John Ganz: Trump’s Coalition of the Aggrieved

Hello and welcome to the board podcast, I'm your host Tim Miller,

“I'd like to welcome the show, the author of Unpopular Front on Sub-Stack.”

He wrote the book when the clock broke, Conment Conspiracyists, and Hall America cracked up in the early 1990s about the, you know, David Duke and the right wing media ecosystem. We're going to talk about that because host a film podcast, unclear in present danger with Jamel Bowie.

It's John Geans, how you doing, man? Good, how are you, Tim? Well, I kind of feel like I'm in college again, because I was up vomiting all night, and I had to meet with T.A. this morning to discuss some reading, "Cave or Mass."

[Laughs] Very strong, it's hard, and, you know, we're going to do a little renaceurard. So it's, uh, we'll be okay. It wasn't the fun kind of vomiting now. So you got to carry me, you got to carry me, is that all right?

Okay, I will do my best, I will do my best, I was not vomiting. Okay. So far as I can remember. Not the, not the best aging. I was going to start with people aren't familiar with your sub-stack, which is great.

This little baseline for your politics, JVL, on our internal slack, was calling you one of the good socialists. I don't know if you accept that moniker, but, uh, why don't you give people-- It's the good part of the socials either, yeah.

“Yeah, I guess you could say on my social democrat, I would say that's how I would identify.”

Um, that's the tradition. I feel closest to, I mean, that's like David Brooks. Yeah, like David Brooks used to be. I hope I don't have the same trajectory to gender. I think I'm, I'm too old for that now already.

But, you know, that's part of the social tradition. It's one, it's one part of the social tradition, uh, historically, and, uh, you know, it comes with a commitment, both to, you know, an economy that tries to work for everyone, and also a commitment, usually, to liberal democracy, and, uh, you know, or robust free society. Okay, so, you know, give me a-- if John Gianz was in Congress, who would your

doppelganger be? I mean, I very, very rarely disagree with anything Bernie Sanders says. I got to tell you, and, you know, we're very temperamentally similar, I think. I was, you know, I, you know, Elizabeth Warren is someone else, so I got a lot of memories for, I, AOC, you know, as we're excited about her eyes,

and, you know, and, you know, I support Sarah Momsani, so, you know, these are my ball sticks, basically.

I've had too many Bernie people on the pod lately. I've got a, we need a club. Yeah, I need a cleanse. I need to get Joe Manchin back up. Yeah, you've got to find somebody who left of, uh, of Bernie to put on the pod,

like some PSL people or something like that. Could tell you how he's a, he's a revisionist. I'm open to it. I want to start with just kind of Trump administration stuff. Then we're going to go back into your book and they'll originate or how we got here on the right. You wrote this, which resonated with me, which shouldn't surprise you, you know,

given that I've got to wake up and talk about this nonsense every day.

At the beginning of the second term administration, I wrote that I wasn't enjoying my job anymore,

because it was at once too easy and too awful. The people in charge are evil, stupid are both, and those who support them, or either evil, stupid are both, that's all there is to say over and over anything else strains the truth. I just take a stand by that.

“I mean, yeah, absolutely, and I think what I, what I wrote after that is actually”

it's become more difficult and not as easy because I find that, you know, when you write political analysis, you know, you usually attribute motives or reasons for people's behavior and sometimes those reasons are ideological, sometimes are self-interested, sometimes are in the context of partisan politics, you try to make it legible for people, and you try to, you know, put your spin on it, will maybe advance her politics a little,

but generally try to communicate the truth with the actions of the Trump administration. It's very difficult, I find, to give them any coherence because it's so based on Trump's personal whims and his own, you know, very idiotic and mercurial way of doing things. So I often find that when I attribute, you know, some kind of ideological thinking or some kind of project, anything they do, you know, a week from then, the line is totally changed.

You know, usually a presidential coalition, you know, has tensions, but there's this in like open confrontation with each other all the time, which is unusual, you know, a president usually went like undertaking a project like going a war site, right? Now, usually you would imagine, I mean,

this is the way we used to think about politics, they would first have their own party very much on board,

and then they would use that as a platform to get the rest of the American people on board. Now, Trump didn't even have his own party on board going into it. So it's a different type of

is the Trump show, and he, he personalizes everything. He does not able to think in terms of systems or abstractions ideas like the market or you don't believe that Donald Trump can abstract. I don't think he can, basically. I don't think that I think, basically, he is sometimes swayed by conspiratorial rhetoric. Some people are ideologically conspiratorial because it sort of supports their worldview. I think that Trump is basically psychologically incapable of understanding things

as processes that don't have like a person behind them. He's always done business. He always thinks

someone's trying to screw you or you're trying to screw somebody and you can see the way you run the economy. The idea of a deal is like a one-off kind of carve out where you make some compromises.

“Now, for the behavior of businessmen and firms that's fine on at scale, you have to have rules.”

