[Music]
Hello and welcome to the board podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller.
I'd like to welcome back to the show, staff writer at the Atlantic and the author of The
“Cruelty is the point. It's Adam Sarwar. How are you doing, man? I'm right. How are you doing, Tim?”
I don't know if you're a little better than you. You kind of seem sad. You're just all right. You know, allergies? You know, I think the voting rights acting is one of the most depressing and demoralizing developments in American politics. I think, you know, watching things like Tennessee redistrict. It's only black district out of existence. You know, days essentially after the ruling. You know, it's very hard to think about all the people who live through, you know, the 1960s
and the civil rights movement who are now seeing all that work, all that sacrifice being undone
by a court that is equal parts naive and malicious. All right. Let's get into that. I was thinking about this before I had you all. I know that you can kind of see, get a sense for what's going wrong in the country based on gas frequency. That's like it's not really a great sign for
“no racial and social justice issues. That this is my second Adam Sarwar visit in the last couple”
months. But I do, I appreciate you coming on. Your latest article on this kind of goes back. I want to get honest with you on time in Tennessee. But I do think it's valuable to take the lens back a little bit. And you started talking about a character that, you know, only old
timers, maybe, or conservative, you know, media obsessives would know about, again, I'm James Jackson
Kilpatrick. And I want you to kind of talk about why you framed up the article about the decision around him and, you know, what lessons we can learn from that. Well, co-patrick's an interesting figure because, you know, he starts off as a hardcore segregationist as a guy who is opposed to brown v-board, opposed to the civil rights act, opposed to the voting rights act, makes an affirmative case that, you know, racial discrimination is one of the, the central
liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and that American society falls apart without it. And then, you know, he becomes a much more mainstream figure. He becomes a newspaper columnist from News Day. And he starts abandoning sort of the overt segregation. And, you know, people have a lot of his personal correspondence, so his rationalizations about this are fairly mercenary and clear. At one point, he, you know, this didn't make it into the article, but at one point,
you know, he wants to publish a piece arguing that black people are biologically and permanently inferior. And then the 15th Street Baptist Church bombing happens. And so he's like, well, that's might not be a good time to publish this, so he doesn't publish it. And then, you know, the editor comes back later and he's like, you know, do you want to publish this now that, you know, everything sort of blow it over. And he says, well, I can't really afford to be associated with those
use right now because, you know, his career is going well. And so he, you know, he doesn't want to be an open clansman anymore. And in some of his correspondence, he says, you know, I'm now a big convert to color blindness. I'm like the Catholic who's more Catholic than the Pope. And the reason he becomes a convert to color blindness is not that his views if fundamentally changes. It's just that he realizes through this expression of sort of reactionary color blindness, the idea that there's
an equivalence between attempts to remedy racism and racism itself that he can achieve his own policy goals of maintaining, you know, at least, de facto segregation, even without having to be an overt racist or to have overtly discriminatory laws. You figured it up nicely in the piece and tying it to the course decision this way. You wrote the course decision is constant with the philosophy articulated by Kilpatrick that the state is oppressive when it interferes with the right to
discriminate and respects liberty when it allows discrimination. And I just said that was very
“succinct way to frame it. Yeah, I mean, I think that the court regards the liberty to discriminate”
as an actual liberty and the liberty not to be discriminated against as sort of a fake thing that was imposed by foolish liberals, whether in the 1860s and 70s or the 1960s and 70s. And I think, you know, to some extent, you know, you look at someone like Samuel Lito who takes tremendous umberage at accusations of racism but is, you know, entirely indifferent to actual racial discrimination when it happens. And I think that, you know, there is this sort of toxic naivete that liberals
are making up this whole racism problem and that, you know, it's just a way to be mean to
Conservatives.
conservatives can possibly be racist. And, you know, when you look at the logic of his decision, I mean, he says, you know, you can't really disentangle racism, partisanship and partisanship is fine. So if this is a really racist to sort of redistrict black people or disenfranchise black people and sure that districts are drawn in such a way that they waste their votes. But that would have been shocking to the framers of the 15th Amendment who were partisan Republicans who understood
that Democrats were disenfranchising black people in order to destroy the Republican party in the South. The thing was intertwined when the 15th Amendment was adopted. So the idea that, you know, this is just a complicated problem and you can't disentangle it. In what other contexts would black people be disenfranchised if not a partisan context, whether that's the democratic
party doing it or the Republican party doing it, that's the whole motive in the first place.
