Making Sense - Sam Harris - #458 — The Bulwark Against MAGA

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

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00:00:36.480 I'm here with Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller. Sarah, Tim, thanks for joining me.

00:00:40.480 Great to be here.

00:00:41.340 It's been years I've been waiting for this invite, and I have to share it with Sarah.

00:00:45.680 Well, yeah, exactly.

00:00:46.740 Oh, so hard for you.

00:00:48.760 Well, you're in good company. I gotta say, first of all, I'm just huge fans of both of you. Tim,

00:00:54.420 you interviewed me on one of your podcasts. I don't know how long ago that was, but I don't

00:00:58.560 think I'd heard you before that interview. I haven't gone back to watch that, but I really

00:01:02.580 didn't realize I was in the company of greatness when you were interviewing me.

00:01:06.380 Oh, God.

00:01:07.180 But the two of you have just been going after Trump and Trumpism so entertainingly with

00:01:13.580 Hammer and Tong for, I mean, you've been doing it longer than I think I've noticed, but for the

00:01:19.340 last year or so, I've been watching you closely, and it's really, it's just, I'm tempted to just

00:01:24.720 walk out of the studio now and let you guys just roll and do an episode of the Bulwark

00:01:29.440 podcast over here. But how many podcasts do you guys have? I just watch more of you and

00:01:33.700 your colleagues in various frames, but feel free to name your actual principal properties

00:01:40.420 now so that people can find you.

00:01:41.860 Whoa. Okay. So Tim's main pod is the Bulwark pod. And I, this is the only nice thing I'm

00:01:47.980 going to say about Tim the whole time. But when Tim took over the podcast, we did not

00:01:52.320 know, I did not know he was going to be as good as he is. Like he, this was a, you know,

00:01:58.020 Charlie Sykes who had been the host of the original pod when we started, retired and we're

00:02:03.080 like, well, Tim will take it over. And he has crushed it. He's doubled its audience. And

00:02:07.300 so that's sort of the main pod that you see up in the top 10 charts all the time. And

00:02:11.380 then not that far below it, me, Tim and JVL have our sort of weekly round table called

00:02:15.560 The Next Level. And then we do takes, which was kind of a more recent invention where

00:02:20.220 we're all jumping on all the time. And then I have the focus group podcast where I listen

00:02:23.980 to voters and play the sound. So people believe me that this is what Americans sound

00:02:27.340 like. And then we've got a whole bunch of other ones. I don't want to like leave people

00:02:31.360 out, but there are just, we've got a big crew now at the Bulwark and they're all

00:02:34.760 excellent. So you should tune into all of them.

00:02:36.600 So Bill Kristol's over there and JVL and you've got other, other colleagues and it's

00:02:41.820 really, it's fantastic. What is the origin of the, the name Bulwark? I know, but just

00:02:47.620 tell people how, how you guys got started.

00:02:49.660 All right. I'll do this too, which is when I, I had a really dumb idea a long time ago,

00:02:53.720 circa like 2017, maybe 2018, where I was like, Hey, we should have an aggregator where we take

00:02:59.300 all the Republicans and conservatives who don't like Trump and we create, like we aggregate

00:03:03.660 them all into one website. And then I realized like a never Trump drudge report.

00:03:08.200 That's right. It was, I did. It was going to be a same drudge report as I pitched it. And I got

00:03:12.040 some seed money, which is just the drudge report now, by the way, drudges come around, but yeah,

00:03:16.360 that's true. That's true. And we, we were trying to find, you know, the, the Bulwark as a name,

00:03:21.480 some people didn't like it at first because they were like, what is that? But of course a Bulwark 0.99

00:03:25.140 is the thing that stands, it's a nautical term, but it's like the thing that stands between you

00:03:30.780 and the bad thing. Like you build a Bulwark, you build a fortress, a fortification between you and

00:03:35.720 the bad thing, maybe cannon fire. That's the, and it was actually one of our sort of junior members

00:03:39.880 named it for the aggregator. But then when the weekly standard was summarily sort of had the

00:03:44.720 lights taken down or, you know, it was just taken offline because it was insufficiently pro-Trump.

