Virtue and Machiavellian Politics

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 right's counterattack DEI initiatives. He's very much behind a lot of the demonization of critical race theory. Critical race theory has become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people , he claims COT is actually a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution. And he built that into a series of campaigns that have actually changed policy. It's very influential in Rona Santis's governorship and kind of running Claudine Gay out of Harvard. Pushing out Claudine Gay, toppling the president of Harvard for a journalist like me is a big win. 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. 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 to some of the work that led to the ICE and CBP deployments to Minnesota. This week, I published an exclusive story exposing the Somali fraud rings in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which are stealing billions of dollars from American taxpayers. 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 Ruf o 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 disqui et. 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 it's attentional and informational 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 int,ended , tried to help it do. As 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 cede 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 journ al. He's 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 Azer Kline Show at NYTimes dot com . Chris Rufo. Welcome to the show. Good to be with you. So I want to begin with a PC wrote in early twenty twenty four titled The New Right Activism, a manifesto for the Counter Revolution . 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 . Yeah, I mean that's an obvious reality if you think about it for longer than a minute. And I think it's important to say because there's this mythology that we have in the United States. And it's a small e liberal methodology that institutions can be kind of neutral arbiters, that they could be valueless vessels 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 or explicit . And for those of us who are on the outside of many powerful institut ions, there's a lot of value in simply revealing the underlying reality. And in fact, political fights are at heart, the fights for who determines the values, what values are installed in an institution and then therefore what kind of decisions get made? So let's take a lot of the arguments about institutions particularly within the broad philosophical tradition of liberalism to 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? No, 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 , if you sent 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 . And so I think neutral and impartial are similar, but in this case kind of critically different. So another argument you make in that piece is you say the popular slogan that facts don't care about your feel betrays similar problems, slogan being Ben Shapiro's slogan. In reality, feelings almost always overpower facts. Reason is a slave of the passions. Yeah, that's true. And we'll caveat. We love Ben Shapiro we're Ben Shapiro fans, of course . But I think 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 a rationalization for losing. It's like , yes, we may have lost the great political question, which operates on emotions or passions , but you know, we have the facts on our side. And if only people would read our white paper, our kind regression analysis , our rigorous logical argumentation , then we would be vindicated . 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 field of sentiment and public opinion, much more on the field of, you know, kind of abstract argumentation at the top. So and then you go on to the same piece to make an argument for agiprop. So agipropold Soviet Union term for agitation and propaganda mashed up together . And it doesn't have a great reputation. Agiprop is usually not a term of endearment, but you say agitprop doesn't mean sacrificing the truth, but rather channeling the truth toward victory . So how do you define what agitprop is ? And what are you trying to explain to your fellow conservat ives about how to use it? 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 . The original meaning comes from the Catholic Church and it was the propagation of the gospels, the propagation of the truth . And so these are concepts that we can recover because the reality is that all politics in the age of the printing press and onward depends on propaganda. And how do you define what propaganda itself is? Propaganda is simply the method of communicating a political narrative , again, we're using neutral, I'm going to say a true narrative 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 . You know, the founding fathers of this country wrote to each other about this, they wrote in public about this . We seem to have forgotten some of these lessons 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. You've been connecting the question of propaganda to whether or not the end it is aimed at is true. How do you think about when you have untrue propaganda unle, ashing intense passions . That's bad towards a true aim. Yeah, look, I don't think that that's good. I think that Aristotle has a great line in his book on rhetoric where he says the truth has a tendency to prevail. I love that. I love that because it's like the truth doesn't always prevail. We can look at history. We can look at history , you know , and sometimes lies prevail . I think in twenty twenty and to twenty twenty four during the Woke era, many lies prevailed . But what is so interesting about that line is the truth has a tendency to prevail. And what I take from it is that therefore , you always want to be on the side of the truth even for your own pragmatic political ends. You always want to be on the side of the truth. And so look , certainly, there are untrue elements or narratives on the right and on the left . I think a political movement to succeed has to have the discipline and integrity to go after it, but always to remember that if the truth has a tendency to prevail, that's where you want to be. And then your piece builds to this idea that quote, in order to realize the ultimate promise of the political, there also must be something higher, a Telos , which is the Greek word for something like an ultimate end. A final cause, a final cause . So one reason I've been focusing on this piece is to understand the way you do your work and what your work is. So what is your tilus ? Well politically speaking, let's say let's leave it down. I don't mean your family . Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think I want to have a restoration of the principles of our republic . And so if you're thinking about our republic, you're thinking about those guiding principles where they have strayed over the last two hundred and fifty years . I want to have a restoration of that. And so I'm constantly looking backward at the founding and trying to understand it better and understand how to bring those principles forward . And so you want to have the principles of liberty and equality, you want to have a functioning, healthy republic , and you want to have a culture that is organized according to virtue . And in particular, you know, the virtues of our Western Anglo American civilization . And through my personal observations around the world as well as my study of the past, I think the Anglo American civilization , the principles that have animated our republic for the last two hundred and fifty years are still the best that we could hope for. So from that perspective, we're seventeen months into Donald Trump's second term . Is that all ? It feels like longer. Tell me about it. It feels like longer for you guys . Is this administration building the kind of country you want to see? Yeah, I think so . And here's how I would here's how I would assess it On the elements within Article two, so the executive power, I think Donald Trump has done almost everything he could do. Great people with the administration have done almost everything they could do to advance this kind of vision of the country . And liberty, equality, virtue. Yes. And I think that the momentum was strong year one. I think it's trailed off in year two. And you know, could that be the executive has lost some of its energy? Yes , could it be that, you know, public opinion has softened? Yes, could it be some of the foreign adventures or misadventures, depending on who you talk to have distracted focus. I think yes, but ultimately the problem is that the president has a majority in Congress, but not sixty votes in the Senate. And so fundamental transform ative legislation that I would like to see is impossible. Make the case to me that Donald Trump is restoring virtue . This is a hard case because what you're going to say is that Trump does not exhibit the kind of Christian virtues in his personal life, right? I'm not even thinking about his personal life. I'm thinking about his public life. Okay, well you tell me I didn't claim he exhibits virtues. So you said you said that