Brazil's Repressive Censorship Judge To Ban X Nationwide; Has Trump 2024 Retained Its Populist Ideology? With Sohrab Ahmari
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Censorship Escalation in Brazil (6:05)
Interview with Sohrab Ahmari (31:32)
Outro (1:09:52)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
As you can undoubtedly see, we are still not in our regular studio, in part due to some traveling that I'm doing, but we are in a studio, specifically the local studio based in South Florida, and it seems to be working very well.
And I will talk on our after show on the Locals platform about a little bit of the reason why I'm traveling.
So for tonight, though, online free speech and increasingly authoritarian governments have been on the collision course for quite some time.
We have twice reported this week, both on Monday and then again last night, on the extremely disturbing and dangerous arrest and now indictment by French officials of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, accusing him of a series of felonies for essentially refusing to censor on command or to provide accusing him of a series of felonies for essentially refusing to censor on command or to provide But now in Brazil,
A country that has, in many ways, led the way in showing democratic states how to crack down on online free expression.
A long simmering war between the social media platform Axe, on the one hand, and Brazil's authoritarian censorship judge, Alexandre de Moraes, on the other, may very well result, as early as tonight, in fact, within 10 or 15 minutes, in the nationwide banning of Axe in all of Brazil, banning of it at the IP level,
As a result of X's refusal to cooperate sufficiently with censorship orders from this judge, as well as its refusal, X's refusal, to send one of its officials to be in Brazil physically, given this judge's explicit threats to arrest X executives until his censorship orders are fully carried out.
Brazil is the fifth most populous country on the planet.
And the third or fourth highest online user population in the world.
The very idea that 215 million people in Brazil will be forcibly blocked from reading X or using X, unless they have and know how to use VPNs, illustrates just how extreme these censorship trends are becoming.
Not only in Brazil, but for governments throughout the ostensibly democratic world, which are now willing to go to very extreme lengths to turn their countries into closed information systems where no dissent is allowed, and only those who serve government dogma are permitted to be heard.
Now, that may sound like an exaggeration, I realize that, and maybe six months ago, it Might have been an exaggeration, although these trends have been long clear and we've been talking about them for a while.
But now there is no other way to describe what is happening, not just in Brazil, but throughout the democratic world.
So we'll tell you about all of the latest and the reasons it has implications for the United States and for Western Europeans as well.
Then Donald Trump achieved so much remarkable success in the 2016-11 election, both in the GOP primary, where he destroyed one establishment-backed candidate after the next, starting with Jeb Bush, then Marco Rubio, finally Ted Cruz, And then defeating Hillary Clinton in the general election against all predictions and odds.
Remember that he did so by running, not on a standard old-school establishment Republican platform or messaging campaign.
To the contrary, he vehemently rejected the establishment wings of both political parties as equal representatives of what he called the D.C.
Swamp.
He ranted against Bush-Cheney orthodoxy on foreign policy and even Reagan-esque foreign economic policy as well.
And that was a winning strategy.
But in 2024, many believe that Trump's campaign and Trump himself have lost a lot of that populist and anti-establishment rhetoric and spirit.
In exchange for relying on the old-school Republican playbook, things like calling the neoliberal Democratic Party communists and warning that they are coming for corporate wealth and profit.
One of those who believe that is the very astute and heterodox conservative writer Saurabh Amari, who is the founder and editor of Comcast magazine.
His latest article in the British journal New Statement is entitled, Trump's Identity Crisis, and explores whether Trump has strayed Fully or close to fully from the 2016 message to his detriment.
I'm going to talk about that article.
I don't necessarily agree with all of the points, but I think that's certainly worth hearing.
Before we get to all of that, we have a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
As I noted at the top of the show, we spent Monday and Wednesday dissecting why developments in France, specifically the arrest of the Telegram founder and CEO, the Russian-born Pavel Durov, specifically the arrest of the Telegram founder and CEO, the Russian-born Pavel Durov, is so unbelievably threatening to core online press freedoms and speech expression rights as well, because what France is essentially saying
Well, because what France is essentially saying is that anybody who doesn't immediately cooperate with our censorship demands and provide us backdoor access to encrypted apps becomes a criminal subject to arrest in France and then presumably in all of Europe as well.
And I can assure you that this has captured the attention of every single founder and CEO of big tech platforms who are all billionaires and travel the world freely and are very concerned now that their liberty can also be controlled.
Constrained if not outright denied by this precedent set in France for obvious reasons.
That's the point of that arrest is to create a climate of fear among big tech companies that you either comply with all of our orders and give us access to your user data or you two might go to prison no matter how rich or powerful you are.
What is happening in Brazil, and this has long been true, is a step beyond.
And the reason, as I say, I always want to report on Brazil is not just because Brazil is a massive country with geostrategic importance, the second largest country in the hemisphere, etc.
It is a part of the democratic world.
Brazil is still ostensibly a democracy in the same way that the U.S.
is, at least.
And I can assure you that all of the censorship actions that have been undertaken in Brazil, which are a step or two ahead of even Western Europe, Are being closely watched in those European allies and in the United States to see how far those countries can go as well.
Every time there's a disinformation conference or a hate speech conference or a combating online harm conference, they invite all these Brazilian judges and all of these Brazilian think tank experts and all these Brazilian prosecutors and experts who are all cheerleaders of the censorship regime to come and talk to these fancy conferences in Berlin and Paris and Amsterdam and Rome and
Uh, Spain and Portugal about exactly what it is that Brazil is doing because the EU wants to copy it.
Now, just a couple of, uh, today actually rather, uh, what, what happened here is the context is, and we've told you about this before, is that last week the indescribably authoritarian judge on the Brazil Supreme Court, Alexandre de Moraes, who essentially runs the country, it's really not an exaggeration to say that,
He threatened Brazilian executives with X that they would be immediately arrested if X did not instantly comply with censorship orders that had been sent to them, including to censor elected members of the Senate and the Congress.
And X is reluctant to censor this because, obviously, these are politically motivated censorship campaigns.
There's no due process provided.
These people have not been convicted of any crimes.
It's just this very politically motivated judge ordering these people banned from the internet with no due process, and X doesn't want to cooperate with that.
And so once this issue was, this threat was issued, we're going to arrest executives with X inside Brazil unless you comply.
Elon Musk said, we can't guarantee the safety of our executives in Brazil any longer, and so we're closing down all offices in Brazil.
We will no longer have any executives who work in Brazil because it's not safe for them to work there and it absolutely is not.
