Matt Taibbi joins me to discuss the FBI s handling of the Trump assassination investigation, and why it may not have been as transparent as it should have been, and what we can learn from it about how the government tries to keep us in the dark about issues of public importance. Matt and I talk about the lack of transparency by the FBI, and how it affects our ability to know the truth about what's going on in the world, and about what we should be doing to make sure we're getting the most out of every piece of information we get from the government, and that we're being honest with ourselves and the public about the things we know and don't know about things that matter most to us, like the assassination of President Donald Trump. And, of course, we also talk about why the government should be transparent about the details of what it knows and doesn't tell us about things like that, and the role of journalists in getting the public the most accurate information they can get about those matters. And we talk about how government transparency goes hand in hand with it, and whether or not it's a good or bad thing, and where we should go to find out what's being told to us by the government about things we can't get right, or what we need to do to get the most of it, in order to be truly transparent about things of public matters and our most important information. and why we should ask for the most important things from government transparency including the truth from government. . The Assassination of Donald Trump, the truth and accountability and the truth, not just the truth in this episode of the truth . and much more to be more transparent on Assassination And much more. on this episode, including a new episode of Conspiracy Theories of The Dark Side of the Internet by Matt and his thoughts on the Trump Assassination, and much, much more! Subscribe to our new podcast, Assassination: The Podcast! and a new podcast called Assassination and the Assassination! Subscribe to Assassination? and more! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and other Podcasts! Subscribe on Podchaser and review our newest episode of Assassination Podcasts on the Podcasts by The FiveThirtyEight on the Four Corners Podcasts Podcasts for more Assassination is a must-listen to the latest Assassination Nation Podcast
Transcript
Transcripts from "Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. You can also explore and interact with the transcripts here.
00:00:00.000So my guest today is Matt Taibbi, one of the few actual journalists left in the world, and I was looking forward to this conversation.
00:00:06.000It wasn't going to be tied to the news, but it turns out that a lot of news has happened in the last 24 hours, and even as this recording is happening within hours of it, that I can't help but make that the focus of what we're about to discuss.
00:00:20.000The first is the appearance that the FBI has, big surprise, not been honest with the public.
00:00:26.000Certainly not fully straightforward based on some recent facts that we've learned about what they know about the Trump would be assassin or the person who at least attempted the assassination on Donald Trump.
00:00:40.000What we've learned, and it's still in real time coming out, is that at least Gab, one of the organizations, social media networks that received an emergency document request from the FBI, suggested that they knew or believed that the account that belonged to Crooks, the alleged assassin, Actually was posting very different things than what the FBI publicly stated.
00:01:02.000So it's interesting to get to the bottom of what's going on there.
00:01:05.000And it's all against the backdrop of a week where leveling the term weird has become the Democrats' principal political strategy, which I think is actually not only a little bit weird in its own right, but more importantly, it's anti-American at its core and rankles me in ways that I think we ought to discuss in greater depth than just knee-jerk reactions.
00:01:27.000So, a lot to talk about, but instead of the usual conversation we were about to have, Matt, I'll bring on my guest, Matt Taibbi, who I had a chance to meet recently at the Republican convention.
00:01:37.000We struck up conversation, and this is an outgrowth and a follow-up to that.
00:01:41.000But, Matt, welcome to my podcast, and I'm excited to chat with you about some subjects that might have been a little bit different than what we were planning on.
00:01:49.000No, thanks for having me on, and good to see you again, Mr. Ramaswamy.
00:01:53.000That was a pleasure to meet you last week, or I guess it was two weeks ago now.
00:01:58.000So what do you make of this, you know, obviously we don't have all of the facts yet, but the appearance that we didn't really get necessarily the full truth of what the FBI knew or even what their full beliefs were.
00:02:11.000And in particular, from your vantage point as a longer-time journalist studying Government transparency goes at the heart of a political journalist.
00:02:20.000How does this fit into a broader history of what we know about how the government really does or doesn't tell the truth to us about issues of public importance?
00:02:29.000Well, I think it says a lot about a lot of things, actually.
00:02:33.000The FBI has Transformed itself into a different kind of organization, really since the beginning of the war on terror years.
00:02:44.000After the hearings in the 70s about the reform of the intelligence community, the FBI essentially became almost entirely a law enforcement agency.
00:02:58.000It could not conduct investigations without some kind of predicate that had to demonstrate that.
00:03:06.000That changed really in the Bush years.
00:03:09.000There was a series of directives that allowed them to essentially conduct investigations without any real important cause.
