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July 31, 2024 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
58:05
Did the FBI lie about the Trump Shooter? Is the GOP ‘Weird’? With Matt Taibbi | TRUTH Podcast #57
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So my guest today is Matt Taibbi, one of the few actual journalists left in the world, and I was looking forward to this conversation.
It wasn't going to be tied to the news, but it turns out that a lot of news has happened in the last 24 hours, and even as this recording is happening within hours of it, that I can't help but make that the focus of what we're about to discuss.
The first is the appearance that the FBI has, big surprise, not been honest with the public.
Certainly not fully straightforward based on some recent facts that we've learned about what they know about the Trump would be assassin or the person who at least attempted the assassination on Donald Trump.
What we've learned, and it's still in real time coming out, is that at least Gab, one of the organizations, social media networks that received an emergency document request from the FBI, suggested that they knew or believed that the account that belonged to Crooks, the alleged assassin, Actually was posting very different things than what the FBI publicly stated.
So it's interesting to get to the bottom of what's going on there.
And it's all against the backdrop of a week where leveling the term weird has become the Democrats' principal political strategy, which I think is actually not only a little bit weird in its own right, but more importantly, it's anti-American at its core and rankles me in ways that I think we ought to discuss in greater depth than just knee-jerk reactions.
So, a lot to talk about, but instead of the usual conversation we were about to have, Matt, I'll bring on my guest, Matt Taibbi, who I had a chance to meet recently at the Republican convention.
We struck up conversation, and this is an outgrowth and a follow-up to that.
But, Matt, welcome to my podcast, and I'm excited to chat with you about some subjects that might have been a little bit different than what we were planning on.
No, thanks for having me on, and good to see you again, Mr. Ramaswamy.
That was a pleasure to meet you last week, or I guess it was two weeks ago now.
A couple weeks ago, yeah.
Time flies.
So what do you make of this, you know, obviously we don't have all of the facts yet, but the appearance that we didn't really get necessarily the full truth of what the FBI knew or even what their full beliefs were.
What do you make of that?
And in particular, from your vantage point as a longer-time journalist studying Government transparency goes at the heart of a political journalist.
How does this fit into a broader history of what we know about how the government really does or doesn't tell the truth to us about issues of public importance?
Well, I think it says a lot about a lot of things, actually.
The FBI has Transformed itself into a different kind of organization, really since the beginning of the war on terror years.
After the hearings in the 70s about the reform of the intelligence community, the FBI essentially became almost entirely a law enforcement agency.
It could not conduct investigations without some kind of predicate that had to demonstrate that.
That changed really in the Bush years.
There was a series of directives that allowed them to essentially conduct investigations without any real important cause.
And the agency has really become much more of a counterintelligence, intelligence gathering agency as opposed to a law enforcement body that just investigates crimes and tries to gather evidence.
When they give...
Basically a general purpose investigative agency as opposed to responsive to a particular alleged violation of the law.
That's what you're saying, which is absolutely, I think, spot on.
Right.
That's what you're saying.
Yes.
And the problem for us as journalists is that the FBI, I mean, I've dealt with them a few times over the years, the FBI, DOJ. Once upon a time, you know, if they could, they would give you information, but it would always be, you know, here's what we found out.
Here's what evidence we can disclose.
Uh...
They were not being political very often in the way that they would disseminate information.
That wasn't really part of their mission.
That wasn't the way they wanted to be perceived either.
Now, in the wake of the Trump assassination, there's this crazy symbiosis between a press that doesn't really do any work and the FBI, which You know, issues these completely nonsensical, off-the-record statements, well, they'll tell people, like, we've done 100 interviews, but we have absolutely no information about what the possible motive is, which is completely impossible.
Anybody who's done 100 interviews with people who've known the suspect will have some kind of idea.
They'll have a theory, at least.
Yeah, they'll have a theory, and now this new thing where they, you know, they affirmatively tell the public, they're trying to convince us that Oh, absolutely.
I mean, I think that The deeper issue that animates my own pursuits, whatever they are going forward, is the people we elect to run the government are absolutely not the ones running the government today, which creates a complete loss of accountability that rejects the project of the American Revolution.
But as it relates to the FBI in particular, I actually agree with almost all of your telling of it.
The only part where I depart from this As a student of the history of this institution is actually the idea that it began this pivot in the aftermath of 9-11 and the Bush-Cheney new neoconservative national security state.
I think you're right about the shift from being an investigator of a specific alleged crime or an enforcer or an enforcement body to being a general purpose investigative unit.
I think that that's largely accurate as I understand it as well.
There's a longer history, though, that the lawless nature of the culture of the institution, one that views the law as a constraint rather than a motivator.
Let me just put it that way, right?
It's one thing if you're a law enforcement body, maybe you view the law as your motivation.
Your motivation as an organization, your organizational raison d'etre, reason for existence, is to enforce the law.
That might be what most Americans think is the purpose of federal law enforcement.
But it's a different thing if you have a federal law enforcement body that views the law as a constraint, an inconvenience on its behavior, but its reason for existence is something else altogether.
That I don't think is just uniquely true post the Bush years, though it's true certainly after the Bush years.
That dates back to J. Edgar Hoover and an FBI that largely has existed the way that you and I know it probably is, probably the closer to the better part of the century.
Yeah, I should have been clear.
I meant sort of at post church committee hearings.
Okay.
So in the 70s, I mean, but you're right, absolutely.
