← Conversations with Coleman
Loading summary
Transcript105 lines
- [00:01]
Coleman Hughes
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Jane Coston. Jane is a journalist who focuses on conservatism and the gop. She was a senior politics reporter at Vox and a contributing opinion writer and host of the Argument podcast at the New York Times. She now hosts what a Day at Crooked Media and frequently appears on cnn. In this episode, we talk about the far right obsession with conspiracies about sexual deviance. We talk about why black support for Trump has increased over the past 10 years. We talk about what the mainstream media gets wrong about conservatives, and we talk about why Jane is a libertarian and much more. We had this conversation about an hour before Charlie Kirk was assassinated. So that's obviously the reason why we didn't talk about that. So without further ado, Jane Coastin. This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Between two factor authentication, strong passwords, and a VPN, you try to be in control of how your info is protected. But many other places also have it, and they might not be as careful. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast for 40% off. Terms apply. Okay. Jane Kosin, thanks so much for coming on my show.
- [01:32]
Jane Coaston
Absolutely. Anytime. Thanks for having me.
- [01:35]
Coleman Hughes
So I've been following you for a while. I think, I assume a lot of my listeners will be familiar with you from your work at Vox for years and also your work at the New York Times. And you ran the Argument podcast. Just great podcast. Used to do it with. And then before that you had done a podcast with Ezra Klein and Matt.
- [01:55]
Jane Coaston
Boutique, Sarah, Cliff Darland. That was the weeds over at Vox.
- [02:00]
Coleman Hughes
That's right. And then the Argument podcast was that. That was with Ross Dauthin.
- [02:04]
Jane Coaston
That. Yeah, that was just me. And then I think now Ross, it's. They changed the name of it. I think it's now Matter of Opinion. And so that's Ross's podcast where he gets to watch. Peter Thiel failed to answer the question of whether he wants humans to keep existing.
- [02:21]
Coleman Hughes
Right. That was a. That was quite the clip. That was quite.
- [02:23]
Jane Coaston
That was a long pause.
- [02:24]
Coleman Hughes
It was a very long pause to what should have been a softball. So can you give my listeners and me a little bit more of your background? Where are you from? I don't know if it's correct to describe yourself as a libertarian, but I've seen. I think I've seen mumblings of that. And so, like, what was your. What were your political. Political beginnings? And give me a little. Little of yourself.
- [02:48]
Jane Coaston
Sure. Well, I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio.
- [02:51]
Coleman Hughes
That's where my dad is from.
- [02:52]
Jane Coaston
Actually, I am legally required to ask, do you know where your dad went to high school?
- [03:00]
Coleman Hughes
He did not go to high school in Cincinnati. By that time, he had moved to Schenectady, New York.
- [03:04]
Jane Coaston
Okay, okay. Because that's the question. If you. If anyone listening is from, like, Cincinnati or Louisville or St. Louis, there's like a. A Midwestern corridor where the most important thing is. Where did you go to high school? I went to Catholic school. I went to Ursulan Academy in Cincinnati for high school, which means nothing except for the people from the 513 area code. Then went to the University of Michigan, lived in Ann Arbor, the greatest place on earth, lived in St. Louis, had a journalism internship after I graduated, then moved to D.C. lived in D.C. for 13 years, did a whole host of things, some of which I was very bad at, some of which I'm pretty good at. Turns out I am terrible at being a press secretary or doing pr, but I'm pretty good at talking and writing. And so I actually got into kind of what I do now, sort of by accident. I was doing. I was a. I was a speechwriter at the Human Rights Campaign. And at night I covered the NFL and college football for a website called SB Nation, which still exists to some extent. And a friend of mine who I was writing with was like, hey, do you want to basically do this full time? And at that time, MTV News still existed. And they were like, you know, we're just going to take big swings. We're going to try a bunch of different things. So they brought on a bunch of people to just. And just basically like, hey, you can do whatever you want. Which, if you've ever worked in media, that never lasts. Like, anyone coming in and being like, oh, you know, we're going to be so creative and you can do whatever you want, and we're just going to take big swings. You've got about, like, a year to a year and a half before somebody else comes in. And it was like, actually, no, we weren't. Are not going to do that. But. So I was at MTV during the 2016 election. Then MTV pivoted to video and laid everybody off. So I was freelancing for a long time. And then I went to Vox in 2017, from Vox, then to the New York Times, then to Crooked Media, where I host what a Day, which is a daily politics show. You asked about my politics. So you mentioned I used to identify as being a libertarian. I actually did an episode of the Argument about this in which I had an argument with former representative Justin Amash because he was trying to convince me to stay within the Libertarian Party. And I said the Libertarian party had been taken over by maniacs, which it has been. But I think that what really shaped my politics and a lot of kind of how I see the world is growing up in a household with two die hard liberals surrounded by conservatives. Growing up in Cincinnati in the 90s, there is an old joke from Mark Twain that when the end of the world comes, he wants to go to Cincinnati because then he'll have 10 more years. That is less true. Now Cincinnati is a thriving metropolis. That's a really interesting place to be, which is a giant shock to me, who grew up there in like the. The 90s. But my parents were basically the only Democrats I knew. I grew up in a pretty working class neighborhood in Cincinnati, one of the inner ring suburbs called Madisonville, which is, you know, it's now one of those places where, like recent college grads can still afford houses. But when I was growing up, it was still, you know, kind of a tough ish area. But I went to Catholic school, so everyone I knew their parents were Republicans and conservatives. That was just. Everybody was a conservative except for my house, where my parents were liberals. My mom converted to Catholicism to marry my dad because that was my dad. My grandma's like one proviso. She had no problem with the fact that my mom was white. She did have a problem with the fact that she was not Catholic, which is kind of an amusing thing about my grandmother, that she was like, that's all you need to do and then we're good to go. But my mom definitely took on the kind of liberation theology element of Catholicism and idea of Catholicism, the Catholicism of Dorothy Day or the lay woman Jean Donovan. And I think that for her, Catholicism was a means by which she was able to find solace in a world that's hard, but also a means by which she could act well and do good. And that's something that was always really important to her. You know, she was a court appointed special advocate for neglected and abused children. My dad was a librarian. Like, it was very much focused on the world of ideas and the world of the mind and the world of being good to other people, but in a context in which my parents thought that everyone around them was ridiculous and insane because everybody we knew who voted who talked about politics were conservatives. Everybody we knew. I was my, you know, 911 happened my. The second week of my freshman year of high school and I remember being, you know, absolutely horrified. I still, I think that that's something that's weird when you talk to younger people where I realize now that 911 has become like Pearl harbor and this thing that's like, it's so far away that it's weird to think about. But I will never get over the visceral horror of, of that day and the days that followed. But I remember being like the only person in my class who thought like, you know, that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were bad ideas. And it was just like, that's just. And you know, my parents were opposed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and everybody else we knew wasn't. And so what's interesting to me is that, and if I can say something about myself being interesting because I'm actually, I think most people are far more heterodox than we give credence to. I think in our industry we praise heterodoxy, but if you look at how voters actually think about things, most of them are just kind of going, ah, I don't know. Like, I think most people are more complex in their politics than how we sometimes depict it. But my parents explanation for why everybody else was a conservative and we were not was basically kind of the exact opposite of what I see sometimes online. Um, which is, you know, how sometimes I think conservatives and people on the right talk about it of like, oh, you know, those poor liberals, they're just, you know, either rich and stupid, poor and stupid, or just some combination of stupid. Well, that's how my parents talked about conservatives and Republicans just being like, you know, these dumb people who don't understand, who haven't read books, who aren't cultured, how can you know, someday they might get it, but they don't right now. And so I always thought that that just seemed to be taking the easy way out. I always have believed that people get to their politics in general in the same way you do. You know, you don't come to a politics just because you read one book or because you were annoyed by one person probably. But I think that I always was interested in exploring how other people thought the way they did or got to where they are now, politically, culturally, socially. And I think that for me, libertarianism. And by libertarianism, I'm thinking about small L libertarianism, not the Libertarian party, where occasionally they have giant arguments about whether driver's Licenses are evil. I think that for me, that was a space that was as questioning of state power, as questioning of the need to wield the state against people perceived as enemies of the state or activities that were in opposition to the state. They were as critical of that as I was. And I think that what really bothered me about libertarianism, the actual ideology, is that, you know, when you go back and you read Rothbard or you read some of, like some of the early libertarian thinkers, there was the combined sense of we should lessen the power of the state, but also this kind of argument that actually we shouldn't lessen the power of the state on these people. I always think about how, if I remember correctly, Murray Rothbard started students for Strom Thurmond at Columbia University, which is one man, he wanted to trigger the libs real early. But two, it was indicative to me of a libertarianism that I don't like, which is a libertarianism for me, but not for thee. And I think that many people espouse a kind of personal libertarianism. I should be able to do whatever I want. I don't know about you. And I think that that's always been the tension that I see when thinking about how I think about libertarianism, which is something I don't really think of myself as anymore, and how libertarianism gets interpreted more broadly. Did that make sense? That was a really long, winding answer to a actually very normal question.