00:03:18.000And the agency has really become much more of a counterintelligence, intelligence gathering agency as opposed to a law enforcement body that just investigates crimes and tries to gather evidence.
00:03:46.000And the problem for us as journalists is that the FBI, I mean, I've dealt with them a few times over the years, the FBI, DOJ. Once upon a time, you know, if they could, they would give you information, but it would always be, you know, here's what we found out.
00:04:04.000They were not being political very often in the way that they would disseminate information.
00:04:10.000That wasn't really part of their mission.
00:04:12.000That wasn't the way they wanted to be perceived either.
00:04:15.000Now, in the wake of the Trump assassination, there's this crazy symbiosis between a press that doesn't really do any work and the FBI, which You know, issues these completely nonsensical, off-the-record statements, well, they'll tell people, like, we've done 100 interviews, but we have absolutely no information about what the possible motive is, which is completely impossible.
00:04:41.000Anybody who's done 100 interviews with people who've known the suspect will have some kind of idea.
00:04:47.000Yeah, they'll have a theory, and now this new thing where they, you know, they affirmatively tell the public, they're trying to convince us that Oh, absolutely.
00:05:08.000I mean, I think that The deeper issue that animates my own pursuits, whatever they are going forward, is the people we elect to run the government are absolutely not the ones running the government today, which creates a complete loss of accountability that rejects the project of the American Revolution.
00:05:25.000But as it relates to the FBI in particular, I actually agree with almost all of your telling of it.
00:05:31.000The only part where I depart from this As a student of the history of this institution is actually the idea that it began this pivot in the aftermath of 9-11 and the Bush-Cheney new neoconservative national security state.
00:05:47.000I think you're right about the shift from being an investigator of a specific alleged crime or an enforcer or an enforcement body to being a general purpose investigative unit.
00:05:59.000I think that that's largely accurate as I understand it as well.
00:06:01.000There's a longer history, though, that the lawless nature of the culture of the institution, one that views the law as a constraint rather than a motivator.
00:06:14.000It's one thing if you're a law enforcement body, maybe you view the law as your motivation.
00:06:17.000Your motivation as an organization, your organizational raison d'etre, reason for existence, is to enforce the law.
00:06:23.000That might be what most Americans think is the purpose of federal law enforcement.
00:06:28.000But it's a different thing if you have a federal law enforcement body that views the law as a constraint, an inconvenience on its behavior, but its reason for existence is something else altogether.
00:06:36.000That I don't think is just uniquely true post the Bush years, though it's true certainly after the Bush years.
00:06:42.000That dates back to J. Edgar Hoover and an FBI that largely has existed the way that you and I know it probably is, probably the closer to the better part of the century.
00:06:57.000So in the 70s, I mean, but you're right, absolutely.
00:07:00.000If you go back to the 60s, you know, the politicized surveillance of, you know, American politicians, you know, infiltration of Dissident groups, all kinds of things that have nothing to do with law enforcement.
00:07:17.000J. Edgar Hoover building files on, you know, OPPO files on every politician that came up through the pipeline.
00:07:26.000That's absolutely part of the Bureau's history.
00:07:29.000I just think, you know, after the 70s, you know, I got to know some FBI agents over the years.
00:07:37.000A lot of people who were kind of like...
00:07:41.000More on the traditional investigatory bank robbery side, that kind of stuff.
00:07:50.000And they saw their jobs as being basically cop jobs.
00:07:56.000And then there was a disenchantment, and I've known some people more recently who left the FBI, who I don't like this new direction that the Bureau is taking, where they're going very heavily in the direction of just counterintelligence.
00:08:12.000One agent talked to me about having to post up outside of some January 6th defendant's house, and he's like, this is a misdemeanor crime.
00:08:44.000I went down to visit him, talked to some other folks.
00:08:48.000But I've known FBI people going back to the war on 9-11, and there's been frustration for a lot of reasons, just in the changes within the Bureau.
00:09:00.000There's been this tension, but now the Bureau is completely a different organization.
00:09:05.000Yeah, and anybody who might at least have visceral doubts about the kinds of views you're sharing here or views I've shared, I'd just say history is actually a pretty interesting lens through which to view the present.
00:09:36.000It's just a pretty down the fairway, very interesting, detail-rich account of a lot of the history of this institution that once you read that, all of the things that you would think that are unimaginable are not only true, It's far more expansive than you could ever imagine, which then raises the question of why one...
