually the right has done a better job at managing it. And I think we'll see, and I, I hope I'm right, that with something like the Fishback campaign, you know, I think of James Fishback as a human meme. It's like amazing. He's like, if you take the memetic energy from that corner of the online discourse and turned it into a human being, it's like it would look and sound like James Fishback. But the reality is that once those ideas gain contact with the, the, the people, the culture, the institutions on the right, they're not going anywhere.

• 59:57Ezra Klein?

  Let me try to frame this more in terms of.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  And the point on diversity.

• 1:00:00Ezra Klein?

  Let me try to frame this more in terms of arguments I've seen you making.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:00:04Ezra Klein?

  And tell me, if I get a chain in this wrong, you tell me where.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  I will.

• 1:00:07Ezra Klein?

  Right? I think you think you now have a problem with a racialist right. I think watching the takeover of conspiracies after Kirk's murder has been sobering or scary for a lot of people on the right. To watch people accusing Israel of it, to eventually see people accusing Turning Point USA of it, or some kind of plot from the people around him, I think has been for major, major figures on the right to be making those arguments has seemed to me to be a kind of shocking moment for a lot of you. And then I've watched you and others, you know, on X and elsewhere, like look in your mentions and be like, oh shit, there's a lot of racism here. Something's happening.

• 1:00:52Ezra Klein?

  So you tell me which part of this you don't agree with.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, here's how I see it. And your, your general analysis is correct. So there is a racialist right, let's say. I've been writing about this for a number of years, but I think a lot of it is something of an optical illusion where, and you see this on the, on, let's say, on the left, where a small group of people that is very loud online appears to represent a larger share of a political coalition or the general population than it really does. And so, look, I don't want a racialist right. That is, that is like a clear, a clear position on my part. And I think to the extent that we

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  have like antisemitic conspiracy theories bubbling up from the, the digital sphere, it's a problem that we have to deal with, that an untruth or a falsehood that should be called out for what it is. And, and what I think it is at, at heart is that, and I've talked to a lot of young right wing guys. So I, sometimes I'll, I'll have lunch or dinner when I'm in DC or elsewhere with younger guys and just say, hey, you know, kind of walk me through like what's happening for people. Like, we're older now. You and I, you and I are, are, are middle aged now. So say, hey, walk me through this thinking and then not kind of non judgmental, just kind of help me understand what's happening with some of the more kind of radical or racialist, uh, young, young men. And this

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  is the, the description that they give. Um, they say, you know, these are guys who hit high school during COVID. They, they kind of transitioned into an almost a purely digital life with all of the various rabbit holes you could get into. They came of age as a, as a function of your kind of entering adulthood during the kind of George Floyd hysteria, where their teachers at school, their media, uh, you know, institutions, the government, everyone was saying, you know, you're a young white man, you're the problem, you're the oppressor, you're evil, you should be denied opportunities because of your biology, because of your, your, your ancestry.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  And essentially that they were programmed by the kind of George Floyd hysteria into thinking racially. And instead of what I think is the the proper and the correct response, which is to say, we've got to move beyond this. We're going to fight this racialist thinking on the left, on the right, wherever it comes from. They essentially psychologically submitted to it, but then reversed the polarity.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  I don't think that's a good way to to pursue it. I don't think on the kind of philosophical question, it's it's it's right. I don't think that from the practical political conception, it's it's fruitful. But in a certain way, it's like, I get it. I understand it. Young people are,

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  you know, kind of in a in a position of growing up and and having a chip on your shoulder. I think it's extremely destructive. And what I see as the the antidote to this, at least within my political coalition, is to be, you know, an older brother figure to say, hey, I could get why you think that. However, the actual path to success is this other way. So I I don't think that,

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  I don't think that this is like predetermined. I actually think that young people have have, you know, their their brain isn't still, their brain isn't locked in in its ways. And so I think you you you want to bring people who are frustrated towards a better path. And and I think that someone like Candace Owens, who's just like driving people into a ditch, you have to kind of guide them away from that.

• 1:04:30Ezra Klein?

  So I think first, there's truth to that narrative. I do think that one of the things that happened over the past decade or so, and this is, you know, something I talked about in my first book, Why We're Polarized, is there is a huge upsurge in telling people that the right way to understand life, America, is all through the lens of identity groups. And when you tell people to look at identity groups, they will form a more coherent sense of their own. And a line I have in that book is, identity activates under threat.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:05:05Ezra Klein?

  And so the more you tell people that their identity is a problem, the more they're going to begin to defend that identity and feel that identity and begin to self define around that identity. So I think all of that happened.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  The And I think that you would also, you would also agree perhaps that, you know, the institutions, the legal system, the prevailing narrative at universities, corporations, et cetera, was explicitly anti-white for a number of years that for these young people were formative.

• 1:05:39Ezra Klein?

  I think it's sometimes moved into being anti-white. I would not say it was all explicitly anti-white.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Hundreds of reports on this from institutions, from banks, corporations, universities, white man bad. If you wanted to just put it into kindergarten language, white man bad. And that was the dominant position for the institutional left.

• 1:05:56Ezra Klein?

  I remember telling people around me that this thing where people are putting out like, papers on what are the negative traits of whiteness was a disaster. Right? So I don't necessarily disagree with that. I think there's truth to it.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  And legally, affirmative action, DEI, was institutional, government-backed discrimination against one racial group.

• 1:06:21Ezra Klein?

  So the thing that I'm interested in though here is that you're now in power and a lot

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Me personally? No, I live on a farm in Washington state. I'm personally not in power.

• 1:06:30Ezra Klein?

  Your executive orders get passed, the whole thing. And these things can all go in better or worse directions. These are all longstanding energies in American life. The sort of argument I'm going to make to be, you know, cards on the table about what I'm doing.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  Please.

• 1:06:46Ezra Klein?

  Is that I think the empirical and epistemological structures on the right and the habits they took on in order to win.

• 1:07:00Ezra Klein?

  Are playing with passions that are very dangerous. Like, I'll give a good example of this. Sure. You can believe what you want about whether or not the immigration of Haitians into Springfield, Ohio was good or bad. The people that city had mixed views on it. I mean, the, the mayor and others were very pro and it had been good for the economy. And Springfield had been in a period of decline and then you had a large Haitian influx. And then you get into this thing that happened in 2024 about Haitians eating cats and dogs, where there's a Facebook post and the right, all the way up to Donald Trump in one of the debates, begins adopting it. You sort of go on a quest to try to figure out if it's true and, you know, to shorthand

• 1:07:45Ezra Klein?

  a long story, maybe in Dayton, Ohio, there was somebody who wasn't Haitian. Correct. Who maybe somebody thought, but other people didn't think had eaten a cat. That would, what I.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Somebody and other people is, is quite, is quite.