they are doing a pretty good job bringing back liberty, equality and virtue? Correct. Make the case to me. Sure. I'll make you the case and I'll make it through the particular example that I'm most familiar with. So one of my big campaigns the last couple years was the fight to abolish DEI . And so DEI was this idea that had been kind of germinating in the nineties and the two thousands, but really exploded into public life with universal adoption by most large institutions after twenty twenty. And it was this idea that was very simple , that there are oppressor groups and oppressed groups in the United States because of the historical realities of our country and therefore to achieve to move towards equal outcomes, you have to treat individuals unequally according to their group identity. And the president on day one issued an executive order that was very much in line with the work that we have been doing to go and kind of wipe out the DEI bureaucracy throughout the federal government. And so in that case, I think that you could argue that the principle of equality and impartiality as we were discussing earlier , had been restored, not totally. We still have some problems with the underlying statutory law . Just recently in the last couple of weeks, the Department of Justice has taken a buzzaw to a so called disparate impact doctrine. Same idea . If there are unequal outcomes, it must therefore by def,inition be because of discrimination, therefore you have to remedy it by treating people unequally. And so in this case, I think and because this is the issue I've worked on and have been passionate about, I think that you can make an argument that liberty, equality, virtue have been restored . Are there other problems? Of course, are we all the way there? No , but on the issues that I personally care about, that I personally have worked on, I think the country is in a much better place than it was two years ago. I guess one thing I think about when I think about Donald Trump in virtue is corruption. So I see Trump taking luxury aircraft from Qatar . I see his family getting involved in all kinds of crypto schemes where the investors in their crypto schemes in many cases seem to be people who have business before the family , business before the country . The New Yorkers sort of did, I think, a quite conservative telling up of how much money the Trump family and Trump have made or how much the net worth has increased that has been connected to the presidency. The number was about four billion dollars in this term . It doesn't when I look at it, look virtuous . Yeah , look , here's my general perspective, and I'll lay it out to you as honestly as I can . There are the issues that I work on, that I'm passionate about, that I feel like I have some control over or influence over , and there are the issues that I don't. And I think I've been very straightforward in the areas where I think the administration has fallen short. And certainly the perception and we'll see over time, I'm sure that there will be inquiries, investigations, et cetera , into these business enterprises is bad. You're not going to get me to defend it. I'm perfectly happy calling out the administration where I think it's strayed or aired . And this is one of those places. I mean, I remember the crypto launch, it was during the transition, I think, where they launched the Trump coin, right ? And it's like, I don't like this, I don't want to see this, they shouldn't be doing that . And yeah, you're not going to get me to defend it. Well, one of the things I'm touching into here is I've been watching a show and I see a growing vein of discomfort from you on at least what part s of the right are becoming sure . So in December you tweeted, The rights media apparatus is how the right teaches its followers how to think. And it's currently getting consumed by conspiracy, psychodrama, and tabloid conflicts. If left uncheck ed, it will turn the audience into the equivalent of a third world click farm. So what's tell me about that? What's been alarming you? Yeah, yeah, that yeah, sometimes when you hear your quotes back to you like that, oh,'s kind of yeah very very lively language. Yeah, this is a huge problem and I don't okay. So 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 writing like Fox News and 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 it's 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 kind of benefits, 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 one 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 wanes over time. And right now you have in the online right, someone like Candace Owens who has like departed so far from reality and yet has a massive audience . 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 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. Why do you think you'll win? Because I look at the right and I see Tucker Carlson is current guys , which is much more conspiratorial guys than he's had before has become more and more dominant figure. As you note, Candace Owen's 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? 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, you know , 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 put 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 . And on top of that, as a kind of extra layer of an optimistic view on the history of anti Semitism right there. Yeah, well okay, I'm saying in the near term, these things kind of wax and wane, 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 six months ago, a year ago, and I hope that trend continues. I think there's an interesting question on institutions in the right here. 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 . It's 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. Correct. But I think they're not being deliberately obscured, right? They're being obscured. But I think sometimes about I think Tucker Carlson is an interesting figure here, somebody who came up institutionally . I think sometimes about the speech he gave at the two thousand nine Conservative Political Action Conference . 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 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 , put aside the special pleading for the New York Times here . Carlson tried to build his media institution, the Daily C ollar. I would say it did not my impression of it is that it did not become a place of put accuracy first and became a kind of conservative New York Times . And it did not become a did not become a conservative New York Times . Over time, he went in darker and darker directions as he chased the audience. And now he's fully without institution and has 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? Yeah, well look, this is a long term trend . This didn't emerge in two thousand nine or twenty twenty. I think of it this way . The left is over institutionalized and the right is under instinctionalized. I save this all the time, man. Left is overformed by institutions, the right is underform ed. Correct. And so we have kind of opposite opposite problems . And I think of it also 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 organiz ed as a Capital P arty and the right is organized under a Capital P rince . So you have Donald Trump essentially sets the direction of the right for better for worse through personal charismatic power and his relationship with the conservative base. There's really no mediating institutions 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 . The reason why I think you get presidential candidates on the left that seem to be like devoid of traditional charisma is because it's organized as an institutional apparatus or a capital P arty . And so conservatives have a problem with institutions , conservatives have a problem building institutions . And this is the deepest irony, right? Is that conservatives in a healthy republic would be the ones that are preserving the institutions , restoring the institutions, maintaining the institutions . But conservatives have found themselves on the outside of institutions. And so when we're talking about this concept of counter revolution . It's a paradox, right? Because a counter revolution is not necessarily a conservative impulse on the top. You can have a conservative mission or goal that drives it. That's why it's a counter revolution rather than a revolution . But conservatives are in this really interesting position where you have a lot of people on the intellectual right . They attend the Black Thai gallas, they attend the events at the country club, they eat the salmon dinner at the whatever Hilton, you know, ballroom . And I'm always looking around at these events I, you know, don't like these events because I'm always looking around and saying, you guys are out of your minds . You guys are operating as if , 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 problem. I can't say that there's a snap your finger solution . And so you have to start where you start. I work for an institution that I think is the best in the business, the Manhattan Institute. I think we do good work that has a high degree of accuracy and rigor and intelligence . And I think that we've put