00:09:58.000It's not a left or right thing, but why one would believe that at this unique point in history, the very institution that was built...
00:10:07.000And institutions have a culture about them.
00:10:08.000It's still the J. Edgar Hoover Building of the FBI, for example.
00:10:10.000That's their main office in D.C. Why it is you would believe that in this moment, the unthinkable is something that actually has been the normal part of the history of this institution for...
00:10:21.000You know, a century, it causes you to sort of check some of your own present-oriented biases.
00:10:27.000But anyway, put that aside, I just recommend that as a book that I think is pretty cool and interesting.
00:10:33.000I mean, you don't have to read the whole thing, but you'll get a good amount even just reading through some of it.
00:10:38.000You know, I guess my question is, in your own experience, because you have been certainly a journalist and observer of the relationship between government and its citizenry for a longer period of time than I have.
00:10:51.000I took a detour away from paying attention to these issues.
00:10:53.000I was in the world of business for a while.
00:10:57.000What is your estimation of the scale of abuse, civil libertarian abuse?
00:11:04.000Through non-transparency going along with that, in the immediate post 9-11 aftermath, sort of in the Bush years, versus like where we are today.
00:11:13.000Forget the partisan nature of which way it leans, but more just the magnitude or the magnitude of concern about the lawlessness or the fundamental absence of commitment to being constrained by the rule of law.
00:11:27.000Like how would you rate that in the 2000s versus your estimation of where we are today?
00:11:35.000There's only limited evidence to go on, and I think it's a great question, but my sense is that it's epidemic now and that it wasn't maybe even five, six, seven years ago.
00:11:47.000But we've had stories come out in the Trump era that have suggested all kinds of problems.
00:11:55.000I think you can see with the unmasking requests with FISA, right?
00:12:00.000That's sort of domestic political surveillance, abuse of that system.
00:12:04.000We had already seen that there were massive violations of FISA, you know, going back to Inspector General reports, even dating back to the Bush era.
00:12:14.000But now it seems like that system is completely out of control.
00:12:18.000The Twitter files showed that the FBI is engaging in wholesale meddling in the domestic speech environment.
00:12:28.000They're representing to the public that they're worried about foreign interference, but they're watching domestic Twitter accounts that have eight followers.
00:12:37.000And that was part of the shock that we all felt when we were looking through those emails.
00:12:43.000So I think there's all kinds of problems.
00:12:45.000And this thing that happened today, it's another example of Wow, they're really getting involved in domestic politics in a way that I don't remember happening in my lifetime.
00:12:57.000So, it's funny you bring up the domestic interference in our own body politic.
00:13:07.000The debate about whether to ban TikTok.
00:13:09.000At first, they'll say it's not a ban or whatever it is.
00:13:11.000But anyway, the premise was we don't want foreign governmental interference in our own domestic politics or our own domestic polity, what tilts the scales of what people can or can't see.
00:13:26.000And yet, if you go back to that era, and this goes back to one of your, you know, obviously hallmark contributions in the last several years, which is the Twitter files— But if you look back at what happened there, was there a government coordinated cover-up job on a question such as the origin of COVID-19 from China?
00:13:52.000Was the public protected or restricted from seeing that information by a government actor using these tech companies as a backdoor to effectuate it?
00:14:01.000But it wasn't really the CCP and TikTok.
00:14:04.000It was actually, in that particular case, the U.S. government effectively pressuring U.S.-based companies through the back door to not only censor all kinds of information, but in this particular instance, one that actually had the effect of protecting the CCP from its own accountability, which I just thought was a reversal of what our own expectations are.
00:14:23.000I guess the way I would say it, Matt, is we tend to be far more alert as a people To some sort of foreign government messing around with us.
00:14:32.000And I say this as a citizen who doesn't want some foreign government meddling in what I can or cannot do on my own soil of my homeland.
00:15:41.000When you talk about the Secret Service or what the Interior Ministry does.
00:15:47.000They understand that abuses happen and they know basically where they're coming from and they have this kind of sanguine understanding of what government does.
00:15:59.000Americans are completely, they have this sort of almost virginal belief in the purity of their system.
00:16:12.000But I mean, I remember Russians just laughing at me when I would, you know, describe, for instance, what the FBI or CIA did or rules that we allegedly followed, like, you know, how naive are you?
00:16:23.000And so this whole period, you know, I think in the Trump era, for me as a journalist, it's been disillusioning.
00:16:31.000I think for the general public, it has been too.
