Jock and Creep Theory of Fascism

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Ask your doctor about Trumphia today. one Call hundred eight six seven seven three six to learn more or visit Trimfia Radio. com Ford is here for those who build America, those who will drive America and keep it moving forward for two hundred and fifty years to come, especially those who believe that giving everything today will pay off tomorrow. If that's who you are, then you value what we value. Right now, Ford is offering employee pricing to everyone. I'm talking American value for American values. Go to your California Ford dealer today or visit buyford now dot com for more information . Hello welcome to the Bollard podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller delighted to welcome to the show , the author of unpopular front on Substack. He wrote the book When the Clock Broke Convent Conspiracy and How America cracked up in the early nineteen nineties about the, you know, David Duke and the right wing media ecosystem. We're going to talk about that he co host a film podcast Unclean Present Danger with Jamel Bowie. It's John Ganz. How you doing ? Good, how are you, Tim? Well, I kind of feel like I'm in college again because I was up vomiting all night and I had to meet with TA this morning to discuss some reading. We call Far and , you know, we're gonna do a little Renaissure ard. So it's we'll be okay. It wasn't the fun kind of vomiting though. So you gotta carry me. You got to carry me. Is that alright? Okay, I will do my best. I will do my best. I was not vomiting so far as I can remember Not the best evening. I just want to start if people aren't familiar with your substack, which is great. Give us a little baseline for your politics. JVL on our internal slack was calling you one of the good socialist s. I don't know if you accept that moniker sure. But why don't you give people it's the good part of the socialist either. Yeah. Yeah, I guess you could say I'm a social democrat. I would say that's how I would identify that That's the tradition I feel closest to. I mean, that's like David Brooks Yeah, like David Brooks used to be. I hope I don't have the same trajectory trajectory. I think I'm too old for that now already. But you know, that's part of the socialist tradition . It's one, it's one part of the socialist tradition historically and , you know, it's it comes with a commitment both to, you know, an economy that tries to work for everyone and also a commitment usually to liberal democracy and , you know, a robust free society. Okay, so you know, give me a if John Gans was in Congress , who would your doppelganger be? I mean, I very, very rare ly disagree with anything Bernie Sanders says. I got to tell you and you know, we're we're very temperamentally similar, I think. Elizabeth, I know I know Elizabeth Warren is someone also I have a lot of admiration for AOC , you know, I was very excited about her rise and, you know, and I support Sora Mom Donnie. So, you know, these are my politics, basically. I've had too many Bernie people on the pod lately. I've got a we need a cleanse. I need a cleanse. I need to get Joe Manchin back on the you got to find somebody to the left of Bernie to put on the pod like some PSL people or something like that I could tell you how he's a he's a revision ist. I'm open to it. I want to start with just kind of Trump administration stuff, then we're gonna go back into your book and the origin how we got here . On the right . You wrote this, which resonated with me, which shouldn't surprise you, you know, given that I've got to wake up and talk about this nonsense every day. At the beginning of the second Trump administration, I wrote that I wasn't enjoying my job anymore because it was at once too easy and too awful. The people in charge are evil, stupid or both and those who support them are either evil, stupid or both. That's all there is to say over and over. Anything else strains the truth. I still stand by that. I mean, yeah, absolutely. And I think what that I wrote after that is actually it's become more difficult and not as easy because I find that, you know , when you write political analysis, you know, you usually attribute motives or reasons for people 's behavior. And sometimes those reasons are ideological, sometimes they're self interested. Sometimes they're in the context of partisan politics. You try to make it legible for people and you try to, you know, put your spin on it, will maybe advance your politics a little, but generally try to communicate the truth with the actions of the Trump administration, it's very difficult I find to give them any coherence because it's so based on Trump 's personal whims and his own , you know, idiosyncratic and mercurial way of doing things . So I often find that when I attribute , you know , some kind of ideological thinking or some kind of project to anything they do, you know, a week from then the line is totally changed . You know, usually a presidential coalition, you know, has tensions, but there's this in like open confrontation with each other all the time , which is unusual. You know, a president usually went like undertaking a project like going to war, say, right ? Now usually you would imagine, I mean, this is the way we used to think about politics. They would first have their own party very much on board. And then they would use that as a platform to get the rest of the American people on board. Now, Trump didn't even have his own party on board going into it. So it's a different type of politics than you know, we grew up with and we're accustomed to to commenting on and it very much is the Trump show and he personalizes everything . He is not able to think in terms of systems or abstractions , ideas like the market or you don't believe that Donald Trump can abstract . I don't think he can, basically. I don't think I think basically he is sometimes swayed by conspiratorial rhetoric is some people are ideologically conspiratorial because it sort of supports their worldview. I think that Trump is basically psychologically incapable of understanding things as processes that don't have like a person behind them. That's the way he's always done business. He always thinks someone's trying to screw you or you're trying to screw somebody. And you can see the way you runs the economy. The idea of a deal is like a one off kind of carve out where you make you make some compromises. Now for the behavior of businessmen and firms , that's fine on at scale , you have to have rules. So you can't have a million different rules for each type of business . There has to be, you know, some rules across the board, which is why the tariff policy looks so incohere nt and why most of his policies look so incoherent is because he basically doesn't have the conception of the economy as a system. He has it as the conception of okay, this guy's in my ear , wants a break for his business and I want this business to do that. It's just a consistent kind of making of carve outs and making exceptions and you can't have nothing but exceptions. It's just total chaos . Me this is just another way of saying that evil stupid frame, but isn't it really just that Trump is a megalomaniac and everything that he's doing