00:03:50.880 I was like, actually the aggregator is a dumb idea. I'm going to take a bunch of these people

00:03:54.280 from the weekly standard. Bill and I were doing a bunch of other things together at that point.

00:03:57.820 I'm going to give them jobs and we're going to start something for real. And then my buddy,

00:04:01.260 Tim, who I've known forever, uh, was kind of at the time in Oakland and he was very sad and filled

00:04:06.620 with rage. And I went to him, you know, like that scene from Hoosiers where they dunk somebody in

00:04:11.540 the, he's dunking the guy in the tank and saying, get it together. I was like, Tim, come do this with

00:04:15.860 us. And then he showed up and he was like a never Trump Hunter S. Thompson. I was like,

00:04:20.400 where's this guy? This is amazing. And then we all just, then we started rolling.

00:04:24.280 Sadness and rage are, those are good fuel. They, they burn cleanly with you, if you,

00:04:28.780 if you let them. So before we jump into the topics about which we are all sad and filled

00:04:33.860 with rage, give me each of your potted bios. I mean, how is it that, I mean, I know you're

00:04:39.720 never Trumpers, but, um, how, how is it that you come to politics? Because I mean, what I love

00:04:44.720 about talking to people who are, you know, generally classed as never Trumpers is that the allegation

00:04:50.680 of partisanship just cannot be made. Right. I mean, if I'm talking to lifelong Democrats

00:04:55.660 like myself, well, then, then a lot of people can get off the train immediately thinking,

00:04:59.700 well, everything you're saying about Trump is a symptom of your own tribalism and partisanship.

00:05:04.140 But you know what, obviously when I'm talking to David Frum and other people who, who saw Trump

00:05:07.800 for what he was from the very beginning, that goes out the window. And so it does with the

00:05:11.180 two of you. So what are your actual bios politically?

00:05:13.640 Yeah. I was just a campaign hack campaign gypsy from, I mean, from high school, actually I was, 0.99

00:05:19.240 uh, I started volunteering on a guy named Bill Owens, this campaign when he's running for governor

00:05:22.780 of Colorado is Republican, just because I had a neighbor that was friends with him. Essentially

00:05:27.480 I just had like a lucky in and the neighbor knew I was a politics junkie and I would show up to

00:05:31.840 intern. And when I was 16, I looked like I was like 11. And most people were just like,

00:05:36.000 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

00:05:42.080 on this campaign. And after that, it just, I just loved political campaigns. I worked on a million

00:05:47.220 of them everywhere from like Virginia and New Hampshire and Florida, Iowa. I did McCain's

00:05:52.440 presidential campaign in 08. Uh, and then John Huntsman's in 12 and then Romney's Jeb's in 16.

00:05:57.920 And between that, I did some advising for Scott Walker and Nikki Haley on their gubernatorial

00:06:01.780 campaigns. So, you know, I was, I was a campaign gypsy for the most part. And then after Jeb lost,

00:06:08.220 my plan was to go back to Miami and lay by the beach and read gay fiction and get drunk all day 0.68

00:06:13.780 for a few weeks, um, before I returned to life. But like day one of that, some rich folks called

00:06:18.440 and said, will you be a spokesperson for this group we're starting? So it then was called

00:06:21.700 our principles pack, which is kind of like a proto Lincoln project, but wait before the Lincoln

00:06:25.460 project. And, uh, will you be the spokesperson for it? And I was like, I said, yeah, hell yeah.

00:06:30.320 Both Jeb and my father thought that was a terrible idea. Trump is a vengeful guy. And I was like,

00:06:36.540 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

00:06:42.760 say, not as attuned to his appeal as I maybe could have been being a political, um, junkie. Like I knew

00:06:49.200 that the appeal was there, but you know, I did, I did think he was beatable in 2016, either in the

00:06:53.860 primary by Marco type or in the general by Hillary. And that turned out not to be the case. And I was

00:06:59.900 persona non grata in Republican politics after that. Then I was sad and angry and then Sarah called me.

