Destiny Introduces JVL to the Wild World of Streaming

Summary

Bulwark Takes — Episode Summary

Episode Title: Destiny Introduces JVL to the Wild World of Streaming
Air Date: July 25, 2026
Host: The Bulwark (JVL, aka Jonathan V. Last, joining Destiny, aka Stephen)
Special Conversation Partner: Destiny (Stephen, prominent Twitch political streamer)

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Episode Overview

In this lively and in-depth episode, Jonathan V. Last (JVL) from The Bulwark joins Destiny (Stephen), a well-known political streamer, for his first-ever streaming experience. The conversation revolves around the evolving nature of political media, the asymmetries in American politics and media ecosystems, the rise and normalization of authoritarian behaviors in U.S. politics, and how the left and right operate vastly different strategies when it comes to messaging, ideology, and political accountability. Both speakers dive into the state of American democracy, the failures of traditional norms, and entertain ideas for institutional reform.

The tone is candid, unfiltered, reflective, and occasionally darkly humorous, with both guests sharing personal anecdotes and frustrations about the current state of U.S. politics and media.

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Key Themes and Insights

1. JVL’s Streaming Experience and Generational Shift

• JVL shares his discomfort and amusement at entering the world of streaming, comparing it to being a "zoo attraction" for Destiny’s digital-native audience.
• Quote: "It's a little like, like I'm, I'm a zoo attraction in the streamer and his audience are all looking at me. But it was very nice, I think." — JVL (01:00)

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2. Economic Illiteracy & Political Nonsense

• Both discuss the widespread economic illiteracy among voters and political elites, referencing Trump’s and conservative voters’ misunderstandings of basic economic and labor market principles.
• Example: Discussion of public confusion about inflation, deflation, and housing market dynamics.
• Quote: "The extent to which people are basically economically illiterate." — JVL (03:21)

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3. Media Asymmetries and the Dilemma of "Both Sides"

• Destiny and JVL highlight the persistent asymmetry in how the media treats left- and right-wing speakers. They critique media’s tendency to downplay or excuse right-wing extremism while nitpicking the left.
• Quote: "This is like... when you’re talking about people on the right, we’re supposed to dismiss everything crazy they say and if they ever said one thing halfway sane, we’ll just engage with that on the merits." — JVL (06:03)
• Destiny expresses frustration over how conspiracy theories and misinformation are handled, noting that "the conspiracy theorists ended up being right about a lot of stuff. No, they were wrong about everything." (09:24), illustrating media’s hesitance to call out right-wing propaganda.

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4. The Right’s Messaging Ecosystem vs. the Left’s Fractured Approach

• Destiny explains how right-wing and far-left media are effective at pushing narratives from elite spaces down to mass consumption, while the moderate left is "needling itself to death" with self-critique and cannot coordinate messaging.
• Quote: "They're able to force so much stuff into the public mind with that environment. And I think Democrats... are completely and totally clueless and cannot do a message from top to bottom at all." — Destiny (19:37, 19:55)
• JVL agrees, noting the left’s coalition-based complexity makes unified messaging difficult.
• Both point to Fox News’ role as Republican messaging arm, contrasted with center-left mainstream outlets that attempt to remain nonpartisan (21:27).

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5. Normalization of Authoritarianism and Collapse of Democratic Norms

• The speakers lament the Republican base’s increasing comfort with anti-democratic behaviors and the normalization of once-unthinkable conduct by political leaders.
• Refer to the public’s tolerance of Trump’s scandals and the double standard in holding Biden and Trump’s administrations accountable for crises (23:00–27:00).
• Quote: "The public itself [is] becoming basically accepting of America turning into a banana republic... The thing about Trump is that he won twice. You know, the second win is the big one." — JVL (24:02)
• Destiny offers a personal anecdote illustrating shifting standards in political morality (36:41–36:51).

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6. Lessons from Recent History and the Dangers of Historical Amnesia

• JVL and Destiny discuss how Americans have short political memories and how this enables political actors to evade accountability ("the American memory for political stuff is... six months, but I don’t even know. Six weeks, six days" — Destiny, 55:26).
• They also discuss how history appears inevitable in hindsight, losing vital "off ramps" and contingencies that could have led to different outcomes (41:00–45:30).

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7. Should the Left “Go Harder”? Accountability versus Healing

• They debate whether Biden was right to pursue a healing, non-punitive approach after Trump or whether aggressive accountability was necessary (50:30–55:53).
• Both ultimately agree: accountability must be pursued to deter future bad actors.
• Quote: "If we're not going, next time we come in, it has to be heavy accountability... When the next guy is in office... he should be thinking, if I fog around too much here, am I going to get in big trouble for it? That has to be a consideration. And right now on the conservative side, it's not." — Destiny (55:26)

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8. Structural and Institutional Reform Wishlist

Top priorities discussed for reform (85:36–90:45):

• Supreme Court expansion: "If you don't expand the Supreme Court, nothing else you do will withstand scrutiny. Supreme Court is partisan. Okay."
• D.C. statehood and possible inclusion of other territories.
• House expansion: To address gerrymandering and urban underrepresentation.
• Antitrust and Oligarchy: Proposals to rein in the power of billionaires and limit ownership concentration (e.g. Big Tech + media).
• Other Norms: Concerns over governmental staffing, executive appointments, and the impossibility of legislating every bad behavior.

Quote: "There is some number of wealth at which a person stops having the ability to act like a citizen and begins acting like a non-state actor." — JVL (86:36)

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9. Gaming Metaphors and Culture

• Destiny and JVL use gaming metaphors to discuss political strategy, offense vs. defense, and generational perspectives on society’s evolution (66:07–70:16).
• They lament the left’s tendency to always play defense, never shifting public narratives or forcing the right to respond.

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10. The Authoritarian Temptation: How Many Republicans Want It?

• JVL and Destiny discuss whether the Republican base is ideologically authoritarian or simply willing to accept authoritarianism out of fear/partisanship (76:05–81:00).
• Destiny estimates up to 75% would accept authoritarianism under the right conditions, but caveats this with the influence of propaganda.
• JVL: Even if only 1/3 are so inclined, it's dangerous; history doesn’t require majorities for dramatic antidemocratic turns.

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11. Critiques of the Far Left

• Destiny urges Democrats to publicly distance themselves from left-wing extremes when necessary, to avoid being tarred by right-wing media as aligned with outlandish ideas (92:02–93:22).

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Notable Quotes & Moments with Timestamps

• JVL on the trap of both-sides ism:
  "On the one hand, you have the President of the United States controlling a mass secret police force... On the other hand, there are some kids at Oberlin who wrote some really mean things..." (10:11)
• Destiny on the media playbook:
  "What helps is that when Trump has this initial thing... all of that credibility then falls to the alternative media people who then essentially uncritically repeat it because they're, I don't know your show, if you say retarded, but they're fucking retards." (14:24)
• Destiny on accountability:
  "If we're not going, next time we come in, it has to be heavy accountability. Not even necessarily for the American public, but it has to be that when the next guy is in office and he's doing a thing, he should be thinking, if I fog around too much here, am I going to get in big trouble for it?" (55:25)
• JVL on Supreme Court expansion as a first step:
  "You got to expand the Supreme Court because if you don't expand the Supreme Court, nothing else you do will withstand scrutiny." (85:45)
• JVL on American political evolution:
  "Maybe that portion of American political life was dormant for that period... and the real American conservatism was all the stuff that existed like shortly before I was born and we're reverting to." (82:29)
• Destiny on generational pessimism:
  "I try... to check myself because I've gotten to the age now to where I can say, 'well, when I was a late teen, early 20s, everything on the planet was better,' and my understanding is basically every single generation... was already complaining about how when he was on all fours, it was better..." (30:33)
• JVL's departing thought on norms:
  "The function of norms is having amorphous guidelines that mostly keep everybody in check. And I do not have any sense as to how to return to that world." (90:21)

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Important Timestamps and Segments

• 01:00–01:59: JVL introduces his streaming debut and apprehension.
• 02:02–04:18: Their take on economic literacy and housing.
• 05:23–07:31: Analysis of "accepting the crazy" in modern political media.
• 13:03–16:27: How narratives are seeded and laundered in MAGA and far-left digital media spaces.
• 21:27–22:28: Breakdown of partisan vs. nonpartisan media and implications for democracy.
• 27:24–34:23: The relentless normalization of scandal and loss of outrage in U.S. politics.
• 50:30–55:53: Debate over healing versus accountability, and the lesson of Biden’s first term.
• 66:07–70:16: Lessons from gaming: offense, defense, and political strategy.
• 76:05–82:29: How much the Republican base wants authoritarianism and the risk to democracy.
• 85:36–90:45: Institutional reform wishlist, including Supreme Court, statehood, and antitrust.

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Conclusion

This episode delivers an unflinching snapshot of American political and media culture in 2026, calling out the structural failures, psychological traps, and asymmetries that have brought U.S. democracy to a precarious point. Through frank dialogue and digital-age analogies, Destiny and JVL diagnose what ails the left, catalog the right’s structural and cultural advantages, and grapple with what—if anything—can be done to reverse the tide. The result is an honest, often bleak, but deeply informed conversation for anyone seeking to understand the challenges facing American politics and the media in the 2020s.

Transcript

[Stephen]

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[Jimmy]

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[Stephen]

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[Stephen]

hey there, it's JVL. I, I went on a streaming show yesterday. This is, this is new for me. Streaming. It's what the kids do these days. And I was invited on the show by a gentleman named Destiny. Not, not his real name. His, his real name is just Stephen, but his gamer tag was, was Destiny before he became a political streamer. Anyway, I, I went on and tried to do the streaming thing. It's a little like, like I'm, I'm a zoo attraction in the streamer and his audience are all looking at me. But it was very nice, I think. Anyway, I'm not sure if you guys are interested in this sort of thing or not. It's a little bit meandering, but it's, it was fun. And if you enjoy some uncomfortable hello fellow kids energy, this is, this is gonna be right up your alley. Have a look.

[Jimmy]

Well, how are you doing today?

[Stephen]

I'm okay. You know, I wrote 2,000 words that nobody will fucking read because it's about demand externalities and the possible labor market implications of. Yeah. Hey, Gabe, I'm on a live thing.

[Jimmy]

It's okay, bud.

[Stephen]

Love ya. Sorry. 10 year old coming in.

[Jimmy]

You're fine.

[Stephen]

It's g money, right? Anyway, you know, I love writing about nobody reads. It's great.

[Jimmy]

I've. I, I'd say I feel the pain, but I guess I don't write as much. But do you have a background in finance or.

[Stephen]

No, I like economic. And I, I mean, I did minor. I did a minor in Economics at the Johns Hopkins University.

[Jimmy]

Okay.

[Stephen]

I'm not sure what that counts for.