- [12:07]
Coleman Hughes
No, it does make sense. I think of libertarianism as having at least three strands. One being economics, preference for free markets, dislike of state intervention in the economy. Then there's the kind of civil libertarian who is really worried about, you know, privacy, worried about due process for people accused of crimes, free speech, this kind of thing. And then there is libertarianism and foreign policy, like, right, basically against the use of state power abroad.
- [12:41]
Jane Coaston
Right.
- [12:41]
Coleman Hughes
Isolationist, broadly. Do you identify with all three of those and do you agree with my categorization?
- [12:49]
Jane Coaston
I think that categorization is correct. I think especially a categorization that is speaking of libertarianism on its own, I think it's worth thinking about how so much, so much of our politics right now is based on being the opposite of something else. And I think that it's helpful to break that out and put that, you know, make sure for once actually talks about libertarianism or any political ideology in a vacuum. Like, what does it look like, let's say a hypothetical world where everybody is not in opposition to something else. So, yeah, I would say that for me, it was the idea of civil libertarianism that appealed, especially because I think that civil libertarianism is one of those ideas that is very easy to embrace, in part, but if you start thinking about it more, like start thinking about it further, you see how it breaks down really quickly. Like, thinking about, you know, something I remember talking about a couple of years ago is the idea that one of the challenges we have with regard to criminal justice reform is that there are too many laws. There are just too many laws. And laws, if you are thinking from a libertarian perspective, laws inherently involve the power of the state to enforce those laws. So when you're thinking about why is it legal to turn left here but not legal to turn left there, if you're thinking about how long your grass can be, if you're thinking about all of these little things that we don't really think of as being crimes or laws at all, that all of that is the ways in which we think about state power, trying to direct the actions of individuals and communities for good and for ill. And so I think that the challenge of civil libertarianism is that what, you know, the ideal to me is to have fewer laws. However, I'm also a person in the world, and I interact. I live in a city, I live in West Hollywood, and I want the world to operate in a peaceable manner, which requires laws. And so I think that that's been the challenge for me of thinking of myself as even a civil libertarian is that I don't know if I can live up to the ideals that I have in terms of how I want the world to work. And I think fiscal libertarianism is definitely the kind of libertarianism that I think is definitely is easier to embrace, because I think that in many ways, it's just correct. And so, you know, I am opposed to protectionism. I was opposed to kind of the protectionist ideals of the Biden administration, and I'm opposed to the protectionist ideals of the Trump administration. It's funny because I remember in 1999, the big world Trade Organization protests in Seattle. I remember this because I was 12, and if I recall correctly, Rage against the Machine, one of my favorite bands was, like, somehow talking about this, and I was like, oh, that's interesting. And now it's just kind of funny that, like, the people who I remember being most critical of those protests are now many of the people who are, like, super into tariffs and protectionism. But I think that the element. How best to put this, I think that for me, it just seems as if, like, that kind of free markets do work. Free markets are Good people get mad at the free market all the time. But free markets I think can, you know, we've all been the beneficiaries of free markets for such a long time that I think we kind of forget that they're there and we would miss it and we will miss it when they're gone. With regard to foreign policy, I think that's the one where I'm just kind of like, ah, like that's one where I think that libertarians on foreign policy, it makes a lot of sense. And then you get into actual foreign policy and you get into like the actual events, you think about these actual contextual circumstances and that's when I'm just kind of like, I don't know, I don't know. So I think that civil libertarianism is probably the piece of the libertarian three legged stool, such as that exists, that appealed to me. But it's also one where I don't know if I can live up to it personally.
- [17:15]
Coleman Hughes
So I'm curious how like in your earliest days as, as a libertarian or learning about these ideas as a younger person, what were your conversations like with your parents? Because certain parts of the libertarian platform, like the foreign policy element, to oppose the Iraq war, to oppose the Afghanistan war, the. Those are gonna go down easy. I imagine for liberal Democrats in the 2000s, the free market stuff may be a little bit less. And so I'm curious was that, did you have interesting thoughts?
- [17:48]
Jane Coaston
Oh, we did not talk about this. We did not talk about this. I think that for my parents, one of the earliest moments of politics in the household that I remember was my mom would never buy Nestle products. So Nestle was accused of promoting formula over breastfeeding in communities that had poor access to clean water. The problem being that when you combine dirty water with formula, you get sick babies. And my mom was so upset about this for years. This is a campaign that began in 1977. I was born in 1987. As far as I know, my mother never purchased a Nestle product. Never. And so I think that my parents understanding of free markets and what, you know, what free markets had wrought, so to speak, is based on, you know, kind of an anti corporatism that I totally understand and I think anybody can understand. That's what makes this conversation so interesting and so difficult is because I can say, you know, free markets are good and it's good to have this interchange of goods and services for currency and hooray for NAFTA or something like that. But then I can also note that like Corporations are not inherently good. They don't do inherently good things. They are not based on being good people. That's not what they do. And I think that my parents really felt as if, you know, the corporatization of broader life. Like, my parents are. My mom was like. I was not allowed to watch any television that wasn't PBS when I was a kid. My mom hates. Sorry. She passed away earlier this year. So I keep doing the like, hates hated thing. My mom hated commercials on television. Hated them, actually. Also hated billboards with ads. Not a big fan of ads. But, like, I think that that's a challenge. That was something like. I just knew I was never gonna really bring this up. Like, I think that that's one of the things about having, like, political differences with your parents. I am not a person who's into fighting. There are people who are very into, like, fighting and arguing, and we encounter them all the time. But I was not about to do that with my parents because, for one thing, I. No, no, no. My mom was. My mom's maximum Height was like 4:11. And I'm still. She passed away in April. And I'm still like, not gonna do it. Not gonna do it.
- [20:14]
Coleman Hughes
I'm sorry to hear that, by the way.
