C (2:21)

And.

B (2:22)

And then I have the focus group podcast where I listen to voters and play the sound so people believe me that this is what Americans sound like. And then we've got a whole bunch of other ones. I don't want to, like, leave people out, but they're just. We've got a big crew now at the Bulwark, and they're all excellent, so you should tune into all of them.

A (2:36)

Yeah, so Bill Kristol's over there and jvl, and you've got other colleagues, and it's really. It's fantastic. What is the origin of the name Bulwark? I know, but just tell people how you guys got started.

B (2:49)

All right, I'll do this, too. Which is when I had a really dumb idea a long time ago, circa, like, 2017, maybe 2018, where I was like, hey, we should have an aggregator where we take all the Republicans and conservatives who don't like Trump and we create, like, we aggregate them all into one website.

C (3:05)

Like a Drudge Report. Like a Never Trump Drudge Report.

B (3:08)

That's right. It was. I did. It was going to be a sane Drudge Report as I pitched it, and I got some seed money, which is.

C (3:13)

Just the Drudge Report now, by the way. Drudges come around, but.

B (3:16)

Yeah, that's true. That's true. And we were trying to find, you know, the Bulwark as a name. Some people didn't like it at first because they were like, what is that? But of course, a bulwark is the thing that stand. It's a nautical term, but it's like the thing that stands between you and the bad thing. Like, you build a bulwark, you build a fortress, a fortification between you and the bad thing. Maybe cannon fire. That's the. And it was actually one of our sort of junior members named it for the aggregator. But then when the Weekly Standard was summarily sort of had the lights taken down or, you know, was just taken offline because it was insufficiently pro Trump, I was like, actually, the aggregator is a dumb idea. I'm going to take a bunch of these people from the Weekly Standard. Bill and I were doing a bunch of other things together at that point. I'm going to give them jobs, and we're going to start something for real. And then my buddy Tim, who I've known forever, was kind of at the time in Oakland, and he was very sad and Filled with rage. And I went to him, you know, like that scene from Hoosiers where they dunk somebody in the. He's dunking the guy in the tank and saying, get it together. I was like, tim, come do this with us. And then he showed up and he was like a Never Trump Hunter esque Thompson. I was like, where's this guy? This is amazing. And then we all just. Then we started rolling.

A (4:24)

Sadness and rage are. Those are good fuel. They burn cleanly if you let them. So before we jump into the topics about which we are all sad and filled with rage, give me each of your potted bios. I mean, how is it that. I mean, I know you're never Trumpers, but how is it that you come to politics? Because what I love about talking to people who are generally classed as never Trumpers is that the allegation of partisanship just cannot be made right. I mean, if I'm talking to lifelong Democrats like myself, well, then a lot of people can get off the train immediately thinking, well, everything you're saying about Trump is a symptom of your own tribalism and partisanship. But obviously, when I'm talking to David Frum and other people who saw Trump for what he was from the very beginning, that goes out the window. And so it does with the two of you. So what are your actual bios, politically?

C (5:13)

Yeah, I was just a campaign hack, campaign gypsy. I mean, from high school, actually was. I started volunteering on a guy named Bill Owens campaign when he's running for governor of Colorado. He's Republican, just because I had a neighbor that was friends with him. Essentially, I just had like a lucky in and the neighbor knew I was a politics junkie and I would show up to intern. And when I was 16, I looked like I was like 11. And most people were just like, where is your dad? I was like, my dad's at home. I'm here, I'm here, I'm working. I'm, you know, the tip of the spear on this campaign. And after that, I just loved political campaigns. I worked on a million of them everywhere from, like, Virginia and New Hampshire and Florida, Iowa. I did McCain's presidential campaign in 08, and then Jon Huntsman's in 12, and then Romney's, Jeb's in 16. And between that, I did some advising for Scott Walker and Nikki Haley on their gubernatorial campaigns. So I was a campaign gypsy for the most part. And then after Jeb lost, my plan was to go back to Miami and lay by the beach and read gay Fiction and get drunk all day for a few weeks before I returned to life. But, like, day one of that, some rich folks called and said, will you be a spokesperson for this group we're starting then was called our Principles Pack, which is kind of like a proto Lincoln project, but way before the Lincoln Project, and will you be the spokesperson for it? And I was like. I said, yeah, hell, yeah. Both Jeb and my father thought that was a terrible idea because they were like, trump is a vengeful guy. And I was like, fuck him. I don't get. I don't care. And, you know, at the time, I do think I was fair to say, not as attuned to his appeal as I maybe could have been being a political junkie. Like, I knew that the appeal was there, but, you know, I did. I did think he was beatable in 2016, either in the primary by a Marco type or in the general by Hillary. And that turned out not to be the case. And I was Persona non grata in Republican politics after that. Then I was sad and angry, and then Sarah called me. So that's the gist.

B (7:05)

Yeah. And unlike Tim, I was not sort of exactly of the political world. I was a policy person. And Tim and I worked together, like, at this. I worked for a Republican firm that did a lot of comms. Like, I was a. And Tim and I are both kind of do have a comms background. But what happened was basically in 2016, as I watched 2015, 2016, as I watched the rise of Trump, it was just one of those things where I was like, my hair was on fire. I was like, I can't believe this is happening. Right. Just this surreal experience of Trump in the early days. But I wanted to do something, and I had a lot of latitude. I'd been at the. The firm where I had been for about 15 years. I was a senior vice president. I was going to run the thing when, you know, the guy, principal retired. And so I just. I started building stuff and I went. I actually went to a room. There were these meetings that were happening at the time of sad Republicans. And we would all get in a room and just be sad together. It was kind of like an AA meeting, but less joyful, maybe. And I don't know, after that, I met Bill in those rooms. And Bill and I decided, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to primary Trump. And we had this plan. And so we were going around to, like, Kinzinger and Larry Hogan. Larry Hogan. Larry Hogan was My big treasure, I was sitting with Larry Hogan, being like, you got to do this, man. Your father would want you to do this. Because his father was kind of the guy who went to Nixon and said, you got to step down. And I was like, this is your moment. We talked to Mark Cuban, and actually, long story short, everyone told us no. But in the process of that, I started doing focus groups to see if I. If there was an appetite within the Republican base. Because I had this strong theory that, of course, Trump is an accident of history. People didn't actually want this. The second I set foot in rooms of voters doing focus groups, I said, oh, wait, I've got something very, very wrong. And I just realized I'd spent too much of my career in D.C. you know, it's so detached from how voters actually think about things. And once I started listening to voters, I really couldn't stop. And I became. I ended up quitting, leaving my firm, starting a bunch of new projects, starting the bulwark. And that's where we are now.