00:07:04.160 So that's the gist. Yeah. And unlike Tim, I was not sort of exactly of the political world. I was a

00:07:11.080 policy person and Tim and I worked together, like at this, I worked for a Republican firm that did a

00:07:16.300 lot of comms. Like I was a, and Tim and I are both kind of do have a comms background, but what

00:07:21.000 happened was basically in 2016, as I watched 2015, 2016, as I watched the rise of Trump, I was just

00:07:27.800 one of those things where I was like, my hair was on fire. I was like, I can't believe this is

00:07:31.420 happening, right? Just this surreal experience of Trump in the early days, but I wanted to do

00:07:35.780 something. And I had a lot of latitude. I'd been at the firm where I'd been for about 15 years. I was

00:07:40.860 a senior vice president. I was going to run the thing when, you know, the guy principal retired.

00:07:45.480 And so I just, I started building stuff and I went, I actually went to a room. There were these

00:07:49.060 meetings that were happening at the time of sad Republicans and we would all get in a room and

00:07:53.140 just be sad together. It was kind of like an AA meeting, but less joyful maybe. And I don't know,

00:07:58.500 after that, I met Bill in those rooms and Bill and I decided, okay, here's what we're going to do.

00:08:02.960 We're going to primary Trump. And we had this plan. And so we were going around to like

00:08:07.420 Kinzinger and Larry Hogan. Larry Hogan was my big treasurer. I was sitting with Larry Hogan being

00:08:14.500 like, you got to do this, man. Your father would want you to do this. His father was kind of the guy

00:08:18.860 who went to Nixon and said, you got to step down. And I was like, this is your moment. We talked to Mark

00:08:24.100 Cuban. And actually, long story short, everyone told us no. But in the process of that, I started

00:08:29.120 doing focus groups to see if I, if there was an appetite within the Republican base. Cause I had

00:08:34.380 this strong theory that of course, Trump was an accident of history. People didn't actually want

00:08:38.260 this. The second I set foot in rooms of voters doing focus groups, I said, oh wait, I've got

00:08:44.560 something very, very wrong. And I just realized I'd spent too much of my career in DC. You know,

00:08:49.180 it's so detached from how voters actually think about things. And once I started listening to

00:08:52.560 voters, I really couldn't stop. And I became, I ended up quitting, leaving my firm, starting

00:08:57.360 a bunch of new projects, starting the bulwark. And that's where we are now.

00:09:02.260 Okay. So now how do, this is a hard question. I think, um, I have never personally come up

00:09:08.720 with even a shadow of an answer to it, but how do you explain to yourselves the smart people

00:09:14.440 who, you know, people who, who might even still be friends in certain cases or family members,

00:09:19.600 certainly, but many might be former friends who don't see anything wrong with what is

00:09:25.760 happening. Right. I mean, they, they, even if they'll concede, you know, perhaps the most

00:09:29.740 they'll concede is, well, they don't like Trump's style. Obviously he's abrasive. He's busted a few

00:09:35.480 norms that we might want to keep in place in the future, but nothing truly out of the ordinary

00:09:42.140 and dangerous. And to say nothing of being actually ruinous of American democracy, uh, is likely to

00:09:48.420 happen. They're apt to say things like, well, all politicians lie. How is it that the three of us

00:09:55.460 and many other people we might name here are living in this invasion of the body snatchers moment where

00:10:00.660 we don't know what the fuck happened to the people who look like they were the same people they were 0.97

00:10:05.700 yesterday, but they just aren't making any sense to us. How, how, how do you explain it? And are there,

00:10:10.880 I mean, maybe there are different versions of this problem, but I would love to know just how

00:10:14.060 you've processed this. Luckily, I wrote about this in my book. So if you want to get the long story,

00:10:18.180 it's about 300 pages, but here's, uh, here's a summary. I think the brain rationalization is a

00:10:23.080 hell of a drug and the brain is very powerful and people can rationalize stuff really up until the

00:10:28.160 moment or even sometimes past the moment it's causing them actual damage and harm. And I think that

00:10:33.140 some of the rationalizations included just simple like tribalism and team sports, you know,

00:10:37.820 just like kind of the way that, you know, I wouldn't, as an LSU fan would convince myself