If you go back to the 60s, you know, the politicized surveillance of, you know, American politicians, you know, infiltration of Dissident groups, all kinds of things that have nothing to do with law enforcement.
J. Edgar Hoover building files on, you know, OPPO files on every politician that came up through the pipeline.
That's absolutely part of the Bureau's history.
I just think, you know, after the 70s, you know, I got to know some FBI agents over the years.
A lot of people who were kind of like...
More on the traditional investigatory bank robbery side, that kind of stuff.
And they saw their jobs as being basically cop jobs.
And then there was a disenchantment, and I've known some people more recently who left the FBI, who I don't like this new direction that the Bureau is taking, where they're going very heavily in the direction of just counterintelligence.
One agent talked to me about having to post up outside of some January 6th defendant's house, and he's like, this is a misdemeanor crime.
I could be out there doing...
Oh, this is interesting.
This is an actual kind of off-the-record sort of journalistic conversation you've had with somebody who was actually...
On the record, actually.
I've had a few of them, yeah.
So I interviewed a whole bunch of FBI agents.
When some of them became whistleblowers and testified in the House, I guess it was a couple of years ago now.
I see.
I interviewed guys like Steve Friend.
I went down to visit him, talked to some other folks.
But I've known FBI people going back to the war on 9-11, and there's been frustration for a lot of reasons, just in the changes within the Bureau.
There's been this tension, but now the Bureau is completely a different organization.
Yeah, and anybody who might at least have visceral doubts about the kinds of views you're sharing here or views I've shared, I'd just say history is actually a pretty interesting lens through which to view the present.
There's actually a pretty cool book.
I don't know if you've read it.
My wife is the one who got me on it.
It's called G-Man.
Have you read that book?
No.
It sounds interesting.
Is it a history of the Bureau?
Yeah, it's a history of the Bureau.
History of J. Edgar Hoover particularly.
And it's not some politicized screed.
Out there's this woman, Beverly Gage.
She's a Yale historian.
It won a Pulitzer.
It's just a pretty down the fairway, very interesting, detail-rich account of a lot of the history of this institution that once you read that, all of the things that you would think that are unimaginable are not only true, It's far more expansive than you could ever imagine, which then raises the question of why one...
It's not a left or right thing, but why one would believe that at this unique point in history, the very institution that was built...
And institutions have a culture about them.
It's still the J. Edgar Hoover Building of the FBI, for example.
That's their main office in D.C. Why it is you would believe that in this moment, the unthinkable is something that actually has been the normal part of the history of this institution for...
You know, a century, it causes you to sort of check some of your own present-oriented biases.
But anyway, put that aside, I just recommend that as a book that I think is pretty cool and interesting.
I like it, G-Man.
I'll take a look.
Yeah, just take a look.
I mean, you don't have to read the whole thing, but you'll get a good amount even just reading through some of it.
You know, I guess my question is, in your own experience, because you have been certainly a journalist and observer of the relationship between government and its citizenry for a longer period of time than I have.
I took a detour away from paying attention to these issues.
I was in the world of business for a while.
I've kind of come back to it now.
What is your estimation of the scale of abuse, civil libertarian abuse?
Through non-transparency going along with that, in the immediate post 9-11 aftermath, sort of in the Bush years, versus like where we are today.
Forget the partisan nature of which way it leans, but more just the magnitude or the magnitude of concern about the lawlessness or the fundamental absence of commitment to being constrained by the rule of law.
Like how would you rate that in the 2000s versus your estimation of where we are today?
I'm curious.
There's only limited evidence to go on, and I think it's a great question, but my sense is that it's epidemic now and that it wasn't maybe even five, six, seven years ago.
But we've had stories come out in the Trump era that have suggested all kinds of problems.
I think you can see with the unmasking requests with FISA, right?
That's sort of domestic political surveillance, abuse of that system.
We had already seen that there were massive violations of FISA, you know, going back to Inspector General reports, even dating back to the Bush era.
But now it seems like that system is completely out of control.
The Twitter files showed that the FBI is engaging in wholesale meddling in the domestic speech environment.
They're representing to the public that they're worried about foreign interference, but they're watching domestic Twitter accounts that have eight followers.
And that was part of the shock that we all felt when we were looking through those emails.
Like, why are they doing this?
So I think there's all kinds of problems.
And this thing that happened today, it's another example of Wow, they're really getting involved in domestic politics in a way that I don't remember happening in my lifetime.
So, it's funny you bring up the domestic interference in our own body politic.
Think about the TikTok debate, right?
The debate about whether to ban TikTok.
At first, they'll say it's not a ban or whatever it is.
But anyway, the premise was we don't want foreign governmental interference in our own domestic politics or our own domestic polity, what tilts the scales of what people can or can't see.
And yet, if you go back to that era, and this goes back to one of your, you know, obviously hallmark contributions in the last several years, which is the Twitter files— But if you look back at what happened there, was there a government coordinated cover-up job on a question such as the origin of COVID-19 from China?
Yes.
Was China protected from public understanding of where COVID-19 likely originated?
Yes.
Was the public protected or restricted from seeing that information by a government actor using these tech companies as a backdoor to effectuate it?
Yes.
But it wasn't really the CCP and TikTok.
It was actually, in that particular case, the U.S. government effectively pressuring U.S.-based companies through the back door to not only censor all kinds of information, but in this particular instance, one that actually had the effect of protecting the CCP from its own accountability, which I just thought was a reversal of what our own expectations are.
I guess the way I would say it, Matt, is we tend to be far more alert as a people To some sort of foreign government messing around with us.