“That's why the 15th Amendment was adopted. So it's, you know, it's a combination of, I think,”
like I said, you know, maliciousness and naivety and sort of a reactionary, everything the lips say must be wrong. Ergo, this is totally fine. If we look at the kind of the trajectory of this, are you right about the 1982 congressional reauthorization, which obviously Reagan signs and then gets reauthorized again in 2006 with Bush. A lot of these sentiments you describe were held then, right? It's not as if conservatives did not believe in 1982 in 2006 that liberals weaponized
accusations of racism against them for, you know, on ways that were, whatever, overrall or fake. And there weren't people that took on bridge against them and Bush appointed a leader, for example. And so I'm wondering what you make of, like, why the change now and what that says about our trajectory and just, just for, give some context to this, I think we'll be interested. I went back and listened to Bush's signing speech when he was signing the reauthorization in 2006,
I just want to play a little bit of that for you. For decades since the voting rights act was
first passed, we made progress. Tordi quality yet to work for a more perfect union is never ending.
Today we renew a bill that helped bring a community on the margins into the life of American democracy. My administration will vigorously enforce the provisions of this law and we will defend it in court.
“What's changed, do you think? Well, I think a couple of things have changed. You know, I think”
the Cold War put a tremendous amount of pressure in the United States to live up to its ideals domestically. We were sort of on autopilot in that sense, after the Cold War and during the war on terror, there was, I think, not the same kind of pressure, but a similar kind of pressure. But what really happened was that Trump showed that the price to pay for being overtly racist was not nearly as much as they thought it was. And so Trump winning two elections.
Since the message, and I think even during the Bush era, there was a whole scandal about the civil rights division in particular, the voting section and the people running it saying, we're going to jerry mandor all those lives out of the division. This was from an office of professional responsibility report on the politicized hiring scandal at the time.
“So, these people did exist, but they were, I think, restrained by leadership because they felt”
like there would be a political cost to pay for over racism. And I think Bush, in particular, the Bush era, probably, can party. If you remember, like, the Republican conventions of that era, you know, they had a gospel choir. There was very much like, you know, we're not that Republican party anymore. And then Trump comes out and he just, you know, he can get away with saying, you know, calling black people garbage, saying, you know, we have these people coming from
shithole countries. We don't want them. We only want Nordics here in America. The public's perception of him is so embedded among low information voters of like, he's just the business guy that nobody seems to believe that he is this ideological racist that he is. And as a result, the Republican party feels like, oh, there are no rules anymore. We can get away with all of this. But, you know, someone like Roberts and someone like Alito, they've been gunning for this for
a long time. They wanted to repeal the voting rights act for a long time. And I think if you look at
Roberts's, you know, our unit in parents involved, you know, which is the first school
to segregation case where he writes this formulation that I think is sort of the central dogma of reactionary, colorblindness where he says, the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop
Discriminating on the basis of race.
When you look at this show, be kind of ruling, he regards federal interference on behalf of black
“people to fight racism. He regards this as a tremendous tyranny. I think that's sincere. I think”
it is an extremely naive perspective. And I think, you know, I think he's maybe slightly different from Alito and that Alito is just a hardcore partisan who doesn't have any, like, real central philosophical beliefs that he applies consistently. But Roberts is consistently opposed federal power to alleviate racism because he thinks it's worse than racism. I think that's really dumb. And I think you can see why. I mean, one of the things is that, you know, there's
all been all this self-congregulation every time the court has stripped away a piece of the voting rights act and has said, well, we've come so far. But actually, we really haven't, I mean, what we're saying right now in terms of like what Republican states are doing in the immediate aftermath of this ruling says that we haven't come so far. It was not that there was, you know, the tremendous culture change that we thought we witnessed after my parents generation was not so much a culture
change as a legal change. There were legal restraints on how racist people could be and that forced to change in the culture. But now that they're taking these restraints away and Donald Trump has shown that there is not as much of a price to be paid for being overtly racist, that supposed progress is not as visible. I agree with that a lot of that. I'm curious to thoughts on my
initial reaction when you're first started talking is one of my fundamental belief changes recently
as I've become very pro virtue signaling lately. I feel like virtue signaling was much maligned for a while like you listen to the Bush speech and it's like there's something to be said for it. You know, it's kind of like at some level you want people's hearts to be changed but there's also something to be said for, you know, leaders feeling like they should appeal to virtue rather than device. I don't want to make this seem like this is a blame on voters, you know, of color that voted
for Trump. But I think that the cynical view that you're talking about where Republicans feel like there wasn't a price to be paid. Like during the Bush era Republicans are doing terrible black voters. But like there's this idea that if they demonstrate a good faith, right, that eventually it could be one over, right? And so I think that Trump, not just weaning twice, but like doing slightly better among black and brown voters. I think also contribute it.
