#54 — Trumping The World
Episode Stats
Summary
Jamie Kirchik is a journalist and foreign correspondent currently based in Washington, D.C. He writes mainly for The Daily Beast and is a columnist for Tablet, and his first book, coming out in 2017, is entitled The End of Europe, Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. His writing has appeared everywhere, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other publications, and he spent a lot of time thinking about the election and its implications for U.S. foreign policy, the kinds of trends and concerns that brought us here and the concerns that will likely endure. I wanted to talk to him, and I'm very glad I got him on the podcast, and we dive back into politics here, talking about the 2016 election and the coming Trump presidency, mostly with a focus on the implications for foreign policy on our watch. If you are concerned about the world and what happens to it on our time, well, then you might find something useful here. I give you Jamie's advice on how to deal with it, and how to make sense of it all. We don t run ads, and therefore it s made possible entirely through the support of our listeners, so if you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming one. You ll get access to access full episodes of the full-length episodes of The Making Sense Podcast. wherever you re listening to the podcast is available. Sam Harris' podcast, wherever you get your news and information, including blogs, podcasts, social media, and more. Thanks to our sponsorships, and social media. This is a big thanks to you, the podcasting network, Big Fish. Big Fish Media. - Big Fish Press. Big Fish Books, Inc., Big Fish PR, and The Big Fish and Big Fish Podcasts for sponsoring the podcast. Thanks to Sam Harris for producing the podcast and for all the hard work that makes this podcast possible. The podcast is made possible by Big Fish and the podcast making sense. by Sam Harris. and the team at Making Sense. Thank you, Sam Harris, for making sense here, and thanks you, for being a friend of the making sense podcast, big fish, and thank you for listening, and making sense everywhere else in the world, and for supporting the podcast in the process of making sense
Transcript
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Jamie is a journalist and foreign correspondent currently based in Washington.
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He's reported from all over the world, Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, various countries
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He writes mainly now for the Daily Beast, and he's also a columnist for Tablet.
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And his first book, coming out from Yale University Press, I believe next March 2017, is entitled
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The End of Europe, Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age.
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His writing has appeared everywhere, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York
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Times, and he spent a lot of time thinking about the election and its implications for
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U.S. foreign policy, the kinds of trends and concerns that brought us here, and the
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I wanted to talk to him, and I'm very glad I got him on the podcast.
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And we dive back into politics here, talking about the election and the coming Trump presidency,
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mostly with a focus on the implications for foreign policy.
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So if you are concerned about the world and what happens to it on our watch, well, then
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Tell our listeners how you describe yourself at this moment and what you mostly focus on.
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I focus mostly, I'd say, on foreign affairs, Europe, where I used to live, working for Radio
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But I write about increasingly domestic American politics.
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I write for the Daily Beast primarily, but also for Tablet, which is a Jewish-themed website,
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I think it might have been on Twitter, which is somewhat ironic because the influence of
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social media on our thinking at this moment is so depressing, and I think we'll probably
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But I think I discovered you that way, and I've actually discovered a few podcast guests
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And I've noticed that you and I are worried about many of the same things, and obviously
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It seems to me that we are engaged in a war of ideas now that's not really between the
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left and the right so much as it's between liberals and illiberals, because we're finding
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And people are falling into identity politics and conspiracy thinking, and they're producing
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fake news stories and standing in opposition to free speech.
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These trends are just, I mean, they're antithetical to getting a grasp on reality and reasoning
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And yet this problem does cut across political lines.
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We might argue that any one of these things might be worse on the left or the right at
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But it's definitely, it's hard to align politically in a way that is easily summarized on many points
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And all of this seems to have crystallized with the election.
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But there are so many topics here, which I've heard you speak about and I've seen you write
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So just there's kind of a through line here where you can talk about the failures of the
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Obama administration at the level of foreign policy.
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So, you know, the red line in Syria, for instance, and subsequent Russian involvement there, and
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then the migrant crisis to Europe, which is leading to the possible dissolution of the
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And this is giving us this spirit of anti-globalism and a fundamental distrust of the media and even
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a disdain for the very concept of a fact, right?
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And again, this all seems to have been brought to a kind of a crystalline focus with Donald
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So just, you know, I've kind of put out the terrain there.
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Tell me how do things look for you at this moment?
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There's a lot to unpack there, but I think you're right.
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And I agree that we're in new political terrain where someone like myself, who really, I consider
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I usually vote Republican, but I found myself so viscerally opposed to Trump, almost even
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more, you know, radically anti-Trump than a lot of my left-wing friends.