up practical political victories in a way that few others have. Another version of this is a line I like is that the personality type of the left is bureaucrat ic and the personality type of the right is autocratic . And I don't think that was always true. I don't think well, I don't think so. I think in the Trump era it is. Okay, well make the case, make the case. There is a falling in line behind Donald Trump. So here's my view of the two coalitions right now . The genius of Donald Trump in the twenty twenty four election was he collapsed the multi dimensional tests of party loyalty that existed in the previous Republican Party where you pro life, you do believe in low taxes, you know, what was your foreign policy, et cetera, and certainly the multiim densional agenda tests 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 techno futurist podcast . You could be a Christian traditionalist, you could be RFK Jr. who'd been running as a Democrat just a year or two before , 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 emerged , but it gave him and them a freedom of movement across other issues where Kamala Harris, a Tim Walls , Joe Biden were much more box checking , right? The sort of multidimensional loyalty test that the left uses. And so on left you end up with and I mean here the left, not like the Democratic Socialist stuff, but the left coalition in this country, the broad Democratic Party , you end up with people who have sort of all of the right views and have an institutional personality , right? Are somewhat risk averse , are worried about getting in trouble at a meeting . And on the right, you have people who they'll go crazy in a meeting. You can be Bill Poulte . But as long as the boss likes you, you're safe. Okay, yeah, 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've seen that. You're with Trump. He's he's with you. You're you're you cross him and he'll he'll attack you. You could be Kim Jong un and they were buddy. It was like a nice buddy comedy. Yeah. I feel like there'd be a buddy comment. He likes Kim Jong Un or he likes Mark Carney . Yeah, well, you know , fair, fair enough, and as personal chemistry goes But yeah, I think there's some truth to that, but I wouldn't therefore, I think your conclusion is overdrawn. I don't think you could say the right has autocratic personalities. I mean, I deal with conservatives all the time. I don't see that as a psychological tendency, but the people I work with, the people I talk to, my friends and neighbors . But so yeah, I think it's over drawn. I think this is just a question of political organization from the top. And I don't think it's total just loyalty, personal loyalty. I mean, Trump wants immigration restrictions, strong national borders, build a wall. He wants kind of American national interest based foreign policy, although that is kind of a little bit on the outs . And then he represents or at least championed a lot of the causes that that I cared about, care about , you know, on DEI, on higher education, on cultural institutions , you know, and a whole host of other sub issues that he really grabbed onto. And look, this is good. You kind of have to work with 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 look, on the whole, I think in those areas where we have had more freedom of movement, more ability to execute policy, I think things have been going quite well. I'm going to go back to Tucker . So I've seen you talk about your take on his evolution. And something you've said is that the Tucker Carlson of the Fox News era, when he was given his eight PM 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, but around the right more broadly. Now the liberal take on Tucker in the Fox News era is that he was beginning to bring a white national strain into centrality in the Republican Party that there were all these daily stormer articles how much 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 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. Yeah, I don't I don't see it that way. I mean, when Tucker was on Fox at that eight PM Eastern time, five PM Western time for me , it really did feel like a shelling point for the right. It was like a quarterback calling the plays every night at eight o'clock in that first five to ten minutes where Tucker kind of condensed the opinion, represented the opinion, reflected back the opinion And then everyone had a central point, a central coherent point to think about, to talk about, 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 twelve hours. Very tight loop. Very tight . And I think also what I've learned about Fox News is that Fox News has, and this is to its great credit, Fox News has kind a of disciplinary function . And I think especially after twenty twenty has become even more cognizant of, okay , message discipline is important . Moving the message forward is important. Here's the kind of guardrail s for the narrative. And this is a function of institutions, a function of technology . 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. But what specifically , you're invoking like the daily it's like, I don't know anything about the daily storm or beyond you a b talkunedch of great replacement there. I mean, this has been 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 , 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. Fox News is reporting state that the administration awarded one hundred seventy two million dollars 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 were 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. I don't think that's right. And I think let's take the you're presenting it in a way that is very charged . I don't think quite fair. But let's take the charged . But let's take the but the narrative that you're that you're portraying. I don't think that that's exactly how I would put it certainly. But the underlying facts are either true or not true. And in this case , 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 ten 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 an expression of bigotry or discrimination , but in fact it's just a basic question . A question that people in the United States have been asking since the seventeen seventies, who are we ? What is an American ? 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 so I don't think that it is right to say that someone who is concerned about rapid and large scale demographic change is kind of a white nationalist . That seems like a kind of the kind of I'm saying that the reason I think Tucker is a white nationalist is due to all the white nationalism. Well, let me ask me let me ask a question on. Let me ask a question fairly clean. No, no , because I mean, that is a huge charge . And I just, again, what is the evidence of that? You could be concerned can you be concerned about mass demographic change with out being racist. I think the answer is yes. How do you define a white nationalist? Well you make the charge, you define it and substantiate your point. So I think that Tucker's view is that Take Tucker out of it, just make it in general argument general argument and then white kind of layer in tucks. 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 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. Sure. 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 just don't like the way their community is changing and there's the KKK , right? Everything exists on a spectr um . But would you say someone who is like, for example, hesitant about rapid large scale demographic change is just a kind of wonderful white nationalist? Yeah, because that would be like the majority of the country . Yes, I don't think it is a problem or unfair or even wrong to worry about large scale rapid demographic change . So maybe to be more specific about Tucker, so you just had on the right wing writer, Scott Greer. He's got a book coming out on the online write called White Pill . So Greer was a former deputy editor at the Daily Collar. He left in twenty eighteen after pass 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 V idere or American Renaissance a few years ago. These are both white national sites . So I guess what do you make of that ? Yeah, so I'll tell you what I make of it. And here's what I think is really interesting some of these figures who were on the once kind of fringe elements of the ride 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 grow up, room to leave bad ideas behind, room for kind of critical self reflection, and then to integrate back into the kind of mainstream thinking. And I think 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 demystify, to defang , to kind of delegitimize that way of thinking? And I think it's interesting to talk to people who once had those ideas. 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. Sure. I think many people change their politics dramatically. And one of the big problems that the left actually has is not giving people space to change , and putting people into a box where they're held in who they were as opposed to who they may become. My problem is not with you green. 