So you can't have a million different rules for each type of business. There has to be, you know, some rules across the board, which is why the tear policy looks so incoherent. And why, you know, most of his policies look so incoherent is because he basically doesn't have the conception of the economy as a system. He has it as a conception of, okay, this guy's in my ear wants a break for his business and I want this business to do that. It's just a consistent kind of

making of carve out and making exceptions and you can't have nothing but exceptions. It's just total chaos. Maybe this is just another way of saying the evil stupid frame, but like isn't it really just that Trump is a meglamaniac and everything that he's doing is in his personal self-interest and it's enriching himself in his family and it's just like sometimes he has the illusion of knowledge and like it doesn't realize what his interest is, he does shit that ends up being

“not in his interest. That's about right. I think that he, I mean, we all don't exactly have a”

perfect idea of our self-interest, but his instincts lead him sometimes, I think, to make mistakes in his political career because his idea of his self-interest is extremely narrow and not very subtle. But, you know, he can also change course. You know, unlike say, you know, he has some instinct that, you know, listening to Stephen Miller about every single thing is probably not the best idea, but he keeps it around. Where do you feel like you'll be around war and the latest when we have

can fit on the evil stupid? It's both. It's really remarkable. I mean, you know, it's a war that had no public support. I am not an expert at foreign policy in any way. I read the news, you know, just like a lot of Americans and I've been following politics for most of my adult life. Anybody who has half a brain knew that this was not going to end up in a way that was

“favorable to the United States or the world at large. And it would be some kind of catastrophe. In fact,”

this is kind of on the lower end of the of the catastrophes, but it's a completely absurd situation. We engaged in this war. It didn't accomplish a single strategic Gulf of the United States. They were talking in the beginning about regime change. You're making all this noise. All this

grandiose plans. And then we basically have nothing of like that. And we're going to go to something

that was, it's kind of a weaker version of the JCPOA. And, you know, it seems as if basically, and this is a goes back to his decision-making process, he was talked into it. He thought it was a good idea. He was talked into this very simplistic idea of it. And when it turned out to be a lot tougher than he was led to believe, he decided to walk away. And he's just basically pulling out of what he feels as a bad deal and trying to enter into a new

deal with with Iran, who now he praises his reasonable people. And before they were lunatics and so and so forth. If you go back to the way he behaved in New York City and the way he carried on business deals and the carried on his behavior with politicians trying to get those deals across,

it was always like this. It was a lot of recommendations. Huge statements that he would never

work for somebody this guy was crazy. It was a lunatic. He was the worst. And then they, you know, the next week he's trying to make buddy buddy or vice versa. He has a close relationship working relationship with somebody. And then they have a terrible falling out. And he's saying all kinds of horrible things to them. He speaks in a way that is guaranteed to make headlines, you know, to stay in the news all the time. But it can't entirely be taken seriously. He's a self-promoter

extraordinary. There's a term called mere puffery, right, in an advertisement. Like if you say it's the best coffee in the world, I can't sue them for false advertising because that's obviously, you know, just an average piece of advertising writer. I mean, terms almost every word is essentially mere puffery. Like that's, that's his functional mode of this course. And so you can't really take any of his declaration seriously, which makes, I'm sure doing diplomacy with him very hard or doing

unreliable. I have a little shot in Florida, as I think many people do as the Israelis having such

just hard time with him and being so shocked. What did you think? Who did you think you were dealing with? Yeah. Oh, you thought you had the special key to his heart? Give me a break. I mean, oh, we're so friendly and he's so good to us. He can change his mind any moment. He's dropped old friends. He can drop some political ally when it doesn't seem like it's going as wet. Consistency is not his forte and he, you know, to his advantage, he's able to to change course very

quickly, should have arrived. Well, I'm sure that they probably tried and are doing something, but I think the real people who are selling and driving him are the Gulf States, probably, and that, that may reflect the, the approach here. I'm a big coffee drinker. I used to think

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feel like your publisher had to hate it, though. My publisher hated my proposed them kind of like weird self-referential titles and wanted it to be very straightforward but it works for me. My agent didn't seem to think it was going to be a good idea, but I convinced the publisher of it pretty quickly. Yeah, I want to give them kind of the political philosophical

“if you want to call it that underpinnings of this, but you have an interesting insight into that,”

like about how Trump is a bit of an unfrozen caveman from this period. Yeah, too. And Trump is maybe was obviously not influenced by the writings of Murray Rothbard, but his obsessions and his instincts were kind of developed in the same time. Well, Rothbard foresaw the

type of politics that Trump practices as a path forward for the hard right, which is basically a kind of

what he called it at the time, right wing populism. He was looking at David Duke running in Louisiana and how the media kind of freaked out about it. And he said, "This is the way to do it." You go around the media, you short-circuit the media, and you've talked directly to the people and you attack your enemies and the bureaucracy and the elites and liberal elites and you get a lot of people very excited and it's a very bombastic style. So he envisioned the style.

I would say the policies insofar as there's any kind of coherent background, a guy named Sam Francis, who envisioned, you know, basically a kind of U.S. under a kind of dictatorship, but that was like a developmental dictatorship that was highly protectionist that would try to protect American businesses, a unilateral aggressive foreign policy,

an America-first foreign policy. So that was the kind of people who I saw as being

harbingers or profits of Trumpism. Now, Trump himself, he saw a pad weekend and they would do running. He said, "Look, you know, they're doing well because there's a lot of anger in this country." And he for a very long time had these protectionist instincts. Essentially, you know, he temperamentally goes along with this ideological program, which is that the United States is relationship with the world is adversarial, and our so-called allies are trying to screw us.

