Chris Rufo Thinks the Right Can Control This. I Don’t.

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To some of the work that led to the ICE and CBP deployments to Minnesota. This week I published an exclusive story exposing the Somali fraud rings in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which are stealing billions of dollars from American taxpayers. Whatever else you want to say about him, Rufo has quite significantly affected the world we live in. He's also, if you listen to him, and he's a very, very smart and often quite honest analyst of his own side. One thing I appreciate about Rufo is he always says what he is doing clearly and in public. He seems uneasy. Gone are the days when Tucker Carlson's nightly monologue set the agenda for the entire right. You can feel a sort of disquiet, a sense that maybe the right, this right, is not becoming what he hoped.

it would be. Now we find ourselves in an escalating war of influencers trading conspiracies and counter conspiracies. That it's attentional and informational sphere is polluted. Driving the right into all different kinds of rabbit holes and dead ends. That the administration is not getting as much done as he had hoped intended. Tried to help it do. And so I wanted to have Rufo on. Not because we agree on things. We obviously don't. You'll hear that. Not because I'm trying to talk him into my way of seeing things. I'm not going to do that. But both to understand how he understands what he is doing and also to interrogate it, to ask if the tactics he is using are actually working, or if he's scoring short-term victories at the cost of helping to cede profound long-term problems.

Rufo is a senior fellow and director of the initiative on critical race theory. The Manhattan Institute. He's a contributing editor of City Journal. He is the co-host of the podcast, Rufo and Lomis, and he's the author of America's Cultural Revolution, How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. As always, my email, Ezraqlenshow at n.Y times.com. Chris Rufo, welcome to the show. Good to be with you. So I want to begin with a piece you wrote in early 2024 titled The New Right Activism. A manifesto for the counter-revolution. And there are a lot of interesting things in there, but the one I wanted to begin with is you write, no institution can be neutral. So tell me why.

Yeah, I mean, that's an obvious reality if you think about it for longer than a minute. And I think it's important to say because there's this mythology that we have in the United States. And it's a small ill-liberal mythology that institutions can be kind of neutral arbiter that they could be valueless vessels that achieve some kind of pragmatic or instrumental ends. And my point is that no, in practice, institutions always have values, whether they're implicit or explicit. And for those of us who are on the outside of many powerful institutions, there's a lot of value in simply revealing the underlying reality. And in fact, political fights are at heart the fight for who determines the values, what values are installed in an institution, and then therefore what kind of decisions get made. So I should take a lot of the arguments about institutions, practically within the broad philosophical tradition of liberalism, to argue that they can have neutral treatment. They can have neutral rules. And a lot of, for better and worse, procedure in these institutions, everything from notice and comment periods to different ways that they can have neutral rules. And a lot of, for better and worse, procedure in these institutions, everything from notice and comment periods to different ways that they.

have to create transparency are about trying to create that capacity for people to be neutrally treated. Do you think that's possible? No, I think neutral is the wrong word. I think what we're looking for is impartial. And I would agree with that. Everyone should be treated equally as an individual under law. But that's impartiality, not neutrality. So in a criminal case, if you sentence somebody to the death penalty, you're not treating them neutrally. You're actually taking their life because the underlying law is a kind of moral code. And so I think neutral and impartial are similar, but in this case, kind of critically different. So another argument you make in that piece is you say, the popular slogan that facts don't care about your feelings betrays similar problems.

It's slogan being Ben Shapiro's slogan. In reality, feelings almost always overpower facts. Reason is a slave of the passions. Yeah, that's true. And we'll caveat, we love Ben Shapiro. We're Ben Shapiro fans, of course. But I think that he's very wrong on that. And I think conservatives have made a fundamental error in latching on to that. And really what it is, it's a rationalization for losing. It's like, yes, we may have lost the great political question which operates on emotions or passions. But, you know, we have the facts on our side. And if only people would read our, you know, white paper, our kind of regression analysis, our rigorous logical argumentation. then we would be vindicated. But look, while we should have the facts on our side, while we should use logic, by itself, it's insufficient. And in fact, politics operates on a deeper level, an emotional level. And politics occurs on the field of sentiment and public opinion, much more on the field of, you know, kind of abstract argumentation at the top.

