Ezra Klein: You could really make a case that Chris Rufo is the most successful activist certainly on the right of this era. He initially rose in prominence as the central strategist in the rights counterattack on DEI initiatives. He's very much behind a lot of the demonization of critical race theory.

Chris Rufo: Critical race theory has become in essence the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people.

Ezra Klein: He claims CRT is actually a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the constitution

Ezra Klein: and he built that into a series of campaigns. They've actually changed policy. It's very influential in Ronda Santis' governorhip and kind of running Claudine Gay out of Harvard.

Chris Rufo: Pushing out Claudine Gay, toppling the president of Harvard for a journalist like me is a big win.

Ezra Klein: Then in Donald Trump's second term, quite a lot has come out of Rufo's work. For better and from my perspective, for worse, from a lot of Trump's early executive orders,

Chris Rufo: we've ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government and indeed the private sector and our military

Ezra Klein: to some of the work that led to the ICE and CBP deployments to Minnesota.

Chris Rufo: This week, I published an exclusive story exposing the Somali fraud rings in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which are stealing billions of dollars from American taxpayers.

Ezra Klein: Whatever else you want to say about him, Rufo has quite significantly affected the world we live in. He's also, if you listen to him, and he's a very, very smart and often quite honest analyst of his own side. One thing I appreciate about Rufo is he always says what he is doing clearly and in public. He seems uneasy. Gone are the days when Tucker Carlson's nightly monologue set the agenda for the entire right. You can feel a sort of disqu, a sense that maybe the right, this right, is not becoming what he hoped it would be. Now we find ourselves in an escalating war of influencers trading conspiracies and counterconspiracies that its attentional andformational sphere is polluted. Driving the right into all different kinds of rabbit holes and dead ends that the administration is not getting as much done as he had hoped intended tried to help it do. And so I wanted to have Rufo on not because we agree on things. We obviously don't. You'll hear that. Not because I'm trying to talk him into my way of seeing things. I'm not going to do that. But both to understand how he understands what he is doing and also to interrogate it. To ask if the tactics he is using are actually working or if he's scoring short-term victories at the cost of helping to seed profound long-term problems. Rufo is a senior fellow and director of the initiative on critical race theory at the Manhattan Institute. He's a contributing editor of City Journal. He is the co-host of the podcast Rufo and Lomez. And he's the author of America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. As always, my email, Ezra Kleinshow Times.com. Chris Rufo, welcome to the show.

Chris Rufo: Good to be with you.

Ezra Klein: So, I want to begin with a piece you wrote in early 2024 titled The New Right Activism, a manifesto for the counterrevolution. And there are a lot of interesting things in there, but the one I wanted to begin with is you write no institution can be neutral. So, tell me why.

Chris Rufo: Yeah, I mean that that's a an obvious reality if you think about it for longer than a minute. And I think it it's important to say because there's this mythology that we have in the United States and it's a small Liberal mythology that institutions can be kind of neutral orbiters that they could be uh valueless vessels um that achieve some kind of pragmatic or instrumental ends. And my point is that no in practice institutions always have values whether they're implicit uh or explicit. Uh and for those of us who are on the outside of many powerful institutions, it's there's a lot of value in simply revealing the underlying reality. And in fact, political fights are at heart the fight for who determines the values, what values are are are installed in an institution. Um and then therefore what kind of decisions get made.

Ezra Klein: So I take a lot of the arguments about institutions particularly within like the broad philosophical tradition of liberalism argue that they can have neutral treatment. They can have neutral rules and a lot of for better and worse procedure in these institutions. Everything from notice and comment periods to different ways that they have to create transparency are about trying to create that capacity for people to be neutrally treated. Do you think that's possible?

Chris Rufo: No. I I think neutral is the wrong word. I think what we're looking for is impartial. And I would agree with that. Everyone should be treated equally as an individual under law, but that's impartiality, not neutrality. So in a criminal case, um if you sentence somebody to the death penalty, you're not treating them neutrally. You're actually taking their life because the underlying law is a kind of moral code. Uh and so I I think neutral and impartial are similar but in this case uh kind of critically different.

Ezra Klein: So another argument you make in that piece is you say the popular slogan that facts don't care about your feelings betrays similar problems. slogan being Ben Shapiro's slogan. In reality, feelings almost always overpower facts. Reason is a slave of the passions.

Chris Rufo: Yeah, that that's true. And uh we we'll caveat. We love Ben Shapiro. We're we're Ben Shapiro fans, of course. Um but I think that that he's he's very wrong on that. And I think conservatives have made a fundamental error in latching on to that. And really what it is, it's it's a rationalization for uh losing. It's like uh yes we may have lost the great political question which operates on emotions or passions um but you know we have the facts on our side and if only people would read our you know white paper our kind of regression analysis our rigorous logical argumentation uh then we would be we would be vindicated. Um but look while we should have the facts on our side while we should use logic by itself it's insufficient and in fact politics operates on a deeper level an emotional level and politics occurs on the on the field of sentiment and public opinion much more on the field of you know uh kind of abstract argumentation at the top.

Ezra Klein: So and then you go on in the same piece to make an argument for agitprop. So aprop old Soviet Union term for agitation and propaganda.

Chris Rufo: Yeah. Mashed up together.

Ezra Klein: And it doesn't have a great reputation. Agyprop is usually not a term of endearment. But you say agyprop doesn't mean sacrificing the truth, but rather channeling the truth toward victory. So how do you define what agit prop is? And and what are you trying to explain to your fellow conservatives about how to use it?

Chris Rufo: So, right, I mean, if you're obviously if you're conducting say propaganda on behalf of a falsehood or evil or an unjust cause, it's bad. My point is that that's not always necessarily true. If you are pursuing a cause that is good and true and beautiful. If you look at the word propaganda, um the original meaning it comes from the Catholic Church. Uh and it was the propagation of the the gospels, the propagation of the the truth. And so these are concepts that we can recover because the reality is that all politics and the age of the printing press and onward depends on propaganda. And how do you define what propaganda itself is? Propaganda is is is simply the the method of uh communicating a political narrative. Again, we're using neutral, I'm going to say a true narrative um uh to a mass audience through the means of modern media. It's a rhetorical argument intended to persuade the majority of people to cobble together a majority of public opinion. And look, this is again for conservatives especially not new. Uh you know the the founding fathers of this country wrote to each other about this. They wrote in public about this. Um we seem to have forgotten some of these lessons uh of how politics actually works. You have to persuade people. What is persuasion? It's rhetoric. What is rhetoric at an industrial scale? It's propaganda.

Ezra Klein: You've been connecting the question of propaganda to whether

Speaker A: "...audience into the equivalent of a third world click farm. Tell me about that. What's been alarming you?"

Speaker B: Yeah. Sometimes, man, you hear your quotes back, you're like, "Oh, that's kind of uh very lively language." Yeah. This is a huge problem. I'll put it this way. There's a growing split between the institutional right and the online right. The institutional right I think actually deserves credit for gatekeeping some of these kind of bad tendencies out of our institutions and I think that's good. However, the online—

Speaker A: right being like Fox News and—

Speaker B: yes, conservative think tanks, you know, the Manhattan Institute, all of the kind of the institutional layer of the professional right, let's say, I think has done a very good job at gatekeeping some of these bad psychological and political tendencies out of our institutions. The problem that we're grappling with though is that the traditional way of thinking about political media is always as an outgrowth of institutions. So you'd have your magazines, your newsletters, your think tank, you know, policy papers. The internet has created costs and benefits. One of the benefits is the kind of ease of communication with a large audience. But one of the negatives is that you have the proliferation of insanity, madness, psychopathology. And on the right, I think this went into hyperdrive after the assassination of Charlie Kirk was bubbling up before then, but really then took a turn. And so you have this tendency on the right historically. You have like a kind of bircher tendency in the post-war era and then it kind of waxes and waines over time. And right now you have in the online right someone like Candace Owens who has departed so far from reality and yet has a massive audience. Um, and I think that it's doing a disservice to the public and even more say kind of self-interestedly doing a very grave disservice to the right because if you can't teach your audience, your followers, your political base how to think properly, they're not going to behave properly and you're not going to have proper outcomes. And so I think it's important for us on the right to have this internal fight, which is to say if you think that, you know, Israel assassinated Charlie Kirk or, you know, whatever kind of handful of conspiracies you have, you know, you're on the outside. You're not within the movement. And this is a fight that is happening now. And I think given sufficient amount of time, I think we'll win.

Speaker A: Why do you think you'll win? Because I look at the right and I see Tucker Carlson and his current guys, which is a much more conspiratorial guys than he's had before, has become more and more dominant figure. As you note, Candace Owen success has been startling. I guess I'd ask this question in two dimensions. What is the audience demand that they are meeting? Right? What is it that they are providing that people want? And then I guess the second question is why do you think you'll win?

Speaker B: Yeah, great question. So, first of all, the audience for conspiracy theories is enormous. Before his kind of legal troubles, someone like Alex Jones was making apparently millions of dollars selling vitamins and survival supplies and if you think about it, to generate that kind of revenue requires a massive, if kind of quiet, under the surface audience. And so I think they're really tapping into that side of the audience. It's right-wing, but not exclusively right-wing. And in fact, a lot of the people who have come over to these conspiracy theories are in that part of the horseshoe where their politics are, let's say sub ideological. They're more of a feeling, a perception, a set of resentments. Second, how do conspiracy theories work? Conspiracy theories work for people who want to forfeit agency, for people who do not see the possibility of constructive action in their personal lives or in public life. And therefore, the conspiracy theory gives them the rationalization and justification for their nihilism. It's, insert here, right? It's this group, it's that group, it's this other group that is controlling the world, making everything impossible, assassinating our heroes. And this gives them a psychological key, right? That is self-reinforcing because a conspiracy theory for conspiracy theorists can never be debunked, right? It's just one layer of the onion that gets peeled. And I'll tell you why I think we're going to win because I've noticed this even for people, let's say, in my kind of one degree of separation, conspiracy theories, and I think in particular anti-semitic conspiracy theories eventually fry your brain. And so I think that we'll see a lot of these personalities, a lot of these psychological tendencies kind of burn out on their own. Um, and on top of that as a kind of extra layer of—

Speaker A: an optimistic view on the history of anti-semitism right there.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, okay, I'm saying in the near term these things kind of wax and wayne, but I think what I've seen in the United States is a greater set of antibodies than you might find elsewhere. And then institutionally for our side on the right, I think that look, the people who run institutions are aware of the problem. They're confronting the problem. We're dealing with it. And to me, this is inevitable. Political coalitions are going to have some kind of mixture of the good and the bad. And the question is who's in a position of leadership? What kind of courage and integrity they have and can they succeed? And so I think that when I look at the field as it is, I think this say faction is less powerful than it was 6 months ago, a year ago and I hope that trend continues.

