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- [00:00]
A
Hey, there, listeners. Before we get going today, I want to remind you all that we've got a live show coming up at the Comedy Cellar in New York City with Nate Silver and Claire Malone on September 29th. I can't predict what the news cycle will be at the end of September, but I can confidently forecast it will be messy. So grab a ticket, grab a drink, and come join us as we try to make sense of it all. You can find tickets@gdpolitics.com did your mic drop?
- [00:28]
B
Me?
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A
Yeah, no.
- [00:30]
B
My cat is chasing a mousey around and she, like, flung my phone across the room because she tripped on the cable.
- [00:39]
A
Katie, come on. She honestly, she's a free speech activist.
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B
I will expel her from this room if she becomes more of a problem.
- [00:48]
A
Okay. All right. Sounds good. Hello, and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Drouke. When the clock strikes midnight on October 1st, the US government will run out of funding if Congress does not pass a funding bill by then because of the Senate filibuster. Republicans need the support of at least seven Democrats to do that. This has caused a debate within the Democratic Party. A shutdown is one of the only leverage points Democrats have in a government fund fully controlled by Republicans. So should they use it? Even if it's unlikely they'll extract much, if anything, from Republicans? Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer took some heat from the left when he declined to support a government shutdown back in March. Now various corners of the Democratic commentariat are calling for one, and Democrats in Washington appear more amenable to it this time around. Today we're going to host a debate on the matter with my dear friends Mary Radcliffe and Nathaniel Rakic. The question is, from a political strategy perspective, should Democrats shut the government down? And the debaters have been randomly assigned a position to argue. Thanks to random.org arguing in favor of a shutdown is Nathaniel Rakic. Welcome to the podcast, Nathaniel.
- [02:11]
C
Thank you, Galen. I am ready to argue why that we are in such a crucial moment for democracy that Democrats must use every. Every lever at their disposal in order to stop this scourge.
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A
Okay, so filling in for Ezra Klein today on the podcast is Nathaniel Rakit.
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C
I don't know how I feel about that.
- [02:33]
A
Arguing against a shutdown is Mary Radcliffe. Mary, welcome to the podcast.
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B
Thank you, Galen. I'm very excited to be here and talk about, you know, how intransigence for its own sake really doesn't by any points for anybody.
- [02:51]
A
Okay, well, I'm excited to hear both of your arguments. But I have to say I've brought us to the precipice of starting the debate just as a fake out. I'm going to backtrack for a second because we have news about our former employer and I want to get your thoughts. So Wednesday night, Jimmy Kimmel went the way of FiveThirtyEight, at least for now, when ABC preempted his show indefinitely. In a monologue on the show, he appeared to suggest that Charlie Kirk's killer was a Republican, saying, quote, the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. On Wednesday, the FCC chair, Brendan Carr appeared to threaten Disney over the comments, saying, quote, this is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. And he went on to say, these companies can find ways. Take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead. This has all caused outrage over the suggestion of government coercion and censorship. And it comes not long after Attorney General Pam Bondi characterized the First Amendment as not covering hate speech, which, by the way, is not a legal category of speech. And the First Amendment does protect hateful speech. Nathaniel and Mary, we haven't talked since Kirk's assassination, so I'm curious for your thoughts on a lot of what's going on and especially these recent developments at our former employer abc. Mary, why don't you kick us off?
- [04:22]
B
You're absolutely right that there is no such thing in America as hate speech, although the concept does exist in other countries that do have regulations on speech that is categorized as hate speech. So, like, there is something that exists there. It's just not an American idea. You know, I. I was looking at some polling, and that was done after Kirk's assassination. This was by morning consult for the Deseret News and the Hinckley Institute of Politics in Utah. This is a national poll, though. They asked if people were concerned about a variety of different things that you might think about in the wake of this kind of event. And obviously people are concerned about political violence. So in their survey, they have 86% of people saying they are very or somewhat concerned about political violence, but they also have 85% saying they are very or somewhat concerned about threats to the freedom of speech. This is as important of an issue to Americans, at least in this survey, as political violence itself. Now, of course, we don't necessarily know exactly what people mean when they think about threats to free speech. Right. Like that could be some amount of people that see the assassination of Charlie Kirk itself as a threat to free speech because he was, it appears by the evidence that we have seen up until this point to be clear, it's Thursday morning at around 11 o'.