And I say this as a citizen who doesn't want some foreign government meddling in what I can or cannot do on my own soil of my homeland.
But I think that balance is right.
I think that's absolutely right.
I mean, I lived in Russia for 11 years.
Oh, that's right.
Yeah, I forgot that.
Okay.
Yeah, and so I was always confronted by, you know, Russians.
Russians have no illusions about What the various institutions of the government are for.
They don't think that the GRU or the SVR or the FSB, that these are just law enforcement bodies.
They know exactly what the deal is.
When you talk about the Secret Service or what the Interior Ministry does.
They understand that abuses happen and they know basically where they're coming from and they have this kind of sanguine understanding of what government does.
Americans are completely, they have this sort of almost virginal belief in the purity of their system.
I think it's eroding now, quickly.
But I mean, I remember Russians just laughing at me when I would, you know, describe, for instance, what the FBI or CIA did or rules that we allegedly followed, like, you know, how naive are you?
And so this whole period, you know, I think in the Trump era, for me as a journalist, it's been disillusioning.
I think for the general public, it has been too.
I mean, you brought up the COVID situation.
When we were doing the Twitter files, we found evidence of the government trying from multiple angles to influence the COVID story.
They did it through The Virality Project, which was sponsored by a number of different government agencies through Stanford.
There was the Global Engagement Center, which is a Technically, it's part of the State Department, but it was pressuring Twitter to take down certain posts that it didn't like, sent them lists of 6,000 accounts that it wanted taken off the platform.
There was pressure from the DHS, pressure from the FBI. I mean, it was coming from all different angles.
For me, it was shocking.
I remember growing up, it was a big story when the FBI wrote one letter to the record company that put out NWA asking them not to put out a certain single.
And here you have thousands of these letters, right?
So it's a completely different ballgame.
Americans haven't caught up to that yet.
They haven't It hasn't registered.
It's rare that you get to talk to somebody who spent 11 years in Russia as a journalist.
That's pretty fascinating.
So I've never been to Russia.
So in some ways, I don't want to exaggerate my level of knowledge here to draw this theory.
But do you think this is a matter of I'm going to offer it as a theory and you tell me whether you think it's just true or off the wall?
Do you think that in some ways, right, I'm going to assume that the magnitude of government overreach from legal or constitutional constraint, like the amount of that overreach is far greater in Russia in the time you spent there than here.
I'll assume that as a baseline.
But do you think that even against that backdrop, the danger to the citizenry Might actually in certain ways be worse here because we are conditioned not to already be in on the game, right?
In a certain sense, you know, you watch the movie The Lives of Others or whatever, like it's kind of a depressing state when the...
You've seen that movie?
Absolutely, yes.
It's a great movie.
It's like an all-time great.
It's like an awesome, well done, not too heavy, not on the nose, but just like there's a certain existential melancholy where you just know that like you're being surveilled, but you've just sort of accepted it.
I actually think that's an important movie for Americans to watch now.
Oh, such an important movie.
I can't even remember.
Is the movie in English or not?
I can't even remember.
I think it's in German.
It landed so much in your heart that you even forget the medium of transmission.
It's that good.
I think it might have been in German.
But anyway, it's like what East Germany was like, you know, back in the day.
But here, you know, we don't have that melancholy spirit, but in a certain sense, we're just then, like, oblivious that, okay, maybe the magnitude of government overreach beyond the limits of legal constitutional restraint are greater in Russia, but people know what's going on, so there's no lie, right?
There's no fundamental dishonesty, but the slate of hand, in some ways, actually leaves us, through the blitheness of our ignorance or willful blindness, to our own government's non-zero overreach, as Actually, in some ways, is more liberty restraining just because of the sheer absence of knowledge of it.
Is that a bridge too far, or do you think that that's not a crazy point?
No.
I think you're absolutely right.
So when I first went to Russia, I went as a 19-year-old.
I'm old enough that I actually studied during the Soviet era.
Oh, wow.
So I went to a Soviet institute to study Russian.
When was this, just a time mark of this?
1989. 1989. Okay, got it.
Yep.
So, when I got there, I remember this very vividly.
There was a Russian student in my dorm, and he had bought a newspaper, and I was curious what he was reading, and he's like, oh, I didn't buy this to read.
He went upstairs, and he was stuffing his winter coat with the pages of the newspaper because he wanted extra insulation.
Nobody reads...
Nobody read Soviet newspapers.
They used them for other things.
They covered their windows to keep the sunlight out or they put them in the bottoms of birdcages.
The idea of reading a newspaper and actually expecting to get real information out of it was laughable.
Even people who were I would say good communists, right?
Like the people who believed in the system, they were like, yeah, whatever.
We don't have that in America.
We are not conditioned to look at our systems of media with the same kind of suspicion that is drilled into people who've lived in a society like that and they know how it works.
We think we have this very functional free press.
And I think we did have a very relatively strong press for a long time.
It's just that it's slid so much in the last 10 years.
And we're in this place where, as you say, Americans are just defenseless against this kind of thing because they've never seen it before or they don't think they have.
And so I think you're right.
It's that.
And also, you know, the American intelligence services and our systems of media, we're just much more They're much more powerful, sophisticated, you know, they have more resources than a country like Russia does to pull off certain things.
So that's why I worry here.
I mean, the best case scenario is you have a constitution and you follow it.
The worst case scenario is that you are, you have, you know, Well, I guess we could debate what the worst case scenario is.