Like ended this conventional wisdom in Republican circles. Like to win over Hispanic voters,
“you have to be moderate on immigration. To win over black voters, you have to, you know,”
moderate on voting rights and criminal justice reform, whatever the stereotypical issues are. And at some ways, like that is obviously wrong and bad, but you can understand why the change is made. I don't know, maybe like the distance from the Civil Rights Act and the types of voters who came along for Trump, that the time contributed in that manner as well. I don't know, what do you make about? I'm not sure how much these numbers that Trump has put up, you know,
improving the voters of color who would normally vote Republican turning out and those who are not staying home. The other theory was that once the Republican party started earning these votes, that they would moderate on these issues. You know, Steven Miller has not become any less ideologically committed to socially engineering, America. Not the white. Not the white. We have a
“whites-only refugee program. You know, that's shocking to me. I think about it every day. And”
I don't, like to me, that's a five-alarm scandal, but it's just sort of like something that's in the ether. The administration has banned travel from like almost every majority in the world. Again, I think that this is an artifact of Trump's image being so cemented in the minds of a lot of low information voters that they simply don't believe any of the stuff that comes out about him, or they're not paying attention, or they just think of him as the guy that they saw on the
Apprentice. I do think there's an element of denial involved just based on personal experience with, you know, non-white Trump voters in my own family. There is just a tremendous denial that he is this person. They don't want to believe it. They want to believe that he's the guy that they want him to be. I mean, you know, ideally in the long term, you do want some kind of racial depolarization because that means that those issues are no longer, you know, a central part of American life,
but, you know, ideally that comes from, you know, broad social and economic equality, not,
and, you know, the end of racism, basically, not from, you know, a kind of authoritarian depolarization
Where you have voters who are attracted to authoritarian governance, even if ...
you know, a candidate who is surrounded fundamentally by people who are ideological, white nationalists who think being an American is about being white. To your point that this is the voters fault, I mean, I don't think there's any way to argue with that. They picked it,
“right? I think that they were delusional to some extent. I think that's why as”
all ratings are so low, when I talk to Trump voters, again, they just discounted, you know, during the campaign, they just refused to believe any of the negative stuff was true, even when it was coming from people who used to work for him. And like when you talk to people, they're like, oh, he's just going to, you know, mass deportation means go after the criminals. Well, that's not what that means, or like the tariffs, you know, they pay the tariffs. I mean, there's just a
total refusal to accept what Trump's agenda actually was because they liked him personally, like his personal brand was so strong with these people that they simply refused to believe that he would do these things. And now that he's doing them, they don't like it very much. And I said this,
you know, right after the election, it was like maybe the second piece I published,
that if Trump actually pursued his agenda, a lot of his voters would be disappointed with it.
“On the flip side of that, just to go back to the virtue signaling question, I think there was a”
tremendously successful caricatureing of the sort of, you know, highly educated, liberal who was like policing everybody's language, you know, this perception that the right was not attacking people of color when it was attacking, quote unquote, "wokeness," but it was actually just attacking these, you know, pointy-headed annoying ones, not the actual communities that these white lips were purporting to defend. And I think that's slight of hand. I think trick people
to some extent to think, "Oh, these people aren't that bad. They just take political correctness." And I don't really like it either. It's so annoying to be told that I'm not allowed to say this, to say that. But ultimately, like the hardcore ideological agenda that, you know, the quote unquote, "wokes were warning about," was the actual agenda. But, you know, like what is democracy,
“if the voters aren't accountable for their choices, and they made a really bad choice, and, you know,”
a lot of people who are vulnerable are going to suffer the consequences of that choice.
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As you've alluded to a couple times in Tennessee, there is no slide of hand. Could not be more of, I mean, I guess there is, but it is, that is obvious of one as possible being put forth by the Republicans that are redistricting the state. They divided Shelby County or Memphis as into thirds. Like a third, a third, a third, then equally put like that percentage of black voters into three different congressional districts to dilute black voting power as
much as possible. In the court of going debate about this, obviously, they're just rubber stamping it. The black representative Jesse Chism was asking a question to the House Majority Leader William Lamberth about this, the manner in which Shelby County was redistricted, and I want to play that way. So I'm trying to kid you. I may not be as smart as some of the rest of us. So I'm just going to ask some really simple questions. So, Memphis is a predominantly African-American
city. Do you take a break? We deliver. I'm not pretty to you. There's demographics. I don't know.
Resent, residence or you recognize me call it.
