Tucker Carlson joins Dave Rubin to dissect how modern leftism functions as a "secular religion" and critiques the mainstream media's shift toward partisan propaganda. Carlson argues that tech giants now wield power exceeding the Pentagon, while Trump serves merely as a necessary disruptor exposing ruling class incompetence rather than driving structural racism. He warns that accepting group punishment invites bloodshed, contrasting this with his advocacy for individual responsibility over identity politics. Ultimately, the conversation suggests that preserving democracy requires challenging corporate influence and rejecting conformity, even as media elites drift into private equity. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, so speaking of control, I have only one goal for the next hour, which is to some point say something so ludicrous that you stare at me with that face.
Well, I know you're not BSing, because even just now, when you were in the green room and my girl was putting makeup on you, you sat there for literally two seconds, you were like, don't do anything, you didn't even look at the mirror, you were looking at me.
All right, so I'm glad to have you here for a couple of reasons.
We're gonna get into the book, and obviously we're kind of simpatico on what I think are the big issues of the day related to free speech and all that stuff.
But I will be totally honest with you.
Years ago, when I first saw you on Crossfire on CNN, I was not a fan.
Well, I grew up here in Southern California, and we lived in Studio City.
And, I mean, I think I've always been the same, anti-authoritarian, for the individual, against the group.
Um, I hate bullies.
I hate being bullied more than anything.
And so if you... I found myself, and I've always been this way, in a scenario where everyone is forced to sort of nod in bovine agreement about something, my instinct is always to be the one guy who's like, no.
And so I haven't changed at all.
The particulars of my political beliefs have changed because America has changed so dramatically.
I'm 49, so in the last 40 years, it's become a different country, and a lot of the things that I thought would work haven't worked.
A lot of the things I thought were not threatening turned out to be threatening.
So, you know, my views have changed, but my instincts have remained, I think, consistent over time.
Well, I was always interested in history, And my father was a non-conformist, I would say.
I mean, that's an understatement.
And his baseline position was just because everybody says it doesn't mean it's true.
And the answers to the way People are, are found in history because the one immutable fact of history is human nature.
Like, it literally does not change.
And you see consistent themes over time, and so if you want to understand what's happening, look backward, and you will... I mean, just pretty conventional stuff, but now it sounds kind of radical, but basically my main influence was my dad.
I grew up with my dad and my brother, and again, his view was, you know, just because all the chin-tuggers are saying it, Does that seem like a pretty obvious through line to your success right now?
Because it's like every day there is some other groupthink, lunacy that it's like, these people then go on your show and I always think it's hilarious because it's like, do they know what they're getting into?
Yeah, that's interesting, a theological conversation.
A couple people have mentioned on the show, my friend Peter Boghossian, who's a philosophy professor who's been on a few times, he calls this sort of new leftism a secular religion.
I mean, I'm kind of, you know, I'm not an intellectual.
I'm a talk show host, so I'm a little... Well, now we have our promo clip.
Well, it's true!
I mean, that's what I do.
So it took me a while to see the outline.
I mean, this all comes kind of slowly to me because I'm caught in an earlier time just by virtue of my age.
And so I would have these conversations that were confusing to me where you would be debating a so-called liberal I would be, and I would find myself taking the liberal side, like in favor of free speech, or my default suspicion of corporate power, or concentrations of power anywhere, because it's a threat to the individual, or in favor of due process.
I would take a position that I heard liberals of my childhood take, and the liberal I'm debating would be like, nope!
You know, if Google says it, it's true.
Or, you know, if you're accused, prove yourself innocent.
Or, if what you say is offensive, you don't have a right to say it, I'd be like, wait a second, this is a mirror image of what I grew up with.
So actually, to answer your question as honestly as I can, I don't know if they ever really meant what they said.
I really don't.
It's possible that the pursuit of power and the empowerment of the Democratic Party was always the goal, and that was just the disguise they used in order to achieve it in 1979.
Do you think we'd be in a healthier situation if there was a sane Democratic Party, even if all the policies were against everything that Douglas Carlson believes?
So for like a hundred years, you had one party, which was the corporate party, the Republican Party, the Country Club Party, the party of the ruling class.