A (9:02)

Okay, so now, how do. This is a hard question. I think I have never personally come up with even a shadow of an answer to it. But how do you explain to yourselves the smart people who. You know, people who might even still be friends in certain cases, or family members, certainly, but many might be former friends who don't see anything wrong with what is happening. Right. I mean, even if they'll concede. Perhaps the most they'll concede is, well, they don't like Trump's style, obviously. He's abrasive, he's busted a few norms that we might want to keep in place in the future, but nothing truly out of the ordinary and dangerous, and to say nothing of being actually ruinous of American democracy is likely to happen. They're apt to say things like, well, all politicians lie. How is it that the three of us and many other people we might name here are living in this Invasion of the Body Snatchers moment where we don't know what the fuck happened to the people who look like they were the same people they were yesterday, but they just aren't making any sense to us. How do you explain it? And are there? I mean, maybe there are different versions of this problem, but I would love to know just how you've processed this.

C (10:15)

Luckily, I wrote about this in my book, so if you want to get the long story, it's about 300 pages, but here's a summary. I think the brain rationalization is a hell of a drug, and the brain is very Powerful. And people can rationalize stuff really up until the moment or even sometimes past the moment. It's causing them actual damage and harm. And I think that some of the rationalizations included just simple, like tribalism and team sports, you know, just like kind of the way that, you know, I would, as an LSU fan would convince myself that Nick Saban was the devil. People convince themselves that Joe Biden was the devil. You know, and I think that you see this very clearly watching sports. And I think politics and sports has merged and morphed into each other a little bit. I think that some people wanted access to close, being close to power. And like, that's as tale, as old as time, kind of Arendt kind of banality of evil element to it. I think that, and this is, I'll let Sarah get into her triangle of doom, but I think that there's a propaganda element of this. Like some people don't even know, like, don't get good information. I think that there are a lot of people that are blocked out for good information. That's, I think that's different from like the elite class that's more among regular folks and more in the family category maybe. But, you know, in the friends category, one of the things in the, so in the book, I tried to have only on record people from my life who went for Trump, but I made a couple of exceptions for people to talk off the record. And one of the, in one of the cases, the guy says to me, you know, he says, tim, here's the thing. This is, you know, it's maybe a year or two after Trump's first term in 17 or 18. He goes, I, my wife's fan, my wife's friends think I'm a racist. Like, people are trash talking me. Like, you know, my kids, you know, can't tell people what their dad does for a living. And I realize that Trump does some bad stuff, but like, in order to deal with that, I just need to, I just grab onto the one or two things that he's right about and really focus on that and think about how, you know, I, I can use that to motivate me. And my, my reaction to that was like, you're not going to be on the record in this book. But I'll know that you said that. That's like so embarrassing. Like, that's such an embarrassing admission. But I, I thought it was really revealing. I think that a lot of people kind of get into clubby vibes and, you know, their career or their social circle and they find Ways to, to rationalize really bad stuff. And, and I just think that the tr. The, that's a story that we've seen throughout history. And like it's, I think the only new part of it is just, and this isn't really even that new, but like the only new part of it in kind of the modern media era is the clownishness of it. You know, I just think that like, which is why some of it breaks some of our brains, that it could be, you know, we, we could understand it if it was a more sophisticated evil, I guess, but it's not. So that's my take. I don't know, Sarah, what you could add on that.

B (12:51)

I mean, I'll throw in the Republican triangle of doom, which is a thing that I talk about a lot, which is the toxic and symbiotic relationship between the voters, the right wing infotainment media and Republican elected officials. And they work together as sort of a reinforcement mechanism. Right. So. And look, democracy is still about the voters. And the fact was Donald Trump caught the entire country off guard by people thinking, nobody's going to vote for this guy cuz he's an idiot. And instead they realized. What I realized when I started listening to voters was Trump had been in people's living rooms and on page six and part of their cultural firmament for such a long time and they were so tired. If you just remember, even the 2016 election, Clinton's Bushes, like they were done with all of that. And so the voters were like, yeah, give me this different guy and that power. When conservative media realized that there was this appetite from the voters, like created an entirely new incentive structure. Right. What happened to Lindsey Graham? Well, Lindsey Graham realized there was a ton of juice in flattering a bunch of people that actually he dislikes and doesn't respect. And the entire party slowly came to realize that if they just like fed this machine that a. There was a lot of people who desperately wanted somebody to be harder on the Democrats to fight harder to burn the Democrats to the ground. And so they loved Trump. And Republicans realized again what I did, which is actually there wasn't a huge appetite for the thing that they were selling anymore, like the limited government, free markets, American leadership in the world. Essentially when George Bush left office and then there was eight years of Obama when he left, he was at 32% approval. And that created a world in which the Republican Party developed an enormous appetite through the Obama years to completely change. And I think as the sort of smart set realized it because they were all with us, like the against Trump issue that National Review did. Like, we were all friends. There were a lot more Never Trumpers in the early days, but they were.

A (14:54)

I mean, even J.D. vance, I don't know if he was in the mix, but, you know, if you're calling Trump either, you know, somewhere on the spectrum between an asshole like, like Nixon or America's Hitler, seems like you should have had a seat at the table with the never drummers.

C (15:09)

Not a compliment. I would add just one more sentence of pop psychology. People don't want Stephen Miller. There's a handful of people, maybe J.D. vance, I don't know, that, like, revel in being bad, revel in other people's pain. And a lot of these other folks that you're asking about, Sam, who know better, who went along with this, are not like that. People want to, want to feel like they're on this, the side of whatever, of good. And so that's how they, they convince them. That goes back to that guy, I told you anonymously, like people really do. When you ask people, like when you have. And I have a few beers with my ex friends, I'm like, what is it really? Like, they will say, like, I do, I think that closing the border was good. Or they'll say sport for Israel. If it's, if it's, you know, for some folks or.

A (15:53)

Yeah, but even I can say that, right?