Is the worst case scenario that you have no constitution, you don't follow it?
Or that you do have one and you don't follow it?
Because in a certain sense...
I mean, it could be either, right?
You could actually make the case for the latter, which is sort of interesting.
Yeah, absolutely.
So what were attitudes towards Stalin, by the way, when you were there, right?
So we were talking 89 through the 90s.
That's an interesting question to bring up.
So there were a few sort of holdovers.
Like every May Day, there were a few Stalinists that would come out.
But the average Soviet citizen was, I would say, pretty cosmopolitan.
They would listen to Voice of America and And they liked European pop culture and all that.
And once the wall fell and they were able to experience Western culture, they caught up pretty quickly, I would say.
And by the way, the Russian free press for the brief period that they had it kind of between 1990 and when Putin took over...
And you would think it was like, you would call that a free press, yeah.
Well, it was a dangerous free press.
But it was nonetheless, it was, you know, you mean that's when you were a journalist there, right?
So, yeah.
Yes, but, you know, reporters were being shot, blown up, you know, beaten all the time, even before Putin.
But they were great journalists.
I mean, they had really excellent investigative journalism during that 10-year period.
And they caught up very quickly.
But the lasting impression for me is just that when those rights went away, when they were unable to do that anymore, it doesn't come back.
And I think that's another thing Americans don't realize, is that when this stuff ends, you can't just turn on a switch and go back to having a free press again.
It doesn't work that way.
Yeah, interesting.
How does it work?
I mean, I don't know.
I mean, it goes away and it stays away.
It stays away, right?
Yeah, the cultural expectation and demand for it in some ways is dampened, too.
That's probably true all over the world.
I mean, I don't know.
That's my only experience, but I would imagine.
Do you think that actually raises an interesting question right now?
As much as we complain about, people like you and I maybe at least complain about Some of the governmental abuses and everything you see in the Twitter files, the backdoor government action to evade accountability.
Is part of the problem anymore that actually the ordinary citizenry just doesn't actually maybe care as much as we once might have?
That might have been the greatest check on government power as a citizenry that actually cared about its liberties.
Do you sense a greater sense of It's a vast generalization, but a greater sense of acceptance or a greater sense of agnosticism to say, okay, well, I'd still rather...
Be controlled in this way as long as I'm getting the advertisements I want to look at and my life is a little bit more convenient.
And if part of this trade-off is I don't have to pay a monthly credit card fee to access these platforms.
If the rest of this is just part of what I'm trading off in that bargain, like, I guess I don't love it, but I'm kind of cool with it.
And I'm certainly not going to start an American Revolution over it in a way that our founding fathers might have in 1776. Well...
It's frustrating for me.
I was a lifelong Democrat.
I gave to the ACLU my whole life.
I didn't really know conservatives growing up.
I grew up in Boston.
I'm one of those.
What did your parents do?
My father was also a reporter.
My mother was a lawyer.
But, you know, free speech was everything, you know, on the left, once upon a time.
I mean, think about all the pop culture stuff, you know, People vs.
Larry Flint, the Maplethorpe story.
I mean, every single, you know, sort of political thriller, you know, the villain was a speech-suppressing Republican, and, you know, the hero was the civil liberties lawyer.
That's right.
Right?
You know, fresh out of college and all that.
Somewhere between the Bush years and now, all the people who had those beliefs completely flipped.
They changed their attitude towards the First Amendment.
People would have done anything to protect it, I feel like, 20, 30 years ago, and that's all gone.
Now, you see It's been kind of amazing and heartening for me to see that, you know, conservatives are up in arms about threats to the Bill of Rights.
And, you know, I'm glad they are.
They need to be.
If they weren't, you know, I think the situation would be so much worse right now.
I think my assessment, I mean, speaking as sort of, you know, right of center, you know, myself, Republican candidate for president, Republican, whatever that label means.
You know, I think...
I would say that the left's abandonment of its interest in free speech protection is far more pronounced than the conservative embrace of it.
Oh, that's interesting.
It's just like a net loss for the country.
It's not like a flip-flop.
You have one flip, for sure.
It's been a decided flip.
The commitment to free speech is no longer a Democrat or liberal or progressive value in America.
To the contrary, if you had to pick what the progressive value is, it is the protectionist instinct, information protectionist instinct to the public to say that too much free speech is actually going to be dangerous.
I think that is a committed, now left-wing position, where the committed left-wing principle position used to be free exchange of ideas.
I think on the conservative side, I think you've seen...
Part of this is like, okay, well, if they're doing that, then, you know, it's a reactionary response.
Second is conservatives, it so happens in the latest iteration of it.
Study history, it hasn't always been this way, but the latest iteration have been the victims of it, so then there's a reactionary response there, too.
But I think it is an open question, if I'm being, you know, kind of calling it straight from where I see it, of what the modern conservative movement's actual push-come-to-shove level of commitment to True free speech actually is.
I am on the right as a, I would say, unapologetic, unrestrained advocate for making this part of the Republican Party's vision and platform, not just the Republican Party, but the modern conservative movement.
But I think it is an open question, right, how committed they are.
So I think it's just a deadweight loss where the left has abandoned it and the right has not totally embraced it, but it's partially embraced it, which I'm glad about.
And I do think it's heartening.
But I just think that an honest appraisal of where we are, I think that's what it is.
So it's interesting that you say that because There is a schism, right?
We just saw Mike Johnson pass the FISA enhancements bill, which is something that...