- [20:16]
Jane Coaston
Thank you. It was terrible. But I think that that was just a moment in which I understood where I was coming from, but I also understood where they were coming from on this. Where their. You know, my parents understanding. And also, I think lots of people's understanding of corporate power. Like I did, you know, I was in anti sweatshop protests in high school. And I think that what companies do and how companies behave cannot be, you know, you can't make it into just kind of like a pro free markets, anti corporatism. Like, that's not that. It's not that easy. And I think that that was something that I think about all the time, where I'm thinking, like, on the one hand, I think tariffs are bad because they're attacks on the American consumer, and I think protectionism is bad. But I also understand how people get there in a lot of different ways.
- [21:07]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, I mean, I think it. Wasn't it Adam Smith and the wealth of nations or somewhere else, you know, the father of modern free market capitalism, who said that businessmen don't get together for two seconds if not to collude, to somehow raise prices, screw over the consumer and otherwise cheat and so forth. And so the idea that free markets as a system are good for the population as a whole, good for countries as A whole has always priced in the fact that individual businessmen and corporations are. Many of them are going to be nasty, you know, rat that are trying to screw people over and do terrible things and cut corners. And so those two things are not incompatible. Although I get how emotionally, when you find out a company is like poisoning babies, that it showers you on the whole system.
- [22:00]
Jane Coaston
Right, exactly.
- [22:02]
Coleman Hughes
So I want to ask you a few questions because you've been covering, I guess it was mostly at Vox, but perhaps also at the New York Times. You've sort of been covering Republicans and conservatives as a phenomenon for the past 10 years. Is that fair to say?
- [22:18]
Jane Coaston
Yeah.
- [22:20]
Coleman Hughes
So I'm curious. What do you think that the mainstream media got most wrong about conservatives in general over the past, say, 10 years?
- [22:33]
Jane Coaston
Well, I think that. Hmm. I think that the challenge mainstream media has is that mainstream media in general. And when I say mainstream media, there's actually. It's funny to me because there's. Newsmax tried to sue Fox News last week. It didn't work. The case got thrown out. But their basic argument in the suit was that Fox News and Newsmax don't count as mainstream media sources because no one who watches them would replay would be like, oh, you know, Newsmax isn't working for some reason. I'm going to watch cnn. It's a specific thing. They under. They. They know that we know that. And so I think that it's always interesting when we talk about mainstream media because we all. We both know what we're talking about. But it's always funny because we need to not be talking about, like, the most popular news channel on earth. But I think that I remember talking to Tucker Carlson years ago. This is like 2017. I wrote a piece about this for the New York Times where he was talking about how there's always been, and there is in any political group, there's always like the people at the top. And by the top, I don't mean like the people who have the most money or something, but kind of the determinists of what the ideology is. I wrote about how William F. Buckley, very famously the founder of National Review, kicked out members of the John Birch Society from the. What he called the conservative movement. Because this is the time in the 1950s where one person could be like, you can't be here. And I went back through some of the archives of the letters that they. That Buckley received over this issue. And it was funny how the language was kind of reminiscent of today. Like, basically people accusing him of being a rhino. And you have always had within the conservative movement, this ideal of what the people at the top want it to be. The people who think that they can determine what conservatism is, the people who can say that it's, you know, the three legged stool or the people who can talk about, you know, this is, you know, a values movement or something like that. You've always had those people, but then you've also had the people who actually vote. And I think the people who vote, to me, are more reflective of what the American right is than the people at the top. And I think that what we saw over the last decade or so is that you had 20 to 30 years of the people, the determinists at the top of American conservatism, such as we understand it, the people who are writing for National Review, the people who were then at the time running the Heritage foundation, aei, any number of the kind of thinkers and talkers of conservatism, they had an idea of what they thought this movement was. And then there were the people who actually vote for Republicans, and they had an entirely different idea of what this movement was, of what the point was, what it was trying to do. They were not as enthralled by an ideal of Ronald Reagan or even Buckley himself, or even, you know, anything that you. That people keep saying today, like, oh, you know, this isn't your grandpa's Republican Party, all of that. I think that was really, it wasn't real. It was not real what people were voting for and what the people, the deciders and kind of the determinists were saying. They were largely disconnected from one another. And I think you see that with how, you know, the Iraq war, it took Donald Trump coming in to being like, this was a terrible idea. And I was like, yeah, it was a terrible idea. And you had a whole host of voters who were like, yeah, it was a terrible idea. We, you know, our kids went and, or we went and fought this war. You know, we, we were in Iraq for nearly two decades. Like, you just saw the difference between what voters were trying to say and what the determinists were trying to say. The determinists who still in some cases think the Iraq war was a great idea, and we just didn't try hard enough. And so I think that one of the things that media does, and you and I both know this, is that if you want somebody to talk about an issue, you do not go to guy on your street. I mean, maybe we should be doing more podcasts with guys on street. You go to like the person who runs the organization that talks about this all the time, the groups. And there's a big conversation among Democrats and liberals about the groups. People get very mad at the groups because the groups can determine whether or not a bill, like what the bill language is in a particular piece of legislation, or if the groups are mad at something, then you have to be mad at something, and you have to determine whether or not you need to make the groups happy or something like that. Well, I think that conservatism has that, too, where you have a whole host of people who used to have the power to say, no, we're not going to do that. No, we're opposed to this. And then you had a whole host of voters who were like, actually, we don't care about any of that. And so you kept seeing that over and over again in 2015, 2016, where it was like, well, you know, you know, Donald Trump used to be a Democrat. You know, Donald Trump is never, you know, is too, as I believe he said, like, oh, the most pro LGBT president or will be ever. Oh, you know, he's not. He doesn't know how to talk about the Bible or he doesn't know how to do these. He doesn't talk in this specific way that was very appealing, or he doesn't know how to talk in a specific way. And that was anathema to the determinists. Like, there's a very famous against Trump issue of National Review, you know, where you have a whole host of people who just kept saying, he's not a conservative, he's not a conservative, he's not a conservative, he's not a conservative. Voters didn't care. And I think that that's because conservatism, much like in some ways liberalism, is now less about a specific list of, you know, do you think this? Do you think that? But it's more about a. I wish there were a better way to say this that I could think of. It's more about kind of a vibe. And you see this now where you have people who are like, oh, I long for the 1990s. We're just like, kind of just a constant idea of like, something used to be better and it's worse now. And I want to go back, but it's just. It's funny because now we're getting to the point where what people have decided is like the, you know, the zenith of human civilization is like 2002. And I'm like, I can tell you, I was there. It was not the zenith of human civilization. I was 15. I wasn't having, like, a real great time. So I think that that's the challenge that media has, is that if you want to talk to somebody about conservatism, you obviously go to a conservative organization and you send them an email, and you're like, can you have this person come to talk to me about conservatism? And they'll be like, yes, I absolutely can. But are they as reflective of what conservatism actually is as the people who actually go and vote?
- [30:01]
Coleman Hughes
Right. So if we try to kind of, like, isolate the actual differences there, what would come to mind for me is that Trump ran far to the right, you would say, of his party, on immigration. He was way tougher on immigration than. Than. Than pretty much than anyone else in the Republican Party in 2015. And this was part of his appeal. Right. And on the other end, he ran much softer and much more to the center on. On. On issues of public entitlements. You know, like, he's like, I'm not going to touch Social Security. He wasn't Paul Ryan.
- [30:40]
Jane Coaston
He wasn't Paul Ryan, who famously said that he'd been, like, dreaming of cutting, I believe it was the tax bill that was in 2017. He was like, oh, you know, we were dreaming about this while we were doing keg stands in college. Which I was like, you went to a different college than I did. But, yeah, like, it was in opposition to a type of conservative orthodoxy that I don't know if everybody, like, really was behind at any point. Right.
- [31:10]
Coleman Hughes
And so, but then there's the other piece I want to talk about is, like, the Christianity piece, because.