is in his personal self interest and it's enriching himself and his family? And it's just like sometimes he has the illusion of knowledge and like doesn't realize what's in his interest and so he does shit that ends up being not in his interest . That's about right. I think that he, I mean we all don't exactly have a perfect idea of our self interest , but his instincts lead him sometimes I think to make mistakes in his political career because his idea of his self interest is extremely narrow and not very subtle . But you know, he can also change course unlike say, you know, he's he has some instinct that, you know, listening to Stephen Miller about every single thing is probably not the best idea . But he keeps them around. Where do you feel like the Iran war and the latest one we have kind of fits on evil stupid . It's really remarkable. I mean, you know , it's a war that had no public support . I am not an expert at foreign policy in any way. I read the news , you know, just like a lot of Americans and I've been following politics for most of my adult life. Anybody who has half a brain knew that this was not going to end up in a way that was favorable to the United States or the world at large, that it would be some kind of catastrophe. In fact, this is kind of on the lower end of the catastrophes, but it's a completely absurd situation. We eng aged in this war. It didn't accomplish a single strategic goal for the United States. They were talking in the beginning about regime change. They're making all this noise, all this grandiose plans. And then we basically have nothing of like that. And we're going to go to something that was kind of a weaker version of the JCPOA . And it seems as if basically and this is goes back to his decision making process, he was talked into it . He thought it was a good idea. He was talked into this very simplistic idea of it. And when it turned out to be a lot tougher than he was led to believe , he decided to walk away . And he's just basically pulling out of what he feels is a bad deal and trying to enter into a new deal with Iran , who now he praises as reasonable people. And before they were lunatics and so on so forth. If you go back to the way he behaved in New York City and the way he carried on business deals and he carried on his behavior with politicians trying to get those deals across, it was always like this . It was a lot of recriminations , huge statements that he would never work for somebody. This guy was crazy. He was a lunatic, he was the worst. And then they, you know, the next week is trying to make buddy buddy, or vice versa. He has a close relationship, working relationship with somebody and then they have a terrible falling out and he's saying all kinds of horrible things to them. He speaks in a way that is guaranteed to make headlines, you know , to stay in the news all the time, but it can't entirely be taken seriously. He's a self promoter extraordinari, there's a term called Mir Puffery, right in advertisement. Like if you say it's the best coffee in the world, I can't sue them for false advertising because that's obviously just an piece of advertising rhetoric. Trump's almost every word is essentially mere puffery, like that's that's his functional mode of discourse . And so you can't really take any of his declaration seriously, which makes, I'm sure doing diplomacy with him very hard or doing any kind of business with him at all very difficult and hard to get and he's extremely unreliable. I have a little shaden for you as I think many people do as the Israelis having such a hard time with him and being so shocked. What did you think? Who did you think you were dealing with? Yeah . Oh, you thought you had the special key to his heart give me a break. I mean, oh, we're so friendly and he's so good to us. He can change his mind at any moment. He's dropped bold friends. He can drop some political ally when it doesn't seem like it's going as wet. Consistency is not his forte. And he, you know, to his advantage, he's able to to change course very quickly should have bribed him. Well, I'm sure that they probably tried and are doing something , but I think the real people who are excelling and bribing him are the Gulf States probably. And that may reflect the approach here . I'm a big coffee drinker and I used to think caffeine was the only way to get the energy and focus boost I need, but recently I've been trying mud water instead of coffee and I gotta say I'm liking it. Mudwater is a coffee alternative made with mushrooms. We love mushrooms and adaptogens about one seventh the caffeine of coffee so you get the focus and energy without the jitters, crash or anxiet y. If you're like me and you love coffee , but sometimes the caffeine sends you straight into an anxiety spiral, mud water might be the solution for you too. With mud water you get the same morning ritual, coffee chai or match a built with functional mushrooms and adaptogens instead of a full caffeine hit, steady energy nose spiral . The best way to start is the starter kit. It's designed to set you up with everything you need to actually build the habit you. When you order, get the full size tin of your choosing blend, plus a free reargeable frother , free gifts at free shipping . There are actually four flavors OG , coffee, matcha, and turmeric. Ready to make the switch to cleaner and energy? Go to mudwater. com slash the bulwark and grab the starter kit. Use code the bulwark and you'll get forty three percent off. The frother alone is worth it. That's right up to forty three percent off with code the bulwark at MUD WRT . com After you purchase, they'll ask you how you found them. Please show your support for our show and tell them we sent you. I want to go back to an early nineties Trump because this ties to your book in this period, the title I really like when the clock broke it's about a Murray Warcart speech. I kind of feel like your publisher had to hate it though. My publisher hated when I proposed them kind of like weird self referential titles and wanted it to be very straightforward , but it works for me. My agent didn't seem to think it was going to be a good idea, but I convinced the publisher of it pretty quickly. Okay . Yeah, I want to get into kind of the political phil likeosoph ical, if you even want to call it that underpinnings of this. But you have an interesting insight into that, like about how Trump is a bit of an unfrozen caveman from this period too. And Trump is maybe was obviously not influenced by the writings of Murray Rothbard , but his obsessions and his instincts were kind of developed in the same time . Well, Rothbard foresaw the type of politics that Trump practices as a path forward for like the hard , which is basically a kind of what he called it at the time, right wing populism. He was looking at David Duke running in in Louisiana and how the media kind of freaked out about it. And he said, this is the way to do it. You know, you go around the media, you short circuit the media and you talk directly to the people and you attack, you know, your enemies and the bureaucracy and the elites and the liberal elites and, you know, you get a lot of people very excited and you know, it's a very bombastic style. So he envisioned