C (15:55)

Yeah, yeah, exactly. The woke stuff, you've been on this beat for 10 years was pernicious. Right? And so they will grab onto those things and take them and be like, I'm on the side of the good guys, and focus on those and almost tune out or compartmentalize the stuff that challenges that narrative in their brain.

A (16:13)

But what do these people think of a Liz Cheney or a Adam Kissinger? I mean, like, how do they explain that they hate them?

B (16:20)

They hate them and they hate us. But that's because we are an in their face, alternate version of what they could have done. And to be confronted with people who say, no, you see what I see? We are all looking at the same thing. And frankly, all of the things that you learned and I learned as young conservatives about personal, personal responsibility, about character mattering, you're the one who's foregone all of that. You're the one who's betrayed their principles. Because there's a, the most insane version of the person that you're talking about, Sam, aren't the people who even went for Trump the first term and got on board. It's the people who after January 6th, still, there's a whole bunch of new people that came to Trump post that who decided? Joe Biden. Like, and this is, they have to hyperbolize. This is why sort of the Epstein stuff and the, the child predator narrative was so important because, like, what's worse than trying to steal a free and fair election? Pedophilia is maybe one of the only ones. And so they became obsessed with this idea that there was a left wing cabal of elites who were, who were harming children. And they could tell themselves that to feel morally okay with Trump, we need somebody like this. But of course, as we see now, that was all a fiction.

C (17:30)

Yeah. They think that Liz and Adam have compromised. Right. It is a totally warped worldview because then once you've convinced yourself that like the woke is the big threat or whatever, like on any of the list of things that are some legitimate threats coming from the left. Right. Then, or in Adam's case, you see this from his family, if, you know, you've convinced yourselves that the left is godless and it's heathens, you say to him, well, you're on your moral high horse, wagging your finger at me for going along with this, but you're going along with, you know, this anti Christian, you know, movement. And so I think that in a lot of ways you see again, Liz Cheney and Adam and being seen as like a, almost a greater evil than the actual left, like that was. There's a lot of hatred, which is.

B (18:10)

Why also the trans stuff really matters. This is why, like with the protecting kids, like, if you listen to the responses when you challenge them about Trump and his morality, they'll be like, well, you believe in chemically castrating kids. Right? Like that's sort of where they go to try to say that they have a moral leg to stand on.

C (18:28)

Right, Right.

A (18:29)

Well, but if you're going to trade like for like, I mean, so you take all the people who cared or pretended to care about the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop, right? Because it signaled all of the corruption and self dealing that the Biden family would be capable of. I mean, there's some.

C (18:45)

Millions of the Biden crime family. Biden crime families.

A (18:48)

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, I mean, this is really something worth worrying about. We care about corruption. We don't want, in this case a vice president and former vice president, much less his family grifting based on their access to power and besmirching the reputation of our fine country. Right. We care about those things. Now Trump comes in and does It a thousand fold worse, and they don't care at all, right? So, I mean, this is just one species of hypocrisy. But the crazy thing is that right of center, it's almost like hypocrisy isn't even a thing, right? It's like the physics of reputation, reputation management has completely changed, and there's just. There's no management to do. It's like Trump can do anything. His enablers can do anything. They can break any norm that one pretended to care about. I mean, you cared about the Twitter files, right? You cared about a candidate, Biden, asking for naked photos of his son to be taken off Twitter. That was just an Orwellian overreach on the part of the powers that be, you know, into the media space. And yet now Don Lemon being arrested for doing journalism doesn't matter, right? So again, you have much more direct contact with these people than I do. Is there any effort to square these weird cognitive swings or it's just pure bankruptcy?

C (20:11)

You can't square cognitive swings with Trump. I mean, Trump has no, like, redeeming values and virtues, right? So it's not like. So no matter if you pick one issue, you know, where does that end? Right? Like, again, this. Now we're going into armchair psychology. But as Sarah mentioned about, like, the post January 6th, right? Like, once you've already decided that, okay, I know that this person instigated a violent attack on the Capitol in order to overturn our democracy and end it so that he could stay in power. And I didn't like that because none of them liked it at the time. We saw them all, but gotta do it because of whatever these other. Whatever the other reason is, you know, Israel, Trans Woke, you know, whatever you can rationalize. Well, then once you've rationalized that, like, how does your brain even compute? Starting to, like, nitpick various hypocrisies going forward, right? Like, you're like, he's already made you dirty. Like, you're already in. And so there's not anything to be gained by doing it. So when you see people doing it, it's usually people that are. Have a niche area of genuine political policy view, genuine principle. You know, whether it's the libertarians, like Tom Massie, even Rand Paul, you got to shout him out on the bombings in the Caribbean, like, so there's a handful of people who can pick things that they have particular interest in and maybe just pick that one thing. But outside of that, you know, once you make the decision to point out one of Trump's horrible hypocrisies. Well, then now you're just on a slippery slip to being in the bulwark because there's so many other ones. And all of these people, particularly in Washington now, you're in a slippery slope of being Liz Cheney or Jeff Flake. And like, that's the worst outcome possible. Right. And so there's no incentive to engage with any of the hypocrisies. That's my assessment.

B (21:57)

Yeah. The short answer is just, yes, it is bankrupt. And Tim's point right there at the end about the incentive structures, like, these are a lot of people, you can see them making decisions in real time about how to protect their incentive structures, which is that Donald Trump built an appetite for a media ecosystem, a pundit ecosystem, to say, hey, no, Trump is good, actually. And at this point, like, there's just sunk costs in doing that. Like, if they challenge Trump now, like, Megyn Kelly can't, Eric Erickson can't. Ben Shapiro can't. Like, Ben Shapiro is one of these people who got on board with Trump post January 6th. After that, he started fundraising for him. Why? That's what his audience wants. Like, that's the pressure is coming. And that's why I talk about the Republican triangle of doom, because there's incentives and pressure on these folks from voters that say, I don't want you to tell me why Trump's bad. I want you to tell me why Trump's good. And if you veer from that, I'm going to complain and leave.

C (22:53)

Dementia Piro is an interesting case, though, just really quick, because he showed some backbone, I just think, to be fair, in standing up to some of the conspiracies coming from Candace and other parts of the right wing media.

A (23:02)

Right.