So, and then you go on in the same piece to make an argument for Agit Prop. So Aged Prop, old Soviet Union term for agitation and propaganda. Yeah, mashed up together. And it doesn't have a great reputation. Aged prop is usually not a term of endearment, but you say, Agedop doesn't mean sacrificing the truth, but rather channeling the truth toward victory. So how do you define what Agit Prop is? And what are you trying to explain to your fellow conservatives about how to use it?

So, right. I mean, if you're obviously, if you're conducting, say, propaganda on behalf of a falsehood or evil or an unjust cause, it's bad. My point is that that's not always necessarily true if you are pursuing a cause that is good and true and beautiful. If you look at the word propaganda, the original meaning, it comes from the Catholic Church, and it was the propagation of the gospels, the propagation of the truth. And so these are concepts that we can recover because the reality is that all politics and the age of the printing press and onward depends on propaganda. And how do you define what propaganda itself is? Propaganda is simply the method of communicating a political narrative. Again, we're using neutral, I'm going to say a true narrative, to a mass audience through the means of modern media.

It's a rhetorical argument intended to persuade the majority of people to cobble together a majority of public opinion. And look, this is, again, for conservatives especially, not new. You know, the founding fathers of this country wrote to each other about this. They wrote in public about this. We seem to have forgotten some of these lessons of how politics actually works. You have to persuade people. What is persuasion? It's rhetoric.

What is rhetoric at an industrial scale? It's propaganda. You've been connecting the question of propaganda to whether or not the end it is aimed at is true. How do you think about when you have untrue propaganda unleashing intense passions? That's bad. Towards a true aim. Yeah, look, I don't think that that's good. I think that Aristotle has a great line in his book on rhetoric where he says,

The Truth has a tendency to prevail. I love that. I love that because it's like the truth doesn't always prevail. We can look at history, we can look at history, you know, and sometimes lies prevail. I think in 2020 to 2024 during the woke era, many lies prevailed. But what is so interesting about that line is the truth has a tendency to prevail. And what I take from it is that therefore you always want to be on the side of the truth, even for your own pragmatic political ends.

You always want to be on the side of the truth. And so look, certainly there are untrue elements or narratives on the right and on the left. I think a political movement to succeed has to have the discipline and integrity to go after it, but always to remember that if the truth has a tendency prevail, that's where you want to be. And then your piece builds to this idea that, quote, in order to realize the ultimate promise of the political, there also must be something higher, a telos, which is the Greek word for something, like an ultimate end. A final cause.

A final cause. So one reason I've been focusing on this piece is to understand the way you do York and what your work is. So what is your telos? Well, politically speaking, let's say, let's leave it at that. Yeah, I don't mean your family. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think I want to have a restoration of the principles of our republic. And so if you're thinking about our republic, you're thinking about those guiding principles

where they have strayed over the last 250 years. I want to have a restoration of that. And so I'm constantly looking backward at the founding and trying to understand it better and understand how to bring those principles forward. And so you want to have the principles of liberty and equality. You want to have a functioning, healthy republic, and you want to have a culture that is organized

according to virtue. And in particular, you know, the virtues of our Western, Anglo-American civilization. And through my personal observations around the world, as well as my study of the past, I think the Anglo-American civilization, the principles that have animated our republic for the last 250 years are still the best that we could hope for. So from that perspective, we're 17 months into Donald Trump's second term. Is that all? It feels like longer. Tell me about it.

It feels like longer for you guys probably. Is this administration building the kind of country you want to see? Yeah, I think so. And here's how I would, here's how I would assess it. On the elements within Article 2, so the executive power, I think Donald Trump has done almost everything he could do. Great people with the administration have done almost everything they could do to advance this kind of vision of the country. Liberty, equality, virtue. Yes. And I think that the momentum was strong, year one. I think it's trailed off in year. or two. And, you know, could that be the executive has lost some of its energy? Yes. Could it be that, you know, public opinion has has softened? Yes. Could it be some of the foreign adventures or misadventures, depending on who you talk to, have distracted focus? I think yes. But ultimately, the problem is that the president has a majority in Congress, but not 60 votes in the Senate.