And the other party existed in effect to keep it in check and to say, wait a second, you know, you're getting rich because all these people are working really hard.
You need to think about their interests.
And a bunch of different things happened.
The value of labor dropped because of technology to the point where it's not even worth representing the working class because they're not worth anything, actually.
This was the calculation of the Democratic Party.
And so basically what you have is this weird alignment where the leadership of the Republican Party represents corporate interests and the leadership of the Democratic Party represents corporate interests.
And there's no one to represent the middle class.
And that, again, the balance is off.
You need a vigorous party standing up and saying, whoa, wait a second, you need balance.
Yeah, so is that the part of this that's sort of scary for our future, and that's kind of what you're going for in the book, is that if one side completely implodes, which it seems more likely as we're taping this at the moment, that the Democrats are going to say, It's gonna absolutely implode, but it's not as if all the conservative policies that you might like would suddenly take root.
It's that we would actually tilt in some really bizarre... Exactly!
I mean, this is why marriage as an institution works, because there's like another person pushing back against your bad instincts or balancing you out, you know?
And what's true at home is probably true on a national scale, on a political scale.
And yes, you absolutely need a vigorous and principled opposition party always, or else you've got something really ugly.
Then you've got the monoparty, which is kind of what we have.
One of the lines when he's talking about politics, it's interesting you brought up marriage, he'll always say, you know, it's like a fight with your spouse.
You don't wanna beat them because then you're married to a loser.
You wanna give them a chance to figure out something so that you'll be able to move forward.
And we seem at this, we're at this odd place right now where it's like one side is trying to beat the other side, the other side is trying to beat the other side, and the rest of us, which I think is actually most of us, are just like.
You don't want to beat your spouse because you're married to a loser, but you're also a loser if you're married to a loser.
The point is, you're implicated in the future of the other side, because in the end, you're all in this together, even though you're coming from different perspectives.
So we're all Americans.
So in the same way that crushing your spouse doesn't actually win you any kind of meaningful victory or victory you'd want, crushing your fellow Americans doesn't Improve your life or your country!
So I know we could talk about why we're frustrated with the Democrats all day long and all that, but let's put that aside, because I feel like that's a little bit of low-hanging fruit and we both do it.
We do it enough.
So let's talk more about the Republicans.
So tell me some of your frustrations with the Republican Party.
The Democratic Party was for, you know, 80, probably close to 100 years, the party of wage earners.
And sometime in the last, I would say, 15 years, probably at the end of the Clinton, right at the kind of apex of the tech boom in the late 90s, the Clinton administration decided to reorient the party away from its traditional base to its new base, which is the rich and the poor.
And the Republican Party, being dumb, didn't see this.
And it was only the emergence of Trump that forced them to sort of realize that, wait a second, You know, we don't represent the people we thought we represented, actually.
It was the country club party, they denied it.
They hated that line because it was true.
I mean, it's the things that are true that we hate to hear.
But he basically has forced the Republican Party to be what it, in effect, already is, the party of last resort for people making, you know, $50,000 to $150,000 a year.
You know, the people who are making enough not to be on welfare, but not enough to send their kids to summer camp.
I mean, that's the core of the country.
And they don't want to represent those people.
And so to me, and by the way, I'm not one of those people.
I'm not here to give you the view from coal country at all.
I grew up in La Jolla and Georgetown.
But I know less about what the middle class thinks.
I know a lot about what the ruling class thinks, having lived in it my whole life.
And they hate, the leadership of the Republican Party, hates What does it say, though, that Trump, who's not one of them, seems to care about them?
But that's exactly the last time we had something like this.
Of course, it was in the progressive era.
Teddy Roosevelt, really the pivotal president of post-Civil War America, I would argue, who made this a capitalist country by restraining capitalism.
The Romanovs didn't do that, and they got 70 years of Bolshevism, right?
But Roosevelt, who really was a genius, was like, wait a second, the concentrations of corporate power are so scary, they're going to overwhelm the democracy, and we're going to have a counter-reaction, and the Wobblies are going to take power.
So Roosevelt was the last person To fill this role.
And he was exactly the same, similar to Trump.
He wasn't throwing chairs through the window into the country club.
He was throwing them out onto the street like he was.