00:16:33.000I mean, you brought up the COVID situation.
00:16:37.000When we were doing the Twitter files, we found evidence of the government trying from multiple angles to influence the COVID story.
00:16:46.000They did it through The Virality Project, which was sponsored by a number of different government agencies through Stanford.
00:16:53.000There was the Global Engagement Center, which is a Technically, it's part of the State Department, but it was pressuring Twitter to take down certain posts that it didn't like, sent them lists of 6,000 accounts that it wanted taken off the platform.
00:17:11.000There was pressure from the DHS, pressure from the FBI. I mean, it was coming from all different angles.
00:17:19.000I remember growing up, it was a big story when the FBI wrote one letter to the record company that put out NWA asking them not to put out a certain single.
00:17:31.000And here you have thousands of these letters, right?
00:17:34.000So it's a completely different ballgame.
00:17:37.000Americans haven't caught up to that yet.
00:17:50.000So in some ways, I don't want to exaggerate my level of knowledge here to draw this theory.
00:17:59.000But do you think this is a matter of I'm going to offer it as a theory and you tell me whether you think it's just true or off the wall?
00:18:06.000Do you think that in some ways, right, I'm going to assume that the magnitude of government overreach from legal or constitutional constraint, like the amount of that overreach is far greater in Russia in the time you spent there than here.
00:18:20.000But do you think that even against that backdrop, the danger to the citizenry Might actually in certain ways be worse here because we are conditioned not to already be in on the game, right?
00:18:33.000In a certain sense, you know, you watch the movie The Lives of Others or whatever, like it's kind of a depressing state when the...
00:18:44.000It's like an awesome, well done, not too heavy, not on the nose, but just like there's a certain existential melancholy where you just know that like you're being surveilled, but you've just sort of accepted it.
00:18:55.000I actually think that's an important movie for Americans to watch now.
00:19:08.000But anyway, it's like what East Germany was like, you know, back in the day.
00:19:14.000But here, you know, we don't have that melancholy spirit, but in a certain sense, we're just then, like, oblivious that, okay, maybe the magnitude of government overreach beyond the limits of legal constitutional restraint are greater in Russia, but people know what's going on, so there's no lie, right?
00:19:27.000There's no fundamental dishonesty, but the slate of hand, in some ways, actually leaves us, through the blitheness of our ignorance or willful blindness, to our own government's non-zero overreach, as Actually, in some ways, is more liberty restraining just because of the sheer absence of knowledge of it.
00:19:46.000Is that a bridge too far, or do you think that that's not a crazy point?
00:20:08.000So, when I got there, I remember this very vividly.
00:20:13.000There was a Russian student in my dorm, and he had bought a newspaper, and I was curious what he was reading, and he's like, oh, I didn't buy this to read.
00:20:24.000He went upstairs, and he was stuffing his winter coat with the pages of the newspaper because he wanted extra insulation.
00:21:05.000We are not conditioned to look at our systems of media with the same kind of suspicion that is drilled into people who've lived in a society like that and they know how it works.
00:21:19.000We think we have this very functional free press.
00:21:22.000And I think we did have a very relatively strong press for a long time.
00:21:28.000It's just that it's slid so much in the last 10 years.
00:21:32.000And we're in this place where, as you say, Americans are just defenseless against this kind of thing because they've never seen it before or they don't think they have.
00:21:43.000And also, you know, the American intelligence services and our systems of media, we're just much more They're much more powerful, sophisticated, you know, they have more resources than a country like Russia does to pull off certain things.
00:23:41.000But the lasting impression for me is just that when those rights went away, when they were unable to do that anymore, it doesn't come back.
00:23:51.000And I think that's another thing Americans don't realize, is that when this stuff ends, you can't just turn on a switch and go back to having a free press again.
00:24:17.000That's my only experience, but I would imagine.
00:24:19.000Do you think that actually raises an interesting question right now?
00:24:23.000As much as we complain about, people like you and I maybe at least complain about Some of the governmental abuses and everything you see in the Twitter files, the backdoor government action to evade accountability.
00:24:35.000Is part of the problem anymore that actually the ordinary citizenry just doesn't actually maybe care as much as we once might have?
00:24:46.000That might have been the greatest check on government power as a citizenry that actually cared about its liberties.
00:24:53.000Do you sense a greater sense of It's a vast generalization, but a greater sense of acceptance or a greater sense of agnosticism to say, okay, well, I'd still rather...