[Jimmy]

Well, if you're talking about economic stuff today, I guess it counts for more than 99% of the Internet conversation. So it's funny you mentioned writing something. There are so many things that are said. I'm sure you know this in our current political climate, where they're just. It's like absolute nonsense. Like, every time I hear Trump say, we're fine with oil in the United States because we make enough oil here so prices around the world don't impact us, and it's just like, I don't even know how to begin with. Yeah. Are we banning all exports or global market. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so. On its face.

[Stephen]

Absurd. Yeah, yeah. The. The extent to which people are basically economically illiterate. Like, I mean, I spent all of 2024 fighting with my. My best friend Sarah Longwell about deflation, and she was explaining to me, like, the voters just want deflation. I was like, no, they don't. Deflation is terrible. If deflation hits and prices go down, it means we are mired in an economic catastrophe and these people will be out of work and losing their houses. Like, we're supposed to just pat the voters on the head when they say, well, I want prices to go down.

[Jimmy]

Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of that. Like, I don't know if you'd call it a revealed preference or proxy issues where people say they want one thing. I think housing is another huge topic that is never really touched much because everybody wants lower housing prices. And it's like, well, 70% of Americans live in an owned home where the house is like. And for most Americans, your house is your biggest investment. Do they really want housing prices to go down? Yeah.

[Stephen]

And Trump said this. I don't, like, three weeks ago or something. He's like, housing prices have to go down, and for everybody who owns a house, the value of their home is going to go up.

[Jimmy]

Yeah, right. There we go.

[Stephen]

Sure, man. Rock and roll.

[Jimmy]

Yeah, yeah. It is what it is. Okay. I want to ask you. We love you and my audience, but I have to figure out now if we should or if it's an act. Okay. One of the huge issues that I have today, that my audience has today, and I think there's a decent chunk of people have, is it feels like we're living in a reality where stuff is so unbelievably crazy and you kind of look at the people that are supposed to be your cheerleaders, and it Feels like the. I don't want to say we should be outraged, but it feels like sometimes there's just a little bit too much acceptance of the stuff that's happening and then it makes me feel a little bit crazy. I think probably one of the strongest reactions I've had to content on your guys platform recently and I was happy to see you feel similarly. I think was that horrible, horrible conversation that Tim had with that all in podcast guy.

[Stephen]

Oh my God, that fucking guy.

[Jimmy]

It was so many things said out loud where I'm like, did he really just say that they actually like the authoritarian because they're friends with him and they can get personal favors from or. I just couldn't believe it. It was like when people say eat the rich. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was just insane to me. And then I feel like there's so much pressure, I guess on all the center left media when they're engaging with these people to like, to like treat it seriously like, okay, well let's debate the merits of random 2 digit, 3 digit tariffs on every single country on the planet and see if this will be good for our economy going forward.

[Stephen]

This is like the one of the many asymmetries where when you. We're talking about people on the right, we're supposed to dismiss everything crazy they say and if they ever said one thing that was like halfway sane, we'll just engage with that on the merits. This is. I remember the Free Press writing a piece about RFK Jr. That was like, sure, he says people are having microchips implanted in their brains, but also he

[Jimmy]

wants the kids to exercise other thing

[Stephen]

that was, you know, that in France they do and France isn't crazy. So maybe we should just start taking him seriously. And then in the other way it's like, well, you know, if Anthony Fauci ever said one thing that wasn't 100% verifiably true, well then you can't trust anything he says like that. That's like this asymmetric trap we're in. And I don't. It drives me a little bit insane. I don't know how to deal with it. Yeah, I think it's because, I mean, this is like largely a media problem, I think, where, you know, normal media is still trapped in the before times where they're like, all right, we gotta assume that basically most people are working on good faith and people will shade and spin, but they won't outright lie. And yeah. That that world is gone, man.

[Jimmy]

Yeah. Can I, real quick, can I make a Request. Are you able to turn your mic up at all?

[Stephen]

Yeah, I got gain on this thing. Hold on.

[Jimmy]

All right. It's a little quiet.

[Stephen]

You tell me. Is that better? Do you want. Am I too hot? More.

[Jimmy]

A little bit more.

[Stephen]

Give you more.

[Jimmy]

Oh, no, wait, that's good. Whatever you just said there is perfect.

[Stephen]

Okay. Yeah, there. Yeah, that's good.

[Jimmy]

That's good. There's a. Somebody in my chat will say this. There's like a law that somebody cited, like, you know, a little political speech thing. But it's this concept that conservatives are treated like children always, and Democrats are treated like parents. So whenever things are happening, Democrats have all of the autonomy. And then when the Republicans have no agency. Yeah.

[Stephen]

No agency at all. How could they.

[Jimmy]

And it's so crazy. This happens. It happens a lot in the UK when it comes to Brexit. When you ask a conservative what's going on with the country today, why do you think things are kind of messed up? Nobody brings up Brexit. It disappears from the conversation for some reason. Or when you ask, people are so keen to bring up Biden's economy, it's so much inflation, and it's like, why? Well, government spending and Democrat. What else? What else was happening? I don't know what else was happening. And then I think I even did this live in a discussion. I think I even said to the audience, watch this. And then I asked the guy, why do you think Trump had such a bad economic record at the end of his. And they were, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid. And it's like, what? Yeah, it drives me insane. And you use that word asymmetry. And it's funny because you use a lot of the same examples that I do too, where Fauci maybe. I'm not even sure if he did. He maybe said one wrong thing about masks one time. So now the person who is infinitely skeptical and they're like, lost our trust. Well, who do you trust now? The guy who fucking drinks blue food dye and thinks they solve fucking autism by telling moms not to take Tylenol? And it's like. Or Alex Jones. And it's like, there are so many wrong things. I'm still waiting every day. I wasted $2 million on term life insurance because I thought I was going to drop dead for my boosters three years ago. And it still hasn't happened yet. There's been no mass casualty event. Everybody says, I remember that Joe Rogan quote where you're like, well, the conspiracy theorists ended up being right about a Lot of stuff. No, they were wrong about everything.

[Stephen]

Wrong about everything.

[Jimmy]

But you wouldn't get that impression when you watch the media today, even on the left. And I feel like a lot of it is they got brain broken from 2017 to 2021 with this term. We do this in the YouTube world. When somebody's criticizing us too much and we don't want them to criticize us, we go, you're obsessed, bro. Why are you talking about me so much? You're so obsessed. And they're like, oh, shoot. And then they stop talking about you. And I feel like the conservatives do that with Trump derangement syndrome, where the liberals were like, man, should we really be impeaching him again for trying to insurrect the government? Didn't we already impeach him once for trying to stuff from Ukraine to get dirt on political opponents? Maybe we are kind of deranged. And it's like,

[Stephen]

yeah, I, I mean, there's something to that. There's also the, you know, everything's both sides, Stephen. Everything. You know, they're, they're, they're problems.

[Jimmy]

My cortisol just spikes so much when you said that.

[Stephen]

I had to.

[Jimmy]

Sorry.

[Stephen]

There are, there are problems with both sides. I mean, on the one hand, you have the President of the United States controlling a mass secret police force that is more funding than the Marines. And they, they often execute people on the streets of America. On the other hand, there are some kids at Oberlin who, Who wrote some really mean things and put held them up on signs at this protest once. So you tell me.

[Jimmy]

It's. It. It drives me insane. Do you watch a lot of Esther Klein's pieces?

[Stephen]

No.

[Jimmy]

Oh, well, my bad. Ezra Klein did a two hour interview.

[Stephen]

Not a huge Ezra Klein fan.

[Jimmy]

Okay, that's fair.

[Stephen]

It's okay.

[Jimmy]

I can imagine why that's okay.

[Stephen]

I think that shouldn't stop you. I know who he is. I'm familiar with his oeuvre.

[Jimmy]

Okay.

[Stephen]

I don't hate the guy or anything. Like, I don't. He's not in the Ross Doutha place with me or anything like that.

[Jimmy]

He's not in the what place? The Ross Douthat place for my audience. Because I know what that word means. What does that mean?

[Stephen]

Ross. Ross Douthit. You don't know Ross Douthit from the New York Times?

[Jimmy]

Oh, oh, yeah. Ross Douthit.

[Stephen]

Ross Douth.

[Jimmy]

Prestigious New York Times guy.

[Stephen]

The prestigious New York Times columnist. The reasonable conservative.

[Jimmy]

The reasonable conservative. Oh, wait, he. He does that? He does a show. He Does a. Yeah, okay, never mind. I do know this guy. Okay?

[Stephen]

That's the guy I am unhealthily obsessed with.

[Jimmy]

Why are you unhealthily obsessed with him?

[Stephen]

Because he's like the biggest fraud in America and I hate him so much. Okay, Jeez.

[Jimmy]

Okay, I'm starting to think Ezra Klein. No, no, you're good. I normally do adversarial conversation, so I'm having a cathartic conversation. I don't navigate these as much. I remember listening to Ezra talk to Ben Shapiro, and I know you've heard these talking points before, and it was just phenomenal to me to hear Ben Shapiro talk about how Obama just like, rubbed so many conservative wrong. And given the opportunity, Ezra Klein asked, what were the things that Barack Obama did that got you guys so riled up? And the two things that Ben Shapiro cited were. One, he spoke too quickly about the Henry Louis Yates thing. I think it was the Harvard guy who got the cops showed up because he was trying to break into his own house.

[Stephen]

The beer summit.

[Jimmy]

Yeah, the beer summit. Yeah. Imagine that, huh? And then when Obama said that Trayvon Martin looked like he could have been his kid. And I'm like, that's the level of like, we could take a single day. Yeah, I know.

[Stephen]

But even though he wore the tan, remember when he bowed to the Saudi king?

[Jimmy]

Oh, yeah.

[Stephen]

He inclined his head to the Saudi king.

[Jimmy]

Not good.

[Stephen]

You know?

[Jimmy]

Meanwhile, Trump is saluting the North Korean military. Yeah, it's such a joke, man. I have. Okay, here's. This is where. Okay, this is where I'm at.

[Stephen]

Sorry, I've never done a stream before, so maybe I'm just doing this all wrong.