• 1:07:59Ezra Klein?

  I'm, people can read your piece. They can read the drop site news article. I'm not going to convince you.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  But the drop site news article, they went out to debunk my story and they ended up finding another independent corroborating witness.

• 1:08:10Ezra Klein?

  So it's not how I read it, not how I read it. But I, on some level, am not even focused on that. What I'm saying is that when you get very into moves like we are going to accuse broad communities of eating cats and dogs, which I think we can all agree, Haitians are not in general eating cats and dogs, you are going to unleash forms of anger and hatred and fear that are not controllable. And I think one of the mistakes the right has made, and frankly, people like you have made, is thinking these passions can then be corralled again. This idea that you can find these really.

• 1:08:51Ezra Klein?

  High passion, like memetic containers. The thing you say, well, the real issue here is just, we want to have a conversation about how much is the appropriate level of Haitian immigration into Springfield, Ohio. But that the way you get people to care about it, J.D. Vance said this very explicitly, is that, well, people really care about the cats and dogs.

• 1:09:12Speaker 05

  The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to-

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  But it wasn't just a meme.

• 1:09:20Speaker 05

  -create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm gonna do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.

• 1:09:32Ezra Klein?

  Which, again, I think, my view is that there's never been any hard evidence of that happening in the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio. Like, nobody has substantiated that, and nor have you.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  Correct, yeah. I haven't made that. And in fact, I've said, look, there's no evidence of this particular claim. We should be more careful.

• 1:09:49Ezra Klein?

  And so there's been a kind of consistent, like, this idea that you could unleash, like, really, I think, quite terrible passions, and then hold it to a level that is controllable. And what you're seeing with Candace Owens, what you're seeing with the new Tucker Carlson, or the old Tucker Carlson, however you want to call it, what you're seeing with Nick Fuentes and the rise of Nick Fuentes, who we've not really talked about, but I think is a necessary figure of thinking in the way we think about this, is that there wasn't a way to stop that move. Like, once people began to move in that direction, and there weren't sort of institutions that were strong enough and respected enough to stop it, that the place it's going on the

• 1:10:30Ezra Klein?

  right, when you talk about it becoming a verbal click farm, is quite dangerous and quite grim. And now I will let you say everything you think.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  Oh, man. All right, where do I start? A couple of huge problems.

• 1:10:41Ezra Klein?

  I gave you a lot there.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  A couple of huge problems. I mean- One is that, you know, and I'm doing reporting in California right now that has that has stories that have a similar kind of, let's say, shock value. For example, we did a story on migrants from Mexico and Honduras who come to San Francisco and get free sex change surgeries from the California state medical system. This is a kind of explosive story that is true, that represents, I think, a lot of these underlying questions about homelessness policy, about immigration, et cetera. Look, if it's true, it's fair game, and there's a way to handle these stories in a responsible way, that you ensure the

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  facts, that you present it fairly, and that you use it as a method of changing public opinion. But that's how it's supposed to work. And, and so I think that the idea that there are taboos that cannot be crossed because they will unleash these, these kind of unspecified or vague, dangerous passions, I think is a problem in two regards. One is that if you're, if you're going for truth seeking, if you're going, if you're playing a kind of responsible rhetorical game, no, I don't think that these questions are out

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  of bounds at all. But second, the predictions have always been, you know, that it's going to unleash some kind of horrible nativist violence sentiment, et cetera. And, but the only example of, of an ideological driven assassination that we've talked about today is the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The, this kind of prophecy of political violence is, is really comes from the institutional ideologies on the left, not the institutional ideologies on the right. And I think that, that, that fact has been hammered home over and over and over these last few years. And, and look, like those of us on the right

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  who, who are in this business, you know, probably have to have like, you know, a little bit more firmness to say, no, the facts are not on this, on your side in this argument.

• 1:12:57Ezra Klein?

  So let me be more specific about what I'm saying, because I'm not making a vague prophecy of political violence. And I'm also not saying that there are these taboos you shouldn't touch. I think where I'm disagreeing is to say that there actually isn't truth seeking here. There isn't enough truth in these arguments. There's too much of an attraction.

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  Which arguments?

• 1:13:17Ezra Klein?

  So the, and it, I mean, arguments like the Haitian cats and dogs, we'll talk, we'll talk about others in a second.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:24Ezra Klein?

  And that the thing I'm worried about has arrived, right? I'm not talking about an unspecified future in which I am concerned the right will increasingly be taken over by conspiratorial racist misogynistic elements. I'm looking at a world where Nick Fuentes is a major figure on the American right.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  Well, you guys are doing a great job at, at, at, at raising his profile.

• 1:13:47Ezra Klein?

  Tucker Carlson is the guy who raised his profile.

• 1:13:49Speaker 02

  Which I think was a mistake.

• 1:13:51Ezra Klein?

  I think it is legitimate to say Tucker is the biggest figure in right wing media. And he brought on Nick Fuentes because, and gave him such a gentle, kind interview. And Tucker, here's one thing I don't underestimate with Tucker. He's fucking good. He's a good interviewer. He has incredible talent as a media figure. If you wanted to cut that guy apart, he could have, as he did to Mike Huckabee when he wanted to do that, or to Ted Cruz when he wanted to do that.

• 1:14:17Speaker 06

  Those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed. And from my perspective, I want to be on the blessing side of things.

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  Of the, those who bless the government of Israel?

• 1:14:27Speaker 06

  Those who bless Israel is what it says. It doesn't say the government of, it says the nation of Israel. So that's in the Bible. As a Christian, I believe that.

• 1:14:35Speaker 02

  Where is that?

• 1:14:36Speaker 06

  I, I can find it. I don't have the, the scripture off the tip of my, you, you pull out the phone and use the Google.

• 1:14:41Speaker 02

  It's in Genesis, but, so you're quoting a, a Bible phrase. You don't have context for it and you don't know where in the Bible it is, but that's like your theology? I'm confused.

• 1:14:50Ezra Klein?

  And he didn't, because I think Tucker understands quite well where the passions are and where the energy is. And he, I, when I hear you sometimes, I hear you being more concerned about this. You're a little chiller in, in, in this, and I recognize you're talking to, you know, in the New York Times podcast studio. But what I'm saying is I actually don't think the balance is right. That I think for some time, people have been, you know, and Donald Trump himself is like the king of this. There's a view to, you know, it's the all take him seriously, not literally.

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:15:29Ezra Klein?

  View that, yeah, the thing that is being said maybe doesn't hold up.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  I'm hoping that you can give me a little bit more though, because I'm saying, well, what are you actually saying?

• 1:15:38Ezra Klein?

  I'll give, I'll give you a little bit more.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  Quintez was on a podcast. I mean.