00:25:08.000Be controlled in this way as long as I'm getting the advertisements I want to look at and my life is a little bit more convenient.
00:25:13.000And if part of this trade-off is I don't have to pay a monthly credit card fee to access these platforms.
00:25:18.000If the rest of this is just part of what I'm trading off in that bargain, like, I guess I don't love it, but I'm kind of cool with it.
00:25:24.000And I'm certainly not going to start an American Revolution over it in a way that our founding fathers might have in 1776. Well...
00:26:05.000I mean, every single, you know, sort of political thriller, you know, the villain was a speech-suppressing Republican, and, you know, the hero was the civil liberties lawyer.
00:26:20.000You know, fresh out of college and all that.
00:26:25.000Somewhere between the Bush years and now, all the people who had those beliefs completely flipped.
00:26:32.000They changed their attitude towards the First Amendment.
00:26:36.000People would have done anything to protect it, I feel like, 20, 30 years ago, and that's all gone.
00:26:42.000Now, you see It's been kind of amazing and heartening for me to see that, you know, conservatives are up in arms about threats to the Bill of Rights.
00:26:57.000If they weren't, you know, I think the situation would be so much worse right now.
00:27:02.000I think my assessment, I mean, speaking as sort of, you know, right of center, you know, myself, Republican candidate for president, Republican, whatever that label means.
00:27:13.000I would say that the left's abandonment of its interest in free speech protection is far more pronounced than the conservative embrace of it.
00:27:37.000The commitment to free speech is no longer a Democrat or liberal or progressive value in America.
00:27:43.000To the contrary, if you had to pick what the progressive value is, it is the protectionist instinct, information protectionist instinct to the public to say that too much free speech is actually going to be dangerous.
00:27:54.000I think that is a committed, now left-wing position, where the committed left-wing principle position used to be free exchange of ideas.
00:28:00.000I think on the conservative side, I think you've seen...
00:28:03.000Part of this is like, okay, well, if they're doing that, then, you know, it's a reactionary response.
00:28:08.000Second is conservatives, it so happens in the latest iteration of it.
00:28:11.000Study history, it hasn't always been this way, but the latest iteration have been the victims of it, so then there's a reactionary response there, too.
00:28:17.000But I think it is an open question, if I'm being, you know, kind of calling it straight from where I see it, of what the modern conservative movement's actual push-come-to-shove level of commitment to True free speech actually is.
00:28:30.000I am on the right as a, I would say, unapologetic, unrestrained advocate for making this part of the Republican Party's vision and platform, not just the Republican Party, but the modern conservative movement.
00:28:43.000But I think it is an open question, right, how committed they are.
00:28:48.000So I think it's just a deadweight loss where the left has abandoned it and the right has not totally embraced it, but it's partially embraced it, which I'm glad about.
00:29:26.000I think there's an opportunity here, not just like a moral...
00:29:31.000But there's an opportunity politically for the Republicans to own this issue, you know, to be champions of something that's always been popular in America.
00:29:41.000Americans, you know, this is a core value of this country.
00:29:47.000One of the reasons that we never had this happen before is because Republicans and Democrats, people just didn't like meddling with the basics of the First Amendment.
00:30:00.000It was politically not terribly possible, right?
00:30:27.000So, yeah, and conversely, the other thing is just not in our tradition and, you know, The bulk of people are not going to be for that.
00:30:37.000Because the idea of having a vanguard class that decides what you can and cannot see, what you're smart enough or able enough to handle, it's so insulting to the bulk of people.
00:30:51.000I think getting on the other side of that only makes political sense.
00:30:57.000Yeah, it makes political sense, I think.
00:31:26.000But the expression of an opinion, any opinion goes.
00:31:29.000Which, though, if we're really prepared to, if you will, swallow that pill, I think, you know, Burning the flag is protected speech, right?
00:31:39.000I think the campus protests, even standing up for heinous views of Hamas or whoever, if you're expressing that opinion, you're not free to commit violence, you're not free to physically obstruct people from going to classrooms.
00:31:52.000But the expression of the opinion is kind of...
00:31:57.000If it doesn't feel unfortunate at times, you're not doing it right.
00:32:01.000And so I do think that that is a question where I think conservatives are really grappling with where we land.
00:32:07.000And I'm not sure that it's going to be unified necessarily.
00:32:09.000I think that we live in a moment where there are sort of weird And alliances, even if we're unwilling to admit that in the open between people who may think they're on the left or on the right on some of these questions relating to, you know, from foreign interventionist policy to the domestic surveillance state, I think those are probably some of the biggest areas for some realignments that I think are still very much in process, actually.
