#458 — The Bulwark Against MAGA
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Summary
On this episode of the Making Sense Podcast, I sit down with Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller, the hosts of the popular conservative podcast, The Bulwark, to talk about what it's like to be a conservative in the 21st century.
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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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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I'm here with Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller. Sarah, Tim, thanks for joining me.
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It's been years I've been waiting for this invite, and I have to share it with Sarah.
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Well, you're in good company. I gotta say, first of all, I'm just huge fans of both of you. Tim,
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you interviewed me on one of your podcasts. I don't know how long ago that was, but I don't
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think I'd heard you before that interview. I haven't gone back to watch that, but I really
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didn't realize I was in the company of greatness when you were interviewing me.
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But the two of you have just been going after Trump and Trumpism so entertainingly with
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Hammer and Tong for, I mean, you've been doing it longer than I think I've noticed, but for the
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last year or so, I've been watching you closely, and it's really, it's just, I'm tempted to just
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walk out of the studio now and let you guys just roll and do an episode of the Bulwark
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podcast over here. But how many podcasts do you guys have? I just watch more of you and
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your colleagues in various frames, but feel free to name your actual principal properties
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Whoa. Okay. So Tim's main pod is the Bulwark pod. And I, this is the only nice thing I'm
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going to say about Tim the whole time. But when Tim took over the podcast, we did not
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know, I did not know he was going to be as good as he is. Like he, this was a, you know,
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Charlie Sykes who had been the host of the original pod when we started, retired and we're
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like, well, Tim will take it over. And he has crushed it. He's doubled its audience. And
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so that's sort of the main pod that you see up in the top 10 charts all the time. And
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then not that far below it, me, Tim and JVL have our sort of weekly round table called
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The Next Level. And then we do takes, which was kind of a more recent invention where
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we're all jumping on all the time. And then I have the focus group podcast where I listen
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to voters and play the sound. So people believe me that this is what Americans sound
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like. And then we've got a whole bunch of other ones. I don't want to like leave people
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out, but there are just, we've got a big crew now at the Bulwark and they're all
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excellent. So you should tune into all of them.
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So Bill Kristol's over there and JVL and you've got other, other colleagues and it's
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really, it's fantastic. What is the origin of the, the name Bulwark? I know, but just
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All right. I'll do this too, which is when I, I had a really dumb idea a long time ago,
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circa like 2017, maybe 2018, where I was like, Hey, we should have an aggregator where we take
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all the Republicans and conservatives who don't like Trump and we create, like we aggregate
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them all into one website. And then I realized like a never Trump drudge report.
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That's right. It was, I did. It was going to be a same drudge report as I pitched it. And I got
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some seed money, which is just the drudge report now, by the way, drudges come around, but yeah,
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that's true. That's true. And we, we were trying to find, you know, the, the Bulwark as a name,
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some people didn't like it at first because they were like, what is that? But of course a Bulwark
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is the thing that stands, it's a nautical term, but it's like the thing that stands between you
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and the bad thing. Like you build a Bulwark, you build a fortress, a fortification between you and
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the bad thing, maybe cannon fire. That's the, and it was actually one of our sort of junior members
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named it for the aggregator. But then when the weekly standard was summarily sort of had the
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lights taken down or, you know, it was just taken offline because it was insufficiently pro-Trump.
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I was like, actually the aggregator is a dumb idea. I'm going to take a bunch of these people
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from the weekly standard. Bill and I were doing a bunch of other things together at that point.
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I'm going to give them jobs and we're going to start something for real. And then my buddy,
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Tim, who I've known forever, uh, was kind of at the time in Oakland and he was very sad and filled
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with rage. And I went to him, you know, like that scene from Hoosiers where they dunk somebody in
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the, he's dunking the guy in the tank and saying, get it together. I was like, Tim, come do this with
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us. And then he showed up and he was like a never Trump Hunter S. Thompson. I was like,
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where's this guy? This is amazing. And then we all just, then we started rolling.
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Sadness and rage are, those are good fuel. They, they burn cleanly with you, if you,
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if you let them. So before we jump into the topics about which we are all sad and filled
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with rage, give me each of your potted bios. I mean, how is it that, I mean, I know you're
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never Trumpers, but, um, how, how is it that you come to politics? Because I mean, what I love
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about talking to people who are, you know, generally classed as never Trumpers is that the allegation
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of partisanship just cannot be made. Right. I mean, if I'm talking to lifelong Democrats
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like myself, well, then, then a lot of people can get off the train immediately thinking,
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well, everything you're saying about Trump is a symptom of your own tribalism and partisanship.
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But you know what, obviously when I'm talking to David Frum and other people who, who saw Trump
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for what he was from the very beginning, that goes out the window. And so it does with the
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two of you. So what are your actual bios politically?
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Yeah. I was just a campaign hack campaign gypsy from, I mean, from high school, actually I was,
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uh, I started volunteering on a guy named Bill Owens, this campaign when he's running for governor
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of Colorado is Republican, just because I had a neighbor that was friends with him. Essentially
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I just had like a lucky in and the neighbor knew I was a politics junkie and I would show up to
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intern. And when I was 16, I looked like I was like 11. And most people were just like,
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where's your dad's at home. I'm here, I'm here, I'm working. I'm, uh, you know, the tip of the spear
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on this campaign. And after that, it just, I just loved political campaigns. I worked on a million
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of them everywhere from like Virginia and New Hampshire and Florida, Iowa. I did McCain's
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presidential campaign in 08. Uh, and then John Huntsman's in 12 and then Romney's Jeb's in 16.
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And between that, I did some advising for Scott Walker and Nikki Haley on their gubernatorial
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campaigns. So, you know, I was, I was a campaign gypsy for the most part. And then after Jeb lost,
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my plan was to go back to Miami and lay by the beach and read gay fiction and get drunk all day
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for a few weeks, um, before I returned to life. But like day one of that, some rich folks called
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and said, will you be a spokesperson for this group we're starting? So it then was called
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our principles pack, which is kind of like a proto Lincoln project, but wait before the Lincoln
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project. And, uh, will you be the spokesperson for it? And I was like, I said, yeah, hell yeah.
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Both Jeb and my father thought that was a terrible idea. Trump is a vengeful guy. And I was like,
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fuck him. I don't get, I don't care. Um, and, uh, you know, at the time I do think I was a fair to
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say, not as attuned to his appeal as I maybe could have been being a political, um, junkie. Like I knew
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that the appeal was there, but you know, I did, I did think he was beatable in 2016, either in the
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primary by Marco type or in the general by Hillary. And that turned out not to be the case. And I was
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persona non grata in Republican politics after that. Then I was sad and angry and then Sarah called me.
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So that's the gist. Yeah. And unlike Tim, I was not sort of exactly of the political world. I was a
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policy person and Tim and I worked together, like at this, I worked for a Republican firm that did a
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lot of comms. Like I was a, and Tim and I are both kind of do have a comms background, but what
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happened was basically in 2016, as I watched 2015, 2016, as I watched the rise of Trump, I was just
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one of those things where I was like, my hair was on fire. I was like, I can't believe this is
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happening, right? Just this surreal experience of Trump in the early days, but I wanted to do
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something. And I had a lot of latitude. I'd been at the firm where I'd been for about 15 years. I was
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a senior vice president. I was going to run the thing when, you know, the guy principal retired.
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And so I just, I started building stuff and I went, I actually went to a room. There were these
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meetings that were happening at the time of sad Republicans and we would all get in a room and
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just be sad together. It was kind of like an AA meeting, but less joyful maybe. And I don't know,
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after that, I met Bill in those rooms and Bill and I decided, okay, here's what we're going to do.