• 1:15:42Ezra Klein?

  Are you saying Nick Quintez is not a big figure now and is not influential among young people on the right? Is that really, would you really make that argument?

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  No, I would make a slightly different argument. I think that Nick Quintez is not a fundamentally political figure. He's a hyperreal figure of spectacle. That again, is you can read my writings on the question. You can read my writings on this, on this exact question. I think he's a, I think he's a bad influence. What I've cautioned people on the right about that genre of personality is that when someone goes on a video and says, you know, I love Hitler. Obviously, we don't love Hitler. We're not, neither of us are, are, are, are fans of Hitler. But you should resist the temptation to be scandalized and shocked and lose your capacity to reason and perceive it correctly.

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  Because what this is, it is a hyperreal spectacle optimized for digital algorithms to harvest attention and to harvest clicks. It's not actually political in that sense. It's not optimized towards any political outcomes. I just reject this idea that, you know, some dumb kid that has, you know, hijacked the algorithm with like superficial ideological spectacle is somehow there, therefore a symbolic of where people, where the right is going as a whole.

• 1:17:07Ezra Klein?

  I think, I think hyperreal is doing work in this argument that is not actually connected to what, what hyperreal means. I can imagine somebody sitting in front of me, even sitting in front of me here in 2015 and us younger, handsomer.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  Ah, yes, yeah.

• 1:17:21Ezra Klein?

  And you're telling me this about Donald Trump.

• 1:17:23Speaker 01

  Tell me what, tell you what?

• 1:17:24Ezra Klein?

  That, listen, you all are being easily provoked. You're looking at a hyperreal algorithmically oriented attentional spectacle and treating it like it's a serious political force. And then maybe if I had been wiser about what Donald Trump represented and the way in which the hyperreal and the real were going to converge in the life that we actually lead here. I would have said. No, attention is the fundamental currency of modern American politics.

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:17:55Ezra Klein?

  Things that are, we have actually fewer defenses against things that feel fundamentally ridiculous. Things that are, this is an era of the trickster spirit, not the earnest energies. And many people like me, I mean, you may remember this, Huffington Post initially would only cover Donald Trump's campaign in its celebrity and entertainment news section.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  Is that right? I don't remember that.

• 1:18:15Ezra Klein?

  Because he was a ridiculous, hyperreal spectacle and to treat it as a serious thing would have been absurd. I think many of us were perfectly willing to say Nick Fuentes is a marginal absurdist figure. And then it became clear in the Tucker Carlson moment, and given where Tucker has gone, that there's like a conveyor belt of these ideas and they go from the fringe to the far right, to the slightly less far right, to Donald Trump.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  Okay, well, here's where I would, here's where I would, where I would, where I would disagree. And you actually have a real world test, right? These kind of ideological media figures are playing a very different game than Donald Trump was playing. And you know that because Donald Trump actually played the game. He announced for president and he, against the odds, against many of the institutions, he won. And so you have to say, yeah, Trump also uses media, but that's like, you know, that's a superficial comparison. You have to say, what is the actual goal? And the goal for like the streamers is not to pass legislation. It's not to win elections.

• 1:19:22Speaker 01

  It's not to cobble together a majority, but it's in fact, it's kind of a narcissistic endeavor to get personal attention. And so, but, but that's the endpoint. There's no actual bridge that that can go over. And look, that's.

• 1:19:37Ezra Klein?

  But can it change minds and can it change people's politics?

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  It could change minds, but like, you know, not to the extent that you think, because people look at it more as a form of entertainment, soap opera, personality drama, than an actual viable political move. And so, yeah, I think that you're kind of conflating the media spectacle with the fundamental political arena. And I think that boundary is not as permeable as you're suggesting. And in fact, to make that boundary more explicit is. Better in my view for my own kind of political desire, but also better for the country. And so when I see, you know, when I see the kind of online right and the, and the New York

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  Times, both doing like puff pieces on the latest, the kind of right wing figure, right? It was David Duke and then it was Richard Spencer and now it's Nick Fuentes. This is a stock character in American discourse and I just refuse to take the bait.

• 1:20:39Ezra Klein?

  I don't think David Duke is a marginal figure. I mean, I, I, I will say this.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  You don't think David Duke is a marginal figure?

• 1:20:44Ezra Klein?

  Here's what I mean. Um, I think John Gans, who's a sort of, he's a great Substack and is a sort of interesting history-based theorist of American politics. He's got this book about the nineties called, uh, When The Clock Broke, I believe. And I've had him on to talk about the book and the argument he would make about David Duke about a bunch of figures who rose in that period, Patrick Buchanan, Samuel Francis, is that if you look at what they were figuring out about politics, I mean, David Duke, by the way, we should note, ran for office. He did not come that far from winning for Louisiana governor.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:20Ezra Klein?

  In the nineties.

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:21:22Ezra Klein?

  And, you know, there was a style of politics that they got kind of quite good at figuring out and Gans's view, and I agree with this view, is it much of what the populist right is today is built on that, often quite explicitly with Samuel Francis and others. Okay, make your, make your case.

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  Absolutely not. I mean, look, for, for those of us who are, look, I'm in the institutional right. I know the people, I know the personalities, I know the organizations. That figure is, is a pain in the ass. Nobody wants it, nobody likes it, nobody believes in it. And in fact, that figure, as we found out recently with the revelations about the Southern Poverty Law Center, is not only a useful tool for institutions on the left, but in many cases was actually secretly funded by the kind of left-wing civil rights outfit known as the SPLC.

• 1:22:15Ezra Klein?

  Which we were talking about David Duke.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  Uh, not, not David Duke in particular, who knows? Um, but I'm saying that-

• 1:22:21Ezra Klein?

  You're saying David Duke is maybe a left-wing plant?

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:22:25Ezra Klein?

  I think that's ridiculous.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  I'm not saying that, I'm not saying that in the sense of totally wholly created, but certainly used by, right? The whole idea was, was this kind of smear effect where the media would go out and say, this bad person, you know, supports your campaign. And then you'd have to disavow and go through this whole, this whole, uh, this whole kind of routine.

• 1:22:45Ezra Klein?

  But the point I'm kind of interested in here is, I mean, my view, and I think this is a fairly wide held view, is my worry is that the institutional right is getting steamrolled.

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  By whom?

• 1:22:58Ezra Klein?

  Yeah. By, well, one, to the, in many cases, in order to survive, it is dramatically changing what it is, like the Heritage Foundation.

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:23:07Ezra Klein?

  Um, in other cases, by Donald Trump. Donald Trump was not the candidate of the institutional right. If the institutional right had its way, Jeb Bush would have been the nominee. I mean, the idea that the institutional right has been racking up victory after victory is ridic- I mean, the Republicans all speaker after speaker after speaker till they got one who was more like properly compliant.