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 a Videre of and they all celebrated him. But I guess the question is whether to phrase a question precisely, which may be 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 white identity focused. Look, okay , huge huge point. I would break it down in a couple ways. One, I don't think that's quite accurate. I actually think that the statement you're reading and you could probably read it from a number of other people, right? If you remember in twenty sixteen , Richard Spencer famously held some sort of conference or group, and he said, Oh, yes, Trump has adopted, you know, Trump is the creation of the alt right . It was completely delusional , totally self serving and a product of narcissism that I wouldn't take at face value. And so I think a lot of the radical elements you're talking about overstate , overstate this relationship because they desperately want to believe it . And I think that someone like Tucker, I don't I don't think it's accurate to say Tucker on Fox in, you know, twenty twenty one was laundering in talking points from , you know, American Renaissance. I just I don't think that's true . I think it's conflating a kind of maybe superficial opposition to immigration . And the conflation game is 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 , media matters , you know, they came after me with many, many smears , trying to destroy my reputation, trying to get me deplatform from social media, trying to kind of eliminate me from the public sphere. None of it worked, thankfully, the ACLU, I would also add . And in fact, as I look back, the arguments that they were making were preposterous, and they only succeeded because people felt fear . And so 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 . But I'm certainly not going to forget emotional tone and the political vulnerability 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 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 just don't yet everything persuasive one way of thinking about that peri od 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 unhappable. 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 the alright was totally destroyed after Charlottesville. I think maybe I may be a different view of what the alright represented which is fair enough, but I think a lot of ideas that were very, very, very far from the center, I think about Elon Musk and him writing. And I mean, later, he had to try to figure out how to apologize for this. And but when somebody basically said like the Jews have been funding the Grace Replacement. Did Elon say that? Yeah. 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 Auschwitz and things like that . The Auschwitz . The Auschwitz apology to but you know, even now, Musk is very conspiratorial and where he is in twenty twenty six now the world's first trillionaire owning, you know, what used to be Twitter . And the things he 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 left went too far . And the forces the left was worried were there are much closer to the center. Yes, they're parts of the alt right that are not significant today. Richard Spencer is not a significant figure. Nick Funtes has a bigger audience than Richard Spencer ever did. 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 mensions is wild to me. And I mean, I don't think he'll win, but you look at fish back, 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 particularly 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. 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 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 Tulsa Gabber DNI and try to make the triumph of bipartisans and try and try to make Matt Gates attorney general. I would have thought that was like an unhinged like resistant substack take and then it all happened. So it's like the fact you can have these things be true at the same time . Yes. I think you're kind of understating kind of understating the dynamic on one side. I mean, it wasn't just about speech policing . After twenty twenty, the left maintained a kind of apparatus of social annihilation . And I went through it myself. I had the ACLU subpoena me and harass me with a law fair campaign that cost me a lot of money. I had the SBLC 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 , you know , threats of violence against me that were very credible at the time And so, you know, people trying to get , 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 , the movements that they have sparked are in fact alive and well. And look , 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 the radical nihilistic movements on the right do not have any institutional support . And our bubble up in your Twitter comments, which again, don't agree , but it is different in kind , not just in quantity. And in the case of someone like James Fishback, I think it 's a great test. Fishback is very charismatic. I think we would all agree on that. I talked with your colleague, Michelle Goldberg about this . But even with a kind of individual charisma , if he's like the Groperi candidate for governor of Florida, which is again, like kind of a crazy thing that is happening , I want to see the actual vote tally because that's going to show me where he is , where he stands with the actual conservative population, the conservative voter, the conservative movement as a whole. I suspect that he's going to get absolutely trousn't. It happened with Vivak running against a guy Casey Putch in Ohio. He got blown out by I don't know , sixty seventy points . And so by contrast, you look at something like the kind of trans ideological movement that I think is both kind of a lie. It's grounded in a series of falsehoods , maintained this suppressive, threatening , censorious power in the kind of pre Elon Twitter days and in the general kind of woke years . And then look, another uncomfortable fact per capita has committed more mass violence than any other group . And so I am willing to indulge in , and think it's important to have a kind of criticism of let's say the elements of my own side . But I also think that if we're to just measure it out, to put it on a scale , you know, 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 was completely distraught for for weeks. And again, like while I don't support James Fishback for governor, again, I think that it's kind of an empty symbolism where I was on the other side, it feels like these ideologies have the support of the institutions , they wield it power irresponsibly in the past and still have the kind of ultimate political threat, threat of violence that I know everybody in my world has seen, has experienced, has feared . And so I mean that grounds . 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 pretty looks right now is that when you say nihilistic, I think you called them, ideals, ideas are not held at high levels of the right. They're only supported institutionally on the left . I see it the opposite way. Right, right? I see it the opposite way and 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 really they could ten years ago they could I'll go through my thing. ADL I don't even see is on the left , which is a different question. I understand . But I see the Trump administration is powerfully and potently extreme and willing to use the power of the federal government from deploying ICNCP 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 Gorpus working in House and Senate offices in Congress that Bronze Age Pervid is one of the most 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 Europe. Now I recognize we're not going to agree on all this, right? This part, I'm not going to try to like bridge the gap. What I will say is that the other thing I think people on the left see has been a sort of movement from twenty sixteen to twenty twenty four where it's almost unbelievable how far things have gone, right? Even Trump one to Trump two were very, very different beasts . And so all of a sudden it doesn't look impossible to imagine that Funtes and Carlson Fishback are the future, not the fring e. 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. And would you say that you saw happen on the left between , you know, twenty fourteen and twenty twenty four. Absolutely. Yeah . Yeah. In part, I think you guys are about to learn some lessons we learned. 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 hope I'm right that with something like the Fishback campaign. You know, I think of James Fishback as a human meme. It's like amazing. He's like, if you take the memetic energy from that corner of the online disc ourse and turned it into a human being. It's like it would look and sound like James Fishback . But the reality is that once those ideas gain contact the people , the culture, the institutions on the right , they're not going anywhere. Let me try to frame this more in point on the first. Let me try to frame this more in terms of arguments I've seen you making. Sure. And tell me, if I get a chain in this wrong, you tell me where. I will . 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 Turnpoint's USA of it or some kind of plot from the people around him. I think it been's 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 and be like, oh shit, there's a lot of racism here . Like something's happening. Tell me which part of this you don't agree with. 