From the class that he was trying to restrain.
And you sort of have to be.
Like he knew what they were like because he was one of them.
I don't know, there's something that, but I would just say my, for me it always goes back to I have greater sympathy for the lone guy who's getting pushed around than I do for the group that's pushing him around.
So I feel like right now the least popular group in America You know, lives in the Middle West, and they have kind of antiquated social attitudes, and they have very little economic power, and they're overweight, and everyone hates them.
And I feel like, really?
Because they're Americans, actually.
Like, you don't—what is this?
By the way, if they were doing this to black people or Hispanics or any group, I would be sympathetic, because I hate that.
What actually, in the scheme of what your book is about and sort of where America's at at the moment, is he just the great wrecker that we sort of needed so that this ship of fools wasn't gonna sink and take everybody down?
Trump is not the guy who comes to Washington and transforms the system because he's not capable of that.
He's not interested in that.
Washington is a very specific town, okay?
So, like, the legislative process is highly complex.
He doesn't understand it, doesn't seek to.
He's not gonna be the guy who runs on these nine policies and then affects them once elected, gets them through the Congress, gets them through the agencies.
He can't!
That's not his role.
It's very frustrating, actually, if you're from D.C., like me, to watch it.
You're like, wow, you know, what a second!
Get the energy department under control!
Not gonna happen.
There's three million executive branch employees versus Trump, okay?
I think there are three million executive branch employees.
That may include the military, by the way, so it's not quite right.
But I'm just saying the permanent class in DC, and I live right in the center of them, they hate Trump.
He's a threat to them.
But why do they hate him?
They hate him not because he's a right-winger.
He's hardly a right-winger, actually.
They hate him because he's the guy who says the obvious things.
So, like, we went to Helsinki last summer and interviewed him during the Putin thing.
And this crystallized for me in this conversation I had with him off camera.
I said to him, I'm going to ask you about NATO.
And he goes, why do we have NATO?
And as someone who's like a Cold War kid, I was like, well, I like NATO.
I'm thinking to myself, and he goes, you know, the Soviet Union, you know, fell in 1991.
Wasn't the point of NATO to keep them from invading Western Europe?
But they don't exist anymore.
Why do we still have them?
And I'm searching for a good answer and I couldn't find one.
So Trump repeats this in public and everyone's like, well shut up!
You know, what are you working for, Putin?
And I thought, this is what Trump does.
He comes in in his kind of autistic way and asks the obvious question at the core of whatever the issue is that is the one question everyone's been avoiding because they don't have the answer to it.
But because they are unanswered and unanswerable in some cases, they expose sort of the mediocrity of our ruling class, like they actually don't know what they're doing, is the truth.
All right, so I have a lot of friends, I think you know some of them, who think that this thing that you're talking about with Trump is a sort of existential threat to the system, that this erraticness, this idea of you just throw the idea out there and then let it sort of ruminate and see what happens, that that is just too dangerous to play ball with.
I mean, I guess, you know, I'm disruptive for asking you the question, but you also should pay for the house.
Do you know what I mean?
So like he's calling BS on them.
I get why they don't like it, but it also is a call to action to them to like answer the question and rule in a way that is sensible and wise and sustainable.
I mean, look, I think on some level everybody is bigoted.
I mean, the human heart is dark and light and, you know, it's a patchwork.
But like, talk about, I mean, look, if he has a policy, if he were to get up and say, you know, the problem is that this one racial group is screwing everybody else, and in response we need to crush them, we need to attack them in public, and then make it much harder for them to get jobs, government contracts, get into school, that would be racism.
Oh wait, that's what our ruling class has been doing for 35 years.
So, you really want to have a conversation about racism?
Racism is attacking people on the basis of their immutable characteristics, which is like how our government operates.
It's totally wrong.
So, yes, there's a lot of racism.
Is Trump an offender?
Probably.
Who isn't?
But the actual structural racism that hurts people and rewards others on the basis of their skin color, something I thought we got rid of 50 years ago, that is not being perpetuated by Trump.
It's being perpetuated and defended and celebrated by his critics.
Don't lecture me or anyone else about racism if you're pushing that crap.