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We're going to primary Trump. And we had this plan. And so we were going around to like
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Kinzinger and Larry Hogan. Larry Hogan was my big treasurer. I was sitting with Larry Hogan being
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like, you got to do this, man. Your father would want you to do this. His father was kind of the guy
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who went to Nixon and said, you got to step down. And I was like, this is your moment. We talked to Mark
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Cuban. And actually, long story short, everyone told us no. But in the process of that, I started
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doing focus groups to see if I, if there was an appetite within the Republican base. Cause I had
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this strong theory that of course, Trump was an accident of history. People didn't actually want
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this. The second I set foot in rooms of voters doing focus groups, I said, oh wait, I've got
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something very, very wrong. And I just realized I'd spent too much of my career in DC. You know,
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it's so detached from how voters actually think about things. And once I started listening to
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voters, I really couldn't stop. And I became, I ended up quitting, leaving my firm, starting
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a bunch of new projects, starting the bulwark. And that's where we are now.
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Okay. So now how do, this is a hard question. I think, um, I have never personally come up
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with even a shadow of an answer to it, but how do you explain to yourselves the smart people
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who, you know, people who, who might even still be friends in certain cases or family members,
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certainly, but many might be former friends who don't see anything wrong with what is
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happening. Right. I mean, they, they, even if they'll concede, you know, perhaps the most
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they'll concede is, well, they don't like Trump's style. Obviously he's abrasive. He's busted a few
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norms that we might want to keep in place in the future, but nothing truly out of the ordinary
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and dangerous. And to say nothing of being actually ruinous of American democracy, uh, is likely to
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happen. They're apt to say things like, well, all politicians lie. How is it that the three of us
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and many other people we might name here are living in this invasion of the body snatchers moment where
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we don't know what the fuck happened to the people who look like they were the same people they were
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yesterday, but they just aren't making any sense to us. How, how, how do you explain it? And are there,
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I mean, maybe there are different versions of this problem, but I would love to know just how
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you've processed this. Luckily, I wrote about this in my book. So if you want to get the long story,
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it's about 300 pages, but here's, uh, here's a summary. I think the brain rationalization is a
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hell of a drug and the brain is very powerful and people can rationalize stuff really up until the
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moment or even sometimes past the moment it's causing them actual damage and harm. And I think that
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some of the rationalizations included just simple like tribalism and team sports, you know,
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just like kind of the way that, you know, I wouldn't, as an LSU fan would convince myself
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that Nick Saban was the devil. People convince themselves that Joe Biden was the devil, you
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know? And I think that you see this very clearly watching sports and I think politics and sports
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has merged and morphed into each other a little bit. I think that some people wanted access to
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close being close to power. And like, that's a tale as old as time, kind of a rent kind of
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banality of evil element to it. I think that, and this is, I'll let Sarah get into her triangle of
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doom, but I think that there's a propaganda element of this. Like I, some people don't
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even know, like don't get good information. I think that there are a lot of people that
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are blocked out from good information. That's, I think that's different from like the elite
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class. That's more among regular folks and more in the family category maybe. But you
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know, in the friends category, one of the things in the, so in the book I tried to have only on
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record people from my life who went for Trump, but I made a couple of exceptions, um, for people
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to talk off the record. And one of the, in one of the cases, the guy says to me, you know, he says,
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Tim, here's the thing. This was, you know, it's maybe a year or two after Trump's first term in
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1718. He goes, I, my wife's fan, my wife's friends think I'm a racist. Like people are trash
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talking me. Like, you know, my kids, you know, can't tell people what their dad does for a living.
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And, um, I realized that Trump does some bad stuff, but like in order to deal with that, I just need
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to, I just grab onto the one or two things that he's right about and really focus on that and think
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about how, you know, I can use that to motivate me. And my, my reaction to that was like, you're
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not going to be on the record in this book, but I'll know that you said that that's like so
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embarrassing. I got such an embarrassing admission, but I thought it was really revealing. I think
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that a lot of people kind of get into clubby vibes and, um, to their career or their social
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circle and they find ways to, to rationalize really bad stuff. And, um, and I just think that
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the, the, that's a story that we've seen throughout history. And like, it's, I think the only new part
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of it is just, and this isn't really even that new, but like the only new part of it in kind
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of the modern media era is the clownishness of it. You know, I just think that I, which is why
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some of it breaks some of our brains that it could be, you know, we, we could understand it if it was
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a more sophisticated evil, I guess, but, um, it's not, so that's my take. I don't know,
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I mean, I'll throw in the Republican triangle of doom, which is a thing that I talk about a lot,
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which is the toxic and symbiotic relationship between the voters, the right-wing infotainment
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media and Republican elected officials. And they work together as sort of a reinforcement
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mechanism, right? So, and, and look, democracy is still about the voters. And the fact was
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Donald Trump caught the entire country off guard by people thinking nobody's going to vote for this
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guy because he's an idiot. And instead they realized what I realized when I started listening
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to voters was Trump had been in people's living rooms and on page six and part of their cultural
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firmament for such a long time. And they were so tired. If you just remember even the, the 2016
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election, Clintons, Bushes, like they were done with all of that. And so the voters were like,
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yeah, give me this different guy. And that power, when conservative media realized that there was
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this appetite from the voters, like created an entirely new incentive structure, right? What
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happened to Lindsey Graham? Well, Lindsey Graham realized there was a ton of juice in flattering a
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bunch of people that actually he dislikes and doesn't respect. And the entire party slowly came
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to realize that if they just like fed this machine, that A, there was a lot of people who desperately
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wanted somebody to be harder on the Democrats, to fight harder, to burn the Democrats to the ground.
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And so they loved Trump. And Republicans realized, again, what I did, which is actually there wasn't
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a huge appetite for the thing that they were selling anymore. Like the limited government,
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free markets, American leadership in the world, essentially when George Bush left office and then
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there was eight years of Obama, when he left, he was at 32 percent approval. And that created a world
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in which the Republican Party developed an enormous appetite through the Obama years to completely
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change. And I think as the sort of smart set realized it, because they were all with us,
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like the against Trump issue that National Review did, like we were all friends. There were a lot
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more never Trumpers in the early days. I mean, even J.D. Vance, I don't know if he was in the mix,
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but, you know, if you're calling Trump either, you know, somewhere on the spectrum between an
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asshole like Nixon or America's Hitler, seems like you should have had a seat at the table with
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the never Trumpers. Not a compliment. I would add just one more sentence of pop psychology.
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People don't want, Stephen Miller, there's a handful of people, maybe J.D. Vance, I don't know,
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that like revel in being bad, revel in other people's pain. And a lot of these other folks
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that you're asking about, Sam, who know better, who went along with us, are not like that. People
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want to feel like they're on the side of good. And so that's how they convince them. That goes back to
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that guy. People really do. When you ask people, like when you have it, when I have a few beers,
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my ex-friends, I'm like, what is it really? Like they will say, like, I do, I think that closing
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the border was good. Or they'll say, I feel they'll support for Israel if it's, if it's, you know,
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for, for some folks or. Yeah, but even I can say that, right? Yeah, exactly. The woke stuff,
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you've been on this beat for 10 years, was a pernicious, right? And so they will grab onto those
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things and, and take them and be like, I'm on the side of the good guys and focus on those
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and almost tune out or compartmentalize the stuff that, that challenges that narrative in their
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brain. But what, what do these people think of a Liz Cheney or a Adam Kissinger? I mean, like,
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how do they explain that? They hate them and they hate us, but that's because we are an in their face,
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alternate version of what they could have done. And to be confronted with people who say, no,
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you see what I see. We are all looking at the same thing. And frankly, all of the things that
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you learned and I learned as young conservatives about personal responsibility, about character
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mattering, you're the one who's foregone all of that. You're the one who's betrayed their
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principles. Cause there's a, the most insane version of the person that you're talking about,
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Sam, aren't the people who even went for Trump the first term and got on board. It's the people who
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after January 6th still say, there's a whole bunch of new people that came to Trump post that
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who decided Joe Biden and like, and this is, they have to hyperbolize. This is why sort of the Epstein
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stuff and the, the child predator narrative was so important. Cause like what's worse than trying
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to steal a free and fair election. Pedophilia is maybe one of the only ones. And so they became
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obsessed with this idea that there was a left wing cabal of elites who were, who were harming
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okay with Trump. We need somebody like this. But of course it, as we see now, that was all
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Yeah. They think that Liz and Adam have compromised, right? It is a totally warped worldview. Cause
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then once you've convinced yourself that like the woke is the big threat or whatever, like
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on any of the list of things that are some legitimate threats coming from the left, right?