00:10:42.720 that Nick Saban was the devil. People convince themselves that Joe Biden was the devil, you

00:10:46.940 know? And I think that you see this very clearly watching sports and I think politics and sports

00:10:51.200 has merged and morphed into each other a little bit. I think that some people wanted access to

00:10:55.760 close being close to power. And like, that's a tale as old as time, kind of a rent kind of

00:11:00.400 banality of evil element to it. I think that, and this is, I'll let Sarah get into her triangle of

00:11:06.060 doom, but I think that there's a propaganda element of this. Like I, some people don't

00:11:10.240 even know, like don't get good information. I think that there are a lot of people that

00:11:13.640 are blocked out from good information. That's, I think that's different from like the elite

00:11:16.420 class. That's more among regular folks and more in the family category maybe. But you

00:11:21.700 know, in the friends category, one of the things in the, so in the book I tried to have only on

00:11:25.960 record people from my life who went for Trump, but I made a couple of exceptions, um, for people

00:11:31.840 to talk off the record. And one of the, in one of the cases, the guy says to me, you know, he says,

00:11:36.500 Tim, here's the thing. This was, you know, it's maybe a year or two after Trump's first term in

00:11:40.640 1718. He goes, I, my wife's fan, my wife's friends think I'm a racist. Like people are trash

00:11:46.340 talking me. Like, you know, my kids, you know, can't tell people what their dad does for a living.

00:11:51.360 And, um, I realized that Trump does some bad stuff, but like in order to deal with that, I just need

00:11:56.680 to, I just grab onto the one or two things that he's right about and really focus on that and think

00:12:01.680 about how, you know, I can use that to motivate me. And my, my reaction to that was like, you're

00:12:07.500 not going to be on the record in this book, but I'll know that you said that that's like so

00:12:10.400 embarrassing. I got such an embarrassing admission, but I thought it was really revealing. I think

00:12:15.120 that a lot of people kind of get into clubby vibes and, um, to their career or their social

00:12:20.560 circle and they find ways to, to rationalize really bad stuff. And, um, and I just think that

00:12:27.580 the, the, that's a story that we've seen throughout history. And like, it's, I think the only new part

00:12:32.600 of it is just, and this isn't really even that new, but like the only new part of it in kind

00:12:36.400 of the modern media era is the clownishness of it. You know, I just think that I, which is why

00:12:40.900 some of it breaks some of our brains that it could be, you know, we, we could understand it if it was

00:12:45.080 a more sophisticated evil, I guess, but, um, it's not, so that's my take. I don't know,

00:12:50.420 Sarah, what you could add on that.

00:12:51.520 I mean, I'll throw in the Republican triangle of doom, which is a thing that I talk about a lot,

00:12:56.660 which is the toxic and symbiotic relationship between the voters, the right-wing infotainment

00:13:02.340 media and Republican elected officials. And they work together as sort of a reinforcement

00:13:08.280 mechanism, right? So, and, and look, democracy is still about the voters. And the fact was

00:13:14.400 Donald Trump caught the entire country off guard by people thinking nobody's going to vote for this

00:13:20.100 guy because he's an idiot. And instead they realized what I realized when I started listening

00:13:23.880 to voters was Trump had been in people's living rooms and on page six and part of their cultural

00:13:29.880 firmament for such a long time. And they were so tired. If you just remember even the, the 2016

00:13:35.580 election, Clintons, Bushes, like they were done with all of that. And so the voters were like,

00:13:41.840 yeah, give me this different guy. And that power, when conservative media realized that there was

00:13:48.520 this appetite from the voters, like created an entirely new incentive structure, right? What

00:13:54.080 happened to Lindsey Graham? Well, Lindsey Graham realized there was a ton of juice in flattering a 0.99

00:13:59.440 bunch of people that actually he dislikes and doesn't respect. And the entire party slowly came

00:14:05.760 to realize that if they just like fed this machine, that A, there was a lot of people who desperately

00:14:11.020 wanted somebody to be harder on the Democrats, to fight harder, to burn the Democrats to the ground.