It's a complicated psychological phenomenon, but at root, it's much easier to maintain power when you divide your opponents, when you divide the country into warring tribes based on characteristics that don't change and therefore can't be resolved.
You know, this is how the British ruled India.
This is the problem with Rwanda.
I mean, this is like a very well-known phenomenon.
But anyway, yes, it's all projection and displacement.
It's like whatever I'm doing, I'm accusing you of doing.
Like, I can't believe, you know, whatever it is.
And it's actually Orwellian, because it's not a lie.
Like, I have a bunch of kids, and they lie because everybody lies, and you especially lie to the people you love because you care about their opinion most, so kids lie to their parents, like it's a feature of it.
But a child's lie is very recognizable because it's always three shades off from the literal truth.
It's actually much more effective and manipulative not to grade the truth and distort the truth, but to tell the opposite of the truth, because it throws the other person completely off.
I can't, Matt, and I have, you know, just because of my job, I mean, I know a lot of people who dissent from the orthodoxy within their group, you know, because I try to have them on because I think they're brave.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, I'm not involved in any of these debates, I'm so, but like, if you're a gay guy, it's like, you know what, I'm not really on board with this.
Yeah, all right, so then that's a perfect segue to the technological part of this.
Because I think the last time I was on your show, this is what we discussed, just what's going on with Google, what's going on with the algorithms, are people being shadow banned, et cetera, et cetera.
I think there's plenty of evidence that yes, this is all real.
I suspect you don't want the government I hate to use the term existential threat because it's so banal and overused, but actually it is an existential threat to the ability of the U.S.
government to run the country, to administer the democracy.
There are 20,000 engineers, engineers making between $200,000 and $400,000, working right now just on Google Search, just on that one feature of Google.
No, but look, it's so asymmetrical, like all these debates are, because with liberals who are only about power, you just make the pitch like, look, we'll fund you.
We're on your side.
You know, we're part of the coalition of the ascendant, so just like, shh, no problem.
With conservatives, all they, who are sort of like dog-like in their, ooh, market, you know what I mean?
It's like, what, are you against markets?
Do you want government control?
Are you for regulation?
Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand!
And conservatives are like, oh my gosh, kryptonite, I'm sorry!
You're right, you're totally right, Mr. Google.
It's actually, and so I feel like I'm the only person who, like, yeah, of course I'm conservative, of course I'm not for regulation, of course I believe in markets.
But this isn't a free market.
This is your free, this is your version of capitalism?
This is what you've been promising all these years?
When, like, two guys who run a company that's not even American, whose values are not aligned with the interests of my country, is in charge of the country?
I gotta say this, man, I did not think that I was gonna bring you in here and that I'd have Tucker Carlson agreeing with my friend Eric Weinstein about this, but that you're basically laying out the same case he's laid out.
It's too big, and sometimes I think, well, maybe I'm going crazy, maybe I'm thinking about this too much, and I'm becoming like the wacko who's like, you don't understand the threat!
But actually, the deeper, and I know people who work there, and I've actually spent a lot of time on it, No, I don't think I'm overstating it.
And by the way, I'm not temperamentally an extremist.
I'm from Southern California.
I'm a kind of semi-observant Episcopalian.
I'm not like, the end is nigh!
That's not the way I am.
But on this topic, I think I'm becoming that because I think the facts warrant it.
Yeah, what do you make of the whole shift, sort of, of what's happening with news and technology at the moment?
That it's funny, I said this to you in the green room, but when I was doing a show with Peterson last week, I said, oh, you know, Tucker Carlson's on my show next week.
The audience went wild, like, went crazy.
And I was like, oh, that's interesting, because I hear from so many of these young people that they don't get their news from cable news anymore.
I think you and Gutfeld are a little bit of a, like a bridge, sort of, between mainstream and the internet thing.
But that CNN has sort of become a joke, that just saying these things about cable news, that's already the punchline for young people.
But whenever two or more people who've thought this through for ten minutes get together, they mention one name and they're like, when's he coming to save us?
Well, now you said it's a he, but let's not get lost in gender pronouns.
So with that being said about the technological component, watching cable news shift right now, there's also an issue that a lot of people are getting their news from this, from this show, shows like this, Shapiro, Rogan, all of these guys.