Immigrants are sucking up our resources. It's a very zero-sum hostile and paranoid attitude towards the world. And, you know, insofar as a philosophical articulation, these guys do it,

of Trump that he picked up through his life. He also don't forget Trump experienced a near-brush

“with ruin in the late '80s early '90s. I think that this intensified his paranoia and his attitude”

to the world as being an essentially hostile place. He found his negotiations with the bankers,

which ultimately came out quite favorable to him because they could have ruined him to be

very humiliating, and he wanted to take revenge against a lot of people who he felt had not stuck with him through his hard times and turned on him. The '80s was a great move time for Trump. That comes to an end at the end of the '80s. And he sticks with a lot of the same preoccupations, urban crime, you know, urban crime is on the decline, but that's a obsession for Trump. You know, if you go back to Syria, this is the era where Japan, South Korea, and at that time West Germany,

their imports, you know, were very competitive with American manufacturers, and there was a

current of opinion, which Trump was, you know, shared, which is that, you know, we need to protect

“domestic industries. And I think that basically Trump is also in this kind of late Cold War period where”

those under the protective umbrella are now becoming our competitors. You see it also in his attitude towards immigration, you know, the Reagan administration was fairly liberal on immigration, but there was a current of opinion that started to get more and more paranoid or hostile that immigrants were harming the national subsets of the United States or taking up resources. I think his obsession with Russia has to do with his notion that Russia is still a power on par with

the Soviet Union. You know, this is also he's very obsessed with this summit diplomacy that he must have seen Gorbachev and Reagan engaging in and the bomb and circumstance with it. So his idea of Russia is just, well, you know, these are the Soviets. We need to treat them with respect and so on, and so forth. And that suits Russia just fine because that's exactly how they want to be perceived. I also think that Trump temporarily finds Putin's motive government to be appealing.

“I think that he likes his way of doing things. He's a bigger gangster in a certain way.”

I don't know that he has direct desire to help Russia because of, you know, whatever P tape. Yeah. As I was listening to have your interviews on this, like the emergence of this, you know, kind of mindset, this kind of right populism in the period of the early 90s. This stuff was bouncing around before that, right? And it's not as if it was not, you know, kind of right populist thought before. A lot of this was in, you know, like mailed newsletters and Republican campaigns and

like things through this nation. And so I sort of figured out like this question of like when you're on Chris Hays' show and he was talking about this like why 1992 and 2016. And you guys as

progressives like both fell back on economic anxiety, basically like economic structures that are

happening at these times. And I'm just like not sure if that's right. Like to me, it feels like it's more about mass media. And like did this, there was this like undercurrent of right populism in a country that needed, you know, basically bombastic media figures, slash politicians to be able to you know, reach them. And like a lot of these people weren't reachable. Uh, you know, those hard don't organize the sort of thing prior. Well, what do you make of that? I think they're both

it's both and it's not either or I think that basically, yes, the fragmentation of media has opened up the doors for a lot of things that would not have made it into, you know, the previous ecosystem of media. And that is a boon to all kinds of correct pots and Charlottes and politics, they were once fringe. There's no doubt about it. But the appeal of these politicians only makes sense if you consider the trajectory of the society and the fact that you have large members of the middle and

lower middle classes, feeling increasingly squeezed and dispossessed and feeling unrepresented by their politicians where they feel are intrinsically corrupt. And, you know, I don't think that Trump comes along without the 2008 crash and the feeling that there's something, you know, rigged about the

it as a good word. This is another thing I was thinking about because, and this is why I'm not, I don't know the view that the public party is like that returning to anything resembling anything from before when the clock broke. Well, I guess unless you're counting like Windberg, unless you're counting that way before. Right, because I, another variable that these two times doesn't think about like why is it began in rising in 92 and why is that successful? Why is Trump

“successful in 2016? And I think well, yeah, it's because this is what Republican voters really wanted.”

Like, the Republican voter, voter id was always, you can, and culture war, Trump, but, you know,

that the elites of the party managed to be able to kind of control the animals a little bit. And then you have like H.W. Bush and Mitt Romney, God love them. Like we're both particularly ill-suited to kind of be able to bring that crowd into more of a mainstream conservatism, Reagan, and then H.W. Bush, both like, you know, both had a focusiness, the kind of allowed them to bridge it. Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate. I do think that, you know, the new right

that coalesced around Reagan, and you know, Reagan was not the first choice for a lot of those guys. I wanted somebody crazy or like John Connelly, you know, and Reagan was kind of too moderate for some people in that version of the new right. And then they kind of grew to love him and realized, you know, he was sort of one of them. But the people I write about, Exited, they were 18 years feeling betrayed and like down that he wasn't more radical rightist for people on the left, like me, you know,

that sounds wild. Because we think, oh, Reagan was an absolute catastrophe and could not have been more right wing. And as Buchanan said, the biggest vacuum in American politics is to the right of Ronald Reagan. And there was a constituency for the type of politics they perhaps, you know, it became apparent. Wallace campaign showed it was there. It overlaps with the, let's say, the Republican primary voter. But it's not entirely partisan because it's in, I think this is what

“you have to understand about Trump is and what I was trying to get out of my book. He also encapsulates”

the spirit of the third party candidate, right, of a candidate like Ross Perro, who comes out and

says, you know, the parties are crooked. I'm going to reform them. I'm going to change everything. So there is a popular spirit which is not entirely contained in either party. And in fact, can attack the party system itself. And if you look at the way Trump takes over the Republican party, he kind of attacks it as a, as a, almost a third party kind of candidate. He's not connected with any of the existing power structures. He's connected with kind of a mass movement

in the Republican party because he has a, he's a tea party figure. But he's not connected really so far and with the elites that, that that generates, but he's not connected to any of the old party structures. And that makes him appeal, right? Because because there's a feeling of betrayal, a feeling that those, those, those people aren't tough enough. I mean, the, the, the massy quote where

“you said, oh, I realized that they didn't care what I believe they were just voting for the crazy”

son of a bitch, one of the most insightful things about American politics anybody said in back 20 years. So yeah, there was a desire on many levels for a figure like Trump. And it was contained, but it couldn't be contained permanently because the voters got fed up. And they said, we don't like the candidates, you're, you're feeding us. And in that way, it's, it's democratic. I mean, Trump's first election is not through democratic means of us through the, the, the, the system of

electro college. But in terms of the way he took over the Republican party, one of those primary spirits where there was a huge, huge, you know, enthusiasm behind in which, which I'm sure you guys all remember. But the internal party democracy of the Republicans allowed Trump to happen the Democrats, still have a little bit of a intact party structure for good and ill. Summer changes, how I get dressed, uh, more tank tops. You guys don't get to see that on the podcast,