You're the guy in a Trump flag, state-revenue in a Trump flag. I mean, like it says blatant as possible in Tennessee. He doesn't see color when he's redistricting black minority districts out of existence. When he's in Memphis, he doesn't see color. He just, he didn't take whichever neighborhood he wants to go to based on that or rest nothing. You know, he's just walking down the street. Everybody looks yellow at him. It's like the Simpson. If you'd like, you know,
resurrected, you list his ass grant to some dark magic, and you told him, hey, this Supreme Court is nullifying the 15th Amendment again. Look what they're doing in Tennessee, the birthplace of the
first clan, he would be like, yeah, that sounds right. He would probably be surprised they
was Republicans, but that's about it. The framers of the 15th Amendment, you know, they wrote that amendment in the context of racist partisan disenfranchised, attempted disenfranchisement of black
“people. That's why it was written, the idea that you couldn't disentangle those things”
or that it would be impossible to do that, or that it wouldn't count if it was motivated by partisanship, would have struck them as insane. You know, so to see the originalists on the court pretend like this is just too complicated, a problem and expect us to believe that is absurd and ridiculous. They know what they're doing. They knew that this would be the
consequences, and the only thing I can say, you know, to go back to our previous question
about the voters is that if the voters don't understand the gravity of what they done and correct their mistake and over correct their mistake, really, I do think we are in for a period of time that is going to be very bad. And I think when you look at the writings of black activists and in journalists and intellectuals in the period, right after
“reconstruction, we have to remember that full disenfranchisement of black Americans does not happen”
immediately after reconstruction. There's a brief period in fact where they are working with the white populist to create biracial coalitions in the south and in some places, North Carolina, Virginia, these are actually quite successful. It is after that that, you know, these sort of overt, you know, white supremacy campaigns that usher in Jim Crow occur. And this is, you know, this is the subject of Stephen Woodward's strange career of Jim Crow, which was considered the
Bible of the Civil Rights Movement precisely because it presented this history as contingent. And what black intellectuals right during that period is that the violence and lynching that occurs, occurs post disenfranchisement. Now theoretically, you know, the end of quote unquote Negro domination should have led to some sort of peace. But in fact, what happens is now that these
“communities are more vulnerable, now that black people are more vulnerable, now that there is no”
democratic accountability to black people, the racism actually gets worse. How to be well's rights about this, you know, Frederick Douglass talks about this, which is like if politicians do not fear losing your vote, you know, they will overlook all kinds of things. And what happens is particularly local authorities in the south, they simply just stop enforcing the law to protect black people in general. And I do fear that what you're seeing with stuff like this in Tennessee,
it's not simply a question of partisanship and to see it that way is actually like tremendously naive. What you're doing is you are severing an entire community from democratic accountability and that is going to leave them vulnerable to economic dispossession, to violence, to discrimination. And I worry that that is precisely the point. I mean, if you look at the way that the Republican Party changes after reconstruction, there's a North Carolina senator who's elected on, you know,
effusionist ticket. I'm blanking on his name at the moment, but he is a tremendous champion of
black rights. There's this incredible scene in the Senate where he is, you know, mocking Benjamin
Tillman who, you know, probably holds the record for the use of the M word in the Senate. Man, he's just making fun of him and talking about what a dummy in a loser he is. And then, you know, North Carolina disenfranchisement happens and this, that his name is Senator Purchut, and after disenfranchisement happens, this guy becomes a huge advocate of the quote unquote, really white Republican Party of like just completely, you know, abandoning the whole black rights
thing and just becoming a party just for white people. And he does that. It's not, it's not
Simply a question of like morality, although it is that.
people can vote for Republicans anymore. So what's the point? And, you know, I think that to some
“extent, this is the larger agenda of creating an electorate that is wider and more right-wing”
so that these issues of social racial, you know, religious gender equality simply are not viable issues for either political party to pursue. When this is where the issue in Tennessee is so stark and where, you know, you're getting more and more worried and upset as I hear you talk, because like, yeah, voters aren't going to correct their mistake. There's no November and a lot of places. We're going to see that. But in some places that I can be able to, and in Tennessee,
they fully rigged the system. And there is no other way to describe what is happening in Tennessee, other than, you know, black voters have then completely disenfranchised. People of Memphis and the people of Nashville have taxation without representation at all. And they've carved up the state and the two biggest cities of the state will not have representatives that reflect, you know, their values or the agenda that they want to put a shot. You know, there's a district now, the new
district that they've carved up is a third of Memphis and it goes all the way to Exnerman Nashville.
