Valuetainment - November 08, 2026


Pete Buttigieg Explains How the Right Used Gramsci’s Ideas to Beat the Left

Pete Buttigieg WARNS Capitalism Could Threaten Democracy Did the Left Push the LGBTQ Agenda Too Far？

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

195.74

Word count

2,188

Sentence count

98

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Your father was a professor at Notre Dame, and he was a big supporter of Antonio Gramsci.
00:00:04.720 You can correct me on any time what I'm saying, but this is what I've read from the internet.
00:00:08.140 And Gramsci is an interesting guy, right?
00:00:10.640 Very much of a, probably a pro-communist himself.
00:00:14.460 Some of the leanings that he had, Marxist, whatever you want to call it.
00:00:17.420 And some would even sell it.
00:00:18.560 He was more influential than Marx was because he was able to bring it into the systems.
00:00:24.180 And when you study the guy, you're like, all right, the whole hegemony, you know, what's going to happen again?
00:00:28.600 First get the kids, let's win the teachers over, let's get the kids, and then send them to different industries, and then keep replicating this, and then eventually we'll get enough people that want to be communists, all this stuff.
00:00:38.420 What part of your dad's admiration for Antonio Gramsci, because you've said good things about your dad that he was a big influence in your life.
00:00:48.440 What did you debate with your dad and say, Dad, I disagree with the following philosophies that Antonio Gramsci had?
00:00:53.180 Oh, we debated all the time. We used to have, I think that's how I learned to debate was obviously I love my father arguing with my father. Usually it'd be after dinner. We'd have dinner, sometimes him, but usually my mom would do the cooking. But he and I were in charge of the dishwashing and we'd start dishwashing. I'm bringing him the dishes. I'm loading the dishwasher. He's scrubbing the pots and pans and we get arguing about something. And usually not always, but usually it was him being a little more politically left than I was and us kind of hashing it out.
00:01:23.180 He was somebody who was pretty skeptical of communist governments.
00:01:27.080 He was extremely skeptical of Cuba, the Soviet Union, but he was a scholar of Gramsci.
00:01:34.380 And so, like you said, Antonio Gramsci is a leftist Italian thinker.
00:01:38.360 He did most of his work in prison.
00:01:41.280 Mussolini, the fascist dictator, locked him up.
00:01:44.100 And he spent most of his life writing in these little notebooks in prison that eventually got smuggled out.
00:01:49.660 and what he wrote turned out to be pretty important.
00:01:53.240 Your father translated it out.
00:01:54.600 Yeah, yeah, he translated many of those notebooks.
00:01:56.660 It went everywhere, went everywhere.
00:01:58.100 And the really interesting thing is
00:01:59.660 most of the people in America right now
00:02:02.220 who have put Gramsci's ideas into practice
00:02:05.020 are on the right.
00:02:06.860 So you look at Breitbart, for example.
00:02:09.680 Breitbart was famously somebody
00:02:11.140 who paid a lot of attention to Gramsci.
00:02:13.060 Now, this isn't just in the US.
00:02:14.380 In Hungary, Viktor Orban actually wrote his thesis
00:02:16.220 on Gramsci.
00:02:17.520 In Italy right now, there's a minister
00:02:19.320 in the Maloney government who wrote a whole book on Gramsci.
00:02:22.700 So even though Gramsci was a leftist,
00:02:24.560 most of the people who have used his ideas recently
00:02:27.120 have been on the right.
00:02:29.360 And as a leftist, I think my dad would probably be rolling over in his grave
00:02:32.520 if he knew that it was really Trumpism
00:02:35.740 that kind of beat the left to some of these insights.
00:02:38.940 For example, one of these sayings that's attributed to Breitbart,
00:02:42.020 politics is downstream from culture.
00:02:45.160 Steve Bannon says that too.
00:02:46.520 I forget which one of them said it first.
00:02:48.780 But it's the kind of thing that Gramsci talked a lot about, this idea of hegemony.
00:02:52.600 I think the strategy is true, but the end in mind was different.
00:02:57.820 Of course, Gramsci wanted a different result at the end than the other ones do.
00:03:01.640 Gramsci gave the marketing strategy, but his intention was at the end to have a different world than the ones conservatives would build.
00:03:08.740 Would you agree with that?
00:03:09.560 Probably. I mean, to be honest, I'm not the expert that my father was on his whole political theory.