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:23:27Ezra Klein?

  The institutional right has not had a strong winning record. And again, part of my argument here is that I think this is because it, it, it keeps thinking it can maybe control these forces and it can't.

• 1:24:00Ezra Klein?

  You asked me earlier to sort of be more specific on a story, so I want to talk about a story you did. In November, you wrote a piece with the title, "The Largest Funder of Al Shabab Is The Minnesota Taxpayer." Tell me what the piece was about.

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  Sure. So, uh, this was a, a feature investigation that we did in Minnesota, looking into organized Somali fraud. And so we spent a number of month on, a number of months on this piece. We went out to Minnesota, we reviewed court documents, we interviewed law enforcement, both, uh, uh, you know. On the record, on background, and then our story, and this had been kind of bubbling up in local press and bits and pieces, was that in fact Somali fraudsters were exploiting Minnesota and federal welfare programs, autism programs, daycare programs, Medicaid

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  programs, and looting billions of dollars from American taxpayers. And this was the story that really blew open the Somali fraud story on the national stage. And then, since then, as sometimes happens when you report on an explosive story, it kind of ricocheted into an entire movement, really, looking at large-scale fraud in American public institutions.

• 1:25:20Ezra Klein?

  So there's a couple of pieces of this. So as you know, the fraud had been, you know, reported elsewhere at the Star Tribune, and it had been in national news.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  Bits and pieces.

• 1:25:28Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, there are bits and pieces. There were prosecutions, right, which is where a lot of the information came from that began in 2022 under the Biden administration. The big sort of move you made in this was to say, this is financing foreign terrorism.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:25:41Ezra Klein?

  What was that argument?

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, the argument is pretty simple, and the mechanics of it are this. So we have billions of dollars being stolen by Somali fraudsters in Minnesota. We then have huge amounts of money being transported out of Minneapolis Airport, Seattle Airport, in cash, in actual physical currency, in suitcases, that goes to Mogadishu. And then when in Mogadishu, it is distributed through various parts of the country through what is called the Hawala Network. Hawala Network is the name for kind of informal, cash-based,

• 1:26:23Speaker 01

  Klan-based financial institutions. They don't have a strong formal banking system in Somalia. It's a rough part of the world. And so they have these couriers that move money in cash. And all kinds of think tanks, military, US government, Department of Justice, Republicans and Democrats. Have made, have essentially made the case that Al Shabab is taking a cut of Hawala financing. And so when we talked with federal law enforcement agents and investigators who have been working on this case, they told us that the flow of funds was this, from the taxpayer, out of the airport in suitcases to the Hawala networks in Somalia, and therefore

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  to the Al Shabab terror networks, taking their cut essentially. Like, we have Visa that takes like 3% of your credit card transactions in parts of Somalia, Al Shabab takes a cut. Not exactly sure how much that is. And federal investigators say, hey, once it exits the country into the Hawala system, you can't claw that money back. There are no, there are no, you know, written receipts or banking transactions. But the scale of that money that was, that was remittances from fraud was so enormous that over time, we're talking about huge sums of money.

• 1:27:40Ezra Klein?

  So I want to take a beat on whether or not this turned out to be true. So the key named source in your story was a retired terrorism investigator named Glenn Kearns. He later came out, claimed that he was misquoted. He said later, the story was bullshit, and that he didn't know on the ground investigating in Minnesota. The two top prosecutors of the fraud in Minnesota said the perpetrators are motivated by greed. There's no evidence of terrorist financing. Do you still stand by that?

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  Of course I do. Yeah. And a couple of things. So the Glenn Kearns detective is very odd. We have him on the record. We have, you know, a transcript of his interview. I'm not sure what happened. My suspicion is that when this story blew up into a huge national story, he got spooked or scared or, but, you know, the, the paper in Minneapolis tried to go through our piece and, and with a kind of criticism, couldn't lay a glove on it, didn't, didn't debunk or even really contradict any of our points. You had, you know, one source who, who knows, don't know what, don't know his personal circumstances.

• 1:28:44Ezra Klein?

  But he was the only named source.

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  He was, I don't think he was the only named source in the piece.

• 1:28:51Ezra Klein?

  He was the only name source making this terrorism argument.

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  Well, incorrect. So, so we had multiple, multiple high-level federal officials who confirmed to us the flow of funds. We substantiated it with contextual reporting from Foundation for Defense of Democracies, from the United States Military Academy, from the Department of Justice. We were saying simply, logically, if we know from a variety of sources that, that Al-Shabaab is skimming off the Hawala network, and we know from a variety of sources that money is moving through that network from fraud committed in the United States, it's a logical syllogism, right? A, B, C. And so we know that this to be true. And I think that idea that because they weren't motivated by terrorism

• 1:29:39Speaker 01

  is not something we alleged and is essentially irrelevant. The, the facts as they played out were that the Al-Shabaab terror network benefits from fraud in the United States that has passed through their financial system.

• 1:29:54Ezra Klein?

  Your piece is actually quite careful, right? I've read the piece, I've read it carefully. And you're right, you don't allege that the point of this is to fund terrorists. Then, when you sort of promote the piece, your tweet is, "Somalis are stealing billions of dollars from American taxpayers and sending cash to terrorists back home. It's time for @RealDonaldTrump to revoke temporarily-protected status for all Somali nationals in the United States. It's time for them to go home." And I think two or three issues here.

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  Two or three, alright. Let's go there one by one.

• 1:30:25Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, we'll do them, we'll do them, I'll give them to you all. You have a limited number of people, right? Committing crimes. They're being prosecuted, right? The prosecutions begin under Biden. This was not like a swept under the rug thing. You guys did not come up with this, you didn't find it yourself. And-

• 1:30:45Ezra Klein?

  They were stealing a lot of money. I mean, that part is true. The sending cash terrorists back home, as you say, you have a more complicated view.

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  I linked to the piece and then you could, like, your rhetorical.

• 1:30:57Ezra Klein?

  And then, and then, and then. None of the people, as far as I can tell, we're doing this, were under temporary protected status, which is only about 750 people, right? So there's this move to say, it's not just like some criminals, it's Somalis. And it's not just some money is being skimmed because of a weak banking sector. It's their funding terrorism. And then it's to get Donald Trump to deport people who are unrelated to the crime.