00:32:39.000Don't you think that the traditional ideas of left and right are kind of meaningless now?
00:33:39.000I mean, even in the Republican primary, some of the people I was running against at the time was a real source of ideological division even within a party.
00:33:51.000And I think that that makes it just an interesting time to be in American politics, actually.
00:34:42.000Yesterday, yeah, they had a story yesterday where the headline was, I think it was J.D. Vance and his Silicon Valley billionaire weirdos want to cut taxes.
00:34:51.000Before that, it was, you know, Vance's downright weird was in the headline.
00:34:58.000And then, you know, almost on cue, you'll see, you know, every Democratic politician using that phrase.
00:35:05.000But the really damning thing for me is seeing all the people in the media Use the same words.
00:35:13.000And, you know, you just can't have that.
00:35:16.000It's such a bad look for the news media to not appear to be independent from a political party.
00:35:22.000To play along with the talkers, right?
00:35:53.000I mean, who's being convinced by that?
00:35:57.000I guess it's a very interesting question.
00:35:58.000I think it comes back to this question of who's being convinced by that.
00:36:02.000I think part of the problem, Matt, might be that a good number of people are convinced by it, actually.
00:36:07.000And I just think the problem comes back...
00:36:10.000People like you and I are often so focused on institutional failure that we forget just broader, pervasive civic failure of our citizenry.
00:36:19.000It's like Jefferson's famous quote, you get the government, whatever, the government you deserve is the government you elect, and the government you elect is the government you deserve.
00:36:27.000And in some sense, I think that the fact that people do fall for it is kind of what makes it work, is a sort of kind of pervasive laziness and lethargic tendency in the American civic spirit right now.
00:36:41.000I don't mean to be a downer about it, but I just think that that kind of is true even outside of institutional failure.
00:38:41.000It is a disappointing form of American political argument to make.
00:38:46.000Because A, it's actually just anti-exceptionalism, right?
00:38:49.000It's against exceptionalism on its own terms.
00:38:51.000Like a guy like Pete Buttigieg, when I saw him on the weekend, right, on one of these shows, talking about J.D. Vance and Donald Trump is weird.
00:38:58.000It just felt disappointing to me, right?
00:39:00.000Because this is a guy I knew in college.
00:39:02.000He was a senior when I was a freshman, so I knew him and knew of him better than he knew of me.
00:39:07.000But I remember being like, okay, I respect this guy.
00:39:10.000He wasn't somebody who would say, okay, somebody who disagrees with me is weird.
00:39:15.000And yet, part of the reason why is he was obviously, probably like me too, right?
00:39:20.000Like weird in a sense of just being, in his case...
00:39:24.000In Indiana, in the 90s, hyper-achieving, scholastic overachiever, shockingly articulate, gay, at a Catholic school that went to Harvard.
00:39:36.000And you substitute Indian American for gay and Ohio for Indiana.
00:39:40.000It's not that different than my own background, right?
00:39:49.000It's just weird referring to what reference point, right?
00:39:52.000Normal relative to what reference point.
00:39:54.000Whereas America is a country where we are unafraid to be weird.
00:39:58.000Our founding fathers, I wasn't joking before, were weird relative to the mores of their times because that's part of what American exceptionalism is about.
00:40:04.000So it just seems like such a particularly un-American expletive or disparaging comment to level against your opponent, as though it's like less about, I'm worried about Republicans.
00:40:18.000I'm worried about like that word being deemed a bad thing.
00:40:21.000America's weirdness relative to human history is part of what makes us us.
00:40:26.000I mean, one of my heroes, Hunter Thompson, he said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
00:40:30.000That was like a cool thing back in the day.
00:41:47.000Don't agree with that because I favor American exceptionalism and I also think about normal relative to what standard.
00:41:53.000And so like my issues with some of the trans overreach or whatever relate to the negative effects it has on children or increasing the rates of gender dysphoria.
00:42:03.000So if by premise gender dysphoria is a condition of suffering, then if you're going out of your way to create more of it, that is by definition then or by obvious logic a bad thing.
00:42:13.000Like that I think is the form of argument.
00:42:20.000And I think that part of what's happening right now is you're actually seeing a lot of that Republican response to say, oh, you're calling us weird?
00:42:25.000Well, look at all of these things that you're doing that are weird in return.
00:42:28.000It feels to me just like the wrong form of argument rather than like an argument of the wrong kind.