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C
Clock.
- [05:48]
B
So that's where we are in the knowledge. Like it appears that he was assassinated because of his speech and ideas. So people could be referring to that. But in, in either case, I think these are both issues that we need to be paying attention to in this moment and Americans are concerned about both of them.
- [06:05]
C
Yeah, I mean they're obviously both serious and concerning issues. I think, I mean the reason, the reason to be pessimistic, I think about democracy or you know, about this whole thing is that right to your point, people mean different things. Like it appears on the surface that, oh, there's a huge consensus that these things are bad, but people mean different things when they, or are thinking about different things when they think about these things. And so in the case of political violence, right, obviously it is easy to say you're against political violence, but a lot of people think that they're, they're blaming the other side for political violence. And to be clear, like both sides has become a caricature. But like, factually speaking, political violence does come from both sides. And like, yes, the data does show that the recent spate of political violence is mostly coming from the right, but it is not exclusively coming from the right. We have clear counterexamples. You have the Charlie Kirk shooting, which again appears at this point to have been motivated by the shooter's left wing views. You have the congressional baseball game shooting on the other side, of course you have things like January 6th, like this is a problem with both sides. And as long as people like Donald Trump or you know, whoever the equivalent on the left is, keep blaming the other side basically exclusively for it and say we have no introspection to be doing, then the problem isn't going to get solved. Right. Because again, both sides do have at least some introspection be doing. Even if you think that maybe the other side is more guilty, like you can't deny that your own side has some kind of cleaning up to do on the issue of free speech.
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A
Yeah.
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C
Again, a Republican is going to view this as, you know, yeah, free speech is threatened because cancel culture. Right. There are people, you know, conservatives can't go on campus anymore and like say their, their views or whatever. Democrats might be threatened by things that the administration is Actually doing like, you know, like the, the prospect that Pam Bondi or, you know, the administration could crack down on OPP opposition to the Trump administration. And we are not talking about the same things when we, we talk about the free speech. And again, it's really about blaming the other side and not to be kind of this, you know, getting on my soapbox person about it. But obviously we are in an incredibly polarized time and the temperature does need to be taken down before we can solve a lot of the issues that Americans are actually concerned about, like high prices or immigration or healthcare. What is it?
- [08:24]
B
The thing that I have found really startling, and not surprising, but startling, I guess in this moment is the degree to this sort of cancel culture anti speech tactics you saw in some ways predominantly on the left in 2020 after the George Floyd protests and amid the Black Lives Matter movement and so on, has really been like, adopted by elements on the right now.
- [08:48]
C
We, yeah, we used to work for abc. You know, that comes with certain feelings. But I am honestly like not gonna sit here and be like, oh, like Disney absolutely should have or absolutely shouldn't have fired Jimmy Kimmel or like suspended him or whatever it is that they did. I think that the concerning, concerning part, like you can. Employers can make their own decisions, but like, if, if Disney was acting in response to this almost explicit threat from the FCC chairman, then that becomes an issue. Because if that, if that is the government, you know, coming in and basically, you know, suppressing opposition speech. Right. This is. Scholars who have studied democratic backsliding. This is one of the things that happens as countries become more authoritarian, is that they do you squelch kind of those opposition voices, whether that is in the media or whether it is in like univers, which we've also obviously seen from the Trump administration. So that. And obviously kind of Pam Bondi saying, you know, hate speech is not protected. Which again, to your point, Galen, it is. She's the literally the attorney General, the top lawyer in the United States. So like, that's the kind of thing that is. That seems problematic.
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B
Yeah. And it also denies Kimmel the opportunity to address those comments which he was planning to do on the next show, but they took that show off the air. So he doesn't have the opportunity to like, respond to the response. Right. Like, it just cuts that debate short, which is like, not how we do it in democracy. We do debates. We're gonna do one today.