That's kind of worrying, too, at some level, right?
And I say that, I'm talking about guys that I love, but just that the fact-checking is different here than, say, it would be on cable news, not that, Cable news has done a great job.
I mean, we're part, you know, we're always a point on a continuum and we're in the middle of a cycle where the media are being reinvented completely and you're right.
I mean, the problem with individual operators, solo guys on YouTube, is they have so much less to lose than a television network does that the incentives to get the facts right and be responsible are, of course, much lower.
The problem, as you well know better than anybody, is that the media have so discredited themselves that it's like, it's so obviously propaganda.
So what would you do to get some of those people back?
If they're out there now, the ones that really are overboard on Trump, that I haven't, you know, I've been able to reach some liberals, some good lefties and liberals, so that, okay, we can put a handout for them, but for the people that are really feeling like they're buying all the nonsense, that this guy is Hitler, and all of this really, do you have any technique that gives them a little bit of an out?
They issued a statement saying, you know, some speech is just too offensive.
Really?
Because you defended the right of Nazis to march through Skokie, which, everyone forgets, had the highest percentage of Holocaust survivors of any town, like, outside Israel.
I mean, you know, I would argue that, I mean, I can only speak for my show, I'm only in charge of an hour of 24, but, you know, that it's actually worth defending the principles as distinct from the individuals or the political figures.
And over time, like, you're not embarrassed to do that.
It's worth doing.
But I think as a business matter and just sort of a matter of life, if you're the guy who's not entirely with the herd and you're like, actually, no, it's a little bit different.
You know, you go to the 19 other stores and you can buy this one product and I've got a different product.
I've worked at CNN, I've worked at MSNBC, I've worked at PBS, I've worked at Esquire, I mean I've worked at like a million different liberal publications and television channels, and they're all selling exactly the same product.
And then there's Fox, in the mainstream landscape, that's different.
Just one channel is different.
And the overwhelming feeling is that should not be allowed.
Like, I can't believe that they're allowed to say what they're saying.
Okay, so that's sort of what... But it's just so uninteresting.
I mean, if everybody's repeating the exact same pieties, diversity is our strength, our children are our future, whatever the sort of banality is that you think is profound, if everybody's saying the exact same thing, that's just boring.
Yeah, I mean, I was a writer before I went into TV, and one of the reasons that I failed a couple of times pretty spectacularly in TV is because I didn't understand the medium and I didn't respect it.
I was like, I'm a writer, I'm a deep person, here I am in the shallow medium.
And what I didn't understand is that TV is a completely different thing.
And it's got its own requirements and its own rules, and you need to understand what it's capable of.
And it's capable of great things, it's just not capable of everything.
Is it odd to you that the interview, the real long form this, like just sit down with another human being that, you know, CNN booted Larry King, which I think was the beginning of the end for them.
Nobody wants to hear what your team thinks, we already know.
What's interesting is when we throw up an idea or policy and we deconstruct it and we have two fairly evenly matched people You know, kind of competing for you, you know?
So anyway, it became something much more... But the idea was always a good idea, and especially the idea of Larry King.
I pitched that show to many different channels, black curtain, two people, hour-long conversation, and my argument was, this will rate.
People want this, there's none of it.
And everyone's like, yeah, I don't think so.
unidentified
We need interstitials and graphics, and it's like... They love interstitials!
How much of all of this, everything we're discussing here, and so much of what you're doing on your show, is just that people are just tired of having their intellect insulted?
But the point is that there is, especially when we're all narrow casting, When you don't need to reach 80 million people, when you can reach three million, and that is a more than viable commercial proposition, you can aim at an audience that wants that, and there is a substantial audience that does.
But if I'm being completely honest, you know, I'm not a huge... I'm so caught up in our hour and I'm so... it's such a hive in my show and we have, like, you know, I intentionally hired really smart, smarter than I am people, that I don't have a sense sometimes of the larger programming.
I would say as a general matter, I've always tried not to be aligned with any politician, because in the end, no matter how sympathetic I might be to the message, it's a politician, and I'm not, if I wanted to be a policymaker, I would be one.
I mean, I live in that world, so I know what it is.
I don't want that.
I have a journalist temperament.