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Then you are, or in Adam's case, you see this from his family. If you know, you convince
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yourselves that the left is godless and it's heathens, you say to him, well, you're on your
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moral high horse wagging your finger at me for going along with this, but you're going
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along with, you know, this anti-Christian, you know, movement. And so I think that in a
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lot of ways you see, again, Liz Cheney and Adam and being seen as like a great, almost a
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greater evil than the actual left. Like there was a lot of hatred.
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Which is why also the trans stuff really matters. This is why, like with the protecting
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kids, like if you listen to the responses, when you challenge them about Trump and his
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morality, they'll be like, well, you believe in chemically castrating kids, right? Like
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that's sort of where they go to try to say that they have a moral leg to stand on.
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Right. Right. Well, so, but if you're going, going to trade like for like, I mean, so you
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take all the people who cared or pretended to care about the contents of Hunter Biden's
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laptop, right? Because it signaled all of the corruption and self-dealing that the Biden
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family would be capable of. I mean, this is, there's some millions of dollars.
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The Biden crime family. The Biden crime families.
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Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, this, this is really something worth worrying about.
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We care about corruption. We don't want, in this case, a, a vice president and former
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vice president, much less his family grifting based on their, um, their access to power and
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besmirching the reputation of our fine country, right? We care about those things. Now Trump
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comes in and does it a thousand fold worse and they don't care at all. Right. So, I mean,
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this is, I mean, this is just one species of hypocrisy, but the crazy thing is that right
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of center, it's almost like hypocrisy isn't even a thing, right? It's like the physics of
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reputation management has completely changed and there's just, there's no management to do.
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It's like Trump can do anything. His enablers can do anything. They can break any norm that
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one pretended to care about. I mean, you cared about the, the Twitter files, right? You cared
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about the, you know, a candidate Biden asking for naked photos of his son to be taken off
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Twitter. Uh, that was just an Orwellian overreach on the part of the powers that be, you know,
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into the media space. And yet now, you know, Don Lemon being arrested for doing journalism
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doesn't matter. Right. I bet. So again, you, you, you have much more direct contact with these
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people than I do. Is there any effort to square these weird cognitive swings or just, it's just
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pure bankruptcy? You can't square cognitive swings with, with Trump. I mean, Trump has no like
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redeeming values and virtues, right? So it's not like, so no matter if you pick one issue, you know,
00:20:23.620
where does that end? Right. Like again, this, now we're going into armchair psychology, but as
00:20:28.080
Sarah mentioned about like the post January 6th, right? Like once you've already decided that,
00:20:32.860
okay, I know that this person instigated a violent attack on the Capitol in order to overturn
00:20:39.000
our democracy and end it so that he could stay in power. And I didn't like that because none of them
00:20:44.000
liked it at the time. Well, you saw them all, but got to do it because of whatever these other,
00:20:49.100
whatever the other reason is, you know, Israel trans woke up, you know, whatever you can
00:20:53.820
rationalize. Well, then once you've rationalized that, like how does your brain even compute
00:20:59.260
starting to like nitpick various hypocrisies going forward, right? Like you're like, he's already made
00:21:04.580
you dirty. Like you're already in. And so there's not anything to be gained by doing it. So when you
00:21:10.920
see people doing it, it's usually people that are, have a niche area of, of genuine political policy
00:21:17.540
view, a genuine principle, you know, whether it's the libertarians like Tom Massey, even Rand Paul,
00:21:21.980
you got to shout him out on the, on the bombings in the Caribbean. Like, so there's a handful of
00:21:26.600
people who can pick things that they have particular interest in and maybe just pick that one thing.
00:21:31.460
But outside of that, you know, at once, once you make the decision to point out one of Trump's
00:21:36.760
horrible hypocrisies, well then now you're just on a slippery slope to being in the bulwarks,
00:21:41.640
right? Because there's so many other ones and all of these people, particularly in Washington,
00:21:46.260
and now you're on a slope to being Liz Cheney or Jeff Flake. And like, that's the worst outcome
00:21:50.260
possible, right? And so there's no incentive to engage with any of the hypocrisies. That's my
00:21:56.700
assessment. Yeah. The short answer is just, yes, it is bankrupt. And Tim's point right there at the end
00:22:02.360
about the incentive structures, like these are a lot of people, you can see them making decisions in
00:22:07.740
real time about how to protect their incentive structures, which is that Donald Trump built an
00:22:12.660
appetite for a media ecosystem, a pundit ecosystem to say, hey, no, Trump is good, actually. And at
00:22:21.140
this point, like there's just sunk costs in doing that. Like if they challenge Trump now, like Megyn
00:22:26.040
Kelly can't. Eric Erickson can't. Ben Shapiro can't. Like Ben Shapiro is one of these people who got on
00:22:32.240
board with Trump post-January 6th. After that, he started fundraising for him. Why? That's what his
00:22:37.820
audience wants. Like that's the pressure is coming. And that's why I talk about the Republican
00:22:41.760
Triangle of Doom, because there's incentives and pressure on these folks from voters that say,
00:22:46.360
I don't want you to tell me why Trump's bad. I want you to tell me why Trump's good. And if you
00:22:50.800
veer from that, I'm going to complain and leave.
00:22:53.500
Ben Shapiro is an interesting case, though, just really quick, because he's showed some backbone,
00:22:56.840
I just think, to be fair, in standing up to some of the conspiracies coming from Candace and other
00:23:01.500
parts of the right-wing media. And so it's interesting. I watched his whole TPUSA speech where he talked
00:23:05.620
about the importance of truth, and how you need to speak truth, and how Tucker and Candace are not
00:23:09.580
doing that, and how if you don't speak truth, that is, you know, pernicious, and it starts to
00:23:14.380
consume you. And it's like, well, but why doesn't that apply to Trump, right? And so you do see this
00:23:19.100
in other, even the people who do demonstrate that they're not hypocrites, that they have courage on
00:23:22.880
particular issues, you find that they stop short of applying that to Trump.
00:23:27.340
So let's walk through this by addressing each of these people by turn. I mean, we started with Ben
00:23:33.600
here, so let's actually, he's coming on the podcast. I'm desperate for him to have him on,
00:23:37.020
so put in a good word for him. Yeah, well, that would be good. It'd be better. Maybe I'll just
00:23:40.720
ambush him with you. He'll come on this podcast. He'll see both of your faces up on the screen.