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 and you see this on the , let's say, 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 a clear position on my part . And I think to the extent that we have like anti Semitic conspiracy the ories bubbling up from the digital sphere. It's a problem that we have to deal with, 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 kind of nonjudgmental, just kind of help me understand what's happening with some of the more kind of 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 kind of 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 your kind of entering adulthood during the kind of George Floyd hysteria , where their teachers at school, their media , you know, 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 kind of George Floyd hysteria into thinking racially. And instead of what I think is the pro 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 rever se 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 concept ion. 's fru Itit . 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 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 I don't think that this is like predetermined. I actually think that young people , you know, their brain isn't still 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 them. 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 something I talk about in my first book, Why We're Polarized is there is 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 , sure . And so the more you tell people that their identity is a problem , the more they're going to begin to defend that identity and feel that identity and begin to self define around that ident ity. So I think all of that happened . The and I think that you would also you would also agree , perhaps that , you know, the institutions, the legal system , the prevailing narrative at universities, corporations, et cetera, was explicitly anti white for a number of years that for these young people were formative. I think it's sometimes moved into being antiwhite. I would not say it was all c.rying I mean, I did it. I had hundreds of reports on this from institutions. I would say there was banks, corporations. I would never say it was white man bad. If you wanted to just put it into kindergarten language, white man bad. And that was the dominant position. I remember telling to left. 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 if we and legally , affirmative action DEI was institutional, government backed discrimination against one racial group. So the thing that I'm interested in though here is that you're now in power and a lot personally you personally own a farm in Washington State Your Executive Orders get passed the whole thing . And these things can all go in better or worse directions. These are all longstanding energies in American life . The sort of argument I'm going to make to be cards on the table about what I'm doing please is that it 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. I'll give a good example of this. You can believe what you want about whether or not the immigration of Haitians into Springfield, Ohio was good or bad. The people 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 twenty twenty four 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. Correct, who maybe somebody thought but other people didn't think had eaten a cat? Somebody and other people is quite important. People can read your pieces. They can read the dropsite news article. I'm not going to convince you to the dro ps Side New article they went out to debunk my story and they ended up finding another independent corroborating witness. So that's not how I read it. I read the reader. But I 'm 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 e,ating 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 corraled again . This idea that you can find these really high passion , like mimetic containers . The thing 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 it 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 to have a meme , create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast . Which again, I think my view is that there's never been any hard evidence of that happening in the Haitian community in Sprinkle, Ohio. Like nobody has that and nor have you correct. Yeah. I haven't made it. In fact, I've said look, there's no evidence of this particular claim , we should be more careful. And so there's been a kind of consistent like this idea that you could unleash like really, I think, quite terrible passions and then hold it to a level 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, want to call it, what you're seeing with Nick Funtes and the rise of Nick Funtes, who've not really talked about, but I think is a necessary figure of thinking 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 stop it that the place it's going on the right, when you talk about it becoming a third ball to click farm is quite dangerous and quite grim. And now I will get you know . Oh man, all right, where do I start? A couple huge problems I did a lot. A couple a couple huge problems. I mean one is that, you know, and I'm doing reporting in California right now that has stories that have a similar kind of let's say shock value. For example, we did a story on migrants from Mexico and Honduras who come to San Francisco and get free sex change surgeries from the California State 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 use it as a method of changing public opinion. Like that's how it's supposed to work . And so I think that the idea that there are taboos that cannot be crossed because they will unleash these kind of unspecified or vague dangerous passions . I think it's a problem in two regards. One is that if you're if you're going for truth seeking, if you're playing a kind of responsible rhetorical game , no, I don't think that these questions are out of bounds at all . But second, the predictions have always been that it's going to unleash some kind of horrible nativist violence sentiment, et cetera. But the only example of an ideological driven assassination that we've talked about today is the assassination of Charlie Kirk This kind of prophecy of political violence is really comes from the institutional ideologies on the left , not the institutional ideologies on the right . And I think that fact has been hammered home over and over and over these last few years . And look, like those of us on the right who are in this business , you know, probably have to have , you know , a little bit more firmness to say no, the facts are not on your side in this argument. So let me be more specific about what I'm saying because I'm not making a vague pro phecy of political violence . 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 seeking here. There isn't enough truth in these arguments. There's too much of an attraction Which arguments? So and I mean arguments like the Haitian cats and dogs will talk will talk about others in the check on yeah 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 racist misogynistic elements . I'm looking at a world where Nick Fuentes is a major figure on the American right. Well, you guys are doing a great job at raising his profile. Tucker Carlson is the 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 Fente's because and gave him such a gentle kind interview. And Tucker, here's one thing I don't underestimate with Tucker. He's fucking good . He's a good interviewer . He has incredible talent as a media figure. If you wanted to cut that guy apart, he could have as he did to Mike Huckabee when he wanted to do that or to Ded Cruz when he wanted to do that. 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. Of the who bless the government of Israel. Those who bless Israel is what it says. It doesn't say the government of it says the nation of Israel . So that's in the Bible. As a Christian, I believe that. Where is that? I can find it to you. I don't have the scripture off the tip of my you pull out the phone and use the It's in Genesis, but so you're quoting a Bible phrase you don't have context for it and you don't know where the Bible it is, but that's like your theology. I'm confused. And he didn't . Because I think Tucker understands quite well where the pass ions are and where the energy is . And when I hear you sometimes, I hear you being more concerned about this . You're a little chiller in this, and I recognize you're talking, you know, in the 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. I'm hoping that you can give me a little bit more though because I'm saying well what are you actually saying? I'll give you a little bit. Nickes was on a podcast. I mean, are you saying Nick Flintes 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? No, I would make a slightly different argument. I think that Nick Cuentes is not a fundamentally political figure . He's a hyperreal figure of spectacle that again is you can write a different lesson. You could read my writings on this exact question. 