And so fundamental transformative legislation that I would like to see is impossible. Make the case to me that Donald Trump is restoring virtue. This is a hard case because what you're going to say is that Trump does not exhibit the kind of Christian virtues in his personal life, right? I'm not even thinking about his personal life. I'm thinking about his public life. Okay. Well, you tell me. I didn't claim he exhibits virtue.

So you said that they are doing a pretty good job bringing back Liberty, quality and virtue. Correct. Make the case to me. Sure. I'll make you the case and I'll make it through the particular example that I'm most familiar with. So one of my big campaigns the last couple of years was the fight to abolish DEI. And so DEI was this idea that had been kind of germinating in the in the 90s, in the 2000s, but really exploded into public life with universal adoption by most large institutions after 2020. And it was this idea that's very simple, that there are oppressor groups and oppressed groups in the United States because of the historical realities of our country and therefore to achieve, to move towards equal outcomes. You have to treat individuals unequally according to their group identity.

And the president on day one issued an executive order that was very much in line with the work that we have been doing to go and kind of wipe out the DEI bureaucracy throughout the federal government. And so in that case, I think that you could argue that the principle of equality and impartiality, as we were discussing earlier, had been restored. Not totally. We still have some problems with the underlying statutory law. Just recently in the last couple of weeks, the Department of Justice has taken a buzzsaw to so-called disparate impact doctrine. Same idea. If there are unequal outcomes, it must therefore, by definition, be because of discrimination. Therefore, you have to remedy it by treating people unequally. And so in this case, I think, you know, and because this is the issue I've worked on and have been passionate about, I think that you can make an argument that liberty, equality, virtue, have been restored. Are there other problems? Of course.

Are we all the way there? No. But on the issues that I personally care about, that I personally have worked on, I think the country is in a much better place than it was. two years ago. I guess one thing I think about when I think about Donald Trump in virtue is corruption. So I see Trump taking a luxury aircraft from Qatar. I see his family getting involved in all kinds of crypto schemes where the investors in their crypto schemes, in many cases seem to be people who have business before the family, business before the country. The New Yorker sort of did I think a quite conservative tallying up of how much money that Trump family and Trump have made or

how much the net worth has increased that has been connected to the presidency. The number was about $4 billion in this term. It doesn't, when I look at it, look virtuous. Yeah. Look, here's my general perspective, and I'll lay it out to you as honestly as I can. There are the issues that I work on, that I'm passionate about, that I feel like I have some control over or influence over, and there are the issues that I don't. And I think I've been very straightforward in the areas where I think the administration has fallen short. And certainly the perception and we'll see over time, I'm sure that there will be, you know, inquiries, investigations, et cetera into these business enterprises is bad. You're not going to get me to defend it.

I'm perfectly happy calling out the administration where I think it's strayed or aired. And this is one of those places. I mean, I remember the crypto launch. It was during the transition, I think, where they launched the Trump coin, right? And it's like, I don't like this. I don't want to see this. They shouldn't be doing that. And yeah, you're not going to get me to defend it.

Well, one of the things I'm touching into here is I've been watching a show. And I see a growing vein of discomfort from you on at least what parts of the right are becoming. Sure. So in December, you tweeted, the rights media apparatus is how the right teaches its followers how to think. And it's currently getting consumed by conspiracies, psychodrama, and tabloid conflicts. If left unchecked, it will turn the audience into the equivalent of a third world click farm. So what's, tell me about that.

What's been alarming you? Yeah, yeah. Sometimes, man, you hear your quotes back. You're like, oh, that's kind of very, yeah, very, very lively language. Yeah, this is a huge problem. And I don't, okay. So I'll put it this way. There's a growing split between the institutional right and the online right.

The institutional right, I think, actually deserves credit for gatekeeping some of these kind of bad tendencies out of our institutions. And I think that's good. However, the online- It's right being like Fox News and- Yes. Conservative think tanks, you know, the Manhattan Institute, all of the kind of the institutional layer of the professional right, let's say. I think it's done a very good job at gatekeeping

some of these bad psychological and political tendencies out of our institutions. The problem that we're grappling with, though, is that the traditional way of thinking about political media is always as an outgrowth of institutions. So you'd have your magazines, your newsletters, your think tank, you know, policy papers. The internet has created, you know, kind of benefits, costs and benefits. One of the benefits is the kind of ease of communication with a large audience, but one of the negatives is that you have the proliferation of insanity, madness, psychopathology. And on the right, I think this went into hyperdrive after the assassination of Charlie Kirk was bubbling up before then, but really then took a turn. And so you have this tendency on the