Thank you for calling it the enhancements.
It's not a reauthorization.
It was an expansion.
That's what it was.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
And a lot of the free speech folks were very upset about that.
Myself included.
And I agree with you.
I think there's an opportunity here, not just like a moral...
But there's an opportunity politically for the Republicans to own this issue, you know, to be champions of something that's always been popular in America.
Americans, you know, this is a core value of this country.
One of the reasons that we never had this happen before is because Republicans and Democrats, people just didn't like meddling with the basics of the First Amendment.
It was politically not terribly possible, right?
It's part of who you are.
It's your identity, right?
All the other stuff just doesn't matter if you don't have a First Amendment left, right?
Yes, and I think it's very much part of the American character.
We're an outspoken people.
We don't like to be told what to do, what to think.
Yeah, we're weird.
We're weird.
Yeah, I'll get to that in a second.
We Americans are weird, right?
All of us, that's who we are.
That's right, that's right.
We like that.
So, yeah, and conversely, the other thing is just not in our tradition and, you know, The bulk of people are not going to be for that.
Because the idea of having a vanguard class that decides what you can and cannot see, what you're smart enough or able enough to handle, it's so insulting to the bulk of people.
I think getting on the other side of that only makes political sense.
Yeah, it makes political sense, I think.
I think it does.
But I just think it makes like normative sense.
Like it's sure we are, right?
So if this, no one's defending this, like we have to defend the essence of what this country is.
It's in the first amendment for a reason.
You get to say anything.
And I say anything means you get to express any opinion, right?
I can't sell you, you know, a medicine bottle and say it's not poison when it is, or, you know, whatever.
You can't, commercial fraud is not the expression of an opinion or the issue.
Threats.
But the expression of an opinion, any opinion goes.
Which, though, if we're really prepared to, if you will, swallow that pill, I think, you know, Burning the flag is protected speech, right?
I think the campus protests, even standing up for heinous views of Hamas or whoever, if you're expressing that opinion, you're not free to commit violence, you're not free to physically obstruct people from going to classrooms.
But the expression of the opinion is kind of...
If it doesn't feel unfortunate at times, you're not doing it right.
It is protected speech.
And so I do think that that is a question where I think conservatives are really grappling with where we land.
And I'm not sure that it's going to be unified necessarily.
I think that we live in a moment where there are sort of weird And alliances, even if we're unwilling to admit that in the open between people who may think they're on the left or on the right on some of these questions relating to, you know, from foreign interventionist policy to the domestic surveillance state, I think those are probably some of the biggest areas for some realignments that I think are still very much in process, actually.
Don't you think that the traditional ideas of left and right are kind of meaningless now?
Right now they're meaningless.
It does feel pretty meaningless right now.
I feel like it's going to land in a new equilibrium, but we're not at all in a stable equilibrium right now.
I think we're in a moment of real shift, actually, real movement.
And I think it's fascinating.
It's an exciting time to be an observer and participant, if I may say, I guess, in this.
I find it just, it's more interesting that way, rather than once it's sort of settled.
It's scary a little bit, but it's also interesting.
I mean, like, if you're an anti-war advocate now, which party do you support?
I mean, it's confusing, right?
If either, right?
Or maybe you can be a force for change within either, too, I think.
And actually, same if you're a true civil libertarian.
I think right now that is undoubtedly, I think, more of a...
For sure.
I mean, even in the Republican primary, some of the people I was running against at the time was a real source of ideological division even within a party.
And I think that that makes it just an interesting time to be in American politics, actually.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Of course, it makes you a pretty weird guy for raising that.
I want to come back to that.
What do you think of this, this Democratic strategy of sort of labeling the Republican Party and Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and whatever?
That's just weird.
What's your reaction to that?
What's your guttural response to that?
So I'm on the, you know, I get the DNC talking points mailers, right?
They send out these, you know, these little email lists.
Oh, really?
All right.
It's like, here's our talking points, you know?
Yeah, well, they call them talkers.
I mean, they're publicly available.
Anybody can find them.
But, you know, they send them out and, you know...
Talkers.
Yesterday, yeah, they had a story yesterday where the headline was, I think it was J.D. Vance and his Silicon Valley billionaire weirdos want to cut taxes.
Before that, it was, you know, Vance's downright weird was in the headline.
And then, you know, almost on cue, you'll see, you know, every Democratic politician using that phrase.
But the really damning thing for me is seeing all the people in the media Use the same words.
And, you know, you just can't have that.
It's such a bad look for the news media to not appear to be independent from a political party.
To play along with the talkers, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Like, okay, fine.
If a politician wants to do that, that's their job.
But, you know, reporters, I'm not going to use some word that you scripted for me.
Are you kidding?
Like, that's ridiculous.
And so that's what this...
The sort of comic compilations that you've seen, I think Dave Rubin posted it today, right?
Of everybody using that word.
They must know how absurd it is.
Oh my gosh.
It's not credible.
Yeah.
So why do they do it?
I mean, who's being convinced by that?
I guess it's a very interesting question.
I think it comes back to this question of who's being convinced by that.
I think part of the problem, Matt, might be that a good number of people are convinced by it, actually.
And I just think the problem comes back...
People like you and I are often so focused on institutional failure that we forget just broader, pervasive civic failure of our citizenry.
It's like Jefferson's famous quote, you get the government, whatever, the government you deserve is the government you elect, and the government you elect is the government you deserve.