I like to watch.
I like the freedom to say what I really think is true.
One thing I will say about Fox, which I'm grateful for every single day, and this is Rupert Murdoch, They don't, they do not control what you say.
I've had this show for two years, almost exactly two years.
Not a single time has someone called, well no one calls me at all, but like no one calls and is like, I can't believe you said, there's nothing like that.
And I would say the other thing is the way TV works, at least at our network, but I think this is true.
When I worked at the others, it was also true.
The shows have enormous autonomy.
They really do.
I mean, there's not a morning call where it's like, here's our line on this or that or the other.
It's like, I never talk to any... I talk to my executive producer, Justin Wells, whom I love, and a lot of my other producers all morning, just in the car parked outside.
I was just doing the show, like, here's what I think we should do.
So I know what it's like to do, I do a couple shows a week and I'm doing long form and this way, but we're not doing a zillion segments and all the interstitials and all that stuff.
The medium, yeah, all of that, but just the medium itself leaves most anchors at some point feeling totally exposed and alone.
It's like, I'm out here, you know, I've got a staff of 80 people or whatever, but in the end I'm out here live, it's just me, I'm taking all the crap, and no one's backing me up.
I mean, every person in the business feels that way at a certain point, and then you start to feel like, you know, no one understands me.
And you actually become so self-pitying and self-involved that no matter how much they pay you, you're deeply unhappy, and then you start acting in erratic ways.
And like, look at TV and you know exactly who's going through this.
Everybody except me.
Because I keep my world so small.
I married my high school girlfriend, I live walking distance from my dad and my brother, and my college roommate and best friend.
And that's who I talk to every day.
Every day.
And the reason I do that is because I love them, but also because I don't want to feel the way that most people on TV do.
I want to talk to people I love and trust, and I want my security and happiness to come from those relationships and not from the affirmation I get on television, because you will become a crazy person.
Someone once said to me, a head of a TV network once said, what do you think my job is?
I said, I don't know, running a TV network?
And he goes, nope, it's keeping millionaires from killing themselves.
My job.
How dark is that?
It's also true.
It's like his job was to keep the people from going totally bananas because the medium itself drives you crazy.
Not quite as impressive effects, but yeah, and I quit smoking four or five years ago and, but I'm, I'm, you know, I wouldn't call it a vice, but I'm a, I'm a enthusiastic user of nicotine gum and lozenges because I think they really have improved my life, like a lot.
I mean, I don't want to endorse the product, but I'm not sure what the downside is of using nicotine.
So is that, do you think, the fundamental, like sort of, if we're looking at this just at a base level, that Trump's temperament and the way the media is with him, is that sort of the root of everything else?
I mean, I think that we needed to awaken the people in charge, not simply of our political system, but also of our economy and our culture, from their stupor.
You know, hey!
You're not listening.
We're going to elect this orange guy to wake you up.
I actually think that was a useful thing, a necessary thing.
But repeated cycles of political volatility, like break your country, obviously.
There are a million examples of this, and it's obvious.
So you need to calm people down, and the main way you calm people down is the way you calm children down.
Which is, you explain to them, as simply and clearly as you can, why what's happening is happening, why you're making these decisions.
And you give them some sense that they have some control, not total control, but some control over the decisions that you're making.
You know, you enfranchise them, you bring them in.
In a democracy, the system is predicated on that idea.
So you need to say to people, look, you want X, Y, and Z?
You elected this guy to build a wall?
We think a wall is stupid.
We don't think it's going to work.
We think it's kind of embarrassing, actually.
It doesn't matter.
We're going to do it.
Because you have demanded it.
You have to kind of give people a sense that the democracy is real if they think it's fake.
If they think it's really an oligarchy posing as a democracy, what are they going to do?
Like for all the sort of anger at each other right now and it's funny because you know I spend time on Twitter where it seems like the Civil War has begun already and then I get out there in real life and I'm on this tour and it's like I meet thousands of people all across the middle of the country who are wonderful and open and decent and all those things.
Anyway, uh, no, who does, look, Nobody does it better.
There's no greater country.
I don't have a foreign passport.
I'm stuck here.
I plan to do everything I can for the country because I have a long-term interest in it, and I don't want to move anywhere else.