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  Okay, so a couple of points on that, on that particular argument. So

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  the point of the, the piece broadly, it raises the question of immigration, cultural compatibility. And if you talk to people with an expert in Somali culture, as we did, and the history of Somalia, as we did, you get the clear sense that in Somalia, there is a kind of kinship and clan-based culture that is prevalent for variety of historical and, and social reasons. And because there is a, has been a weak central government, contested central government in Somalia in the modern period, there is a feeling that exploiting the central government

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  is, is permissible. And I, I think the, the, the underlying point, which is very uncomfortable, not just for people who are small L liberals, but even for many conservatives, is that actually all national culture, all national cultures are not equal. And in fact, because immigration is a group-based or national border-based system, you have to be prudent in which nations of origin you prioritize in immigration. And so I think the, the, the record on Somalis in the United States and elsewhere on many of those metrics is not good. You have low levels of education, high levels of welfare dependency,

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  and you have these cultural incompatibilities, let's say. And so, again.

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  In a prudent, national interest-based immigration policy, I would put Somalis down lower on the list. And I think that's perfectly defensible.

• 1:33:07Ezra Klein?

  I don't have a problem saying that American immigration policy should solve our, should serve our interests.

• 1:33:12Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:33:13Ezra Klein?

  Should not just be omnidirectional. What I am saying is that to take a crime committed by a limited number of people, then say, this is something about an entire group of people, and, and you should deport these unrelated people. Like, that that is a bad thing to do. And to yoke this sort of larger argument you're making to this much more kind of tendentious, well, some of the money that goes because of this fucked up system back in Somalia can get taken by Al-Shabaab.

• 1:33:44Speaker 01

  But, but.

• 1:33:44Ezra Klein?

  To finish the thought.

• 1:33:45Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:33:46Ezra Klein?

  And then I'll let you take it where you want to take it. That, that, that is, and to, to, that's part of this larger point I'm trying to make to you, which is that you are not putting like passion in service of reason. You're, you're unleashing things here that are like first going to really harm people who did nothing wrong, right? These Somali temporary protected stud, I mean, many, as you say, Somalia is a tough place. Many people flee it for completely reasonable reasons. And we, you know, honor them for doing so and trying to make a better life for them and their families. Like, they did nothing wrong. I think you actually do believe from many things you've written in like the primacy of thinking about the individual.

• 1:34:28Ezra Klein?

  If you want to say that our immigration policy should not favor Somalis, fine, fair enough.

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  But, but our immigration, the temporary protected status is, is based on group designations. And in fact, Somalis, Haitians, Venezuelans.

• 1:34:41Ezra Klein?

  Did not do this crime. Right? We agree on that part, right?

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  Hold on. Well, let, let me take it, let me take it in pieces. So you, a couple of kind of factual problems here. You said, a limited number of people committed these crimes. I'm actually not sure that that's true. And I'll, and I'll, and I'll explain it, uh, why I believe that. If you look at the actual schemes committed by Somalis, for example, for autism services, you had members of the Somali community opening up fake clinics with fake pay. Patients that were receiving, you know, kind of fake treatment. And what we're looking at is actually a non insignificant number of people that were involved or had knowledge of these schemes as they were unfolding. Because you're talking about thousands of patients, you know, larger family sizes. And secondarily, prosecutors told us over and over and over.

• 1:35:30Speaker 01

  We're just looking at the tip of the iceberg. We don't have the prosecutors, we don't have the investigators, we don't have the manpower to actually unravel all of these fraud schemes. And so let's just say the median estimate, kind of responsible estimate is $5 billion. Well, they've only uncovered fraud schemes and maybe $300 million. And so that would indicate that actually the vast majority of the schemes were simply kind of vanishing through your fingers. And so you're actually getting what I believe is, because also the Somali community is very concentrated and geographically tightly integrated in kinship networks. I actually think you're getting the complicity or knowledge of actually a non insignificant

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  part of this community are most Somalis in Minnesota.

• 1:36:16Speaker 01

  You don't have proof of that.

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  I think it's just, it's just logical. And I think that we can make this, we can make this, we can make the argument with a high degree of certainty based on the court documents, based on the total of fraud committed, and based on how these things are structured. And then, look, this is a mass fraud committed in Minnesota, committed now in other states that we're uncovering. And, you know, one, one West Coast police detective who has been looking into this said, you know, I've been, I've been looking into this for 30 years and organized fraud rings.

• 1:36:57Speaker 01

  In his experience are, are committed to a massively disproportionate amount by foreign nationals and groups of, you know, and groups of originating from migrant groups. So this is a fact. It's uncomfortable, it's uncomfortable. I didn't, I didn't argue. This is how it is. And so the question. I've not, I've not done my own reporting on this. But, but hold on. But the question then is, how do we respond to that politically? And so I actually think. Well, I want to talk about how it got responded to politically. So Donald Trump did what you wanted him to do. He.

• 1:37:31Ezra Klein?

  He put up a true social post on Thanksgiving Day, which you called iconic. Is that right? You, you know, as you called it iconic. Um, did I? In which he says, you sure did. All right, let's hear it. In which he says, Refresh. Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great state of Minnesota. Somali gangs are roving the streets, looking for prey as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses, hoping that they will be left alone. But, but then it kind of moves on from there. So then Nick Shirley, a right wing influencer, launches his own investigation of Somali fraud in, in Minnesota. He starts going to daycares and like knocking on them and being like, hey, is there, are there kids here? And these women come out and they don't speak English and they're like looking at him strangely.

• 1:38:12Ezra Klein?

  This gets, I think, like 130 million views across platforms. It goes crazily viral. But I want to play this clip. You, you did this podcast conversation with, with Richard Hanania, where you guys were talking about this. And I think, I think what you say is interesting. Sure.

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  If you look at the Nick Shirley video and you really dig into it, um, there are two things happening. Okay. On the surface, he is raising, he's shining a spotlight on something that is very real, that is a, a kind of endemic form of corruption. And he's bringing it to life through kind of zoomer style, YouTube, kind of gonzo, um, uh, video production. Okay. It draws attention to a real issue. It's driving politics in the right direction and, and it's, I think, overall beneficial. Granted, your, your critique of what's happening under the surface is also true. I mean, I couldn't publish, uh, the

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  conclude, you know, Nick Shirley gets in there, sees a building is empty and then assumes, oh, they're committing $70 million of fraud or whatever. As a journalist, as someone who has to go through fact checking, legal review, uh, kind of peer scrutiny, I kind of clam up and I'm like, oh, wow, man, you're going to about to get sued because what you're saying is just not defensible as, as, as a journalistic process.

• 1:39:33Ezra Klein?

  So the reason I found that to be such an interesting quote is it, I feel like both sides of what we're talking about are in there. You know, this video is not strong. Let's put it that way, that there's a lot, you, you can't go and be like, show me your kids. And when they don't show the kids, be like, this is a fraud. You don't have any kids. On the other hand, you have this contrary feeling that, well, it may not be true, but it puts attention towards something real. It's like in line with where I want politics to go. It does become a huge issue. We'll talk about like what it leads to. And like, I can feel this tension. So I mean, how do you balance that?