And as a result, Axe Either separated with Brazilian executives or brought them outside of Brazil to work with X in other capacities.
And now this judge in response is saying, either you comply with our censorship demands in 24 hours.
This is the order that he issued last night.
In 24 hours, you must number one, comply with all of our censorship orders and remove these members of Congress from the internet.
Instantly, without question, and number two, you must identify an ex-representative in Brazil, physically in Brazil, because he wants to hold them hostage.
He wants to order them arrested and then say they're not getting out unless X complies with these censorship demands.
What person in their right mind would agree to be the ex-representative in Brazil, given this judge, unless he said X complies with those two conditions, Then he will block X as a platform in all of Brazil.
So anybody in Brazil will no longer be able to read X, they won't be able to participate in X, they won't be able to express themselves on X. No journalists, no politicians, no activists, nobody.
X will be unavailable in Brazil except to people who have and know how to use VPNs, which scramble the location physically that you're actually in.
It's used in many authoritarian countries.
China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, by people who want to be able to access the internet, but have internet access blocked in those countries.
They use VPNs to scramble where they are.
That's what happens in authoritarian countries.
And it's now increasingly happening in Brazil.
As I think I've told you before, rumble is banned in Brazil.
And if I'm in Brazil, I'm not now, but when I am in Brazil, if I want to access the platform where my show is broadcast or see a clip from my own show, I have to use a VPN and pretend I'm in the US or Europe or in some other country.
Otherwise, I won't get a notice saying this site is blocked.
Reuters today, quote, Brazil's top court threatens to suspend Axe by Thursday night.
That's tonight.
Quote, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice on Wednesday ordered billionaire Elon Musk to name a legal representative for his messaging platform and Axe in Brazil within 24 hours or face the site's suspension in the country.
Early this month, Axe announced it would close its operations and it would be a good and fire its staff in Brazil due to what it called, quote, censorship orders from the judge, Alexandre de Moraes.
X, at the time, claimed Moraes secretly threatened one of the country's legal representatives in Brazil with arrest if it did not comply with legal orders to take down some content from its platform.
By the way, that was not a secret order.
That threat was very explicit that they would arrest executives of X in Brazil immediately if those censorship orders were not obeyed.
Quote, in Wednesday's ruling, Moraes says that under the country's law, regulating internet issues, companies that do not respect Brazilian legislation or the confidentiality of private information could have their activities temporarily suspended.
I believe the deadline for this was...
8 o'clock Eastern, 8 o'clock PM in Brazil, which is 7 o'clock Eastern here in the United States.
So we'll check online to see whether or not this has already happened, but certainly the deadline has already elapsed and a lot of people in Brazil are wondering how much longer will we have X available to us to conduct our public debates, to hear about news, to communicate, to organize.
Here was the order from the STF, which is the Basically, it's an acronym for the Supreme Court, the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil.
There you see it's a summons, and it was posted on Axe, which is not even a legal order.
But because there's no one in Brazil to accept this order, the STF, the Supreme Court of Brazil, just went on to Axe and underneath the government affairs account of Axe posted what they purported to be this legal order, a summons for Elon Musk and global affairs.
It says Minister Alexandre de Moraes orders the Justice Secretary of the Federal Supreme Court to notify Elon Musk by electoral means of the decision given in the above-mentioned case on August 18th, which determined the summoning within 24 hours of the name and qualification of legal representatives of ex-Brazil and national territory duly proven with JUCCESP under penalty of immediate suspension of the activities of the social network X
Until the court orders are effectively complied with and daily fines are paid in accordance with Article 12, Section 3 of Brazilian law.
Now, in theory, let's just make this concession.
If a foreign country, or foreign corporation rather, wants to operate in a certain country, it is true that in general they have to comply with the laws of that country.
And if they don't, they can be subject to punishment for violating the law like anybody else.
The problem is when you have governments that are tyrannical and authoritarian and unjust and ordering political censorship, it's expected, especially for Western companies, that they're not going to comply with authoritarian regimes and shut down all opposition that's considered immoral.
The Chinese demanded that of Google for a long time.
Google became unavailable in China.
As a result, all the authoritarian countries that were taught to hate have had constant conflict with Big Tech over its refusal to censor dissidents or opponents of the government.
And now this is contaminating the Western world as well.
That's the context for all of this.
It isn't as though there's somebody here convicted of pedophilia or child pornography who the Brazilian government is ordering X to ban or to take down and X is refusing.
These are elected members of Congress, people democratically elected by the Brazilian people.
Who have never been charged with crimes, let alone convicted of crimes, but this judge is simply saying, ban them, banish them from online.
Much as was done, let us recall, in the United States in January of 2021 to the sitting president of the United States, Donald Trump.
Although in that case, that was a decision undertaken by the platforms themselves, the pre-Elon Musk Twitter era, as well as Facebook and Google.
Nobody ordered them to do it.
There was no government.
Requiring it.
That was a decision they made on their own, which in many ways you could argue is worse because it shows the power of big tech.
But in this case, it's the government demanding it.
Here is from a Brazilian newspaper today called Metropolis that is very close to Alexandre de Moraes that is reporting on exactly what he's thinking.
Quote, Moraes has already decided to ban acts He's already decided to ban X, but is still evaluating how to do it.
Quote, STF Minister Alexandre Moraes has already decided that he will vote to overthrow X in Brazil, given Elon Musk's likely failure to comply with the Supreme Court's orders.
However, Moraes is still evaluating how he will formalize his decision.
At the moment, Moraes is analyzing four different scenarios and should only make his decision official this Friday, August 30th or during the weekend.
So maybe Brazilians have a day or two left to use X.
While they figure out the best technical means for banning the entire social media platform from all this entire large country.
The first possibility is that Merage makes a unilateral decision, does not submit it to the entire court.
It is then considered the most remote option.
The second would be to decide unilaterally, but take the decision to the entire court immediately so that it can be corroborated by other ministers, whether in person or virtually.
Merage already has the signal that the majority of the Supreme Court will follow him and vote for the ban of X.
The other scenario is that before deciding unilaterally, Maraj takes the case to the full court to be judged in person.
If that happens, the case will probably only be discussed next week.
And the fourth scenario would be for Maraj to take the issue to a virtual full trial tomorrow over the weekend.
This is the hypothesis considered most likely, according to ministers interviewed by journalist Ghulami Ahmada.
One day I'll tell you about this journalist.