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And having lived in Europe, you see this sort of political realignment of the extremes coming
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So, you know, there's this Syriza government in Greece, which is sort of neo-communist.
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And, you know, they've been praised by Hungarian fascists that I've interviewed because they're
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all sort of anti-liberal, illiberal in the classic sense of the word.
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And during the campaign, I wrote an article for the Daily Beast that got a lot of angry
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responses where I really called out some of the lefties for Trump, you know, and one of
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whom I just said out loud was our very good mutual friend, Glenn Greenwald, whose real,
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you know, whose entire approach to the election was basically could be summed up as, well, Hillary
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Clinton is a lying neocon, neoliberal, corporate warmonger shill.
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And how dare you accuse me of passively, aggressively supporting Donald Trump?
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And there were many people I found on the left who, you know, they would never come out
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explicitly and say it because obviously, you know, you wouldn't want to ally yourself
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with this guy who's such a bore and playing all these kind of racist dog whistles.
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But I think Trump actually had a lot in common with sort of the far left, certainly in terms
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of his worldview and his view of American power and his belief that America should just kind
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of mind its own business and, you know, stay, stay at home, the kind of anti-imperialist
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And I, you also brought up this issue of, you know, how much of what we're going through
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And I do think that there's an element of this and we can talk more about sort of the
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And there seems to be a lot of self-flagellation now from liberals in which they're sort of
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accusing themselves of not being, you know, in touch with middle America and the media
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was, you know, sort of navel-gazing and we talk in this bubble.
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You know, SNL had a skit about the bubble last week.
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And I, you know, I've written a lot about political correctness and free speech and I
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am the first person to criticize the left for this.
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Yet as strongly as I loathe the kind of social justice warrior left and when President Obama
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refuses to say Islamic terrorism, none of these things in my mind justify a vote for
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And I feel like a lot of people who might not be as nuanced as, you know, Sam Harris and
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Jamie Kerchick, they basically threw up their arms and they said, you know what?
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I'm being told that there's 69 different genders.
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The president won't talk about Islamic extremism.
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I'm just going to vote for this Trump guy because he tells it like it is.
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It's interesting because I'm finding, I know, as you probably know on my podcast, also on
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my blog, I've been maybe not as vociferous as you.
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You may set the standard there, but I've been probably as vociferous as anyone else I could
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name in my repudiation of Trump and really gone on ad nauseum.
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I noticed that post-election, there's this kind of the wind has gone out of my sails to
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a significant degree because I basically said everything I had to say.
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And now he's elected and there's a sense I have that the moment to do anything has really
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And, you know, this is politically, this may in fact not be true, but it's not just me.
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I think I feel like many people are sort of moving on to just accepting that we're going
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to have four very interesting and perhaps very depressing years of political incompetence.
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And I think the worst things about Trump, I mean, the things I fear most about him are
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not what liberals and what the mainstream media is tending to focus on.
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I mean, obviously, we can debate whether, you know, the dog whistles were in fact dog whistles.
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I think we both bemoan the eruption of misogyny and anti-Semitism and racism we've seen that
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has been a response to Trump and part of his support.
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But I think it is at least reasonable to expect that that is a tiny fraction of the people
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And the scariest thing is just we now have elected somebody who is, you know, as I've
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said before, just clearly a con man and a pathologically selfish and petty and just unenlightened person.
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And we are now giving him more responsibility than any person has had in human history.
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So it's incompetence and dogmatism and, you know, this kind of the petty tyranny of a psychologically
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not entirely healthy person that I worry about more than the prospect that he is a deeply racist
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And also just the concept of how normalizing this is a is almost irresistible, even for
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critics of Trump, because it's just that you just can't.
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What are we just going to complain endlessly for four years now?
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I mean, like you, I I feel sort of exasperated, exhausted.
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I think from about February or March until, you know, two weeks ago when the election was
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held, I really didn't write about anything other than Trump.
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And I have to understand, I usually don't write that much about domestic politics.
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I just got so sort of obsessed with doing what I could to kind of, you know, warn people
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And now there's sort of a feeling like, wow, like it didn't even have an effect.
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And what does it say about our country that however many tens of millions of people would
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I mean, to me, it almost one article I wrote about Trump was that he most reminded me of
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And he seemed he almost seems like a cult leader and that his his pull over his supporters is
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I mean, when he went when he got up and said, you know, I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue
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And that doesn't that that's not the kind of language of a of a democratic political
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It's the it's the it's the language of a of a dictator or sort of, you know, David Koresh
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And as someone as someone who studies faith and religion, I'd be curious to know your views
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I mean, I agree that I'm much less worried about the implications and the consequences.