C (23:02)

And so it's interesting, I watched his whole TPOSA speech where he talked about the importance of truth and how you need to speak truth and how Tucker and Candace are not doing that and how if you don't speak truth, that is, you know, pernicious and it starts to consume you and it's like, well, but why doesn't that apply to Trump? Right? And so you do see this in other. Even the people who do demonstrate that they're not hypocrites, that they have courage on particular issues, you find that they, they stop short of applying that to Trump.

A (23:27)

So let's walk through this by addressing each of these people by turn. I mean, we started with Ben here, so let's. Actually, he's coming on the podcast.

C (23:35)

I'm desperate for him to have him on. So put in a good word for yeah.

A (23:38)

Yeah, well, that would be good. It'd be better. Maybe I'll just ambush him with you. He'll come on this podcast, he'll see both of your faces up on the screen. I mean, do you explain his situation purely as a result of just a pernicious business model? I mean, he's got the Daily Wire and he recognizes that it would be a extinction level event to admit what we are demanding he admit about Trump.

B (24:02)

Yes.

A (24:03)

There's no way to pivot if you're Ben Shapiro. There's no way because obviously he broke up with Candace Owens. That was a stressor on his system. Right. You know, he hired her for a reason and then fired her for a reason. And that was painful and probably still is painful. But it could be accomplished. Right. It was mandatory based on how far apart they were. You think it's just impossible to, at this late hour or at the late hour of January 7th, to have realized, okay, conservatism has to be about something other than Trumpism at this point, and the Daily Wire is going to be part of that.

C (24:35)

I think it'd be very hard for him from a business standpoint. I think that he has some genuine beliefs. Like, I don't. I think that he likes Trump's Israel policy for one example, and, and probably some others. And, you know, maybe Ben is happy about the total deregulation and the fact that we're not doing any investigation of white collar crime anymore. I don't know exactly the extent about how happy he is with all the deregulation, but I think there's some of that. But look, Ben left Breitbart over Trump like he was at. That's how the day of that was the David Miller's origin story. It was originally a never Trump outlet by like definition. Right. He thought that Trump was morally corrupt and he couldn't back him for that reason. And then, you know, I think he was pretty DeSantis friendly during that primary last time and I think obviously would have preferred that for it to be a DeSantis type to win. But then once he didn't, you know, there is this end for a penny in for the pound. There is no business model for him to do otherwise. And Ben is talented. He could go out on his own, I would think, and do fine with however he. What he wanted to do. But the Daily Wire would collapse. Yeah.

B (25:34)

I think first Ben Shapiro both made Candace Owens.

A (25:38)

Yeah.

B (25:39)

And that's important to remember. Like, he's tolerated. And this is where Ben's going to make some policy arguments. When he comes on, he's going to say, well, Trump secured the border and like the woke stuff and the anti free speech stuff of the left. And he'll have a bunch of critiques of the left, some true, many of them overstated in their relative, both impact and sort of the moral dangers that they pose to society. Like they don't come close to Trump. And I think if you look back, I think it was on Bill Maher where Bill Maher was kind of like, come on Ben, why do you do and why do you do this? Or somebody else on the panel did and he was like, I sleep on a bed of money. And you know, he is cross pressured. But here's the thing about somebody like Ben Shapiro, unlike Candace Owens, I will always. They're like, Tim, I think Tim can correct me if I'm wrong, will sort of take Ben's side in that fight and be like, look, he's standing up a little bit. Like, let's give him half a cheer. That is not how I feel. I feel like Ben Shapiro knows better. Ben Shapiro knows what's wrong. Ben Shapiro has been is making arguments that contravene everything that he used to stand for. One of his big last pieces was in the Weekly Standard about how we cannot go down this road with Trump. He was pressured by his audience to get on board and the ensemble that he built at the Daily Wire, which is why he's somebody who after January 6th got on board with him and he is smart enough to know better. And I held out a great deal of contempt for the people who know better and have gone along with it because they have created a permission structure for a certain type of person that is not all the way. Candace Owen maga But is actually somebody who thinks of themselves as a good conservative and he gives them a way to kind of slice that up morally that is absolutely untenable with any objective observer.

C (27:19)

Yeah.

A (27:19)

It also requires memory holing the details of January 6th. I mean, not just what happened at the Capitol that day, but just either the, the all too obvious efforts to steal an election, all the while claiming it was being stolen from him. Right. I mean it was a twofold crime against our politics here. I mean, just he weaponized this lie, which he weaponized even before the election was run, that it was going to be rigged if any, you know, the mail in ballots were going to be part of this rigging and the election was going to be stolen from him. And this lie has always been a provocation to violence, political violence. And that should have been enough to make this man unelectable and impeachable, et cetera, for all time. But then you had the actual efforts to steal the election, post election, the assault on the Capitol. And then you had people like Ben who said publicly to their own audience, this is the worst. I think Ben's words were like, this is the worst thing that's happened in American history or since the Civil War or something. He acknowledged at the time how awful this was. But then you had this slow leakage of understanding that came. There were several moments that accomplished this. I mean, one I remember was when Tucker. We'll get to Tucker in a minute. But just this far, when Tucker aired on his show, maybe it was. I can't remember if it was his podcast or if he was on Fox at the time. Footage of Capitol Police just letting people in peacefully and through some other door. And this kind of uninterpretable footage. I mean, I think it's interpretable by the fact that these guys are clearly scared and outnumbered and knew that the walls had been breached, you know, already. But you have this seemingly collaboration, what gets spun as a collaboration between the cops and the protesters. And it's all just a matter of them being given a tour of the Capitol. And so it was nothing was as it seemed. And I think a lot of people have now pivoted to that interpretation. This is some combination of false flag, you know, larping, non event or. And you can't even reconcile those two, but, you know, some combination of those contradictory possibilities. But it was not a coup. It was not anything that put anything in jeopardy. No one's life was ever in danger. And, you know, it was Ashley Babbitt who got martyred that day. And this is really. It's all. And all. And Nancy Pelosi really, at bottom is probably at fault because she didn't get enough cops there in the first place. But that's where Ben. I think Ben has just forgotten that he ever cared about January 6th.