Speaker A: I think there's an interesting question on institutions in the right here. You I forget if it's a Chesterton quote or a CS Lewis quote, but he says one of them says that when men stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing. when men stop believing in God, they believe in everything. And I do think there's a dimension of that around institutions where the right has become much more anti-institutional. I think the view that institutions cannot be neutral and largely cannot even be impartial is much more widely held and there's been a sort of coordinated attack on many of the institutions in American life. But sort of new ones haven't emerged, right? You could imagine the right and the left having parallel institutions that have different core values because I do agree with you actually that institutions almost they do always have values at their heart and when you don't think they do it just means you don't know what they are.

Speaker B: correct

Speaker A: or they're being deliberately obscured right but I think sometimes about I think Tucker Carlson is an interesting figure here somebody who came up institutionally I think sometimes about this speech he gave at the 2009 conservative political action conference

Tucker Carlson (Recording): "and I saw conservatives create many of their own media organizations and I saw many of those organizations prosper and I saw some of them fail and here's the difference. The ones that failed refused to put accuracy first. This is the hard truth and conservatives need to deal with this. I believe this. I'm as conservative as any person in this room. I am literally in the process of stockpiling weapons and food and moving to Idaho. So I'm not in any way going to take a second seat to anybody in this room ideologically. But I will say honestly, if you create a news organization whose primary objective is not to deliver accurate news, you will fail. You will fail. The New York Times is a liberal paper, but it's also, and it is to its core a liberal paper. It's also a paper that cares about whether they spell people's names right. By and large, it's a paper that actually cares about accuracy. Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions that are that's the truth. You don't believe me? So, put aside the special pleading from the New York Times here."

Speaker A: Carlson tried to build his own

Speaker A: institution, the Daily Caller. Sure.

Speaker B: Um, I would say it did not, my impression of it is that it did not become a place to put accuracy first and became a kind of conservative New York Times.

Speaker A: It did not become a conservative.

Speaker B: It did not become a conservative New York Times. uh over time he went in I think darker and darker directions uh as he chased the audience and now he's fully without institution and has I think emerged I'll put it this way into a form I think when I listen to you you find more concerning and problematic. So what do you think went wrong there?

Speaker A: Yeah. Well it look this is a a long-term trend. This didn't emerge in 2009 or or 2020. I think of it this way. Um, the left is over institutionalized and the right is under institutionalized.

Speaker B: I say this all the time, man. Left is over formed by institutions. The right is underformed.

Speaker A: Correct. And so we have kind of opposite uh opposite problems. And I think of it also in in this way. I wrote a piece about this I don't know a long time ago and I think it really it really holds up. The left is organized as a capital P party and the right is organized under a capital P prince. So you have Donald Trump essentially sets the direction of the right for better for worse um through personal charismatic power and his relationship with the conservative base. There's really no mediating institutions uh in the kind of way that you would see elsewhere. That's where conservatives have figured out this formula for at least the time being to achieve political victory. It has benefits. It has it has problems. The left has the opposite problem. Um, the reason why I think you get like presidential candidates on the left that seem to be like devoid of traditional charisma is because it's organized uh as an institutional apparatus or a capital P party.

And so conservatives have a problem with institutions. Conservatives have a problem building institutions. And and this is the deepest irony, right? is that conservatives in a healthy republic would be the ones that are um preserving the institutions um restoring the institutions, maintaining the institutions. But conservatives have found themselves on the outside of institutions. And so when were talking about this concept of counterrevolution, it's a paradox, right? Because a counterrevolution is not necessarily um a conservative impulse on the top. You can have a conservative mission or goal that drives it. That's why it's a counterrevolution rather than a revolution.

Um, but conservatives are in this really interesting position where you have a lot of people on the intellectual right. They attend the black tai gallas. They attend the events at the country club. They eat the, you know, salmon dinner at the whatever Hilton, you know, ballroom. And I'm always looking around at these. I I you know don't like these events cuz I'm always looking around and saying you guys are out of your minds. You guys are operating as if um you know the Elks lodge was still the formative institution of the United States. You're living in a fantasy. You're living in a nostalgia that isn't actually grappling with the fundamental problems in the country and is totally out of step with the very voters that you claim to represent.

And so look, this is a this is a problem. I I I don't I can't say that there's a snap your finger solution. Um and so you have to start where you start. You know, I work for an institution that I think is, you know, the best in in in the business, the Manhattan Institute. I think we do good work that has a high degree of accuracy and rigor and intelligence. Uh and I think that we've put up uh practical political victories uh in a way that few others have. Another version of this is uh a line I like is that the personality type of the left is bureaucratic and the personality type of the right is autocratic. And I don't think that was always true. You let me give you a response.

Speaker B: Well, I don't think so.

Speaker A: I think in the Trump era it is.

Speaker B: Okay. Well, it make the case. Make the case.

Speaker A: There is a falling in line behind Donald Trump. So, here is my view of the two coalitions right now. The genius of Donald Trump in the 2024 election was he collapsed the multi-dimensional test of party loyalty that existed in the previous Republican party. Were you pro-life? Did you believe in low taxes? You know, what was your foreign policy? Etc. And certainly the multi-dimensional agenda test you see on the left down to a single point of loyalty. Did you support him personally? If you did, there was actually room for a wide variety of other opinions. You could be a technofuturist.

Speaker B: You could be a Christian traditionalist. You could be RFK Jr. who'd been running as a Democrat just a year or two before.

Speaker A: Um, but also you could be Ted Cruz. And what held that together is that the line that you could not cross was Trump himself. But as long as you were useful to him, you could be on the team. Now that has obvious issues when you move into governance and I think some of them have have emerged but it gave him and them a freedom of movement across other issues where you know a comma Harris a Tim Walls uh Joe Biden were much more boxchecking right this sort of multi-dimensional loyalty test that the left uses and so on the left you end up with uh and I mean here the left not like the democratic social stuff but the left coalition in this country, the broad democratic party,

Speaker B: you end up with people who have sort of all of the right views

Speaker A: and have an institutional personality, right? Are somewhat riskaverse, are worried about getting in trouble at a meeting. And on the right, you have people who

Speaker B: they'll go crazy in a meeting. You can be Bill Py, but as long as the boss likes you, you're safe. Okay. Yeah. I I think that there are elements of that that are true. prince versus party. It's a method of political organization, psychological organization. Certainly, one of Trump's kind of the great litmus test for him is personal loyalty. Like we we've seen that you're with Trump, he's he's with you, you're you're you cross him um and he'll he'll he'll attack you.

Speaker A: You could be Kim Jong-un and be

Speaker B: buddy. It was like a nice buddy comedy. I feel like there'd be a buddy comedy.

Speaker A: He likes Kim Jong-un more than he likes Mark Carney.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, you know, um, fair fair enough. And as personal chemistry goes, uh, but yeah, I think there's some truth to that, but I wouldn't therefore I think your conclusion is is overdrawn. I don't think you could say the right has autocratic personalities. I mean, I deal with conservatives all the time. I I don't see that as a psychological tendency, but the people I work with, the people I talk to, my friends and neighbors. Um, uh, but so yeah, I think it's over overdrawn. on I think this is just a question of political organization uh from the top and I don't think it's total just loyalty personal loyalty I mean Trump wants uh immigration restrictions strong national borders build a wall he wants uh kind of uh uh American national interestbased foreign policy although that is kind of uh a little bit on the outs and then he represents uh or at least championed a lot of the causes that that that that I cared about care about um you know on DEI I on higher education, on cultural institutions, um you know, and a and a whole host of other sub issues that he really grabbed on to. And and look, this is good. You you you you kind of have to work with what what is there. You want to you always want to plan for the future, build for the future, but ultimately you're faced with decisions in the moment. And uh look on the whole I think in those areas uh where we have had more freedom of movement more ability to to execute policy I think things have been going quite well.

Speaker A: I want to go back to Tucker. So uh I've seen you talk about your take on his evolution and something you said is that the Tucker Carlson of the Fox News era when he was given his 8mm monologues that in that era they were a unifying script for the right. that Fox News was this institutional structure around him that maybe contained him to a certain point and that created a unity a coherence that has now dissolved not just around him specifically

Speaker A: but uh around the right more broadly. Now, the liberal take on Tucker uh in the Fox News era is that he was beginning to bring a white national strain into centrality in the Republican party that, you know, there were all these Daily Stormer articles about how much uh he was saying exactly what they thought. He was talking about great replacement theory. And you've got to ask yourself as you watch the historic tragedy that is Joe Biden's immigration policy. What's the point of this? They are flooding this country with immigrants in order to change the demography to maintain political power for themselves to change the racial mix of the country. That's the reason to reduce the political power of people whose ancestors lived here and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the third world. Now I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term replacement, but they become hysterical because that's that's what's happening actually. Let's just say it. That's true. He had already in our view become quite conspiratorial and that what he is now and what he is then are a straight line from each other and that the sort of passions he was unleashing. Right. Reason of course being a slave of such passions that it was always going to go in one direction and that celebrating what he was at that moment and then being confused by what he is at this moment is a kind of like a strange unwillingness to either grapple with one or the other. So, tell me how you see it.

Speaker B: Yeah, I I don't I don't see it that way. I mean, when Tucker was on Fox at that 8:00 PM Eastern time, 5:00 PM Western time for me, um it really did feel like a shelling point for the right. It was like a quarterback um calling the plays every night at 8:00 in that first, you know, 5 to 10 minutes where Tucker kind of condensed the opinion, represented the opinion, reflected back the opinion, uh and then everyone had uh a central point, a central coherent point to to think about, to talk about, to to mobilize on and it was very effective. So even in my own experience when I first started reporting on critical race theory in the institutions went on Tucker gave a kind of opening monologue with Tucker President Trump was watching it got a call from the White House the next morning hey the president saw you on TV he wants to take action on critical race theory come to the White House let's get this thing done and so that mechanism that even in my personal experience the loop on that was like less than 12 hours

Speaker A: very tight loop in the White House.

Speaker B: And I think also what I've learned about Fox News is that uh Fox News uh has and this is to to its great credit, Fox News has a kind of disciplinary function. And I think especially after 2020 has become even more cognizant of okay, message discipline is important. Uh moving the message forward is important. Here's the kind of guard rails for the narrative. And this is a function of institutions, a function of technology.