the style. I would say the policies in so far as there's any kind of coh erent background, a guy named Sam Francis who envisioned, you know , basically a kind of US under a kind of dictatorship, but that was like a developmental dictatorship that was highly protectionist that would try to protect American businesses, a unilateral aggressive policy, an America first foreign policy. So that was the kind of people who I saw as being harmingers prophets of Trumpism. Now Trump himself , he saw Pat Bucanan and David Duke running . He said, look, you know, they're they're they're doing well because there's a lot of anger in this country. And he for a very long time had these protectionist instincts . Essentially , you know , he temperamentally goes along with this ideological program, which is that the United States ' relationship with the world is adversarial and our so called allies are trying to screw us. Immigrants are sucking up our resources. It's a very zerosme hostile and paranoid attitude towards the world . And you know, in so far as a philosophical articulation, these guys do it, but you know, you can also just boil it down to certain instinctual or habitual behavi and beliefs of Trump that he picked up through his life . He also , don't forget , Trump experienced a near brush with ruin in the late eighties, early nineties . I think that this intensified his paranoia and his attitude to the world as being an essentially hostile place He found his negotiations with the bankers, which ultimately came out quite favorable to him because they could have ruined him to be very humiliating and he wanted to take revenge against a lot of people who we felt had not stuck with him through his hard times and turned on him . The eighties was a great boom time for Trump. That comes to an end at the end of the eighties . And he sticks with a lot of the same preoccupations. Urban crime, you know, urban crime is on the decline, but that's an obsession for Trump. You know, if you go back to this era, this is the era where Japan , South Korea and at that time West Germany , their imports, you know, very we're competitive with American manufacturers. And there was a current of opinion, which Trump was shared, which is that, you know, we need to protect domestic industries. And I think that basically Trump is also in this kind of late Cold War period where those under our protective umbrella are now becoming our competitors . You see it also in his attitude towards immigration , you know , the Reagan administration was fairly liberal on immigration, but there was a current of opinion that started to get more and more paranoid or hostile that immigrants were harming the national substance of the United States or taking up resources . I think his obsession with Russia has to do with his notion that Russia is still a power on par with the Soviet Union. You know, this is also he's very obsessed with this summit diplomacy that he must have seen Gorbachev and Reagan engaging in and the palm and circumstance with it. So his idea of Russia is just, well, you know, these are the Soviets. We need to treat them with respect and so on and so forth. And that suits Russia just fine because that's exactly how they want to be perceived. I also think that Trump temperamentally finds Putin's mode of government to be appealing . I think that he likes his way of doing things. He's a bigger gangster in a certain way. I don't know that he has direct desire to help Russia because of whatever. P tape. Yeah. You know, as I was listening to some of your interviews on this , like the emergence of this kind of mindset, this kind of right populism in the period of the early nineties . This stuff was bouncing around before that, right? And it's not as if it was not kind of right populist thought before. I mean, a lot of this was in kind of like mailed newsletters and Republican campaigns and like things through this notion. And so I started to figure out like this question of like when you were on Chris Haze's show and he was talking about this, like why nineteen ninety two in twenty sixteen . And you guys as progressives like both fell back on economic anxiety, basically, like economic structures that were happening at these times. And I'm just like not sure if that's right. Like to me, it feels like it's more mass media. And like this, there was this like undercurrent of right populism in the country that needed , you know, basically bombastic media figures slash politicians to be able to , you know, reach them. And like a lot of these people weren't reachable. You know, it was hard to organize this sort of thing prior. What do you make of that? I think they're both it's both and it's not either or I think that basically yes , the fragmentation of media has opened up the doors for a lot of things that would not have made it into the previous ecosystem of media and that is a boon to all kinds of crackpots in Charlottes and politics that were once fringe. There's no doubt about it . But the appeal these politicians only makes sense if you consider the trajectory of the society and the fact that you have large members of the middle and lower middle classes feeling increasingly squeezed and dispossessed and feeling unrepresented by their politicians who they feel are intrinsically corrupt . And you know, I don't think that Trump comes along without the two thousand eight crash and the feeling that there's something, you know , rigged about the system as he likes to put it. So I don't think you can really disentangle them. They're not represented as a good word though, because this is another thing I was thinking about because and this is why I'm not I'm of the view that the Republican Party is like not returning to anything resembling anything from before when the clock broke? Well, I guess unless you're kind of like Lindbergh, unless you're kind of about way before because like variable about these two times is I'm thinking about like why is Buchanan rising in ' ninety two? And why is that successful? Why is Trump successful in twenty sixteen? And I think, well, yeah, it's because this is what Republican voters really wanted. Like the Republican vote voter Id was always Buchanan culture War, Trump. But, you know, the elites of the party managed to be able to kind of control the animals a little bit. And then you have like H. W. Bush and Mitt Romney, God love them, like were both particularly ill suited to kind of be able to to bring that crowd into more of a mainstream conservatism Reagan and HW Son and W. Bush both like, you know, both had a focusiness that kind of allowed them to bridge it. Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate. I do think that, you know, the new right that coalesced around Reagan, and, you know, Reagan was not the first choice for a lot of those guys. They wanted somebody crazier like John Connelly. You know, Reagan was kind of too moderate for some people on the in that version of the new right . And then they kind of grew to love him and realized , you know, he was sort of one of them. But the people I write about exited their eighteen years feeling betrayed and let down that he wasn't more radical rightist for people on the left like me, you know, that sounds wild because we think, oh, Reagan was an absolute catastrophe and could not have been more right wing . And as Buchanan said, the biggest vacuum in American politics is to the right of Ronald Reagan. And there was a constituency for the type of politics they practiced became apparent. Wallace campaign showed it was there. It overlaps with the, let's say, the Republican primary voter, but it's not entirely partisan because it's an I think this is what you have to understand about Trump is and what I was trying to get out of my book. He also encapsulates the spirit of a third party candidate, right ? Of a candidate like Ross P eru who comes out and says, you know, the parties are crooked, I'm going to reform them, I'm going to change everything . So there is a populist spirit which is not entirely contained in either party and in fact can attack the party's system itself. And if you look at the way Trump takes over the Republican Party, he kind of attacks it as a almost a third party kind of candidate. He's not connected with any of the existing power structures. He's connected with kind of a mass movement in the Republican Party because he's a tea party figure, but he's not connected really so far and the elites that that generates, but he's not connected to any of the old party structures. And that makes him appealing, right? Because there's a feeling of betrayal, a feeling that those people aren't tough enough. I mean, the massy quote where he said, Oh, I realized that they didn't care what I believe. They were just voting for the craziest son of a bitch. It's one of the most insightful things about American politics, anybody said in about twenty years. Yeah. So yeah, there was a desire on many levels for a figure like Trump and it was contained, but it couldn't be contained permanently because the voters got fed up and they said, We don't like the candidates. You're feeding us. And in that way, it's it's democratic. I mean, Trump's first election is not through Democratic means. It was through the fac ed system of the elector college, but in terms of the way he took over the Republican Party, he won those primaries fair and square. There was a huge, huge, you know, enthusias m behind him, which I'm sure you guys all remember, but the internal party democracy of the Republicans allowed Trump to happen. The Democrats still have a little bit of a intact party structure for good and ill . Summer changes how I get dressed . More tank tops, you guys don't get to see that on the podcast , but in addition to that, you want pieces that feel lighter and more breathable . that Th areings easy but still put together. That's why I keep coming back to Quints. They focus on high quality essentials that feel and look amazing. Think breathable linen and software gain a cotton well made basics but without the luxury markup. I've been wearing that European linen shirt . I was never a shirt linen shirt man really because of all the wrinkles, but Quintz linen shirt is coming out of the driver looking just nice for me. I've been wearing my linen shirt kind of over the tank top sometimes been looking good. 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Go to quints dot com slash the ballwork for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns now available in Canada too, that's QINCE dot com slash bulwark for free shipping and three hundred sixty five day returns quince dot com slash the ball I want to get to the Democrats in a second, but your comment about Trump and how he like despite, you know, being the three time Republican nominee, still kind of represents or positions as a nonpartisan fig ure or as like some kind of outside figure. The kind of big news in right circles yesterday was a clip from Tucker Carlson, what he said on a show in Canada. He's speaking to uncensored Canada. We're exporting our crankery as well. So Tucker on the show said this, I would not support the Republican Party. There's no chance I'd support it. Not going to support the Democratic Party either. How could I support a political party that is not loyal to the United States there's no defending this. I'm out. I don't believe that for a second. I don't believe that for a second. First of all , again, like Trump and Tucker Carlson has been in media for a very long time. He knows how to make a he knows how to make news and get him the headlines and he does that instinctually, you know, he's got to be interesting. He's got to always say something. Also, he's mirroring what people do his right have already said is he's just copying Aflentes at this point who's been saying the same thing. Infants goes farther to be provocative and says he's going to vote for Democrats. He's going to change his mind. So is Tucker Carlson. They're making news. The other thing about Tucker Carlson is I don't think he remembers half the things he says. And he makes outrageous statements all the time . He said that he thought that this administration was ruled by the Antichrist. And then he was on the Times and they said, Well, you said this administration is ruled by the Antichrist. And he said, I never said that. I never said that. I don't know if he was lying or just doesn't know the truth from anything. These people, I mean, you know, we're part of it in a certain way, but I don't think in exactly the same way. They basically have an ongoing discourse of verbal diarrhea, and I don't think that they really pay that close attention or that careful about what they say or they won't they don't say, oh I said this and to be a principled person I have to stick by it. I'm sure by primary time Tucker's going to have his guy and the fact that he said that is going to mean nothing. People are going to play the clip over and over of him saying I'm not going to support Republicans. He's not going to care. He's not going to care. He's going to say, well, actually this guy probably JD Vance is fine. And you know what ? Frankly, he might be setting himself up for his own run . There's been a lot of speculation for a long time that Tucker has ambitions in this regard . And the only reason why you think that might not be true is because a lot of his friends and family work for JD and they seem to have a buddy relationship. So does he really want to compete directly with them? I don't know. Like even paying attention to that seems to be kind of kind of stupid. He's just making noise. Two things to that. Later in the interview, he does talk about JD and then he discusses like basically how this is why he's a media person and JD's a politician because he couldn't be in JD's shoes. He's in this impossible situation. The vice president works for the president, can't be fired. And he's like, I know I believe that JD realizes that this is a mistake. This is kind of the Iran war, Israel partnership element of it. And I think that he is trying to like at least position himself as being an outside air cover, I guess for JD. But in the context of the book that I do think it's interesting he is leveling the same critiques of right populists from there you're talking about you're writing about . Yeah , especially when it comes to Israel . That was a big, that was a big issue for them even at that time when it wasn't quite so salient. I think it's extremely dangerous and irresponsible to pretend