right historically. You have like a kind of bircher tendency in the post-war era, and then it kind of waxes and wanes over time. And right now you have in the online right, someone like Candice Owens, who has like departed so far from reality and yet has a massive audience. And I think that it's doing a disservice to the public and even more, say, kind of self-interestedly, doing a very grave disservice to the right, because if you can't teach your audience, your followers, your political base, how to think properly, they're not going to behave properly and you're not going to have proper outcomes. And so I think it's important for us on the right to have this internal fight, which is to say, if you think that, you know, Israel assassinated Charlie Kirk

or, you know, whatever kind of handful of conspiracies you have, you know, you're on the outside. You're not within the movement and this is a fight that is happening now. And I think given sufficient amount of time, I think we'll win. Why do you think you'll win? Because I look at the right and I see Tucker Carlson and his current guys, which is a much more conspiratorial guys than he's had before, has become more and more dominant figure. As you note, Candace Owens's success has been startling. I guess I'd ask this question in two dimensions. What is the audience demand that they are meeting, right?

What is it that they are providing that people want? And then I guess the second question is, why do you think you'll win? Yeah, great question. So first of all, the audience for conspiracy theories is enormous. Before his kind of legal trouble, someone like Alex Jay Jones was making apparently millions of dollars selling vitamins and survival supplies. And if you think about it, to generate that kind of revenue requires a massive, if kind of quiet, under the surface audience. And so I think they're really tapping into that side of the audience. It's right wing, but not exclusively right wing.

And in fact, a lot of the people who have come over to these conspiracy theories are in that part of the horseshoe where their politics are, you know, let's say sub-ideological. They're more of a feeling, a perception. a set of resentments. Second, how do conspiracy theories work? Conspiracy theories work for people who want to forfeit agency, for people who do not see the possibility of constructive action in their personal lives or in public life. And therefore, the conspiracy theory gives them the rationalization and justification for their nihilism. It's, you know, insert here, right?

It's this group. It's that group. It's this other group that is controlling the world, making everything. everything impossible, assassinating our heroes. And this gives them a psychological key, right, that is self-reinforcing. Because a conspiracy theory for conspiracy theorists can never be debunked, right? It's just one layer of the onion that gets peeled. And I'll tell you why I think we're going to win.

Because I've noticed this, even for people, let's say in my kind of one degree of separation, conspiracy theories, and I think in particular anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, eventually fry your brain. And so I think that we'll see a lot of these personalities, a lot of these psychological tendencies, kind of burn out on their own. And on top of that, as a kind of extra layer of confidence. That is an optimistic view on the history of anti-Semitism right there.

Well, okay, I'm saying in the near term, these things kind of wax and wane. But I think what I've seen in the United States is a greater set of antibodies than you might find elsewhere. and then institutionally for our side on the right. I think that, look, the people who run institutions are aware of the problem. They're confronting the problem. We're dealing with it. And to me, this is inevitable. Political coalitions are going to have some kind of mixture of the good and the bad. And the question is, who's in a position of leadership, what kind of courage and integrity they have,

and can they succeed? And so I think that when I look at the field as it is, I think this say faction is less powerful than it was six months ago, a year ago, and I hope that trend continues. I think there's an interesting question on institutions in the right here. I forget if it's a Chesterton quote or a C.S. Lewis quote, but he says, one of them says that when men stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing. When men stop believing in God, they believe in everything. And I do think there's a dimension of that around institutions where the right has become much more anti-institutional. I think the view that institutions cannot be neutral and largely cannot even be impartial is much more widely held and there's been a sort of coordinated attack on many

of the institutions in American life. But sort of new ones haven't emerged, right? You could imagine the right and the left having parallel institutions that have different core values, because I do agree with you actually, that institutions almost, they do always have values at their heart. And when you don't think they do. It just means you don't know what they are. Correct. But I think a lot. Or they're being deliberately obscured, right? Or they're being obscured. But I think sometimes about, I think Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson is an interesting figure here, somebody who came up institutionally. I think sometimes about this speech he gave at the 2009 conservative political action conference. And I saw conservatives create many of their own media organizations. And I saw many of those organizations prosper.