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quints.com/thebower. I want to get to the don't guys this second. But your comment about Trump

and how he, like despite, you know, being the three-time Republican nominee, still kind of represents or positions as a non-partisan figure. It's like some kind of outside figure. It's a kind of big news and right circles. The SJ has a clip from Tucker Carlson. What he's said on a show in Canada is speaking to unsensored Canada. We're exporting our cranky as well. So, Tucker on the show said this, I would not support the Republican Party. There's no chance

I'd support it. Not going to support the Democratic Party either. How could I support a political party that is not loyal to the United States? There's no defending this. I'm out. I don't believe that for a second. I don't believe that for a second. First of all, again, like Trump and Chuck Carlson is being a media for very long time. He knows how to make news and get into the headlines. And he does that instinctually. He's got to be interesting. He's got to

always say something. Also, he's mirrorering what people do with rate of rate said is he's just

copying it. If when did it's at this point, it's been saying the same thing. If one day goes farther to be provocative and says he's going to vote for Democrats. The changes mine, so is Tucker Carlson. They're making news. The other thing about Tucker Carlson is I don't think

“you'd remember his half the things he says. And he makes outrageous statements all the time.”

He said that he thought that, you know, this administration was ruled by the Antichrist. And then he was on the times. They said, well, you said this administration is ruled by the Antichrist. And he said, I never said that. I never said that. I don't know if he was lying or just doesn't know the truth from anything. These people, I mean, you know, we're a part of it in a

certain way. But I don't think of exactly the same way. They basically have an ongoing discourse

verbal diarrhea. And I don't think that they really pay that close to tension or that careful about what they say. They won't. They don't say, oh, I said this. And to be a principled person act to stick by. I'm sure by primary time Tucker's going to have his guy. And the fact that he said that it's going to mean nothing. People are going to play the clip over and over of him saying, I'm not going to throw a problem. He's not going to care. He's not going to care. He's going to say,

well, actually, this guy probably J.D. Vance is fine. And you know what, frankly, he might be saying him himself up for his own run. There's been a lot of speculation for a long time that Tucker has ambitious in those regard. And the only reason why you think that might not be true is because, you know, a lot of his friends and family work for J.D. Vance. They seem to have a buddy of a relationship. So does he really want to compete directly with him? I don't know. Like even paying

attention to that seems to be kind of kind of stupid. He's just making noise. Two things, so that later in the interview he does talk about J.D. And then he discusses basically how this is what he's a media person and J.D. is a politician because he couldn't be in J.D. shoes. He's in this impossible situation,

“the vice president works for the president, can't be fired. And he's like, I believe the J.D.”

realizes that this is a mistake. It's kind of the Iran War Israel partnership element of it. And I think that he is trying to like at least position himself as being an outside air cover, I guess, for J.D. But in the context of the book that I do think it's interesting. Like he is he is leveling the same critiques of the right populists from there. You're talking about your writing about. Yeah, especially when it comes to Israel, that was a big issue for them even at

that time when it wasn't quite so salient. I think it's extremely dangerous and irresponsible to pretend like that first of all, J.D. Vance was a part of the policy making apparatus of a situation. It didn't have a hand in making a decision. And that Donald Trump is not a grown-up who who doesn't make it so decisions. I mean like they support a guy who they seem to implicitly say in their discourse is swayable and controllable by other people. So like what kind of a person

is that? What are you doing supporting this person? And they're creating this narrative that's kind of stabbed in the back narrative where, oh well, you know, Maga was great and we were going fine and then the Israelis, the Jews, came along and screwed it all up. Well, Trump screwed it all up because he unlike every single other US president didn't see through the fact that BBs rhetoric and ideas about this were unrealistic and crazy and he had his own political needs to take care of

the head. Nothing to do with the United States and nothing to do with, you know, protecting our interests. And just said, eh, go fuck yourself. I'm not going to do it. Trump was the only person's stupid enough

“or, you know, material enough or whatever to try to roll the dice. I think he rolled the dice”

because his administration was sinking on every other issue. You know, don't forget that comes

of what is going on in the news for Trump shortly before. And if he feels like he's being weakened or he looks bad, he makes these improvisional decisions based on the need to appear strong. The president happens to have a lot of power for him policy and more making powers, unfortunately. So that's an area he can make an immediate impact and try to make a big splash when the policy

“part of his administration is very much a flop. So, you know, I think that that's what he was”

thinking with the war. And he thought it would probably be something like Venezuela, a simple matter. And anybody who is an adult who's read the newspaper can tell you not the same story at all. But for some reason, every 15 years or so, the United States forgets how to think. We think that the world is some simple place that we can manipulate it will. And oh, well, you know, we're going to go in there and then we're going to knock over the regime.