[Jimmy]

No, no, you're good, you're good, you're good. Usually. Yeah, I'm flow in my thought here. Okay, Here, this is a. This is a thing I would like your feedback or opinion on. Okay. I am of the mindset right now and I've been screaming at a lot of people about this that I feel like right now there is a media ecosystem that is really well understood by the MAGA movement and it's really understood by. I don't know what you guys are calling them now, but we call them ML types, Marxist London, or Tankies or. Or the socialists. But like the. The real socialists, not like the I want Medicare trap House guys. Right, sure. Yeah. The very, very left people. The anti Democratic Party people who are on the left. And the way that this media ecosystem works is you plant ideas in the top where they're allowed to basically resonate through a bunch of people in an uncritical fashion. And then those kind of percolate to your mid tier alternative media streamer people. And then they're all accepted because they were all seen up here and you want to be part of that ecosystem. And then they make it to the for you pages on everybody's social media where now the opinion has been fully validated and laundered. And this is your reality. This is done so well on MAGA and so on the far left. But I feel like when I'm looking at the lib left or moderate left, people analyzing the media environment, they keep seeing the stuff that comes out of the bottom of that funnel and they think, how can we replicate that bottom thing? So they'll see something like, Trump was able to message really well on this because he hit this point and this point and this point. Or Mamdani is able to message well on this because he hits this point or this point. And when I'm looking at it, what I'm seeing is no, the reason why it works is it doesn't really matter what the message is. It matters a little bit. But what helps is that when Trump has this initial thing, we'll say it's something related to Russiagate. You have Tulsi Gabbard that will make the rounds on every Fox show. All of them will uncritically repeat it. All of that credibility then falls to the alternative media people who then essentially uncritically repeat it because they're, I don't know your show if you say retarded, but they're fucking retards. And then that makes it to the average person who watches it. And now they believe it all. And all of that opinion is from top to bottom is how it works. And then on the moderate left to the lib left credit, we're more self critical people, but we end up needling ourselves to death over here. So there's no way that any coherent messaging or opinion from the Democratic Party can even get out of the crib. It's killed in the crib immediately, basically. I don't know how you feel that

[Stephen]

sounds probably about right. I mean, a lot of it is to, I mean, the center left and the center right, to the extent the center right even still exists. I mean, the center right now is like the center left from 10 years ago. Like the same people right in the center left to shift it a little bit to the left. Not a lot though. And a lot of it's like those are, I mean, those are not the Kind of spaces that like have their own niche because they are by definition centrist and not, not fringes. They don't have their own, their own like boutique niche media. Right. Because by definitely you're, you're with the normies. With the normies. And so I don't, I don't know how this all works. I so much of it. Really. Well, I don't know. Let me ask you because this is something I go back and forth with. How much of it is about messaging and how much is just vibes. Like people want what they want and

[Jimmy]

I, I mean they make up what

[Stephen]

they want and then they backfill and justify their decisions and their desires and urges after the fact.

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[Jimmy]

I think a lot of it is vibes, but this is the thing that I think is so hard for people to understand. So my mom and dad are ride or die maga, 100% of the answer. My mom is Cuban and Cubans are all crazy in the United States. But, but I think what people don't understand sometimes is everything today on your social media feeds is so heavily algorithmically curated to match the other stuff you've seen that if you try to argue with somebody about a thing, even if you argue it the best way possible. And I don't mean just like, oh, you make all the logical points but you're compassionate, you break through and everything else, you might be able to come through really, really well on a point and maybe Even make them reconsider, possibly on a thing. Maybe the vaccines weren't a mass extermination program. Maybe. But even if you do that, the microsecond they leave, it's like an addict coming out of rehab and going right back to skid row. They're back on. Well, what did Joe Rogan talk about today? Oh, it's four and a half hours with Dr. Robert Malone about how Covid lab leak happened. Oh, it's Ian Carroll to talk about how Churchill was the bad guy in World War II. Or, oh, it's the other guy who was talking about the lost city of Atlantis and how the JFK assassination was fake. And it's just Dave Smith to talk about how Iraq and that environment, when you're in it, there's no way that you're ever getting your mind changed unless you have to be totally removed from that environment. Insofar as you say, is it vibes? I do think that the media you consume can heavily dictate even how you feel about a thing. There are people when you talk about them. I think some people will describe problems as opportunities or opportunities as problems, depending on who's in office. But I think that those fives are very heavily and very inorganically controlled on the far right. And I would argue, well, the far right is all of Maga. And then I would argue, now the tanky people on the left have figured out how to do it pretty well as well. But the lib left people are completely and totally clueless and cannot do a message from top to bottom at all.

[Stephen]

Are you describing a platform problem or a media problem? I think it feels a little like a platform problem. Like this is what Twitter and YouTube and TikTok are. They see something that flits across your screen that you pause on for a minute and then they just start giving you more.

[Jimmy]

I think it's a bit of a platform. I think the platform problem definitely amplifies it. But I think that. Did you ever read any of the slides from the Fox News v. Dominion? That civil suit?

[Stephen]

Yeah.

[Jimmy]

Everybody at Fox News knew that that story was a fucking lie that was used to push the insurrection. And. And everybody was complicit in selling it. I don't think you could get anybody. That story is what they accused the left of doing with Biden's health, basically, is what they thought. Yeah. And look at how big of a story the Donna Brazile thing was when Hillary got the one question in advance. I think people still talk about it to this day. Bernie supporters will talk about that, I don't even know how many American. My guess is less than 3% of Americans are even aware of that Dominion Fox News lawsuit. If that happened at cnn, oh my God, it would be. Do you remember the shadow voting app in the Iowa caucuses between people who did it?

[Stephen]

Yeah.

[Jimmy]

These are stories that everybody. Because it gets amplified with these sites. But the lib left, the moderate left, people, they cannot amplify a message partly because of the platform, but partly because people have this understanding of what the mission is on the far left side and on the MAGA side, but not on the lib left side. The one example I always use is if you hear somebody say this candidate is really, really bad at messaging, that is a comment that come from the center left because on the right they understand that they are the messaging. Sean Hannity is never going to criticize how the Republican administration messages. He understands that it's his job to message for them at all costs.

[Stephen]

That's an excellent point. Yeah. Nobody will ever tell Mike Johnson, like, oh, Mike Johnson's not great at messaging because they do their own thing. Yeah, yeah, that's. Yeah. Well, this is the point for having like the difference between having partisan and non partisan media. Right. Like we have, we have partisan media and the partisan media is basically all of the MAGA stuff. And then we have the non partisan media which is like everything that's mainstream. It's the New York Times, it's, it's, I guess not the Washington Post anymore. Cnn, it's all these things. And I, you know, I don't know what to, I don't know what to do about any of this, you know, and we, I don't know. I mean it's, I am bearish on America. I don't know how much you read my newsletter, but I think a lot of the traps we're in right now are really, really hard to get out of. I don't think the before times are coming back.

[Jimmy]

Okay, well, I feel like there have been a lot of times in history where people are like, this is the worst time in history. We've managed to bounce back. So I have to hope that you have to have some underlying. No, you deep down, you have some underlying optimism. You must. Otherwise why do anything, right? Really?

[Stephen]

Not really. I mean like, it is true, like sometimes things get better. Like sometimes societies fix themselves. But those aren't things you can really like engineer. You know, like you get a reformation movement or something like that. Like those things tend to be sui generous and you can't predict Them. You can't engineer them. It's not a button you can push. I don't know. I mean, I, you know, I. I had David Fromm on the podcast yesterday. I was sitting in for Tim, and, you know, David was doing, like, his hopeful thing about, you know, America can get better. And it's true, it could. But we have a couple problems happen. I'm at the very, very most macro level. We have a bunch of institutional problems where the system of government itself that we have has been exposed as having a lot of weaknesses to it. For instance, the separation of powers has been exposed as having a lot of weakness. Right. Congress not doing its job. The. The electoral process, which has always had a bias built in towards rural citizens that has become, like, sort of supercharged and leveraged to levels which I think make it a difference in kind, not just a difference in scale. We have a Supreme Court, which has become sort of nakedly partisan, but also corrupt at the same time. It's just a bunch of problems. And then we have, in the realm of economics, concentrations of wealth, which, again, once you, like, have a trillionaire, it's just. It's different. It's different even than, like, Gilded Age America. So you have stuff like that all happening at the same time, that you have the public itself becoming basically accepting of America turning into a banana republic. I mean, that is the. The thing about Trump is that he won twice. You know, the second win is the. Is the big one. Yeah, it's. And it isn't like twice, because the first one was like, well, you know, it actually worked out pretty well. We didn't see anything bad. We had a global pandemic and a million Americans died. A million Americans died. And this is like the one time in the history of America that all of a sudden, voters supposedly have this very highly nuanced understanding and aren't just focused on results. Right? I mean, this is. I hear this all the time. People say, well, you know, you can't blame Trump for the pandemic because, you see, there was this global thing, and, you know, the infrastructure only moves so fast then. But of course, the economy was terrible under Biden, and Biden did that, right? So people become, like, super reductive when talking about the Biden years, but incredibly sophisticated and able to apportion blame versus non blame during the Trump years.

[Jimmy]

I said on a quick thing on that, oh, my God, one of the worst things I read in my entire life. I spent so much time in the COVID years, all right, arguing so much nonsense, pseudoscience on the two big drugs were hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Just absolute dogs. Never worked out for anything. I saw, I think it was under Desantis here in Florida, they published something about rescinding trans healthcare. It was either to everybody or at least to youth. And I saw on their printed statement where they are like, we have not seen any study of sufficient size that meets our gold standard criteria of being a double blind control study or whatever. And I was like, oh, so you guys, you motherfuckers do know what good research is?

[Stephen]

Where the will they need that?

[Jimmy]

And I know what you mean. Yeah. When you talk about, like, Trump couldn't control the pandemic, but Biden sure as hell was responsible for the Afghanistan pullout catastrophe. That was negotiated under Trump, by the way. He was responsible for Russia invading Ukraine. I don't know why or how. And he was, he was responsible for the October 7 attacks, even though the Abraham Accord. We were told peace in the Middle East. I don't think we've ever had more peace in the Middle east more times than under Trump. I don't know if he's trying to get the Nobel Peace Prize. I think he's just spammed the achievement or something. But yeah, yeah. Not to interrupt you, but yeah, that, the, the double standard thing. And, and the thing I just interviewed. I'm sorry, the thing. Because you said a few times, I agree with this so much. It's, it's this desire to seem like a reasonable person and you have like a kid like smearing all over the wall and then you've got another guy who's like, tried to paint something and maybe like the, the figures aren't like perfectly anatomically correct. And you're, and you're like. It's like you're two children. You don't want to choose which one is your favorite. So you try to be like.

[Stephen]

You have perspectives kind of off on that one. Jimmy, your lighting isn't quite done. The chiaroscuro is not.

[Jimmy]

And then the shit painting is like, well, Monet had a lot of like, really interesting, you know, pieces of art that he did. And it's just like, are you fucking. I feel like I'm fucking insane here. And. Yeah, yeah, sorry, yeah, it's. The asymmetry is impossible to deal with because I think the average American looks at it. Because the average American, nobody has time to chase all these stories to the ends of the earth. Even researching one of these stories can take weeks of time depending on how deep you want to go into things. And you look at the media and you. Have you said something earlier? It triggers me so much because it's true, but nobody views it that way. The moderate left people really too, try to be nonpartisan. And then the MAGA media is the most hyper partisan trash in the universe. But that's not how the average American.

[Stephen]

They're explicitly partisan. They are literally like, they're not even ideological, they're just partisan.

