#428 — Political Extremism
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Summary
Jonah Goldberg returns to the podcast to talk about the Trump administration, Bitcoin, and much, much more. Jonah is the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times and co-founder of The Dispatch, a left-of-center publication that focuses on reporting on the far-right. He's also the host of The Remnant, a podcast about the alt-right, and a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard.
Transcript
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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're
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hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing
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the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense
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Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore
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it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're
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doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Jonah Goldberg. Jonah, thanks for
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joining me. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me back. Yeah, it's great to see you again. So I'm
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sure there's a lot to talk about. Let's remind people, first of all, where they can find most
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of your stuff to read online, and how do you describe what you do and where you are these
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days? Sure. I'm the editor-in-chief of The Dispatch, which Steve Hayes and I launched about
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six years ago because we wanted to sort of model behavior that wasn't too much on display in American
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journalism, particularly in right-of-center journalism. And so we are unapologetically
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right-of-center. We have some left-of-center writers as well, but we pride ourselves on being
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fact-driven, and we're sort of violently nonpartisan, so we're perfectly happy to talk about how the
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Republican Party's a shit show. And so The Dispatch is the best place to find me. I'm an LA Times
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columnist, have been for almost two decades, and I've got a podcast called The Remnant. So there you
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go. Nice. Nice. Well, let's start with Trump 2.0. How's it going? How has the first, what is this,
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seven months, almost eight months been in your view? What has surprised you? What is better than
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you thought, worse than you thought? Yeah, so that's a good question. I am, uh, I have to admit
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I was wrong about some things. I, like a lot of people, thought that we would see more continuity
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with the first term for good and for ill than we have. I had this theory, I may have even floated
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it on here, that the kind of mass deportation he was promising is too big of a lift logistically
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politically and politically for him to pull off. I don't think he's where, he still hasn't gotten to
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where he sort of promised to go, but he's gotten closer to it than I thought he would. I have to say
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I've been surprised at his remarkably quick success in shutting down the border. I think if he were
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smart politically, he would talk about that a lot more and stop doing a lot of the other stuff that
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he does. I've been surprised by the really sort of complete feckless confusion of Democrats in all
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sorts of ways and how to counter him. Yeah. I also, you know, but the thing that I was wrong about
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is more that I, I thought that in his first term, the condo salesman part of his presidency was much
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more pronounced insofar as he liked the headline. He liked to promote the headline. He liked to claim
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total victory. You would tell people he actually built the wall. He claimed that he completely tore up
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NAFTA when in reality, he basically just added a couple, you know, new provisions to an updated NAFTA
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and kept it, but he got to claim that he did something huge. Right. And this time around,
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I've been shocked to the degree to which there's more substance for good or for ill to a lot of his
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stuff. I never thought Doge would work and it didn't, but it did a lot of damage. There was a lot of
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performative vandalism to it. Yeah. And I, I guess the thing I'm sort of most shocked by, it's hard.
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I should have made a list, but I guess the thing I'm most shocked by is the cavalier way a lot of people
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just sort of price in the corruption. And I don't mean, I don't necessarily just mean like the crypto
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stuff and the Bitcoin stuff and taking a plane from the Qataris and all those sort of obvious
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things. You know, corruption has a more, has a richer, more redolent meaning than the sort of
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just bribe-taking kind of connotation to it. The corruption of sort of the way the system is
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supposed to work, the, you know, one of the things that's good about hypocrisy that people
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don't really appreciate is that even lip service to an ideal that you fall short of maintains this
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idea that the ideal should be an ideal, right? Like Wayne Booth, the literary critic says that
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rhetoric is the art of probing what men believe men ought to believe. And so the fact that Trump has
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been so successful in just dispensing with the pretense of doing the right thing some of the time
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and people cut them slack for it, you know, this idea that you're going to fill the government with
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loyalists where you make them take loyalty tests and everyone says, well, that's just Trump. That's
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what people voted for. The idea that you're going to put some of these, some truly unqualified people
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in power solely because they're loyal. That's the kind of thing that, look, loyalty tests are a thing
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in politics and have been for thousands of years and they're never going away. But the pretense that
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you're doing things for other reasons is usually cover for it. And here, there's a lot of crap he's
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doing that, that they're just, they're just owning it. And that's been pretty shocking to me.
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Yeah. That point about hypocrisy is, is a deep one. I think it was, I think there's this, uh,
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La Roche-Vicotte maxim that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice plays to virtue.