00:23:46.260
I mean, do you explain his situation purely as a result of just a pernicious business model? I mean,
00:23:52.220
he's got the Daily Wire, and he recognizes that it would be an extinction-level event to admit
00:23:59.160
what we are demanding he admit about Trump. I mean, there's no way to pivot. If you're Ben Shapiro,
00:24:04.900
there's no way, because obviously he broke up with Candace Owens. That was a stressor on his
00:24:09.080
system, right? You know, he hired her for a reason and then fired her for a reason, and that was painful
00:24:14.080
and probably still is painful, but it could be accomplished, right? It was mandatory based on
00:24:19.420
how far apart they were. You think it's just impossible to, at this late hour or at the late
00:24:26.100
hour of January 7th to have realized, okay, conservatism has to be about something other
00:24:31.780
than Trumpism at this point, and the Daily Wire is going to be part of that? I think it'd be very
00:24:36.280
hard from a business standpoint. I think that he has some genuine beliefs. I think that he likes
00:24:40.960
Trump's Israel policy, for one example, and probably some others. And, you know, maybe Ben is happy about
00:24:46.680
the total deregulation and the fact that we're not doing any investigation of white-collar crime
00:24:52.100
anymore. I don't know exactly the extent about how happy he is with all the deregulation, but
00:24:56.700
I think there's some of that. But look, Ben left Breitbart over Trump. That was the Daily Wire's
00:25:03.340
origin story. It was originally a never-Trump outlet by definition, right? He thought that Trump was
00:25:08.660
morally corrupt and he couldn't back him for that reason. And then, you know, I think he was pretty
00:25:13.960
DeSantis-friendly during that primary last time, and I think obviously he would have preferred that
00:25:18.180
for it to be a DeSantis type to win. But then once he didn't, you know, there is this in for a penny
00:25:23.220
in for the pound. There is no business model for him to do otherwise. And Ben is talented. He could
00:25:27.600
go out on his own, I would think, and do fine with however he wanted to do. But the Daily Wire would
00:25:34.580
Yeah. I think first, Ben Shapiro both made Candace Owens.
00:25:39.100
And that's important to remember. Like, he's tolerated, and this is where, look, Ben's going to make some
00:25:44.160
policy arguments when he comes on. He's going to say, well, Trump secured the border. And like,
00:25:48.080
the woke stuff and the anti-free speech stuff of the left, and he'll have a bunch of critiques of
00:25:51.740
the left, some true, many of them overstated in their relative both impact and sort of the moral
00:25:59.920
dangers that they pose to society. Like, they don't come close to Trump. And I think if you look back,
00:26:05.620
I think it was on Bill Maher where Bill Maher was kind of like, come on, Ben, why do you do this?
00:26:10.460
Or somebody else on the panel did, and he was like, I sleep on a bed of money. And, you know,
00:26:15.260
he is cross-pressured. But here's the thing about somebody like Ben Shapiro, unlike Candace Owens,
00:26:19.840
I will always, like, Tim, I think, and Tim can correct me if I'm wrong, will sort of take Ben's
00:26:24.540
side in that fight and be like, look, he's standing up a little bit. Like, let's give him half a cheer.
00:26:29.160
That is not how I feel. I feel like Ben Shapiro knows better. Ben Shapiro knows what's wrong.
00:26:35.200
Ben Shapiro has been, is making arguments that contravene everything that he used to stand for. One of his
00:26:40.460
big last pieces was in the Weekly Standard about how we cannot go down this road with Trump. He was
00:26:46.060
pressured by his audience to get on board and the ensemble that he built at the Daily Wire, which is
00:26:50.440
why he's somebody who, after January 6th, got on board with him, and he is smart enough to know
00:26:54.500
better. And I held out a great deal of contempt for the people who know better and have gone along with
00:27:00.400
it because they have created a permission structure for a certain type of person that is not all the way
00:27:06.160
Candace Owens, MAGA, but is actually somebody who thinks of themselves as a good conservative,
00:27:11.340
and he gives them a way to kind of slice that up morally that is absolutely untenable with any
00:27:19.400
Yeah, it also requires memory-holing the details of January 6th. I mean, not just what happened at
00:27:25.060
the Capitol that day, but just either the all-too-obvious efforts to steal an election all the while
00:27:31.040
claiming it was being stolen from him, right? I mean, it was a two-fold crime against our
00:27:36.620
politics here. I mean, just he weaponized this lie, which he weaponized even before the election
00:27:42.080
was run, that it was going to be rigged. If any, you know, the mail-in ballots were going to be
00:27:47.800
part of this rigging and the election was going to be stolen from him. And this lie has always been a
00:27:54.300
provocation to violence, political violence. And that should have been enough to make this man
00:27:59.220
unelectable and impeachable, et cetera, for all time. But then you had the actual efforts to steal
00:28:05.520
the election, post-election, the assault on the Capitol. And then you had people like Ben who said
00:28:11.000
publicly to their own audience, this is the worst, I think Ben's words were like, this is like the
00:28:14.720
worst thing that's happened in American history or since the Civil War or something. I mean, he
00:28:18.360
acknowledged at the time how awful this was. But then you have this slow leakage of understanding
00:28:25.000
that came, there were several moments that accomplished this. I mean, one I remember was
00:28:29.840
when Tucker, we'll get to Tucker in a minute, but just this far, when Tucker aired on his show,
00:28:36.520
maybe it was, I can't remember if it was his podcast or if he was on Fox at the time, footage of
00:28:41.340
Capitol Police just letting people in peacefully and through some other door and this kind of
00:28:46.620
uninterpretable footage. I mean, I think it's interpretable by the fact that these guys are
00:28:50.720
clearly scared and outnumbered and knew that the walls had been breached already. But you have
00:28:56.680
this seemingly collaboration, which gets spun as a collaboration between the cops and the protesters,
00:29:02.740
and it's all just a matter of them being given a tour of the Capitol. And so nothing was as it
00:29:08.640
seemed. And I think a lot of people have now pivoted to that interpretation. This is some
00:29:13.540
combination of false flag, LARPing, non-event, and you can't even reconcile those two, but some
00:29:22.040
combination of those contradictory possibilities. But it was not a coup. It was not anything that
00:29:27.800
put anything in jeopardy. No one's life was ever in danger. And it was Ashley Babbitt who got
00:29:34.360
martyred that day. And this is really, it's all, and Nancy Pelosi really at bottom is probably at fault
00:29:39.980
because she didn't get enough cops there in the first place. But that's where Ben is. I think Ben
00:29:43.300
has just forgotten that he ever cared about January 6th. I don't know. I don't think he's forgotten.
00:29:47.060
I think that he's rationalized. Look, again, we can just imagine. I was one that gave Ben a half
00:29:51.040
cheer, and I will continue to, for fighting the fight against Candace, even though he created her,
00:29:54.960
just because I think that the degree of perniciousness that's coming out of Candace and Tucker,
00:29:59.000
which we can get to if you want, is so, so severe that I just think it's important that someone in that
00:30:04.380
world is speaking out against it. But even though he might not be necessarily the best messenger,
00:30:08.380
but just using Ben, I just think about how Ben acted during the Obama administration.
00:30:12.800
And this is what I would want to talk to him about. If you want to come on, maybe you can do
00:30:15.560
that, Sam, is you can imagine a counterfactual where Barack Obama loses to Mitt Romney,
00:30:21.380
and there's a mob of Black Panthers at the Capitol, and Obama sicks them on the Capitol.
00:30:27.140
They go and attack police. They go and attack, and they start beating police, and some policemen die
00:30:33.160
If memory serves, all Obama had to do was wear a tan suit on that day, and we would have had a
00:30:38.940
Yeah. I mean, like, I just, I don't, I don't think that it takes a very wild imagination to
00:30:44.780
think about the kind of rhetoric that'd be coming out of Ben Shapiro and Fox and others had that
00:30:48.660
happened. And it's very hard to imagine forgiveness ever coming, you know, ever reaching a period where
00:30:53.860
it's like, you know, he was wrong about that. Like, and so I just think that thinking about it in that
00:30:58.140
sense, like, reveals a lie. He hasn't forgotten. There hasn't been, what was your phrase,
00:31:02.980
like, a leakage of understanding. He knows, but, like, eventually he just made a different bet.