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I think a lot of people on the left are getting a little hysterical about America turning
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What I'm much more concerned about, and this stems from my experience having lived and worked
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in Central and Eastern Europe, is really the effect that he will have on the world and
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I think the biggest story of this election that still has not been fully explained is
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Russia and their involvement and their involvement in this election.
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I mean, they the the tactics that they used in hacking the DNC and John Podesta and then
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These are the sorts of tactics that, you know, I witnessed as a reporter in Kyrgyzstan, OK, which
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It's the kind of stuff that the Russians would do in, you know, like the third world countries
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To see them actually use these kinds of tactics in the world's greatest democracy, so-called,
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and to basically get away with it is really appalling.
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And I and I still don't think that we fully wrapped our our heads around this.
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I think part of the reason might be because a lot of the journalists on the left who sort
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of, you know, wrote about this story were kind of like, you know, Johnny come lately
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It's like, oh, wow, all of a sudden, like, you know, Josh Marshall cares about Russia
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It's like it would have been nice if you were there, you know, for the past eight years
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You know, President Obama's disastrous policy towards Russia or, you know, when you were
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laughing at Mitt Romney for saying that Russia was our greatest, you know, global security
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And so this this whole angle, the Russian angle, their involvement in our election, also
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their involvement in a lot of this kind of fake news that you're hearing a lot about.
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I mean, what there's there's a friend of mine, Peter Pomerantz, who wrote an excellent
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It's called Nothing is True and Everything is Possible.
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And it's about his years living as a TV producer and sort of Putin's Russia.
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And it's a brilliant book about sort of the surreal postmodernist Russian world where
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there's, you know, fake political parties and it's called Managed Democracy.
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And as the title suggests, nothing is true and everything is possible.
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And I never thought that his book, which just came out a couple of years ago, would so accurately
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describe the kind of postmodern world that we're entering now in the United States, where
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basically a candidate can get up, lie through his teeth left and right.
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And people just don't, you know, you and me get really angry and we fume and scream and
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That's actually been the scariest aspect of this election for me, because you can, you
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know, intelligent people can disagree about what we should do about trade, say, or immigration
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or Islamism or, I mean, all of these topics have room for diversity of opinion.
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I think if you're dismissing climate science at the moment, you probably don't deserve a
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But we could disagree about how bad it is or what we should do about it or what the likely
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implications are, but this kind of post-fact moment where people no longer care what the
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And there's a kind of nihilistic delight in just setting the universe of information on
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I mean, this fake news orgy is just unbelievable.
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So I think you have seen both of these articles or you know about both of these stories.
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A couple of days ago, there was an article in the Washington Post about these two guys
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in California who have made up Liberty Writers News is their website.
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And they've got millions of readers and they're making probably some hundreds of thousands of
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dollars a month just creating fake news stories, which have been lapped up by Trump supporters.
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And they were part of this Facebook scandal that may in fact have influenced the election
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where Facebook became an organ of disinformation, publishing these stories.
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And as you say, there's this now cottage industry sponsored or at least inspired by Russia, right?
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And in some Eastern European countries, just creating fake news websites that have significant
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Again, this happens on the left and the right, but now I'm talking about right-wing versions
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But there's other story, which was just completely insane, which I just heard about yesterday,
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which I think is going by the name of Pizzagate.
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that was alleged to be running a child sex trafficking ring run by Hillary Clinton and
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And this is, I mean, apparently believed by people, right?
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So the owners of this restaurant are getting death threats by the hundreds and, you know,
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They've got photos of their kids online being circulated on crazy websites.
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It's pure insanity and should be recognizably insane to anyone who cares about what's happening
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And so, I mean, this breakdown of valid forms of information and is a kind of moral equivalence
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where any error found in The New York Times is considered to be on par with a fake news
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website that is just manufacturing propaganda out of whole cloth.
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Let's focus on that piece a little bit and on Russia's putative involvement here, because
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whenever I have circulated stories about Russia hacking the election, I have gotten back,
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you know, by the dozens and more claims from Trump supporters that all of that's made up,
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that there is, there's no evidence that Russia has been involved in anything.
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Yeah, I mean, there's this, there's, there's this sort of, you know, you're being a McCarthyite.
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They, they, they love to throw that word around.