00:03:13.540 What I know is that the part that seems most relevant in our time is this
00:03:18.020 strategy question.
00:03:19.640 And,
00:03:19.880 you know,
00:03:20.360 my side likes to think of ourselves as the more intellectual ones,
00:03:23.840 but I think sometimes we've been outgunned by the right.
00:03:26.860 You look at, 0.98
00:03:27.880 yeah,
00:03:28.180 you look at things like the heritage foundation and,
00:03:31.580 you know,
00:03:32.300 the truth is we don't have quite the Cato Institute,
00:03:35.020 that whole ecosystem of think tanks.
00:03:36.460 Yeah.
00:03:37.060 I think they set those up,
00:03:38.780 you know,
00:03:39.120 30,
00:03:39.500 40,
00:03:39.760 50 years ago because they felt like they needed a balance to the
00:03:42.700 universities.
00:03:43.180 they were kind of they felt doing the same thing to the left for the left i think over the years
00:03:47.940 the universities have actually become less connected to the political left and the right
00:03:54.280 and these think tanks have become very i mean you look at things like project 2025 you remember we
00:03:59.000 had a whole fight over project 2025 trump swore up up and down he had nothing to do with it had
00:04:03.700 no idea what it was uh but now the biggest thing though i don't even remember what the biggest
00:04:08.000 it's like a thousand pages of stuff and what was what was the most intimidating thing i don't know
00:04:11.940 Stuff like getting rid of the Department of Education.
00:04:13.500 Stuff they're actually doing now.
00:04:14.740 So the Heritage Foundation boasts that the majority of Project 2025 is now reality.
00:04:20.620 And it was an extremely unpopular set of ideas.
00:04:23.060 It was politically toxic, which is why we tried to use it as a matter of campaign strategy.
00:04:26.640 Remember, we held up big copies of it at the end.
00:04:28.500 Sure, yeah.
00:04:29.360 I think it even worked a little bit because we didn't win.
00:04:32.280 But it worked in the sense that, you know, I got a mailman.
00:04:35.160 Trump distanced himself.
00:04:36.280 That's a form of workings.
00:04:37.320 Yeah, yeah.
00:04:37.800 Then he put the guy in charge of it, in charge of the O&B.
00:04:40.080 Who was the guy?
00:04:40.580 Russ Vaught, right?
00:04:41.560 So he was a big project.
00:04:42.820 So I had the president on,
00:04:44.500 what was the guy's name?
00:04:45.280 Kevin Roberts,
00:04:46.060 I think.
00:04:46.860 Oh,
00:04:47.020 president heritage.
00:04:47.620 Yeah.
00:04:48.060 Oh,
00:04:48.460 you're talking about,
00:04:49.380 yeah.
00:04:49.940 President,
00:04:50.340 but yeah,
00:04:51.540 you're right.
00:04:51.860 The Russ Fod,
00:04:52.360 who was involved with all of that,
00:04:53.400 president Trump,
00:04:54.000 him in charge of me.
00:04:55.440 Right.
00:04:56.020 So obviously I don't think the president was telling the truth when he
00:04:59.180 distanced himself from it.
00:05:00.300 But anyway,
00:05:00.980 my point is that level of strategic thinking,
00:05:03.520 actually there's not been as much of that in my party.
00:05:06.820 So when I think about the 30,
00:05:09.780 40, 50 year project to end the right to choose in America. That was the result of some really
00:05:14.520 patient and organized work. I think, I think my side has been a little more caught up in the
00:05:19.920 moment and a little bit less attentive to the kind of the longer term strategy of how to build a
00:05:26.520 country that reflects the values that guide us, which again, I would argue are values that most
00:05:31.280 Americans share, which is why most Americans are increasingly aligning with us. A lot of these big
00:05:36.240 issues like health care taxes wages uh political reform um so part of what i'm trying to get my
00:05:42.660 side my party to do is to be to frankly learn from the right and be a little more strategic
00:05:48.320 be a little more thoughtful be even a little more intellectual it's a weird thing for somebody
00:05:52.100 left to center to say but be as intellectual as the right wing is but because i think the right
00:05:56.660 wing doesn't get enough credit for um strategic credit define intellectual to me because when i
00:06:03.200 mean a relationship between your first principles your big ideas you're not talking schooling
00:06:08.260 degrees you're saying no no yeah yeah no i'm just saying like you need to you need to have a
00:06:12.860 relationship between your first principles and your foundational philosophical beliefs and what
00:06:18.800 you're doing all day in your campaigns and your policy ideas i actually think sometimes the right