C (29:45)

I don't know. I don't think he's forgotten. I think that he's rationalized. Look again, we can just imagine. I was one that gave Ben a half cheer and I will continue to for fighting the fight against Candace, even though he created her. Just because I think that the degree of perniciousness that's coming out of Candace and Tucker, which we can get to if you want, is so severe that I just think it's important that someone in that world is speaking out against it. But even though he might not be necessarily the best messenger, but just using Ben, just think about how Ben acted during the Obama administration, and this is what I would want to talk to him about. If you were to. Come on, maybe you can do that. Sam is. You can imagine a counterfactual where Barack Obama loses to Mitt Romney and there's a mob of Black Panthers at the Capitol, and Obama sicks them at the Capitol. They go and attack police. They go and attack and they start beating police, and some policemen die subsequently.

A (30:33)

And if memory serves, all Obama had to do was wear a tan suit on that day, and we would have had a controversy.

C (30:38)

Yeah, I mean, like, I just. I don't think that it takes a very wild imagination to think about the kind of rhetoric that'd be coming out of Ben Shapiro and FOX and others had that happened. And it's very hard to imagine forgiveness ever coming, you know, ever reaching a period where it's like, you know, he was wrong about that. Like. And so I just think that thinking about it in that sense, like, reveals a lie. He hasn't forgotten. There hasn't been. What was your phrase? Like, a leakage of understanding. He knows, but, like, eventually he just made a different bet. He was like, I think a lot of people, by the way, also not us, because I saw. And Sarah, because her focus groups and us had started to see the Republican base. Clearly, a lot of people genuinely thought he was done, including Mitch McConnell and I think probably including Ben Shapiro and others. And so they made that bet at the time that they could speak out against him being like, oh, phew, it was almost like a weight off their shoulders. Now I get to speak freely for a couple months because it's over finally. And so to me, it's more of, like, a slow crawl back rather than starting to forget what they knew, starting with Kevin McCarthy.

B (31:42)

Right. And this is where the triangle of doom went to work. Right. Cause right in the beginning, the voters and the elite set and politicians knew that what he did was wrong and bad. And they called for his impeachment. And then they were like, well, he's done anyway. We'll leave it to the courts if we need to do that, so we're not going to impeach him. Because they started to hear from voters being like, don't you dare impeach our boy. And they got scared and they thought, well, he's done, but I don't want to make his base mad, so we won't go forward with the impeachment. And then they told the false flag story first. Right. The false flag story of these are actually antifa rioters. It's not us. That was the first thing people clung to. Second thing was, what about this is a very important characteristic? Because Black Lives Matter had just happened and they were happening. So they happened very close together, right. And so they were able to say, Black Lives Matter people, they burnt things to the ground and nobody went to jail, which is a lie and wrong. And them not understanding what actually happened. And they use that as a moral excuse to say, then the FBI is overdoing it by prosecuting these people. You know, and this is always. They. It actually follows a pattern. Often with Trump voters, we're like, it's bad, but it wasn't us, actually. It wasn't worse than what the other side did to. It was good, actually. And we had to do it because the election was actually stolen.

A (32:57)

All right, Candace. I haven't heard about Candace since maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention, but I was hearing about her every hour on the hour for a long time. And then I think maybe the Epstein file dump kind of pushed her out of everyone's mind. Is Candace still out there saying crazy things and.

C (33:13)

Oh, my God, yeah. She was out there just the other day talking about how Charlie made the lights flicker in the room when he walked in. She's got a lot of stuff. Here's the thing that worries why I think Candace is worrisome. I had a period of time where I was worried that she might kind of go a Trump path like Sarah. In her focus groups, people would name her as somebody that they thought maybe could be a presidential candidate in the future. And that was kind of my initial worry, which was legit worry because Trump can get nominated. Who. Who cares? Who. Why, why is Candace any more crazier than that? I now have a different worry, which is I think that she is really infecting young voters, even on the left. And. And I see a pretty decent amount of anecdotal evidence for this. In addition, you know, to some data of she was so like, anti Israel and anti Semitic in how anti Israel she was, that there are, you know, kind of college kids that. That she showed up in their. In their feeds, in their TikTok feeds, in their. In their YouTube reels, because they were getting anti Israel material around the protests. And then they start following her kind of like you follow Real Housewives. You. Back in our day, we'd read the National Enquirer at the. At the grocery store checkout. Right. She's interesting, she's entertaining. But, like, you go down a real radicalization pipeline. And I speak on college campuses, and almost always there is, like, canvas people, and they are not who you'd expect. And she has a casual audience, like, people know her who are casual viewers. And she's crazy. I no longer think that she, you know, can do a hostile takeover of the Republican Party like Trump did. But I think that it's extremely worrying that there is like. That she's kind of at the center of this horseshoe and that there's a lot of younger people that are getting pretty deranged material for me.

A (34:55)

You just said she's crazy. What is your theory of mind about her? Is she actually suffering some kind of clinical episode and she's just so telegenic that it works, or do you think.

C (35:07)

She is conscious of this feels much like your wheelhouse?

A (35:09)

Yeah, I'd like to know. I mean, I'm not a clinician, but I mean, I look at her and I don't see. I mean, apart from the actual transcript of the words, the claims coming out of her mouth, I don't see a crazy person. I see somebody who's just very good at the character she's playing. And I mean, like with Alex Jones, I see somebody who's clearly, he's got some. I mean, there's some role for. Obvious role for medication in his life, right. I mean, he's not in control of his physiology on some level, whereas Candace. I just see somebody who could be playing a character. Right. I mean, and it's apparently lucrative, right? There's a market for it. I'm not quite sure how it's lucrative, but maybe. I don't know who's running ads against what she's doing.

C (35:52)

If it's a character, it is a great character. Because nobody would come to you with a pitch which is like, hey, the real way to make a lot of money in the content space is to go all in with hours of content talking about how Emmanuel Macron's wife actually has a dick. I don't think that would be anybody's pitch in a pitch meeting. But that is what she decided to do, and it worked. And so maybe that's a character. Doesn't matter, I guess, is the question. But to me, that seems like some kind of psychosis. But I defer to your expertise.

B (36:21)

I have a slightly different take on this, which is. So there is a. If we, as rational people tried to kind of segment out these different content creators in the arc sort of in the, in the Republican universe, you've got your America First Trump critics, and that's Candace and Tucker and Marjorie Taylor Greene. There's a thread through all of them that is anti Israel and in certainly Candace's case, absolutely anti Semitic.