But he is Very close to Alexandre Maneis, often serves as his messenger in the media, and that is probably an accurate summary of what Alexandre Maneis is planning.
Not whether to ban X from Brazil, just figuring out the best way to do it.
Here is from Globo, the Globo magazine as well, and this is actually quite unbelievable.
We have there the Headline in Portuguese, I'll just translate that for you, which is, as a result of a lack of representation in Brazil, the Supreme Court has blocked the financial resources of Starlink, a completely separate company.
In which Elon Musk is involved.
There's no ruling that Starlink has done anything wrong.
In fact, Starlink provides free internet to many of the poorest areas in Brazil.
In 2022, Elon Musk was awarded all kinds of official commendations from Brazilian authorities for his benevolent act of providing free internet connection to many of the poorest areas in Brazil that the government hasn't been able to provide on their own.
And yet somehow this judge, even though there's no finding That Starlink itself did anything wrong as a block, the bank accounts of Starlink in Brazil in order to punish X.
The article says, quote, this is from Globo, after X failed to submit legal representatives, FTF minister Alessandro de Mareche blocked the financial accounts of Starlink Holdings.
Last week, Marais claimed the existence of a quote de facto economic group under Musk's command and on August 18th ordered to block all of their Brazilian financial assets in order to guarantee payment of fines applied by Brazilian courts against X. Another of Elon Musk's company in the country besides X is Starlink, which operates in Brazil selling satellite internet services mainly in the North region.
All Starlink staff in Brazil has already been notified in order to respond For amounts owed to Brazilian courts by X. And then we have the Brazilian text here.
Last week, Marais considered the existence of a quote.
Oh, this is actually what I just read to you that had already been translated.
So I want you to see how extreme this is because it is genuinely remarkable the lengths to which not just Brazil, but countries throughout the democratic world are now willing to go To prevent the internet from being a free exchange of ideas where human beings can organize freely and privately because they recognize that is the one threat to establishment power and to status quo ruling class prerogatives.
I've been talking about this for a long time.
Until 2015, the internet was basically free and there was obviously a lot of surveillance going on.
But this form of brute censorship was not common at all.
2016 was the turning point.
That was when European and American elites concluded they couldn't control people's thoughts, as evidenced by, first, the British decision to withdraw from the EU by ratifying Brexit, and then even more traumatically, from the perspective of Western liberal elites, the decision to vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton and make Donald Trump President of the United States.
And when they saw that, they decided that Our media outlets that used to control how people think, the information they get, the kinds of opinions to which they're exposed, are no longer the gatekeepers.
They lost their monopoly to the internet, to social media.
And the only option we have for remaining in power to continue to be able to propagandize people and keep them in a closed information system is if we start implementing systems and justifying rationale.
For controlling the internet every bit as rigidly as we control large standard corporate media outlets, where most views don't get in to those outlets ever, most dissidents are never heard from.
And since then, this has been a progression that is now manifesting in, I wouldn't call it yet its final form, unfortunately, but a much graver one than we've seen before.
There's an article in the outlet that is called American Quarterly.
There you see on the screen, Brazil's most powerful judges in the spotlight again.
And this is a magazine that is not at all on the left.
If anything, it's sort of a centrist magazine.
And the article was published today.
And it says, quote, an escalating clash with Elon Musk and damaging revelations In the press are intensifying a long-running debate about whether Alexandre de Moraes is too powerful.
Now the press revelations that this article is referring to is the reporting I've been doing with Folha de São Paulo, the largest newspaper in Brazil, where we obtained a massive database of information, six gigabytes worth of messages and audios and other documents exchanged between the highest levels of Marais's chambers among his aides that we've been reporting and revealing and disclosing, much to his extreme anger.
So this article talks about the conflict with Axe as well as the reaction to our reporting.
Quote, Marais prevented highway police From stopping buses full of voters in an area of Brazil dominated by Lula supporters, he also banned social media accounts of prominent figures who speculated the election had been stolen, and went after officials who failed to prevent the January 8th riot in Brasilia, even suspending the governor of Brazil's federal district from his job for three months.
Maraish banned the social media accounts of right-wing influencers such as Rodrigo Constantino and Paulo Figueiredo for allegedly spreading COVID-19 misinformation and casting doubt on the Brazilian electoral system.
He also banned the accounts of department store chain owner and right-wing influencer Luciana Honghi, allegedly for agitating a queue in a pro-Bolsonaro message group.
Now let me just stop there.
Luciani Honghi is a multi-billionaire.
He owns a huge series of department stores, a big character in Brazil.
On Twitter alone, he had something like 10 million followers on other social media outlets.
He had as many, if not more.
And he was a vocal supporter of Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 election, a very influential one.
And this judge, obviously doing everything he could to prevent Bolsonaro's election, just banned his social media accounts, closed them, ordered them shut.
To prevent him from communicating with millions of people, they remain shut to this day, even though Luciano Hunghi has never been accused of a crime.
Quote, blogger Alan DeSantos, in self-imposed exile in Florida, had his passport revoked after calling for the dissolution of the STF and being accused of involvement in a, quote, organized crime network that operates through monetized videos online.
Quote, right now he's protecting democracy and I think it's a very necessary thing, said Roberto Braga, executive director of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas, a nonprofit aimed at the digital information environment in Latin America.
Quote, but You could see a world in which someone else in his role doing something similar in a different context would generate a lot of problems.
This is the issue.
Brazilian elites are essentially saying, of course there's too much power in his hands.
Of course he's exceeding all legal limits.
But the danger of Bolsonaro's movement is so extreme, it's so criminal, that we have to allow this judge basically dictatorial powers.
It's the same mindset that prevailed during the war on terror in the wake of 9-11.
Yes, we're running roughshod over civil liberties, we're allowing the government to spy on us, to prison us without due process.
It's all necessary, even though in other contexts it wouldn't be, in order to stop the threat of terrorism.
This is always the formula of every tyrannical regime, everywhere.
We know you like your rights, usually we'll give them to you, but right now there's a threat.
It's not the first time that X would be blocked in a major country.
of our homeland that simply doesn't allow ordinary rights to exist.
It's not the first time that X would be blocked in a major country.
Here from, if we can go back a little bit, Reuters in April of 2024, earlier this year, this was after the coup of the elected prime minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, which, as it turns out, shockingly, which, as it turns out, shockingly, was supported by and given a green light by the CIA, removed Imran Khan, put him in jail, installed a military regime in Pakistan, far more obedient to U.S.
uh, The U.S.
security state, the social media platform Axios, blocked in Pakistan over national security, the ministry says.