And in some sense, I think that the fact that people do fall for it is kind of what makes it work, is a sort of kind of pervasive laziness and lethargic tendency in the American civic spirit right now.
I don't mean to be a downer about it, but I just think that that kind of is true even outside of institutional failure.
I guess so.
There's just so much of that now.
It's probably self-fulfilling.
It recycles.
Again, I grew up a Democrat.
Democrats...
Once upon a time, they used to pride themselves on being independent thinkers.
The prototypical Great Democrat was a stand-up comic.
It was somebody who had fresh material, used brash language.
Now you have this thing where everybody's like a herd animal.
I remember reading zoologists talking about how when 51% of the deer decide to bolt, they all go.
That's how this weird thing happens.
Somebody gets a cue, everybody goes.
There are no holdouts.
The entire news media environment speaks as one voice.
It's just embarrassing.
It's just a terrible look.
Embarrassing is probably the right word, especially you coming from that profession.
It is sort of embarrassing.
Can you imagine Cy Hirsch doing that and saying, you know, he's really weird.
It's just like, you know, I'm going to tell you what I think, not regretting what somebody else thinks.
So that's in the media aspect, which I think is a great point, actually.
I mean, if you look at the number of times within a concentrated 48-hour window that that individual word has been used.
It's not even like they use other words like bizarre.
It's just like, that word, we're sticking to that word, does reflect that type of weird conformity.
Now, like on the content of it, 'cause I'm also just interested, So why did they do it?
Yeah, why did they do it?
But, hmm, not even from a political analysis, just like from my own opinion about it, is, I think it is...
An argument of the wrong kind, right?
It is a disappointing form of American political argument to make.
Because A, it's actually just anti-exceptionalism, right?
It's against exceptionalism on its own terms.
Like a guy like Pete Buttigieg, when I saw him on the weekend, right, on one of these shows, talking about J.D. Vance and Donald Trump is weird.
It just felt disappointing to me, right?
Because this is a guy I knew in college.
He was a senior when I was a freshman, so I knew him and knew of him better than he knew of me.
But I remember being like, okay, I respect this guy.
He wasn't somebody who would say, okay, somebody who disagrees with me is weird.
And yet, part of the reason why is he was obviously, probably like me too, right?
Like weird in a sense of just being, in his case...
In Indiana, in the 90s, hyper-achieving, scholastic overachiever, shockingly articulate, gay, at a Catholic school that went to Harvard.
And you substitute Indian American for gay and Ohio for Indiana.
It's not that different than my own background, right?
Right.
Like, that was weird.
And now to just say, oh, no, no, we're not one of the weird ones.
They're weird.
It's just weird referring to what reference point, right?
Normal relative to what reference point.
Whereas America is a country where we are unafraid to be weird.
Our founding fathers, I wasn't joking before, were weird relative to the mores of their times because that's part of what American exceptionalism is about.
So it just seems like such a particularly un-American expletive or disparaging comment to level against your opponent, as though it's like less about, I'm worried about Republicans.
I'm worried about like that word being deemed a bad thing.
America's weirdness relative to human history is part of what makes us us.
I mean, one of my heroes, Hunter Thompson, he said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
That was like a cool thing back in the day.
Say that again?
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
I like that.
That's kind of who we are a little bit.
It's a statement of that, of American exceptionalism, right?
Yeah, and being weird and far out is very much in the American character.
The thing that's even more unusual, though, is that the current incarnation of the American left They don't even like the word normal.
They think the word itself is bad somehow.
You know, they're into transgender boxing and, you know, everything you see, if it's not transgressive, it's not okay.
So for them to turn around and try to make weird an insult...
It's particularly weird, actually.
It's particularly self-contradictory.
But I also just think that even...
So even the Republican tendency, right?
Because I'm a little bit...
I do chafe at some of the version of this from the right.
Like other people I ran for against you as president, right?
Some of them made, like on the debate stage or whatever, we just want America to be normal, right?
That's what they would say.
And I actually think...
Don't agree with that because I favor American exceptionalism and I also think about normal relative to what standard.
And so like my issues with some of the trans overreach or whatever relate to the negative effects it has on children or increasing the rates of gender dysphoria.
So if by premise gender dysphoria is a condition of suffering, then if you're going out of your way to create more of it, that is by definition then or by obvious logic a bad thing.
Like that I think is the form of argument.
Not that you're weird, right?
Like that alone is not...
And I think that part of what's happening right now is you're actually seeing a lot of that Republican response to say, oh, you're calling us weird?
Well, look at all of these things that you're doing that are weird in return.
It feels to me just like the wrong form of argument rather than like an argument of the wrong kind.
If national unity is at all something we remotely care about, right?
If the election gets decided, and it acknowledges about 70 million people on each side of this, if the election gets decided based on one side winning, the argument of which other side was weird, and Republicans, I believe, and be advised to have at least as strong of a claim in return, it just doesn't seem like a good place to go in the character of national discourse or the future direction of a nation, right?
As opposed to a nation that isn't one nation anymore and might be two nations of, you know, weird, seen as weird from the other side, but normal from within.
I don't think that's what we want to see the country become.
No, probably not.
I mean, is it possible?
I mean, here's a question.
I'm curious to know what you think.
I've heard it theorized that The Democrats realize that the constant accusations of racism, sexism, misogyny are beginning to fall on deaf ears, that people don't like that as a campaigning tactic.
So they're rolling this out as a new way of trying to Put the public relations ick on the Republican Party.
You know, it's a different kind of word shaming.
Less potent, right?