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Right. And that does have the same, it's making the same point that you're only truly capable of
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hypocrisy if you're to some degree granting the importance of certain norms tacitly. So it's by
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reference to those norms that you can be convicted of hypocrisy, but there's just no pretense of
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normativity at all with these guys. You know, the one thing, I mean, Trump lies about everything
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under the sun. Uh, he's a massive imposter and has been for, in so many respects, you know, he
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pretended to be rich when he wasn't rich, et cetera, but he's never pretended to be a good
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person, right? He's not a hypocrite in that sense. And I think that's some of some key to his, his
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charm for at least half of America. Yeah. I'm kind of curious what you think about this. Cause I,
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I often try to explain this point to people and they look at me the way my basset hound used to look
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at me when I tried to feed it a grape with just sort of head tilting, total incomprehension. I see
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Trump in many ways as almost a culmination of postmodernism, right? And we can stay on the
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hypocrisy thing for just a second. You know, as, as a friend of mine once said, when Hugh Hefner
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moved out of the Playboy mansion to raise little kids, no one criticized him for failing to live down
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to his principles, right? Like the, I, in a healthy society, the hypocrisy thing about upholding the
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ideals is important because it still keeps the standard alive and the cult of authenticity,
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which is more from romanticism than postmodernism, but they overlap says, no, the true, the highest
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version of, of truth, the highest version of legitimacy comes from within that you just have
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to be true to yourself. And that's why I think our culture for the last 50 years has been so obsessed
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with notions of hypocrisy. But I always used to say, you know, if a glutton says everyone should
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overeat that he's being true to himself, but he's giving terrible advice. It's better to say,
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don't do what I do, right? The essence of good parenting is to say, you know, don't make, you
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know, is not to sort of teach your kids to make the same mistakes you made, but to say, I learned from
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some things and we're going to set some standards and do as I say, not as I did. And Trump, I think
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comes partly from Norman Vincent Peale and the power of positive thinking upbringing that he had
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and partly from his just, you know, malignant narcissism. He has this approach to the universe,
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which is to say that his feelings are determinative of reality. We just saw this last week with the
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firing of the BLS commissioner. It's critical Trump theory, right? If any external truth or standard
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undermines his desires, his will to power, his preferences, it must not only be corrupt or rigged,
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as he would put it, but it must be specifically rigged against him, that it's bigoted against Trump,
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right? When Barr told him, we looked into these allegations that the election was stolen and there's
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no evidence to it. Trump's response was, wasn't go look again or show me the facts. It was, you must
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hate Trump because he doesn't speak the vernacular of, you know, Foucault reading campus radicals or
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anything like that. And because he, he, he's so naked in his appetites and his agenda, people don't
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see it that in many ways, it's a kind of horseshoe theory thing where he is, he's living down to this
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cult of authenticity thing and it gets him off the hook. People will say, that's just Trump being Trump
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as if an explanation is the same thing as an excuse. Yeah. Well, there's this phrase that is
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gaining some currency in, among the commentariat, which is the woke right, you know, or the postmodern
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right. And, um, the claim seems to be that the right has learned, if not explicitly by osmosis from
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the success of wokeness on the far left, that you can essentially take all of your political assertions
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off the gold standard of reality testing and truth claims and intellectual honesty. And it's
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just all a matter of just the memetics of what will win. I mean, what narrative can you force
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into people's brains on social media? Who can you smear successfully? And yeah, then there's just
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whatever sticks, sticks. And it's, it's just a set of power relations, right? You're just, you're,
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you're worried about who has power, who's going to benefit from anything being established as true,
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as opposed to whether or not it is true. And yeah, it does vindicate at least this part of
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horse, horse to share theory. I mean, I guess there's antisemitism also vindicates it. If you
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go far enough left or right, you meet antisemites of a different flavor. But the resemblance of the,
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of the political extremes to one another is in the lack of principles and the conspiracy thinking
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and the willingness to really break all of the, the norms that allow for sane, rational compromise.