And I saw some of them fail. And here's the difference. The ones that failed refused to put accuracy first. This is the hard truth, and conservatives need to deal with this. I believe this. I'm as conservatives as any person in this room. I am literally in the process of stockpiling weapons and food and moving to Idaho. So I'm not in any way going to take a second seat to anybody

in this room ideologically. But I will say, honestly, if you create a news organization whose primary objective is not to deliver accurate news, you will fail. You will fail. The New York Times is a liberal paper, but it's also, and it is to its core liberal paper,

also a paper that cares about whether they spell people's names right by and large. It's a paper that actually cares about accuracy. Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions that are, that's, that's the truth. You don't believe me? So put aside the special pleading for the New York Times here. Tucker Carlson tried to build his own media institution, the Daily Caller. Sure. I would say it did not, my impression of it is that it did not become a place to put accuracy first and became a. a kind of conservative New York Times. It did not become a conservative New York Times.

Over time, he went in, I think, darker and darker directions as he chased the audience. And now he's fully without institution and has, I think, emerged, I'll put it this way, into a form, I think, when I listen to you, you find more concerning and problematic. So what do you think went wrong there? Yeah. Well, look, this is a lot. long-term trend. This didn't emerge in 2009 or 2020. I think of it this way. The left is over-institutionalized, and the right is under-institutionalized. I save this all the time, man. Left is overformed by institutions. The right is underformed. Correct. And so we have kind of opposite problems. And I think of it also in this way. I wrote a

piece about this, I don't know, a long time ago. And I think it really holds up. The left is organized as a capital P party. And the right is organized under a capital P Prince. So you have Donald Trump essentially sets the direction of the right for better for worse through personal charismatic power and his relationship with the conservative base. There's really no mediating institutions in the kind of way that you would see elsewhere. That's where conservatives have figured out this formula for at least the time being to achieve political victory. It has benefits. It has it has problems. The left has the opposite problem. The reason why I think you get, like, presidential candidates on the left that seem to be, like, devoid of traditional charisma is because it's organized as an institutional apparatus or a capital P party.

And so conservatives have a problem with institutions. Conservatives have a problem building institutions. And this is the deepest irony, right? is that conservatives in a healthy republic would be the ones that are preserving the institutions, restoring the institutions, maintaining the institutions. But conservatives have found themselves on the outside of institutions. And so when we're talking about this concept of counter-revolution, it's a paradox, right? Because a counter-revolution is not necessarily a conservative impulse on the top.

You can have a conservative mission or goal that drives it. That's why it's a counter revolution rather than a revolution. But conservatives are in this really interesting position where you have a lot of people on the intellectual right. They attend the black tie gala. They attend the events at the country club. They eat the salmon dinner at the whatever Hilton ballroom. And I'm always looking around at these events. I don't like these events because I'm always looking around and saying, you guys are out of your minds.

You guys are operating as if, you know, the Elks Lodge was still the formative institution of the United States. You're living in a fantasy. You're living in a nostalgia that isn't actually grappling with the fundamental problems in the country and is totally out of step with the very voters that you claim to represent. And so, look, this is a problem. I can't say that there's a snap your finger solution. And so you have to start where you start. You know, I work for an institution that I think is either the best in the business, the Manhattan Institute. I think we do good work that has a high degree of accuracy and rigor and intelligence.

And I think that we've put up practical political victories in a way that few others have. Another version of this is a line I like, is that the personality type of the left is bureaucratic. And the personality type of the right is autocratic. And I don't think that was always true. I don't think so. Well, I don't think so, right. I think in the Trump there it is. Okay.

Well, make the case. There is a falling in line behind Donald Trump. So here is my view of the two coalitions right now. The genius of Donald Trump in the 2024 election was he collapsed the multidimensional test of party loyalty that existed in the previous Republican Party, where you, you know, pro-life, you do believe in low taxes, you know, what was your foreign policy, etc. and certainly the multidimensional agenda test you see on the left, then to a single point of loyalty. Did you support him personally? If you did, there was actually room for a wide variety of other opinions.