00:42:34.000If national unity is at all something we remotely care about, right?
00:42:38.000If the election gets decided, and it acknowledges about 70 million people on each side of this, if the election gets decided based on one side winning, the argument of which other side was weird, and Republicans, I believe, and be advised to have at least as strong of a claim in return, it just doesn't seem like a good place to go in the character of national discourse or the future direction of a nation, right?
00:43:03.000As opposed to a nation that isn't one nation anymore and might be two nations of, you know, weird, seen as weird from the other side, but normal from within.
00:43:11.000I don't think that's what we want to see the country become.
00:43:24.000I've heard it theorized that The Democrats realize that the constant accusations of racism, sexism, misogyny are beginning to fall on deaf ears, that people don't like that as a campaigning tactic.
00:43:38.000So they're rolling this out as a new way of trying to Put the public relations ick on the Republican Party.
00:43:48.000You know, it's a different kind of word shaming.
00:44:39.000Well, those are the people who actually go on to create things that improve humanity in our lives at times.
00:44:45.000And that's America, the place where you get to thrive.
00:44:49.000Joseph Priestley came to this country because he had weird beliefs by the standards of the Anglican Church, and he was received by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in Pennsylvania.
00:45:01.000He came here for the freedom to be weird, and they welcomed him because that's America.
00:45:06.000And so to level that as a charge, as a disqualifying charge, I just think is disappointing, actually, to me, is how I feel about it.
00:45:16.000Yeah, we've had that streak all through our history.
00:45:20.000How many different kinds of You know, kooky, utopian thinkers came to America to try to build societies that anybody would characterize as strange.
00:45:58.000I just think that that's probably the right answer is it's not a pejorative, right?
00:46:02.000And even if you think about the stuff JD was talking about.
00:46:05.000The sad part about this is in the wake of this, nobody actually will talk about anything other than the actual fertility crisis, which is we're well below replacement rate.
00:46:14.000You're going to have two workers for every retiree, which is considered crisis level, by 2060, which is, you know, God willing, within our own lifetimes.
00:46:23.000Although that is a disaster for a country, and nobody has a plausible or the first beginnings of a plausible solution to that question.
00:46:30.000And so maybe you like J.D. Vance's solutions and maybe you don't.
00:46:32.000If you don't like him, debate the solutions.
00:46:33.000But instead we've ignored the entire question by calling the whole thing weird.
00:46:37.000And I still think that's constructive, just in a very pragmatic sense, for a country that wants to solve some major problems that it's up against.
00:47:12.000You know, even when Biden, like I'll pick an example, right?
00:47:15.000Like it's easier to sort of pick on the other side, but like even when Biden said something like, if you don't vote for me, then you ain't black.
00:47:22.000I mean, it's kind of annoying, but he was also speaking in jest, right?
00:47:27.000And so that did not become the cultural phenomenon in the same way as like childless cat ladies did.
00:47:33.000And so it sort of is a bit of an evisceration of the possibility of humor, at least in certain contexts, too, which I do think is actually a separate cultural risk that we face, too.
00:47:47.000I also think it touched a nerve because there's a little bit of discussion within the Democratic left about this issue.
00:47:55.000Remember, James Carville brought it up.
00:48:29.000Yeah, I mean, I'm just curious, you don't have to share with me, or maybe you haven't decided yet, but do you have a sense for, just as a citizen, taking your journalist hat off, do you have a sense for how you might vote amongst the options available this year?
00:48:45.000Well, I can say I'm not going to vote for the Democrats, I think.
00:49:43.000Yes, I think I voted in both the 96 and 2000 elections from there.
00:49:51.000That's an interesting thing too because I remember how rigorous the absentee ballot process was and I'm just now having to learn.
00:50:03.000One of the things I'm going to start working on is You know, election security, because I know it's going to be so controversial no matter what happens in November.
00:50:28.000They actually have single-day voting, make Election Day a holiday.
00:50:32.000They have a lot of levels of protections.
00:50:35.000I think often when you go to the sites, they make you put your finger in a die such that if you go to another site to know that you didn't vote on that same day.
00:50:46.000I picked this up when I traveled there earlier this year and met with a lot of leaders locally just to understand how things work.
00:50:55.000And one of the biggest takeaways is, even for people who say, oh, this concern about election integrity is overblown.
00:51:01.000What I'll wait for is, what is the best counterargument to, in a moment where there's at least a loss of public trust, to at least taking certain basic steps that would shore up public trust?