• 1:40:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, it's a free country. Everyone has a First Amendment right. And so therefore, you can't say, I don't like this for these reasons. Therefore, you shouldn't be able to do it. But I think this is just another instance, an example of the right being under institutionalized. And so what I would say is that an ideal, say, outcome or method would be to take someone that has charisma, that has courage, that has curiosity, someone like Nick Shirley, and then integrate that person into an institution to put up those guardrails to refine and really improve the product itself. And then

• 1:40:53Speaker 01

  to use that attention toward productive ends. And so that would be like the ideal. That's the kind of thing that I think would be good. But the reality is that on the right, the media is so fragmented and the media institutions are not that strong, not that well-developed. And in many cases, you know, highly risk averse for obvious reasons. And therefore, there's an entire territory that is ceded to people. I don't even know if Nick Shirley is right wing. I'm not sure I would even categorize him as that. I think the story landed in that particular manner. But you have people, independents.

• 1:41:32Ezra Klein?

  He's not left wing.

• 1:41:32Speaker 01

  Let's say citizen journalists. I think that was the phrase for a while. There was great hope in the citizen journalist, you know?

• 1:41:39Speaker 01

  Love citizens, love journalists. Citizen journalist is one of those things like it sounds good in theory, but in practice, there are some real limitations. And so it is what it is. What are you going to do about it? You know, this is the kind of thing where as an individual, my only reaction is to say, you can put out a kind of remedy, suggestion for remedy, but it's not within my direct control.

• 1:41:59Ezra Klein?

  I guess the thing I'm asking, not as an individual, but as an activist and an analyst and somebody influential in the administration that responds to these stories, yours, his, by deploying a giant ICE and Border Patrol deployment to Minnesota, that deployment ultimately, and the fighting around it leaves Renee Good and Alex Purdy dead. Minneapolis calculated the economic impact of the raids at at least around $700 million. Joe Thompson, the acting US attorney in Minnesota, who is leading the fraud investigations, he was quoted quite a bit in your original piece. He resigns in anger after Trump's Department of Justice demands his office investigate Renee Good's wife.

• 1:42:42Ezra Klein?

  So, I mean, to me, I look at all this and I say like, that wasn't beneficial. This was catastrophic. I mean, it harmed people's lives. It led to people dying. It was bad for the Minnesota economy. It led to the fraud stuff getting, you know, completely sidelined and the person who was pushing it resigning. That this did not go in a good direction, in part because it wasn't based on good information. But like now, like looking back at the whole thing, do you disagree with that?

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would disagree. So, so, so, well, I would agree with certain points, but I would refine them and disagree with others. So, I mean, the fraud work is continuing. The vice president is now chairing an anti-fraud task force. They've significantly increased the manpower to look into fraud. That said, it was a bad strategic decision to deploy force, Customs and Border Patrol, ICE agents. With that kind of force posture, it's a no win situation. And I was advising against it from even the previous summer.

• 1:43:50Speaker 01

  And so in that particular case, I would say it was ill advised. And I think that finally, the administration has learned that. They reshuffled DHS, they reshuffled Customs and Border Patrol. And if you want to.

• 1:44:05Speaker 01

  If you want to create deportations at scale of illegal immigrants, you have to do so in what I've kind of called an invisible manner, an impersonal manner. You have to change banking regulations, financial transfers, remittance fees, employment verification to incentivize self deportation. Because the idea that you could deport people by simply like sending in armored cars with ICE agents on the side is delusional. It's never going to happen. I think there's part of the right that wants that kind of macho imagery.

• 1:44:47Speaker 01

  But if you look at the underlying substantive policy that you want to enact, I think it's detrimental. And in fact, the situation in Minneapolis, again, in that sense, was did not achieve the stated objective for reasons that I and others had predicted.

• 1:45:07Ezra Klein?

  Let me pick up on the fraud.

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  And to me, it's also, it's annoying to me personally. Because we, I think fraud, huge winning issue. No one wants fraud. It's a huge problem in the country. If you had, if you could just focus on that, you could rally not only Republicans who are traditionally kind of, you know, a small government, but you could also bring into the coalition moderate Democrats who want good governance. And so to me personally, I found it very, you know, very, very upsetting because it's like, hey, we have this winning issue. Focus on the issue. Execute the policy at scale. Save the taxpayers money. You know, you're giving someone a nicely wrapped gift and you just wish that they would take it. In this case, it didn't happen that way.

• 1:45:53Ezra Klein?

  It feels to me like the fraud problem for you all is bigger than this. According to a Times analysis across two terms, Trump has granted clemency to more than 70 allies, donors and others convicted in fraud cases, including Philip S. Formis, who stole $1.3 billion from Medicare and Medicaid in a fraudulent billing scheme. It was the FBI's largest ever criminal healthcare fraud case against individuals. Trump commuted his 20-year prison term.

• 1:46:21Speaker 01

  You're not going to get me to defend it. I would in fact-

• 1:46:24Ezra Klein?

  But I don't see you really attacking it either.

• 1:46:26Speaker 01

  I'll attack it right now.

• 1:46:27Ezra Klein?

  Okay.

• 1:46:28Speaker 01

  Shouldn't have done that. And in fact, you know, if, if, if, if these people were convicted of fraud at that scale, 20 years seems like a light prison sentence. I would double it personally. And so, yeah, this is-

• 1:46:40Ezra Klein?

  The push I'm making, and I recognize you're not going to defend this, but there is this movement on the right right now to, to focus on fraud. You've been very much leading this. Meanwhile, I look at Trump and he's gutted the machinery of anti-fraud enforcement all across the federal government. He gutted it at the IRS. There's a tremendous amount of fraud in tax returns. We all know that. And huge amounts of money are being stolen under those terms because now you, the, the audit capacity has gone way down. He gutted inspectors general across the federal government, the people seeing what is happening inside these organizations. He destroyed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which did a lot of anti-fraud work.

• 1:47:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Debatable.

• 1:47:18Ezra Klein?

  I recognize we would debate it, but what I don't think is debatable is that Trump and this administration have sort of systematically gone across the federal government and taken apart, parts of the government that are supposed to watch if the government itself is committing fraud and if, you know, taxpayers and, and, and others are. I just, I look at the country right now and I see Donald Trump has like, you like using piracy around the Somalis. I think of the Trump and the Trump family as pirates. I think that they are looting the country for their benefit. I think that that's what the Qatari plane is. I think that that's what the crypto investments are. I think that's how Trump and his family have

• 1:48:00Ezra Klein?

  increased their net worth by billions of dollars. And I'm not saying you support it, but I don't understand how you think you're going to have like a right- That is doing good governance and that is taking these things institutionally seriously. And have that be what is happening at the very top.