I can't think of anywhere better.
Alpine, Switzerland's pretty nice, but there's no humor allowed.
Anyway, the point is, no, you can look at countries and see their ruling classes doing things you wish ours did.
There's no country I kind of despise more than China, but one thing I do admire about China is that its ruling clique thinks long-term about stability.
That's their overriding concern.
Now, of course, that's rooted in their desire to hold on to power, which is ignoble.
I get it.
They understand how important continuity and stability are to the society, so they think deeply.
And they don't make the right decisions all the time, obviously.
The one-child policy is a disaster, but that's how they think.
And I wish we thought that way.
I think we've too internalized libertarian economics as a model for everything.
That, like, it's always virtuous to destroy this thing and build something new, and what we don't understand is, like, that's not, people are not capable of that on, at scale.
So do you think any of the people right here, these beautiful caricatures of Maxine Waters and Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi, who else do we have on there?
And they're on the cover of my book not because of that or any real political reason, particularly Lindsey Graham is there and it's described inside.
He's the embodiment, and I like Lindsey Graham and I think he's smart, but he's the embodiment of a phenomenon that I think is really destructive, which is the refusal of people to learn from the failures that they created.
And so, like, it's okay to have supported the invasion of Iraq.
I did.
What's not okay is to, you know, 15 years later, look at it and be like,
"No, that wasn't a mistake," and, "No, I refuse to learn from what happened,"
and, "Yes, I think we should do it again."
That's something for which you should be held responsible.
That's my only point.
It's like, I catch my kids doing something wrong.
I'm not surprised that they did something wrong, but I demand that they concede they did something wrong, and I make them try and learn from it.
Look, this is a guy who, if you haven't sat down with him in a while.
I have.
Oh, okay, good.
This is a guy who admits, freely admits now, that he was part of the problem, that he was one of the people that led to the polarization, and he's trying to fix it.
People will say, well, his motives, he just wants money.
Whatever.
People's motives are unknowable.
Yes, if you repeatedly show me that your motives are bad, fine.
But I see a guy who genuinely is trying to fix some things.
So when I discussed this with him about the midterms, we sort of agreed basically that the only option that I see that is remotely possible here for the betterment of the country going forward The Democrats kind of have to be destroyed so that they can rebuild.
Otherwise, if they do well in these midterms, we end up in two years of impeachment.
And then it's like that revolution thing that you think we're on the brink of?
I mean, I have to say, I think that story for me has been a happy respite from all this heavy stuff, because it's just so hilarious how out of it Elizabeth Warren is.
But I do think there's a deep question at the bottom of it, not even at the bottom, at the very top of it, which is, Like, should your DNA determine your life?
And maybe I'm just too American or too Californian or something, but no, I don't think it should.
I don't think you're responsible for what people you never met did.
I think you're responsible for the decisions that you make.
I don't think we should hurt you because of your eye color or your height or your race.
I mean, like, if you start to accept that it's okay to inflict group punishment on groups, Then like, I mean, isn't that the whole lesson of the 20th century, that that's wrong, and that's a cul-de-sac that ends in bloodshed?
And every day on TV, one of the main problems, last thing I'll say, but one of the main problems with our coverage is that it's brought to us by dumb people.
And I really think finance, the whole finance world, is partly to blame.
Forty years ago, Evan Thomas from Newsweek used to live on my street.
Evan Thomas is a very smart guy.
Went to Harvard.
You know, he's kind of liberal, whatever, but he's legitimately smart.
Smarter than I am.
He left Harvard and went to work at Newsweek because that was kind of an acceptable path.
Now, what percentage of Harvard seniors are going to Newsweek?
No, they're going into private equity.
So what you're left with, it's almost like medieval England where, you know, under primogeniture, the first son gets the estate and the second son has to, like, figure it out or become an army officer or a vicar or something.
It's like we're getting the dumb people.
We're getting the people who can't think for themselves are all of a sudden winding up as cable news anchors.
Listen man, you know the first video that I did in 2018 was that I thought this was gonna be the year of unusual alliances and I would say this is right up there because I consider this a great alliance and I think you're doing great work and all that stuff, not that you need me to tell you that.