Speaker A: Yes. But what I'm talking about is what the narrative itself is. I agree with you that Tucker played this role when he was on Fox News. But the thing that many of us who I mean I knew Tucker before many of us who had watched him for a long time from a good time libertarian,

Speaker B: but what what spec you you I can't you're invoking like the daily it's like I don't know anything about the Daily Stormer beyond beyond.

Speaker A: He talked a bunch about great replacement. I mean this has been exa hold on this has been exhaustingly documented. I mean there are biographies of the guy. The times did a bunch of work on this. The bringing in of a macro narrative that there was a function I would call it a cabal of elites importing brown voters to replace you. Um that you were being betrayed by elites representing foreign interests and foreign people to sort of alter the culture of this country to their benefit. was something he hammered all the time.

Speaker A: Fox News is reporting tonight that the administration awarded a $172 million grant to a George Soros linked organization which exists to quote help young border crossers avoid deportation. Now, why is some foreign born billionaire allowed to change our country fundamentally? That's the big question, right? A relentless focus on crime from immigrants, a relentless focus on George Soros. And so to me, I see Tucker now and I see Tucker then. And I agree the shackles are off a little bit, but I see him calling the same play. He's just had to turn up the dial a little bit because he doesn't have Fox News.

Speaker B: I don't I don't think that's right. And I think it Let's take the

Speaker B: You're presenting it in a way that is very charged. Um I I don't think quite fair, but let's take the charge, but let's take the but but the narrative that you're that you're portraying. I I don't think that that's exactly uh you know, how I would put it. certainly, but the underlying facts are either true or not true. And in this case, um, demographic mass demographic change has been and is a reality in the United States. And I think it's fair to talk about that politically. We've been talking about it politically for 10 years. And you could do it in a way that is exemplifies bigotry or discrimination, of course, but you can also do it in a way that isn't isn't an expression of bigotry or discrimination. Um, but in fact is just a basic question. Um, a question that the that people in the United States have been asking since uh since the 1770s. Who are we? What is an American? Um, and if we are a sovereign nation, we have the not just the right, but really the obligation to determine these great questions of who comes in, who doesn't come in. And and so I I don't think that it is it is right to say that someone who is concerned about rapid and large scale demographic change is is is kind of a white nationalist. Um, that that seems like a kind of the kind of

Speaker A: No, I'm saying that the reason I think Tucker is a white nationalist is due to all the white nationalism.

Speaker B: Well, let me ask let me let me ask a question. Let me ask a question. No, no, because that that I mean that is a huge charge. Um, and and and I I just again like what is the evidence of that? You could be concerned can you be concerned about mass demographic change without being racist? I I think the answer is yes.

Speaker A: How do you define a white nationalist?

Speaker B: Well, you you make the charge. you define it and and substantiate your your point.

Speaker A: So I think that Tucker's view is that the

Speaker B: take Tucker out of it just make an in general argument of what of what you can kind of layer in Tucker.

Speaker A: So I think that there is a straightforward view in white nationalism that there is such a thing as a white race. That race is fundamentally European came here and founded this country. that race has depending on the variant of white nationalism we're talking about uh genetic advantages or cultural advantages and that that race deserves to have should have dominance particularly over this country there are harder and softer versions of this right in some versions Jews are included in that white race

Speaker B: sure

Speaker A: in some versions they're not included in that white race in some versions we are talking about something I would describe primarily as a kind of nationalism right the you know If you have too much of a country not sharing a common heritage, you lose solidarity. In some cases, we're talking about something much darker than that. Right. There are people who just don't like the way their community is changing. And there's the KKK, right? Everything exists on a spectrum. But but would you say someone who is like, for example, hesitant about rapid large scale demographic change is just a kind of 1% white nationalist. Yeah. because that would be like the majority of the country.

Speaker B: Yes. I don't think it is a problem or unfair or even wrong to worry about large scale rapid demographic change. So to maybe to be more specific about Tucker, so you just had on um the right-wing writer Scott Greer. Um he's got a book coming out on the online right called White Pill. So Greer was a former deputy editor at the Daily Caller. He left in 2018 after past...

Speaker A: writings for white national site were dug up. And he once said of Tucker, so this is Greer speaking, Tucker is ultimately on our side. He can get millions and millions of boomers to nod along with talking points that would have only been seen on Vair or American Renaissance a few years ago. These are both white national sites. So I guess what do you make of that?

Speaker B: Yeah. So I'll tell you what I make of it. And here's what I think is really interesting about some of these figures who were on the once kind of fringe elements of the right who have in some ways seen the errors of that way of ideological thinking. And to me, you always want to leave people room to to grow up, room to leave bad ideas behind, room for um kind of critical self-reflection, and then to integrate back into the kind of mainstream thinking. And I think you know Scott Greer is interesting and one of the reasons why we interviewed him was to kind of chart out this trajectory which there's a lot of people that had more radical politics and then they moderate over time. And so I was very interested in understanding that process of kind of ideological development and growth and then and then really scrutinizing you want to actually try to figure out all right well what's the way out of that? What's the way to to demystify to defang to to kind of delegitimize that way of thinking? And I think it's interesting to talk to people who once had those ideas.

Speaker A: So, I'm not against you talking to him at all. Right. What I'm saying is not that you shouldn't interview Scott Greer.

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker A: I think many people change their politics dramatically. And one of the big problems the left actually has is not giving people space to change.

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker A: and putting people into a a box where they're held in who they were as opposed to who they may become. My problem is not with you. I'm saying that I looked at Tucker in that period and thought, "Huh, he's going in this direction that I understand this to be the argument of, you know, a vair of a" and they all celebrated him. But I guess the question is whether to to phrase a question precisely which maybe I haven't yet whether one of the lessons of where he has gone and where some of the right has gone is that people like you on the right were a little insensitive to when something wasn't just a breaking of a liberal taboo but was a movement towards a politics that was much more let's call it white identity focused.

Speaker B: Look, I Okay, hu huge point. I I would break it down in a couple ways. One, I I I don't think that's that's quite accurate. I actually think that the the the statement you're you're reading, and you could probably read it from a number of other people, right? If you remember in 2016, uh Richard Spencer famously held like some sort of uh conference or or or group and he said, "Oh, yes, Trump has um has adopted, you know, Trump is a creation of the alt-right. We willed Donald Trump into office. We made this dream our reality. And if we will it, it is no dream. A quote I'm sure our friends at the Anti-Defamation League know very well. It was completely delusional. um totally self-s serving and and uh uh a product of narcissism that I wouldn't take uh at face value. And so I think a lot of the radical elements you're talking about overstate um uh overstate this relationship because they desperately want to believe it. And I think that um you know someone like Tucker I I I don't I don't think it's accurate to say that Tucker uh on Fox in in you know 2021 was laundering in you know talking points from you know American Renaissance. I just I I I don't think that's true. I think it's conflating a kind of maybe superficial opposition to immigration. um and and the the conflation game is is is really really really I think dishonest and unfortunately for a lot of time it worked and so I think that in fact we're in a much better place than in the past and I remember some of these groups like ADL SPLC um media matters you know they came after me with many many smears trying to destroy my reputation trying to get me deplatformed from social media trying to to kind of eliminate me from the public sphere none of it worked Thankfully, the ACLU, I would also add, um, and in fact, as I look back, the arguments that they were making were were were preposterous, and they only succeeded because people felt fear. And so, I I'm glad that we don't live in that condition of fear anymore. And today, we can talk very reasonably across a table, which I think is good. Um, but I'm certainly not going to forget the emotional tone and the political um, uh, vulnerabilities of that era. And again, the SPLC that was coming after me because of God knows what was at the same time giving money to neo-Nazis and white nationalists to keep them afloat. And what that shows me is that the supply of racism in the United States uh and including racism on the right in the United States has dwindled to such a small degree in real life that it took the SPLC to actually inject cash into that ecosystem merely to keep it alive. And so I I just I just I I just don't Yeah.

Speaker A: persuasive one way of thinking about that period that I think is how I think about it is that two things were sort of true at the same time. So one, there was way too much speech policing. There was too much cancellation. There was too much that instead of being willing to have arguments, people just tried to make the arguments unhavable. That all happened, right? I don't deny any of it. And on the other hand, a lot of what people more on the left in that moment were afraid of or what they predicted also happened. The alt-right moved much more from the fringe to the center. I always think about um

Speaker B: the alt-right was totally destroyed after Charlottesville.

Speaker A: I I I

Speaker B: yeah,

Speaker A: I think maybe we have a different view of what the alt-right represented.

Speaker B: Um which is fair enough, but I think a lot of ideas

Speaker A: that were very very very far from the center. I think about Elon Musk and him writing and I mean later he had to like try to figure out how to apologize for this and but when somebody basically said like the Jews have been funding the grace replacement.

Speaker B: Did Elon say that?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: No, Elon didn't say that. What he said was underneath that he said to whoever had tweeted that you have spoken the truth and then he had to go to Ashwitz and things like that.

Speaker A: Okay. The Ashwitz. Yeah.

Speaker B: The Ashwitz apology tour. So,

Speaker A: but you know, even now Musk is very conspiratorial and where he is in 2026 now the world's first trillionaire owning, you know, what used to be Twitter.

Speaker B: Um, and the things he like kind of pumps into the attentional stream would have been considered incredibly marginal even in Trump's first term. So, two things I think were true, right? I think there are many ways which the left went too far and the thing the forces the left were was worried were there are much closer to the center. Yes, there are parts of the alt-right that are not significant today. Richard Spencer is not a significant figure. Nick Fuentes has a bigger audience than Richard Spencer ever did.

Speaker A: Sure. And there is I mean when I'm on X and other places, the amount of just constant anti-semitism and anti-Indian racism I see just happening in people's mentions is wild to me. And I mean I don't think he'll win, but you look at Fishbach who's running for governor in Florida, it's sort of almost unimaginable to think of somebody like him being a figure in Republican party politics who would be commanding the support of practically anybody. And I think the reason that people worry about him is they don't think he's going to win, but he seems to be doing very well among the young right.

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker A: And so I think you can hold your view, which I at least partially share, that there are many ways in which the left and the speech policing and the um you know boundaries went too far. And also a lot of the people who were most hair on fire in that period had a point and some of their more kind of wild predictions. I was thinking about like if you had told me that Trump was going to make RFK Jr. HHS secretary and Tulsi Gabber DNI um and try

Speaker B: the triumph of

Speaker A: and try and try to make Matt Gates attorney general. I would have thought that was like an unhinged like resistance Substack take and then it all happened. So it's like the fact you can have these things be true at the same time.