You could be a techno-futurist, a podcast, Elon Musk, you could be a Christian traditionalist, you could be Robert F. Kennedy Jr.., who'd been running as a Democrat just a year or two before, but also you could be Ted Cruz. and what held that together is that the line that you could not cross was Trump himself. But as long as you were useful to him, you could be on the team. Now, that has obvious issues when you move into governance, and I think some of them have emerged. But it gave him and them a freedom of movement across other issues where, you know,

Kamala Harris, a Tim Walz, Joe Biden were much more broad. box checking, right? This sort of multi-dimensional loyalty test that the left uses. And so on the left, you end up with, and I mean here the left, not like the Democratic social stuff, but the left coalition in this country, the broad Democratic Party. You end up with people who have sort of all of the right views and have an institutional personality, right, are somewhat risk averse, are worried about getting in trouble to meeting.

And on the right, you have people who, they'll go crazy. in a meeting. You can be Bill Pulte. But as long as the boss likes you, you're safe. Okay. Yeah. I think that there are elements of that that are true, Prince versus Party. It's a method of political organization, psychological organization. Certainly one of Trump's, kind of the great litmus test for him is personal loyalty. We've seen that. You're with Trump. He's with you. You're, you cross him. And he'll, he'll attack you. You could be Kim Jong-un and be a friend of good standing. It was like a nice buddy comedy. I feel like there'd be a buddy comedy. He likes Kim Jong-un more than likes Mark Carney.

Yeah, well, you know, fair enough, and as personal chemistry goes. But, yeah, I think there's some truth to that, but I wouldn't therefore, I think your conclusion is overdrawn. I don't think you could say the right has autocratic personalities. I mean, I deal with conservatives all the time. I don't see that as a psychological tendency with the people I, we're. work with, the people I talk to, my friends and neighbors. But so, yeah, I think it's overdrawn. I think this is just a question of political organization from the top. And I don't think it's total just loyalty, personal loyalty. I mean, Trump wants immigration restrictions, strong national

borders, build a wall. He wants kind of American national interest-based foreign policy, although that is kind of a little bit on the outs. And then he represents. or at least championed a lot of the causes that I cared about, care about, you know, on DEI, on higher education, on cultural institutions, you know, and a whole host of other sub-issues that he really grabbed onto. And look, this is good. You kind of have to work with what is there. You always want to plan for the future, build for the future,

but ultimately you're faced with decisions in the moment. And look, on the whole, I think in those areas where we have had more freedom of movement, more ability to execute policy, I think things have been going quite well. Group health insurance can challenge company budgets with large and unpredictable rate increases. Now, a new form of employer coverage called an ICRA, or ICRA, can help. ICRAs make health plan expenses more predictable and affordable by tapping into a much larger risk pool. That means businesses know what to expect and what to budget. If you're tired of expensive surprises, plan on something predictable. Plan on an ICRA.

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one at NYTimes.com slash subscribe. I'm going to go back to Tucker Carlson. So I've seen you talk about your take on his evolution. And something you've said is that the Tucker Carlson of the Fox News era, when he was given his APM monologues, that in that era they were a unifying script for the right, that Fox News was this institutional structure around him that maybe contained him to a certain point. And that created a unity, a coherence that has now dissolved, not just around him specifically, but around the right more broadly. Now, the liberal take on Tucker Carlson in the Fox News era is that he was beginning to bring a white national strain into centrality in the Republican Party. That, you know, there were all these Daily Keir Starmer articles about how much he was saying exactly what they thought. He was talking about great replacement theory.

And you've got to ask yourself as you watch the historic tragedy that is Joe Biden's immigration policy, what's the point of this? They are flooding this country with immigrants in order to change the demography to maintain political power for themselves. To change the racial mix of the country. That's the reason to reduce the political power of people whose ancestors lived here and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the third world. Now, I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter, literally hysterical if you use the term replacement.

But they become hysterical because that's what's happening, actually. Let's just say it. That's true. He had already, in our view, become quite conspiratorial and that what he is now and what he is then are a straight line from each other. And that the sort of passions he was unleashing, right, reason, of course, being a slave of such passions, that it was always going to go in one direction. And that celebrating what he was at that moment and then being confused by what he is in the this moment is a kind of like a strange unwillingness to either grappled one or the other. So tell me how you see it. Yeah, I don't see it that way.