• 1:48:17Speaker 01

  Sure, and let's take let's take pardons as the most concrete example.

• 1:48:22Speaker 01

  Yes, I agree. I think you and I would agree and, you know, I'm political, but in a sense, not partisan in that way. I'm not going to reflexively defend every decision by someone in my camp or the President of the United States. And in fact, a lot of those pardons,

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  ill-advised, shouldn't have done it. And because in the reporting that I've read, a number of those individuals had also been putting money into various lobbies and various attempts to influence and various, you know, campaign funds or committee funds, or however the finances work. You create the perception of corruption that is not good and does in some ways undercut the the good work of combating systematic social service fraud as a whole. But from my point of view and how I have to look at it is, okay, you live in an imperfect world.

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  You don't have ultimate control. My influence is great on the things I care about, on DEI, on higher education, defunding NPR, whatever, like go down the list of

• 1:49:32Ezra Klein?

  You've been very influential, I agree.

• 1:49:34Speaker 01

  But the the the kind of implicit premise of your criticism, which again, I take seriously and I think it's a fair criticism, is, oh, therefore, you know, you should give up, you should turn against the good work that's being done. It's kind of canceled out or invalidated because of something that's happening over here. And my personal policy is

• 1:49:59Speaker 01

  where there's where there's necessary criticism, I'll create, I'll give the criticism. But I'm not going to stop to work in that little sphere of influence that I have to do good. And so, you know, I'm kind of walking the line, right, where I will issue the criticism as necessary. And if that reduces my influence in a certain regard, I'm willing to accept it. And while I would certainly, you know, speak out against, I think the crypto thing was, was, was just, you know.

• 1:50:28Ezra Klein?

  And is ongoing.

• 1:50:30Speaker 01

  It's ongoing. Yeah.

• 1:50:30Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, their crypto plays are ongoing. World Liberty and all this stuff is ongoing.

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah. And, and, and at the end of the day, when I, you know, when I sit down in my office, you know, at 7:30 AM every morning, I'm like, all right, how can we win? How can we move the ball forward? How can we do good policy? And ultimately, at the end of the day, that's all that's within my control. And, and that's the, that's the attitude that I bring to the fight.

• 1:50:55Ezra Klein?

  I think you underestimate yourself. The, the point I'm making is.

• 1:50:58Speaker 01

  Well, explain it to me.

• 1:50:58Ezra Klein?

  I will. The point I'm making is actually a little bit even larger than you. Look, the, one reason I have you here for this conversation is I think you're very, very good at what you do. I think you're probably the most successful activist, certainly right wing activist of this era.

• 1:51:13Speaker 01

  But maybe overall, you're saying.

• 1:51:14Ezra Klein?

  Huh?

• 1:51:15Speaker 01

  Maybe overall, maybe left and right, in general.

• 1:51:17Ezra Klein?

  Maybe, maybe, right?

• 1:51:18Speaker 01

  I'll take it.

• 1:51:19Ezra Klein?

  And like you and I are not going to agree on a million things, right? My point is not to convert you to my politics. I'm not going to do that.

• 1:51:25Speaker 01

  You should try. I mean, why not? I'm trying to convert you.

• 1:51:28Ezra Klein?

  Listen, we, we talk. Um, but I think that the right's inability to hold itself to certain epistemological or institutional standards, standards of, let's not call it neutrality. Let's call it impartiality at the institutional level, at the federal government level. What the right is accepting that Donald Trump is doing is insane, in my view.

• 1:51:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:51:56Ezra Klein?

  And the epistemological standards and Nick Shirley's stuff is, and some of your things, in my view, which go, again, I think you're careful in like the, the, the, the body and then not always in the promotion and the weaponization of it. It.

• 1:52:11Speaker 01

  I think careful in the

• 1:52:13Ezra Klein?

  I think you're

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  the written pieces that are defensible.

• 1:52:15Ezra Klein?

  And I think

• 1:52:16Speaker 01

  I take the rhetorical flourish too far.

• 1:52:18Ezra Klein?

  And and then beyond you, I think there's a generalized view that we need to unleash these passions. There's been too much that has been unsayable and we need to make sure we can say it all again. And the result of this is like a like a hydraulic process, not like some future result, but a current result. When I look at the Spotify rankings, the right of center figures on the top have become highly conspiratorial. And, you know, there are figures like Fuentes Rising and we need a strong right in this country.

• 1:52:50Speaker 01

  I would so I'd ask you a question then. Has the has the New York Times editorial line, right? The editorial line, has it moved more in my direction since 2020? Or have I moved more in its direction since 2020?

• 1:53:01Ezra Klein?

  I'm not sure the way you have moved since 2020.

• 1:53:04Speaker 01

  I haven't moved at all.

• 1:53:05Ezra Klein?

  Okay.

• 1:53:06Speaker 01

  So if I'm the baseline.

• 1:53:08Ezra Klein?

  So I think you're saying it's moved in your direction.

• 1:53:09Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:53:10Ezra Klein?

  Okay.

• 1:53:10Speaker 01

  You look at the the big piece on D E I, you know, you had editorialist saying that I was, you know, some sort of villain on D E I.

• 1:53:16Ezra Klein?

  Let's agree.

• 1:53:17Speaker 01

  And then the Times kind of moves back.

• 1:53:18Ezra Klein?

  Let's agree you've won some fights.

• 1:53:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:20Ezra Klein?

  I am saying that they're like the right, in my view, right? As somebody who I think actually has a good record of criticizing my own, right? I pushed Joe Biden to, you know, when that was like a much more dangerous thing for me to do.

• 1:53:32Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 1:53:33Ezra Klein?

  I wrote abundance, which is entirely critique of democratic governance. And where the right has gone, I think is not going to work. And what's interesting to me about you right now is I'll watch your show and I can see you and your co host wrestling with these questions.

• 1:53:51Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:53:51Ezra Klein?

  Right? I don't think you're comfortable, but ultimately there's like two problems that I see the right having that it really does not know how to solve. One problem is its attentional sphere.

• 1:54:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:54:03Ezra Klein?

  Is pathological.

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  Parts of it are.

• 1:54:07Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, parts of it are, and it doesn't have a lot of institutional strength there. And the second is that. You cannot challenge Donald Trump. You can sort of say some things he's doing you don't like, you know, maybe wouldn't fully support. But Donald Trump is the sun king and he has to be obeyed, or you get if you go too hard.

• 1:54:28Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't think that.

• 1:54:29Ezra Klein?