“Like, that's the only way that they could carve it up to state to make sure that there's no”
representation for Democrats and no representation for black people in a state, as you mentioned in the south, replace the clan. And it's like, I don't know how you deal with that, right? Like, because you can really say legitimately like that voters in Tennessee potentially are going to be in such a system where they, that's rigged as such a degree, like they don't have the franchise. They don't, they can't use the normal democratic process to fix the system. Like, in the whole
country, there are other places we can, but I don't know how you can argue that it's possible in
Tennessee if this is not held by the court. You know, arguably it took a third American revolution
to fix it the last time. So I can't say I'm optimistic in part because that revolution that's a rights movement was based in a network of relationships and social connection that needs to be rebuilt in an era of social media atomization that the barriers to these kinds of movements being constructed in the same way are tremendous. But, you know, if you look at a place like Minnesota, it can't happen. Yeah, I realize that I was saying that I feel like I don't want to demoralize
my Tennessee listeners because I've had, you know, just the realities reality. No, I mean, but there are no permanent victories. You know, part of the folly here is that Republicans think that if they do this, that people will eventually stop wanting to be free. But it didn't happen in the 1890s. It didn't happen in the 1920s. It didn't happen after the Red Summer and all those maskers and riots. It did not happen after the lynchings of soldiers coming back from World War
One and World War Two. People are not going to give up. But that doesn't take away from the evil in my view of what's being done and the conscious malice with which it is being done. I do think it is going to take a tremendous effort to get us back, you know, even to score one. Well, it's already been kind of a bleak show. I'm sorry to do this to you. I have some more bad news on the breaking news front. The Virginia Supreme Court has overturned the redistricting map
that was passed by the voters of Virginia on technical grounds. This is just happening right now. So, obviously, I haven't had a chance like dig into the ruling. You wrote about this. I in Virginia voters were purposely disenfranchising Republicans. But it was part of this effort the broader fight to kind of fight fire with fire here and hopefully lead to better results. I think that the political position for the president is so bad right now that I'm not sure
that this ruling will have an impact on what happens in the House of Representatives really.
“I think that the only way what the Virginia Democrats did is justifiable is as an escalation meant”
to de-escalate ultimately to, you know, to get to a point where Republicans are ruling to negotiate over the issue of Jerry Mandarin. Drawing districts is tough. I mean, the other thing is that you can try to do this and you can get it down to a pretty good science. But the fact is people move.
Those lines don't always stay what you think they're going to stay. You think you've made
a bulletproof district and sometimes it doesn't actually turn out that way. You know, again, I think this race to the bottom of the Jerry Mandarin where Democratic states have been responding to Republican Jerry Mandarin by Jerry Mandarin of their own is only necessary because the only thing that's worse than constitutional hardball is
Unilateral constitutional hardball.
are open to de-escalation, not just one side. I think that race to the bottom is bad news.
In general, I don't know how else to describe it to go back to our previous conversation. They are going to try and redistrict black people out of American political life. It is hard to do that than they think. That's all I can say about that. I don't think it'll necessarily
“work out the way that they want it to work out, but I think it should be very clear what the intent”
is here. We should be helpful because there's a report last night that the Justice John Roberts has been promoting privately that Americans just don't understand how the Supreme Court operates. They see the Justice as political actors, but the Court sometimes just has to make
unpopular decisions in line with the Constitution. So, I don't think you got to worry about the
Supreme Court acting in a political manner. The Court in the 1870s is facing a tremendous amount of public pressure from white Americans to abandon the Reconstruction Project, not just peaceful violent pressure, but this Court did it without any of that. They just did it because they wanted to. They work facing that kind of pressure to disenfranchise black people. They had upheld section two of the voting rights act. It's not like people would have been showing up to the Court
trying to burn it down. Well, also, they didn't have to do it when they did it. Again, even if you take them at the vessel, they could have just done it in the June and July session so that Louisiana didn't nullify the votes of 42,000 people. It had already voted. I mean,
“I think the other thing is that that Court, the 1870s Court, maybe didn't understand the consequences”
of what they were doing, but these people have done it without the public pressure, but with the knowledge of hindsight. So, in some ways, you could actually argue that there were, I mean,
you know, Henry Billings Brown only wrote one classy in Elito as basically written too. So,
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Sarah Fitzpatrick, wrote about Cache Patel's incompetent leadership of the Bureau, the degree to which he was drunk and hungover so much that they'd descend in teams to go wake him up from his hotel room and he's missing meetings, et cetera, et cetera. And reaction to that, the free speech of administration launched a criminal leak investigation against her, typically these times at least investigations looking to government officials who
just go state secrets. In this case, it was going after a journalist. It's a little bit conflicting for them to Cache said that this story was made up in lies, but it's also a criminal leak, I'm unsure how to square that, but what I really love is that after that, after news of that leak broke, you guys just dropped another article, Sarah Fitzpatrick just dropped another article of that question about how he's handing out branded bottles of woodford reserve
to people as little gifts from the head of the Bureau. So, I don't know, a lot there, wondering what you're making, what you make of a story. I make a lot of things of the story. None of which I'm in a place to discuss, because the Atlantic has asked us not to talk about it. Jeffrey Goldberg is silent thing you right now. I would just repeat, you know, whoa, I'm just joking. That's a joke, that's a joke. I don't want to put the magazine in like a
weird legal position. So, I just point to our public statements. I will say hypothetically, you know, if I were the head of head of the FBI, you know, I would try to act with the utmost integrity and then knowledge that I'm running an organization full of investigators and bureaucrats who are very familiar with chains of evidence and documentation. So, you know, I don't know that I would
I'd be trying to piss off my workforce if I were running the FBI and I were i...