I mean, when Tucker Carlson was on Fox at that 8 p.m. Eastern time, 5 p.m. Western time for me. It really did feel like a shelling point for the right. It was like a quarterback calling the plays every night at 8 o'clock in that first, you know, five to 10 minutes where Tucker Carlson kind of condensed the opinion, represented the opinion, reflected back the opinion. And then everyone had a central point, a central coherent point to think about, to talk about, to mobilize on. And it was very effective. So even in my own experience, when I first started reporting on critical race theory in the institutions, went on Tucker Carlson, gave a kind of opening monologue with Tucker Carlson. President Trump was watching it, got a call from the White House the next morning, hey, the president saw you on TV. He wants to take action on critical race theory. Come to the White House. Let's get this thing done.

And so that mechanism that even in my personal experience, the loop on that was like less than 12 hours. Very tight loop. A very tight loop. Very tight. And I think also what I've learned about Fox News is that Fox News has, and this is to its great credit, Fox News, Fox News, has a kind of disciplinary function. And I think especially after 2020 has become even more cognizant of, okay, message discipline is important. Moving the message forward is important. Here's the kind of guardrails for the narrative. And this is a function of institutions, a function of technology. Yes, but what I'm talking about is what the narrative itself is. I agree with you that Tucker Carlson played this role when he was on Fox News. But the thing that many of us who, I mean, I knew Tucker Carlson before, many of us who had watched him for a long,

time from a good time libertarian. But what specific, you, you're invoking like the daily, it's like, I don't know anything about the daily storm or beyond, beyond, you talked a bunch about Great Replacement through. I mean, this has been, hold on, this has been exhaustingly documented. I mean, there are biographies of the guy, the Times did a bunch of work on this. The bringing in of a macro narrative that there was a function that it's called a cabal of elites, importing brown voters to replace you, that you are being betrayed by elites representing foreign interests and foreign people

to sort of alter the culture of this country to their benefit was something he hammered all the time. Fox News is reporting tonight that the administration awarded a $172 million grant to a George Soros-linked organization which exists to, quote, help young border crossers avoid deportation. Now, why is some foreign-born billionaire allowed to change our country fundamentally? That's the big question. Right, a relentless focus on crime from immigrants, a relentless focus on George Soros.

And so to me, I see Tucker Carlson now and I see Tucker Carlson then. And I agree the shackles were off a little bit. But I see him calling the same play. He's just had to turn up the dial a little bit because he doesn't have Fox News. I don't think that's right. And I think if let's take the, you're presenting it in a way that is very charged. I don't think quite fair. But let's take the underlying.

I mean, Tucker Carlson's a charged figure. But let's take the, but the narrative that you're portraying. I don't think that that's exactly, you know, how I would put it, certainly. But the underlying facts are either true or not true. And in this case, demographic change, mass demographic change has been and is a reality in the United States. And I think it's fair to talk about that politically. We've been talking about it politically for for 10 years. And you could do it in a way that exemplifies bigotry or discrimination, of course, but you can also do it in a way that isn't an expression of bigotry or discrimination.

But in fact, it's just a basic question, a question that people in the United States have been asking since the 1770s, who are we? What is an American? And if we are a sovereign nation, we have the, not just the right, but really the obligation to determine these great questions of who comes in, who doesn't come in. And so I don't think that it is it is right to say that someone who is concerned about rapid and large-scale demographic change is kind of a white nationalist. That seems like the kind of smear. No, I'm saying that the reason I think Tucker Carlson is a white nationalist is due to

all the white nationalism. Well, let me ask, let me ask a question. Hold on, no, no, no, no, no, because that, I mean, that is a huge charge. And I just, again, like, what is the evidence of that? You could be concerned, can you be concerned about mass demographic change without being racist? I think the answer is yes. How do you define a white nationalist?

Well, you make the charge. You define it and substantiate your point. So I think that Tucker Carlson's view is that the tick Tucker Carlson out of it. Just make it. And in general argument. A general argument of what a white nationalist. And then you can kind of layer in Tucker Carlson. So I think that there is a straightforward view in white nationalism, that there is such a thing as a white race.