00:31:08.520
He was like, I think a lot of people, by the way, also, not us, because I saw, and Sarah,
00:31:13.280
because her focus groups and us had started to see the Republican base clearly. A lot of people
00:31:17.180
genuinely thought he was done, including Mitch McConnell, and I think probably including Ben
00:31:20.980
Shapiro and others. And so they made that bet at the time that they could speak out against it,
00:31:24.960
being like, oh, phew, it was almost like a weight off their shoulders. Now, now I get to speak
00:31:28.920
freely for a couple months because it's over finally. And so to me, it's more of like a slow
00:31:34.440
crawl back, you know, rather than, you know, like starting to forget what they knew.
00:31:41.160
Starting with Kevin McCarthy, right? And this is where the triangle of doom went into,
00:31:45.560
went to work, right? Because right in the beginning, both the voters and the elite set and politicians
00:31:51.320
knew that what he did was wrong and bad, and they called for his impeachment. And then they were like,
00:31:56.120
well, he's done anyway. We'll leave it to the courts if we need to do that. So we're not going
00:31:59.660
to impeach him because they started to hear from voters being like, don't you dare impeach our boy.
00:32:03.720
And they got scared and they thought, well, he's done, but I don't want to make his base mad,
00:32:07.460
so we won't go forward with the impeachment. And then they told the false flag story first,
00:32:11.640
right? The false flag story of these are actually Antifa rioters. It's not us. That was the first
00:32:17.200
thing people clung to. Second thing was what about, this is a very important characteristic,
00:32:21.080
because Black Lives Matter and just happened and they were happening. So they happened very close
00:32:25.140
together, right? And so they were able to say, Black Lives Matter people, they burned things to
00:32:29.520
the ground and nobody went to jail, which is a lie and wrong and them not understanding what
00:32:34.520
actually happened. And they use that as a moral excuse to say, then the FBI is overdoing it by
00:32:40.420
prosecuting these people. You know, and this is always, it actually follows a pattern often with
00:32:45.900
Trump voters. We're like, it's bad, but it wasn't us. Actually, it wasn't worse than what the other
00:32:50.740
side did, too. It was good, actually. And we had to do it because the election was actually stolen.
00:32:57.540
All right. Candace. I haven't heard about Candace and maybe I haven't been paying close enough
00:33:01.740
attention, but I was hearing about her every hour on the hour for a long time. And then I think
00:33:05.800
maybe the Epstein file dump kind of pushed her out of everyone's mind. Is Candace still out there
00:33:11.580
saying crazy things? And. Oh, my God. Yeah. She was out there just the other day talking about how
00:33:15.800
Charlie made the lights flicker in the room when he walked in. She's got a lot of stuff. Here's the
00:33:20.280
thing that worry why I think Candace is worrisome. I had a period of time where I was worried that
00:33:24.680
she might kind of go a Trump path. Like Sarah and her focus groups, people would name her as somebody
00:33:30.500
that they thought maybe could be a presidential candidate in the future. And that was kind of my
00:33:33.900
initial worry, which was a legit worry because Trump can get nominated. Who care? Why is Candace
00:33:39.180
any more crazy than that? I now have a different worry, which is I think that she is really
00:33:43.740
infecting young voters, even on the left. And I see a pretty decent amount of anecdotal evidence
00:33:50.220
for this. In addition to some data of she was so like anti-Israel and anti-Semitic and how anti-Israel
00:33:58.180
she was that there are, you know, kind of college kids that were that she showed up in their in their
00:34:03.760
feeds and their TikTok feeds and their in their YouTube reels because they were getting anti-Israel
00:34:09.100
material around the protests. And then they start following her kind of like you follow
00:34:14.440
Real Housewives. You back in our day, we'd read the National Enquirer at the grocery store checkout,
00:34:20.580
right? She's interesting. She's entertaining. But like you go down a real radicalization pipeline.
00:34:25.580
And I speak on college campuses and almost always there is like Candace people and they are not who
00:34:31.760
you'd expect. And she has a casual audience. People know her who are casual viewers. And she's
00:34:38.740
crazy. I don't I no longer think that she, you know, can do a hostile takeover of the Republican
00:34:42.900
Party like Trump did. But I think that it's extremely worrying that there is like that she's kind of at
00:34:49.200
the center of this horseshoe and that there's a lot of younger people that are getting pretty deranged
00:34:55.060
material from her. You just said she's crazy. What is your theory of mind about her? Is she
00:34:58.880
actually suffering some kind of clinical episode and she's just so telegenic that it works? Or do
00:35:06.840
you think she is consciously? This feels more like your wheelhouse.
00:35:09.720
Well, yeah, I'd like to know. I mean, I'm not a clinician, but I mean, I look at her and I don't
00:35:14.840
see, I mean, apart from the actual transcript of the words, the claims coming out of her mouth,
00:35:20.940
I don't see a crazy person. I see somebody who's just very good at her, at the character she's
00:35:27.360
playing. And I mean, like with Alex Jones, I see somebody who's clearly he's got some I mean,
00:35:32.800
there's there's some role for obvious role for medication in his life. Right. And he just he's
00:35:36.640
not in control of his physiology on some level, whereas Candace, I just see somebody who could
00:35:41.900
be playing a character. Right. I mean, and it's apparently lucrative. Right. There's a there's a
00:35:47.140
market for it. I'm not quite sure how it's lucrative, but maybe I don't know who's running ads
00:35:50.780
against what she's doing. If it's a character, it is a great character because no, you know,
00:35:55.420
nobody would come to you with a pitch, which is like, hey, the real way to make a lot of money in
00:35:59.960
the content space is to go all in with hours of content talking about how Emmanuel Macron's wife
00:36:05.880
actually has a dick. I don't think that would be anybody's pitch in a pitch meeting, but like that
00:36:10.860
is what she decided to do and it worked. And so maybe that's a character or it doesn't matter,
00:36:15.840
I guess, is the question. But to me, that seems like some kind of psychosis, but I defer to your
00:36:20.180
expertise. I have a slightly different take on this, which is so there is a if we as rational
00:36:27.020
people tried to kind of segment out these different content creators in the arc and sort of in the in
00:36:33.220
the Republican universe, you've got your America first Trump critics and that's Candace and Tucker
00:36:40.140
and Marjorie Taylor Greene. There's a thread through all of them that is anti-Israel and in certainly
00:36:45.660
Candace's case, absolutely anti-Semitic. Would you would you put Nick Fuentes in that bin? I would
00:36:50.020
put Nick Fuentes in this in this category. Exactly. And this Nick is actually an important component of
00:36:54.480
this because people especially. So for Candace, her audience is young MAGA women. And so they are
00:37:01.340
there for and this is why you call it infotainment. They don't get their news exactly from Candace.
00:37:07.360
They get their news for maybe like even Ben Shapiro and that. But then they want the Candace spin
00:37:13.040
because it's fun and funny. The number of young men who tell me they listen to Nick Fuentes and they're
00:37:17.060
like, I don't agree with everything he says, but he's funny. And if you listen to these guys for a
00:37:21.460
long time, Nick Fuentes is spending half of his time being self-deprecating about how you can't get
00:37:25.680
anyone to date him. He's so ugly. He's so useless. And then he like goes on his anti-Semitic rants. But
00:37:30.500
young men are like it's part comedy, part community, part point and laugh. But then you take in some of it.