You could go another route, though, which is where Catwood Cash has done,
going to Carolina reporting yesterday from us now. He's ordered the polygrapping of more than two dozen members of his security detail, as well as other close staff, because he's in panic mode, to save his job and concerned about all the leaks. So, you know, polygrapping all the people around you as another approach besides just acting with the integrity. You know, I wish that there are a lot of things I wish they could say and I'm not kidding you. Your face says a lot for the YouTube
viewers, I'm going to give you one more swing at this, but this way you can you can talk about an external, I was intrigued by this article by the free press, not title ironically. They had a profile
this week, had lined meet the free speech warrior of the Trump administration, was talking about
some woman in the Trump administration who is cracking down on Germany and other countries and waving her finger at them for their violations of free speech. And I don't know, man, it's, it's, it's really something when you've got somebody like the free press out there doing this and writing that article on that's the week where they're actively investigating journalists. Well, there's also, you know, burning car job owning ABC over Jimmy Kimmel, because he's making
jokes to president and his wife don't like, I mean, look, these people's philosophy of free speech is the Republicans have the right to say what they want to say and you have the right to say what Republicans want to say. And if you don't say those things, you might be subject to legal or professional sanction. It's one thing for the administration to be total liars on this and there are
“some people who have been consistent, but I think it says a great deal that the sort of self-styled”
free speech champions of the quote unquote cancel culture era are praising this administration's stewardship of free speech when it is blatantly trying to censor criminalize all of its critics. I mean Trump called for prosecution of hockey and Jeffries for speech yesterday. And I think the general philosophy of right-wing free speech warriors on essay free speech and quotes, because they don't actually believe in it, it's simply to pretend that the Trump administration
doesn't exist. Or to be very selective, like the parts of the Trump administration who that exists is that like you can do slurs now without a problem unless they're exposing them to Jewish people. And the administration will lecture-- Well, it depends on how you catch this stuff. And the administration will lecture other countries when they do things badly. Those are the parts that they like. Even in the context of this, I mean, you know, they're trying to revoke visas or block people
from traveling to United States who, you know, we're doing any kind of disinformation research, which itself is speech. You know what I mean? Like, you know, if you're a private organization doing disinformation research, that is speech. They're entitled to do that. And their view is that any criticism of them is censorship. And when you define it that way, then you can fight censorship
“by censoring people. This is honestly Jeff's doing a great job with his stewardship of the”
Atlantic and their commitment to free speech and is the unofficial podcast of the Atlantic. Whenever folks are ready to talk about it, I'm happy to have somebody on, I'm not rush. I want to get you just a little bit on the Iran War. The ceasefire is continuing, but we are firing also. So, you know, it's a little confusing, but we had three boats that were traversing the straight as part of the so-called project freedom effort to free some boats in order to help the
supply chain issues that they've created with this war. Some of the Iranian ships fired on our boats, and we fired on the Iranian boats, and the President put out a statement talking about
how amazing it was that we successfully shot down those boats and drones and talked about how the
Iranians are lunatics, and if they weren't lunatics, then, you know, the straight would be open, and they better do a deal real soon, or else he's going to have to crack down on them very hard. But the ceasefire is still on. No worries. I was just going to love top. So, that's the state of play in the Iran War. And it is rarely ceasefire. I'm going to get in trouble for that.
“You know, so, you know, I think the issue with the Iran War is that it was a stupid idea to begin with.”
And the administration is run by these people who have this like, you know, turn of the century Victorian conception of masculinity. They just assume that this would be like an easy war against, you know, quote, unquote, primitive people. And it didn't occur that they might be outmaneuvered strategically, because they were too busy, you know, wanting to show everybody that they were big tough guys. I mean, you look at like Steven Miller, who's like,
We never should have withdrawn from our colonies after World War II.
think that was a choice? You know, and I mean, did you think that you just did that out of the
“goodness of your heart? And I think he probably does believe that because, you know, he's blinded by this”
sort of ideology about cultural superiority to the extent that they assumed that if they just simply bombed Iran a whole lot that Iran, you know, would not really react or try to figure out a way to outmaneuver them. And while it's clear that the United States is militarily superior to the Iranian military that does not necessarily yield strategic victory. And this is sort of the lesson of American military interventions for like the past century. So it's it's kind of striking
that they hadn't learned it. The other thing that they seem to misunderstand, but this is pretty
related, just kind of to the misconception of how and why America does what it does versus how these
foreign countries act. Rubio to press conference this week. And there were two segments of the press conference that were pretty striking. One, he talked about how Iran needs to understand that they're the bad guys right now, since they're the ones blowing up boats and that were the good guys. Like he literally used good guys bad guys as as the frame. And then he also talked to later about how the Iranian regime was bad because they killed protesters and because protesters aren't
given the opportunity to speak out. There didn't seem to be any kind of awareness of the way other people might see those facts, which I, by the way, in the context of Iran, I agree, but coming from somebody speaking on behalf of this administration, there may be some logical flaws.