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Yeah. It seems to be there and it just is in self-evident. I used to be a big critic of horseshoe
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theory and I'm still willing to defend my old criticisms, but I've had to say times have changed
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it and I've changed my mind about it. And so far as I used to defend the American right and
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conservatism, and I still defend the conservatism that I believe in on these grounds. It's just that
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my conservatism isn't very popular these days, but you know, American conservatism is liberal in the
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classical liberal sense is that the heart of the American conservative movement in my lifetime was
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defending, you know, the founding fathers and the, the constitution, free market capitalism,
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all of these things that stem out of 18th and 19th century classical liberalism. And a big chunk of
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the American center left is classically liberal too. I mean, they have too much Rawls in it for me,
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but that's a different conversation. And what kind of just dawned on me is like, I never, I always
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thought that the right would not let go of those commitments. And it turns out that the reason why
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horseshoe theory works is the second you stop being liberal, right? In the classical liberal sense,
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you know, individual rights, the sovereignty of facts, the liberal of liberal arts, right? That's
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the kind of liberal I'm talking about. This idea that rules and rights are sovereign, that the individual
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is key, that conscience rights are important, that we don't judge people as members of groups,
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but on their own actions and based on their own arguments and facts and all that. The second you
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abandon that, whether you do it for a culturally loaded left-wingism or a culturally loaded right-wing
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ism, the salient point is it's illiberal. Yeah. And illiberalisms, it's sort of like in particle
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physics, you know, you got different, they start giving these different things, different tiny little
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flavors to explain the differences of them. But at the end of the day, like illiberalism is a liberalism.
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And the differences between them boil down to flavors and aesthetics and also which constituencies
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you want to reward, right? Which powers, which groups you want to elevate and which you want
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to denigrate. But in terms of like respect for rights and facts and logic and reason and conscience
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and all that kind of stuff, the different forms of illiberalism are all remarkably similar.
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Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're, they're both tribal, right? You're, you're fighting for your tribe and
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there's no pretense of the universality of your commitments, you know? So, I mean, to be actually
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ethical, to be saying something is good or something is evil, really you have, it can't just be, it's
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that way because you are you part of your group or you have your skin color. I mean, you have to be
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making a claim that's generalizable to people regardless of identity. But once you give up
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that criterion and you just think identity is everything, then yeah, there's no reason to
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respect expertise. I mean, obviously we, you know, expertise is a sham. That's just another power
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relation. Institutions don't have to be preserved. We don't, you know, as you go far enough left and
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far enough right now, you meet people who don't seem to think there's much of any, anything worth
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preserving in our society, right? So it's definitely not conservative. The further right you go,
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you meet the tear it all, tear it all down brigade, you know, just as surely as you meet them on the
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left. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the arguments, I think, I apologize if we talked about this last time I
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was on here, but one of the arguments that drives me crazy is this claim, which you get from a lot of
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people on what they call the common good constitutionalism. It's one of these post
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liberal right-wing intellectual niches. And the argument that they like to make, which has its,
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its analogs in the arguments that the Trump administration makes all the time is that the
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constitution and by extension, the rule of law, but the constitution is a morally neutral document.
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And I find this really grotesque because first of all, where the constitution is neutral,
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that neutrality itself is profoundly moral, right? This idea that you, you know, the reason why
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justice is blind is that you're not supposed to pick favorites by the color of the scheme of people
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walking to the courtroom, right? But at the same time, you know, the idea that you have the right
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to confront your accuser, right? That was one of the most hard won moral victories for humanity, right?
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The idea that you should be secure in your papers and your properties, and you have a right to
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privacy and all these kinds of things, that is not morally neutral. And it's very easy to see how
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it's not morally neutral. If you feel like it, when it's violated, you know, if you, if you start
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thinking about the fifth amendment or the first amendment, the right to speak your conscience
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without punishment, right? The right to worship as you please to associate as you please. We take these
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things for granted, which is a shame, but taking them for granted is not the same thing as
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thinking that they're morally neutral. This is what makes Western democracies morally superior
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to totalitarian and authoritarian regimes of the right or the left, right? The fact that we recognize
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these things, but this tribal thing that you get on the post-liberal right says, no, no, no,
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because they don't reward the things that we like and they allow for the freedom of people we disagree
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with. That's a suicide pact and we got to get rid of it. And I think it's, that's what's suicidal is
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So what do you make of Trump's apparent failure to put the Epstein mess behind him in a way that is,
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uh, as efficient as, um, his dispatch of most of the scandals he's had to deal with?