like that first of all, JD Vance wasn't part of the policymaking apparatus of this administration. It didn't have a hand in making this decision. And that Donald Trump is not a grown up who doesn't make his own decisions. I mean, like they support a guy who seem to implicitly say in their discourse is swayable and controllable by other people . So like what kind of a person is that? What are you doing supporting this person? And they're creating this narrative, this kind of stabbed in the back narrative where oh, well, you know, Maga was great and we were going fine and then the Israelis and the Jews came along and sc rewed it all up. Well, Trump screwed it all up because he, unlike every single other U. S. president, didn't see through the fact that BB's rhetoric and ideas about this were unrealistic and crazy and he had his own political needs to take care of that had nothing to do with the United States, had nothing to do with protecting our interests and just said, go fuck yourself. I'm not going to do it. Trump was the only person stupid enough or mercurial enough or whate ver to try to roll the dice. And I think he rolled the dice because his administration was sinking on every other issue. You know, don't forget this comes not long after the tariffs thing. You know, I think you have to put every decision in the context what is going on in the news for Trump shortly before . And if he feels like he's being weakened or he looks bad, he makes these improvisational decisions based on the needing to appear strong. The president happens to have a lot of power in foreign policy and warm powers unfortunately. So that's an area he can make an immediate impact and try to make a big splash when the policy part of his administration is very much a flop . So, you know, I think that that's what he was thinking with the war and he thought it would probably be something like Venezuela, a simple matter. And anybody who is an adult who's read the newspaper can tell you not the same story at all. But for some reason , every fifteen years or so, the United States forgets how to think. We think that the world is some simple place that we can manipulate at will and oh well we're going to go in there and then we're going to knock over their regime and people who ought to have known better because they live through Iraq were like, oh yeah, well , well maybe it'll work out this time. You know, even some people who were critics of Trump went, well, about this like about this thing. Oh, you mean one of the most unrealistic and potentially catastrophic things he could possibly do, which is to pick a fight, you know, start a war with another power with no idea what was going to be at the end of that war . I think the United States basically showed itself to be not that powerful , you know, he made a lot of big noises like it could affect a lot now they realize we got to kind of just take what we can get here . I did not actually suffer through a communion prod,ucer Ansley Defini Vancisney. Yeah Sent some sections. It's a section I want to share with you because I noticed you were on the Know Your Enemy podcast to our guys over there. We've been on a couple of times at one time I was discussing Renaiss Gerard. Yeah. And you won't be surprised that Rena Gerard gets a shout out in communion. There are two sections I want to read to you. The first one is how came around to seeing the error of his ways when with regards to atheism . Peter Thiel impacted me in another way. Possibly the smartest person I'd ever met, he identified very openly as a Christian. He defined the simple social template I had constructed, that dumb people were religious and, smart people were atheists. I began to wonder where his faith came from, which led me to Renee Gerard, the French philosopher under whom Thiel had studied at Stanford. Gerard's thought catalogue is rich enough that my summer going to justice is theory of medic rivalry that we tend to comp ete over things other people want spoke directly to some of the competitive pressures I had experienced at Yale . So it goes on, but I just was wondering what your kind of initial reaction is to that origin story. Well, Rena Gerard believes that people essentially , you know, mimic each other and want the same things and that leads them into inevitable conflict . And that's the heart of this kind of philosophical anthropology and description of the world. And the upshot for him is the only way out of this is religious faith. So the whole thing is kind of a Christian apologetics . For me, what he's describing there not really being moved by religious sentiment. It's kind of realizing that the smart people that he wants to be in with religious and then kind of changing his tune. And he said, Oh, well, you know, I want to impress Tiel so I'm into Gerard. And that's mimetic behavior like Gerard describes who start to copy people because I think Tiel is smart, therefore what Tiel pursues . So I've always believed that JD Vance is deeply wounded by the kind of entry into America's elite that he had which is that he's a bright guy. He went to Yale , you know, but he comes from this underprivileged background. And I think he like Richard Nixon before him , who was a bright guy, but really resented elites and their condescending towards him. I think that, you know , he really has a chip on his shoulder about that. It's funny, there's another clip of his. I was watching Bob Costa was interviewing him and Usia together about the book of Joint Interview . And I just thought it was like really unintentionally revealed. Oh, I thought you said Bobstas for a second. I was like, that's my rebranded. He's a podcaster these days. Right. Here is Usha Vance explaining why she didn't convert alongside JD. I think it's pretty telling. Well, I think in some ways it has been a very personal journey for him. I grew up in a household, a Hindu household, a very stable household, and I've not felt the same sense of need to seek something different that he has . So I think the journey has been more in our relationship, right ? Trying to understand where he is, the different ways he's thinking about things, how that fits into the life that we have together , and less a religious journey of my own. I love the question . She's like basically saying like, yeah, JD was wounded. His ego is wounded by his by the lack of a father figure and you know, maybe by the people looking down their nose at him as El and this is all part of his self discovery more than it is actually a religious endeavor. One knock you could make on Gerard in general and this approach to religion and a lot of conservatives approach to religion quite frankly is that no doubt many of them are sincere of course. But they usually relate to religion as some kind of social or psychological necessity . And that's not quite the same as believing, right? If you say, well, it's better for society if we do that. That's not quite saying I believe in the literal truth that of this religion and that God is communicating through its representatives . It's something much more utilitarian . So I think that Gerard 's philosophy is an entry point for people whose viewpoint on the world is fundamentally not one of faith, it's one of reason and this seems to be