Those are the kind of countries in which these sorts of things happen.
Back in 2010, as Ars Technica reported, Google stops Hong Kong auto-redirect as China plays hardball.
Under threats that the Chinese government won't renew its internet content, Google has decided to call off its efforts to redirect all China users to its Hong Kong search site.
Instead of automatically sending searchers straight onto google.com.hx, the search site once again serves up a Google China homepage.
Complete with a faux search box image that sends users to the Hong Kong site when they click on it.
The change may seem minimal, but Google hopes it will be enough to appease the Chinese government and to keep its license to operate on the internet business in the country.
All these evil countries we're told are so threatening and tyrannical, now far beyond what they do.
The Guardian in March of 2022 at the very start of the war on Russia, quote, Russia blocks access to Facebook and Twitter.
The move to block Facebook and Twitter comes as the government passed a bill that criminalizes, quote, fake news reports against the war.
What The Guardian forgot to mention, forgot to mention, was that the EU also banned Russian state media from being platformed by anybody.
If you are somebody who has a social media platform and you want to give people the ability to listen to RT or Sputnik, It's against the law in the EU to do it, which is why Rumble is not available in France.
Now, speaking of Rumble, the platform of Rumble is unavailable both in Brazil and France.
So if you try to access Rumble while in Brazil and France, and you don't use a VPN, what you get is the following quote, and I've tried it both in both countries.
Quote, because of Brazilian or French government demands to remove creators from our platform, Rumble is currently unavailable in Brazil and France.
We are challenging these demands and hope to restore access soon.
So you see this rapidly escalating, unfolding, extremely menacing scheme of censorship.
Which is, you either remove every dissident, every idea that we don't like, that we deem false, that we deem harmful, or we will, in the case of France, imprison you and your executives the minute you step foot into the EU.
Or we'll just block your entire platform from being available in our country at all, and we will only allow those platforms that maintain a closed system of information for our citizens to hear and say only what we think they should be hearing and saying.
This is happening in the democratic world, the ostensibly Western democratic world.
I cannot do anything more in terms of words to express how extreme, how severe, and how dangerous this trend is.
is we could see it coming for several years now, and it is here.
Speaking of Rumble, one of the very few platforms on the internet actually devoted to battling governments, even at their own expense, in order to resist censorship even at their own expense, in order to resist censorship demands,
There's obviously been a pretty hefty financial price that Rumble has paid for doing so, not just through lack of access to markets, but through a smear campaign against Rumble by the corporate media, trying to drive large corporate advertisers away from it.
And if you support the cause of free speech, like I do, You have an interest in having platforms, free speech platforms like Rumble succeed.
That's really the main reason we brought our show here.
is because we wanted to do everything possible to bring our audience to a platform that is truly devoted to free speech as I knew Rumble was.
And one of the ways you can support Rumble is by patronizing the products that they are now developing and putting on the market, one of which is Rumble's very own 1775 Coffee.
It basically is coffee that if you buy defends free speech and is also great tasting coffee.
It's ethically sourced from a family farm in the high altitude mountains of Bolivia.
There are several different flavors and roasts to choose from.
I started off with my favorite being Dark Roast, but I've now been open to a lot of others.
I don't drink dark as much as I used to, and I encourage you to try them all and see which one you like best.
It really does help Rumble's mission of defending free speech.
You can go to 1775coffee.com right now and pick up your first bag.
Use the promo code Glenn to save 10% off your first order, and that way you know that your hard-earned dollars are going To not only improving your morning routine, but supporting Rumble and its mission of free speech.
You can wake up every day and choose free speech and coffee by ordering at 1775coffee.com slash glenn.
Glenn, and if you use the promo code Glenn, you will have 10% off of your first order.
Saurabh Amari is a very incisive writer and political analyst, and In 2021 or 2022, he founded and now edits the heterodox populist journal called Compact Magazine, which I should just note, I was originally
A member of its Board of Advisors, I supported that magazine and still do in terms of the exchange of ideas that it provides.
He's also the American affairs columnist for the British journal New Statesman.
And in that journal, he has a new article entitled, quote, Donald Trump's identity crisis, how the former president's campaign abandoned its populist roots.
And as I said, I found this article very interesting.
It's about a topic that I myself have been spending a lot of time thinking about.
I don't necessarily agree with all of the statements in it, which is all the more reason that I am very delighted to welcome Saurabh to our show for his, what I think is his debut appearance on System Update.
Far too late, but better late than never.
Saurabh, it's great to see you.
Good evening.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me tonight.
Thanks for having me, Glenn.
But I have been on once before when my book came out last year.
You were kind enough to To host me.
So this is my second time.
There you go.
All right.
I'm sure it was a memorable experience, but when you do a show every night, it's sometimes hard to remember.
So welcome to your second appearance on System Update.
We have to do it more often anyway.
All right.
Let me start with this article because I think even the hard discord and most devoted Trump supporters have noticed that the campaign seems to be stumbling a little bit, maybe even more than a little bit, ever since Joe Biden left the ticket and was replaced By Kamala Harris.
And one of the things that even a lot of Trump supporters have noted is the argument that you advance in this article, which is that this sort of populist agenda, or at least populist messaging that worked so well for Trump in 2016 is either eroding, is far less visible, or as you call it, is something that he has abandoned.
Let me begin by asking you, first of all, what do you mean by Trump's populist roots?
Do you mean in terms of domestic policy, foreign policy?
The whole governing ideology?
What is it that you mean by that?
Kind of both, Glenn.
In 2016, I was a Wall Street Journal editorial writer.
In my defense, I was like in my mid to late 20s.
And Trump shocked me, us, by questioning the conventional Republican Party's orthodoxies around free trade, around entitlements, around labor unions.
and around foreign policy, right?
In all of those areas, he strayed from the Republican consensus.
In terms of entitlements, obviously he said, contra like Paul Ryan types, I'm not going to cut your Social Security and Medicare, which resonates with a lot of people because the only people who really want to cut those entitlement programs or to privatize them which resonates with a lot of people because the only people who really want to cut those entitlement programs or to privatize them are just
So when he said that, he was speaking for actually a majority of Americans, including a majority of Republicans.
Of course, he said that the post-911 wars were a disaster.
A lot of people at the time on the right and my side of the aisle weren't willing to say that back then.
But when he said it, it sort of liberated the rest of us to acknowledge what you could see with your own eyes, which is that those post-911 wars were a disaster.