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There's the, um, I'm, I'm not alleging hacking of the ballots or the, you know, election system.
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In fact, it was Donald Trump who, it was Donald Trump who was the one who was going on and
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What we do know is that Russian hackers basically committed cyber Watergate at the DNC, and then
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they released, and then they used, you know, WikiLeaks, which is their front.
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And, you know, that, that's a whole, I can explain that to people, but that's pretty
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much accepted that WikiLeaks is a Russian intelligence front.
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Now, do you think that WikiLeaks has always been, or it's just simply been co-opted recently?
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I think they've been, yeah, I think they've been co-opted.
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Julian Assange really does, he, I would say he's, he's a radical transparency activist,
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You don't see him publishing documents from Russia or China.
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What I think he is, is he's a, he's a, he's just your typical sort of far left anti-American
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And, you know, the Russians were very smart and they were able to basically co-opt him.
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He had a show on RT, which is the Russian propaganda channel.
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Um, and so they're basically being used now as a front for Russian intelligence.
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They released these emails right on the eve of the Democratic National Convention that
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were designed to, um, anger the Bernie supporters, the Bernie Sanders supporters, um, to get them
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That might've, that might've been enough to swing the election, right?
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To keep the Bernie supporters home on election day.
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These are, these are, these, this, this, this is true.
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Um, as with regard to the fake news, this is a real, I mean, I don't, I don't know how
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This is basically, you know, this is, um, Russia trying to take advantage of our freedoms,
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which is freedom of speech and basically sneak inside and take advantage of it and corrupt
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And, you know, we, we, we, we can't, you know, censor these things.
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We can't, um, you know, arrest people for writing fake news stories.
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What we need is just some sort of, I mean, media literacy among our population.
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I mean, we need people to be, people need to understand that, you know, when they read
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something that's in the New York times or the Washington post, there's a much better
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chance it'll be true than if it comes from literature, Liberty writers, news.com.
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And it's just astounding to me that we have a society where there are so many people who
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Well, unfortunately every case of error or bias on the part of a institution like the New York
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times does so much damage to their credibility.
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And I mean, obviously there are people who are poised never to accept anything they say
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So those, those people may be irreclaimable, but still it's just to, to notice, I mean,
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cause we have people in, you know, on the op-ed page of the New York times, someone like Nick
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Who will reliably make the most charitable thing is to say an error of judgment about something
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relevant to Islamism say, you know, or, you know, he won't recognize that Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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He will, he will basically castigate her as a bigot.
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And as you probably know, the Southern Poverty Law Center just did this.
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They put together a list of quote, anti-Muslim extremists and Ayaan and Majid Nawaz are both
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The irony here is, is really painful because if ever we needed a clean and truly wise institution
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to combat right-wing extremism and racism in the U.S., right.
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We needed it now, post-election, but as far as I'm concerned, the Southern Poverty Law
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Center is, is irredeemable on the basis of this, the magnitude of this error and the fact
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that they have just doubled down on it and defended it.
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Yeah, I see them being, I see them being quoted a lot over the past couple of weeks and sort
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of the spike in hate crimes after Trump's election.
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And it really angers me for precisely the reason you say, because they are, they totally
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They slandered Majid and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who are heroes of liberalism, frankly.
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And so, yeah, they've totally lost credibility.
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And I think it's, it's, it's, it's a shame when, when institutions that should, you know,
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play that role, that constructive sort of arbiter role get tainted in that way.
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By their own doing, by their own doing, it's completely self-inflicted.
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But the problem is that, you know, it does come down on some basic level to intellectual
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I mean, it's, you know, if you made a mistake, right, well then, as long as your overriding
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goal is to correct your mistake as soon as it comes to light, right, and not be wrong
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any longer than you need to be, then basically everyone can forgive that.
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I mean, that's what, that's what every institution needs.
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And that's what a nonprofit like the Southern Poverty Law Center needs.
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And it would have been totally possible, I guess it's still possible for them to correct
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this error, and it's possible for someone like Nick Kristof to realize, oh, you know,
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I've been defending Islamists in many respects and castigating a truly courageous and victimized
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It would be possible to correct this error and issue the appropriate mea culpa, and the institution
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But either there's just, people have too much going on and they just can't, they can't take
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the time to figure out how they got things wrong, or they just, there's this all-too-human
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tendency to double down in the face of criticism, and it's really damaging.