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. Neither of us are fans of Hitler , but you should resist the temptation to be to be scandalized and shocked and lose your capacity to reason and perceive it correctly . Because what this is, it is a hyper al 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 some dumb kid that has , you know, hijacked the algorithm with like superficial ideological spectacle is somehow there fore a symbolic of where people where the right is going as a whole. I think hyperreal is doing work in this argument that is not actually connected to what hyperreal means. I can imagine somebody sitting in front of me, even sitting in front of me here in twenty fifteen and us younger, handsomer. Yes, yeah. And you tell me this about Donald Trump. Tell me what, tell you what? That listen , you all are being easily provoked . You're looking at a hyper real, 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 hyper real and the real were going to converge in the life that we actually lead here. I would have said no, attention is the fundamental currency of modern American politics. Things that are we have actually fewer defenses against things that feel fundamentally ridiculous, things that are, this is an era of the trickster spirit, not the earnest energies . And many people like me, I mean you may, remember this Hu.ntington Post initially would only cover Donald Trump's campaign in its celebrity and entertainment news. Is that right? I don't remember that because he was a ridiculous hyper real spect acle and to treat it as a serious thing would have been absurd. I think many of us were perfectly willing to say Nick Fontes 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. Okay, well here's where I would here's where I would disagree . And you actually have a real world test, right ? 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 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 it's kind of a narcissistic endeavor to get personal attention. And so but that's the endpoint. There's no actual bridge that that can go over. And look, that's because they're changed minds. They're candid to 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 write 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 Funtes. This is a stock character in American Discourse and I just refuse to take the base. I don't think David Duke is a marginal figure. I mean, I will say you don't think David Duke is a marginal figure. Here's what I mean . I think John Gans, who's a sort of he's a great substack and is a sort of interesting history based theorist of American politics . He's got this book about the nineties 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 rose in that period, Patrick Buchanan , Sama 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. Yeah, in the nineties . And there was a style of politics that they got kind of quite good at figuring out and Gans's view and I agree with this view, 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, make your case. 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 Cent 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 out anfit known as the SPL. Which we were talking about David Duke? Not David Duke in particular, who knows , but I'm saying that saying David Duke is maybe a left wing plant . Yes I think that's ridiculous. 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 supports your campaign and then you'd have to disavow and go through this whole this whole 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 well one to the in many cases in order to survive, it is dramatically changing what it is like the Heritage Foundation . Sure . In other cases, by Donald Trump, Donald Trump was not the candidate of the institutional right. 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. Sure. 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. 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 Funder of Al Shabab is the Minnesota Taxpayer . Tell me what this piece was about. Sure. So this was a feature investigation that we did in Minnesota looking into organized Somali fraud. And so we spent a number of month of a number month s on this piece. We went out to Minnesota, we reviewed court documents, we interviewed law enforcement both 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 exploiting Minnesota and federal welfare programs, autism programs, daycare programs, Medicaid programs , and looting billions of dollars from American taxpayers. And this was a 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 move ment really looking at large scale fraud in American public institutions. So there's a couple pieces of this. So as you note, the fraud had been, you know, reported elsewhere Star Tribute and it had been news , there are bits and pieces. There were prosecutions, right, which is where a lot of the information came from. That began in twenty twenty two 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? Sure. I mean, the argument is pretty simple and the mechanics of it are this. So we have billions of dollars being stolen by small ie 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. Hawa 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 have made have essentially made the case that Al Shab is taking a cut of Hoala financing. And so when we talked with federal law enforcement agents and 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 in suitcases, to the Hoala networks in Somalia and therefore to the Al Shababer networks taking their cut essenti ally. Like we have Visa that takes like three percent of your credit card transactions in parts of Somalia. Al Shabab takes a cut . Not exactly sure how much that is. And federal investigators say, hey, once it exits the country into the Hoala system , you can't claw that money back. There are no there are, you know, written receipts or banking transactions , but the scale of that money that was remittances fraud was so enormous that over time, we're talking about huge sums of money. So I want to take a beat on whether or not this turned out to be true. So the key named source in your story was a retired terrorism investigator named Glenn Kearns. He later came out, claimed that he was misquoted. He said later the story was bullshit, and that he did know on the ground investigating in Minnesota. The two top prosecutors of the fraud in Minnesota said the perpetrators were motivated by greed. There's no evidence of terrorist financing. Do you still stand by? Of course I do, yeah. And a couple things . So the Glen Kerns detective is very odd. We have him on the record. We have, 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 scared but you know, the paper in Minneapolis tried to go through our piece and with a kind of criticism , couldn't lay a glove on it, didn't debunk or even really contradict any of our points. You know, one source who, who knows, don't know what, don't know his personal circumstances . But he was the only name source I don't think he was the only named source in the piece. He was the only name source making this terrorism argument. Well, incorre ct. So we had multiple, multiple high level federal officials who confirmed to us the flow of funds. We substantiated it with contextual reporting from Foundation for Defense of Democracies, from the United States Military Academy from the Department of Justice. We were saying simply logically , if we know from a variety of sources that Al Shabab is skimming off the Hoala 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? APC. And so we know that this to be true. And I think that idea that because they weren't motivated by terrorism is not something we alleged and is essentially irrelevant. The facts as they played out were that the Al Shab Terror Network benefits from fraud in the United States that has passed through their financial system. 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 Somalis are stealing billions of dollars from American taxpayers and sending cash to terrorists back home. It's time for Atreel Donald Trump to revoke temporary 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. Two or three, all right. Let's go there one by one. Yeah, we'll do them we'll do them. I'll give them to you all . 