a rational picture of the world and how it works and why people are competitive. What Gerard is right about is that being involved in these social competitions and desiring what others want and being in these menicet basically love triangles is extremely painful and it's very difficult to feel like you've accomplished very much because there's always this endless regress of, oh this person has something I want. So the appeal of religion then is it seems that Gerard said, well, you know, instead of imitating others, imitate Christ. And you know, he was the only person not infected by this. And yeah, I can understand, you know, the pain s of living in a competitive society. One would want to escape that and take a more contemplative stance towards it . It seems to me that these fellows have a very utilitarian, almost cynical relationship to religion that is not one of deep feeling. I don't know. I've not read the book, but does he describe , you know, being in the presence of God or is it like Augustine's confessions where he has this very, you know , this realization that his former life was deeply sinful. Well, he does shout out his mistake about the childless cat ladies. You mentioned the love triangle, and I do wonder if maybe that I don't know if you know that Denash DeSusa and Laura Ingram and Erin Colter were in a love triangle back during the early nineties. And so maybe that was a girard. I'm very sorry to have learned that because it's a totally rep ulsive prospect and I will never forget that. I didn't know that but it doesn't surprise me. I mean, like, you know, the professions of conservatives to moral rectitude, everyone knows that's a hypocrisy. Everyone knows they're just like everybody else. This is Hodac y from Joy one hundred and one with Hodac i. Okay, you know those quick CBS runs we all make, they're starting to feel like more than just a stop along the way. You know, it's really about showing up for life's little moments and big ones too, and helping you feel your best along the way and making every visit feel easy, a little more rewarding, and something you can feel good about inside and out. It kind of feels like CBS is becoming that place where you can take care of everything in one trip, whether it's something you need for your health, something that makes life easier, or even something that just lifts your mood. 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Ford is here for those who build America , those who will drive America and keep it moving forward for two hundred and fifty years to come , especially those who believe that giving everything today will pay off tomorrow. If that's who you are, then you value what we value. Right now, Ford is offering employee pricing to everyone. I'm talking American value for American values. Go to your California Ford dealer today or visit by for now . com for more information . I want to read one more quote from the book and then with the Democrats . Gerard's work captured so well the psychology of my generation, especially its most privileged members. Mired in the swamp of social media, we would identify a scapegoat and digitally pounce keyboard warriors. He goes on, blind to our own failings. It's hard to imagine how you can write that without reflecting on one's own failings, of the author's own failings, but JD manages to do that. He thinks he's talking about the cancelled cultural libs, I guess. Yes, okay, so that's the other part of Gerard's philosop hy. He believes that basically society picks scapegoats and this is an outlet for aggression that would otherwise lead to kind of a universal civil war all the time. So we scapegoat people his. And solution is like, well, he thinks Jesus was scapegoated, but he was the one person was totally innocent. So therefore it revealed the mechanism of scapegoating, so on and so forth. Right. What I think that people like T iel and Vance take from Gerard is not in order to be good Christians in order to be good people, we ought not to scapegoat. They say, well, that's kind of the way the world works. So we're going to pick our own scapegoats. We're just going to make the right people escape goating. I don't think the man who repeated the, you know, the slander against Haitians eating cats, you know, I don't think that person really can say with a lot of sincerity that they're against scapegoating. So I think that essentially that's another side of the cynicism is that Gerard gives them a picture of the world of a humanity that's irrational, competitive , prone to violence, natur ally scapegoats people. And then Gerard himself says, well, this is why Krishna is necessary and why you know there is an escape from this . But they sort of say, well , that's just sort of the way things are. Yeah, and it works . And it works. Right. So one of the things I really wanted to explore with you is this, you know, one of the political problems Democrats have is I don't remember if I stole this from, and I said've it a lot. So my apologies is the crank alignment under Trump . And where a lot of the people that resonated with the politicians and figures in your book had been southern Democrat , you know, that were kind of racist Southern Democrats. They were part of the FDR coalition. You know, a lot of them had been kind of independents that were not really part of the political process, maybe voting for Peru, maybe they voted for Clinton one time . And now fast forward today and Trump has kind of united all of those types of voters inside the Republican coalition . And as Democrats try to think about how to handle that challenge . There's like whatever it's social justice woke thought that's like fuck those people, whatever, you know, and then there's another school of thought that maybe is , you know, that Platiner might be an example of, you know, which is like, we need , you know, kind of a bad boy of our own, a working class figure of our own to reach them. Like how do you like think about the political challenge of reaching these kind of aggrieved voters? Well, I think it's going to shake out the way it's going to shake out and this whole primary season electoral cycle is going to see who there's probably going to be some coalition a mixture of the two. The Democratic Party will be, you know, an amalgam as it always has been , I do think there's a populist tradition of the Democratic Party obviously . And perhaps Democrats have moved too far away from that populist tradition. That's independent of the merits of any particular candidate or defending any particular candidate . You know, Obama comes out of a wing of the Democratic Party, which kind of doesn't exist so much anymore. But it was kind of the Howard Dean progressive side of the party, which was anti war , you know, a little populist , but you know, not looney toms. Not Dennis Kosinich, right? So Mike Rvell . Right, right . So it was kind of, I don't know , we might want to call it like moderately populist and that was kind of what it meant to be a Democrat for a while . And I think that that spirit is good and fine and actually necessary. And I think it will appeal to people , you know, who feel that alienated from politics. I think Trump's coalition of the alienated obviously was extremely fragile and temporary. And