- [10:17]
A
Indeed, indeed. And I don't know if Jimmy Kimmel has been fired and if he's performed his last show or if he will be back on and have that opportunity. But I want to see if I can thread together some of the different elements that we've been talking about here, which is political violence and free speech. I think part of the reason people took offense to what Jimmy Kimmel said, I mean, if we're assigning people good faith, and I don't think in these arguments everyone has had good faith, but part of what I would say is problematic about what Jimmy Kimmel said is that we know that people are more likely to support political violence if they think the other side supports political violence. And so in these situations, it's important not to just sort of cast blame on a party or a group of people or a movement or what have you, because that increases the likelihood that the side is being told that will support political violence. And so in these moments, I think it's incumbent on everyone to say the vast majority of Americans do not support political violence. And, and this is part of why it's important that in a pluralistic society, Democrats have experiences, all kinds of experiences, maybe positive, maybe negative, whatever, but normal experiences on a regular basis with Republicans and Republicans have normal experiences on a daily basis with Democrats. And they can learn that most people are pretty level headed about these things and also don't prioritize politics, period, are more concerned about some of the other things that make a full life. And so when somebody like Kimmel with a significant platform goes on the stage that he has and sort of casts blame on Republic, makes it seem like, oh, the assassin in this case is a MAGA person, you know, his language is a little bit muddled, so it's not entirely clear to me what he meant, but it seems like the suggestion is, oh, he's a Republican. And now the Republicans are trying to say, oh, he's not. And you know, whatever he said, doing anything they can to blame it on somebody else. So telling a largely Democratic audience falsely in this case that, oh, Charlie Kirk's killer was a Republican makes it more likely that Democrats will see political violence as acceptable. Likewise, when somebody like Trump or other folks in the Republican Party say, this is the doing of the Democratic Party, this is the doing of the left, they make it more likely that Republicans are going to see political violence as an acceptable form of political behavior. And it's not, full stop. I mean, that's, that's the entire premise that things like this podcast and all kinds of political discourse in a Democratic society rest on. So it's not okay what Jimmy Kimmel said And if, you know, ABC wanted to fire him, that's like 2020 era cancel culture, which I think at the time many people realized was wrong. In retrospect, many people realize that it was wrong or that it went too far at the very least. But if ABC wants to fire Kimmel in the aftermath, again, that's something that we've seen before in this country that's not shocking or new or whatever.
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C
Democracy. Yeah, yeah.
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A
There are some underpinnings of, you know, ESPN wants to have some sort of merger with the NFL. And so even in the absence of the FCC chair's comments, there may be some motivations that are impure and motivated by other things than just the sort of cancel culture righteousness, which are a little, maybe weak or you can criticize in their own right. But once Brendan Carr steps into all of this and says, and let me. Let me repeat his quotes, this is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way, and then goes on to say, these companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to guess at what that means. So once the federal government is trying to dictate what speech can happen on a Disney platform, it takes us to a whole nother level. And so I think that people are right to criticize Jimmy Kimmel, and I think people are extremely right to criticize the behavior of Brendan Carr in this situation.
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C
Yeah. And, you know, Disney, just to get our Disney shot in there. No, I completely agree, Galen. And I think that right on the point of viewing the other side kind of in the appropriate way, social media is not our friend in this regard. Right. Because people are going to tweet stupid things and then, yeah, people like Trump or J.D. vance are going to elevate those and say, look like the left is celebrating Charlie Kirk's murder, when in fact, the left, quote, unquote, here is one random Twitter person with like 120 followers. And that is, again, just not true. And I think that it is so important for people, again, on both sides to understand that, like, the, the most, like, the vast majority of voters, the vast majority of, like, politicians on the other side are not in favor of this. And hopefully that I don't think can take the picture.
- [15:27]
B
I don't think there's a single politician that you could point to with a statement that was like, actually, it's good, right?
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C
Yes. No, but, no, I caveated. It There because like, obviously, like some politicians have made comments in the past not, not necessarily tied to Charlie Kirk's murder, but you know, that have basically like insinuated, you know, that people on the other side should be, you know, taken out back. But you know, and obviously those are counterproductive as well.
- [15:53]
B
Yeah, I, I think to both of your points here, the thing that I have my like ears perked for when I'm listening to these conversations on social media is the vegetation of all of this. Right. Like using they to discuss the actions of a single individual. Yes, right, right.
- [16:10]
C
They killed Charlie Kirk. No, it was just this one guy actually.
- [16:13]
B
No, this one guy killed Charlie Kirk. And I suspect we will find as, as is most often the case among people who commit these sorts of acts, that he has his own unique brand of crazy that we can't even imagine.
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C
Rational people tend not to shoot people.