And people who are to have known better because they live through Iraq were like, oh, yeah, well, well, well, maybe it'll work out this time. You know, even some people who were critics of Trump went, well, about this, look, about this thing, oh, you mean one of the most unrealistic and potentially catastrophic things he could possibly do, which is to pick a fight, you know, start a war with another power with no idea what was going to be at the end of that

“war. I think the United States basically showed itself to be not that powerful. You know,”

he made a lot of big noises like he could affect a lot of night. They realized, yeah, we got to kind of just take what we can get here. I did not actually suffer through communion, producer Ansely, David and his new voice. Oh, yeah, I have sent him some sections. So section I want to share with you, because I noticed you were on the know your enemy podcast, I took guys over there. We've been on a couple of times. One time, I was discussing

Renesia Rard. Yeah. And you won't be surprised that Renesia Rard gets a shout out

in communion. There are two sections I want to treat to you. The first one is how

came around to sing the era of his ways when it was a grads to atheism. Peter Teele impacted me in another way. Possibly the smartest person I'd ever met, he identified very openly as a Christian. He defined the simple social template I had constructed, the dumb people were religious, and smart people were atheists. I began to wonder where his faith came from, which led me to Renesia Rard, the French philosopher, under whom Teele had studied at Stanford.

Jordan's thought catalogues rich enough that my son we went to adjust this is there of him at a rivalry that we tend to compete over things other people want, spoke directly to some of the competitive pressures I had experienced at Yale. So it goes on, but I just wonder what your kind of initial reaction is to that origin story? Well, Renesia Rard believes that people essentially mimic each other and want the same things and that leads them into inevitable conflict.

And that's the part of his kind of philosophical anthropology and description of the world.

“And the upshot for him is the only way out of this is religious faith. So the whole thing is kind”

of a Christian apologetics. For me, what he's describing there is not really being moved by religious sentiment. It's kind of realizing that the smart people that he wants to be in with are religious and then kind of changing his tune. And he said, oh, well, you know, I want to impress Tiel. So I'm into Renesia Rard. And that's a mimetic behavior like Gerard describes who

start to copy people because I think Tiel is smart therefore what Tiel pursues. So I've always believed

that J.D. Vance is deeply wounded by the kind of entry into America's elite that he had, which is that he's a bright guy, he went to Yale, you know, but he comes from this, this under privileged background. And I think he, he like Richard Nixon before him, who was a bright guy, but really resented elites of their condescension towards him. I think that, you know, he really has a chip on his shoulder about that. It's funny. There's another clip of Vance. I was

watching Bob Castro's interviewing him and he was shot together, but the book had joined an interview. And I just thought it was like really unintentionally revealing. Oh, I thought you said Bob

cost us for a second. I was like, that's a, you know, I think you're really pretty. I think everybody's

a podcast for these days. Right. And here is Ushavance explaining what she didn't convert along side, J.D. And I guess pretty telling. Well, I think in some ways, it has been a very personal journey for him. I grew up in a household, a Hindu household, a very stable household. And I've not felt the same sense of, of need to seek something different that he has. So I think that journey has been

about things, how that fits into the life that we have together. Unless a religious journey of

my own. I love the course of my findings. She's like basically saying like, yeah, J.D. is was wound it.

His ego is wounded by his by the lack of a father figure. And, you know, maybe by the people looking down there knows if him is ill. And this is all part of his self-discovery. Yeah, more than it is actually a religious endeavor. One knock you could make on J.D. in general, and this approach to religion, a lot of conservatives approach to religion quite frankly, is that no doubt many of them are sincere. Of course, but they usually relate to religion as

“some kind of social or psychological necessity. And that's not quite the same as believing, right?”

If you say, well, it's better for society if we do that. That's not quite saying I believe in the literal truth that, you know, of this religion and that, you know, God is communicating through its representatives. It's something much more utilitarian. So I think that Gerard's philosophy is an entry point for people whose viewpoint on the world is fundamentally not one of faith. It's one of reason. And this seems to be a rational picture of the world and how it works

and why people are competitive. What Gerard is right about is that being involved in these social competitions and desiring what others want and being in these midmedic, basically love triangles is extremely painful. And it's very difficult to feel like you've accomplished, you know,

very much because there's always this endless regressive, oh, this person has something I want.

So the appeal of religion then is it seems that Gerard said, well, you know, instead of imitating others, imitate Christ and, you know, he was the only person not infected by this. And yeah, I can understand, you know, the pains of living in a competitive society. One, we want to skate that and take a more contemplative stance towards it. It seems to me that these fellows have a very utilitarian, almost cynical relationship to religion that is not one of deep feeling. I don't know,

I've not read the book, but does he describe, you know, being in the presence of God or is it like Augustine's confessions where he has this very, you know, this realization that his former life was deeply sinful? Well, he does shout out to his mistake of the childless cat ladies. You mentioned the love triangle and I do wonder if maybe that, I don't know if you know, the dinesh to Susan, Laura, Ingraham and Colter one were in a love triangle back during the early

90s and so maybe that was a Gerard. I'm very sorry to have learned that because it's a totally

“repulsive prospect and I will never forget that. I didn't know that, but it doesn't surprise me.”

I mean, like, you know, the professions of conservatives to moral rectitude, everyone knows that's a hypocrisy, everyone knows they're just like everybody else. I want to read one more quote from the book and then we'll do Democrats. Gerard's work captured so well the psychology of my generation, especially it's most privileged members. Mired in the swamp of social media, we had identified a scapegoat and digitally pounce with keyboard lawyers. He goes on blind to our own failings.

It's hard to imagine how you can write that without, you know, reflecting on one's own failings, the authors own failings, but JD manages to do that. He thinks he's talking about the cancel coach or lips, I guess. Yes. Okay, so that's the other part of Gerard's philosophy. He believes that

basically society picks scapegoats and this is an outlet for aggression that would otherwise,

you know, lead to kind of a universal civil war all the time. So we've scapegoat people and his solution is like, well, he thinks Jesus was scapegoated, but he was the one person who was totally

“innocent. So therefore, it revealed the mechanism of scapegoating so on and so forth. Right?”