- [31:14]
Jane Coaston
Right.
- [31:15]
Coleman Hughes
If we're. If we're considering Trump's win as, like, a litmus test of how off the Republican Party was from its base, would. Would that then imply that the base did not care about believable. Being a believable Christian as much? Absolutely thought.
- [31:31]
Jane Coaston
Absolutely. 100%. I think that there is a type of. How best to put this? There's a type of kind of secular evangelicalism. And what I mean by that is that there are people who embrace the aesthetics of Christianity but don't do it or live it, but they know that it is important to embrace it because of the symbology it offers. And so, of course, I mean, I think I always think back to, In, I believe it was 2015 or early 2016, when Trump does that interview with Chris Matthews, where he is at, you know, he says that women who have abortions should be punished. And I remember a bunch of anti abortion groups were like, no, we don't think that. We don't think that. Like, I know that they're kind of like the weirdos in Texas who absolutely think women who have abortions should be punished, but it's not a big thing. But it 100% is the kind of thing that you would think pro life people think if you were a Manhattan liberal. And so there were so many moments, and you see this whenever Trump has to talk about the Bible in, like, in depth, where you're just kind of.
- [32:48]
Coleman Hughes
Like, he actually doesn't know a single Bible verse. He has not memorized a single Bible verse.
- [32:54]
Jane Coaston
Nope. Which it's actually kind of impressive because it's easy to do. You know, you could just do, you know, for God so loved the world he gave his only son. Like, there's a.
- [33:04]
Coleman Hughes
And you would think he would have just like, he would have like, prepped one. Prepped one or two just to be ready.
- [33:09]
Jane Coaston
Exactly. But it's interesting because he didn't have to do any of that because you can see in polling that there are a host of people for whom they describe themselves as Christians or even evangelical Christians, which is a specific thing I hate. We can talking about things that, like, media gets wrong, talking about Christianity or religion in general, absolute shit show bananas pants over there. But you can, you know, there are a host of people who are evangelical Christians who, when they're polled are like, oh, you know, I do not think that Jesus is the son of God. Which I was like, I. That I think that's a pretty big piece of it. And so I think that he was much more. And I wrote a piece about this for the Times about the debate. Debate between an episode of Firing Line between William F. Buckley and Hugh Hefner about essentially sex and media and pornography. And I argued that it's a debate that Hugh Hefner obviously won because one of the things that you have when you have kind of the secular evangelicalism is that you have a Christianity of vibes. You have a Christianity of people who are like, we love the Ten Commandments, but we don't want to really abide by them. And for whom, you know, it's a Christianity in which you go to church on Sunday, but it's also a version of which you think that, you know, wasn't it so much better when movies were hornier and you could put up a pinup calendar in your office and nobody would get mad at you? And so I think that many people, and I would say, like, this is, you Know, I do not want to be one of those people who is just like, oh, you say you're a Christian, name the all the apostles or something like that. But I do think that there's a type of secular evangelicalism that is very much about, like, Christianity as a vibe Christianity in opposition to something else, not Christianity as truth. You know, I happen to believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God who did indeed, was indeed murdered on the cross and did indeed rise again three days later in fulfillment of the scriptures, son of a virgin, whole thing. Totally believe it. And I think that one of the things that I've seen over and over is that there are people for whom they think of Christianity in the same way that, you know, Constantine did, where it's like, if I say that I am this, that means I'm actually part of this movement that is defending the west or I am standing athwart liberalism or something like that.
- [35:56]
Coleman Hughes
It's like instrumental Christianity.
- [35:59]
Jane Coaston
Yeah, it's exactly. It's instrumentalized Christianity, which as someone who actually believes in this, I find kind of objectionable because it strikes me as like, you know, what would you be using if Christianity didn't work? Like what? You know, it just really speaks to me of like, you know, if Zoroastrianism had more pull, you'd be like, ah, Uhura Mazda. That's my guy.
- [36:24]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. So there's one element of that I want to push back on, which is the foreign policy piece. I think it's definitely true that the US Security establishment was far more gung ho on the Iraq war than the American people were. The Afghanistan war, I think not so much. I think the American people were very much behind that war, certainly in the beginning because they saw the direct link between 911 and Afghanistan, and there was no direct link between, between saddam and, and 9 11. But I mean, you would think. I think there's a bit of a false memory around that only because, you know, by 2007 and 2008, it's, it's super mainstream to oppose the Iraq war at that point. And, you know, Obama runs on a platform of having opposed it, and now it's. But like, in 2003, it's not like people, like everyone was opposed to the Iraq war. And it's not like people, people didn't punish Bush at the polls in 2004 for it.
- [37:28]
Jane Coaston
Nope, nope. He went in there and he thought, I think about that 2004 election a lot because it really is another example of. And this happens every time, like you win an election and you're like, wow, everyone's into everything. I'm into. I'm going to privatize Social Security. And it just like, okay. But yeah, it really was. It's interesting because there was a large anti war movement, but I think that one of the challenges, again, if you go back and read about anti war protests in 2003, there really is a sense of these people are standing against our troops. They don't care about America. Don't they remember what just happened? And it is interesting because I think that. And I'm a prime example of that kind of weird, hazy memory because my, you know, we 911 is my freshman year, we go into Afghanistan, and I just remember there was a lot of talk about, like, the Taliban being terrible for women. Totally true. And then it is, you know, we go to Iraq and even, like, even going back and trying to remember, like, how we got there. It's very hazy for me at the time, and I was in high school, so I think it might. I think that many people would be kind of experiencing that same haze, especially when there was a sense that this was something we needed to do, but we needed to do it for reasons that even now, I'm kind of like, what was the point here? What were we doing here? And I think that that's something that's so weird for me is now seeing people who are all saying, like, oh, we all opposed this. We were all against. This is so bad. I'm like, I was. First time. I remember that. You didn't. But it is a kind of a really hazy moment.
- [39:22]
Coleman Hughes
Right. So what it says about the. I'm curious what this says about the future of the Republican Party after Trump is gone, presuming that he leaves, which I think he will. What, like, what lessons do you think the party is going to? The party elites are going to internalize. Because one lesson you might internalize is just like, copy Trump. Trump was so successful. He. He wrote a different playbook, and that is the new playbook. But there's a danger in that, which is that part of Trump's success might not just be his policies. It might be his personal individual charisma. Because Trump has this quality where I think he can sort of take voters to places that they didn't know they wanted to go. He can. I mean, I. I'm curious if you, if you agree with this. Is it just that he's sensing where his base actually is, or is it that his base is so loyal to him that whatever decision he makes, they will trust they will trust him, even if it's a bad decision.