00:14:16.280 And so they loved Trump. And Republicans realized, again, what I did, which is actually there wasn't

00:14:21.220 a huge appetite for the thing that they were selling anymore. Like the limited government,

00:14:26.160 free markets, American leadership in the world, essentially when George Bush left office and then

00:14:31.280 there was eight years of Obama, when he left, he was at 32 percent approval. And that created a world

00:14:37.140 in which the Republican Party developed an enormous appetite through the Obama years to completely

00:14:41.300 change. And I think as the sort of smart set realized it, because they were all with us,

00:14:47.220 like the against Trump issue that National Review did, like we were all friends. There were a lot

00:14:52.100 more never Trumpers in the early days. I mean, even J.D. Vance, I don't know if he was in the mix,

00:14:57.680 but, you know, if you're calling Trump either, you know, somewhere on the spectrum between an

00:15:02.000 asshole like Nixon or America's Hitler, seems like you should have had a seat at the table with

00:15:08.020 the never Trumpers. Not a compliment. I would add just one more sentence of pop psychology.

00:15:12.640 People don't want, Stephen Miller, there's a handful of people, maybe J.D. Vance, I don't know,

00:15:17.340 that like revel in being bad, revel in other people's pain. And a lot of these other folks

00:15:23.480 that you're asking about, Sam, who know better, who went along with us, are not like that. People

00:15:27.980 want to feel like they're on the side of good. And so that's how they convince them. That goes back to

00:15:36.800 that guy. People really do. When you ask people, like when you have it, when I have a few beers,

00:15:41.960 my ex-friends, I'm like, what is it really? Like they will say, like, I do, I think that closing

00:15:46.660 the border was good. Or they'll say, I feel they'll support for Israel if it's, if it's, you know, 0.82

00:15:51.480 for, for some folks or. Yeah, but even I can say that, right? Yeah, exactly. The woke stuff,

00:15:57.000 you've been on this beat for 10 years, was a pernicious, right? And so they will grab onto those

00:16:01.380 things and, and take them and be like, I'm on the side of the good guys and focus on those

00:16:06.700 and almost tune out or compartmentalize the stuff that, that challenges that narrative in their

00:16:12.980 brain. But what, what do these people think of a Liz Cheney or a Adam Kissinger? I mean, like,

00:16:18.720 how do they explain that? They hate them and they hate us, but that's because we are an in their face,

00:16:25.480 alternate version of what they could have done. And to be confronted with people who say, no,

00:16:31.460 you see what I see. We are all looking at the same thing. And frankly, all of the things that

00:16:35.760 you learned and I learned as young conservatives about personal responsibility, about character

00:16:41.000 mattering, you're the one who's foregone all of that. You're the one who's betrayed their 0.94

00:16:45.500 principles. Cause there's a, the most insane version of the person that you're talking about,

00:16:49.940 Sam, aren't the people who even went for Trump the first term and got on board. It's the people who

00:16:54.680 after January 6th still say, there's a whole bunch of new people that came to Trump post that

00:17:00.220 who decided Joe Biden and like, and this is, they have to hyperbolize. This is why sort of the Epstein

00:17:06.500 stuff and the, the child predator narrative was so important. Cause like what's worse than trying

00:17:12.280 to steal a free and fair election. Pedophilia is maybe one of the only ones. And so they became

00:17:17.140 obsessed with this idea that there was a left wing cabal of elites who were, who were harming

00:17:24.680 okay with Trump. We need somebody like this. But of course it, as we see now, that was all

00:17:29.800 a fiction.

00:17:30.220 Yeah. They think that Liz and Adam have compromised, right? It is a totally warped worldview. Cause

00:17:35.720 then once you've convinced yourself that like the woke is the big threat or whatever, like

00:17:39.520 on any of the list of things that are some legitimate threats coming from the left, right?

00:17:43.900 Then you are, or in Adam's case, you see this from his family. If you know, you convince

00:17:47.820 yourselves that the left is godless and it's heathens, you say to him, well, you're on your

00:17:51.480 moral high horse wagging your finger at me for going along with this, but you're going

00:17:55.320 along with, you know, this anti-Christian, you know, movement. And so I think that in a

00:18:00.720 lot of ways you see, again, Liz Cheney and Adam and being seen as like a great, almost a

00:18:06.560 greater evil than the actual left. Like there was a lot of hatred.