They were a mistake.
And of course, on free trade, rethinking corporate-led, what we call neoliberalism, this idea that the state should go out of its way to demolish all barriers to private economic power.
or, you know, In all of those areas, Trump stood out by, and I would argue immigration was also a component of this, is the free movement of labor is a component of a world in which Labor, capital, goods and services are all free to move to the benefit of the wealthiest and corporations.
I don't hear those messages anymore, and that's my argument in the New Statesman essay, is that much of this stuff is now muted, and the essay kind of attempts to explore why that has come to be, and I give three arguments for it, but I don't want to I want to go into that in a step-by-step way.
I just wanted you to lay the foundation in the first place for what you meant by Trump's populist roots.
And I just want to add to that, I think the thing that struck me the most wasn't necessarily even Trump's repudiation of Bush-Cheney foreign policy, because on some level he kind of had to repudiate Bush dogma, since his main opponent at the start was Jeb Bush, and he couldn't.
Praise the Bush family or the Bush ideology when he had Jeb Bush standing next to him.
It was kind of almost a necessity, although I think consistent with a lot of things Trump has said about wars and humanitarian interventions as Democrats call them and the like.
The thing that most struck me, though, was when he really did kind of start repudiating Republican ideology for as long as I can remember.
I mean, I remember in the 80s One of Reagan's most effective phrases to convince people that they should be happy when corporate profits increase and taxes on corporations decrease was this idea that a rising tide lifts all boats.
The richer the rich get, the more jobs there are, the better everybody does.
I think a lot of people thought that for a long time.
Maybe, let's say, 50 years ago, there might have been some validity to the ability to argue that, as we've seen over the decades where, you know, these companies have turned into multinational corporations, no national allegiance, they ship job overseas, they strip towns.
The fact that Trump was willing to stand up and say corporate power is something that we need to contest and combat and fight against was something so radical in the Republican Party, especially given that he won.
What I want to ask you, though, is this.
There's always been this kind of confusion between things Trump says in one context and then things he does in another.
As you well know, he had this populist message on both foreign policy and economic policy in 2016, but his first term was filled with a bunch of militarists and neocons that he put in very powerful positions who stayed till the end, people like Mike Pompeo, but a lot of others.
He also, one of the first things he did, Contrary to his campaign, was lower taxes on the largest corporations.
And so the question has always become, is there a sort of core ideology that is populist in nature of Donald Trump?
Or was he convinced that that was a successful rhetorical strategy in 2016, and it was not?
What is your view on that?
I think there was something to that.
I've lamented the fact that his major legislative accomplishment in his first term was a big tax cut for the largest corporations and some of the wealthiest Americans.
That was engineered by none other than Paul Ryan.
That's certainly true.
I would also note that, you know, despite his early overtures to the American labor movement, His Department of Labor was stuffed with typical Republican union busters.
That said, he did something, which is this kind of—he voiced the discontent with neoliberal globalization.
It was a discontent that, by the way, the anti-globalization movement in the early 2000s and the late 1990s had also voiced as well, but basically was suppressed and ignored.
But then it found a kind of different kind of valence and different kind of expression In the Trump movement of 2016.
And he did certain things that became establishment conventional wisdom, even though initially everyone was shocked by it, which is, for example, the idea of decoupling from China, imposing tariffs on certain Chinese goods, insisting on manufacturing revival in the United States.
These were kind of signature Trumpian policies.
I would say those are the only ones that he like, of the kind of populist program that you're talking about that he actually did deliver on, and deliver on in such a way that they became conventional wisdoms.
So now you have like Financial Times columnists writing about why we need a less globalized world.
And a couple of years ago, de-globalization became a buzzword among CEOs and Davos types.
So he certainly had an effect.
But the question is like, where does he go from here?
And what does he do?
And it seems to me that Trump, at least.
Maybe J.D.
Vance is a different question, but Trump himself is no answer to that.
And now he's increasingly sounding and acting like a conventional Republican, right?
When the bill came up, which you might disagree with, but the idea of exerting control over big tech by banning TikTok and insisting that TikTok not be owned by a foreign company, Um, he opposed it and it didn't fail.
You know, they didn't escape notice that one of his biggest backers, uh, well, he originally, he originally supported it when he was president and then changed his mind and now opposes it.
Because as you say, one of his major donors has a huge stake in a company that owns a minority state worth $33 billion in TikTok.
So, um, there are other things of the kind.
I mean, I'm one of the ones that really shocked me.
I'll be honest, what disgusted me was his remarks with Elon Musk.
He had a conversation with Elon, and there's this kind of Elon worship on the right, which I really despise.
Not because, look, I don't want the old regime on Twitter to take over, but my point has always been, I don't want anyone oligarch to have the power to You know, shape the nature of a discourse and decide what I get to see and what I get to hear.
But some on the right, including it seems Trump himself, are like, well, now one of our own guys owns Twitter, so it's all good now.
And there's a lot to object to with Elon.
So when he goes on this X conversation with Elon and praises him for firing striking workers, That doesn't send that kind of message that I think won over a decisive marginal share of union households to Trump back in 2016.
You're talking about Trump's admiration when Musk purchased Twitter, what was then Twitter, and fired 80% or 85% of the staff within the first month or two.
That was the reading that the pro-Trump people gave.
They were like, well, what he's talking about is these professional manager class censors at Twitter, so it's okay if he's firing them over the fact that they're organizing.
But I went back and still I listened to the conversation again.
He's just saying like, you take over a company and anyone who objects, you fire.
If they try to organize, you fire them, Elon.
Good for you.
I'm only slightly paraphrasing.
There's no indication that it's just about Twitter per se.
And the sad fact is that at the Republican National Convention, you had Sean O'Brien, the leader of the Teamsters Union, making history by becoming the first leader of his union to appear in front of the Republicans.
And, you know, he's taking a risk.
Lots of leaders of the mainstream labor movement ostracized Sean O'Brien for that because they see, you know, Republicans as being irrevocably hostile to labor unions.
So he took that risk.
He's trying to work with both parties on labor issues.
And then when he hears and turns around, and that's what he gets from Trump and Elon chuckling together about firing workers who might band together to defend their collective bargaining rights.
He had to then release a statement, as he did.
Sean O'Brien said, well, that's economic terrorism.
That's just tragic.
Let me just...
I wanted to ask you, actually, about the Elon-Trump conversation, because that was not a case where Trump was being controlled by campaign consultants.
There weren't He wasn't reading from a teleprompter.