[Jimmy]

Yeah, but the American public views Fox News is the right. And then CNN and Ms. Now and the New York Times and watch what. They're the left. And it's like, yeah, I don't know

[Stephen]

how you fix any of that. And so I, I mean, here's a real question for you. Has American society gotten worse? Like, like, have the people as the organize gotten worse? And this is so. One of my beliefs is that, like, the human condition is real and persistent and that in all times, in all places, individual people in the human condition is the same. Right. You know, the, the sort of base desires and the, the virtues and all those things, they are the same today here in Florida as they were a thousand years ago in, like, I don't know, the steps of Asia or something. People are people. But societies change a lot. Right. Once you start amalgamating people, the societies and cultures they build, they can take on very different characters and they can move in ways, I mean, imperial fascist. Japan of 1925 is very different than Japan of 2026. Right. Germany of 1940, very different than Germany of 2026. Like, it isn't like the people are the same. Like, you know, they're just human beings, but they build cultures and they build societies. And I, I mean, I. Look, I. I don't want to go through all of American history because I can't speak to that, but do we think that the American society as a whole is, like, better and more healthy than it was in one generation ago, in 2006? I think it's worse. Like, observably, immeasurably worse.

[Jimmy]

Can I.

[Stephen]

The people are worse.

[Jimmy]

Yeah. Can I ask.

[Stephen]

People are rotten.

[Jimmy]

Yeah, I understand. Maybe, or maybe, I don't know. The people, the culture maybe a little feels different.

[Stephen]

That's what I mean.

[Jimmy]

Yeah.

[Stephen]

When I say the people have gone rotten, what I mean is the culture.

[Jimmy]

How old are you? Do you ever say that?

[Stephen]

I'm in my early 50s.

[Jimmy]

Early 50s. Oh, I would have never guessed. So nice.

[Stephen]

Thank you. Oh, man, I knew I liked you.

[Jimmy]

I'm 37 and I try one thing I have to constantly check myself on because I've gotten to the age now to where I can say, well, when I was a late teen, early 20s, everything on the planet was better. And my understanding is basically every single generation, from the first homo sapien that stood up, was already complaining about how when he was on all fours, it was better or whatever. In his last. In his teens or whatever. I do feel like in a lot of cultural ways, the late 90s and early mid 2000s, which would have been when I graduated high school, was peak for social discourse, was peak for a lot of cultural stuff. We had women representation better in media, but we didn't quite have the. The crazy. I don't know how much I want to get into the culture. We were trying to be more woke on racial issues, but, like, DEI wasn't like the center point conversation thing, or we weren't like, pushing for land acknowledgments or whatever, or we were trying to bring more awareness to stuff. Like, the beginning of the MeToo movement, I think, was really good. There are. It's a whole side story. But, like, I actually think the Epstein story has been one of the most annoying things in the universe for me personally to watch, because I think it's been a way for men to offload what has historically been the most normal behavior in all of human history, which is just men in power trying to have sex with all of the women that are trying to come up underneath them and then abusing that role. And they tried to write it off as, oh, that was just a crazy, weird pedophile problem instead of like, this is a problem that's existed basically everywhere. But then that kind of morphed into, like, I remember the. I feel like the peak horrible for this. Was that. Is it Aziz Ansari? Is that how you say his name? There was an article written about. It was like. It just seemed kind of like an awkward bad date slash hookup and this. Yeah, everything kind of got crazy at that. And then the conservative hijacking of, like, when the woke stuff got too woke. And it was like, okay, I think it's really cringe that you guys are pushing for stuff that's a little too woke. So now we need a $90 billion funded ICE to start assassinating American citizens and to be protected by the federal government while it's happening. Like, holy, what the fuck? And, yeah, it's not good. We haven't recovered fully from Season 8 of Game of Thrones yet. I fear in American society, it does

[Stephen]

feel like I think that's right. I mean, a lot of it just leaves questions like, what will. What will the culture tolerate? Right. Like, what. What will. What will people say? Where do they say the norms are and where the lines. And we've been, like, erasing those lines a lot over the last 10 years in ways which are so shocking that I honestly think if. If you just got into a time machine and went back to 2014 and described some of the. That's going on and said. And also, what do you think the President's approval rating will be? People would say, like, 4%. Right. And. And I just. Nobody would believe you. That these things are basically just tolerated. You're like, yeah, so the president had $2.2 billion in income in his first year in office because he was selling crypto and because he was. His kids were making defense deals and whatnot. And also he had been convicted of these 34 felonies. And also he had to pay off this woman because a jury, A jury determined that it was true that he sexually assaulted her. Also, like, we now have law enforcement now wear masks all the time, and we have a nationalized police force that is mostly masked who walks around and they do kill American citizens, like, execution style on the streets. Sometimes people be like, oh, also in this other guy, he did attempt a coup. There was an insurrection and all this. And people like, no, come on, that's not possible. But we just, like, adapt to it. And we're like, well, you know. Yeah, at least it's not the Civil War.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

True.

[Jimmy]

Yeah, that. Yeah. I always, like, imagine, like, it's 2050, 2060, and you're like a kid in high school, and then you read through the first Trump presidency and it's like, okay, and then Biden. And then it's like, wait, they elect Trump again? So what? But what did Biden do? And it's like, well, so unemployment was

[Stephen]

3.9% for four years.

[Jimmy]

It's just unbelievable. Yeah. So there was this guy called Hunter Biden, and it's like, oh, the Burisma stuff. Yeah. Although the guy that started that actually went to prison because he lied about all of it. And it's like, okay, geez, how much did he make from burisma? Was it 5 billion, $6 billion? Like, well, it was less than what Tim Pool made, actually, in one year of getting Russian propaganda illegally wired to him through a shell company in New York City through Tenet. But we don't know anything else about that because the Trump admin that came in dismissed it. One of the reasons why Trump won, though, was the very aggressive lawfare from the prior Biden admin. And it's like, oh, what was the rule back then that made it so that attorney generals had to wait two years to start investigating the prior president for Congress? Well, no, that just seems to change. They were just waiting. The normalization thing that you bring up is. I mean, it's kind of what I opened this with. Yeah. It just. It's crazy to me that I get so irritated, because I'm sure you grew up hearing this. I grew up hearing this. We always have these exceptional views of, like, how stupid were the Germans to, like, fall for Nazis? Or how stupid were these people to fall for these insane ideas. And right now, there's, like, no limiting principle. There are no backstops on the Trump behavior. I feel like the last 10 years has been Donald Trump and the rest of the Republican lawmaker class, to their chagrin, finding out. He can't say that. Oh, my God. He can say that. Grab him by the pussy. He's gone. McCain war heroes. My parents are both vets. You can't get away with. Oh, I guess you could. Never mind. I remember my mom standing in front of me in her fucking. In her little flight suit before she went to her. Both my parents were Air Force. I remember her standing in front of me. I don't think it's a flight suit. It's whatever the fatigues are. Whatever. And she was crying when that Bill Clinton stuff came down. Talking to me about how. Stevie, you have to understand that when we go to work every day as women, like, the president is the commander in chief and his behavior rolls down right from the top, and men see women that way, and it's disgusting and blah, blah, blah. And my mom was one of the biggest defenders of Trump over the. Grab him by the pussy. That was five years ago, Stevie.

[Stephen]

Locker room talk.

[Jimmy]

Yeah. And it's like, what the fuck?

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Really?

[Jimmy]

This was the party of moral centeredness or whatever.

[Stephen]

Right. Yeah. I've learned a lot in the last 10 years. None of it good. Yeah, I think. I mean, but. But. But a lot of it true. Right. And so it's good to. It's good. It's good to open your eyes and to learn the true things, even if it's not very nice. And I mean, one of. So, like, like you said a lot of the. I mean, I literally just assumed that it couldn't happen here. Yeah. Like, my whole adult life, I think. Well, you see, America is a mature democracy, and that makes Different, Right. Because after X number of centuries, the institutions are built up, the guardrails exist, the checks and balances. Right. But it has been very instructive to see, for instance, that in a capitalist system, if you get a strong man who comes in and wants to turn it into a command economy, the big businesses don't really object to it because they think they can work with it. Right. And so, you know, like, Jeff Bezos doesn't really get freaked out by Trump because he feels like, oh, I can. I can make this work. Right. Elon Musk is like, how I can get on the inside. And so you now see, like, how I.W. farber and all the German companies got on board with the Nazis. Right? I mean, this is. They think they can work with it. And you see how. I don't know. I mean, I came, so. I'm not a Republican. I've never been a Republican. I don't like parties, period. Like, I'm. They're fine, but they're not for me. I'm not a joiner, but, you know, I grew up at the Weekly Standard. That was a conservative magazine. And so, you know, I was hanging around them. I was sort of the. Because I'm Catholic, I believe in all, like, the Catholic, like, you know, social justice. I was always, like, the house communist.

[Jimmy]

Okay. Did you go to a Jesuit high school?

[Stephen]

I didn't. You did, though.

[Jimmy]

I did, yeah.

[Stephen]

Yeah, the Jesuits. You had me. A Jesuit? No. Are you still Catholic?

[Jimmy]

No, I'm not.

[Stephen]

Were you Catholic to begin with?

[Jimmy]

I was very Catholic, yeah. But the. The Jesuit teaching order. It was a very. Like, if my son wanted to, I would send him to that high school. No problem. It was. It was a very good school. I very much appreciate. Yeah. The teaching.

[Stephen]

Was it Regis? Did you go to Regis?

[Jimmy]

Is that the. Are they different?

[Stephen]

It's. It's just one of the. The big Jesuit high schools. Oh, and Tim Miller went to Regis.

[Jimmy]

Oh, okay.

[Stephen]

I was a Regis kid.

[Jimmy]

I lived in Omaha. My high school is called Creighton Prep, so I don't know what that matters.

[Stephen]

Oh, Creighton Prep. Sounds fancy. No, I didn't. But anyway, so I had always seen. I grew up in the world of, like, AEI talks and Brookings, and I just assumed. No, these people are all, like, ideologues. They're. You know, they would never flip on all this stuff that they dedicated. Nope, nope, nope, nope. You know, like, 5% of them cared about the stuff they said. And for everybody else, it was just. I don't know. It was like a game they were playing or just a thing they said or it was an excuse for their, you know, pre existing preferences and priors. And as soon as they saw a way to, you know, scurry up the, the flagpole and get ahead or they saw that in order to keep making money they had to, to change their view, they just did it. And it wasn't even hard for most of them. So yeah, yeah, we've learned a lot about the world. We've seen that it can happen anywhere on.