A (36:48)

Would you, would you put Nick Fuentes in that?

B (36:49)

I would put Nick Fuentes in this. In this category. Exactly. And this, Nick is actually an important component of this because people especially so for Candace, her audience is young MAGA women. And so they are there for. And this is why you call it infotainment. They don't get their news. Exactly. From Candace. They get their news from maybe like even Ben Shapiro, some that. But then they want the Candace spin because it's fun and funny. The number of young men who tell me they listen to Nick Fuentes and they're like, I don't agree with everything he says, but he's funny. And if you listen to these guys for a long time, Nick Fuentes is spending half of his time being self deprecating about how you can't get anyone to date him. He's so ugly, he's so useless. And then he like goes on his anti Semitic rant. But young men are like, it's part comedy, part community, part point and laugh. But then you take in some of it. And so. And that is true of Candace. So when Tim talks about it being pernicious, it is pernicious in the sense, like. But Alex Jones was a little bit like this on the cutting edge, where it was like entertaining in that he's freaking out about gay frogs. He's just freaking out about frogs. They're turning frogs gay. And people thought that's funny. But then they also took in some political analysis from that, the real stuff and the. And they love to go down the rabbit hole in conspiracies. Conspiracies are not new in America. The thing that's new is that we have a president who pushes conspiracy theories.

C (38:08)

And platforms and platform.

B (38:10)

Right, exactly. But she and Tucker, they represent a different wing from kind of the MAGA cheerleaders, where you have Benny Johnson and Megyn Kelly and like groups of people who are just there to say, trump good, Trump good. Left bad, left bad. And both of them are finding different types of audiences within a broader MAGA coalition.

C (38:31)

And the America first people are the recruiters. I guess that's my point. They are recruiting new people into the thing, you know, like somebody who was non political and you know, like might have some conservative sensibilities as a college kid. Like they're not getting recruited into Trumpism by the Laura Ingraham show anymore, you know what I mean? But like they might like somebody like that might, you know, find Candace's TikToks or Tucker's or Nick Fuentes. All of them are talented. Like, I suffer through all of their like TikToks because I just want to kind of see what is out there. All of them make very compelling two minute bites of short form video and you can understand how somebody might get sucked into it. And all of them talk about shit besides politics and Trump. Good. You know, they'll talk about dating or gender roles. They'll talk about celebrity gossip. Right. Like, and I think that is another way to get people in.

B (39:20)

And they feud with each other. They've created soap opera conditions for the MAGA content types, people who want to just like live it. And this is where the right did a lot of world building where people exist in that ecosystem and they follow the fact that these people fight with each other and get mad at each other. And like, that is a form of entertainment now, political entertainment that is different from what used to be there.

C (39:43)

I'm desperate for a feud. I keep trying to get into a feud.

B (39:48)

I feud with you all the time.

C (39:49)

I know that's not enough.

A (39:51)

All right, so there are a few moments that genuinely surprised me on this part of the landscape. So one was around the America Fest conference where you referenced Ben Shapiro's speech there. But the fact that Candace could allege that Kirk's assassination was in some sense, if not actually accomplished by tpusa was being covered up by TP USA and maybe even by his widow. Correct me if I'm wrong, I mean, just how explicit her allegations were. But some semblance of that allegation was that tpusa killed, or allowed to be killed, their founder and now patron saint Charlie Kirk, and even possibly his widow Erica was somehow culpable for this, if not the murder, then the COVID up. She could allege all of that. And still that was not sufficient to make her radioactive for the TP USA audience.

C (40:55)

Right.

A (40:56)

I mean, or at least half the audience. Half of that audience, it seemed to look at Tucker's performance on that stage where Tucker said, listen, I'm not here to cancel anyone. Right? So you got Ben Shapiro, this whiny Jew who wants us to cancel everybody. But he's who put him up on his high horse, right? Morally right. Like, who's he to judge that this allegation against Erica Kirk is outside our Overton window? And the fact that he basically correct me if I'm wrong, but it seemed like he probably won the day over there at America Fest with respect to this non cancellation of a direct allegation of a conspiracy theory involving the participants at America Fest. These people are so hungry for conspiracy theory that if you tell them that they murdered their favorite person on earth, half of them want to hear more about that.

B (41:48)

Yeah, this is a pretty sick. Because actually this goes to why you hear among the right and Candace has really been on this and it has started to come out in focus groups of young MAGA types that there is the controversy is over how Erica Kirk is or is not grieving efficiently. And you have to understand this also in the context of. And this is true for so many, they understand Trump is not forever. And they are jockeying, especially in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination, for more audience supremacy. Right. There is a battle going on right now between the America first wing, Tucker and Candace and Marjorie Taylor Greene with the MAGA establishment. And there's a reason that Erica Kirk felt like amidst all this, she needed to sit down and chat with Candace about the light flickering stuff, because they recognize the power of that audience and they try to sort of reconcile it and create it so that like they can all fight and be mad at each other, but like live under the same broad tent where the enemy is the left, but right now while they're in power.

A (42:50)

But aren't you just fundamentally surprised by this? I mean, how is it that that just 99% of the sympathy isn't just by default with Erica Kirk and her just kind of straightforward Christian response to the awful murder of her husband? And why don't people perceive Candace to be this lunatic grifter who's just doing manifest harm to their movement and to this woman who's already been harmed more than anyone can imagine?

C (43:18)

I have to admit I'm surprised just in the sense that it goes back to the other Candace thing from earlier. Is this an act or is it genuine? I don't know. But again, but before this all started, if you were trying to be a grifter, would you have thought the best way to get audience is to like accuse the French and maybe Israel and maybe Charlie's own wife of killing him? I wouldn't have thought that that would have done. I mean, sure, there's an audience for everything, right? People like conspiracies, but I wouldn't have thought that would have been the most efficient way to garner attention and gain audience. And it has for her and the numbers that she gets are legitimate on YouTube and other platforms. So I'm not sure. I think that there is something. I guess my answer for you goes back to Alex Jones, and it's something that I did not appreciate enough when he was in his heyday, which is there's just something intoxicating about the conspiracy, and it almost is like the details are kind of meaningless. And there's something intoxicating about the. About being contrarian, being the ones that are seeing the real. Being someone that's not a sheep, you know, being someone that is. There's a. There's a choose your own adventure element to it. There's a discover it's interesting, right? Like, you know, just. You can just look at the numbers, right? Is. Are the boring Trump apologist podcast doing that? Well, is. How's Hugh Hewitt show doing? You know, or the National Review guys? Like, you know what I mean? Like, not great. And there's something appealing about this. And so that is why I think that, you know, they have tapped into that. And I wish I knew what the, like, end point of that is or when the point that backfires.