But more diffuse and irrefutable, yeah.
Right, right, yeah.
How do you counter it?
I would embrace it if I were to get events.
I'd be like, hell yeah, I'm weird.
That to me feels like the right answer versus like, oh, you're weird.
No, you're weird.
Reference to what reference point?
Americans, like our exceptionalism is weird in the course of human history.
Right?
Like you got like founding fathers inventing Lightning rods and bifocal spectacles and people who signed the Declaration of Independence.
Livingston, actually, he was a guy who literally invented the steamship along with Fulton while he's an ambassador to France.
That's weird, right?
It's the kind of thing where you see somebody who's hyper-successful in middle school.
Yeah, that's weird.
Well, those are the people who actually go on to create things that improve humanity in our lives at times.
And that's America, the place where you get to thrive.
Joseph Priestley came to this country because he had weird beliefs by the standards of the Anglican Church, and he was received by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in Pennsylvania.
He came here for the freedom to be weird, and they welcomed him because that's America.
And so to level that as a charge, as a disqualifying charge, I just think is disappointing, actually, to me, is how I feel about it.
Yeah, we've had that streak all through our history.
How many different kinds of You know, kooky, utopian thinkers came to America to try to build societies that anybody would characterize as strange.
Yeah.
Elon Musk fits that description, right?
For example, a guy you got to know.
Sure, yeah.
He came to this country.
He is weird, actually.
He came to this country, right?
I mean, like, I consider myself, you know, I'm a weird person in a lot of ways.
So are you.
So are most people who aspire To greatness.
And like America as a nation is proudly weird against the course of human history.
So no, I just don't.
I just think that that's probably the right answer is it's not a pejorative, right?
And even if you think about the stuff JD was talking about.
The sad part about this is in the wake of this, nobody actually will talk about anything other than the actual fertility crisis, which is we're well below replacement rate.
You're going to have two workers for every retiree, which is considered crisis level, by 2060, which is, you know, God willing, within our own lifetimes.
Although that is a disaster for a country, and nobody has a plausible or the first beginnings of a plausible solution to that question.
And so maybe you like J.D. Vance's solutions and maybe you don't.
If you don't like him, debate the solutions.
But instead we've ignored the entire question by calling the whole thing weird.
And I still think that's constructive, just in a very pragmatic sense, for a country that wants to solve some major problems that it's up against.
Yeah, it's silly, though.
And also, going after what's clearly kind of a joke line about childless cat ladies.
I mean, Rick Wilson said about Trump that his followers were childless cats.
It was like childless men who masturbate to anime or something like that.
You gotta give people some license.
You know, even when Biden, like I'll pick an example, right?
Like it's easier to sort of pick on the other side, but like even when Biden said something like, if you don't vote for me, then you ain't black.
I mean, it's kind of annoying, but he was also speaking in jest, right?
And so that did not become the cultural phenomenon in the same way as like childless cat ladies did.
And so it sort of is a bit of an evisceration of the possibility of humor, at least in certain contexts, too, which I do think is actually a separate cultural risk that we face, too.
I also think it touched a nerve because there's a little bit of discussion within the Democratic left about this issue.
Remember, James Carville brought it up.
Oh, really?
About how there's too many preachy females.
So it maybe touched a nerve a little too close to home, actually.
Yeah, exactly.
It's been a thing that people have been arguing about, so maybe that's part of it.
I don't know.
People don't lash out.
I mean, you might be annoyed, but you don't lash out unless you actually acknowledge some level of truth to the claim, usually.
That's kind of interesting.
Yeah, jokes don't land unless...
Yeah, there's truth to it.
Some level of truth to it, yeah.
Right.
Interesting.
Yeah, I mean, I'm just curious, you don't have to share with me, or maybe you haven't decided yet, but do you have a sense for, just as a citizen, taking your journalist hat off, do you have a sense for how you might vote amongst the options available this year?
Well, I can say I'm not going to vote for the Democrats, I think.
I think I'm done with them.
You know, the last eight years have just been impossible.
You know, other than that, I don't know.
I didn't vote last time, which was hard for me.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
You did mention that to me.
I forgot.
So you, not because you were lazy, but you, like, couldn't bring yourself to...
Yeah, I mean, I wrote an article about it.
It was kind of a hard situation.
I think, you know, voting is important.
You know, it's a right we...
You know, you need to exercise it or else you're going to lose it, right?
So, yeah, I don't know.
It's difficult.
But I also try not to talk about it because as a journalist, you know, you don't want to...
Yeah, wearing your journalistic hat, I think that's fair.
Maybe a little bit of an unfair topic for us to, you know, I don't want to, you know, undermine what you do.
But did you actually vote while you were in Russia?
Did you vote for, like, absentee mail-in?
Yes.
Yes, I think I voted in both the 96 and 2000 elections from there.
That's an interesting thing too because I remember how rigorous the absentee ballot process was and I'm just now having to learn.
One of the things I'm going to start working on is You know, election security, because I know it's going to be so controversial no matter what happens in November.
Totally.
I think every journalist needs to know all the laws.
And mechanics, even.
Yeah.
And mechanics, because we don't, frankly.
One interesting place to look, just to the extent you're taking an interest in that, is actually Puerto Rico.
It's a U.S. territory.
They actually have single-day voting, make Election Day a holiday.
They have a lot of levels of protections.
I think often when you go to the sites, they make you put your finger in a die such that if you go to another site to know that you didn't vote on that same day.
Oh, that's interesting.