- [40:26]
Jane Coaston
I think the latter. I think that the base, and I always think it's important to remember that there's the base and then there are the people who voted for Trump. And those aren't the same thing. I always do the comparison, like, do you like this band, or did you, like, line up for tickets and try to get signatures? And are you, like, you know, talking about them all the time? That's a different thing than, you know. And so I think that what Trump is able to do is that he does have this very solid base that will follow him on basically whatever he wants. And that base makes everybody else anxious to oppose him or anxious about opposing him. And so, but to your point, to your question of, like, you know, what comes after Trump, I think the challenge is going to be that there are going to be a lot of people who try to imitate Trump, but none of them have worked. None of them. Like, Even when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ran and his whole effort was to be like, you know, Trump, but better Trump, but smart Trump, but on top of it. And it absolutely did not work. I would argue in part that that was also because he had an incredible, incredibly online campaign. Like, you remember, he launched on Twitter Spaces, and it didn't work. And then, you know, you have weird son and rad ads about, like, you know, they're just so online and you see this. Actually, I actually think that that's a concern for this Trump White House, too, of just being incredibly online. But I think that we even going back to 2017, I always love this example because it was so, you know, I was in D.C. at the time, and it was just so funny to watch it happen. When Corey Stewart ran in Virginia, and his whole thing was being like, you know, taking down Confederate monuments is evil and talking, yelling about carpetbaggers. He's from Minnesota. He went to St. Olaf College. Like, there just really was a moment of people just being like, oh, all you have to do is sound like Trump. And I think that is my concern and actually an overarching concern, because there are a lot of people, a lot of conservatives who I think, think that, you know, they. They have done a rethink of foreign policy, of domestic policy, of taxation, of, you know, what it means to have a government. And they, I think, would, you know, would see Trump as being like, oh, you know, this is a reason to kind of shift our perspectives on a couple of issues. But then there are going to be a lot of Republicans and You see them trying to run for office and failing right now, who are like, oh, all you have to do is just be an asshole. That's it. You don't have to change anything about your actual politics. You don't have to change anything about your views. If you post videos of yourself setting fire to a Quran or calling everybody fags, well, that'll do it. And I think that, that to me, one kind of weirdly insulting to Donald Trump. Like, it's kind of weird that you're just like, I'm not going to change any of my policy views. I'm just going to be the most annoying person on earth. And that'll do it. Because people clearly love that. Like, that's kind of insulting. But I also think like, when people are given the choice between you could change your demeanor or you could change your policies, people will change their demeanor so fast every time. And so I think that, oh, a.
- [43:38]
Coleman Hughes
Hundred percent, because it seems to me like it, you know, given how famously politicians flip flop on policies, I think.
- [43:45]
Jane Coaston
That people, that it's easier to do.
- [43:47]
Coleman Hughes
That than to actually change your personality or change the way you show up on a mic.
- [43:52]
Jane Coaston
I think it's, I disagree. I think people will change their personality and how they talk about an issue in such a way that it might even sound like they've changed their minds. There's a great example. My colleague John Lovett had a really interesting kind of infuriating conversation about a housing bill in California with some Democrats. And one of them was trying to argue that she voted against more affordable housing because of like something, something making apartment buildings shorter or something like that. And you could tell that she thought like she was winning this argument because she had, she was talking about it in a spot specific way, but she hadn't, like, she hadn't actually done anything for affordable housing in California or Los Angeles for that matter. And so I do think that there is a demeanor shift. But then, you know, and you can see this with how some Republicans talk about, you know, talk about war, for example, where you have someone who, you know, Donald Trump, I don't think Donald Trump is anti war. I think Donald Trump is anti losing wars. I think if you, if he, he will go to war with anyone, if you could guarantee that he is always going to win or be viewed as winning. But I think that he did tap into a lot of people who expressed a lot of exhaustion from Iraq and Afghanistan. But now you see that, you know, the same Republicans who were talking about how, you know, Trump is this anti War president and this idea of like, oh, we're going to be turning down foreign entanglements, and they're like, let's bomb some drug boats. And so I do think that it's really easy to change how you talk about something. It's really easy to start using different language or swearing a lot or it's easy to do all of that. But I think that policies, politics is the road by which we get to policy. I think that policy is often people are less willing to give up on.
- [45:47]
Coleman Hughes
Okay, so let's shift gears, talk about the Democratic Party a little bit. Because, you know, after there's a certain shock to having allowed Trump to win a second time, given how unpopular he became by 2020, 2021, given all the indictments, although the indictments perhaps might have helped him, actually might have helped rally the base around him, given that he was just never a popular president, particularly popular president, even the first time. Right. You would think Democrats would love the idea against running against Trump again in 2024, but they blew it very, very badly for many reasons that are too widely known for us to need to rehearse here. But if we're talking about the future of the Democratic Party, what do you have any strong views about what a smart Democratic strategist should lay out as a plan for them for winning next time and for broadly, you know, saving their legacy as a party?
- [46:50]
Jane Coaston
Well, a couple of things. One, I have now you mentioned George W. Bush winning in 2004 earlier. And I was alive then. I remember this all very well growing up in Ohio. And, and there was a sense of inevitability about George W. Bush that I think people who are maybe younger or weren't around for it don't know, that there was a sense of, like, you know, 2004, the Republican Party is ascendant. They will, you know, never lose again. I think that that's a thing that happens in politics is that, like, you win one election and you're like, we did it. We did it forever. And so I think that, you know, like, in 2004, we don't know what the future will hold. We don't know what is going to happen. That might make it seem, it might make this entire conversation seem kind of ridiculous when, I don't know, Governor Pritzker wins a landslide in 2008 or 2028, wins a landslide in 2028, like, which I do not think will happen. But I'm just saying we don't know. I would say also that one of the challenges of Any sort of autopsy is that everybody seems to think that everyone would win everything if they just did whatever actually they said. So, for example, you have this ongoing battle, especially on Blue sky, where I've yelled about this. A lot of people being absolutely convinced that the reason why Kamala Harris lost is because she did not take a hard enough line on Israel. People 100% convinced of this. And then you look at. There was actually really interesting data in the nation, surprisingly, that showed that the people who like the swingest voters and the people who declined to vote at all also had, like, no opinion really, on Israel, Palestine, and they didn't. They were tended to be more conservative than the Democrats who did vote. So. But, you know, at a certain point, if there. If that's the most important issue to you, of course you think that it's the most important issue to everybody else. I appear. You know, I've always joked that I personally am aware that most people don't hold my politics. I know that, and I would never assume otherwise. And I think it's very strange when people are just like, america agrees with me. I'm like, no, they don't. So I think that that's also a challenge of people doing, you know, just pretty much kind of arguing that whatever it is they happen to want would also help Democrats win. But, you know, setting aside all of that, I would say that a smart Democratic strategist should embrace what I've jokingly called the cool dad theory of liberalism, which is a liberalism of what would my dad want? And by my dad, I mean literally my dad, but like a liberalism that understands that most people don't want to do politics all the time. Most people don't want to do this. I think that politics as a. As a hobby is terrible for everybody, and it's making everything worse. Like, people who really get really mad at you if you talk about something other than politics, like, on a social media site, which is somebody who. For whom, you know, I love football. I do not love politics. I love football. I love working out. I love metal. I do not love politics. I'm interested in politics, and I think it's interesting. And I want good policies to happen and bad policies not to happen. But, like, I have things I actually enjoy and that that are not this. But I think that, yeah, I think many people feel that way. You know, that was kind of. I think Biden's Entire campaign in 2020 was like, aren't you tired of all of this? And then, of course, Biden was like, actually, you're not tired of all this. We're doing all this new stuff and it's more politics all the time. But I think that a cool dad theory of liberalism is that America is great, can always get better. It's actually nice to be able to have non political moments and talk about things with your friends without calling them either degenerate or problematic. I wrote about this, you know, a couple of years ago but like most people in general, there's actually a recent, I think it's in the Economist. Like most people hold pretty like kind of center weaving complex views. It's just that social media, it makes it seem like it's all tankies and all Nazis all the time. But most people kind of want a politics that works for them. A politics that's about like why does that road never get repaired Or I want more affordable housing or I want it to be better to live where I am or I want it to be easier to move or change jobs or have kids or do something like that. Like I want politics, a liberal politics that is about helping people do the stuff that they want to do and not yelling at them about whether or not they should do the thing they want to do. And so, you know, yes, this is a politics that all eventually leads to everybody getting to watch football with no one yelling at them about it in any direction, which is very important to me personally. But I do think that there is something to be said for a politics that embraces patriotism in kind of the OG Barack Obama kind of way of like we are not a red country or a blue country, we're America and very 2004 DNC speech, but also one that emphasizes action towards doing things, not action towards being something or seeming like something or saying something. And I think that that that's where I would go. But again, I'm not a Democratic strategist, mercifully so that's kind of where I'm thinking.