I think that people like Tiel and Vance take from Gerard is not in order to be good Christians in order to be good people. We ought not to scapegoat. They say, well, that's kind of the way the world works. So we're going to pick our own scapegoats and we're just going to make the right people or scapegoating. I don't think the man who repeated the, you know, the slander against Haitians, eating cats, you know, I don't think that person really can say with a lot of sincerity that they're

against scapegoating. So I think that essentially that's another side of the cynicism is that Gerard gives them a picture of the world of the humanity that's irrational, competitive, prone to violence, naturally scapegoats people. And then Gerard himself says, well, this is why Christianity is necessary and why, you know, there is an escape from this, but they sort of say, well, that's just sort of the way things are. Yeah, it works. And it works. Right. So like all,

problems Democrats have is, I don't remember if I stole this from it, I've said it a lot. So my

apologies is the crank alignment under Trump and where a lot of the other resonated with the politicians and figures in your book had been Southern Democrats, you know, the kind of racist Southern Democrats, they were part of the FDR coalition, you know, a lot of them had been kind of a dependence that were not really part of the political process, maybe voting for parole, maybe vote for Clinton one time, you know, and now fast word today and Trump has kind of united all of those types of voters

inside the Republican coalition. And as Democrats try to think about how to handle that challenge, there's like whatever social justice woke thought that's like fuck those people, whatever, you know, and then there's another school of thought that maybe is, you know, the platner might be an example of, you know, which is like we need, you know, kind of a bad boy of our own or working class figure of our own to reach them. Like how do you like think about the political challenge

“of reaching these kind of agreed voters? Well, I think it's going to shake out in the way it's”

going to shake out in this whole primary season, electoral cycle is going to see who, there's probably going to be some coalition and mixture of the two, the Democratic Party will be, you know,

an emalgam as it always is being, I do think there's a populist tradition with the Democratic

Party, obviously, and perhaps Democrats have moved too far away from that populist tradition. That's independent of the merits of any particular candidate or defending any particular candidate. You know, Obama comes out of a wing of the Democratic Party, which kind of doesn't exist so much anymore. What was kind of the how we're deemed progressive side of the party, which was anti-war, you know, a little populist, but, you know, not loony tunes, maybe we're not that

as cocinate, right? So, like, Revelle. Right. Right. So, it was kind of, I don't know, you might want to call it like moderately populist, and that was kind of what it meant to be a Democrat for a while.

“And I think that that spirit is good and fine and actually necessary. And I think it will appeal”

to people, you know, who feel that alienated from politics. I think Trump's coalition of the alienated obviously was extremely fragile and temporary, and many of the people he brought on board, he quickly alienated himself and they're up for grabs. Are they all going to become Democrats now? Some of them will just be demobilized, you know, but I do think, yeah, of course, like a politician who seems to be a fighter against entrenched, sloth, a privilege, and systemic

corruption is going to appeal to a certain type of voter. I don't think that the appeal to, we are competent, technocrats is really going to work, especially since this leads to your Pete Skepticism. I went back and looked through our Twitter history of you dunking on me and Twitter.

Oh, sorry. No, that's okay. No, that's great. Your first ever Twitter dunk on me was

over me being to, to gushing to Pete. You're like, he got exactly what he deserves. This was like

“right after he dropped down. Maybe I'm less hostile to him now than I was then. I think that”

he's, he's demonstrated a lot of seriousness and, and his, his genuinely, he does seem to be kind of going a little too in set pieces. He seems a little stiff to me. I think John Ossoff is a little bit more like the Pete but a judge who's a little more spontaneous. I just, I'll give you a homework assignment. We should go listen to John Ossoff on this podcast a couple months ago and report back to me. Okay. We'll say if you still feel that way. All right. Okay. Well, I've seen him speed. I

've seen him speak and I'm not really good. I think that's not the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Pete's more actual. No, actually. And I will agree with you. Yes, Pete, that's Pete's, the appearances on the talk show circuit have been quite interesting. And I think that, you know, he's positioning himself as a kind of radical reformer, which, which is an angle perhaps in the, in the primaries, which will be one of the angles, you know, he's got to find some

eyeer because it's going to be a cycle where, you know, Democrats are angry at their own party angry at the Republicans and they're going to want somebody who seems like a fighter and it's going to change things. Yeah. You know, the Democrats do have a little bit of a nerd problem. Yeah. Let's say the Biden administration was the test run for the competency and technocracy. Was it wasn't that the Obama administration? I think the Biden administration was like

Biden having a couple of old timers around him and then outsourcing the policy making to Elizabeth Warren once. Well, yeah. But those people were, that's true. But there was a lot of people who were, you know, highly qualified educated people, where all these advanced policy ideas.

you know, they wanted. Also, he was not in great shape as a messenger for all of it. So I would say

it depends. He was not, I'm not saying technocrat as synonymous with centrist. Sure. I'm just saying there was a highly, wonky aspect of the Biden administration, which I was very friendly to because I

“thought their ideas sounded great. And I think some of them were actually worked and just did draw”

attention to them. But yeah, I mean, the thing is is like the kind of social democratic ideas that Biden tried to implement were sunk partially because of inflation, which is an issue that, you know, every politician seems just seems to be kryptonite for everybody. And there's not much you could do about it. On those kind of reform questions and can eventually the pizza trying to do radical reform,

there's something that I have like two wolves inside of me on this question, which is assuming the

Democrats get back into power, like how do you solve the Biden problem? People not feeling the positive change. And I think that the predominant view within democratic circles is going to be, you know, we should be more aggressive, you know, in using the levers of power that we have in order to get policies done. Biden kind of trying that with a student loan thing and a back

“fire. You know, so like so this is like a little bit of an easier said than done. I think a lot of”

people are like magic wand, we're going to start it. And there's like another view, which is okay, we need to take reform the whole system and like take less power away from a future demagogue and, you know, fix things. And this kind of question, you wrote something a while ago about like an old that we could learn from, I think it was the French in the 20th century and this question of the Senate. And I kind of how to deal with the Senate. You can take that wherever you want.