[Jimmy]

To give like a slightly different view of it. I largely agree. There's two things I wish in history we did more in school. One is that I think historical fiction is actually really important. I feel like when you look at the Constitutional Congress or Constitutional. Yeah, the Constitutional Congress. When you look at like the Revolutionary War, when you look at all of these big events in history, it's very inhuman or dehuman. The humanity is like sucked out of the. It's like these computer programs went in and this is what they did. And people don't consider sometimes that you have, you know, like I think, I think Benjamin Franklin was like when his 50s or 60s and you had all these other guys that were in their like 20s, you're Adams and all these people. This like influences the way that they approach each other, the way that they have conversations and you know, as kids it's hard even to imagine the difference in age sometimes. Like I remember in high school I always roll my eyes at like In World War II it was just a bunch of kids that went over and it's like these guys were fucking an 18, 19 year old. I don't know what you're talking about. But now like as a 37 year old, I'm like holy fuck. 18 year olds with rifles on beaches. That's. That's craz. I don't even know my. That's insane. So I feel like historical fiction sometimes I think it would help people understand that there are like humans at the time dealing with these things because of a second thing too in that because history's already happened, a lot of people view history as kind of being inevitable. Like things could have only gone one way. And I think that leads a lot to our. In our current time there's a factor of. I say this when it comes to anything. It could be gym, it could be business, it could be hobbies or what. It's actually really easy to super dedicate something, to have high levels of motivation and to push really hard on a thing for like A day. Anybody can do that. But to maintain motivation over time in the face of adversity, that time element makes it a lot harder because you don't actually know if it's going to turn out one way or not. And a lot of the times, you know, like, how do you know if you're in a recession? Well, you won't until. I don't know if we still use this definition, but you have to have, like, two consecutive quarters of gdp.

[Stephen]

Yeah.

[Jimmy]

And. And now we might be in the bad times. I had an argument before, like, well, you think we're in a fascist government. Is it fascist? If this was a fascist government, and if they were to determine that in the future. Yeah. Or. Well, yeah, because in the future they say, yes, and all the signs were there, and it started in 2018. And we'd be like, oh, shit, this

[Stephen]

is exactly the case. Nobody knows they're living through an inquisition, right? And so you. Perhaps this is something I think about a lot of is the difference in viewing history through the contingent lens versus the dialectical lens. And so if you, if you go back and read Marx, like real Marx, one of the things that is interesting about him is he, he views history dialectically, which is to say that there are these big forces, these big impersonal forces. They largely have to do with technology and capital and population flows, and they make everything inevitable. And, you know, like these. These forces are like the tectonic plates shifting underneath us, and they're what lead us forward in. In the world. And the opposite view of that is the contingent view, which is that, you know, it's like the great man theory of history, you know, George Washington. Without George Washington, there is no America, et cetera, et cetera. And as with all things, like, the answer is somewhere in the middle, right? And history is much more contingent than we think it is often, but it is also dialectical. And so, for instance, technology is one of the big dialectics, right? As technology begins, all of a sudden you have the printing press, and the printing press really influences how a bunch of things unfold after that. And economics, right? Concentration of wealth matters, and that influences things, but then it becomes contingent, right? And so you wind up in a way where you can say, there's no real reason World War I had to happen, right? World War I sort of happens by accident. And so it's a really contingent event. But the fact of World War I makes World War II almost inevitable, right? Because. Because of the way the, The Western powers react to World War I and are trying to recoup their, their money and really sit on the Germans. And that makes what. So you have both of these things, Right. So you have a contingent event, then creates this dialectical event. And so yeah. All which to say is, I heartily agree that trying to expose people to thinking about history through both lenses and to try to really hammer home to them that it's both and to have a lot of imagination when they're thinking about history and to understand how it unfolds is that's the best way to sort of have an open mind about what the future can bring.

[Jimmy]

Yeah.

[Stephen]

Does that make sense? Is that too much?

[Jimmy]

Sorry, no. 100%. I agree. We've gone back and forth in discussing this a lot like you know, this idea of the great man in history can change the course of events. Like I fully believe in it. But the great man didn't land here on a ufo. He wasn't implanted by. I guess if you believe in Jesus, maybe one guy was to be to carve out for your religious wayfarer. But like a great man can emerge, but he emerges from a society that produced him not by accident, not, not randomly. Right. He was created for, you know, produced from some set of conditions that enabled him to rise up and do the things that he did. The. Yeah, the off ramps and everything are important. I wish that there was a book I started by. I'm not going to remember his name but it's a huge three part series on like the Germany in the post World War I and then leading up through and then after I think is it called the Fall of the Nazi the Fall of the Third Reich maybe by Richard Evans? I think it sounds right but a lot of the parts of his book as he's going through Germany is considering the off ramps. It didn't have to be this way that the society went in this direction or it didn't have to be this way when the French troops in the world didn't have to be this way. This could have gone on in considering those. And yeah, I think it's important because history oftentimes just feels like train tracks that the choo choo train is just riding along and there's nothing you could do for it and all that to say that historians, if there is any singular man and a man. I hate blaming singular men, but he played a dangerous fucking game. And that was Mitch McConnell when I don't know how many people are aware of this, but the Senate had absolutely enough votes on the merits to impeach Trump fully and he said no. And the bullshit reason they gave was that you can't impeach a guy out of office. Which doesn't make any fucking sense at all. But it was because he thought, McConnell thought that was his gamble. Trump's probably gone. I don't want to eat the electoral unpopularity.

[Stephen]

Do you remember what he said?

[Jimmy]

Which thing? I remember the rationale he gave that you can't impeach a man who is not out of office. What was the other thing?

[Stephen]

We don't have to do it. They'll take care of the son of a. For us.

[Jimmy]

Oh, I didn't even hear that.

[Stephen]

This was the fame, this was the famous McConnell behind closed door quote about, about this. Because, and so he, he said to the Republican conference, he said, and he was explaining why they didn't need to convict him. And it was because the Democrats would take care of Trump for them. There was no need for them to eat the electoral cost and the political cost of voting for it. Yeah, that fucking guy has a lot to answer for.

[Jimmy]

Yeah. I don't want to speak ill of the, of the recently departed, so I don't want to spend too much time on McConnell, assuming he's, I don't know if he's alive or not.

[Stephen]

You're very, it's very, very funny. We got a picture, a perfectly normal picture, which just happened to have the corner of the Washington Post in it as proof of life.

[Jimmy]

I just don't know why you would act. So it's like the example I gave is like you're at a party and you have a wife or girlfriend and you post a picture of you at the party and it's you and a girl next to you and that's it. And it looks like you're at dinner and then your girlfriend calls you, what the fuck, what's going on? Or whatever. And it's like, oh, no, we're at a party. And then there are other pictures and there are a ton of people. I was like, why would you post the most guilty looking picture possible? You know, and it's like, here's McConnell the turtle in his bed, alive with the, and everything. And it's just like, God, and, and the thing that. This is the thing.

[Stephen]

Call Jonathan Swan.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Sure.

[Stephen]

Spend five minutes on the phone with Jonathan Swan. Jonathan Swan will say in the Axios. The next morning. I spoke with Mitch McConnell for five minutes and he sounded okay.

[Jimmy]

Yeah, I feel like Trump literally takes off the CPAP machine and is calling Fox and Friends every morning. This guy sounds like he's barely awake and he's struggling in bed, gasping for breath as the, as the Fox News hosts are trying to cut him off every other line because they don't know when he's gonna stop rambling on whatever he's talking about. The thing that drives me the craziest, though, about all of this, now, I go back and forth on like, I wish that it would have just been Jack Smith was the President of the United States or whatever. I wish it would have been so much more aggressive than Biden. In one sense, if we do make it back from this, I am glad that we elected Biden because I do believe that Biden was literally. He was the. Well, why don't you guys just try acting right and see how maybe things will get better then? And it's like, okay, well, let's put literally the nicest, least vindictive. I wanna be the president of both sides and I'm not gonna stick Merrick Garland on you. And I'm gonna council investigate me for secret classified documents while the own classified documents case gets killed by cannon in Florida. And I'm going to, I'm going to allow my son to be infinitely investigated by 52 different Judiciary hearing committees while every single Republican on the planet says, I plead the Fifth over and over again to every single question. It's like, and then by the end of all of that, nothing. We got nothing for it. And so now, yeah, when conservatives bring up any issue, right, the McConnell thing, and it's like, you guys complain so much about us hiding Biden and hiding his medical conditions, we just found out that both of Trump's ankles are exploding. That McConnell, we don't even know what's happening. Like, it almost seems like he made a deal with the devil and Lindsey Graham was sacrificed to keep this guy alive for a little bit longer. Like, what is happening? Like, what the fuck is even going on in our, in the Republican establishment right now? And it's all, like, normal.

[Stephen]

So I have a question for you. Yeah. We had a lot of internal debate at the Bulwark about this circa 2021, where, you know, on the one hand, should the Biden administration pursue maximum accountability and most aggressive possible reforms, or should the Biden administration try to heal the country and push forward and just fake it till you make it right? We're going to treat the Trump years as an aberration. These things happen. Sometimes a country elects an insane person for one term, then they learn their lesson and we just don't speak of it again. And I gotta be Honest, I really, I was genuinely torn by this. And it was not obvious to me that one path was clearly the right answer and the other was the wrong one. I think we know what Biden chose. Biden chose to try to put the country back together again, try to treat the Trump years as an aberration and something which didn't have to be repeated. And that look, you know, this is like his hokey corn pop, you know, I'm. I believe this is who we are and if it isn't who we are, then we're going to fake it till we make it. I think it wasn't a crazy thing. It was a perfectly reasonable judgment to make at the time. It was wrong, though. I think we now know that it was wrong.

[Jimmy]

But where.

[Stephen]

I mean, can you put yourself back like early 2021, did you. Were you thinking in those terms too about the. The two roads diverging in the wood for him or.

[Jimmy]

No, I got embarrassingly, I fell a little bit into the. One of my biggest fears as a content creator is falling too much into an echo chamber is the thing that I'm always petrified of because I see so many other people and I'm like, how can you be so blind to your own biases? I'm really worried about that. And I got a little bit mind tousled by the Trump derangement syndrome thing and I thought, maybe I'm a little bit too harsh on this guy. And it wasn't until, man, I don't know, it might have been a year after January 6th where I had an old friend who was like, don't you think Trump should have deployed the National Guard there? And that was his fault. I was like, I mean, was it really his fault? I don't know. And then I went down the rabbit hole of reading the Select Committee report and things that I didn't even. Embarrassing, I didn't even know about, actually. I didn't really know how electors work for a state. I don't know. He probably was. Out of all the. I didn't know how any of this shit worked. And then to go through stuff that is just like. I would have imagined you would have to go on a Nicholas Cage explorer adventure to find the elector slates that were the illegally assigned elector slates. And these are all just like publicly available. All this stuff is out here and nobody. So, yeah, so initially I was probably a little bit more forgiving, but now I feel differently. One of the examples, there's a thing that I talk about a lot when people Ask me for advice interpersonally. When people talk to me and they're frustrated with partners or friends or whatever, people will do this thing. You'll have a parent and it'll be like, my kid just. He's just so irrationally just makes all these horrible choices like, well, what's going on? It's like he can't hold down a job. He gets high all the time. And I don't understand this guy. And it's like, well, what's going on with him? It's like, well, he's staying over here, he's upstairs and he's so lazy. I got to do his laundry for him. I gotta cooking his meals. This guy's a loser. What's going on? I just don't understand him. And it's like, it's like he's acting like a perfectly rational human being. It sounds like the guy gets free video games, free food, he lives at your house, he gets to fuck around all day and you're rewarding him the entire time for what he would be stupid to do otherwise. Why would you want to go out and get a job that sucks. He can smoke weed all day and his mom and dad will take care of him forever. I kind of launched, at least in my part of the political sphere, this conversation on Tit for tat, where I think in some ways we have. In some ways not to sound ultra woke, but we do have a biological programming, but it is suited for a particular environment. And we really are guided, I think a lot more by social stuff than we realize sometimes even when it comes to things like gendered stuff. I have a musical background. Women are amazing classical pianists. They can play violin. There's no reason why they can't play guitar or drums, but they don't. That's a social thing. When you look at rock bands, 0.01% of all guitar players are women. That's not a biological thing, that's a social thing. But that social factor there drives a 99.9 to 0.1% difference in behavior. All this to say that when I look at conservatives and I look at how they act in 2024 and I look at the constant lies and I look at all of the collaboration and I look at all of the rule breaking and the law breaking and everything else, all I think of is coming out of 2021, like, well, of course, why would they not act that way? They should look at the immense shot. Yeah, they're getting so much for it. They get so many rewards for it. And the American memory for political stuff is. I was just about to say six months, but I don't even know. Six weeks, six days.