Speaker B: Yes. I I I think I think I think you're you're kind of understating uh uh kind of understating the dynamic on on one side. I mean, it wasn't just about speech policing. Um the after 2020, the left maintained uh kind of apparatus of social annihilation, and I went through it myself. I had the ACLU subpoena me and harass me with a lawfare campaign that cost me a lot of money. I had the SPLC and the ADL put me on some sort of hate list that was totally bogus trying to destroy my reputation. And so I had people, you know, uh uh you know, threats of violence against me that were very credible at the time. Uh and so, you know, people trying to get uh uh you know, going after my family, my kids. I mean, we shouldn't forget just how awful that period was and how insane that period was. And unfortunately, while I think that many of the institutions on the left have learned after having suffered some consequences for enabling that, um, the movements that they have sparked, um, are in fact alive and well. And look, I I I think the difference that maybe you're not seeing is that the radical, nihilistic, and violent left-wing movements have the full support of the left's institutions. And what we're talking about is a radical, nihilistic movements on the right do not have any institutional support. and are bubble up in your Twitter comments which again don't agree um but is is different uh in kind not just in quantity and in the case of someone like James Fishbach I think it's a great test fishbach is very charismatic I think we would all agree on that I talked with your colleague Michelle Goldberg about this um but even with a kind of individual charisma if he's like the groper candidate for governor of Florida which is again like kind of a crazy thing that that is happening thing. I want to see the actual vote tally because that's going to show me where he is um where he stands with the actual conservative uh population, the conservative voter, the conservative movement as a whole. I suspect that he's going to get absolutely trounced. It happened with Vivc running against a guy Casey Push uh in Ohio. He got blown out by I don't know 60 70 points. And so, um, by contrast, you look at something like the the the kind of trans ideological movement, um, that I think is both kind of a lie. It's it's grounded in in a series of falsehoods, maintained this, um, suppressive, threatening, sensorious power in the kind of prelon Twitter days and in the general kind of woke years. And then look another uncomfortable fact uh per capita has committed more mass violence than any other group. And so I I am willing to indulge in uh and and think it's important to to have a kind of criticism of let's say you know elements of my own side. But I also think that if we were to just measure it out to put it on a scale, you know, it it's it's looking a lot more like this assassination's attempt against President Trump, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the kind of security posture that's required for conservatives just to go on a college campus. That's how I measure it. It's like I'm looking at it. I'm feeling it. I'm seeing it with my colleagues. After Charlie Kirk was killed, I called all the people, friends and colleagues in the business. And I just like was completely distraught for for for weeks. And uh again, like while I don't support uh you know, James Fishbach for governor, again, I think that that's kind of an empty symbolism. Whereas on the other side, it feels like these ideologies have the support of the institutions. They wielded power irresponsibly in the past and still have the kind of ultimate political threat, the threat of violence that I know everybody in my world um um you know has seen, has experienced, has has feared.

Speaker A: Um and so I mean that grounds me do you not see that? is that I don't have the same view of it but let me hold as saying that your experience of it I understand right and as somebody who also you know sometimes deals with threats of violence and other things of that nature I think the way this often looks to people on the left particularly looks right now is that when you say these nihilistic I think you call them ideals ideas are not held at high levels of the right they're only supported institution usually on the left. I see it the opposite way.

Speaker B: Really?

Speaker A: Right. I see it the opposite way. And I'll I'll explain why. I don't see the SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, as like a powerful, potent left-wing actor. They're not

Speaker B: really They could 10 years ago, they could nuke you

Speaker A: like I'll go through I'll go through my thing. Um ADL I don't even see as on the left, which is a different question. I understand. But I see the Trump administration as powerfully and potently extreme and willing to use the power of the federal government from, you know, deploying ICE and CBP agents to different cities to directing the DOJ who to investigate and go after to after Charlie Kirk's murder trying to get people fired who are just sort of random people who had done shitty tweets. I do not see a world in which there is this huge separation between the extreme elements of the right and this administration. I keep hearing from people like you, right, who I think has talked about this, that there's a huge number of gripers working in uh House and Senate offices in Congress that, you know, Bronze Age pervert is one of the most uh popular people to read if you're a Trump staffer. And I see those things actually moving into things like national security strategies, you know, about the civilizational suicide of of Europe. Now, I recognize we're not going to agree on all this, right? This this part I'm not going to try to like bridge the gap. What I will say is that the the other thing I think people on the left see has been a a sort of movement from, you know, 2016 to 2024 where it's almost unbelievable how far things have gone, right? Even Trump one to Trump 2 are very very different beasts. And so all of a sudden it doesn't look impossible to imagine that Fuentes St. Carlson and Fishbach are the future not the fringe. I think a lesson that has been burned into many of us is that it is dangerous to dismiss something that seems to have a lot of energy around it as a fringe because what is today's fringe is tomorrow's maybe not center but much more live and potent political force

Speaker B: and would you say that you saw that that happen on the left between you know 2014 and and 2024

Speaker A: absolutely

Speaker B: yeah in part I think you guys are about to learn some lessons we learned.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe so, but I would argue that actually the right has done a better job at managing it. And I think we'll see, and I I hope I'm right that with something like the fishback campaign, you know, I think of James Fishbach as a human meme, it's like amazing. He's like, if you take the mimemetic energy from that corner of the online discourse and turned it into a human being, it's like it would look and sound like James Fishbach. But the reality is that once those ideas gain contact with the the the people, the culture, the institutions on the right, they're not going anywhere.

Speaker B: Let me try to frame this more in terms of Let me try to frame this more in terms of arguments I've seen you making.

Speaker A: Sure.

Speaker B: And tell me if I get a chain in this wrong, you tell me where I will. Right. I think you think you now have a problem with a racialist right. I think watching the takeover of conspiracies after Kirk's murder has been sobering or scary for a lot of people on the right. To watch people accusing Israel of it, to eventually see people accusing Turning Points USA of it or some kind of plot from the people around him, I think has been for major major figures on the right to be making those arguments has seemed to me to be a kind of shocking moment for a lot of you. And then I've watched you and others, you know, on X and elsewhere like look in your mentions

Speaker A: and be like, "Oh [ __ ] there's a lot of racism here. Something's happening." So you tell me which part of this you don't agree with.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I mean, here's how I see it. And your general analysis is correct. So there is a racialist right, let's say. I've been writing about this for a number of years, but I think a lot of it is something of an optical illusion where you see this on the left where a small group of people that is very loud online appears to represent a larger share of a political coalition or the general population than it really does. And so, look, I don't want a racialist right. That is like a clear position on my part. And I think to the extent that we have like anti-semitic conspiracy theories bubbling up from the digital sphere, it's a problem that we have to deal with, and of untruth or a falsehood that should be called out for what it is. And what I think it is at heart is that—and I've talked to a lot of young right-wing guys. So sometimes I'll have lunch or dinner when I'm in DC or elsewhere with younger guys and just say, "Hey, you know, kind of walk me through like what's happening for people, like we're older now. You and I are middle-aged now. So say, 'Hey, walk me through this thinking' and not kind of non-judgmental, just kind of help me understand what's happening with some of the more radical or racialist young men." And this is the description that they give. They say, you know, these are guys who hit high school during COVID. They transitioned into an almost purely digital life with all of the various rabbit holes you could get into. They came of age as a function of entering adulthood during the George Floyd hysteria where their teachers at school, their media institutions, the government, everyone was saying, you know, you're a young white man, you're the problem, you're the oppressor, you're evil, you should be denied opportunities because of your biology, because of your ancestry. And essentially that they were programmed by the George Floyd hysteria into thinking racially, and instead of what I think is the proper and the correct response, which is to say, we've got to move beyond this, we're going to fight this racialist thinking on the left, on the right, wherever it comes from, they essentially psychologically submitted to it, but then reversed the polarity. I don't think that's a good way to pursue it. I don't think on the philosophical question it's right. I don't think that from the practical political conception it's fruitful. But in a certain way it's like I get it. I understand it. Young people are, you know, kind of in a position of growing up and having a chip on your shoulder. I think it's extremely destructive. And what I see as the antidote to this, at least within my political coalition, is to be, you know, an older brother figure to say, "Hey, I could get why you think that. However, the actual path to success is this other way." So I don't think that this is like predetermined. I actually think that young people have, you know, their brain isn't locked in its ways. And so I think you want to bring people who are frustrated towards a better path, and I think that someone like Candace Owens who's just like driving people into a ditch, you have to kind of guide them away from that.

Speaker A: So I think first there's truth to that narrative. I do think that one of the things that happened over the past decade or so—and this is, you know, something I talk about in my first book, Why We're Polarized—is there's a huge upsurge in telling people that the right way to understand life, America, is all through the lens of identity groups. And when you tell people to look at identity groups, they will form a more coherent sense of their own. And a line I have in that book is: identity activates under threat.

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker A: And so the more you tell people that their identity is the problem, the more they're going to begin to defend that identity and feel that identity and begin to self-define around that identity. So I think all of that happened. And I think that you would also agree perhaps that, you know, the institutions, the legal system, the prevailing narrative at universities, corporations, etc. was explicitly anti-white for a number of years that for these young people were formative...

Speaker B: I think it's sometimes moved into being anti-white. I would not say it was all explicit. Hundreds of reports on this from institutions, from banks, corporations: white man bad. If you wanted to just put it into kindergarten language, white man bad. That was the dominant position in institution. I remember telling people around me that this thing where people are putting out like papers on what are the negative traits of whiteness was a disaster. Right. So I don't necessarily disagree with that. I think there's truth to it. And legally affirmative action, DEI was institutional, government-backed discrimination against one racial group.

Speaker A: So the thing that I am interested in though here is that you're now in power and a lot...

Speaker B: Personally I live on a farm in Washington state. I'm personally not in...

Speaker A: Your executive orders get passed, the whole thing.

Speaker B: And these things can all go in better or worse directions. These are all longstanding energies in American life.

Speaker A: The sort of argument I'm going to make, to be, you know, cards on the table about what I'm doing, please, is that I think the empirical and epistemological structures on the right and the habits they took on in order to win are playing with passions that are very dangerous. Like I'll give a good example of this.

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker A: You can believe what you want about whether or not the immigration of Haitians into Springfield, Ohio was good or bad. The people of that city had mixed views on it. I mean, the mayor and others were very pro, and it had been good for the economy, and Springfield had been in a period of decline, and then you had a large Haitian influx. And then you get into this thing that happened in 2024 about Haitians eating cats and dogs where there's a Facebook post and the right all the way up to Donald Trump in one of the debates begins adopting it. You sort of go on a quest to try to figure out if it's true. And, you know, to shorthand a long story, maybe in Dayton, Ohio there was somebody who wasn't Haitian...