- [52:36]
Coleman Hughes
Gotcha. Recently we asked some people about sharing their New York Times accounts.
- [52:41]
Jane Coaston
My name is Dana, I am a.
- [52:43]
Coleman Hughes
Subscriber to the New York Times, but my husband isn't. And it would be really nice to.
- [52:48]
Jane Coaston
Be able to share a recipe or an article or compete with him in wordle or connections. Thank you Dana. We heard you introducing the New York Times Family subscription. One subscription, up to four separate logins for anyone in your life.
- [53:04]
Coleman Hughes
Find out more@nytimes.com family I didn't really.
- [53:08]
Fabric by Gerber Life Advertiser
Think seriously about life insurance until I started planning for marriage and kids. I mean I always knew it was important but it felt like one of those things I just get to eventually. Then one day it hit me. If something unexpected happened to me, I'd want to make sure my family was taken care of. No confusion, no scrambling, just peace of mind. That's when I found Fabric by Gerber Life. Fabric by Gerber Life is term life insurance you can get done today. Made for busy parents like you all online, on your schedule, right from your couch, you could be covered in under 10 minutes with no health exam required. And here's the thing. If you're young and healthy, now is the time to lock in low rates. You might think, I'm in good shape, I've got time. But that's actually exactly when you should be applying. Even if you've already got life insurance through your job, it might not be enough. It might not even follow you if you change jobs. Fabric offers policies issued by Western Southern Life Assurance Company that are flexible, high quality and can actually scale with your family's needs. Think a million dollars in coverage for less than a dollar a day. And look, fabric isn't just trusted by me. It's backed by Gerber Life, which has been helping families for over 50 years and they've got more than 1900 five star reviews on Trustpilot. So you're not rolling the dice. Join the thousands of parents who trust Fabric to help protect their family. Apply today in just minutes@meetfabric.com Coleman that's meatfabric.com Coleman M E-E-T fabric.com Coleman Policies issued by Western Southern Life Assurance Company not available in certain states. Prices subject to underwriting and health questions.
- [54:58]
Coleman Hughes
Okay, so this is a topic I think we've both you've written about at least once. I assume you've talked about probably many times. The trend in the past 10 years or so of black Americans going towards the Republican Party. Now, it's not a huge trend. It's not as big as the trend in the Hispanic community, but it nevertheless is true that I'll speak for myself and everyone I know in my life. It was on neither my bingo card nor anyone I know. If you asked us in 2015, someone came from the future and said Trump is going to run three times. Each time he's going to get a higher share of the black vote than the last time. And by the third time he's going to get a higher share of the black vote black vote than any Republican you can remember in your lifetime. This would be on nobody's bingo card in particular because of how how deep the conviction was among many Democrats that Trump was a racist of a kind. Worse than we even thought previous Republicans were racists. Right. And so clearly the electorate was going to react to this, and he was, if anything, going to do worse than a typical Republican with black voters. The opposite happened. The question is, what do we know about this trend by now? I think people have stopped denying the trend is a thing at this point. What do we know about this trend? I mean, I know that we know it's more male than female. And my understanding is it's like it's more under 35 than over 35. It might be more. I'm not sure whether it's more college educated or working class. So give me, give me what you think the trend is, and if you have strong ideas about why it's happening, tell me about that, too.
- [56:45]
Jane Coaston
Yeah, it's funny because I'm looking at exit polling right now for 2024, and it's the trend. 92% of Black women voted for Kamala Harris. That's compared to 77% of black men, which is like, you know, we're still, we're still talking, like very large numbers of people voting for Democrats. And I think that that gender breakdown is really important and kind of under discussed. But I think that one of the challenges is that the politics of people who are within the fulcrum of oppression are always going to be different than people who are not. And what I mean by the fulcrum of oppression is that you have roughly, you know, African Americans being able to vote en masse happens roughly in the 60s, let's say roughly. And then you, you know, you have basically people with the lived and institutional memory of life before then and how people are talking about race. And I think that there really is a sense of like, there's only one game in town and it's the Democratic Party. And I think that as the experiences of African Americans, like pretty much every other racial group in the United States, are more influenced by class, by gender, by where you live and what you do and what you have access to than by institutionalized racism, I think that you see people whose politics are shifting based on that, because as you and I both know, African Americans in general tend to be more socially conservative. They just do. So it actually makes a lot of sense why, you know, a socially conservative African American man would vote for Donald Trump. Like, yeah, that, that checks out. I mean, it makes sense if you're a socialist conservative, you know, Cuban emigre. It makes sense if you're A, you know, kind of right leaning El Salvadorian second generation, then that person that would.
- [58:58]
Coleman Hughes
Push the question back to why didn't that socially conservative black dude vote Republican 10, 15 years ago?
- [59:06]
Jane Coaston
I mean, I think that the, I mean, you have to say also the Trump team did a lot of outreach, but I also think that the availability of social media means that you feel as if there are more options for you or you've heard of more people talking about these specific issues or, you know, you see a lot more African American men who talk about being supporters of Donald Trump. And so you feel as if it's less anathema for you to do so because it's not like you were between Trump and Harris. It's because it's between Trump and not voting at all. And so I think as the parties have shifted as especially the role of gender here, how has that has shifted in terms of how people are thinking about for whom they vote? I think that that becomes a moment where people are more tied to class, gender than they are to voting as a member of a group. And in general, I think that's a good thing. I think it's a good thing that people feel as if they can vote for whom they want to, not because, you know, they are not necessarily voting, quote unquote, against their own interests. Because everybody kind of votes against their own interests in a lot of cases. Because voting often becomes an identity marker. It's like, you know, it is a symbol of what you value or want, not necessarily what you think is actually going to happen sometimes. And I, so I think that for me, I think that that is something where, it's one of those things where if the, if black, if the numbers for black women were significantly different, I'd be like, okay, that's, that's, that's very curious. But this actually to me makes sense.
- [60:55]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. So this might be another way of saying the same thing you're saying or, or, or it might be different. What do you make of the theory that really what's happened over the past 10 years is that the Democratic Party has become more hostile towards men and masculinity in general, even though it's not, it's like hard to cite a specific policy that has caused this, but there is, as we were talking about earlier, a general vibe. I remember there was some Democratic advisor or strategist in this past election cycle who said, I'll butcher the exact quote, but it was like something like the Democratic Party really like, let's be honest, we care more about women, right? And there. And the Republican Party has at the same time embraced a kind of masculinity. I mean, toxic masculinity is an overused meme, but it describes Donald Trump absolutely perfectly.
- [61:53]
Jane Coaston
Right.
- [61:54]
Coleman Hughes
And so doesn't it just make sense that men of all races have drifted towards the Republican Party, which is true. And why would black men be exempt from that trend? So on this theory, it's really just a gender effect. And the truth is the racial solidarity, like cultural element of the black community, where we really kind of police perceived race traitors and basically effectively try to vote as a bloc, just wasn't strong enough to overcome the gender effect.