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And it allows people to now, going forward, no longer distinguish between real journalistic
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enterprises that are trying to get the facts straight most of the time, and these confections
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of just teenage insanity, where literally you've got like 18-year-olds with their laptops
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Yeah, and what I worry about is that Trump is so awful, he's so manifestly awful, that
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I feel that a lot of our sort of mediating institutions are just going to kind of become less responsible.
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They're going to feel that they can kind of get away with more, perhaps.
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They might cover him in a more shrill, hyperbolic manner, because he's so bad, and they'll think
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There might be some, you know, curtailments of facts here and there.
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And I worry that sort of the average, decent, you know, liberal center is just getting lost
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in what's becoming almost a kind of Weimarization of American political discourse, where, you know,
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on the right, you have this sort of ethno-populist authoritarianism, and on the left, you know,
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it just seems that the Democrats, the lesson that they're taking from this election is, oh,
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well, we need to be even more left-wing, and we need to protest in the streets, and we need
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And that's, you know, and that's going to be our ticket forward.
00:26:39.100
And it's like, well, where are the people in the middle supposed to go?
00:26:41.440
Well, unfortunately, being in the middle, I can tell you personally what the inclination
00:26:47.220
It's to more or less change the subject and focus on other things.
00:26:51.580
So I just noticed how, again, this is kind of a psychological experiment being run hour
00:26:59.480
I see, like, when I see someone like, you know, David Frum, or somebody take another hard
00:27:05.640
Like, he'll send out an article revealing how Trump is showing that he's just going
00:27:10.840
to wring out every dollar from the family business in response to this opportunity.
00:27:16.860
And you've got Ivanka's jewelry company advertising the $11,000 bracelet she was wearing in the 60
00:27:25.940
And, you know, prior to the election, I would have circulated that stuff, too, because, you
00:27:31.420
know, anything I can do to put my shoulder to the wheel and stop this guy, right?
00:27:35.260
But now it just seems like I know what the consequences are.
00:27:38.800
You know, some significant percentage of the people following me are Trump supporters, and
00:27:45.560
And I will be, I will look boring and repetitive to some, and just totally ineffectual, and in
00:27:52.440
fact, be ineffectual to some significant percentage of the rest of the people following me.
00:27:56.860
And so it's sort of the avoidance of boredom and this hunger to be once again free to pay
00:28:08.780
Among other, many other things, Trump is one of the most boring people on earth.
00:28:13.720
Perversely, I mean, now we're through the looking glass, and it's hugely consequential, if not
00:28:19.900
interesting, that he now has the power or is about to have the power he will have.
00:28:24.780
But talk about someone who encapsulates basically the, he's like an intellectual vacuum, right?
00:28:31.800
I mean, there's just nothing there that you would want to spend any time on.
00:28:36.100
I feel myself kind of wanting to move on to other things and more or less just wanting
00:28:42.500
to hope that he's not as ignorant or as bad as he advertised himself to be.
00:28:51.100
And I was just wondering if you can comment on that, that mood that is growing in me, which
00:28:57.740
So yeah, I mean, I guess the danger is that we become apathetic, right?
00:29:00.960
That we just sort of, you know, we've lost and we just sort of tend to our gardens and
00:29:07.780
he goes on and does, you know, awful things and there's just less people to fight him because
00:29:17.420
On the other hand, I think, like you said, I think now that he's going to be in office,
00:29:24.520
we need to perhaps, you know, preserve our gunpowder for the real serious fights.
00:29:29.940
So, you know, perhaps the Ivanka jewelry marketing scandal, you know, maybe that's not really
00:29:41.840
I mean, similarly, there are a lot of people talking about over the weekend how Trump, you
00:29:46.940
know, was tweeting these attacks on the Hamilton cast for lecturing Mike Pence and how that coincided
00:29:53.840
with the $25 million settlement that he just made in the Trump University case.
00:29:59.280
And how that was sort of expertly timed to distract us, you know, he could distract us with this
00:30:05.540
silly scandal about Hamilton, while the real story is the fact that he just settled a fraud
00:30:12.600
So I think, I think we need to be, you know, vigilant in terms of where our outrage goes.
00:30:19.060
And in terms of Trump himself and how he performs, look, no one would be happier if he becomes
00:30:24.880
Harry Truman and just, you know, becomes this great president and surprises everyone.
00:30:30.540
But if it does happen, then I'll be the first person to admit it.