I'm just going to wonder where your head is on that. I mean, I am thought personally conflicted as well. I mean, you know, I am sympathetic. I'm highly sympathetic to the belief of fellow people in the left that there are deeply undemocratic and unrepresented parts of the U.S. system that, you know, is it fair that New York State has two senators and North Dakota has two senators and that makes the, you know, the proportional representations of those places so out of whack. I don't think so

is it fair that the judiciary, which is packed with conservative justices, have so so much power. I don't know. But on the other hand, you know, as the second Trump administration has unfolded, I have to say, the checks and balances are real. I mean, perhaps not Congress,

unfortunately, but more you see this a judiciary institution. I never really had much regard for.

“Now, unfortunately, I think the Supreme Court has made things a little easier for Trump at”

some regards, but also, you know, rejected key parts of his policy. So, you know, I'm, I guess a little bit more of a constitutionalist than I was at the beginning of Trump. But I will say that that is tempered by the fact that, you know, the parts of the Constitution that were supposed to protect us from a crazy demagogue. Ironically, allowed him to take power in the first place, right? So, so the idea that those those mechanisms are so essential to prevent, you know, abuse,

I don't know. And I do think that perhaps if they were reformed and there was a more muscular mode of governance, the desire for a kind of strong man figure might be less and because there will be less close to some less frustration with the political system and people could see it working. Our people have ever going to be totally happening now. So, am I worried about like a future Trump? I mean, having less, you know, checks on their power, like whoever has authoritarian

designs on the United States has learned plenty and they're not, I don't think that they're going to meet that much. Yeah, when I fall and up falling to, which is frustrating, I don't like it. They want to start a fight to Platinum really quick though, because part of the reason when I we invited Joe's because I had professional jealousy over your platform article because it was another thing where I think we're in a similar boat or you kind of were grappling with this, the question of

Platinum, like I totally recognize the appeal to main voters and like that is what democracy is and you have this old governor who like wants to compromise. He's so corrupt running against an old senator who wants to compromise and you've got a young guy who's like, "Fuck these people, we need to care about your economic interests. I'm going to fight for you." Like, I have any's from Maine and they get it. They know the type of character. Like, I get it, a hundred

percent. I don't think that it's short. Sneaky anti-Semitism among the 75-year-old main Democratic Democratic voters. Like, I get it. On the other hand, like, so there's like the main

as a national figure that is an avatar for this kind of factional fight within the Democratic

party. And on that, he's a little more complicated. Sure. And my professional jealousy was with sealed when you pulled a random Simone de Beauvoir quote that just like nailed it. I was just like, "Where did you fucking pull this from?" So this is so good. It was, I mean, it just happened. Yeah. The ethics of ambiguity. Yeah, just going, he was like this adventure a lot of soul. So anyway, for people that are at it, she kind of summarized that.

“Yeah, you know, I think that his character is legible to me. I could be wrong. You know, I can't”

see into his soul, but from his behavior, from his activities. I think, yeah, you know, he's a person who yarn for adventure, who yarned for a more authentic feeling life than was given to him. And, you know, those types of people can be very charismatic and wonderful and do great things in the world. And they can also be very dangerous in and really only kind of nihilistically interested in their own self-expression and so on and so on. Which is platinum? I don't know.

I would say I would rather plan on our side than the other side. I would say, for my perspective, he's lending his powers for good. I'm, you know, pleased with most of the things he says, but he's not said anything that I find particularly offensive or worrisome, we share very close politics. Frankly, I just find an intellectually insulting to believe that he didn't know that that was a Nazi symbol when he got it. Obviously, no. Obviously, no. Because he can't say, yes, I know I

got a Nazi tattoo because everyone's going to be like, what do you mean? But because what he was doing was, and it seems like everyone doesn't have a conception of this for whatever reason, even though it's to me, very understandable. He did it to be edgy. And if you say, well, that's too offensive. Well, that's the whole fucking point. It's a taboo. I get this 100% by the way. So this is

something that you can whatever clip this and use this against me if I ever, I'm never running

percent of it. But like, when I was in college, I was being edgy and we have various, you know, overlaps and dissimilarities between me and Platner, but like my mother's went to Ole Miss. And I got like old Colonel Reb gear and I brought it back to my dorm room to like troll the Northeast and lips. And it wasn't like I want to bring back the Confederacy. I'm scared of needles, so I didn't get a tattoo. It was like kind of a trying to be a bad boy. Right. And a thing to

silly in childish, right? But like, that's what happened. Like that's what happened. He got the tattoo. Maybe he didn't know at the exact moment, but eventually knew. And then he thought it was funny and edgy and whatever. And so he didn't get rid of it. Like he didn't, he didn't keep it because

“he's a fucking secret Nazi. Like that's why he did it. Those people are not that good at, like,”

hiding their politics. There would be a lot of other things other than the tattoo that suggested they had this politics. And I don't think being a critic of Israel is a sign, frankly. So I'm very sensitive to signs of Nazi because I'm, and I just don't see any, and and and Platte referently. He doesn't strike me as, is that sort? Now in a different historical era, different conditions with someone like him be attracted to fascists and short. But so we're many people, right?