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B
Yeah, exactly. Right. And if you look at the history of assassins and would be assassins, they all have these, like, sometimes they're trying to impress Jodie Foster, sometimes they're members of the Manson family. Right. Like things are weird out there. And this person is probably, I don't have the information to date. We don't know that much about him at this point. It's probably his own unique brand of weird. But I mean, Galen, I think you're right that the federal government's involvement here and the federal government here verifying this situation is what's particularly dangerous to me. Right. Like it's one thing for a commentator to go on a podcast and, and verify the whole thing. They're a commentator, they have their right to free speech. But for the federal government to take the actions of an individual person and say they, all of them should be silenced, that's a little frightening because I know lots of leftists and liberals and none of them shot Charlie Kirk. They didn't do anything wrong.
- [17:39]
A
Yeah. I want to pick up on what Nathaniel said about social media not being our friend in this instance because it does sort of connect to what you were all just saying, which is that historically actors who commit political violence have had more of a clear sort of cohesive ideology behind some of the things that they believed, whether it's, whether it's a cult. I mean it may still be a crazy ideology, but whether it's a cult or whatever. But we've seen recently an increase in these lone wolf actors who fall down a rabbit hole on social media and have very obscure ideologies that I think a lot of individual based views that a lot of People wouldn't even recognize as belonging to again, one side or the other. I'll say Derek Thompson wrote a good piece on this, which is about online extremism and in particular sort of lonely, isolated people becoming extremists through the Internet. And to that end, Congress is inviting the CEOs of Twitch, Discord, Reddit and the likes to testify in all of this. Because, you know, on those bullet casings, for example, there were basically discord memes.
- [18:56]
B
It's like simultaneously this very weird ideology and like a deep nihilism in all of this.
- [19:03]
A
There's one more just to just to heap it on somewhat disheartening thing that has happened. Nathaniel, you actually brought my attention to a study that shows Americans are becoming in some ways desensitized to political violence.
- [19:20]
C
Yeah, there was this really interesting article from Jessica Piper at Politico that looked at basically Google trends and like headlines in major newspapers and kind of how long it took for these instances of political violence to fade from those headlines. Slash Google search terms. And basically, you know, mo more recent incidents of political violence have just really fallen off the national radar just a lot more quickly. So you go back, they went back to the Gabby Giffords shooting back in 2011, which, I don't know, I at least personally, that is kind of in my lifetime or at least in my kind of close paying attention to politics. Lifetime was kind of the first incident that I really remember of this kind of internal political violence. And that was in the news for a long time and people were like really interested and horrified in it. But then after the Steve Scalise shooting at the Congressional baseball game practice in 2017, that kind of held people's attention like a little bit less time. The Paul Pelosi attack for a little bit less time. And then by the time you got to even the Trump assassination attempt last year, which obviously was like a really holy shit moment that didn't hold in the headlines. Obviously there were other things going on like Joe Biden dropping out of the race and the rnc. And that was just a crazy month, but it didn't stay in the public imagination that long. And the Minnesota assassinations just a few months ago also really faded from the headlines quickly. And you know, I guess TBD on what happens with Charlie Kirk. But yeah, it does seem like this is becoming more normal. And I don't necessarily think that this is obviously we do know that political violence is on the increase. I think that is apparent to everybody at this point. And so it maybe makes sense that people are Starting to just kind of internalize it. But it is certainly a disheartening thing.
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B
I want to just flag, like, methodologically, I have a lot of questions about how this study was done because I have concerns that when you're comparing 2011 to 2025, it doesn't really take into account changes in the media landscape and how people consume news. So, for example, this about the number of front page headlines. What about the number of newspapers? They're only counting newspapers that publish daily in the United states. So in 2025, there's a lot fewer of those. And so you're always going to have fewer headlines about everything on front pages. Right. A lot of cities are no longer publishing daily, like, so, for example, I think the Detroit Free Press publishes twice a week rather than daily. So it wouldn't be counted in this, even if it did have front page headlines on this. So I think. And Google search traffic also I would. I would quibble with. Right. Because in 2011, if you wanted to find out about something, you would go Google it. But now in 2025, if I wanted to find out about a news story, I'm much more likely to go to Twitter than to go to Google. I will go to Google later maybe if I have like, I'm looking for articles. I'm gonna look at the journalists I follow on Twitter that are tweeting out the smart articles that they have read about, whatever the thing is.
- [22:20]
C
Right, well. But not a lot of people are on Twitter, though. I'm not sure that, that. I think your point is well taken away.