00:18:09.940 Which is why also the trans stuff really matters. This is why, like with the protecting 1.00

00:18:14.880 kids, like if you listen to the responses, when you challenge them about Trump and his

00:18:18.820 morality, they'll be like, well, you believe in chemically castrating kids, right? Like

00:18:23.240 that's sort of where they go to try to say that they have a moral leg to stand on.

00:18:28.400 Right. Right. Well, so, but if you're going, going to trade like for like, I mean, so you

00:18:33.700 take all the people who cared or pretended to care about the contents of Hunter Biden's

00:18:38.360 laptop, right? Because it signaled all of the corruption and self-dealing that the Biden

00:18:43.060 family would be capable of. I mean, this is, there's some millions of dollars.

00:18:46.680 The Biden crime family. The Biden crime families.

00:18:48.280 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, this, this is really something worth worrying about.

00:18:51.840 We care about corruption. We don't want, in this case, a, a vice president and former

00:18:57.360 vice president, much less his family grifting based on their, um, their access to power and

00:19:04.800 besmirching the reputation of our fine country, right? We care about those things. Now Trump

00:19:11.420 comes in and does it a thousand fold worse and they don't care at all. Right. So, I mean,

00:19:16.940 this is, I mean, this is just one species of hypocrisy, but the crazy thing is that right

00:19:21.080 of center, it's almost like hypocrisy isn't even a thing, right? It's like the physics of

00:19:25.960 reputation management has completely changed and there's just, there's no management to do.

00:19:30.540 It's like Trump can do anything. His enablers can do anything. They can break any norm that

00:19:35.680 one pretended to care about. I mean, you cared about the, the Twitter files, right? You cared

00:19:39.840 about the, you know, a candidate Biden asking for naked photos of his son to be taken off

00:19:45.440 Twitter. Uh, that was just an Orwellian overreach on the part of the powers that be, you know,

00:19:50.840 into the media space. And yet now, you know, Don Lemon being arrested for doing journalism

00:19:58.100 doesn't matter. Right. I bet. So again, you, you, you have much more direct contact with these

00:20:02.640 people than I do. Is there any effort to square these weird cognitive swings or just, it's just

00:20:10.460 pure bankruptcy? You can't square cognitive swings with, with Trump. I mean, Trump has no like

00:20:16.720 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 0.88

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

00:25:33.160 collapse.

00:25:34.580 Yeah. I think first, Ben Shapiro both made Candace Owens. 0.69

00:25:38.780 Yeah.

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

00:27:17.920 objective observer.

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

00:30:32.060 subsequently.

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

00:30:37.740 controversy.

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 0.84

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 1.00

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 0.97

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 1.00

00:33:24.680 she might kind of go a Trump path. Like Sarah and her focus groups, people would name her as somebody 0.94

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 0.91

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 0.97

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. 1.00

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 0.87

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 0.99

00:34:55.060 material from her. You just said she's crazy. What is your theory of mind about her? Is she 0.99

00:34:58.880 actually suffering some kind of clinical episode and she's just so telegenic that it works? Or do 0.86

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. 0.80

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. 0.99

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 0.99

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, 0.82

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 1.00

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.

00:42:48.440 But right now, while they're in power...

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

00:43:15.280 been harmed more than anyone can imagine?

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 1.00

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 0.99

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

00:51:58.220 reason.

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,

00:52:48.720 this is what they're associated with now.

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?

00:52:57.340 No, no.

00:52:58.380 He's like a MAGA policy wonk, and-

00:53:01.620 You know, passes for smart MAGA.

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 0.74

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,

00:53:35.820 like, requires those, those voters, and-

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 1.00

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 If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at

00:58:33.600 samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast.

00:58:40.140 The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support.

00:58:44.340 And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.

00:58:53.420 Thank you.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - February 11, 2026

#458 — The Bulwark Against MAGA

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