[Stephen]

I don't know.

[Jimmy]

Like we have no hour and a half. Yeah. So if we're not going, next time we come in, it has to be heavy accountability. Not even necessarily for the American public, but it has to be that when the next guy is in office and he's doing a thing, he should be thinking, if I fog around too much here, am I going to get in big trouble for it? That has to be a consideration. And right now on the conservative side, it's not.

[Stephen]

So I agree completely. And again, not unreasonable to make the decision Biden meant Biden made because he was assuming it was an aberration, not a fact of life. We now know it's a fact of life. If there is another Democratic control of the federal government, then I think it's pretty clear that they should attack both maximum accountability, like maximum legal accountability for everybody at every level of the Trump government. And they should, should be pretty aggressive in pursuing real institutional reforms. And I'm, I'm wanting to get pretty far out there on institutional reforms. What do you think the odds are that even your favorite Democrat would do that? Because I think the odds are like 1 in 10, maybe less. Because what will happen is you'll get Democrats in there and they'll be like, we got to focus on the future. We got to, you know, don't look back.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Word.

[Stephen]

We gotta what people care about. They don't care about process, they don't care about this stuff. They care about their wallets and the kitchen table. You know what we need to do? We need to expand healthcare access and do Medicare for all who want it, which, by the way, may be a perfectly good plan. I don't know. I'm not a healthcare policy wonk. But I can tell you that as a political matter, it'll mean like two years of fighting. They won't get what they actually want. They'll get marginal improvements and that, but they'll also get blamed for anything that goes wrong. And yeah, like, it's just a recipe to do this all over again. Because as you said, like, it just tells Republicans, oh, you get free shots. You can make as many authoritarian attempts as you want and you don't have to worry because you'll never be held accountable for it. So take another one.

[Jimmy]

I feel like I've watched the Democratic Party learn this lesson over and over again, and I feel like we're doing it right now. Again, where they have this conversation about, like. And even I go back and forth on this like, it's the economy, stupid. Like, people don't care about social issues and it's really just about affordability and yada, yada, yada. I don't think that's true. I think there are social issues that people care a lot about because politicians manage to kick up so much noise about them. And I think that. That there is a. You don't want to be mean about it, but people will care to some extent about the things that you tell them to care about. And this is the thing that conservatives have figured out so well that when you consider a concept like the Overton Window, I think Democrats look at this as like, the Overton Window is the furthest extent to which we could ever even message. And we can dream perhaps an inch beyond. And the Republicans see the Overton Window as like a springboard. And it's like, maybe we can start here and see how the fuck far we can go. And I don't know what we'll message. I would have lost so much money if I was a betting man on Polymarket earlier on, trying to predict what conservatives would tolerate. A new market is open. So today, Trump has adopted the new slogan of a nation of no new wars. What are the chances that we will enter more global conflict than we have in all of. I think in one year, I think he bombed. It was like eight different countries. I think more than any president in U.S. history. Yeah. So the issue is that what happens is Democrats will going back to the media ecosystem thing. I said a Democrat will think he'll have this idea be like, I think that. I think we should do accountability. And when he has that idea of accountability, he might even go to Fox News and do an interview on it and get thrashed. Or maybe he'll go to Joe Rogan and do a talk on it and get thrashed. Or maybe he'll go to Jake Tapper if he's not writing another book on Biden, and then he'll get thrashed by Jake Tapper who says, well, the country wants to look forward. Maybe he'll go to Pod Save America. I don't know what the fuck I'm trying to think of left wing podcasts that aren't like, super out there, left wing. Maybe he'll go to the Bulwark and have a good conversation with Tim Miller where Tim Miller will be fair but critical. And then that idea will just kind of sit there because it's like. And the American Public will look at it like, I don't know, man. That seems like kind of, I'm not sure. And that's it. When the Republican has an idea, they brainstorm it. They think about it like, okay, okay, let's accelerate this bad boy. They make all the rounds on all their shows where it is uncritically repeated there. So they have all of that energy from there. And then from there, everything is like accelerated out into other parts of the media ecosystem until the public cares about it. And that's how they message and that's how they do. And they're able to force so much stuff into the public mind with that environment. And I think Democrats. So like, for your accountability thing, I agree that there should be accountability, but it has to be. Everybody is on board. And it's like, this is what we're doing. And if it pulls a, a little bit like at 49% support first, it. Don't worry about it. Push the message hard, like Newsom did with the, with the gerrymandering in California. Push it and see if you can get people to actually accept it and then message on it. Don't wait to see if they feel good about it right now. Make them feel something about it, you know.

[Stephen]

Yeah, no, I think that's, that's very valid and Right. The other problem for Democrats, which is a good thing for Democrats, is the diversity of their electoral coalition. So, I mean, Democrats are some white working class union members, a lot of white educated professionals, a lot of women, single women, a lot of Hispanics, a lot of African Americans. And what this, like, it is not a homogenous coalition. Right. A lot of Jewish people, a lot of Catholic people, a lot of nuns, you know, people who don't. You don't do religion, period. And when you have a networked coalition like that, it's much harder to hold together because everybody has different things that they're interested in. But it means that it's also, you're pretty resistant to a demagogue because it is hot. Like they all have different interests. Right. Whereas if you. The Republican coalition is basically white high school educated men, like that is, that is the majority of the, the Republican coalition. And they all kind of want the same things. They all come from very similar cultures. And so it's easy for one person to get a lot of power by just catering to one demographic. And I think that is also part of the messaging aspect, which is that it's really big coalitions, a lot of disparate interests, and that's, that's good. I mean one of the things which has changed America, I'm sure you've talked about this before, is the ideological sorting of the parties. And so beginning around 1980, we wound up, I mean we used to have very ideologically heterodox parties. There were conservative Democrats, liberal Democrats, conservative Republicans, liberal democral Republicans. And if I just told you somebody was a Democrat or Republican, you couldn't automatically know where that politician was on the spectrum. And the party starts sorting them out around 1980. And one of the things that we then see is what are called landslide counties. So these are counties in which the presidential result is 20 points one way or the other. And I, I don't have this in front of me, so I'm going off memory. Please don't take this as gospel. You have to go look it up. Starting in 1976, I think the number of the percentage of counties in America that are landslide counties is like 40%, I think. And today it's like 80%. And so you just, as people start sorting out out the part as this, as the parties sort out ideologically, people then start sorting out geographically. And so you wind up with these really homogeneous pockets everywhere. And so that now if you're in Salt Lake City, Utah, Salt Lake City is a lot closer to like Brooklyn than it is to, you know, like, I don't know, Bum, Wyoming or something. And but by the same token, rural New York State is a lot closer to like Alabama than it is to Brooklyn too. And so all of this stuff, this is why I said, I mean we just have all these cross pressures that are. I don't know if they're new in the history of the country because I don't know all of American history that well, but they're new in like the age of modern politics. They're new in the post television age, you know. And I don't know man, I'm just not, I'm not super, super optimistic that this all goes back together again.

[Jimmy]

Yeah, I mean I definitely, I share the feeling, I just, I have some level of optimism because I feel like you have to otherwise. Geez, what a depressing. Especially to exist in media. Do you ever play or have you ever played any video games growing up or anything or.

[Stephen]

Yeah, not that old man.

[Jimmy]

Well, I don't know if you played

[Stephen]

a lot or not at all or I, I was. So you don't need my full gaming history. But like I remember buying my first super Nintendo entertainment system and being very excited with my snes and I, you know, all the way through. Played a lot of Sid Meier Civilization through college. Did a little bit of World of Warcraft MMORPG stuff. And, you know, my kids have a switch to. I got a couple pinball machines here in my office. I actually have a custom gaming cabinet being made for me.

[Jimmy]

Jeez.

[Stephen]

Wow.

[Jimmy]

All right. Okay. So lots of video games.

[Stephen]

A little bit of a game. Yeah. But not like a League of Legends guy.

[Jimmy]

Gotcha.

[Stephen]

I mean, so I'm not sure if that. So I can't. Am I really. Am I really a gamer if I don't do first person shooter type?

[Jimmy]

It depends on if you've ever broken a gaming accessory before or peripheral or whatever.

[Stephen]

No, because I was a. Because I bought that stuff with my own money. I was always really, really. Whereas my best friend, who. From second. Second grade, who's still my best friend today, he. He was like a kind of a rich kid. Not a really rich kid, but within the scale of New Jersey suburban worlds, he counted as a rich kid. And he would get so mad and would break his, like, Atari controllers. And then he'd always tell his mom, like, it's defective. And his mom was always like, oh, that's terrible. I'll get a new one.

[Jimmy]

It came with that massive crack right down the middle. That's insane. Yeah. And all the tape all over one thing, I think, again, I try to analyze like the. Like the whole thing because sometimes if you look at just the end, you miss stuff that's happening. There's. My background is professional. There's a game called Starcraft or whatever.

[Stephen]

I.

[Jimmy]

You don't really know that. I guess I don't know why I went on that.

[Stephen]

Oh, Starcraft. People talk about Star. Right? It's a spreadsheet game,

[Jimmy]

I guess. Depends on, you know, if you've only played Atari games, I guess to you everything is a spreadsheet on a computer. So.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Yeah. Okay.