These were not ads that his campaign were producing.
This was Trump talking off the cuff, stream of consciousness almost, you know, just sort of like rambling.
And I think a lot of his, for me at least, a lot of his populist sentiments Not entirely, but more so than the campaign has reflected.
And just on this Elon issue, just to kind of look at this from this other perspective, think if you were to ask anyone on the right why they admire Elon Musk, they would not say, oh, because he fires and busts unions and union workers.
They would say, it's because one of the biggest problems we have had is that big tech has been censoring Free thought and free expression on the internet.
Largely, they're not entirely aimed at conservative speech.
And one of the things Elon Musk did when he bought Twitter, the reason he bought Twitter, was to say, I think we need to have a public square that is free, not only of big tech censorship, but really the real origin of the censorship was the U.S.
security state, the CIA, the FBI, the White House kind of coercing and cajoling, as we know, dissent that the government disliked from being removed.
And Elon stepped up and said, I'm going to push back against this.
And although he's been imperfect in that regard, for sure, he has made big steps in restoring some of this anti-censorship sentiment.
You see him now at war with the Brazilian government over exactly this, as well as defending Pavel Durov in France.
So I guess what I'm saying to you is that I don't see it quite as clear.
I don't, I, I don't see the admiration of Elon or why he's become a folk hero on the right having to do with his union busting.
I see it more so with the free speech banner that he's been waving, not just in general, but against the U.S.
security state's ability to censor the internet as well.
Yeah, I gotta say, I'm a little bit more skeptical of Elon than you are.
You know, in terms of some of the things we've seen.
So, you know, one is the sort of use of throttling against links, which actually wasn't a part of the Ancien Regime.
I'll tell you, to be honest, like, as you know, I was the op editor of the New York Post when Twitter censored our Hunter Biden story.
Nevertheless, the day after that happened, I wrote an op-ed for the New York Post in which I described that act of censorship as contemporary totalitarianism, and it still got tens of thousands of retweets at the time.
What Elon has done to me is not so much like this kind of overt censorship, but the way that he uses the algorithm is that he wants there to not be any conversations that lead you outside the platform.
It might be for commercial purposes, but the bottom line is that if you post a Substack link, or if you post the link in general, It's completely unrelated to how many followers you have.
I have 150,000 followers.
No, but as you said, that is a commercial.
I mean, he wants to keep people on the platform because that's the way that X can become profitable.
I don't think there's an ideological component to that.
Do you?
Is he suppressing links on Substack that are more ideological or less so?
I guess so.
But look, the other fact is that I don't want censorship.
On the other hand, his algorithm seems to favor really, really cranky, anti-Semitic and racist stuff.
The For You feature of Elon's platform is for me, and these are accounts I have no relationship with, but it'll be like, you know, some of someone will be like, Sub-Saharan African, look at them.
And it's like an African-American person would be like, look at their disgusting bodies or something like that.
Or like, look at Jews, you know, like I see an overwhelming amount of that.
I'm not saying, although I can't rule it out either, that like somehow there's a dimension of Elon's ideology or something where he wants like the edgiest stuff all the time.
To the point where it's crowding out conversations that are actually substantive and serious about issues.
It's kind of like a kind of ideological pollution to me.
Now, my point is, I don't care what Elon's ideology is just as much as I don't care what Mark Zuckerberg's ideology is or anyone else.
I just want a public square, because these platforms are our public square.
I want one where the algorithms that are used are transparent and clear to everyone, and there's a kind of ability of us to push back against any kind of throttling, whether it comes from Woke leftist ideologues, you know, or deep state ideologues, or it comes from Elon.
I don't think Elon has been the solution to that.
He's promoted his own, what I see as his own sort of worldview, which is a distinct worldview.
He has a distinct worldview.
I'm not saying it's a racist worldview, but it's like a let's shock everyone worldview.
Whatever it is.
But the reality is that there are major social media stars who have built up gigantic platforms whose every tweet goes viral, whose only function is to promote American liberalism, Western liberalism, and the Democratic Party.
These people are not being suppressed.
These people have immense influence on us.
supporting a presidential candidate who is the exact opposite one of the one that Elon Musk is supporting, namely they're supporting first Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris in very aggressive ways.
And you have people who have millions of followers and millions of retweets every time they utter a word.
And those messages are being spread far and wide, even though Elon opposed them.
But let's get back to your article and to the question of Trump's populism, because we got a little feel that maybe it was my fault.
But let me ask you about this.
I've long had this theory about Trump and his presidency that, you know, the architect of this 2016 populist message, one of them at least, was Steve Bannon.
Like him or not, you know, I remember very well Steve Bannon in an interview in 2016 saying, the first thing we should do is get in, do a bipartisan infrastructure deal with the Democrats, spend tons amount of money rebuilding our roads and infrastructure, and then raise taxes on corporations in order to pay for it, and then take this money and build a wall so that we keep people out.
And these benefits are only for American.
You can quibble with those things.
That was a populist agenda.
And yet what happened was, in my view, is that Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner sort of had this power conflict inside the White House House over whose ideology or worldview would be dominant, and Jared Kushner being the son-in-law of the president ended up prevailing, and Steve Bannon was gone.
And to me, that became kind of a pivotal moment in the direction that the Trump administration took.
Do you see that that way?
I don't want to exaggerate that incident, but it was sort of a microcosm for what was happening inside the war between these factions over who gets to control Trump.
No, I agree with you.
I think there was something to the Bannon phenomenon that was more responsive to—one of the frustrating things about American democracy is we have an elite, bipartisan elite, that just does stuff that doesn't correspond with the majority.
The majority of people, I think, the majority of American people, if you ask them, they don't want a hyper-interventionist foreign policy that is engaged in flashpoints around the world all the time.
You know, infrastructure that works and that reflects our wealth as a nation.
And yet, as you know, and I know you agree with me on this, that's not the policy mix that we get.
We get this bizarre, you know, neglectful of our health and infrastructure at home kind of policy and overactive abroad.
And unfortunately, I think as far as the Trump movement goes, I think a lot of it's We now can look back and say a lot of its best instincts were coming from Ben.
And I should say, I have a lot of, you know, I personally, I think someone like JD Vance gets a lot of this stuff, especially, I think I trust them on foreign policy a lot more than anyone else, you know, who is in the American, in the American policy sphere.
Unfortunately, like the left has completely given up its historic anti-war, Still unclear if people will elect a woman president.
I mean, until that happens, you don't know if that will happen.
like completely bleak here.