Speaker B: Correct.

Speaker A: ...who maybe somebody thought but other people didn't think had eaten a cat, that somebody and other people is quite, is quite important. People can read your piece. They can read the Drop Site News article. I'm not going to convince you.

Speaker B: But the Drop Site News article, they went out to debunk my story and they ended up finding another independent corroborating witness. So...

Speaker A: It's not how I read it, not how they read it, but I on some level am not even focused on that. What I'm saying is that when you get very into moves like we are going to accuse broad communities of eating cats and dogs, which I think we can all agree Haitians are not in general eating cats and dogs, you are going to unleash forms of anger and hatred and fear that are not controllable. And I think one of the mistakes the right has made and frankly people like you have made is thinking these passions can then be coralled again this idea that you can find these really high passion like mimemetic containers that then you say well the real issue here is just we want to have a conversation about how much is the appropriate level of Haitian immigration into Springfield Ohio but that the way you get people to care about it JD Vance said this very explicitly is that well people really care about the cats and dogs. The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have tome create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people then that's

Speaker A: What I'm going to do Dana because you guys are completely letting Kla Harris coast. Um, which again I think my view is that there's never been any hard evidence of that happening in the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio. Like nobody has substantiated that and nor have you.

Dana: Correct. Yeah. I haven't made that. And in fact, I've said look, there's no evidence of this particular claim. We should be more careful.

Speaker A: And so there's been a a kind of consistent like the this idea that you could unleash like really I think quite terrible passions and then hold it to a level that that is controllable. And what you're seeing with Candace Owens, what you're seeing with the new Tucker Carlson or the old Tucker Carlson, however you want to call it, what you're seeing with Nick Fuentes and the rise of Nick Fuentes, who we've not really talked about, but I think is a a a necessary figure of thinking uh in the way we think about this, is that there wasn't a way to stop that move. like once people began to move in that direction and there weren't sort of institutions that were strong enough and respected enough to to stop it that the place it's going on the right when you talk about it becoming a third world click farm is quite dangerous and quite grim and now I will let you say everything you think

Dana: well oh man all right where do I start couple couple huge problems I gave you a lot a couple a couple huge problems I mean one is that you know and and I'm doing reporting in California right now that has uh that has stories that have a similar kind of let's say shock value. For example, we did a story on um migrants from Mexico and Honduras who come to San Francisco and get free sex change surgeries from the California state uh medical system. This is a kind of explosive story that is true that represents I think a lot of these underlying questions about homelessness policy about immigration etc. Look, if it's true, it's fair game. And there's a way to handle these stories in a responsible way, that you ensure the facts, that you present it fairly, and that you uh use it as a method of changing public opinion. Like, that's how it's supposed to work. And and so I I I think that the idea that there are taboos uh uh that that cannot be crossed because they will unleash uh these these kind of unspecified or vague dangerous passions. I think it's pro is is a problem in in two regards. one is that if you're if you're going for truth seeeking, if you're going if you're playing a a kind of responsible rhetorical game, um no, I don't think that these questions are out of bounds at all. Um but second, the predictions have always been um you know that it's going to unleash some kind of horrible nivist violence sentiment, etc. And but the only example of of an ideologicaldriven assassination that we've talked about today is the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The this kind of prophecy of political violence is is really comes uh from the institutional ideologies on the left, not the institutional ideologies on the right. Um and I think that I that that fact has been hammered home over and over and over these last few years. Um and and look like those of us on the right who who who are in this business. Um you know probably have to have like uh you know a little bit more firmness to say no the facts are not on this on your side in this argument.

Speaker A: So let me be more specific about what I'm saying because I'm not making a vague prophecy of political violence. Um and I'm also not saying that there are these taboos you shouldn't touch. I think where I'm disagreeing is to say that there actually isn't truth seeeking here. There isn't enough truth in these arguments. There's too much of an attraction.

Dana: Which arguments?

Speaker A: So the and it I mean arguments like the Haitian cats and dogs. We'll talk we'll talk about others in a second. Um and that the thing I'm worried about has arrived, right? I'm not talking about an unspecified future in which I am concerned the right will increasingly be taken over by conspiratorial um racist misogynistic elements. I'm looking at a world where Nick Fuentes is a major figure on the American right.

Dana: Well, you guys are doing a great job at at at at raising his profile.

Speaker A: Tucker Carlson is a guy who raised his profile, which I think was a mistake. I think it is legitimate to say Tucker is the biggest figure in right-wing media and he brought on Nick Fundes because and gave him such a gentle kind interview. And Tucker, here's one thing I don't underestimate with Tucker. He's [ __ ] good. He's a good interviewer. He is incredible talent as a media figure. If he wanted to cut that guy apart, he could have. As he did to Mike Huckabe when he wanted to do that or to Ted Cruz when he wanted to do that.

Dana: Those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed. And from my perspective, I want to be on the blessing side of things.

Speaker A: Oh, the those who bless the government of Israel,

Dana: those who bless Israel is what it says. Doesn't say the government of it says the nation of Israel. So that's in the Bible. As a Christian, I believe that.

Speaker A: Where is that?

Dana: I I can find it to you. I I don't have the the scripture off the tip of my You pull out the phone and use the

Speaker A: It's in Genesis. But so you're quoting a a Bible phrase. You don't have context for it and you don't know where in the Bible it is, but that's like your theology. I'm confused.

Speaker A: And he didn't because I think Tucker understands quite well where the passions are and where the energy is. And I when I hear you sometimes I hear you being more concerned about this. You're a little chiller in in in this. And I recognize you're talking to, you know, in a New York Times podcast studio, but what I'm saying is I actually don't think the balance is right. That I think for some time people have been, you know, and Donald Trump himself is like the king of this. There's a view to, you know, it's the old take him seriously, not literally view that. Yeah. The thing that is being said maybe doesn't hold up. I'm hoping that you can give me a little bit more though because I'm I'm saying well what are you actually saying I'll give I'll give you a little bit

Dana: was on a podcast I mean

Speaker A: are you saying Nick Fuentes is not a big figure now and is not influential among young people on the right is that really would you really make that argument

Dana: no I would make a slightly different argument I think that Nick Fuentes is not a fundamentally political figure he's a hyperreal figure of spectacle um that again is you can read my writing You can read my writings on on this on this exact question. I I think he's a I think he's a bad influence. What I've cautioned people on the right about that genre of personality is that when someone goes on a video and says, you know, I love Hitler. Obviously, we don't love Hitler. We're not neither of us are are are fans of Hitler, but you should resist the temptation to be uh scandalized and shocked and lose your capacity to reason and perceive it correctly because what this is, it is a hyperreal spectacle optimized for digital algorithms to harvest attention and to harvest clicks. It's not actually political in that sense. It's not optimized towards any political outcomes. I just reject this idea that, you know, some dumb kid that has uh, you know, hijacked the algorithm with um, like superficial ideological spectacle is somehow there therefore a symbolic of where people where the right is going as a whole.

Speaker A: I think I think hyperreal is doing work in this argument that is not actually connected to what what hyperreal means. I can imagine somebody sitting in front of me, even sitting in front of me here in 2015 and us younger, handsomemer.

Dana: Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Speaker A: And you telling me this about Donald Trump.

Dana: Tell me what Tell me what.

Speaker A: That listen, you all are being easily provoked. You're looking at a hyperreal, algorithmically oriented, attentional spectacle and treating it like it's a serious political force. And then maybe if I had been wiser about what Donald Trump represented and the way in which the hyperreal and the real were going to converge in uh the life that we actually lead

Speaker A: Here, I would have said no. Attention is the fundamental currency of modern American politics.

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker A: Things that we have actually fewer defenses against things that feel fundamentally ridiculous. This is an era of the trickster spirit, not the earnest energies. And many people like me, I mean, you may remember this, Huffington Post initially would only cover Donald Trump's campaign in its celebrity and entertainment news section.

Speaker B: Is that right? I don't remember that.

Speaker A: A ridiculous hyperreal spectacle and to treat it as a serious thing would have been absurd. I think many of us were perfectly willing to say Nick Fuentes is a marginal absurdist figure. And then it became clear in the Tucker Carlson moment and given where Tucker has gone that there's like a conveyor belt of these ideas and they go from the fringe to the far right to the slightly less far right to Donald Trump.

Speaker B: Okay. Well, here's where I would disagree. Um, and you actually have a real world test, right? Um, these kind of ideological media figures are playing a very different game than Donald Trump was playing. And you know that because Donald Trump actually played the game. He announced for president and he, against the odds, against many of the institutions, he won. And so you have to say yeah, Trump also uses media, but that's like, you know, that's a superficial comparison. You have to say what is the actual goal? And the goal for like the streamers is not to pass legislation. It's not to win elections, it's not to cobble together a majority, but it's in fact to, it's kind of a narcissistic endeavor to get personal attention. And so, but that's the end point. There's no actual bridge that can go over. And look, can it change minds? And can it change people's politics? It could change minds, but like, you know, not to the extent that you think because people look at it more as a form of entertainment, soap opera, personality drama than an actual viable political move. And so, yeah, I think that you're kind of conflating the media spectacle with the fundamental political arena. And I think that boundary is not as permeable as you're suggesting. And in fact to make that boundary more explicit is better in my view for my own kind of political desire, but also better for the country. And so when I see, you know, when I see the kind of online right and the New York Times both doing like puff pieces on the latest kind of right-wing figure, right? It was David Duke and then it was Richard Spencer and now it's Nick Fuentes. This is a stock character in American discourse and I just refuse to take the bait.

Speaker A: I don't think David Duke is a marginal figure. I mean, I will say...

Speaker B: You don't think David Duke is a marginal figure.

Speaker A: Here's what I mean. Um, I think John Gans, who's a great Substack and is a sort of interesting history-based theorist of American politics. He's got this book about the '90s called When the Clock Broke, I believe. And I've had him on to talk about the book and the argument he would make about David Duke, about a bunch of figures who arose in that period, Patrick Buchanan, Sam Francis, is that if you look at what they were figuring out about politics... I mean, David Duke, by the way, we should note ran for office, he did not come that far from winning for Louisiana governor.

Speaker B: Yeah, in the 90s.

Speaker A: You know, there was a style of politics that they got kind of quite good at figuring out. And Gans's view, and I agree with his: Is it much of what the populist right is today is built on that, often quite explicitly with Samuel Francis and others? Okay, make your case.