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So, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm, and I'm glad we've moved on from the, the philosophical stuff for a little
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bit. So I think the Epstein thing is kind of fascinating. All right. We'll just do this as
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political punditry for just for a second. Part of what we're seeing here is it dawning on the various
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hotbeds of MAGA, social media, podcast bros, whoever, right? Steve Bannon, it's dawning on them
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that Trump's not going to be around forever. And the Epstein story is just too good. Right. It's
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got, I mean, it is, as my friend, David French says, it's something like he calls it the thinking
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man's QAnon. Right. And it just checks so many boxes and scratches so many erogenous zones. It's
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got this, this perfidious Jewish guy at the head of it. Right. And he's in the shadowy globalist world
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of banking and all of this kind of thing. And it's got pedophilia and, and sexual depravity,
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which, you know, is always a big theme of the QAnon crowd. And to let go of it means that you
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can't use it down the road, say in the Republican primaries or in the post Trump era. And so part of
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it, I think is like a bunch of people are realizing this topic is just too damn monetizable to let go
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of. That's part of it. There's also the fact that it's just too damn juicy. Right. And people like
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Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, they have invested so much of their identity in these stories that
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they're presented with. And for listeners, I assume they know head of the FBI and the number
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two guy at the FBI that for them to say, Oh, we were just, there was nothing there puts them in
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this incredible bind, which I find utterly justified and delicious because either the only choices are
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we were lying to you all along or we were full of crap all along. Right. Um, maybe the, it could be
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one or both of those. I, I think they're both, but, but we were, we were gaslighting you all along
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and, and now we're telling you the truth or we were telling you the truth before, and now we're
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lying to stay in power. And that rubs up against this whole sort of anti-deep state, anti-establishment
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thing. It creates excruciating problems for them. And the fact that Trump has had such a hard time
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putting it to bed, I mean, it's kind of gone to bed now. It's taking a nap. I don't think it's,
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it's gone. Shows how fraught creating a mass movement based on a cult of personality is
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because you've got this massive coalition that is only unified basically around one
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thing. It's Donald Trump. And that's not an ideological coalition. That's not a political
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coalition. That's not even a coalition of interests properly understood. It is purely a
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grift about a cult of personality. And the fact that you can see that he can't hold it all
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together on when it comes to an issue like this is fascinating. Now, as for why he wants it
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to go away, I'll just be clear. I don't think there's any, I don't think we're ever going to
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get evidence that he was on the blackmail list. I don't think there was a blackmail list. I don't
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think there's going to be any evidence that he was sleeping with underage girls. And the reason
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I think that is not because I have a high view of Donald Trump's character. It's because if that
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stuff existed, there is no way the Biden administration or New York district attorney's
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office or the justice department generally wouldn't have weaponized it when they were
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putting Donald Trump on trial for the stupid bank, you know, uh, business records thing. Right. Um,
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and that kind of stuff, if they had this and opted not to use it, that would be utterly bizarre.
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The idea that it wouldn't leak is utterly bizarre at the same time. Do I think there's embarrassing
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stuff in there for Trump? Absolutely. And I think that's probably enough. And he deserves all the
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grief he gets for it because he's covering up something that he's told his people for years,
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any government coverups of something is proof of some conspiracy. And now he's covering up something
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that he said he was going to release. So it would sort of take a heart of stone not to laugh at all.
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Yeah. Yeah. No, my, my schadenfreude circuits have been humming along for at least a month now.
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Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, the only time I can remember Trump getting sideways with his cult in
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this sort of way that was kind of briefly surprising. And then he'd never touched that
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again, I think was when he, uh, in front of some crowd, it might've been CPAC, I don't know where he
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was, but he took credit for the vaccines and he got booed. Right. And that, that was just this first
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moment, really. I mean, I think not to be repeated until the Epstein mess where it was just clear
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that, okay, his cult, it's all about him, except there are a few things they really do care about.
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And if he seems to see those things differently, that's a potential problem for him. Right. So they
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really were against the vaccine more or less to a man at that point. And so for him to take credit
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for it as though it were a good thing, that was just too much cognitive dissonance. They just,
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they erupted in booze. And here it seems like, yeah, they, they know he lies about everything
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or they pretend not to know that he lies about everything, but here's a case where he seems to
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be lying about something they actually care about. Right. And that might've been the first
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occasion where that was the case. So I agree with you entirely on the, the analog that I think that
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is the last time, I think it's worth pointing out that this sort of adds another layer of
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schadenfreudtastic deliciousness to all of this, which is that Donald Trump's bubble, like when he
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was, I think you're right, it was CPAC, but if it wasn't CPAC, it was TPUSA or one of those kinds of
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groups, his primary feedback mechanism are the extremely online ultra mega types, right? The
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people who, um, that's his pool of narcissists are, are those people. And, and they steer him the wrong
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way all the time. And sometimes to his credit, I gotta say, he doesn't listen to him, but like
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he imbues, he sees that crowd, those kinds of crowds as avatars for the rank and file Republican
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voter. And the rank and file Republican voter, there's not a lot of polling evidence that they
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care much about the Epstein stuff, that they're focusing on the Epstein stuff. This is an obsession
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among the groups that he's obsessed with rather than sort of the median voter. And, you know, the
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Democrats are trying to change that and turn it into a bigger thing. And I do not blame them in the
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slightest as a matter of just raw politics, but Trump would be in better shape if, you know,
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he stopped caring what Laura Loomer and these other gargoyles thought about stuff because they
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actually off of social media platforms, they actually don't seem to move the needle very much
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on, on public opinion, but he cares about them. Don Jr. cares about them. The people in his orbit
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care about them. And I think some of it is a function. I remember back when he was running for the
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first time in 2016, people, he would constantly talk about how online polls are very scientific.