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 terrorists back home , as you say, you have a more complicated link to the piece and you could you're rhetorical and then and then and then none of the people as far, as I can' getm doing how we this we',re under temporary protected status, which is only about seven hundred and fifty 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 to the crime. Okay , so a couple points on that on that particular argument. So the point of 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 in Somalia, there is a kind of kinship and clan based culture that is prevalent for a variety of historical and social reasons . And because there is been a weak central government, contested central government in Somalia in the modern period, there is a feeling that exploiting the central government permissible . And I think the underlying point, which is very uncomfortable, not just for people who are small e 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 border based system , you have to be prudent in which nations of origin you prioritize in immigration . And so I think the record on Somalis and 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 interest based immigration policy, I would put Somalis down 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 shoulder serve our interests. Should not just be on the directional . What I am saying is that to take a crime committed by a limited number of people then say this is something an entire group of people . And you should deport these unrelated people . Like 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 fucked up system back in Somalia can get taken by Al Shabaab to finish the thought of and they'll let you take it where you want to take it . That is That is and 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 stead I mean many as you say, Somalia is a tough place. Many people flee it for completely reasonable reasons and we 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 for many things you've written in like the prime of thinking about the individual. If you want to say that our immigration policy should not favor Somalis, fine, fair enough. But our immigration the temporary protected status is based on group designations and in fact Somalis, Haitians but then people are going to did not do this crime . We agree on that part, right? Hold on. Well, 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 explain it why I believe that. If you look at the actual schemes committed by Somalis, for example, for autism services , you had members of the Somali community opening up fake clinics with fake patients that were receiving kind of fake treatment . And what we're looking at 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, 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 five billion dollars . Well, they've only uncovered fraud schemes and maybe three hundred million dollars. 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 because also the small 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. Are most Somalis and you don't assume of that ? I think it's just it's just logical. And I think that we can make this we can make this we can make the argument 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 a mass fraud committed 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 thirty years and organized fraud rings in his experience are committed to a massively disproportionate amount by foreign nationals and groups of , you know, and groups of originating from migrant groups . So this is a fact it's uncomfortable. It's. uncomfortable I didn't argue . I didn't argue that . So the question I've not done my own reporting on this, but hold on. But the question then is how do we respond to that politically? And so I actually think I want to talk about how it got responded to politically. So Donald Trump did what you wanted him to do. He put up a true social post on Thanksgiving Day, would you call it ? Is that right? You know this, you called it iconic which he says, you sure did. All right, let's hear it 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 to hope that they'll be left alone . 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 day cares and knocking on them and being like, Hey, is there there? A kreids here and these women come out and they don't speak English? And they're like looking at them strangely . This gets I think like one hundred thirty million views across platforms. It goes crazy viral. But I want to play this clip. You did this podcast conversation with Richard Hanani where you guys were talking about this. And I think I think what you say is interesting. Sure. If you look at the Nick Shirley video and you really dig into it , 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 , video production. Okay , it draws attention to a real issue. It's driving politics in the right direction. And it's, I think, overall beneficial . Granted, your critique of what's happening under the surface is also true. I mean , I couldn't publish the conclusion, you know, Nick surely gets in there, sees a building is empty and then assumes, oh, they're committing seventy million dollars of fraud or whatever. As a journalist, as someone who has to go through fact checking, legal review , kind of peer scrutiny, I kind of clam up and I'm like, oh, wow, man , you're going about to get sued because what you're saying is just not defensible as a journalistic process . So the reason I found that to be such an interesting quote is that 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. There's a lot. You can't go and be like, show me your kids. And when they don't show your kids, be like, this is a fraud, you don't have any kids. On the other hand, you have this contrary feeling that, well, it may not be true, but 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 what it leads to. And I can feel this tension. So I mean, how do you balance that? Yeah, I mean, well first of all , it's a free country. Everyone has a First Amendment right, and so therefore I 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 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 person into an institution to put up those guardrails , to ref ine really improve the product itself . And then to use that attention toward product ive ends. And so 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 are not that strong, not that well developed . And in many cases , 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 that. I think the story landed in that particular manner, but you have people independent. He's not left wing. Let's say citizen journalists I think that was the phrase for a while. There was great hope in the citizen journalist . You know , love citizens, love journalists . Citizen journalists 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 darkness. 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 deploying a giant Ice and border patrol deployment to Minnesota. That deployment ultimately and the fighting around it leaves Renee Good and Alex Predi dead. Minneapolis calculated the economic impact of the raids at least around seven hundred million dollars. Joe Thompson, the acting U. S. attorney in Minnesota, who is leading the fraud investigations. He was quoted quite a bit in your original piece . He resigns in anger after Trump's Department of Justice dem ands 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 harmed people's lives. It led to people dying. It was bad for the Minnesota economy . It led to the fraud stuff getting, you know, completely sidelined and the person who was pushing it resigning 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? Yeah, I would disagree. So well I would agree with certain points, but I would refine them and disagree with others. So I mean, the fraud work is continuing. The Vice President is now chairing an antifraud task force. They've significantly increased the manpower to look into fraud That said , like it was a bad strategic decision to deploy force, customs and border patrol , IC agents . Would that kind of force posture , it's a no win situation . And I was advising against it from even the previous summer . And so 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 , if you want to create deportations at scale of illegal immigrants. You have to do so in what I've kind of called an invisible manner, an impersonal manner, you have to change banking regulations , financial transfers, remittance fees , you know, employment employment verification to incentivize self deportation because the idea that you could deport people by simply like sending in armored cars with Ice agents on the side is delusional. 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 policy that you want to enact , I think it's detrimental. And in fact, the situation in Minneapolis , again , you know in that sense was did not achieve the stated objective for reasons that I and others had predicted. Pick up on the front and to me it's also it's annoying to me personally , because 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, 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 , you know , very , very upsetting because it's like , hey, we have this winning issue, focus on the issue , execute the policy at scale, save the taxpayer's money . You know, you're giving someone a nicely wrapped gift and you just wish that they would take it . In this case, it didn't happen that way. It feels to me like the fraud problem for you all is bigger than this . According to a Times analysis across two terms, Trump has granted clemency to more than seventy allies donors and others convicted in fraud cases, including Philipp S Formis who stole one point three billion dollars for Medicare and Medicaid in a fraudulent billing scheme. It was the FBI's largest ever criminal healthcare fraud case against individuals , Trump commuted his twenty year prison term. You're not going to get me to defend it. I would infect it. But I wouldn't see really attacking it either. I'll attack it right now. Okay . Shouldn't have done that. And in fact, you know, if these people were convicted of fraud at that scale , twenty years seems like a light prison sentence. I would double it personally. And so yeah this is the push I'm making I recognize you're not going to defend this, but there is this movement on the right right now to focus on fraud. You've been very much leading this. Meanwhile, I look at Trump and he's gutted the machinery of antifraud enforcement all across the federal government. He gutted it at the IRS. There's a tremendous amount of fra ud in tax returns. We all know that. And huge amounts of money are being stolen under those terms because now 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. Debatable . I recognize we would debate it, but 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 parts of the government that are supposed to watch if the government itself committing fraud and if you know taxpayers 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 Somalis . 