I picked this up when I traveled there earlier this year and met with a lot of leaders locally just to understand how things work.
And one of the biggest takeaways is, even for people who say, oh, this concern about election integrity is overblown.
What I'll wait for is, what is the best counterargument to, in a moment where there's at least a loss of public trust, to at least taking certain basic steps that would shore up public trust?
And I think that there's something to be said for a case for ritual.
A, for actually what the ritual accomplishes.
I mean, it's not like we're not asking people to, I don't know, do cartwheels and take, you know, foot showers before they vote.
We're asking them to show their ID, which relates to the act of voting.
But I think having it as a national holiday and a ritual that you go through almost creates a greater sense of civic duty and commitment.
It's also something that enhances the public trust itself.
Like, even if, for those who, I'm not one of them, but even for those who would argue that it doesn't improve the actual integrity of the results by that much, at a moment of doubt, why not take a unifying, non-controversial step?
And then, you know, take every increment you can.
It's something so important that you might as well want it to be as accurate as you possibly could want.
That, to me, I think is as much the question of The solidarity we get in moving past what otherwise is a very risky issue is public concern and trust in elections, that I'm open to the best arguments for the other side, but I haven't yet heard them in terms of moving to single-day voting on Election Day, make it a national holiday, make government-issued ID a requirement to vote.
And, you know, I think if we ever got there, I certainly would commit for my part to be as loud of a voice as I could to the Republican base or any other that we are done complaining about concerns about election integrity if we get to that, if we get to that place where we say we've taken the steps that one recently can to be confident.
Are you in favor of automatic voter registration?
I'm not, actually.
I think that there's something to be said for the civic act of going through the process of, you know, largely for practical reasons, because then you can be registered in multiple places.
Puerto Rico does not have that either.
So it's a good case study of Puerto Rico.
Interesting.
I think that I am in favor of debureaucratizing anything that does not actually help the ultimate act of Knowing whether the right person voted in the right place.
I don't want an iota more of bureaucracy than is required to achieve that goal.
But I want enough verification to know that the person who's actually voting is voting in one place is alive and is indeed the person who shows up at the ballot and is a citizen of this country.
I actually come around to being in favor of English as the sole language that appears on a ballot as well.
And I think there are deep discussions to be had of saying that Look, if we require, like think of what we require of an immigrant, a legal immigrant, before they can cast a ballot.
You could have paid millions of dollars in taxes sitting in Silicon Valley or elsewhere.
You're still not able to cast a ballot legally until you have taken an oath of loyalty to the United States of America and passed a civics test that says you know the first thing about what's going on in the United States of America.
And I think that's a good thing.
I don't think it's crazy to talk about whether these should be basic requirements to graduate from high school in the country to become a full citizen in the United States either.
And so I think that that would unite the country, actually.
And I do think that the revival of like civic ritual, even a day where we say that this is the day where we carry out our civic duty, and then attach all of the integrity-enhancing components, not as like box-checking exercises for just technical confidence in the results, but actually even a unifying civic ritual that brings us together.
I think there's an opportunity to do both of those things at once.
And I don't think it's as far out of reach as we make it out to be.
I think it would have broad appeal, too.
I think it would.
It's drilled into Democrats when you're coming up and you're young and an activist that any kind of Any step that might slow down someone's ability to vote is like dog whistle, racism, any kind of voter ID requirement.
But really, when you think about it, it's ridiculous.
We require now very hardcore ID to get on a plane.
Drive a car.
You've got to have insurance to rent a car.
There's all kinds of things.
The requirement, it shouldn't be a big deal that you should have to prove who you are to vote.
And also, I don't think it's a big deal to ask somebody to go vote.
Neither of those things seems like a huge ask to me.
And then there's the further, we're getting into spicier territory, but whatever we require of an immigrant, if you believe in that logic, should we ask more of ourselves as well?
And do we think our nation will be better off for it?
I think that these are at least questions worth discussing.
Sure, sure.
I mean, yes, if they have to go through all these different hoops, Conversely though, I think that there should be something stronger than just having to check a box that you're a citizen.
At least there should be some kind of post-factum process for reviewing that and making sure that the person who checks that box actually is one.
I don't understand why that's controversial.
I also think that even if you voted in the election of another country, you shouldn't be able to vote in the election of the United States as well, right?
Dual citizenship as a concept, right?
If somebody has an allegiance to a different country, it's what citizenship is.
I think that there should be serious questions about their ability to cast a ballot in the United States.
You should have to choose, shouldn't you?
Yeah, I think you should have to choose.
You don't today, actually, mostly under current law.
You generally don't.
For people who are dual citizens.
But I think you should have to choose, right?
I think you should be a civic participant who selects the leadership of one country, not multiple countries.
And I don't think that's too much to ask either.
I've known a lot of people who are dual citizens, you know, either from former Soviet countries and the United States.
And, you know...
It's okay for traveling.
I mean, I sort of understand the logic of that, but you can't be voting in two places.
I just don't think it makes sense to vote in two places, right?
And just as I don't think it makes sense to serve in two militaries, right?
It doesn't make sense.
But anyway, I'm having too much fun, man.
We're over time already, but let's continue this.
And I like smart people like you who are...
I'm untethered with respect to the ministerial partisan politics-ness of it, but care a lot about ideology, and I love that.
So thanks for taking the time today.
I really appreciate it.
I had a lot of fun discussing all this with you, so I'm happy to talk anytime.
We'll continue.
Let's do more.
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