00:51:11.000And I think that there's something to be said for a case for ritual.
00:51:15.000A, for actually what the ritual accomplishes.
00:51:17.000I mean, it's not like we're not asking people to, I don't know, do cartwheels and take, you know, foot showers before they vote.
00:51:24.000We're asking them to show their ID, which relates to the act of voting.
00:51:27.000But I think having it as a national holiday and a ritual that you go through almost creates a greater sense of civic duty and commitment.
00:51:35.000It's also something that enhances the public trust itself.
00:51:39.000Like, even if, for those who, I'm not one of them, but even for those who would argue that it doesn't improve the actual integrity of the results by that much, at a moment of doubt, why not take a unifying, non-controversial step?
00:51:53.000And then, you know, take every increment you can.
00:51:55.000It's something so important that you might as well want it to be as accurate as you possibly could want.
00:52:00.000That, to me, I think is as much the question of The solidarity we get in moving past what otherwise is a very risky issue is public concern and trust in elections, that I'm open to the best arguments for the other side, but I haven't yet heard them in terms of moving to single-day voting on Election Day, make it a national holiday, make government-issued ID a requirement to vote.
00:52:30.000And, you know, I think if we ever got there, I certainly would commit for my part to be as loud of a voice as I could to the Republican base or any other that we are done complaining about concerns about election integrity if we get to that, if we get to that place where we say we've taken the steps that one recently can to be confident.
00:52:51.000Are you in favor of automatic voter registration?
00:52:56.000I think that there's something to be said for the civic act of going through the process of, you know, largely for practical reasons, because then you can be registered in multiple places.
00:53:06.000Puerto Rico does not have that either.
00:53:08.000So it's a good case study of Puerto Rico.
00:53:11.000I think that I am in favor of debureaucratizing anything that does not actually help the ultimate act of Knowing whether the right person voted in the right place.
00:53:23.000I don't want an iota more of bureaucracy than is required to achieve that goal.
00:53:27.000But I want enough verification to know that the person who's actually voting is voting in one place is alive and is indeed the person who shows up at the ballot and is a citizen of this country.
00:53:37.000I actually come around to being in favor of English as the sole language that appears on a ballot as well.
00:53:45.000And I think there are deep discussions to be had of saying that Look, if we require, like think of what we require of an immigrant, a legal immigrant, before they can cast a ballot.
00:53:54.000You could have paid millions of dollars in taxes sitting in Silicon Valley or elsewhere.
00:53:57.000You're still not able to cast a ballot legally until you have taken an oath of loyalty to the United States of America and passed a civics test that says you know the first thing about what's going on in the United States of America.
00:54:09.000I don't think it's crazy to talk about whether these should be basic requirements to graduate from high school in the country to become a full citizen in the United States either.
00:54:18.000And so I think that that would unite the country, actually.
00:54:21.000And I do think that the revival of like civic ritual, even a day where we say that this is the day where we carry out our civic duty, and then attach all of the integrity-enhancing components, not as like box-checking exercises for just technical confidence in the results, but actually even a unifying civic ritual that brings us together.
00:54:39.000I think there's an opportunity to do both of those things at once.
00:54:43.000And I don't think it's as far out of reach as we make it out to be.
00:54:48.000I think it would have broad appeal, too.
00:54:54.000It's drilled into Democrats when you're coming up and you're young and an activist that any kind of Any step that might slow down someone's ability to vote is like dog whistle, racism, any kind of voter ID requirement.
00:55:20.000But really, when you think about it, it's ridiculous.
00:55:24.000We require now very hardcore ID to get on a plane.
00:55:36.000The requirement, it shouldn't be a big deal that you should have to prove who you are to vote.
00:55:43.000And also, I don't think it's a big deal to ask somebody to go vote.
00:55:48.000Neither of those things seems like a huge ask to me.
00:55:52.000And then there's the further, we're getting into spicier territory, but whatever we require of an immigrant, if you believe in that logic, should we ask more of ourselves as well?
00:56:04.000And do we think our nation will be better off for it?
00:56:06.000I think that these are at least questions worth discussing.
00:56:10.000I mean, yes, if they have to go through all these different hoops, Conversely though, I think that there should be something stronger than just having to check a box that you're a citizen.
00:56:22.000At least there should be some kind of post-factum process for reviewing that and making sure that the person who checks that box actually is one.
00:56:37.000I also think that even if you voted in the election of another country, you shouldn't be able to vote in the election of the United States as well, right?