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And the reason he thought they were scientific is that he did well in online polls. And because he
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invests in the shadows on the Plato's cave, he, he overreads their importance in all sorts of ways.
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It's why he puts Fox news hosts throughout his administration. He lives in this very meta sort of
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online, on TV universe. And he doesn't actually have good instincts for reading the normies all
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that well. And that's one of the reasons why this thing has gotten him into trouble because he cares
00:23:38.560
so much about their feedback that he's the one who keeps bringing it up.
00:23:42.000
Is there anyone in that orbit who's fundamentally broken with him over this? I mean, I haven't
00:23:48.420
followed this that closely, but people like Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens, or I mean, they were quite
00:23:53.440
disgruntled in the beginning around how, I mean, I think they deflected a lot of their blame onto
00:23:59.600
Pam Bondi and Cash Patel and Dan Bongino. But has anyone just actually broken with Trump and MAGA
00:24:06.900
over this be like, this is clearly that they've just become the swamp and you know, the, the new
00:24:13.580
Not that I can think of all the top of my head. I mean, I remember, I mean, Charlie Kirk said shortly
00:24:17.860
when this thing first started to blow up that he would never let go of the story. It's the most
00:24:21.780
important story of the 20th century. And then like 72 hours later, after he got a call from the White
00:24:27.000
House, he's like, yeah, I'm not going to be talking about this anymore. Uh, I think I get, I try not to
00:24:32.240
follow Tucker too closely, but I don't think Tucker's let go of it, but I don't think, I don't think
00:24:36.940
the incentives are quite there to say I'm done with Trump. I mean, there's this dynamic that has
00:24:42.980
been very common. I mean, I'm sure you've seen it a thousand times, right? There's this, it's sort of
00:24:47.760
a cliche and among, about Jews and in czarist Russia, where they would always say, if only the czar
00:24:54.160
knew, right. And there's this desire to say, oh, whenever Trump gets himself into trouble, his advisors
00:25:01.540
should stop telling him this as if he hasn't made these decisions himself, right? Falsifying Trump,
00:25:09.900
it gets you in a lot of trouble saying that the people around him are in error is usually the safe
00:25:15.360
harbor. What do you think about the state of the democratic party at this point? I mean, as you say,
00:25:21.060
they're trying to ride this political controversy to some better, uh, spot on the map. But until this
00:25:28.920
moment, until the Epstein story began to cause Trump, uh, this amount of anguish, I mean, they
00:25:35.100
seemed completely feckless. And I mean, it's hard to even know what they were attempting to do. It
00:25:42.680
seemed like they were, it was just nothing but apathy and bewilderment that had subsumed the party. I,
00:25:48.480
I mean, I, it's like they were, you know, apart from the, the rallies that, uh, Bernie Sanders and AOC
00:25:54.360
were holding, they got some traction, uh, which seemed to be pulling the party in absolutely the
00:25:58.680
wrong direction for, for future political success. It's, it was hard to know what anyone was attempting
00:26:05.080
to do to push back against, uh, Trump in his second term. What, what, how do you view the democratic
00:26:10.280
party at this point? And what, what do you think the prospects are going forward?
00:26:14.160
So Ezra Klein had this piece, which I don't think was, I'm not trying to insult Ezra. It was less
00:26:20.740
that it was so insightful than it was so indicative of a mood shortly after the election, where he
00:26:28.000
was lamenting the fact that given how close the presidential election was in 2024, the vibe shift
00:26:34.840
is waving. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe
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00:26:45.260
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