But that said, like the Trump campaign is just missing something.
And it might still win because the inflation is in a dismal state.
People are very upset over what's happening at the border.
But I just am not hearing- Still unclear people will elect a woman president.
I mean, until that happens, you don't know if that will happen.
That could still be a barrier as well.
Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, it could.
It could or it could not be, but the point is that Well, policy-wise, somehow the Trump campaign overall seems off to me in terms of what made it interesting and attractive, especially to working and lower middle class people in 2016.
And I can't explain it.
It could be partly that some of these things, the establishment actually gave it some concessions You know, whether you agree with it or not, but I think some of the elements of Biden's economic policy was a concession to the Trumpian movement, right?
Industrial policy, revival of manufacturing, chips manufacturing, etc.
However effective or not it was, it was like trying to give points or kind of concession to the Trumpian uprising.
That may be part of it.
The other, I cannot deny, forget about Elon, I don't want to get into an Elon discussion again, but just this, the influence of the coterie of oligarchs, tech oligarchs on Trump that didn't exist in 2016, I think.
And it may be a result of democratic lawfare against Trump.
He's put him in so much kind of civil liability that he now has to rely on other billionaires a lot more than he would otherwise.
But it's made him, in terms of economic populism, made him a lot more docile and neutralized his edgier economic message. - Yeah, and just to be clear, just in order to be fair, I guess, to the Trump presidency, there were a couple other examples where I do think there was sort of a populist ethos to it.
In fact, you mentioned some of them in the article, including the fact that this gigantic antitrust lawsuit against Google that just had a major victory was actually initiated by the Trump Justice Department, something completely unthinkable.
Say, going back to Reagan or Bush 41, certainly Bush 43, but even Clinton and Obama, who were in bed with Silicon Valley in every way.
So there was still a little bit of that, I think, pervading the Trump presidency.
At the same time, you have a Republican Party in Congress you have to deal with, who is not as populist or anywhere near that as Trump.
I want to talk to you about the campaign they're running against Kamala in just a second.
But before I do, you mentioned JD Vance.
The two Republicans who the Teamsters president Sean O'Brien typically praises most, and someone you mentioned in your article, my friend Matt Stoller, friend of the show, who's very big on antitrust, has praise for these two same senators.
One is Josh Hawley, the other is J.D.
Vance, is sort of really genuine economic populist, or at least in the context of the United States Senate.
Did Trump's choice of J.D.
Vance Give you sort of some hope that Trump was going back to that populist message of 2016, as opposed to, say, choosing Marco Rubio or Tim Scott or any of those standard Republicans?
I would say even Rubio has made some important shifts over the past few years.
I mean, in 2019, even Rubio gave a speech saying, Praising Catholic social teaching and calling for what he called common good capitalism as an alternative to the neoliberal, big corporate, can-do-no-wrong.
But not on foreign policy.
Not on foreign policy.
Much more the conventional, conventional Republican.
But yes, it did.
And I, I was, I was very pleased.
And of course I was quoted widely in the press praising the Vance choice, and I continue to praise it.
But, you know, then in a month after, I don't know what it is.
It's because maybe they were expecting to go up against Biden and it was supposed to be a cakewalk or whatever it is.
Something seems off.
And I think that they're struggling to define Kamala now that she's the opponent.
And, you know, I think that like calling her communist, I personally find that Idiotic, idiotic, idiotic.
It's idiotic because it's like, okay, well, like, because she proposed anti-gouging measures or even price controls.
As you know, Nixon, whatever you think of the actual merits of the policy, Nixon actually imposed quite extensive price controls in the early 1970s, and he was no communist.
A lot of American red states to this day have anti-gouging laws.
Again, I'm not defending the particulars of the Kamala proposal, per se.
I'm just saying the idea that the state should have some concern whether or not the price is just, or whether it outstrips even inflation levels, is not communist.
That's part of the toolkit of a modern state.
Let me ask you about that, because for as long as I've been paying attention to politics my entire life, the playbook of the Republican Party, when running against the Democrats, is to say the Democrats are all far leftists, they're socialists, they're communists, they don't believe in the free market.
I mean, this is, I think, my first election when I was alive was Nixon and McGovern.
That was certainly the theme.
It was most definitely as I grew up and watched Ronald Reagan run against people like Walter Mondale and then George Bush 41 against Michael Dukakis.
That was the standard playbook, George Bush against John Kerry and Al Gore.
Absolutely.
Oh, they're far leftists.
They're this and that.
When Trump ran in 2016, he didn't try and depict Hillary Clinton as a far leftist because Hillary Clinton is not a He depicted her as what she is, which is a lackey of the neoliberal establishment.
You know, the standard factions in Washington who she serves and represents and always has.
And that was the campaign was, we have to uproot the swamp.
She's a Living, breathing manifestation of the swamp.
And you could absolutely do the same thing with Kamala Harris, because she's, you know, probably tied even more to the Obama neoliberalism than even to the small amounts of populist policy that the Biden administration ended up including.
So, and to me, there's a sort of analogy that I want to draw, and I just want to ask you about this, where when Bernie Sanders ran in 2016 with no expectation that he could win, He ran a very nonpartisan campaign.
There was no like, the Republicans are evil, the Democrats are gonna, you know, it was very like, Democrats and Republicans are both bad.
He's after an independent.
He attracted a huge number of rural voters, people who don't identify as Democrats.
There were all those people who said, my two favorite candidates are Bernie and Trump.
And then in 2020, when he thought he could really win, he turned far more into this Democratic partisan because he was so desperate to win.
And he was being told by consultants, you need to talk about Trump as a threat to democracy, a racist, a fascist, all of that.
I wonder whether Trump now looks at this election, and you could make the case that this is a very reasonable perception, That he is very desperate to win the election and will do anything to win the election because it's the only way that he can actually stay out of prison.
I mean, these cases have sort of stalled, but the one that went forward convicted him and these others are going to be heard eventually.
And as a result, he's just kind of listening to people around him or saying, look, in order to win, the way to run against, say, a black woman is that you depict her as a far leftist.
There's just kind of a visceral appeal to it.
How much do you think is being, I know it's hard to get into Trump's brain, but if you look at the Trump 2024 and 2016, the differences are obvious in terms of the playbook, the messaging.
How much of that do you think is at play here?
I really don't know.
But what I do know is that what is a fact is that he does have even the civil liabilities are adding up.
I've always, I think, not been incorrect in thinking that even by American billionaire standards, His finances are shakier than your typical American billionaire.