00:37:37.800
And so and that is true of Candace. So when Tim talks about it being pernicious,
00:37:42.700
it is pernicious in the sense like but Alex Jones was a little bit like this on the cutting edge
00:37:47.060
where it was like entertaining in that he's freaking out about gay frogs. He's just freaking
00:37:52.340
out about frogs. They're turning frogs gay. And people thought that's funny. But then they also
00:37:56.880
took in some political analysis from that, the real stuff. And they love to go down the rabbit hole
00:38:01.900
in conspiracies. Conspiracies are not new in America. The thing that's new is that we have a
00:38:05.880
president who pushes conspiracy theories. And platforms. And platforms. Right. But like,
00:38:11.160
yeah, exactly. But she and Tucker, they represent a different wing from kind of the MAGA cheerleaders
00:38:18.040
where you have Benny Johnson and Megyn Kelly and like groups of people who are just there to say
00:38:23.240
Trump good, Trump good, left bad, left bad. And both of them are finding different types of audiences
00:38:29.260
within a broader MAGA coalition. And the America First people are the recruiters. I guess that's my
00:38:34.380
point. They are recruiting new people into the thing, right? You know, like somebody who was
00:38:38.760
nonpolitical and, you know, like might have some conservative sensibilities as a college kid. Like
00:38:45.500
they're not getting recruited into Trumpism by the Laura Ingraham show anymore. You know what I mean?
00:38:50.480
But like they might like somebody like that might, you know, find Candace's TikToks or Tucker's or Nick
00:38:55.960
Flint is all of them are talented. Like I suffer through all of their like TikToks because I just want to
00:39:01.040
kind of see what is out there. All of them make very compelling two minute bites of short form
00:39:06.480
video. And you can understand how somebody might get sucked into it. And all of them talk about
00:39:10.300
shit besides politics and Trump good. You know, they'll talk about dating or gender roles. They'll
00:39:15.700
talk about celebrity gossip. Right. And I think that is another way to get people in.
00:39:21.060
And they feud with each other. They've created soap opera conditions for the MAGA content types,
00:39:27.560
people who want to just like live it. And this is where the right did a lot of world building where
00:39:32.340
people exist in that ecosystem and they follow the fact that these people fight with each other
00:39:36.820
and get mad at each other. And like that is a form of entertainment now, political entertainment
00:39:41.600
that is different from what used to be there. I'm desperate for a feud. I keep trying to get into a
00:39:47.060
feud. I feud with you all the time. I know that's not enough. All right. So there are a few moments
00:39:53.120
that genuinely surprised me on this part of the landscape. So one was around the AmericaFest
00:39:58.620
conference where you referenced Ben Shapiro's speech there. But the fact that Candace could
00:40:07.960
allege that Kirk's assassination was in some sense, if not actually accomplished by TPUSA, was it being
00:40:17.380
covered up by TPUSA and maybe even by his widow? Correct me if I'm wrong. I mean, just how explicit
00:40:24.340
her allegations were. But some semblance of that allegation was that TPUSA killed or allowed to be
00:40:31.260
killed their founder and now patron saint, Charlie Kirk. And even possibly his widow, Erica, was somehow
00:40:42.260
culpable for this, if not the murder, then the cover up. She could allege all of that. And still,
00:40:49.620
that was not sufficient to make her radioactive for the TPUSA audience, right? I mean, or at least half
00:40:57.140
the audience. I mean, half of that audience, it seemed, to look at Tucker's performance on that
00:41:02.340
stage where Tucker said, listen, I'm not here to cancel anyone, right? So you got Ben Shapiro,
00:41:06.520
this whiny Jew who wants us to cancel everybody, but he's, who, you know, put him up on his high
00:41:14.760
horse, right? Morally, right? Like, who is he to judge that this allegation against Erica Kirk is
00:41:20.920
outside our Overton window? And the fact that he basically had, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong,
00:41:26.940
but it seemed like he probably won the day over there at AmericaFest with respect to this non-cancellation
00:41:33.720
of a direct allegation of a conspiracy theory involving the participants at AmericaFest.
00:41:40.740
I mean, like, these people are so hungry for conspiracy theory that if you tell them that
00:41:44.160
they murdered their favorite person on Earth, half of them want to hear more about that.
00:41:49.040
Yeah, this is a pretty sick, because, like, actually, this goes to why you hear among the
00:41:55.040
right, and Candace has really been on this, and it has started to come out in focus groups of young
00:41:59.420
MAGA types, that there is, uh, the controversy is over how Erica Kirk is or is not grieving
00:42:05.380
efficiently. And you have to understand this also in the context of, and this is true for so many,
00:42:11.440
uh, they understand Trump is not forever. And they are jockeying, especially in the wake of
00:42:16.580
Charlie Kirk's assassination, for more audience supremacy, right? There is a battle going on right
00:42:22.700
now between the America First Wing, Tucker and Candace and Marjorie Taylor Greene with the MAGA
00:42:28.700
establishment. And there's a reason that Erica Kirk felt like, amidst all this, she needed to sit down
00:42:33.640
and chat with Candace about the light flickering stuff, because they recognize the power of that
00:42:39.320
audience, and they try to sort of reconcile it and create it so that, like, they can all fight and
00:42:44.660
be mad at each other, but, like, live under the same broad tent where the enemy is the left.
00:42:51.060
But aren't you just fundamentally surprised by this? I mean, how is it that just 99% of the
00:42:55.400
sympathy isn't just by default with Erica Kirk and her just kind of straightforward Christian
00:43:01.760
response to the awful murder of her husband? And why don't people perceive Candace to be this
00:43:08.160
lunatic grifter who's just doing manifest harm to their movement and to this woman who's already
00:43:17.900
I have to admit, I'm surprised. I just, in a sense, it goes back to the other Candace thing
00:43:21.580
from earlier. Is this an act or is it genuine? I don't know. But again, but before this all started,
00:43:26.680
if you were trying to be a grifter, would you have thought the best way to get audience is to,
00:43:32.840
like, accuse the French and maybe Israel and maybe Charlie's own wife of killing him?
00:43:38.080
I wouldn't have thought that that would have done... Sure, there's an audience for everything,
00:43:41.940
right? People like conspiracies, but I wouldn't have thought that would have been the most
00:43:44.840
efficient way to garner attention and gain audience. And it has for her. And the numbers
00:43:49.780
that she gets are legitimate on YouTube and other platforms. So I'm not sure. I think that there is
00:43:55.040
something, I guess my answer for you, it goes back to Alex Jones. And it's something that I did not
00:44:00.340
appreciate enough when he was in his heyday, which is there's just something intoxicating about
00:44:05.780
the conspiracy. And it almost is like the details are kind of meaningless. And there's something
00:44:12.680
intoxicating about the, about being contrarian, being the ones that are seeing the real, being
00:44:18.720
someone that's not a sheep, you know, being someone that is, there's a choose your own adventure
00:44:23.460
element to it. There's a discover. It's interesting, right? Like, you know, just, you can just look at
00:44:29.280
the numbers, right? Is, are the boring Trump apologist podcast doing that well? Is House
00:44:34.580
Hugh Hewitt show doing, you know, or the National Review guys? Like, you know what I mean? Like,
00:44:38.660
not great. And there's something appealing about this. And so that is why I think that, you know,
00:44:44.780
they have tapped into that. And I wish I knew what the, like, end point of that is, or when the
00:44:50.160
point that backfires. I was just reminded of the moment when Trump dissed McCain, you know,
00:44:55.340
posthumously where like, I like, you know, I forget the verbatim line of something like, I like
00:44:59.440
war heroes that don't get captured or something. Like that was a moment where you couldn't see how
00:45:04.460
a single member of the military could have tolerated him from that moment forward. Like,
00:45:09.560
how is, how was that not beyond touching the third rail politically and yet somehow it worked
00:45:15.820
for him? So I think what we're continually discovering right of center, I mean, maybe there's
00:45:19.720
a left of center analog to this. I'm not sure what it is, but we're discovering that the things you
00:45:24.460
think matter and would actually be fatal if touched, not only don't matter and aren't fatal,
00:45:31.320
but somehow you can use them to your advantage if you pick them up in the right way.