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's what the crypto investments are. I think that's how Trump and his family have increas ed 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? Sure. And let's take let's take pardons as the most concrete example . Yes, I agree . I think you and I would agree and you know, I'm polit ical, 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 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 attempts to influence in various, you know , campaign funds or committee funds or however the finances work . You create a perception of corruption that is not good and does in some ways undercut the good work of combating atic 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 . 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 you've been very influential. But the kind of the implicit premise of your criticism, which again, I take seriously, and I think it's a fair criticism is, oh, therefore , you know, 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 necessary criticism 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 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 while I would certainly , you know, speak out against , I think the crypto thing was just, you know, and is ongoing. It's ongoing. Yeah. Crypto players are ongoing, world liberty and all the stuff is ongoing. Sure, yeah. And and at the end of the day, when I, you know, when I sit down in my office , you know, at seven thirty AM 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 that's the that's the attitude that I bring to the fight. I think you underestimate yourself. The point explain it to you. I will. Yeah, the point I'm making is actually a little bit even larg er than you. 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. But maybe overall, you're saying. Huh? Maybe overall. Maybe left and right in general. Maybe, maybe, right? I'll take it. And like, 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 do going that to. You should try. I mean, why not? I'm trying to convert you we talk . But I think that the right's 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 Donal thatd Trump is doing is insane in my view. Okay . And the epistemological standards and Eculey stuff is 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 . I think careful in the I think ists that are defensible I think I take the rhetorical flourish too far as 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 a hydraulic process, not like some future result, but a current result where when I look at the Spotify rankings, the write of center figures on the top have become highly conspiratorial and, you know, there figures like Fonte's rising . And we need a strong right in this country. I would so I'd ask you a question then has the New York Times editorial line, right? The editorial line . it H movedas more in my direction since twenty twenty or have I moved more in its direction since twenty twenty? I'm not sure the way you have moved since twenty twenty . I haven't moved at all. Okay . So if I'm the baseline, so I think you're saying it's moved in your direction. Of course. Okay. You look at the big piece on DIDEI, you know, you had editorials saying that I was, you know, some sort of villain on DI. Let's agree. Let's agree moves back. Let's agree you've won some fights. Yeah . 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 when that was like a much more dangerous thing for me to do. I wrote abundance, which is entirely critique of Democratic governance . 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. Rhett. I don't think you're comfortable . But ultimately, there's like two problems that I see the write having that it really does not know how to solve. One problem is its attentional sphere is pathological . Parts of it are parts of it are. And it doesn't have a lot of institutional strength . 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 I mean shown his ability to do it . If you go too hard, you get like pushed out in a way maybe you can't come back for and those two things are allowing a tremendous amount of bad ideas, of actual corruption , of just 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 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, disciplined 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 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. 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 has 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 politics moves forward . And I think actually after, you know, Trump is in his last term . Depending on how things go to 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. 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 pass ions 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 look past. If they have enough strength to their passions, that is fine . And similarly in the informational sphere in the attention 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 attention sphere because it's this constant you like you can't get heard if you're not now playing this game of incred ibly weaponized like explosive allegations, which of course is going where that ultimately always goes, which is towards antisemit conspiracy theories, like the oldest potential move in the book . 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 virtue, which is a totally it's the same word but a totally different conception. And for Machiavelli, virtue, the political virtue 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 cunning, ambition, design . And so politics is always a conversation between virtue and virtue . 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 de ontological principles that you can make the means always have to be one hundred percent pure towards one hundred percent pure ends . And I laugh. It's like, well, only an academic could really 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 virtue 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 answ er 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 we need to kind of deliver tangible political victories. We can't retreat just to abstract speculation . 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 win in the arena. And so I oftentimes and this conversation is interesting because you're oftentimes 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 we going to push next? What kind of victory is available ? And you have to do that knowing that the system you're operating in is littered with imperfections . And again, at the end of the day, what I my calculation is , I'm very mindful and even try to somebody wouldn't believe this, try to even be humble as to the little part of the world that I can influence. And I think I've changed it for the better . I think institutions that I'm working with 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. I'll leave it there. I really appreciate you doing this conversation. Always our final question, but a few books you would recommend to the audience. Okay, so we're going to do three books from the Cutrosuff personal Conservative Canon. The first I would recommend is a book by my mentor, John Marini, Claremont Institute scholar 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 . 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 . I think he kind of kind of clarifies for 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 the forgotten founder, really. He's been downgraded for centuries now, but I think he's actually the most important founder . And then third, I would recommend a number of books by the kind of conservative journalist for,mer NYU professor, James Burnham, wrote a book called Managerial Revolution, another called Immaculians, another called Suicide of the West . And for me , Burnham is someone who has the kind of sophisticated analys that helps illuminate these questions. His work is quite good and might even be interesting for people who don't share my little compos would you start with? I would start with managerial revolution again because it just it kind of describes it in the nineteen forties, it's unbelievable. You read it now and he's describing the world we live in , but he's describing it from a point of kind of optimism, American optimism, but he already saw some of the problems that were starting to emerge. Chris Rufo, thank you very much. Thank you.