I, I, I would say that, you know, his adventure streak, and maybe that slightly nihilistic and, and boundary-breaking thing. Yeah, he could get into that, but it seems like, you know, as an adult,

he's has an ethical worldview. And, uh, is that ethical worldview always been expressed consistently

throughout his whole life? No. But the story that he has matured and become a better person is trying to do civic service. It's a plausible one. You weren't negative polarized by the reaction among Plattener stance. I think that's a bad way to going about thinking about the world. It's tempting, but you got, you can't, like, this is a problem. Like, you know, a lot of the people who I thought, who were going to the mat for him, I was like, do you sound like an idiot? And I

don't like that you insist, like, I sound like an idiot. But I don't think that your judgment of the world should be, you know, affected that much by, okay, well, the, you know, assholes are really like this guy. So I don't want to be on the asshole team. So therefore, you know, I think that that really deforms your, your judgment. With that being said, what people are projecting on and what he represents for certain people. I'm like, well, that's stupid, too. But I don't think that

that's necessarily Plattener's fault that they're projecting that out to him. Maybe it helps him in a certain way. But so, no, I really try to avoid that sort of habit of thought of being negatively polarized. Here's a more concerning part within the coalition for me than than Plattener. Yeah. There's a story yesterday, Dan Goldman is running tonight in the primary in New York. He's

“going to get, he's going to get his ass beat by Brandlander, which is democracy. That's how”

democracy works. But like Dan Goldman was an impeachment manager. He's a conventional down the line, liberal progressive. He was out there defending his chief of staff, specifically when these right-wing assholes were posting pictures of him in like leather, gay outfits and Goldman was coming to his

it's Bradley, they're really. Right. And he goes to do a coffee shop, Paletteka, and New York,

and they said they're going to deny him service, but they didn't recognize him in times. They posted a picture calling him a genocide lover, and they refunded him the money. And that activity on the left starts to head more down the path of anti-Semitism to me. I don't know that Dan Goldman deserves to be denied sitting at the counter, because he has like some conventional

“progressive views on Israel. Well, yeah, probably not, but you have to keep in mind that I mean”

that the common sense on this has shifted enormously in the past couple of years. Like, yeah, I think that, you know, it gets ridiculous, and it can edge on anti-Semitism, but the fact

the matter is, is that a lot of people live in a previous world where Israel is perceived very

differently, and they're having a rude awakening, because, you know, the fact of the matter is people grew up. They didn't grow up with Israel as this brave little country standing up to big enemies all around. They grew up with the occupation. They grew up with Gaza, and they have a very different perception of it, and they view Israel, like they say, as, you know, they use the word apartheid, as people would view South Africa, or Rodeja, as kind of rogue racist country. And they have some

good reason to feel that way. So I just think that the, there's a generation gap, and older people are very shocked. There are several other apartheid countries, so when it seems like Dan

Goldman's the only one that's going to deny this coffee. Well, I mean, is there any others that we,

you know, directly give their military so much aid, and, and it like, we're just went, just went to we're cutting a deal of Pakistan right now. So I don't know the better, internal politics, or, I mean, is there the focus on Israel as far as, well, yes, I mean, I am no friend of the UAE, but, you know, Israel right now, those places are not great places. You cannot deny the Israel post October 7th, and maybe for some understandable reasons. I'm not denying that. I'm just saying

the Dan Goldman should be able to get a cup of coffee in short, whatever, and it's a little consistent.

“Yeah, I think that that, you know, is, is, I don't think that that's a systemic problem. I mean,”

there are many Dan Goldman's in New York getting coffee just fine. Thank you. So like, yeah, I don't think New York City is to worry about a spirit of anti-Semitism. We'll keep an eye on it. All right, we're going to close with a rapid fire. You have, you famously had the jock creep theory of fascism with the Italians with the jocks and the Germans were the creeps. I googled the German word for classic example, and that is "Musturbyspiel". So I'd say that the "Musturbyspiel"

examples of this would be Stephen Miller has the creep in Peter, Seth is the jock. Sure. So I'm going to rapid fire to you, other other figures in the administration. You tell me where they are. Greg Bavina, jock, carry lake, jock, Jady Vance, grape, Steven Chung, jock, Carolyn Levitt, jock, a lot more jocks than creeps. Who are some other creeps in the administration? Miller, Michael Antomba is not part of the administration anymore. We'll be another example. I'm sure

there's a lot we have to plant. Chuck, jock. I mean, the high level trump picks the jocks. The face trump picks the jock. Hammer facing his jocks. I mean, trump's a jock. Yeah, right. Vance is the creep. That's the coalition, right there. You know, Tucker is a jock, but he's a prep. That's something a little bit of a synthesis. So, you know, there's probably a lot of people we don't know about in the policy weighing or

like, you know, staffer, sewer. But yeah, I look pretty jocky, jocky, bunch. It's a notable how jocky it is. I can put the ur fascism, like the parallels to trump are so much more on the nose than they have more stuff for sure. And so there you go. So it's jock,

“jock fascism. We'll leave it there. I think I didn't ask you anything you want to”

eliminate the Bullark audience on before we let you know. Please subscribe to my sub stack. If you think I sound like I make sense at all and buy my book, it's out in paperback. And yeah, that's it. I'm hopefully going to have a new book and I'm going to be working on soon. So I can't talk about yet, but it's a little teaser. It's exciting. It's unpopular front. It's a good sub stack. I recommend it. Everybody else we back here tomorrow.

Hopefully about the color we back in my skin. And I'll get a good night's rest. So we'll see you all the end. Peace. Thanks, Jock. Thanks, Jock.

associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Loots, an audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.