Speaker B: Absolutely not. I mean, look, for those of us who are... look, I'm in the institutional right. I know the people, I know the personalities, I know the organizations, that figure is a pain in the ass. Nobody wants it. Nobody likes it. Nobody believes in it. And in fact, that figure, as we found out recently with the revelations about the Southern Poverty Law Center, is not only a useful tool for institutions on the left, but in many cases was actually secretly funded by the kind of left-wing civil rights outfit, known as the SPLC.

Speaker A: Which we were talking about David Duke.

Speaker B: Uh, not David Duke in particular. Who knows? Um, but I'm saying that...

Speaker A: You're saying David Duke is maybe a left-wing plant. Yes, I think that's ridiculous.

Speaker B: I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that in the sense of totally wholly created, but certainly used by, right? The whole idea was this kind of smear effect where the media would go out and say this bad person, you know, supports your campaign and then you'd have to disavow and go through this whole kind of routine. But the point I'm kind of interested in here is I mean my view and I think this is a fairly wide held view is my worry is that the institutional right is getting steamrolled like...

Speaker A: Boom. Yeah.

Speaker B: By, well one to the, in many cases in order to survive it is dramatically changing what it is like the Heritage Foundation.

Speaker A: Sure.

Speaker B: Um, in other cases by Donald Trump. Donald Trump was not the candidate of the institutional right. If the institutional right had its way, Jeb Bush would have been the nominee. I mean, the idea that the institutional right has been racking up victory after victory is ridiculous. I mean, the Republicans all speaker after speaker after speaker till they got one who was more like properly compliant.

Speaker A: Sure.

Speaker B: The institutional right has not had a strong winning record. And again, part of my argument here is that I think this is because it keeps thinking it can maybe control these forces and it can't.

Speaker A: You asked me earlier to sort of be more specific on a story. So, I want to talk about a story you did in November. You wrote a piece with the title, The Largest Fund of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer. Tell me what the piece was about.

Speaker B: Sure. So, uh, this was a feature investigation that we did in, uh, Minnesota looking into organized Somali fraud. And so, we spent a number of months on this piece. We went out to Minnesota. We reviewed court documents. We interviewed law enforcement both, you know, on the record, on background. And then our story—and this had been kind of bubbling up in local press and bits and pieces—was that in fact Somali fraudsters were exploiting Minnesota and federal welfare programs, autism programs, daycare programs, Medicaid programs and looting billions of dollars from American taxpayers. And this was the story that really blew open the Somali fraud story on the national stage. And then since then, as sometimes happens when you report on an explosive story, it kind of ricocheted into an entire movement really looking at large-scale fraud in American public institutions.

Speaker A: So there's a couple pieces of this. So as you note the fraud had been, you know, reported elsewhere at the Star Tribune and it had been in national news. Yeah, there were bits and pieces.

Speaker B: There were prosecutions, right, which is where a lot of the information came from that began in 2022 under the Biden administration. The big sort of move you made in this was to say this is financing foreign terrorism. What was that argument?

Speaker A: Sure. I mean the argument is pretty simple and the mechanics of it are this. So we have billions of dollars being stolen by Somali fraudsters in Minnesota. We then have huge amounts of money being transported out of Minneapolis airport, Seattle airport in cash in actual physical currency in suitcases that goes to Mogadishu and then when in Mogadishu it is distributed through various parts of the country through what is called the Hawala network. Hawala Network is the name for kind of informal cash-based clan-based financial institutions. They don't have a strong formal banking system in Somalia. It's a rough part of the world. And so they have these couriers that move money and cash and all kinds of think tanks, military, US government, Department of Justice, Republicans and Democrats um...

Speaker A: have made uh uh have have essentially made the case that Elshaab is taking a cut of Hala financing. And so when we talked with federal law enforcement a agents and uh investigators who have been working on this case, they told us that the flow of funds was this from the taxpayer out of the airport and in suitcases to the uh hoala networks in Somalia and therefore uh uh to the al-Shabaab terror networks taking their their cut essentially like v we have visa that takes like 3% of your credit card transactions in in parts of Somalia. uh al-Shabaab takes a cut. Not exactly sure how much that is. And federal investigators say, "Hey, once it exits the country into the Hala system, you can't claw that money back. There are no there are no, you know, written receipts or banking transactions." Um, but the scale of that money that was that was remittances from fraud was so enormous that over time we're talking about huge sums of money.

Speaker B: So, I want to take a beat on whether or not this turned out to to be true. So the key named source in your story was a retired terrorism uh investigator named Glenn Karns. He later came out claimed that he was misqued. He said later the story was [ __ ] and that he did no on the ground investigating in Minnesota. The two top prosecutors of the fraud in Minnesota said the perpetrators are motivated by greed. There's no evidence of of terrorist financing. Do do you still stand by this?

Speaker A: Of course I do. Yeah. And a couple things. So the Glenn Karns uh uh detective is very odd. We have him on the record. we have uh you know a transcript of his interview. I'm not sure what happened. My suspicion is that when this story blew up into a huge national story, he got spooked or or or scared or or or uh but you know the uh the paper in Minneapolis tried to go through our piece and and with a kind of criticism couldn't lay a glove on it. Didn't didn't debunk or even really contradict any of our points. Um you had you know one source who who knows don't know what don't know uh his personal circumstances. Um but you know

Speaker B: he was the only named source.

Speaker A: He was I don't think he was the only named source in the piece.

Speaker B: He was the only name source making this terrorism argument.

Speaker A: Well incorrect. So so um we had multiple multiple highlevel um federal officials who confirmed to us the flow of funds. We substantiated it with contextual reporting from Foundation for Defense of Democracies, from the uh United States Military Academy, from the Department of Justice. We were saying simply, logically, if we know from a variety of sources that that al-Shabaab is skimming off the Hala network and we know from a variety of sources that money is moving through that network from fraud committed in the United States, it's a logical syllogism, right? A BC. And so, um, we know that this to be true. And I think that idea that because they weren't motivated by terrorism um is not something we alleged uh and is essentially irrelevant. The the facts as they played out um were that the al-Shabaab terror network benefits from fraud in the United States that has passed through their financial system.

Speaker B: Your piece is actually quite careful, right? I've read the piece. I've read it carefully. And you're right. You don't allege that the point of this is to fund terrorists. Then when you sort of promote the piece, your tweet is, "Somalies are stealing billions of dollars from American taxpayers and sending cash to terrorists back home. It's time for at real Donald Trump to revoke temper protected status for all Somali nationals in the United States. It's time for them to go home." And I have I think two or three issues here.

Speaker A: Two or three. All right, let's go through them one by one.

Speaker B: Yeah, we'll do them. We'll do them. I'll I'll give them to you all. Uh you have a limited number of people, right? committing crimes. They're being prosecuted, right? The prosecutions begin under Biden. This was not like a swept under the rug correct thing. You guys did not come up with this. You didn't find it yourself. And they are they were stealing a lot of money. I mean, that part is true. the sending cash tariffs back home. as you say, you have a more complicated

Speaker A: to the peace and then you could like your your your rhetorical

Speaker B: and then and then and then none of the people as far as I can tell were doing this were under temporary protected status which is only about 750 people right so there's this move to say it's not just like some criminals it's Somalis and it's not just some money is being scammed because of a weak banking sector it's they're funding terrorism and then it's to get Donald Trump to deport people who are unrelated ated to the crime.

Speaker A: Okay. So, a a couple points on on that on that particular argument. So the point of the the piece broadly it raises the question of immigration cultural compatibility and if you talk to people with an expert in Somali culture as we did and the history of Somalia as we did you get the clear sense that uh in Somalia there is a kind of kinship and clan-based culture that is prevalent for a variety of historical and and social reasons. And because there is a has been a weak central government, contested central government in Somalia in the modern period, there is a feeling that exploiting the central government um uh is uh is permissible. And I I think the the the underlying point which is very uncomfortable not just for people who are small L liberals but even for many conservatives is that actually all national culture all national cultures are not equal. And in fact, because immigration is a group-based or national uh border-based system, you have to be prudent in which nations of origin you prioritize in immigration. And so uh I think the the the record on Somali in the United States and elsewhere on many of those metrics is not good. You have low levels of education, high levels of welfare dependency, and you have these cultural incompatibilities. let's say. And so again, in a prudent national interestbased immigration policy, I would put Somali's down uh lower on the list. And I think that's perfectly defensible. I don't have a problem saying that American immigration policy should solve our should serve our interests, should not just be omnidirectional.

Speaker B: What I am saying is that to take a crime committed by a limited number of people then say this is something about an entire group of people and and you should deport these unrelated people. like that that is a bad thing to do and to yoke this sort of larger argument you're making to this much more kind of tendentious well some of the money that goes because of this [ __ ] up system back in Somalia can get taken by al-Shabaab to to finish the thought and then and I'll let you take it where you want to take it that that is and to to that's part of this larger point I'm trying to make to you which is that you are not putting like passion in service of reason you're you're unleashing things here that are like first going to really harm people who did nothing wrong right these Somali temporary protected stud I mean many as you say Somalia is a tough place many people flee it for completely reasonable reasons and we you know honor them for doing so and trying to make a better life for them and their families like they did nothing wrong I think you actually do believe from many things you've written in like the premisy of thinking about the individual if you want to say that our immigration policy should not favor Somali. Fine, fair enough.

Speaker A: But but our immigration, the temporary protected status is is based on group designations. And in fact, Somali, Haitians,

Speaker B: but the people are going who did not do this crime, right? We agree on that part, right?

Speaker A: Hold on. Well, let let me take it let me take it in pieces. So, a couple kind of factual problems here. You said a limited number of people committed these crimes. I'm actually not sure that that's true. And I'll and I and I'll explain it uh why I believe that. If you look at the actual schemes committed by Somali, for example, for autism services, you had members of the Somali community opening up fake clinics with fake patients that were receiving, you know, kind of fake treatment. And uh what we're looking

Speaker A: ... is actually a non-insignificant number of people that were involved or had knowledge of these schemes as they were unfolding because you're talking about thousands of patients, you know, large, larger family sizes. And secondarily, prosecutors told us over and over and over: "We're just looking at the tip of the iceberg. We don't have the prosecutors. We don't have the investigators. We don't have the manpower to actually unravel all of these fraud schemes." And so let's just say the median estimate, kind of responsible estimate, is $5 billion. Well, they've only uncovered fraud schemes and maybe $300 million. And so that would indicate that actually the vast majority of the schemes were simply kind of vanishing through your fingers. And so you're actually getting what I believe is, uh, because also the Somali community is very concentrated, in geographically tightly integrated in kinship networks. I actually think you're getting the complicity or knowledge of actually a non-insignificant part of this community.