- [62:25]
Jane Coaston
Right. Which, I mean, again, I don't, you know, I have never gotten to be on the black community zoom, you know, where we all talk, where it's just like you, me, LeBron, you know, Barack Obama, when he can join. I think that that is, that's always been something you. I feel like that's one of those things where you can just kind of see it if you knew it, like it actually. I mean, it's kind of like how I am not very surprised that like, left wing woo culture moved to the right. Like, it kind of, it makes sense if you're just like in these spaces and can think about what this all means and what the language people are using looks like or sounds like more accurately. So, yeah, I do think that it's, it's that gender piece about how people view the Democratic Party. And it's interesting also, though, because I do think that there's a sense for which how one, it's interesting to me that we talk about a party or an entity becoming feminized and that's to imply that that something's bad about it, that, you know, you want to have this more masculine party.
- [63:34]
Coleman Hughes
Because I don't think, I don't think it implies that. I mean, at least when I say it, I'm just describing it.
- [63:38]
Jane Coaston
No, no, I know. I don't, I don't think, I don't think you think that. I'm just thinking about, like the people yelling about the Longhouse on the Internet think that. And so I think that that piece, the gender piece, is really important. And I also think, like, it's fascinating to me that while the GOP has been so good at outreach to African Americans, for example, like the ways in which kind of right wing influencers basically try to, or I don't think they're trying very hard, like, perform towards women is so funny to me. It's like the exact Opp. You know, it very much is the kind of, like, hashtag, male tears just reversed. Just, you know, it's just two people, like, entities attempting to pretend as if genders are constantly at war. And that. That's good. And I do think that's the piece that I think will be really intr. Like, really. I mean, not interesting, necessarily, because I don't think it's good. But that's going to be the piece to follow in the future where you see how much.
- [64:42]
Coleman Hughes
Who was it that said the gender wars will never be won because there's too much fraternizing with the enemy?
- [64:47]
Jane Coaston
Yes, Yes. I love that quote.
- [64:49]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah.
- [64:51]
Jane Coaston
Yeah. But I think, like, that's something. And especially because I think it's really important to. Not to understate how much social media is playing into this and so in how people are performing their politics and even performing their gender politics. And so I think that that plays an important piece here. But, you know, to your original thought about, like, you know, African American men voting for Republicans. Yeah, that totally checks out based on everything else we know.
- [65:23]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. Okay. So another question about something that surprised me over the past five years. So if you had asked if you had a time machine, right. Or you had asked me in, say, 2020 or even 2018, you told me that in a few years, the Supreme Court's going to abolish affirmative action. There is going to be a slew of executive orders and a cultural. A decisive cultural turn against dei. I would have said, well, okay, well, surely people would be in the streets protesting that. Akin to the women's march, you know, on a scale that was, like, profound and huge. And there would be the, you know, the country would be torn and divided over it, and yet, surprisingly, a lot less than I thought. Like, the reaction to it was a lot more. Obviously, many people were upset, but it did not the upset. The upset didn't reach even a third of the scale that I thought it would compared to. If you look, you know, how campuses are melting down over Gaza and. And how people, you know, how many people show up to the women's march and all these other issues. Do you share that surprise with me or is that unsurprising to you? And what do you make of it?
- [66:47]
Jane Coaston
I think that I am not surprised because I think that there is a real sense that the women's march didn't work or that, like, what mass movement politics looks like now is very different from what it looked like before. Like, people obviously still protest, but I think that there is a sense of how protest is interpreted and what it means. You can. You can tie this to how Twitter has changed. You know, you remember that, like, a lot of kind of protest movements of the 2010s, a lot of them were people talking about it on Twitter in a way that is less easy to do now. And also how people view protests in general is different now. But I also think that the challenge is that there's been, you know, how Americans feel about affirmative action, which is why I think it's been lightly amusing to me that you see a bunch of people online who kind of want affirmative action, but like a version of affirmative action for white people where it's kind of like, you know, you see this in conversations, which I was entertained that it happened seemingly so quickly, which, you know, you can hear the conversations of how people talk about Indian Americans. This idea of, like, well, you know, they're too successful, so we can't, you know, we got it. We can't have that. And there really is kind of this, like, Goldilocks, like, you know, you have groups that are too successful and groups that aren't successful enough, and in the middle, somehow, just the perfect group who should get everything. But I also think that people are in general aware. In general, they are aware that most people were opposed to affirmative action, particularly what they viewed affirmative action to be, and they also are opposed to what they imagine DEI to be. Now, the challenge, I've always found, is that DEI became very quickly, there's a black lady here, and we can't have that. And you could see that where it's just like, here's a picture of a judge. She's black. What's the, like, the implication is, like, black lady or.
- [69:05]
Coleman Hughes
The one. The one I remember being very absurd, was calling Brandon Johnson, mayor of Chicago, a DEI mayor.
- [69:11]
Jane Coaston
Yes. Yeah. Which I was like, how do you think people become mayor?
- [69:15]
Coleman Hughes
Right. Well, like, there's no such thing as a DEI mayor by definition, because mayors are elected. Right. There is no. There is no. Like, you know, it's just a result of an election.
- [69:24]
Jane Coaston
Right, right.
- [69:25]
Coleman Hughes
There's. How could it not be meritocratic in some.
- [69:28]
Jane Coaston
Right.
- [69:28]
Coleman Hughes
Broader sense? Even if you think he's a bad mayor, it's a separate point.
- [69:32]
Jane Coaston
Yeah, yeah. And so I think that, like, you know, what DEI and what affirmative action actually were or actually are, and then how they have been construed culturally. I think that in general, most. A lot of people were opposed to that, including a lot of African Americans and a lot of people who just kind of like, this Just seems unfair. You know, it seems unfair to say that, like, there should be fewer Asians at a college because they're not as likable or something. Like, you know, you go back through some of the filings in the Harvard case, and you're just kind of like, yeah, that's a weird way to talk about people. But I think that. So it actually does not surprise me that people, you know, that people were not out in the streets protesting. I also think that there's just kind of a general exhaustion of the last, like, 10 years, and it, you know, and you can see that. And I think that that's what actually really pisses me off about sometimes, like, online rhetoric, about how, you know, people are so exhausted by politics, and yet you have people now who are like, well, now it's time for a race war. And I'm like, we're not doing a race war. We're not. One, no, two. No. But, like, there is. I think that people have been so let down by a politics and in a political environment that promises everything but delivers markedly little. It's like the promises keep going up and the delivery keeps going down. If you go back and look, you know, and this is not a new problem. Politics has always been just kind of an element of prom. You know, everybody's running for sixth grade class president all the time for ice cream and pizza for everybody. And then when that doesn't happen, everybody's always disappointed. And that happens all the time. And so I do think, like, I think that they're just kind of a general exhaustion, which is funny, because you would. You. You go online and people are just, like, mad and screaming. You would think people would be in the streets all the time, every day, but actually, people don't want to do that.
- [71:41]
Coleman Hughes
Okay, so final two questions for you. Just curious to get your take. And I don't know it, but you've tweeted some stuff which would lead me to think you have a take. Jeffrey Epstein, did he kill himself? Do you have an opinion? I mean, this, this. This obsession has swept the culture over the past summer. What do you make of it?