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B
I'm just not entirely sure that this study shows what it purports to show.
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A
Purports to show? Yeah, I think that's an important say.
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B
That we are not desensitized to violence. But it's. I just am not entirely certain about the way that this was approached.
- [22:39]
C
Fair.
- [22:40]
A
Yeah, I think. I think it's a fair critique, I would say, from. From lived experience. If we're going to try to combine data and real life reporting in all of this. I forgot that somebody set Governor of Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro's house on fire while his kids were sleeping. You know, like some things don't even Jewish holiday on. Yeah. So I do think that these horrific actions are holding our attention for less time. Look, a lot of things that we would have considered completely batshit crazy in past eras of American politics are holding our attention for less time. And it overwhelms the senses. And it's in many cases a normal human reaction to just Kind of block it out and stop paying attention when that happens. And that's not a good thing because we're asking the American public, when it comes time to vote or hold their law, hold their lawmakers to account to consider all of these things.
- [23:47]
C
Right. Yeah. I don't see this as a failing on the part of people or even the media. I think it is just this is the environment we're in where just the news cycle is absolutely crazy. And that is an environment in which things like this can be normalized, that shouldn't be normalized. And that is the problem.
- [24:05]
B
Yeah. I also wonder if people are sitting on their screens all day and they're on their preferred social media app or whatever. Like I've said, mine is Twitter. Great. But like, I also wonder the extent to which people get too flooded with news about the story of the day and then they're like, I am tired of this. This is becoming tedious and I don't want to do it anymore. Right. Like, I don't know the answer to that. But like, perhaps the deluge of information that is coming at us all the time means that we feel satiated on a story more quickly because we feel like we've seen a ton of stuff about it, even if it's like a bunch of bullshit.
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C
Oh, totally. I think it tires people out and drives them away from politics and being engaged in a. And you need people to be engaged and like, frankly, like angry about things that are unacceptable in order for kind of the guardrails of democracy to hold and to hold. And so when people are unengaged, then that's when bad stuff can happen.
- [25:07]
A
Well, and also rage is what keeps social media companies profitable. And so there always needs to be a new outrage of the day. But on the topic of losing interest and moving on to a new topic.
- [25:21]
C
We'Ve ranted long enough for you, Galen, Swipe up.
- [25:26]
A
Let's get on to our promised debate. So till set the table a little bit. On Tuesday, Republicans released a seven week stopgap funding bill that would also add tens of millions of dollars in security for lawmakers, the Supreme Court and the executive branch. This is in part a response to what we were just talking about. Democrats responded on Wednesday with a counter proposal that would permanently extend Obamacare subsidies set to expire at the end of the year. Reverse cuts to Medicaid passed earlier this year and add more insecurity spending for lawmakers and others than the Republicans proposal. I mean, by a factor of 10, I think it was somewhere between like 30 and 50 million in the Republican proposal and something over 300 million in the Democratic proposal. It would also block the Trump administration from clawing back funding approved by Congress. This is basically a non starter for Republicans. So in the absence of some sort of compromise, which appears unlikely, should Democrats withhold their support for a stopgap spending bill and shut the government down? So like I said at the start, Nathaniel, you have been tasked with coming up with an argument that Democrats should in fact shut the government down. Mary, your argument is that they should not. I think we're gonna have a lot of opportunity to go back and forth, so let's begin with an opening argument of sorts from Nathaniel, the floor is yours.
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C
All right, Galen, we are at a dire place for democracy and Republicans are in control of all three branches of the government or all three policy making bodies at this point. They control the Senate, they control the House. They can.
- [27:06]
A
All right, and that's the end of today's preview. Head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and hear the full episode. Our debate lasted about half an hour and we got into the political upsides and downsides of a shutdown. We talked about whether it's a worthwhile play, even if it only appeases the base. We also talked about historic successes and failures parties have had in shutting the government down to extract concessions on policy. We also talked about whether the betting markets are to be believed when it comes to a shutdown. It was a good one. So like I said, head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and catch the whole thing. Paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes, can join in our paid subscriber chat and, and most importantly, keep this podcast going. When you become a subscriber, you can connect your account to wherever you listen to podcasts so you'll never miss an episode. There's a link in the show notes explaining exactly how to do that. Again, head over to GDPolitics.com see you there.