Speaker B: Are most Somali in of that?

Speaker A: Uh, I, I think it's just, it's just logical, and I think that we can make this, uh, we can make the argument, um, with a high degree of certainty based on the court documents, based on the total of fraud committed, and based on how these things are structured. And then look, this is, uh, mass fraud committed, um, in Minnesota, committed now in other states that we're uncovering. And you know, one West Coast police detective who has been looking into this said, you know, "I've been looking into this for 30 years, and organized fraud rings, um, in his experience, are committed, um, uh, to a massively disproportionate amount, um, by foreign nationals and groups of, uh, you know, and groups of originating from, uh, migrant groups." So...

Speaker B: This is a fact. It's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable.

Speaker A: I didn't, I didn't argue. I didn't argue with that. Um, so I've not, I've not done my own reporting on this, but...

Speaker B: But hold on. But the question then is how do we respond to that politically? And so I actually think...

Speaker A: Well, I want to talk about how it got responded to politically. So Donald Trump did what you wanted him to do. He, um, he put up a Truth Social post on Thanksgiving Day, which you called iconic...

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: You, you know this. You called it iconic.

Speaker B: Um, in which he says, you sure did.

Speaker A: All right. Let's hear it. In which he says refresh. "Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great state of Minnesota. Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for prey as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping, hope that they will be left alone." But, but then it kind of moves on from there. So then Nick Shirley, a right-wing influencer, launches his own investigation of Somali fraud in Minnesota. He starts going to daycares and like knocking on them and being like, "Hey, is there, are there kids here?" and these women come out and they don't speak English and they're like looking at him strangely. Um, this gets I think like 130 million views across platforms. It goes crazily viral. But I want to play a clip. You, you did this podcast conversation with Richard Hanania where you guys were talking about this, and I think, I think what you say is interesting.

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker A (Podcast audio clip): "If you look at the Nick Shirley video and you really dig into it. Um, there are two things happening. Okay. On the surface, he is raising, he's shining a spotlight on something that is very real, that is a kind of endemic form of corruption, and he's bringing it to life through kind of Zoomer-style YouTube kind of gonzo, um, uh, video production. Okay. It draws attention to a real issue. It's driving politics in the right direction, and, and it's I think overall beneficial. Granted, your, your critique of what's happening under the surface is also true. I mean, I couldn't publish, uh, the conclude, you know, Nick Shirley gets in there, sees a building as empty, and then assumes, oh, they're committing $70 million of fraud or whatever. As a journalist, as someone who has to go through fact-checking, legal review, uh, kind of peer scrutiny, I kind of clam up and I'm like, 'Oh, wow, man. You're gonna, about to get sued because what you're saying is just not defensible as, as a, as a journalistic process.'"

Speaker A: So, so the reason I found that to be such an interesting quote is it, I feel like both sides of what we're talking about are in there. You know, this video is not strong. Let's put it that way. That there's a lot you, you can't go and be like, "Show me your kids." So when they don't show the kids, be like this is a fraud, you don't have any kids. On the other hand, you have this like contrary feeling that, well, it may not be true, but it, it puts attention towards something real. It's like in line with where I want politics to go. It does become a huge issue. We'll talk about like what it, what it leads to, and, and like I can feel this tension. So I mean, how do you balance that?

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, well first of all, uh, it's a free country. Everyone has a First Amendment right, and so therefore, uh, you, I, you can't say I don't like this for these reasons, therefore you shouldn't be able to do it. But I think this is just another instance, an example of the right being under-institutionalized. And so what I would say is that an ideal, say, uh, outcome or method would be to take someone that has charisma, that has courage, that has curiosity, someone like Nick Shirley, and then integrate that into an institution to put up those, uh, guardrails, uh, to refine and, and, and really improve the, the product itself, uh, and then to use that attention toward productive ends. And so, um, that would be like the ideal, that's the kind of thing that I think would be good. But the reality is that on the right, the media is so fragmented, and the media institutions, um, are, are, are not that strong, not that well-developed, um, and in many cases, uh, you know, highly risk-averse for obvious reasons, and therefore there's an entire territory that is ceded to people. I don't even know if Nick Shirley is right-wing. I'm not sure I would even categorize him as, as that. I think, um, the story landed in that particular manner. But you have people independent.

Speaker A: She's not leftwing.

Speaker B: Let's say citizen journalists. I think that was the phrase for a while. There was great hope in the citizen journalist. Um, you know, love citizens, love journalists. Um, citizen journalist is, is one of those things like it sounds good in theory, but in practice there are some real limitations. And so it is what it is. What are you going to do about it? You know, this is the kind of thing where as an individual, my only reaction is to say you can put out a kind of remedy, suggestion for remedy, but it's not within my direction.

Speaker A: That's the thing I'm asking, not as an individual, but as an activist and an analyst and somebody influential in the administration that responds to these stories, yours, his, by, uh, deploying a giant ICE and Border Patrol deployment to Minnesota. That deployment ultimately and the fighting around it leaves Renee Good and Alex Prey dead. Minneapolis calculated the economic impact of the raids at, at least around $700 million. Joe Thompson, the acting US attorney in Minnesota, who was leading the fraud investigations. He was quoted quite a bit in your original piece. He resigns in anger after Trump's Department of Justice demands his office investigate Renee Good's wife. So, I mean, to me, I look at all this and I say like that wasn't beneficial. This was catastrophic. I mean, it, it harmed people's lives. It led to people dying. It was bad for the Minnesota economy. Um, it led to the fraud stuff getting, you know, completely sidelined. Um, and the person who was pushing it resigning, that, that this did not go in a good direction in part because it wasn't based on good information. But like now, like looking back at the whole thing, do you disagree with that?

Speaker B: Yeah, I would disagree. So, so, so, well, I would agree with certain points, but I, I would refine them and disagree with others. So, uh, I mean, the fraud work is continuing. The vice president is now chairing an anti-fraud task force. They've significantly increased the manpower to...

Speaker A: look into fraud. Um that said, like it was a bad strategic decision to deploy force, Customs and Border Patrol, uh ICE agents, um with that kind of force posture. Um it's a no-win situation. Uh and I was advising against it from even the previous summer. Uh and so in in that particular case, I would say it was ill-advised. And I think that finally the administration has learned that they reshuffled DHS, they reshuffled Customs and Border Patrol. And if you want to um if you want to um create deportations at scale of illegal immigrants, you have to do so um in what I've kind of called an invisible manner, an impersonal manner. You have to change banking regulations, financial transfers, remittance fees, um, uh, you know, employment, employment verification to, uh, incentivize self-deportation because the idea that you could deport, um, uh, people by simply like sending in, you know, armored cars with ICE agents on the side is is is delusional. It's it's never going to happen. I think there's part of the right that wants that kind of macho imagery, but if you look at the underlying substantive um policy that you want to enact, I think it's detrimental. And in fact, the the situation in Minneapolis um again, you know, in that sense was did not achieve the stated objective for reasons that that I I and others had had predicted.

Speaker A: Let me pick up on the the front. And and to me it's also it it's annoying to me personally because we I I think fraud huge winning issue. No one wants fraud. It's a huge problem in the country. If you had if you could just focus on that you could rally not only Republicans who are traditionally kind of you know uh small government but you could also bring into the coalition moderate Democrats who want good governance. And so to me personally, I found it very uh uh you know very uh very upsetting because it's like hey we have this winning issue, focus on the issue, execute the policy at scale, save the taxpayers money. Um you know you're you're giving someone a a g a nicely wrapped gift and you just wish that they would take it. Uh in this case it didn't happen that way.

Speaker B: It feels to me like the fraud problem for you all is bigger than this. According to a Times analysis, across his two terms, Trump has granted clemency to more than 70 allies, donors, and others convicted in fraud cases, including Philip Esformis, who stole $1.3 billion from Medicare and Medicaid in a fraudulent billing scheme. It was the FBI's largest ever criminal healthcare fraud case against individuals. Trump commuted his 20-year prison term.

Speaker A: You're not going to get me to defend it. I I would in fact,

Speaker B: but I don't see you really attacking it either.

Speaker A: I'll attack it right now.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: shouldn't have done that. And in fact, you know, if if if these people were convicted of fraud at that scale, uh 20 years seems like a light prison sentence. I would double it personally.

Speaker B: And so, yeah, this is the push I'm making, and I recognize you're not going to defend this, but there is this movement on the right right now to to focus on fraud. You've been very much leading this. Meanwhile, I look at Trump and he's gutted the machinery of anti-fraud enforcement all across the federal government. He gutted it at the IRS. There's a tremendous amount of fraud in tax returns. We all know that. And huge amounts of money are being stolen under those terms because now you the the audit capacity has gone way down. He gutted inspectors general across the federal government. People seeing what is happening inside these organizations. He destroyed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which did a lot of anti-fraud work.

Speaker A: Um, debatable.

Speaker B: I recognize we would debate it. What I don't think is debatable is that Trump and this administration have sort of systematically gone across the federal government and taken apart um parts of the government that are supposed to watch if the government itself um is committing fraud and if you know taxpayers and and and others are. I just I look at the country right now and I see Donald Trump has like you like using piracy around the Somali. I think of the Trump and the Trump family as pirates. I think that they are looting the country for their benefit. I think that that's what the Qatari plane is. I think that that's what the crypto investments are. I think that's how Trump and his family have increased their net worth by billions of dollars. And I'm not saying you support it, but I don't understand how you think you're going to have like a right that is doing good governance and that is taking these things institutionally seriously and have that be what is happening at the very top.

Speaker A: Sure. And let's take let's take pardons as the most concrete example. Um yes, I agree. Uh I think you and I would agree and you know I I'm political but in a sense not partisan in that way. I'm not going to reflexively defend every decision by someone in my camp or the president of the United States. And in fact a lot of those pardons um ill advised shouldn't have done it. And because in the reporting that I've read, a number of those individuals had also been putting money into various lobbies and various uh attempts to influence and various, you know, campaign funds or committee funds or however the the finances work. um you create the the a perception of corruption uh that is not good and does in some ways uh undercut the uh the the good work of combating systematic social service fraud as a whole. But from my point of view and how I have to look at it is okay, you live in an imperfect world. Uh you don't have ultimate control. My influence is great on the things I care about on DEI, on higher education, defunding NPR, whatever. Like go down the list of of of uh

Speaker B: you've been very influential of

Speaker A: but the the the the kind of the implicit premise of of your criticism, which again I I take seriously and I and I think it's a fair criticism, is oh therefore, you know, you you you should give up. You should turn against the good work that's being done. it's kind of canceled out or invalidated because of something that's happening over here. And my personal policy is where there's where there's necessary criticism, I'll create I'll give the criticism, but I'm not going to stop to work in that little sphere of influence that I have to do good. And so, you know, I'm kind of walking the line, right, where I will issue the criticism as necessary. And if that reduces my influence in a certain regard, I'm willing to accept it. And uh while I would certainly, you know, uh speak out against uh I think the crypto thing was was was just, you know,

Speaker B: and it is ongoing.