many of the people he brought on board he, quickly alienated himself and they're they're up for grabs. Are they all going to become Democrats? No, some of them will just be demobilized. You know, but I do think, yeah, of course, like a politician who seems to be a fighter against entrenched sloth and privilege and systemic corruption is going to appeal to a certain type of voter. I don't think that the appeal to we are competent technocrats really going to work, especially since this leads to your peat skepticism. I went back and look through our Twitter history of you dunking on me on Twitter . No, that's okay. No, it's great. Your first ever Twitter junk on me was over me being too gushing to Pete. You were like, he got exactly what he deserves. This was like right after he dropped down. Maybe I'm less hostile to him now than I was then. I think that he's he's demonstrated a lot of seriousness and is genuinely. He does seem to be kind of going a little too and set pieces . He seems a little stiff to me. I think John Ossoff is a little bit more like the Peep butterjez who's a little more spontaneous. I'll give you a homework assignment. We should go listen to John Aussaff on this podcast a couple of months ago and report back to me. Okay. We'll see if you still feel that way. All right, okay. Well, I've seen him speak. I've seen him speak and his speech is really good. The speech is good. Okay, that's not the same. Yeah. Pete's more and I will agree with you. Yes, Pete Pete's appearances in the talk show circuit have been quite interesting. And I think that, you know, he's positioning himself as a kind of radical reformer , which is an angle, perhaps in the primaries, which will be one of the angles . You know, he's got to find some ire because it's going to be a cycle where Democrats are angry at their own party, angry at the Republicans and they're going to want somebody who seems like a fighter and is going to change things . Yeah, you know, the Democrats do have a little bit of a nerd problem. Yeah. Let's say the Biden administration was the test run for the competency and technocracy. And was it wasn't that the Obama administration? I think the Biden administration was like Biden having a couple of old timers around him and then outsourcing the policy making to Elizabeth Warren Walkes, I think happening. But those people were all true that's , but there was a lot of people who were, you know , highly qualified educated people about all these advanced policy ideas . And then the perception of people's actual experience of those policies is a lot different than they wanted . Also, he was not in great shape as a messenger for all of it. So I would say it depends. He was not I'm not saying technocrat as synonymous with centrists. I'm just saying there was a highly wonkish aspect of the Biden administration, which I was very friendly to because I thought their ideas sounded great and I think some of them actually worked and I just didn't draw attention to them. But yeah, I mean the thing is like the kind of social democratic ideas that Biden tried to implement were sunk partially because of inflation, which is an issue that, you know , every politician just seems to be cryptonite for everybody. And there's not much you can do about it. This is Hodac y from Joy one hundred and one with Hodac iott, CBS is there for moments big and small, making it easy to get what you need and leave feeling confident that you've got it all covered. It's where everyday errands turn into something more. You go in for the essentials , but you end up finding those small useful things that add a little something extra to your day. With CBS brands, there's something for every moment. Visit your local CBS pharmacy. Presented by CBS . Ford is here for those who build America, those who will drive America and keep it moving forward for two hundred fifty years to come, especially those who believe that giving everything today will pay off tomorrow . If that's who you are, then you value what we value. Right now, Ford is offering employee pricing to everyone. I'm talking American value for American values. Go to your California Ford dealer today or visit byford now. com for more information . On those kind of reform questions and mentioned that Pete's trying to do radical reform, it's something that I have like two wolves inside of me on this question, which is assuming the Democrats get back into power , like how do you solve the Biden problem of people not feeling the positive change . And I think that the predominant view within Democratic circles is going to be, you know, we should be more aggressive in using the levers of power that we have in order to get policies done . Biden kind of tried that with a student loan thing and it backfired, you know. So this is like a little bit of easier said than done. I think a lot of people are like magic wand, we're going to start it. Then there's like another view which is okay, we need to reform the whole system and like take less power away from a future demagogue and, you know, fix things. And this kind of question , you wrote something a while ago about like an old learned from, I think it was the French in the twentieth century and this question of the Senate and like how to deal with the Senate. You can take that wherever you want. I'm just kind of wondering where your head is on that. I mean, I am personally conflicted as well. I mean, you know, I am sympathetic, I'm highly sympathetic to the belief of fellow people on the left that there are deeply undemocratic and unrepresentative parts of the U . S. system , that you know, is it fair that New York State has two senators and North Dakota has two senators? And that makes the proportional representations of those places so out of whack. I don't think so . Is it fair that the judiciary which is packed with conservative justices have so much power ? I don't know. But on the other hand, you know, as the second Trump administration has unfolded , I have to say the check s and balances are real. I mean, perhaps not Congress unfortunately , but more you see this the judiciary institution I've never really had much regard for. Now , unfortunately, I think the Supreme Court has made things a little easier for Trump in some regards, but also, you know, rejected key parts of his policy. So I'm I guess a little bit more of a constitutional than I was at the beginning of Trump. But I will say that that is tempered by the fact that the parts of the Constitution that were supposed to protect us from a crazy demagogue ironically allowed him to take power in the first place, right ? So the idea that those mechanisms are so essential to prevent, you know, abuse , I don't know. And I do think that perhaps if they were formed and there was a more muscular mode of governance, the des ire for a kind of strong man figure might be lessened because there would be less sclerosis and less frustr ation with the political system and people could see it working. Are people ever going to be totally happy now ? So am I worried about like a future Trump ? I mean , having less , you know, checks on their power , like whoever has authoritarian designs on the United States has learned plenty and they're not I don't think that they're going to