[Jimmy]

It's not Pac Man. Okay. All right. There is a. I use this concept of, like, the Democratic Party is always defending against the other side. And if you're defending, the. The best that you can do is hold ground. You're never advancing. You're only holding. At best, that's a perfect defense. Otherwise you're losing ground. And when you're attacking, sometimes there are strategies in the end games, whatever. When you're attacking all the time, you're not attacking to win. You could win. But when you're attacking, one, you're not getting attacked. And two, sometimes by doing the attack, you can open up other opportunities that you don't even see. Yeah, but those other opportunities, you can't even see them if you're not already kind of assuming an aggressive posture. And somebody in a defensive posture would never even see those aggressive opportunities because they'd be too scared to even move their army outside of their base. I have to be here to defend. And there are some things where sometimes I almost wish what it would look like if, if somebody in Congress was to. If the Democrats could get enough people to pass a bill or to have 150plus people ready to pass a bill saying that they want Donald Trump to have to apologize on national TV for scamming the American public with cryptocurrency. I don't know, something dumb like this to attach it to a bill. And I don't know if it would necessarily pass or not, but it would be interesting to hear the Republican Party have to contend with the fact that Donald Trump has made over a billion dollars with crypto and to at least have to discuss that. And the Republican Party gets away so much with always being on the attack that they never have to really discuss anything. They are never held to account for anything. I joke a lot with my audience because there's a lot of my background for politics is I'm like the Internet debater guy. That's what a lot of the stuff I've done in the past is. And there are a lot of strategies that I would complain about when I'm arguing with people that I've noticed the Republican Party has just adopted. One of the, you know, unbeatable strategies is the. I haven't heard of that. Somebody would bring up something about Hunter Biden and they would know every forum, every possible thing relating to his taxes and everything else. And they'd be like, did you know that, like, Roger Stone was in direct contact with the hacker that breached the dccc? And like, I don't. I'm not really sure Roger Stone or Goose Guccifer, is that the same as Assad? They'd have no knowledge of it. And it's like, oh, I guess we just can't talk about it. And you see Mike Johnson doing this today where Trump will just do the most outlandish stuff. And apparently Mike Johnson just hasn't ever heard about it. Yeah, I haven't seen that. I didn't know you said that. And the Republicans, because the Democrats are always so defensive sometimes I wish I'm going back to your idea of like, we should prosecute them. You know, if we push for it, at least we get to hear them have to defend it. Because right now there are just so many things that are given. I think because Democrats want to be not conciliatory, but they want to be reasonable and fair minded and self critical. There are so many truisms that just reverberate around this country that just drive me insane when I argue with anybody. When I hear people like, why do Republicans get this credit for not spending as much? Right. Even today, I think even a poll I saw a week ago, I think Republicans are still trusted more with the economy than Democrats. In my lifetime, that's never been true. Why do we believe this? Not fiscally, definitely not economically.

[Stephen]

It's vestigial cultural memory. It's fucking insane.

[Jimmy]

Yeah, but I never hear Democrats, it seems like they're afraid to fight on like almost any point ever. And then there are just things that I feel like, like I've radically morphed how I viewed all these things. There are things like culturally, socially and then politically that we kind of do where we talk about these things that we do as like responsibilities to be burdened. Like, we talk about like diversity and like including people and it's like this is just a thing, guys, and we got to be nice to the minorities and blah, blah, blah. And it's like we've looked at like racially pure societies that are like hell bent on only the best and whatever. And these guys, they die in a generation. They suck. These countries don't succeed. And the soyest, most dei, affirmative action, multicultural, whatever. How many years have you heard? I've heard how many times that China's economy, the GDP, is just about to take over America's gdp. And despite all of our mistakes, everything else, it's still, they're not even close. The United States is one of the most diverse countries in the world in terms of everybody that we have. And we have managed to do so much with it. But every time Democrats talk about a positive on their end, it feels like we're very reluctant to like aggressively market on it. And all of it comes off as like a little bit like kind of like finger waving, you know, like, you gotta do this. And then we let the Republicans get away with so many myths or whatever. Like people look at me crazy, but I'll have the argument with anybody. If you wanted to get an impartial judge on who has more evidence for their senility, like Trump too or Biden. I would say Trump, a million percent. Biden had an abysmal debate performance. Absolutely. Trump didn't debate anybody in his Primaries. And after his one debate with Kamala, he said he didn't wanna do another one, but they're just. They get away with all this. Why is Trump called the dealmake? Where are the hundred deals in 100 deal?

[Stephen]

He wrote a book about it, so it must be true.

[Jimmy]

Yeah, it's just. Why do they get a word? It drives me crazy.

[Stephen]

Again, it's because all of that is priced in somehow in the minds of the public. Right? The public's like, well, yeah, you know, but he just says that he's. Yeah, well, I mean, you can't take that seriously. Right? It's. It's the. The clown nose on. Clown nose on, off. And, you know, whatever Trump says that you don't like, you can just say, well, you know, literally, not seriously, or vice versa. And with the other side, it's, well, like, can you believe that Democrat X said this? I mean, it's a. I don't know what. What to do about. Do you have. Speaking of radical reforms and accountability, do you have, like, a wish list for if we ever go to the Good Place?

[Jimmy]

I kind of do, but I usually push back against it. There's a more macro concept, but, like, just to not get too far into it, the example I always use is that if you're playing Monopoly with a bunch of friends and in the middle of the game, somebody lands on your boardwalk, and then he doesn't have the money to pay, so he takes out a knife and he stabs you, your conversation is not going to be, we need to ban knives and maybe even guns. Like, the next time we play Monopoly, it's going to be, this guy is not playing by the rule, where this guy's not going to join us on our next Monopoly. He's never playing Monopoly with us again. And so there are things that I would like to see changed structurally in the United States. But people need to look at it as, like, a perspective. Like, our institutions would function better if they were to change in this way, but it wouldn't have prevented where we're at now. The best, the most crystallized example of this I can think of is when they amended the Electoral Count act after the January 1st stuff or the January 6th stuff. If you read any of the Chesbro stuff, any of the Eastman stuff, they knew they were breaking the law. They knew the whole time.

[Stephen]

Oh, yeah.

[Jimmy]

They don't care what the law said. That's why anytime a conservative says constitutional, that's a code word for break the law. Because we know that we're Going to hope that our Supreme Court backs us and they have two free votes there right now, so they probably would. So there are changes that I would definitely like to see a whole host of them. I think that I do believe. I do believe that state representation is important. So, like, conceptually I get things like the Senate, but we have the Senate. For the Senate, do we need the Senate also for the electoral votes for the President of the United States, do we need land to be represented there? Do we need the House to be slightly unbalanced? Or maybe we should expand the number of seats. It can't be that rural peoples have an advantage structurally at every single part of our government. I think the Senate is there and it protects the state interests. And that's enough stuff. Obviously, Supreme Court, I think the people should be term limited. I feel like we should have more justices. I thought it was cool when they used to ride circuit and you could get justices that were ruling in circuit decisions. So they just. Just you get more info from them and everything. Term limits, I think, are good. I like term limits not because they should be term limited, but I like the idea that we don't play like the wacky crazy lottery game of is my president going to get zero Supreme Court picks or four. I think that's fucking crazy. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of stuff like that, I guess, like, I mean, conceptually, I like the filibuster, but at this point, I. Fuck. When. If you had, like the parliamentary thing that I don't think anybody understands, where it's like, man, this legislation be really hard to pass at 60 votes, but, like, if I can kind of sort of make a compelling argument for why it's just like a budget thing, I guess I can do it with 51. I don't know what the fuck. I don't know. So, yeah, there are definitely structural things that I think are worth looking at that would make it so we have a better, stronger system, but it won't save us from a Republican Party right now that is without accountability because they'll break whatever rule. The best example I can think of is this is the Lindsey Halligan appointment. And I don't even remember which district it was in, but there was a rule that Virginia. Yeah, you can only have them for 90 days, I think, and then the district court gets to decide. And then Pam Bondi was a genius, and she was like, well, it says 90 days. Well, once she's gone, I could put her in for another 90 days. And they're like, no. And she's like, yeah, and it's like, if that's how you're going to read every rule and every law, like there's no hope for those people, you know.

[Stephen]

Let me ask you another question. So this is again a subject of some debate between myself and my colleagues. What percentage of Republican voters do you think want the authoritarianism? Like, so for them, the authoritarianism isn't something they have to look past because they like the policies or because they're team players or something. But, but what they, when they look at Trump, the thing they like about him is that he will hurt their enemies and he will accumulate more power and move us towards a one party state.

[Jimmy]

I hate seriously considering this question because I just like to scream at people all day. In my mind this question is like, like, why did this relationship end between the man and the woman? And while the man cheated and that's why it ended? Well, the woman wouldn't fuck him for two years. Oh, then it's her fault. Well, the guy didn't take showers. Oh, well, I guess it's his fault. Well, like, I don't know who's the fault. So when you ask me that question, on its rawest level, I would say of Republican voters, 75% maybe plus would be okay with some form of like authoritarian stuff. But I think that that opinion and that perspective is heavily influenced by them believing that the other side has a vitriol for them and is engaged in their own authoritarian stuff. And at that point, it's like a survival question. As somebody that grew up hardcore conservative, I listened every day to your Buck Sextons, your Michael Savages and your Rush Limbaughs. And every time there was a new Democratic thing, it was like green energy. This is how the Democrats want to control what car you drive. This is when they want to shut off your air conditioner. This is how they want to destroy your life and control every part of it and take over everything and force your kids to all be gay and trans and whatever else. And if you legitimately believe that, as silly as it might seem, if you legitimately believe that, well, fuck if I don't have my authoritarian leader, they're going to bring in the drag queens and they're going to trans my kid and he's going to pull up with a Prius and my life is going to be over because we accepted FEMA funds for a disaster two years ago. And now Biden FEMA agents are coming to inject us all with the COVID vaccines forever. And it's on A quick real life example of that. Oh, my God. That flooding that happened in Hare county in Texas. We went back and we were watching, I think it might have been several years earlier. It was like three to six million dollars of funds were sitting in a bank account and they were having these city meetings, right? Well, yeah, it could have been used for that, but every person that was coming up and speaking to the district or city panel or whatever of the elected officials was talking about how we can't use this money. As soon as you accept FEMA funds, they can take our homes, they can force us to get vaccinated. And this is a small county, $5 million, a lot of money for these guys. So, yeah, so my answer is it's a high percentage. But hearkening back to what you said in the beginning, not because I don't think Republicans are fundamentally evil, terrible people, but they live in an environment where they really do think that the left has basically operated on this level forever, and so why shouldn't they do the same?

[Stephen]

Interesting.

[Jimmy]

There was American Rescue Plan funds, not, not FEMA funds. Sorry. They did do the FEMA funds thing though, for Carolinas. I remember there were people saying that if you accepted FEMA funds, Biden would take your house. But yeah, where, why, where you guys are. How do you engage with that question? I have. I don't think of it this way, by the way, because otherwise we're just evil people.