That's the element that makes me angry, to be honest, at the center-left establishment for all the lawfare that they've launched against him.
You could argue that that's the kind of thing that makes you, if you're Trump, run into the arms of someone like Jeff Yass.
any kind of typical hedge fund figure or VC venture capital figure, but that comes with a price because those people want Trumpism to remain strictly limited to like opposing BI or just sort of edgy rhetoric at the level of the culture.
Or Sheldon or, or, or, or Miriam Adelson when it comes to foreign policy as well, she's a gigantic funder of his.
And so that's, you know, that's what lawfare arguably does, right?
That's a, that's, That's very unfortunate.
But the point is that even on its own terms, I think it just, it fails.
I think that it's, as you said, Glenn, there's a much better case to be made that Kamala is actually a typical neoliberal Democrat or, you know, that's, I'm not saying she is, but there's an argument there, right?
The fact that, for example, Some of her supporters include someone like Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, who as soon as she was put forward as the actual Democratic nominee was like, well, you know, two things she could do to get my support is get rid of the tariffs against China and fire Lina Khan, President Biden's crusading antitrust czar who's gone after a lot of big tech companies.
That's an easy line of attack.
I actually didn't see the Trumpians take that up as a line of attack.
Did you?
I don't think so.
The Reid Hoffman thing was delivered to them.
And it was Matt Stoller.
It was our friend Matt Stoller who really led that, including a piece in Compact, the magazine that I co-edited, and also one that he wrote for The New York Times.
Why is that?
That's a more Trumpian line of attack than calling her communist for something that I think, whether it's good policy or not, is within the American economic policy toolkit, which is combating price gouging in the food industry.
Communism?
Yeah, I mean, this thing of like calling Republicans and people on the right calling every Democrat a communist reminds me so much of the way Democrats call anyone on the right a fascist or a white nationalist or whatever.
Such a crude way of looking at things.
I mean, the ideology of communism is that you want to eliminate the free market, you want to take You know, property and money from the rich and distributed equally to everybody as a way of gaining power.
The Democratic Party is tied at the hip to Wall Street.
They're financed by hedge fund tycoons as well.
They are in bed with Silicon Valley.
These people have spent their career being funded by billionaires, the idea that they want to just like tax the rich and redistribute.
You resources for the poor is absurd.
It's not even what the country perceives the Democratic Party as being, which are these kind of affluent elites who serve the riches.
They don't look like communist revolutionaries to anybody.
I think it's a very ineffective attack, but it comes from this old Republican playbook that your article, I think, makes a good case.
Not necessarily in every specific that I don't agree with.
I know that I don't agree with every specific, but I think the overall point is that it's a very traditional Republican establishment playbook.
I think it's understandable that when you just change the candidate that you're running against, like with three months to go before the election with no vote, you're going to be a little uncertain about how to run against that person.
But I do think you're right that this kind of embrace of this old establishment Republican playbook is going to make it harder, not easier to win.
And I'm going to encourage everybody to go to read your article where you make a much more detailed case than we can sort of go over tonight.
But I guess I want to ask you as the last question, like, what do you...
I know I already asked you this a little bit, but what is motivating that?
Is it that he again surrounded himself by the kind of people he says he wants to purge the Republican Party from?
Is it that he just needs donors more than he needed in 2016 who are demanding that this sort of be the line of attack?
Like, why would Donald Trump look at his victory in 2016 and run in the opposite campaign in 2024 if he wants to win?
I give three arguments in the essay.
Two of them we've already discussed.
One is the fact that in some ways the establishment conceded some elements of the Trumpian critique of neoliberal globalization.
Whether you like those policies or not, the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the maintaining of tariffs against Chinese goods, which are all Biden administration policies, in a way is trying to concede to the Trumpians that they had a point about the kind of globalization that prevailed from the end of the Cold War through the Obama era.
So that's one.
Once the establishment has taken over your points, where's your next populist thing to do?
They're struggling to answer that.
That's one.
The second one we have already discussed is the influence of the oligarchs.
The third one is more complicated.
I just think the history of American populism is one where American populists, going back to Andrew Jackson, who the founder of the Democratic Party alongside his future Vice President, Martin Van Buren.
Populists are better at smashing things and unsettling things than formulating a governing agenda.
So Andrew Jackson, his war against the elite institution of his time was against the Second Bank of the United States, which was a kind of this imperious institution which would interfere in politics,
was technically supposed to be under the control of the taxpayer because the taxpayer provided a fifth of its capital, but really it completely ignored that and defied any attempts by Congress to assert popular control over it.
So Jackson smashed the Second Bank of the United States, destroyed it, but then he didn't think, "Well, the country needs a banking system.
How are we going to do that?
And the result was that, in fact, you had an inflation, you had a kind of a period of depression.
And afterward, the United States actually, as a result of the Jacksonians' war against the Second Bank, we didn't have a centralized banking system that could discipline the flow of capital until the birth of the Federal Reserve System.
So I think it's a kind of feature of American populism that is It is easier to smash than to govern.
And the Trumpians did their smashing.
They did make a splash.
They forced the center-left establishment to give them some concessions.
And now they're left wondering, well, what do we do to govern?
And in the absence of a good answer to that, they're reverting to conventional Republican orthodoxy, Which includes calling price controls communist.
Anything that's like slightly interventions in the market must be Marxist-Leninist, which, as you said, is kind of brain dead stupid.
Yeah, I mean, I do think part of the communist label has to do with just a general sense of, like, that the Democrats are authoritarian in the way communists are, wanting to control speech, wanting to crush dissent, those sorts of things.
But communism has a very specific ideological meaning that in so many ways does not apply to the Democratic Party.
All right.
Saurabh, it was great to speak with you.
Your article is Donald Trump's Identity Crisis, How the Former President's Campaign Abandoned Its Populist Roots is in a new statement.
And I would suggest if you're somebody who supports the Trump campaign, if you're somebody who doesn't, it's a very worthwhile article to read because it at the very least identifies what I think are some serious weaknesses in the ability of the Trump campaign to articulate a winning message with just two months to go.
Thank you, Glenn.
Good to see you as well, as always.
You too.
We're going to harass you to come back on soon.
And I hope you have a great evening.
Thank you, Glenn.
Good to see you as well, as always.
You too.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
All right.
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Among other things, it is the community on which we most rely to enable and support the independent journalism that we do here every night.
For those who have been watching this show, we are, of course, always very appreciative, and we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