00:06:22.800 pays more attention to that than we do interesting how much of that do you think was a new age guy
00:06:29.560 like the late uh charlie kirk or do you think it's others who were leading it even before him
00:06:36.000 how much you think it was him playing that role because obviously he's no longer here he was i
00:06:41.080 think he was the most intimidating person for the right for the left my opinion because for the
00:06:46.520 longest time the left had the youth i mean antonio gram she's philosophy hey get him in school get
00:06:52.800 him early and next thing you know it's like yeah i don't need to go to school oh no no we can't do
00:06:56.880 that kids need to go to school what happens if we lose the kids that are going to school 1.00
00:07:00.540 and then we saw girls are getting degrees bachelor's degrees ladies more than men were
00:07:05.240 so then you know they have a certain role they're playing but do you put it as somebody like a
00:07:11.680 charlie kirk he was one of the guys that had the influence um i think it's probably upstream of
00:07:15.740 somebody like him okay but i do think he did something that yeah obviously i have enormous
00:07:22.160 disagreements with him. But he did something that is really important, which is going out on those
00:07:27.260 campuses and having those debates. And I think that's harder now, especially because young
00:07:31.440 people live more and more online, right? So you're in this online world where most of what you see
00:07:37.940 is somebody that you already agree with looking good. Or when you do see somebody you disagree
00:07:43.440 with, they're making an ass of themselves. Like I would guess that your feed as somebody who's 0.95
00:07:49.560 more conservative when it features people from my party it's usually our biggest gaffes our dumbest
00:07:55.420 moments right and vice versa right like if i see jd vance in my feed it's definitely some moment 0.88
00:08:00.360 where he's doing something dumb yeah but in both directions that's obviously very cherry-picked
00:08:04.600 right but that's what the algorithm gives us because you don't have to challenge your own
00:08:07.720 ideas yeah right you just look at this you're like well it doesn't make you stop and think
00:08:10.540 yeah i mean part of why i like trying to engage more conservative media is you know first of all
00:08:15.080 i think i'm responsible for bringing my world view into spaces where it isn't always there
00:08:19.780 What else is just more interesting, right?
00:08:22.120 Like you learn more and you think more.
00:08:24.120 You think harder.
00:08:24.960 You know who I had on last week?
00:08:26.140 Frances Haugen. 0.75
00:08:26.960 You know who Frances Haugen is?
00:08:27.940 The social reckoning girl that was a whistleblower at Facebook 0.59
00:08:32.000 and they had to end up paying a $25 billion fine
00:08:34.400 and 47 states sued Meadow.
00:08:36.400 You know what she said?
00:08:37.160 That was the most interesting thing, Pete.
00:08:39.020 She said at Facebook, they had a program called CrossCheck.
00:08:43.360 And then under CrossCheck, they started a new thing
00:08:46.220 that they measured say you're a liberal yourself and they wanted to see why do so many people on
00:08:52.660 the conservative side like your post or you're a conservative why do so many people on the left
00:08:57.540 still like this guy and then they they rank those people like even you right now sitting here this
00:09:03.420 is not most people on your side don't do this like they're not going to come and sit down so
00:09:06.600 but they'll sit this and they'll say at least this guy's willing to have the conversation
00:09:10.400 they widened the algorithm she said facebook started doing that for people that had a high
00:09:15.620 reasonable score that they can sit down and talk to person on the other side so it's funny you're
00:09:20.340 saying that you mean they score us as users on how reasonable we are or like how open specifically
00:09:25.200 you because you're sitting here with me oh like as a speaker so they're gonna say yeah he just got
00:09:29.760 let's just say your post gets on instagram 20 000 likes i'm just making it up but 2800 were
00:09:35.580 conservatives why did 2800 people like me who is this guy oh it's pete buddhich interesting
00:09:40.640 whatever he says he's getting people on the opposite side to also agree with them on certain
00:09:45.020 issues let's widen his audience that's just something they started you know this was like
00:09:49.760 when she was talking about it i thought it was fascinating handmade in portugal where
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