[Stephen]

But, yeah, yeah, here's, here's, here's. I mean, so I, I am maybe more fatalistic than you are on this. So I think the number is probably lower, maybe even significantly lower. Like, maybe it's only like 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 Republican voters who have decided that actually they're kind of down with authoritarianism. My concern is that that's a lot of people and I don't know that a liberal democracy is sustainable in the long run. If you've got. So if, if. Let's, let's just say it's one third of Republican voters. Republican voters are a third of the country. So if you have one ninth of the country that is no longer interested in liberal democracy and liberal society instead wants totalitarianism, I think the odds are pretty good that eventually they're going to get it right. I mean, the, the. There were like, what, 25, 000 Bolsheviks, right? You know, it's not like the entire Russian countryside was full of, of people who are committed Marxist Leninists. You can, you can move a lot of the world around you with a mass of People that big. And I don't think. Well maybe that's not true. We clearly have had a large percentage of Americans who were invested in totalitarianism. We know this because of slavery, the Civil War and then Jim Crow.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Pro.

[Stephen]

Right. Yeah. I mean they were, they were just, just objectively there was a large portion of America who wanted a form of authoritarianism and did not like liberal democracy. And then we sort of believe that that went away, you know, like by the time you have the Civil Rights act, so let's just say roughly from 1975 through like, like 2015. And. But maybe it didn't go away, right? Maybe, maybe that portion of American political life was dormant for that period. And, and so the thing which has haunted me a lot is that the political context of conservatism in which I sort of came up through the world, I had thought was like the end point of conservatism in America. Right. Like this is a, you know, we, we had reached this sort of pure Burkean, very intense intellectual. This is, you know, the conservatism that I was seeing was the party of Lincoln and Burke and it was all about, you know, free thought and liberalism in the small L way. But maybe that was actually just an aberration, right? That's a historical aberration in the real American conservatism was all the stuff that existed like shortly before I was born and we're, we're reverting to. That mean something to think about.

[Jimmy]

Yeah, yeah, that's a hard one.

[Stephen]

That's what I do. I'm just a ray of sunshine. I show up on people's streams and

[Jimmy]

I better than being a. Both sides are at least don't be a both sides. Oh my goodness, those people. I think that. I guess at the end of the day the reason why I fixate on the media stuff so much much is at the, at a very abstract level when I look at like the ontology of a human being, I think that there are things that we all consider good and there are things that we all consider bad and that generally in order to get people. Generally I'm generalizing a lot. In order to get people to, to believe in or to do bad things, you have to obscure something from them. Like I fully admit I am a meat eater, but I genuinely believe that if every person had to watch a 30 second video of like a slaughterhouse before they ate or something even for one day, I think you probably have like anywhere from 5 to 30% of society might go vegan depending on how Many times you make them watch those videos. I just think that the more stuff that you're able to put between a person and the bad, as we would agree what is happening, then the harder it is for them to. The harder it is for them to say that that is like a bad thing, I guess. And because our world today is so international, a lot of things that we talk about, you never really get to verify or come in contact with. Like if I started a cult of balcony jumpers who I, you know, claim that we could fly. That cult lasts for all of after the first or second jump. Maybe for the true believers, they might last to see the second jump and then that cult is gone. But if I have a cult that tells you that 20, no, 30, no, 40 million illegal immigrants came in under Biden. I don't know, was it 1 million or 100,000 or 100 million? I don't know. You don't know? At the end of the day, and there are so many lies that you never actually have to pay back. Generally, as you lie and you accumulate this deceitful debt, at some point you kind of have to cash in and like, oh, okay, shit's catching up with me. But one thing that really bothers me is I feel like in 10 or 20 years you're going to have kids coming home from school and their parents are going to be telling them that what you're learning about the 2020 elections isn't true. That was a contested election, or maybe they'd even be teaching that in schools. I don't know that it's a contested election. And as long as we are having all of these systems, and I think the systems have gotten more sophisticated a bit because we become more nationalized, you're not seeing what's going on in your neighborhood. It's what's all around the world. Because the Internet is bringing everything to you. It's just harder to know. My ex wife, Swedish. It was so funny going back and forth, you know, between Stockholm and southern Sweden and coming back to the United States and hearing about Sweden is on fire, Malmo is burning down, and it's like, where the. Where the fuck is it? Like, is there crime and shit? For sure. Related to some immigration stuff. Absolutely. But holy Christ, people think it's. It's a. It's a war zone and that's a problem.

[Stephen]

It's bad. Listen, I think I gotta jump. Is that all right? Did I. Yeah. Wait, Jam by leaving.

[Jimmy]

Can I ask you one question? Just because you asked me what is the one or Two or the getting the top three big reforms that you think you want to see for government stuff.

[Stephen]

So you got to expand the Supreme Court because if you don't expand the Supreme Court, nothing else you do will withstand scrutiny. Sure. Supreme Court is partisan. Okay. Irrespective of the fact that it ought to be expanded for like other reasons. Just as a, you know, if you're trying to reform the system, the first thing you have to do is reform the court. You have to add state.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

States.

[Stephen]

I mean there's just no way around it. And the deployment of national guard to Washington D.C. gives you the perfect rationale for it. The citizens of Washington D.C. because they were not a state, were threatened by the United States military. They must be given statehood in order to protect the citizens of D.C. in the future from other presidents. Bam. Right. I, I think it should be absolutely open and should be part of the discussion as to whether other U. S. Territories become states.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

States.

[Stephen]

The obvious one is Puerto Rico. But I mean they have to decide whether they want to be a state. You can't like, you know, make them become a state.

[Jimmy]

And Canada and Greenland too, of course.

[Stephen]

Right, Obviously. Obviously. Okay. I think House expansion is something that ought to be like this is a place where the Overton window really needs to be moved by Democrats. And I, I have really come around on the idea of House expansion and you're not going to get it in 2029 or 20 or whatever. But, but this needs to be a part of the long term plan because it's one of the only ways you fight gerrymandering and it's one of the only ways to begin lowering that like structural penalty that urban, urbanized populations wind up facing. And, and then after that like I have a lot of thoughts about like nationalizing space. I, which I think it was an enormous, enormous mistake. And I say this irrespective of Elon Musk and his politics. Enormous mistake to privatize control of the gravity. Well, like just as a matter of national security should never have been done. And I, I think, I would think the American people have learned, learned that by now. Certainly the American military has learned that by now. I think. And I don't know man, like I get pretty far out into like oligarchy stuff. Like I would be, I, I would be very, very antitrust. You know, I do not like the idea that a guy who owns a bunch of tech infrastructure also owns CBS News and CNN and Tick Tock don't love that. That. And I, I think about wealth taxes and you can't really tax wealth. What you have to do is you have to monkey around with capital gains in order like to do an actual wealth tax. But I think about billionaires not in terms of fairness but in like antitrust terms that there is some number of wealth at which a person's stops having the ability to act like a citizen and begins acting like a non state actor. You know. And I don't know if that number is $200 billion or $500 billion, but there's a level at which it does become a category difference. Yeah. And it's dangerous to the state. Like the state can't allow, in the same way the state can't allow somebody to mint their own currency. They, they, they just can't allow that level of wealth concentration. And I am, am, I am interested in that stuff too. And then there's all bunch like section schedule F stuff like, you know, can you depoliticize the government? Like this is one of the things I, you know, can you imagine that? John, John Ossoff. Joel Ossoff. John Ossoff. I always mess that up. John Ossoff is inaugurated as president and the first thing is like, well, is he going to fire Cash Patel? I don't know. Cash Patel was appointed to a 10 year term and that's one of the norms. I thought John Os Kosov and the Democrats said that they wanted to adhere to norms and traditions and well, this would make him just as bad as Trump if he fired Cash Patel. You can see this conversation, right?

[Jimmy]

It will happen.

[Stephen]

And so, you know, like a lot of, a lot of conversations are going to have to happen around trying to understand how do you re. Establish norms. Because one of the things I do believe pretty strongly is this, that you can't, you can't legislate everything.

[Jimmy]

Yes.

[Stephen]

Right. And this is like once you start drawing lines, you are giving people permission to do lots of bad things right up to the line. And this is like the function of norms. The function of norms is having amorphous guidelines that mostly keep everybody in check. And I do not have any sense as to how to return to that world.

[Jimmy]

Okay, two quick things and then I'll let you go. Somebody brought this up in chat. I had a friend, not even that political brother say, I love this idea. My one big thing to be easy to do is anytime an elected official or a member of the government, so kind of whatever, or member of the executive branch, whatever, anytime they're talking on the news, they're sworn in first. So if they lie about Something they can be charged with perjury.

[Stephen]

Oh, 100. I love that idea. Absolutely. Yeah. Andrew Weissman has a book coming out. I haven't read it yet, so I've, I don't know. This is what he said. I've only heard him talk about it. But like, you know, other countries like France and Brazil have laws for politicians about lying about election results. And I'm interested. I don't think that could withstand judicial scrutiny because of the First Amendment. But like, I'm listening, listening. And it is, if it seems weird to me that it is illegal for a, the CEO of a company to lie about like their earnings. Right. Because then you can then prosecute them under, you know, criminal fraud statutes. But it's not illegal for the President of the United States to lie about an election being stolen. Yeah, that seems bizarre to me.

[Jimmy]

I can't tell you that. You can go to the polling place a day earlier, a day late. I can't lie about anything related to where to vote. Vote. That's illegal. Yeah, there was that and then the second thing. We didn't talk about this, but I just plant this in your mind. You probably imagine you already agree, kind of. But one thing that the Democrats can do if they message better is we have to, at some point where I say we meet, we as in me and my Democratic group have to be able to say no. When there are wacky crazy things happening on the left. And sometimes I think that we get associated with a lot of the crazier stuff on the far left, not because any amount of us believe it it, but just because there's no public voice saying I think the Mao costume is a bit much or I think that the, you know, the five year old trans athletes. Probably not. We probably don't need to have this like as a matter of policy for the party. And yeah, I think the Democrats could do a better job at being able to push back against that too.

[Stephen]

But fully agree. I, I would say though one of my senses, you could tell me I'm if I'm wrong or not. Is that when you get out to like the far left by which we're talking about like the Mao people, the Tanki, I mean, are, are they ever likely to vote Democrat? Right. Unless like if the Democrat is a Joe Biden, like I'm not. I don't think they will just as a political science matter, that they did show up for Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. Yeah. And don't we have some evidence that a bunch of those people became Trump

[Jimmy]

voters or don't vote or. Yeah, because a lot of.

[Stephen]

Right. They don't vote or they become Trump voters. This is, you know, like the horseshoe is. Is kind of real. And so, I don't know, like, I. I have no patience for the tankies. Yeah. You know, like, maybe it's because I'm a cold war baby. I'm like, you know, Russia was bad and it's bad.

[Jimmy]

It's bad still today.

[Stephen]

Liquidating the Kuloks was bad.

[Jimmy]

Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

[Stephen]

Cultural revolution, bad. Killing all the sparrows, bad.

[Jimmy]

True. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Please stay based. We love you and Sarah and Tim and. Yeah.

[Stephen]

That's very nice of you to have me. Thanks, man. You took my streaming cherry. Oh, well, I gave it to you.

[Jimmy]

Well, thank you so much. I'll make sure Tim knows that.

[Stephen]

See you, man.