00:45:35.780
One of the answers to this is something that is happening culturally on the right,
00:45:39.620
which I would basically categorize as vice signaling that starts out as ironic detachment
00:45:45.300
and then sort of grows into a real way. You know, there's this line I like to, that I think about a lot
00:45:50.360
where it's like, we all wear masks and end time, our faces grow to fit them. And I feel like that's
00:45:55.800
your answer kind of on Candace, which is like, it's some parts entertainment, but like as the
00:46:00.600
feedback loop starts from people, she's like, oh, people are into this Macron stuff. Like, yeah,
00:46:05.460
I'm going to like dig deeper in that. I'm going to go further in that, see how far people go with
00:46:09.000
me. And at some point you're kind of, you're in it, the gay frogs, you're really, really upset about
00:46:12.760
them. And before you know it, you're like, actually the six-year-olds weren't all murdered
00:46:16.880
at, uh, Newtown. And, you know, and, and that vice signaling though is kind of a new way. It's
00:46:24.660
like both an antidote to virtue signaling, which they see as a hallmark of the left. But in the
00:46:29.820
other way, it's like a code that they talk to each other in, which is why when like these text
00:46:34.320
messages come out and you see people answering with, oh, just put them in the gas chamber, you know,
00:46:38.560
these right, these, all these like staffers on the Republican side, that vice signaling has become
00:46:43.000
a cultural touchstone of who people are on the right now.
00:46:46.040
Can I just say on the, I, just because I do think there's a human nature element of this.
00:46:50.420
And I don't think that the version on the left that I'm trying to bring up is, is equal in any way
00:46:55.160
or is as pernicious, but like use the folks on the left. We're also very happy to hear Charlie
00:47:01.100
Kirk murder conspiracies. Like that material did quite well on left-wing, uh, YouTube, just looking at
00:47:08.320
like our YouTube metrics, for example, if I do a video about Donald Trump's hands, people are
00:47:14.200
interested in that material. Um, so that's legitimate. I'm not making things up like
00:47:17.960
Candace's, but I, you know, I just look, I think that like the notion that the other side is, is
00:47:25.220
losing, you know, and, and, and is losing power forever or that there's a secret, like all this
00:47:31.520
sort of stuff, like there's a human element to that. I would have thought that there was a limit to
00:47:36.180
it. Right. And I, and who knows what the limit is on the left. I think that there's maybe just
00:47:39.700
like a little bit of dabbling sometime in what, what I'll call like blue mega, you know, uh, like
00:47:44.860
online rhetoric where there's just, you know, feeling of where they don't really want to be
00:47:50.040
told the truth. They want to be told what they want to hear. Now there's a long way from that to,
00:47:54.600
oh my God, you know, Charlie Kirk's wife was part of an inside job. You know what I mean? Like all the
00:47:58.500
other crazy stuff that you're saying on the, on the, on the right. But I don't know, there is just,
00:48:02.580
you know, as, as the media democratizes and as these algorithms back to the platforms,
00:48:08.200
you'll control a lot of what people see. I don't think it's that surprising that a lot of the
00:48:12.860
winners are people that are offering, you know, kind of titillating conspiracy theories, you know,
00:48:18.060
or doom porn, et cetera. And I think that you can see a little bit of that on the left too.
00:48:23.360
So how do you guys think about Tucker Carlson at this point? Obviously he's a very different
00:48:27.680
character from Candace Owens, but they share a lot in common too. I mean, he's very different
00:48:33.980
in the sense that when you look at his past, you see, I think a very talented magazine journalist
00:48:39.040
who went on a very strange journey into pandering and audience capture and, you know, desperate
00:48:46.740
lurches to a new media purchase that, you know, finally paid off in something that looks very
00:48:52.500
Candace like, except, you know, given his background, it's even more reprehensible somehow.
00:48:58.260
I mean, with Candace, you know, but when Ben Shapiro hired Candace, I knew that was a colossal
00:49:02.980
mistake, you know, the moment I heard he had made it, right? So it was from a thousand miles away,
00:49:07.040
I could see that Candace was going to be a problem. But with someone like Tucker Carlson,
00:49:10.540
he was a promising young man and then a promising middle-aged man, and now he's a proper atrocity.
00:49:16.340
How do you think about what he's doing and what he's likely to do next? Are we going to see a
00:49:21.200
presidential candidacy for Tucker Carlson, or is that, are we not that dystopian?
00:49:26.220
I have two Tucker thoughts. I'll let Sarah go. I just think that the, um, the J.D. Vance-Tucker
00:49:30.500
connection, I think, is the skeleton key to what he would want to do next, and his son works for
00:49:34.940
J.D. Vance. I think he was a key player in J.D. Vance getting the VP slot. He told, we have now in
00:49:39.920
good authority, Donald Trump, that he thought that the deep state would kill him if he picked a neocon like
00:49:44.480
Marco Rubio to be his VP. Whether or not he believed that or not, I guess, is kind of immaterial,
00:49:48.580
but he told that to Trump, not as a joke, but in a serious way, and in his advocacy for J.D.
00:49:53.980
So I think that if J.D. continues to have political success, I think Tucker will be happy to ride
00:49:58.240
that. If J.D. crashes and burns, I think it's, I don't know, I think the doors are open to anything
00:50:02.960
with its strange times. My Tucker thing that I would point people to, his brother, Buckley Carlson,
00:50:08.980
has been posting a lot more on social media lately. I don't know if you've seen this.
00:50:12.160
J.D. I've heard he's a proper Alex Jones-level conspiracy theorist.
00:50:16.580
J.D. Proper kook. But I just think that's really important, because he has said in multiple
00:50:20.700
interviews over time that Buckley is his best friend. And to me, I do think that there's like
00:50:24.900
a real red-pilling and radicalization happening. Now, obviously, all of this is like a little bit
00:50:29.100
from column A, a little bit from column B. There's performance, there's pandering to audience. But I
00:50:32.400
just, when you watch Buckley's feed, it is like the raw heroine of the Tucker Carlson show.
00:50:37.840
And I think that's pretty telling about whether Tucker plans to continue on this trajectory.
00:50:43.740
And to me, what it says is that, yes, he is going to.
00:50:47.320
J.D. Yeah. I mean, look, every single one of these people is trying to figure out what their
00:50:50.260
lane is toward more power. And Tucker, look, I don't rule out that Tucker Carlson run for president.
00:50:57.780
But running for president is like a terrible job.
00:51:00.540
Like, it wouldn't surprise me at all if, because part of, I do see a schism lining up between
00:51:06.180
the America First wing of the party and the MAGA establishment. And J.D. Vance, the reason that
00:51:13.360
I think people kind of assume that he is the future of the party is because he straddles that world
00:51:18.080
in a slightly better way. The problem is he may win the influencer game, but the voters kind of hate
00:51:24.060
him. Like, they just find J.D. Vance to be a rizzless. Like, he gives them the ick,
00:51:28.980
including MAGA voters. And so that's a bit of a problem. But I think that Tucker
00:51:33.560
looks and says, like, how can I continue to consolidate my power? And he has said,
00:51:37.980
that's why he has, he does like a buddy thing routine with Candace. He knows that if they can
00:51:42.680
continue to combine their audiences, that they can collectively build out like a meaningful wing
00:51:49.420
of the party that's really influential in the future of Republican politics.