00:30:34.240
If that does happen now, what I think will have been lost is this sense of sort of honesty
00:30:43.760
I mean, maybe it's been gone already, but I just, I feel like if Donald Trump governs
00:30:48.120
as some sort of like Rockefeller Republican moderate, then like, what was the entire point
00:30:53.820
of that election when he got up there screaming and yelling about locking Hillary in prison and
00:30:59.480
the whole litany of things, it's like, then we've truly entered this postmodern era, right?
00:31:04.220
Where you can just get up and shout ridiculous things and just no one takes anyone seriously
00:31:09.940
That's something I commented on a couple of podcasts back, I think, after his acceptance
00:31:15.240
speech, which I found alarming just in how benign it was and how antithetical it was to
00:31:23.840
And I was just trying to take the position of a person who had voted for him.
00:31:28.640
And, you know, chanting, lock her up, lock her up as the happy mantra of the campaign.
00:31:35.220
What did it mean to that person to see Trump say nothing but good things about Hillary?
00:31:42.240
And today he said, yeah, today he said he's not going to pursue her.
00:31:45.060
So now we learn, you know, like, so like, who's the cuck now, right?
00:31:48.380
I mean, now we learn he's not going to do any of that, right?
00:31:53.420
So is there anyone who supported him rapidly who cares about this mismatch between who he
00:32:01.640
said he was and what he said he was committed to and what, in fact, appears to be true of
00:32:09.180
It's just this lack of concern about what's real and just this indulgence of the theater
00:32:18.520
It's just like, it doesn't matter as long as, as long as I'm up here on stage making
00:32:23.060
noise, I don't even have to speak in complete sentences.
00:32:26.900
And yes, I could shoot someone in Times Square and you're, you're all going to stay with me
00:32:33.320
And it's, it's just, this is not something that for all her flaws and for all her deceitfulness,
00:32:39.840
And all her guardedness with the media, this is not something that Hillary Clinton was remotely
00:32:47.660
I mean, it is, it'd be amazing for him to move forward and be essentially the Democrat
00:32:52.900
that everyone thinks is hiding in there, at least on most issues, and pursue a massive
00:32:58.180
infrastructure project that he manages to get through because the Republicans are now in
00:33:02.580
his thrall and then basically do, you know, eight out of 10 good things.
00:33:07.880
Although, again, I share your skepticism about whether it's possible.
00:33:12.180
And it seems that there's like two kinds of Trump supporters.
00:33:14.500
They're the ones who like fully believe and want him to carry out every kind of cockamamie
00:33:22.420
And then there are the more cynical ones, the operators, the ones in Washington, D.C., the
00:33:30.860
And these are the people, I think, who always knew that he was a bullshit artist, frankly,
00:33:37.300
but that he obviously clearly had some amazing ability to connect with people and they were
00:33:45.780
I'm not sure which is worse, you know, if you actually believe that he's going to deport
00:33:50.900
11 million people and, you know, all this nonsense, or if you, you know, you cynically
00:33:56.880
attach yourself to this because you want power.
00:33:59.340
I mean, they're not, neither of them are very good.
00:34:03.660
What I worry about is, you know, are these kind of radicalized people, if they don't
00:34:08.320
get what they want in a Trump, you know, how are they going to respond?
00:34:11.460
What's their, what's their next move going to be?
00:34:14.020
Do they become more radical right wing and go for someone, you know, some other demagogue
00:34:18.880
who comes along, or do they reconcile themselves to the reality of politics and basically agree
00:34:24.700
with him that, oh, you know, Trump's whole shtick was moving the Overton window, you know,
00:34:28.740
so we could, so we could get more money out of our NATO allies was, you know, the whole
00:34:32.580
purpose of threatening to leave NATO was to get them to pay up.
00:34:38.980
You might define Overton window for some listeners.
00:34:41.600
I think it's a little esoteric bit of internet knowledge.
00:34:44.120
Yeah, I guess I'm not sure where it kind of, maybe it was Glenn Backer.
00:34:47.040
I'm not sure exactly where it comes from, but it's basically this,
00:34:48.880
this notion that in, in politics or in negotiating, you initially come out with a, an extreme
00:34:58.020
position to sort of move the conversation more in your direction.
00:35:04.560
And it's also this notion of the window that bounds what is acceptable to talk about.
00:35:10.540
So it's like now, now it's acceptable to talk about deporting 11 million people, say, or,
00:35:20.320
Well, let's talk a little bit more about the Trump presidency before we talk about the
00:35:26.380
What are any of these appointments that he's made thus far as scary to you as they seem
00:35:34.500
I mean, Bannon is bad, but I think Steve Bannon is the former kind of, you know, overlord of
00:35:43.640
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