Speaker A: It's ongoing. Yeah.

Speaker B: Their crypto plays are ongoing. World Liberty and all this stuff is ongoing.

Speaker A: Sure. Yeah. and and uh and and at the end of the day when I you know when I sit down in my office uh you know at 7:30 a.m. every morning I'm like all right how can we win? How can we move the ball forward? How can we do good policy? And ultimately at the end of the day that's all that's within my control and and that's the that's the attitude that I bring to the fight.

Speaker B: I think you underestimate yourself. The the point I'm making is I'll explain it to you. I will the point I'm making is actually a little bit even larger than you. Um, look, the one reason I have you here for this conversation is I think you're very very good at what you do. I think you're probably the most successful activist, certainly right-wing activist of this era,

Speaker A: but maybe overall you're saying,

Speaker B: huh?

Speaker A: Maybe overall. Maybe left and right in general.

Speaker B: Maybe. Maybe. Right.

Speaker A: I'll take it.

Speaker B: And look, you and I are not going to agree on a million things, right? My point is not to convert you to my politics. I'm not going to do that.

Speaker A: You should try. I mean, why not? I'm trying to convert you.

Speaker B: Listen, we we talk. Um, but I think that the rights inability to hold itself to certain epistemological or institutional standards, standards of, let's not call it neutrality, let's call it impartiality at the institutional level, at the federal government level. What the right is accepting that Donald Trump is doing is insane in my view.

Speaker A: Okay?

Speaker B: and the epistemological standards and Nick Shirley stuff is

Speaker A: ...and some of your things in my view which go again I think you're careful in like the body and then not always in the promotion and the weaponization of it.

Speaker B: ...careful in the...

Speaker A: I think that are defensible, but you think I take the rhetorical flourish too far as...

Speaker B: And then beyond you, I think there's a generalized view that we need to unleash these passions, there's been too much that has been unsayable. And we need to make sure we can say it all again. And the result of this is like a hydraulic process, not like some future result, but a current result where when I look at the Spotify rankings, the right of center figures on the top have become highly conspiratorial and you know there figures like Fuentes Rising and we need a strong right in this country.

Speaker A: I would so I'd ask you a question then. Has the New York Times editorial line, right, the editorial line, has it moved more in my direction since 2020 or have I moved more in its direction since 2020?

Speaker B: I'm not sure the way you have moved since 2020.

Speaker A: I haven't moved at all.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: So, if I'm the baseline...

Speaker B: So I think you're saying it's moved in your direction.

Speaker A: Of course.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: You look at the big piece on DEI, you know, you had editorialists saying that I was, you know, some sort of villain on DEI.

Speaker B: Let's agree. Let's agree moves back.

Speaker A: Let's agree you've won some fights. I am saying that they're like the right in my view, right as somebody who I think actually has a good record of criticizing my own right, I pushed Joe Biden to, you know, when that was like a much more dangerous thing for me to do.

Speaker B: Agree.

Speaker A: Uh, I wrote abundance which is entirely critique of democratic governance.

Speaker B: And where the right has gone I think is not going to work and what's interesting to me about you right now is I'll watch your show and I can see you and your co-host wrestling with these questions. Sure.

Speaker A: Right. I don't think you're comfortable. But ultimately, there's like two problems that I see the right having that it really does not know how to solve. One problem is its attentional sphere.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Is pathological.

Speaker B: Parts of it are.

Speaker A: Parts of it are. And it doesn't have a lot of institutional strength there. Um, and the second is that you cannot challenge Donald Trump. You can sort of say some things he's doing you don't like, you know, maybe wouldn't fully support, but Donald Trump is the sun king and he has to be obeyed or you get if you go too hard and shown his ability to do it.

Speaker B: If you go too hard, you get like pushed out in a way maybe you can't come back from. And those two things are allowing a tremendous amount of bad ideas of actual corruption of just the institutional and non-institutional rot to occur and like we're all going to pay for it because right now we're all living under right-wing governance. So I have a lot of worry about this, right? I don't need just like my point is not you should become a liberal but the right...

Speaker A: ...has some real issues. I would agree that the right has some real challenges and this is universal right there's no entirely virtuous effective discipline political movement. Every political movement has a certain fermentation a certain amount of internal conflict you have to figure out how to resolve disputes settle questions and what I've tried to do especially in the last say year and a half since Trump has become president again is bring a lot of those conversations into the open. And I think that while there are these real challenges, the epistemological machine of the right has some real weak spots, some real flaws, some real vulnerabilities. While Trump's kind of highly individualized, charismatic presidency that is charismatic rather than legal, rational or traditional, the Max Weber, you know, triangle of legitimacy and authority. The reality is that, okay, then let's solve it. We this is the conversation we need to have. These are the problems we need to grapple with. The charismatic leadership has enormous benefits. It also creates a series of underlying problems to solve. But I think that all of these can be resolved productively. I think the people in charge of the conservative institutions still in general have good epistemological judgment intuitions, attitudes. And I think that you know politics moves forward and I think actually after you know Trump is in his last term if depending on how things go with the house this might be the really last kind of truly effective moment for the Trump presidency. And then we ask the next question. And so the reality is that you have to move forward. You have to work within imperfect conditions.

Speaker A: One of my critiques of the right right now and I have my own of the left and I've talked about many of them. But I think the right likes to talk about virtue and doesn't insist on it and virtue to go back to what we were talking about around telos and your telos is very much in part about restraining the passions and channeling them productively. There's a lot of talk about virtue, but the people who are leaders on the right, Donald Trump very much included, are not virtuous often. And if they have enough power, that is looked past. If they have enough strength to their passions, that is fine. And similarly in the informational sphere in the attentional sphere there is a lot of playing with stories that are designed like memetically constructed to arouse very very very base passions. Those stories are often much more complicated if they're true beneath them. And there's a view that that can be channeled in the right direction. And I think the opposite is happening that in fact the people who are restrained are really losing out in the right attentional sphere because it's this constant you like you can't get heard if you're not now playing this game of incredibly weaponized like explosive allegations which of course is going where that ultimately always goes which is toward anti-semitic conspiracy theories like the oldest intentional move in the book.

Speaker B: You're raising I think a really important philosophical question and the conservative tradition offers a lot of good debate discourse on this question. The question is this you have what we might say Aristotelian virtue or Christian virtue and then Machiavellian virtù which is a totally it's the same word but a totally different conception. And for Machiavelli, virtù, the political virtue was the virtue of how to win power, how to maintain stability, and in his book on republics, how to have a flourishing republic, which often requires cunning, ambition, design. And so politics is always a conversation between virtue and virtù. And you're essentially reconciling means and ends. And there are people who will argue, academics in particular, even those on the right, well, we need to have deontological principles that you can make, you know, no that the ends, the means always have to be 100% pure towards 100% pure ends. And I laugh. It's like, well, only an academic could really, you know, make such a case because the reality is that in politics, it's an imperfect world and you're constantly balancing means and ends. You're constantly taking the measure of virtù and virtue. And so you have to figure that out. You have to figure out where you're personally comfortable, where you personally can feel that your work is justified. And then as a movement as a whole, this is a constant negotiation. And look, in my mind, political leaders are not your friends. Political leaders are not your priest. You know, political leaders are kind of blunt instruments. Political leaders are means to an end. And there's no easy answer there. There's no immediate answer there. But what I would say is that those are the people that are my compatriots, the people that I'm fighting every day alongside and along with are high integrity people, very smart people, conservative institutionalists who understand the moment, who understand that that we need to kind of deliver...

Chris Rufo: tangible political victories. We can't retreat just to abstract speculation and and who you know look we're playing the game and in my view the game is simultaneously to improve our own capacities but also to to win in the arena and so I I I oftentimes and and this this conversation is is interesting because you're often times you're moving forward all right what are we going to do how are we going to hit this where are we going to where are we going to push next what kind of what kind of victory is is is is available Um, and you have to do that knowing that the the the system you're operating in is is littered with imperfections. Um, and again, at the end of the day, what I my calculation is I I'm I'm very mindful and even try to be some people wouldn't believe this, try to even be humble as to the the little part of the world that I can influence. And I think I've changed it for the better. Um, I think institutions that I'm working with are are improving over time and I think this epistemological question and the individual charismatic question are questions that can be and will be resolved in the say short to medium term.

Interviewer: I'll leave it there. I really appreciate you doing this conversation. Always our final question. What are a few books you'd recommend to the audience?

Chris Rufo: Okay, so we're going to do three books uh from the Rufo's personal conservative cannon. The first I would recommend is a book by my mentor John Marini, Claremont Institute uh scholar uh called unmasking the administrative state which I think has helped me more than anything understand the deeper philosophical and political underpinnings of our modern dilemma. Uh, the second book that I think all conservatives should read and all liberals should read is a biography by Stacy Schiff called The Revolutionary, which is a biography of the American founder Samuel Adams. And Adams is the most political founder. Uh, I think he uh kind of kind of clarifies through example all the questions that we've been talking about about propaganda, about passion, about institutions, about political change. He's the kind of key and and the forgotten founder really. He's been downgraded for for centuries now, but I think he's actually the most important uh founder. And then um you know, third, I would recommend a number of books by the the kind of conservative journalist, former NYU professor James Burnham. Wrote a book called Managerial Revolution, another called the Machavelians, another called Suicide of the West. And for me, Burnham is someone who has the kind of sophisticated analysis that helps illuminate these questions. His his work is quite good and might even be interesting for people who don't share, you know, my political.

Interviewer: Which book of his would you start with?

Chris Rufo: I would start with managerial revolution um again because it it just it kind of describe it's in in the 1940s. It's unbelievable. You read it now and um he's describing the world we live in. uh um but he's describing it from from a point of of kind of optimism, American optimism, but he already saw some of the problems that were starting to emerge.

Interviewer: Chris Rufo, thank you very much.

Chris Rufo: Thank you.