need that much where I fall end up falling too, which is frustrating because I don't like it. I want to circumcite to Platinum really quick though. Because part of the reason why we invited you is because I had professional jealousy over your platinum article because it was another thing where I think we're in a similar boat where kind of we're grappling with the question of flattener. Like I totally recognize the appeal to main voters. And like that is what democracy is. And you have this old governor who like wants to compromise like running against an old senator who wants to compromise and you've got a young guy who's basically like fuck these people. We need to care about your economic interests. I'm gonna fight for you. Like and he's from Maine and they get it. They know the type of character. Like I get it a hundred percent. Like I don't think it's sneaky anti Semitism among the seventy five year old main Democratic primary voters . Like I get it . On the other hand, like so there's like the main platiner that you write about. And then there's kind of like the platinum figure as a national figure that is an avatar for this kind of factional fight within the Democratic Party . And on that, he's a little more complicated My professional jealousy was sealed when you pulled a random Simone de Beauvoir, quote, that just like nailed him. I was just like, I was like, where do you fucking pull this from? So this is so good. It was I mean, it just happened from the ethics of ambiguity describing him as like this adventure lost soul. So anyway for people who haven't read it once you kind of summarize that. Yeah, you know, I think that his character is legible to me. I could be wrong, you know , I can't see into his soul but from his behavior, from his activities. I think yeah, you know, he's a person who yearned for adventure, who yearned for a more authentic feeling life than was given to him. And you know, those types of people can be very charismatic and wonderful and do great things in the world and they can also be very dangerous and really only kind of nihilistically interested in their own self expression and so on and so forth, which is Platinum. I don't know. I would say I would rather Platner on our side than the other side . I would say from my perspective, he's lending his powers for good. I'm, you know, pleased with most of the things he says. He's not said anything that I find particularly offensive or worrisome . We share very close politics. Frankly, I just find it intellectually insulting to believe that he didn't know that that was a Nazi symbol when he got it. He obviously knew. He obviously knew. Because he can't say yes, I know I got a Nazi tattoo because everyone's going to be like, What do you mean? But because what he was doing was and it seems like everyone doesn't have a conception of this for whatever reason, even though it's to me very understandable. He did it to be edgy. And if you say, well, that's too offensive, well, that's the whole fucking point. It's a taboo. I get this one hundred percent by the way. So this is somebody can whatever clip this and use this against me if I ever I'm not ever running for Senate. But like when I was in college, I was being edgy and we have various, you know, overlaps and dissimilarities between me and Platiner, but like my parents went to old miss and I got like old Colonel Reb gear and I brought it back to my dorm room to like troll the Northeastern libs and it wasn't like I want to bring back the Confederacy. I'm scared of needles so I didn't get a tattoo. It was like kind of a trying to be a bad boy of thing, just silly and childish, right? But like that's what happened. Like that's what happened. He got the tattoo. Maybe he didn't know at the exact moment, but eventually he knew and then he thought it was funny and edgy and whatever. And so he didn't get rid of it. Like he didn't get he didn't keep it because he's a fucking secret Nazi. Like that's why he did it. Those people are not that good at like hiding their politics. There would be a lot of other things other than the tattoo that suggests they have those politics. And I don't think being a critic of Israel is a sign frankly. So I'm very sensitive to signs of Nazism. And I just don't see any in Plattma, frankly. He doesn't strike me as that sort. Now in a different historical era, different conditions, would someone like him be attracted to fascism short, but so would many people, right? I would say that you know, his adventurous streak and maybe that slightly nihilistic and boundary breaking thing. Yeah, he could get into that, but it seems like, you know, as an adult , he has an ethical worldview. And is that ethical worldview always been expressed consistently throughout his whole life? No, but the story that he has matured and become a better person is trying to do civic service, it's a plausible one. You weren't negative polarized by the reaction of Monplatten's stance? I think that that's a bad way to go about thinking about the world. It's tempting, but you got you can't like this is a problem. Like, you know , a lot of the people who I thought who were going to the mat for him, I was like, you sound like an idiot and I don't like that you insist like I sound like an idiot, but I don't think that your judgment of the world be , you know , affected that much by okay, well , you know, assholes are really like this guy. So I don't want to be on the asshole team. So therefore, you know, I think that that really deforms your judgment . With that being said , what people are projecting on and what he represents for certain people, I'm like,, well that's stupid too, but I don't think that that's necessarily Platinum's fault that they're projecting that onto him . Maybe it helps him in a certain way. But so no, I really try to avoid that sort of habit of thought of being negatively polarized. Here's the more concerning part within the coalition for me than Platinum. Yeah. There's a story yesterday Dan Goldman is running tonight in the primary in New York. He's going to get he's going to get his ass beat by Brad Lander , which is democracy. That's how democracy works. But like Dan Goldman was an impeachment manager . He's a conventional down the line liberal progressive. He was out there defending his chief of staff vociferously when these right wing assoles were posting pictures of him in like leather gay outfits and goldman was coming to his defense . You know, he is a J street type pro Israel liberal, not an APAC type. Also his Brad Leager, really. Right. And he goes into a coffee shop, Poetica in New York, and they said they were going to deny him service, but they didn't recognize him in time. So they posted a picture calling him a genocide lover and they refunded the money. And that activity on the left starts to head more down the path of anti Semitism to me. I don't know that Dan Goldman deserve to be denied sitting at the counter because he has like some conventional progressive views on Israel . Well, yeah, probably not, but you have to keep in mind that I mean the common sense on this has shifted enormously in the past couple years . Like yeah, I think that, you know , it gets ridiculous and it can edge on antemiit Sism, but the fact of the m atter is