“I think to go back to your point about virtue signaling, if you abandon the virtue signaling,”
and you just, you know, you want to talk like Darth Vader in your speeches. You know, then it's a little harder to be like, but we're the good guys. And obviously, if you kill protesters in the United States, it gets a lot harder to attack other governments for doing the same thing. To be clear, the Iranian regime has been a lot deadlier against this protest than the, than the Trump administration. But the issue with the
banning morality and being like, a might makes right school shooter manifesto type rhetoric is that, you know, then people take you seriously and it's harder to appeal to the better angels of people's nature and, and make it seem like, you know, you're doing things out of the goodness of your art. You've already told us that your might makes right people, you can't then complain that it's wrong when the strong abuse the weak. I want to just do a little politics with you
to end. I mean, we've obviously all, everything is politics, but just like campaign politics. And
first is a relates to the war and just curiously, if thoughts on this, I do think that like the
commentary, it doesn't really appreciate the degree of rage and the electorate, particularly the Democratic electorate, just broadly about what is happening, that about this war in particular.
“And I think that that is only going to increase, maybe that's led to some mis-analysis of what's”
happening. And just a couple of examples, like we had the Platner story, you know, he runs against the sitting governor of Maine and beats her so badly that she doesn't even make it to be election. She has to draw off on the race. Like, Platner has no background in politics on my colleague, Javier Orton, or Nicole about how Platner has somewhere between a 5 and 33% chance of being the Democratic nominee in 2028. It's a little cheeky, maybe, but like, you know, the point that you're
trying to make is like, the Democrats are looking for somebody that just channeling their anger. And if nobody else is going to do it, maybe it'll be the oyster farmer. simultaneously, Kamala, there's a story yesterday that Kamala has been signaling privately that she has more to say about the Middle East, now that she's freed from the Biden White House, but that she'll likely do so after the mid-terms. I don't even really want to pick on her because I think that
that is like a mindset that is pretty widespread among the Democratic establishment, though like they are not happy with the war and they've changed their views on it, but like they're really not that mad about it, you know, you're sort of closer to that Democratic activist world than I am. I'm so sure if you'd kind of agree with that assessment that there's like a misdiagnosis of the rage, particularly around the foreign policy issues. I think that people are justifiably angry
about the suffering that has been inflicted on Palestinians, civilians with American help. And I think that when it comes to the Iran war, we are talking about, I mean, not unlike the 15th amendment discussion. We are talking about the kind of war that the American government, the original founders of the American government, split the war powers in such a way to prevent
Capricious kings from going to war for personal profit.
Lincoln speech when he's a congressman about how kings were always going to war and
impoverishing their own populations for personal gain. And the entire purpose of separating the powers between the legislature and the executive was to prevent it. And here we have a president going to war, flouting those very conventions that were built to prevent capricious stupid wars like this were happening. And now, you know, we're in one that puts the entire global economy at risk. I will be honest with you, Tim. You know, I do not
honest the rest of the time. I mean, like, you know, this is my preface of saying, you know,
“I'm about to say something that I think is probably might be bad news, which is that I do not”
trust the polling. Like, I simply do not. Like, directionally, I think it's probably correct,
but the extent to which the American people are genuinely angry at this administration is something that I think we will only know after November. I think Trump to some extent has made polling unreliable, not totally like it's not something that can totally be dismissed. But I think it is actually very difficult to gauge public sentiment from the normal tools we use to gauge public sentiment in the Trump era because he seems to activate people who do not show up in polls,
but do show up at the ballot box to what extent the American people have been activated by this, the reporting from inside the administration seems to suggest that they are concerned about it. But I don't think that they're a reliable gauge of that either. I think sometimes, you know,
“I think, I remember in 2016, they thought they were going to lose and they very narrowly won.”