- [72:05]
Jane Coaston
Based on the long, long, long, long, long history of the MCC where he was being held, being kind of a shoddy establishment. I do think he died by suicide. Especially, like, if you think about it for long enough, you know, this is a person who is about. Who had spent his entire life being, you know, fetid by everyone around him and given unimaginable amounts of money to do something. That's the other Thing about this is that, like, it's. You know, there's a lot of, like, the financial stuff about his crimes that I'm. You know, there's been some great reporting in the New York Times on this subject, but that's still very curious. But, like, many people die by suicide in jail because they do not want to deal with the future. And what that means. They do not want to go to trial. They do not want to have all of this discussed all the time. There's a reason why traditionally you put people on suicide watch, but also, traditionally, this prison isn't very good. So I think he did die by suicide. I would also say that, like, I think that the story of Jeffrey Epstein, as someone who, you know, I. I've written a lot and talked a lot about the sexual abuse of young people. And I think that the story of Epstein is indicative of how we treat the sexual abuse of young people, which is that we ignore it or we, in some cases, support it, especially if it's being done by somebody that we think is, you know, smart or interesting, and we just don't believe that they would ever do such a thing. You can go back to the Larry Nassar case with USA Gymnastics. I always think about how when he was arrested in September, I believe, of 2016, the MSU gymnastics coach, the women's gymnastics coach, had her team assign a card for him of support for a man who sexually abused hundreds of years.
- [74:05]
Coleman Hughes
Was that they were personal friends or.
- [74:07]
Jane Coaston
She just thought it would be a nice gesture?
- [74:09]
Coleman Hughes
She didn't know the guy?
- [74:11]
Jane Coaston
It's unclear, but I think, like, I think all the time about how you know and you see this over and over again in case there was a recent case of sex trafficking in Alabama. Like a circle of people and people being like, how could you know? We had no idea. This is all such a surprise. And I'm like, no, people did know. And I'm guessing that someone tried to tell someone and no one listened to them. And we see this over and over and over and over and over again. And it also is like, it's. You know, you read. You read that 50th birthday book that was made for him, and everybody knew, all of these people writing and just kind of joking about the fact that this guy is a sexual predator. And so I think that the reason, to me why this story is important is not because of its political implications, but because of its societal implications. There's a great piece I was reading recently that was talking about MeToo's one win, which is that in general, now we think it's bad if adult men are sexually attracted to 13, 14 year old girls. And you know, you go back in our culture 15, 20 years ago and how adult men are talking about girls who are 13, 14, 15 is very different. And it was widely accepted. And I can say, you know, I was never catcalled as much as I was when I was 11. Never. It's never the most effort that ever happened, like from, you know, walking down the street, from, you know, passing cars, from people. Never more so than when I was 11 years old. And so I think that that is why the story is important to me. It's been very weird to watch the people who, for whom it was very important until it stopped being important. But that's why I think it's of interest. Anyway, that was a long answer.
- [75:51]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. So I agree with you that he probably killed himself. I mean, it's amazing though that, though you and I agree about that and I actually changed my mind on that. I was early years ago, I was, I wasn't sure he was murdered, but I mean, there were just so much, so many weird facts that it seemed like there was, there had to be more to the story. But the more I've actually looked into it, the more it does seem a story of very weird guy plus incompetence. You know, classic prison guard incompetence.
- [76:27]
Jane Coaston
Right.
- [76:27]
Coleman Hughes
I mean, he tried to kill himself two weeks before that, right. And he had, he had every. And then he changes his will the day before he kills himself. It's like at some level you, you've gotta focus on like the basic elements here are just very much pointing towards suicide. And if you get too deep into your cork board and connecting little facts and you can sort of miss, miss, miss the bigger picture. But I, I do find it, I find it kind of astounding how deeply the conspiracy has swept the culture to the point where I see recent polls, like 50% of people in both parties think he was murdered. And the people who agree with you and I, it's like 15% of the country is like a very much a minority view.
- [77:08]
Jane Coaston
Right.
- [77:10]
Coleman Hughes
And. And it's actually looped into another question I wanted to ask you, which is why does it seem that at least on the right, the conspiracy theories are always related to either pedophilia, incest or, or some other kind of sexual deviance. Right. Like I'm thinking obviously, QAnon, right. I'm thinking of Brigitte Macron is a man. The deeper you go into that, you actually Realize there's a. Incest is key to the whole.
- [77:40]
Jane Coaston
Yeah.
- [77:41]
Coleman Hughes
And sexual deviance is wrapped up in all of it. Yeah, Epstein. I mean, I can go on, but why is it always, like, about sexual deviance?
- [77:51]
Jane Coaston
I think that it's. Sexual deviance is something that we all recognize as being wrong. And so I think that it is also the easiest cudgel to use, which is repulsive to me in so many ways. Thinking about the work that my mom did with abused and neglected kids, many of whom had been sexually abused. The number one sexual abusers of children are parents, the number one producers of child sexual abuse material typically referred to as child pornography. I don't like that term because it makes it sound like the genre of pornography. It's not. It's a crime. The number one producers of those parents.
- [78:35]
Coleman Hughes
Are you talking about biological parents or like step parents and things?
- [78:39]
Jane Coaston
Biological parents. And that's depressing. It's extremely depressing. Let's see, let me double check.
- [78:45]
Coleman Hughes
Because I wouldn't have trouble believing, like, you know, step parents or adults in the house that aren't related to the kid.
- [78:52]
Jane Coaston
But let's see. Parental production of. Yep, yep, yep. Let's see. Parental. Yeah. So typically biological father. Stepfather or mother's partner.
- [79:09]
Coleman Hughes
Right.
- [79:10]
Jane Coaston
Who. This is depressing. Anyway, sorry. Yeah, it's. It's a big thing. But so I think that there's this idea also that you can define deviancy or define that kind of sexual deviancy as on the other side. I think a lot about how that, like kind of the whole groomers thing, where it was using a term that is referencing preparing a child to be sexually abused, but using that to refer to gay people being teachers. And I think that there's always a sense of, like, sexual deviancy is indicative of, you know, it is something that's not your deviancy. That's not you. It's them. Them being deviant, them being bad, them the other. You see this in a lot of kind of anti Semitic writings, the idea that Jewish people are behind pornography, that they invented it or something like that.
- [80:03]
Coleman Hughes
Or that like Israel is a haven for pedophiles.
- [80:05]
Jane Coaston
Pedophiles, Right, exactly. And so you see that in an effort to indicate that these people are not just bad, but they're evil in a way that is easily understandable to an audience that knows that pedophilia and incest are evil. And so I think it's like, it's an available cudgel. And I also think that, you know, if I was queen of everything, I could Change anything. That would be something in which I would strike. I want that. That idea of taking the abuse, the sexual abuse of children and young people and using that as a political cudgel against your enemies. If there was one thing I could strike from our political culture, that would be it. 100%. Especially because it does not do anything to benefit children and victims of sexual assault at all. It doesn't do anything. It doesn't do anything. It doesn't make anything better. It makes everything worse. Especially because it becomes clear that there are sexual deviants that you will be okay with, because it's not, you know, it's your. It's your political side. You know, the idea. Like, I keep thinking about the people who are like, oh, you know, the Democrats, they gotta protect Bill Clinton. So that's why they don't wanna talk about Epstein. And I'm like, how close do you think I am to Bill Clinton? Like, how much do you think I am? Like, oh, my God, the guy who left the White House when I was 12. Oh, yeah, I gotta go full hard for that guy. And so when you wield child abuse as a political cudgel and you're not talking about child abuse as a societal scourge, as something that is deeply evil and wrong, I think that you do nothing but make our political culture worse and put more kids at risk.
- [82:05]
Coleman Hughes
All right, we'll end on that. James Costen, thank you so much for coming on my podcast. And before you leave, can you plug where people can find you if they want to follow you more?
- [82:14]
Jane Coaston
Sure. I'm on Twitter and bluesky. Jane Coston. And you can listen to my podcast every day. It's called What a day. 20 minutes to explain whatever is happening on these weird days we keep having.
- [82:28]
Coleman Hughes
All right, Jane, thanks so much.