00:51:52.400
That's why I had Fuentes on and gave him a softball, you know, kind of foot massage interview. Same
00:51:58.680
Yeah, that was another moment of surprise. And I guess it's still, we're still in this moment,
00:52:02.360
the fact that even the people in power, I mean, even, you know, J.D. Vance, even Trump himself,
00:52:08.020
on some level, can't convince themselves that they don't need the anti-Semites and white supremacists
00:52:15.240
in the Republican Party. Like, they have to, it's like, stand back and stand by, you neo-Nazis,
00:52:21.740
because we're not going to say anything too critical of Nick Fuentes here, because we might
00:52:26.460
need every last one of you. You'd think that there would be more concern about all of the people in
00:52:33.540
the middle, some of the, many of the people who voted for Trump this time, but they voted for Biden
00:52:37.500
last time, but they voted for Trump this time. Wouldn't they be concerned to lose all those people
00:52:42.540
because they're glad-handing neo-Nazis and fans of Stalin, and Hitler's got Riz, and I mean,
00:52:50.680
Yeah. I think they knew, know they need those folks, though, because there's a key part of
00:52:54.180
the base. I mean, I would point out, I'm sure, have you ever had Orrin Cass on the show?
00:53:03.180
Yeah. It's like, does the Orrin Cass candidate for President 2028 have any chance? Like, somebody who
00:53:09.840
tries to do, you know, serious white paper populist nationalism? Absolutely not. Like, there's no
00:53:14.940
market for that. There's some, there's a handful of people, but, like, the people that, that are,
00:53:19.660
that power their base and their movement are conspiracy theorists, are, some of them are white
00:53:25.660
nationalists, are kooky, and, and have very strange views and heterodox views. Now, there are also a lot
00:53:31.100
of mainstream people that voted for Trump, but I just mean, like, the engine that is churning for them,
00:53:38.200
But there are more, you think there are more of those voters than mainstream voters who voted for
00:53:42.580
Trump, and the, and the Hispanics who came over to Trump, and the-
00:53:45.480
No, but you can't control the party without controlling those, you can't control the party
00:53:49.080
of those, they'll, they'll undermine you. And, you know, look, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley tried to do
00:53:54.100
the other thing, right, like, to various degrees, like, Ron, you know, kind of more, from a more
00:53:58.360
conservative standpoint, Nikki, from more of, like, a center-right standpoint, and there's no market for it.
00:54:03.640
So, I, no, sure, like, in gross, there is more, kind of, mainstream people that voted for Trump
00:54:08.940
because of, you know, inflation, sure, than there are white nationalists, like, yeah, there are more.
00:54:13.860
But, of the people that, like, are influential within the party power structure, I don't, I don't
00:54:18.940
think so. I don't know. Sarah, do you disagree with that?
00:54:20.640
Well, no, no, I agree. I just, part of what is interesting about listening to voters is some of,
00:54:25.720
there's a lot of cleavage points among voters. One of them is generational. So, like,
00:54:30.760
a lot of young people are listening to Tucker and Candace, and, like, there's still a whole
00:54:36.640
Republican normie set that, like, kind of doesn't know what these guys are saying, doesn't know
00:54:42.140
anything about them, and only kind of taps in on the news. Maybe they watch Fox News,
00:54:47.900
but maybe they don't. I mean, the extent to which people are running off of vibes now and scrolling,
00:54:53.440
but, like, I don't know. I said this going into the election about a million times. My podcast buddy,
00:54:58.040
JBL, and I were having a fight about this the whole time. Like, the extent to which people
00:55:01.200
were frustrated with the economy and with Joe Biden's age and felt like they got gaslit by
00:55:05.100
Democrats over the fact that Joe Biden was old and they shouldn't have run again, people were
00:55:09.620
really, really mad. And I think, like, my anger really lies with the Ben Shapiros because they
00:55:16.240
gave permission for people to be like, yeah, Trump's fine, despite the fact that he tried to steal an
00:55:20.120
election. And that allowed a lot of people to say, you know what? I know Trump's a bad guy. I hear this
00:55:24.800
all the time. Like, I'm not going to invite him to a dinner party. I just want the economy to be
00:55:28.560
better. And he's a businessman. And, like, there's that whole set. He's a fake businessman,
00:55:33.120
but he plays it on television. He's a fake businessman. I mean, you and I know that.
00:55:36.320
And nobody should confuse my analysis for my own viewpoints, but, like, I listen to voters all the
00:55:42.380
time and hear the ways in which they live in their own world, both algorithmically and just in terms of
00:55:47.520
what they hear, what they know about. And some people are deep in Candace, and other people are like,
00:55:53.060
oh, I've kind of heard of her. Or like, no, I've never heard of Nick Fuentes. Like, there's a whole
00:55:57.720
world out there of Republicans who barely know who Nick Fuentes is. And so, like, understanding the
00:56:03.080
differences, the different segments that it takes to build a political coalition and how those come
00:56:07.740
together. And usually it has something, it's like you swim in the soup of Trumpism. Much of it, so,
00:56:13.300
again, things cleave geographically. So you live in central Pennsylvania, where I'm from,
00:56:18.140
and you were always a Republican. And you don't really, it's not that you're listening to Candace,
00:56:23.580
but, like, the smartest person that you know listens to Candace and says, who's, like, deep into
00:56:28.100
politics and is like, yeah, she says some interesting things and let me know you what I know. And you're
00:56:31.660
like, wow, like, just while you're working together or whatever. But that vibes, that way in which we get
00:56:36.960
to a social norming place, like, Trump got social normed for us as a certain kind of person. Not for us,
00:56:43.420
not for super close observers, but for people. I tweeted this going into the Super Bowl just as,
00:56:49.480
because I was thinking about how I didn't know anything about either team. And I'm only a light
00:56:54.760
football observer trying to get into it. But I was like, millions of people right now are going to a
00:56:59.760
Super Bowl party and they're like, who's playing? Who should I root for? What weird, like, piece of
00:57:07.140
information am I going to take to decide who I'm going to root for? You're talking to one of those
00:57:09.320
people. Okay, so that's you. That's how most Americans do elections.
00:57:13.300
Right, right. Yeah, that's a good analogy. It's concerning.
00:57:17.160
So let's talk about J.D. Vance for a moment, because I'm, again, I don't really have a clear
00:57:22.820
theory of mind about him. He's been on quite a journey and he's obviously smart. He's obviously
00:57:29.380
not, if you roll back the footage of his life, at one point he appeared to be quite normal and ethical
00:57:37.120
and had his head screwed on straight and had a lot of interesting things to say to America about
00:57:43.140
part of America that has been, you know, much ignored. And then whether it's just pure opportunism
00:57:50.420
or some kind of, you know, Machiavellian unmasking of his, you know, deeper ideological commitments,
00:57:59.120
he's now become, he does seem like a fairly sinister figure to me. Like, I don't know what,
00:58:04.660
I don't know what he's capable of, if not initiating himself, collaborating with in the end and his
00:58:10.660
desire to just maintain and seize more power. How would you feel if Trump were to not wake up
00:58:17.720
tomorrow morning for whatever reason and we suddenly had President Vance, would that be a good thing,
00:58:23.420
all things considered, or a bad thing, would you be more or less worried about the future of America?
00:58:29.420
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