So I'm going to wait to make a final judgment on where the American people are at. When it comes to this stuff, I will say that I do think if people are angry about these things, they are right to be angry about it. I totally agree with that. I think I was getting a little
high on my own supply just because things are going so bad for a second about how, you know,
the state of the electorate and I just think that they're just going to mix that on that now. But that rage within the democratic base, I think it's pretty. Yeah, and I think it's, I think it's then I think I would repeat the assessment that it has less to do with liberal or moderate in a desire for the democratic party to show some fight. I think, you know, with the voting rights act stuff, I mean, I think there's just a sense
that the democratic party has been so afraid of the Republican base that it is not defended its own base. Democrats are extremely hungry for politicians who are willing to do that, whether or not they're liberal or moderate, but people who are willing to stand up for sort of these bedrock principles of democracy and equality. I won the last thing, it kind of relates to the partner question and it relates to everything
we've been talking about. But I saw this post by Dave Weigel and it was like, it's like I really need to get atoms to take on this. He posted about this book called The DeGlocked It Voter,
“was written by David Paul Cohn in 2007. So I think that how Democrats are losing with white men and”
how that could is going to be a problem. And this book ends up being kind of forgotten because Obama wins the next year. And it's like, whatever, this isn't that big of a problem. But the thesis of the book was like a white men start voting for Republicans at the rates to black men vote for Democrats. Like, that's bad news for the Democrats. Obviously, just given that they're way more white people in the country. So he posted about this and tied it to this recent poll, there's
a Pew poll that says that like despite Democrats gaining with all these other groups, they continue to be weaker with particularly young white men for Pew just 18% of white men under 30 ideas Democrats. And I guess the question is, what is like to be done about that that is not undermining Democrats outreach to other demographics? Just as someone who, you know, on social media gets a lot of content from fitness spaces, we have people turning out the
dumbest, do-murist reactionary content day after day aimed at this demographic. You know, this idea that, you know, everybody hates you, you know, girls aren't going to respect you. If you can't bench 225, they don't give a shit about that. You know, I'm saying there's a sort of creation of this Naomi Klein in her book. She calls it the mirror world. You know, this sort of mirror world where white men are oppressed that everybody wants to take their rights and privileges away
from them. And I think to some extent, this is a product of economic dislocation, you know, in a sense that like we have a service economy in which, you know, a lot of the jobs growing are
Female-coated service jobs.
You know, in terms of like all those mainly jobs that he said he was going to bring back with his manufacturing, trucking, all this stuff. He's made those markets worse with his tariffs. So that could make the Democrats political problem worse. It creates a cycle where they're job opportunities.
“That's right. Because I think there is to an extent there is like, it's not so much the producing”
that jobs that matters, but the signaling about the sort of traditional manliness that these, that some of these guys feel like they have been denied. And the answer that they're being given from this sort of, you know, male-dumer industry is that if you take away other people's rights and choices that like the paradise that you're like grandads lived in will come back. And it's nonsense. It's just not true. It's not even really economically possible.
But, you know, it seems to have been tremendously effective in convincing people that like, I don't know, the reason that you don't have your dream job is, you know, that women can decide who they marry or date now. I don't know what to say about, I think, to some extent, it really is a question of Republican control of the means of information production and distribution. But that doesn't tell you how to fix it. The honest, I don't know how to fix it. I don't have a solution
that problem. What I will say is that I think it's tremendously obvious, both from the, you know, the administration's policies and it's effect on sort of the economic fundamentals that are producing this situation. But it's also like, you know, then these guys complain that when they go on dating apps, women ask or they vote for, you know, because they don't want a data guy who thinks that
“they should be property. And then they complain about that, too. And it's like, well, that's what”
buddy. Like, that is the solution that, you know, the right is offering you not working in the way that you thought it was going to work. But for some reason, it is not yet quite sunk in that
the solution is the right is offering to this, you know, cultural and economic dislocation
and our, our math solutions at all. You know, to some extent, I can't really offer advice on this, because I don't really give a shit how manly or whatever you think I am, I really do not care. So I can't like give these guys advice on like how to be a real man, because, you know, you know, I have two daughters. I just, I just want to be a good person. And I want my daughters to have the same rights and dreams that I do. And in this type of shit, sort of drives me crazy.
I think I'm, I must not, I cannot be the only father of daughters who is like it continuously radicalized by the amount of casual misogyny EEC on the internet every day. I saw my dad finally getting into the me two movement, watching my daughter play on a mixed gender basketball team,
watch them boys never pass the tour even though she is better than most of them and just slowly
watched my father feel like fucking sex. I mean, a problem. I can see it. You know, there's this whole conversation about like what the Democrats should do about men. And like, I don't have an answer to that except like, I just think you should not want to be an asshole. You're consuming fitness content,
“does that need you must be doing something? Are you doing peptides? Are you peptiding?”
No, I just, you know, I'm just, I'm a middle-aged man. I need to, you know, I need like 30 minutes of physical therapy before I go to the gym. So I can make sure that I can carry both of my kids, you know, to their rooms when it's bedtime. Like, you know, so you're not looks maxing, you're just doing that. I mean, are you kidding me? I think you look good. Well, thank you for that, too. I don't understand. It wasn't a very
uplifted broadcast for a Friday, but I guess we knew that when we scheduled it. So, you know,
I hope people can get outside, find some joy this weekend, and appreciate your time as always.
Thank you so much for having me. We'll be back here on Monday for another edition of the show. We'll see everybody then, peace. The board podcast is brought to you. Thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz, an audio engineering in editing by Jason Brown.