  His ability to do it. If you go too hard, you get like pushed out in a way maybe you can't come back from. And those two things are allowing a tremendous amount of bad ideas of actual corruption of just institutional and non-institutional rot to occur. And like, we're all going to pay for it because right now we're all living under right wing governance. So I've, I've a lot of worry about this, right? I, I don't need just like, my point is not you should become a liberal, but the right has some real issues.

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  I would agree that the right has some real challenges. And this is universal, right? There's no entirely virtuous, effective, disciplined political movement. Every political movement has a certain fermentation, a certain amount of internal conflict. You have to figure out how to resolve disputes, settle questions. And what I've tried to do, especially in the last, say, year and a half since Trump has become president again, is bring a lot of those conversations into the open. And I, I think that while there are these real challenges, the epistemological machine

• 1:55:42Speaker 01

  of the right has some real weak spots, some real flaws, some real vulnerabilities. While Trump's kind of, kind of highly individualized charismatic presidency that is charismatic rather than legal, rational, or, or traditional, the Max Weber, you know, triangle of, of legitimacy and authority.

• 1:56:06Speaker 01

  The reality is that, okay, then let's solve it. This is the conversation we need to have. These are the problems we need to grapple with. The charismatic leadership has enormous benefits. It also creates a series of underlying problems to solve. But I think that all of these can be resolved productively. I think the people in charge of the conservative institutions still in general have good epistemological judgment, intuitions, attitudes. And I think that, you know, politics moves forward. And I think actually after, you know, Trump is in his last term. Depending on how things go with the House, this might be the really last, truly effective moment for the Trump presidency. And then we ask the next question.

• 1:56:51Speaker 01

  And so the reality is that you have to move forward. You have to work within imperfect conditions.

• 1:56:55Ezra Klein?

  One of my critiques of the right right now, and I have my own of the left, and I've talked about many of them. But I think the right likes to talk about virtue and doesn't insist on it. And virtue, to go back to what we were talking about around Thelos, and your Thelos, is very much in part about restraining the passions and channeling them productively. There's a lot of talk about virtue, but the people who are leaders on the right, Donald Trump very much included, are not virtuous often. And if they have enough power, that is looked past. If they have enough strength to their passions, that is fine. And similarly, in the informational sphere, there is a lot of playing with stories

• 1:57:39Ezra Klein?

  that are designed, like memetically constructed, to arouse very, very, very base passions. Those stories are often much more complicated if they're true beneath them. And there's a view that that can be channeled in the right direction. And I think the opposite is happening, that in fact, the people who are restrained are really losing out in the right attentional sphere because it's this constant, you can't get heard. If you're not now playing this game of incredibly weaponized, like explosive allegations,

• 1:58:24Ezra Klein?

  which of course is going where that ultimately always goes, which is towards antisemitic conspiracy theories, like the oldest potential to move in the book.

• 1:58:33Speaker 01

  You're raising, I think, a really important philosophical question, and the conservative tradition offers a lot of good debate discourse on this question. The question is this, you have what we might say Aristotelian virtue or Christian virtue, and then Machiavellian virtu, which is a totally, it's the same word, but a totally different conception. And for Machiavelli, virtue, the political virtue was the virtue of how to win power, how to maintain stability. And in his book on republics, how to have a flourishing republic, which often requires cunning, ambition, design. And so, politics is always a conversation

• 1:59:15Speaker 01

  between virtue and virtu. And you're essentially reconciling means and ends. And there are people who will argue, academics in particular, even those on the right, well, we need to have deontological principles, that you can make, you know, the ends, the means always have to be 100% pure, towards 100% pure ends. And I laugh, it's like, well, only an academic could really, you know, make such a case, because the reality is that in politics, it's an imperfect world, and you're constantly balancing means and ends. You're constantly taking the measure of virtu and virtue. And so, you have to figure that out. You have

• 1:59:56Speaker 01

  to figure out where you're personally comfortable, where you personally can feel that your work is justified. And then as a movement, as a whole, this is a constant negotiation. And look, in my mind, political leaders are not your friends. Political leaders are not your priest. You know, political leaders are kind of blunt instruments. Political leaders are means to an end. And there's no easy answer there. There's no immediate answer there. But what I would say is that those are the people that are my compatriots, the people that I'm fighting every day alongside and along with.

• 2:00:39Speaker 01

  Are high integrity people, very smart people, conservative institutionalists who understand the moment, who understand that we need to deliver tangible political victories. We can't retreat just to abstract speculation. And who, you know, look, we're playing the game. And in my view, the game is simultaneously to improve our own capacities, but also to win in the arena. And so I oftentimes, and this conversation is interesting because

• 2:01:12Speaker 01

  you're oftentimes, you're moving forward. All right, what are we going to do? How are we going to hit this? Where are we going to, where are we going to push next? What kind of, what kind of victory is available?

• 2:01:22Speaker 01

  And you have to do that, knowing that the, the, the system you're operating in is, is littered with imperfections.

• 2:01:30Speaker 01

  And again, at the end of the day, what I, my calculation is, I'm very mindful and even try to be, some people wouldn't believe this, try to even be humble as to the little part of the world that I can influence. And I think I've changed it for the better. I think institutions that I'm working with are improving over time. And I think this epistemological question and the individual charismatic question are questions that can be and will be resolved in the, say, short to medium term.

• 2:02:01Ezra Klein?

  I'll leave it there. I really appreciate you doing this conversation. Always our final question, what are a few books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 2:02:07Speaker 01

  Okay, so we're going to do three books from the Rufo's personal conservative canon. The first I would recommend is a book by my mentor, John Marini, Claremont Institute scholar, called Unmasking the Administrative State, which I think has helped me more than anything, understand the deeper philosophical and political underpinnings of our modern dilemma. The second book that I think all conservatives should read and all liberals should read is a biography by Stacey Schiff called The Revolutionary, which is a biography of the American founder Samuel Adams. And Adams is the most political founder. I think he kind of, kind of clarifies through example,

• 2:02:50Speaker 01

  all the questions that we've been talking about, about propaganda, about passion, about institutions, about political change. He's the kind of key and the forgotten founder, really. He's been downgraded for centuries now, but I think he's actually the most important founder. And then You know, third, I would recommend a number of books by the kind of conservative journalist, former NYU professor James Burnham, wrote a book called Managerial Revolution, another called The Machiavellians, another called Suicide of the West. And for me, Burnham is someone who has the kind of sophisticated analysis that helps illuminate these questions. His work is quite good and might even be interesting for people who don't share, you know, my political convictions.

• 2:03:35Speaker 01

  But which book of his would you start with? I would start with Managerial Revolution, again, because it just, it kind of descri-- it's in the 1940s. It's unbelievable. You read it now, and he's describing the world we live in, but he's describing it from a point of kind of optimism, American optimism, but he already saw some of the problems that were starting to emerge. Chris Rufo, thank you very much. Thank you.