A (44:51)

I was just reminded of the moment When Trump dissed McCain, you know, posthumously, where like, I like, you know, I forget the verbatim line or something like, I like war heroes that don't get captured or something like that was a moment where you couldn't see how a single member of the military could have tolerated him from that moment forward. Like, how was that not beyond touching the third rail politically? And yet somehow it worked for him. So I think what we're continually discovering right of center. I mean, maybe there's a left of center analog to this. I'm not sure what it is, but we're discovering that the things you think matter and would actually be fatal if touched, not only don't matter and aren't fatal, but somehow you can use them to your advantage if you pick them up in the right way.

B (45:35)

One of the answers to this is something that is happening culturally on the right, which I would basically categorize as vice signaling. That starts out as ironic detachment and then sort of grows into a real way. You know, there's this line I like to that I think about a lot where it's like we all wear masks and in time our faces grow to fit them. And I feel like that's your answer kind of on Candace, which is like, it's some parts entertainment, but like, as the feedback loop starts from people, she's like, oh, people are into this Macron stuff. Like, yeah, I'm gonna like, dig deeper in that. I'm gonna go further in that, see how far people go with me. At some point, you're kind of. You're in it. The gay frogs, you're really, really upset about them. And before you know it, you're like, actually, the six year olds weren't all murdered at New and.

C (46:19)

Yeah.

B (46:20)

You know, and. And that vice signaling, though, is kind of a new way. It's like both an antidote to virtue signaling, which is they see as a hallmark of the left, but in the other way. It's like a code that they talk to each other in, which is why when like these text messages come out and you see Bill answering with, oh, just put them in the gas chamber, you know, these. Right, these, all these, like, staffers on the Republican side, that vice signaling has become a cultural touchstone of who people are on the right. Now.

C (46:46)

Can I just say on the. Just because I do think there's a human nature element of this, and I don't think that the version on the left that I'm trying to bring up is, is equal in any way or is as pernicious. But, like, use the folks on the left who are also very happy to hear Charlie Kirk murder conspiracies. Like, that material did quite well on left wing YouTube. Just looking at like our YouTube metrics, for example, if I do a video about Donald Trump's hands, people are interested in that material. Now, that's legitimate. I'm not making things up like Candace's, but, you know, I just. Look, I think that, like, the notion that the other side is, is losing, you know, and, and is losing power forever, or that there's a secret, like all this sort of stuff, like, there's a human element to that. I would have thought that there was a limit to it. Right. And who knows what the limit is on the left. I think that there's maybe just like a little bit of dabbling sometime in what, what I'll call like Blue Maga, you know, like online rhetoric where there's just, you know, feeling of where they don't really want to be told the truth. They want to be told what they want to hear. Now, there's a long way from that to, oh, my God, you know, Charlie Kirk's wife was part of an inside job. You know what I mean? Like all the other crazy stuff that you're seeing on the right. But I don't know, there is just as the media democratizes and as these algorithms back to the platforms, you know, control a lot of what people see. I don't think it's that surprising that a lot of the winners are people that are offering kind of titillating conspiracy theories or doom porn, et cetera. And I think that you can see a little bit of that on the left too.

A (48:23)

So how do you guys think about Tucker Carlson at this point? Obviously he's a very different character from Candace Owens, but they share a lot in common too. I mean, he's very different in the sense that when you look in his past, you see, I think a very talented magazine journalist who went on a very strange journey into pandering and audience capture and desperate lurches to new media purchases that finally paid off in something that looks very Candace like. Except given his background, it's even more reprehensible somehow. I mean, with Candace. When Ben Shapiro hired Candace, I knew that was a colossal mistake the moment I heard he had made it. So from a thousand miles away I could see that Candace was going to be a problem. But with someone like Tucker Carlson, he was a promising young man and then a promising middle aged man and now he's a proper atrocity. How do you think about what he's doing and what he's likely to do next? Are we going to see a presidential candidacy for Tucker Carlson or are we not that dystopian?

C (49:26)

I have two Tucker thoughts and I'll let Sarah go. I just think that the J.D. vance Tucker connection I think is the skeleton key to what he would want to do next. And his son works for JD Vance. I think he was a key player in GD events getting the VP slot. He told we have now in good authority Donald Trump that he thought that the deep state would kill him if he picked a neocon like Marco Rubio to be his vp. Whether or not he believed that or not, I guess is kind of immaterial. But he told that to Trump not as a joke, but a serious way and his advocacy for JD So I think that if JD has continues to have political success, I think Tucker will be happy to ride that. If JD crashes and burns, I think it's. I don't know. I think the doors are open to anything. We live at strange times. My Tucker thing that I would point people to his brother Buckley Carlson has been posting a lot more on social media lately. I don't know if you've seen this.

A (50:12)

I've heard he's a proper Alex Jones level conspiracy theorist.

C (50:16)

Proper cooc. Yeah. But I just think that's really Important because he has said in multiple interviews over time that Buckley is his best friend. And to me, I do think that there's like a real red pilling and radicalization happening. Now, obviously, all of this is like a little bit from column A, a little bit from column B. There's performance, there's pandering to audience. But I just. When you watch Buckley's feed, it is like the raw heroine of the Tucker Carlson Show. And I think that's pretty telling about whether Tucker plans to continue on this trajectory. And to me, what it says is that, yes, he is going to.

B (50:47)

Yeah, I mean, look, every single one of these people is trying to figure out what their lane is toward more power and Tucker. Look, I don't rule out a Tucker Carlson run for president, but running for president's like a terrible job. Like, it wouldn't surprise me at all if. Because part of. I do see a schism lining up between the America first wing of the party and the MAGA establishment. And JD Vance. The reason that I think people kind of assume that he is the future of the party is because he straddles that world in a slightly better way. The problem is he may win the influencer game, but the voters kind of hate him. Like, they just find JD Vance to be a riz. Less like he gives them the ick, including MAGA voters. And so, like, that's a bit of a problem. But I think that Tucker looks and says, like, how can I continue to consolidate my power? And he, he has said that's why he has. He does like a buddy thing routine with Candace. He knows that if they can continue to combine their audiences, that they can collectively build out like a meaningful wing of the party that's really influential in the future of Republican.

C (51:52)

Same with Fuentes. That's why I had fed Fuentes on and gave him a softball, you know, kind of foot massage interview. Same reason.

A (51:58)

Yeah, that was another moment of surprise. And I guess we're still in this moment. The fact that even the people in power, I mean, even J.D. vance, even Trump himself on some level, can't convince themselves that they don't need the anti Semites and white supremacists in the Republican Party, it's like, stand back and stand by, you neo Nazis. Because we're not gonna say anything too critical of Nick Fuentes here because we might need every last one of you. You'd think that there would be more concern about all of the people in the middle, many of the people who voted for Trump this time, but they voted for Biden last time, but they voted for Trump this time. Wouldn't they be concerned to lose all those people because they're glad handing neo Nazis and fans of Stalin and Hitler's got Riz. And I mean, this is what they're associated with now.

C (52:50)

I think they know they need those folks, though, because there's a key part of the base. I mean, I would point out, I'm sure. Have you ever had Oren Kass on the show?

A (52:58)

No.

C (52:58)

He's like a MAGA policy wonk.

B (53:01)

And who passes for smart maga?

C (53:03)

Yeah, it's like, does the Oren Cass candidate for president 2028 have any chance, like somebody who tries to do, you know, serious white paper populist nationalism? Absolutely not. Like, there's no market for that. There's some, there's a handful of people, but like the people that, that are that power, their base and their movement are conspiracy theorists, are. Some of them are white nationalists, are kooky and have very strange views and heterodox views. Now, there are also a lot of mainstream people that voted for Trump. But I just mean like the engine that is churning for them like, requires those, those voters and.

A (53:38)

But you think there are more of those voters than mainstream voters who voted for Trump and the Hispanics who came over to Trump and the.

C (53:45)

No, but you can't control the party without controlling those. You can't control the party if those votes. They'll undermine you. And you know, look, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley tried to do the other thing right. Like to various degrees, like Ron, you know, kind of more from a more conservative standpoint. Nikki from more of like a center right standpoint. And there was no market for it. So I know, sure. Like in gross, there is more kind of mainstream people that voted for Trump because of, you know, inflation. Sure. Than there are white nationalists. Like, yeah, there are more. But of the people that are like, are influential within the party power structure. I don't, I don't think so. I don't know. Sir, do you disagree with that?

B (54:20)

Well, no, no, I agree. I just part of what is interesting about listening to voters is some of, there's a lot of cleavage points among voters. One of them is generational. So like a lot of young people are listening to Tucker and Candace and like there's still a whole Republican normie set that like kind of doesn't know what these guys are saying, doesn't know anything about them, and only kind of taps in on the news. Maybe they watch Fox News, but maybe they don't I mean, the extent to which people are running off of vibes now and scrolling. But, like, I don't know, I said this going into the election about a million times. My, my podcast buddy jbl and I were having a fight about this the whole time. Like, the extent to which people were frustrated with the economy and with Joe Biden's age and felt like they got gaslit by Democrats over the fact that Joe Biden was old and they shouldn't have run again. People were really, really mad. And I think my, my anger really lies with the Ben Shapiro's because they gave permission for people to be like, yeah, Trump's fine, despite the fact tried to steal an election. And that allowed a lot of people to say, you know what? I know Trump's a bad guy. I hear this all the time. Like, I'm not going to invite him to a dinner party. I just want the economy to be better. And he's a businessman. And like, there's that whole set.

A (55:31)

He's a fake businessman, but he's a, he plays one on television.

C (55:35)

A really terrible businessman.

B (55:36)

And nobody should confuse my analysis for my own viewpoints. But, like, I listen to voters all the time and hear the ways in which they live in their own world, both algorithmically and just in terms of what they, what they hear, what they know about. And some people are deep in Candace and other people are like, oh, I've kind of heard of her. Or like, no, I've never heard of Nick Fuentes. Like, there's a whole world out there of Republicans who haven't, who barely know who Nick Fuentes is. And so like, understanding the differences, the different segments that it takes to build a political coalition and how those come together. And usually it has something. It's like you swim in the soup of Trumpism, much of it. So again, things cleave geographically. So you live in central Pennsylvania, where I'm from, and you were always a Republican, and you don't really. It's not that you're listening to Candace, but like, the smartest person that you know listens to Candace and says, who's, like, deep into politics and is like, yeah, she says some interesting things and let me know you what I know. And you're like, wow, like, just while you're working together or whatever. But that, that vibes that way in which we get to a social norming place. Like, Trump got social normed for us as a certain kind of person. Not for us, not for super close observers, but for people. I, I made I tweeted this going into the super bowl just as cause I was thinking about how I didn't know anything about either team and I'm only a light football observer trying to get into it. But I was like, millions of people right now are going to a Super bowl party and they're like, who's playing? Who should I root for? What? What weird, like, piece of information am I going to take to decide you're.

A (57:08)

Talking to one of those people. Yeah.

C (57:09)

Yeah.

B (57:10)

Okay. So that's you. That's how most Americans do elections, right?

A (57:13)

Right. Yeah, that's a good analogy.

C (57:15)

It's concerning.

B (57:17)

It's concerning.

A (57:18)

Well, let's talk about J.D. vance for a moment because again, I don't really have a clear theory of mind about him. He's been on quite a journey and he's obviously smart. He's obviously not. If you roll back the footage of his life, at one point he appeared to be quite normal and ethical and had his head screwed on straight and had a lot of interesting things to say to America about part of America that has been much ignored. And then whether it's just pure opportunism or some kind of Machiavellian unmasking of his deeper ideological commitments, he's now become. He does seem like a fairly sinister figure to me. I don't know what he's capable of, if not initiating himself, collaborating with, in the end, in his desire to just maintain and seize more power. How would you feel if Trump were to not wake up tomorrow morning for whatever reason and we suddenly had President Vance? Would that be a good thing, all things considered, or a bad thing? Would you be more or less worried about the future of America? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support and you can subscribe now@samharris.org.