That race is fundamentally European, came here and founded this country. That race has, depending on the variant of white nationalism, we're talking about genetic advantages or cultural advantages. And that that race deserves to have, should have dominance, particularly over the, this country. There are harder and softer versions of this, right? In some versions, Jews are included in that white race. Sure. In some versions, they're not included in that white race. In some versions, we are talking about something I would describe primarily as a kind of nationalism, right? The, you know, if you have too much of a country not sharing a common heritage, you lose solidarity. In some cases, we're talking about something much darker than that. Right. There are

who just don't like the way their community is changing, and there's the KKK, right? Everything exists on a spectrum. But would you say someone who is, like, for example, hesitant about rapid, large-scale, demographic change is just a kind of one-percent white nationalist? Yeah, because that would be like the majority of the country. Yes, I don't think it is a problem or unfair or even wrong to worry about large-scale, rapid demographic change. So to maybe be more specific about Tucker Carlson, so you just had on.

the right-wing writer Scott Greer. He's got a book coming out on the online right called White Pill. So Greer was a former deputy editor at The Daily Caller. He left in 2018 after past writings for white national site were dug up. And he once said of Tucker Carlson. So this is Greer speaking. Tucker Carlson is ultimately on our side. He can get millions and millions of boomers to nod along with talking points that would have only been seen on V-Dare or American Renaissance a few years ago. These are both. white national sites. So I guess what do you make of that? Yeah, so I'll tell you what I make of it. And here's what I think is really interesting about some of these figures who were on the once kind of fringe elements of the right who have in some ways seen the errors of that way of ideological thinking. And to me, you always want to leave people room to grow up, room to leave bad ideas behind, room for kind of critical self-reflection and then to integrate back into the kind of mainstream thinking. And I think, you know, Scott Greer is interesting. One of the reasons why we interviewed him was to kind of chart out this trajectory, which there's a lot of people that had more

radical politics and then they moderate over time. And so I was very interested in understanding that process of kind of ideological development and growth. And then really scrutinizing, you want to actually try to figure out, all right, well, what's the way out of that? What's the way to demystify, to defang, to kind of de-legitimize that way of thinking? And I think it's interesting to talk to people who once had those ideas. So I'm not against you talking to him at all, right? What I'm saying is not that you shouldn't interview Scott Greer. Sure.

I think many people change their politics dramatically. And one of the big problems the left actually has is not giving people space to change. Sure. and putting people into a box where they're held in who they were as opposed to who they may become. My problem is not with you in doing Greer. I'm saying that I looked at Tucker Carlson in that period and thought, huh, he's going in this direction that I understand this to be the argument of, you know, a Vidaire, and they all celebrated him. But I guess the question is whether, to phrase a question precisely, which maybe I haven't yet, whether... One of the lessons of where he has gone and where some of the right has gone is that people like you on the right were a little insensitive to when something wasn't just a breaking of a liberal taboo, but was a movement towards a politics that was much more, let's call it, white identity focused.

Look, okay, huge point. I would break it down in a couple ways. One, I don't think that's quite accurate. I actually think that. that the statement you're reading, and you could probably read it from a number of other people, right? If you remember in 2016, Richard Spencer famously held like some sort of conference or group, and he said, oh, yes, Trump has adopted,

you know, Trump is a creation of the alt-right. It was completely delusional, totally self-serving, and a product of narcissism that I wouldn't take at face value. And so I think a lot of the radical, elements you're talking about, overstate,

overstate this relationship because they desperately want to believe it. And I think that, you know, someone like Tucker Carlson, I don't think it's accurate to say that Tucker Carlson on Fox in, you know, 2021 was laundering in, you know, talking points from, you know,

American Renaissance. I just, I don't think that's true. I think it's conflating a kind of, be superficial opposition to immigration. And the conflation game is really, really, I think, dishonest. And unfortunately, for a lot of time, it worked. And so I think that, in fact, we're in a much better place than in the past. And I remember some of these groups like ADL, SPLC, media matters.

You know, they came after me with many, many smears trying to destroy my reputation, trying to get me deplatform from social media, trying to kind of eliminate. me from the public sphere. None of it worked, thankfully. The ACLU, I would also add. And in fact, as I look back, the arguments that they were making were preposterous. And they only succeeded because people felt fear. And so I'm glad that we don't live in that condition of fear anymore. And today we can talk very reasonably across a table, which I think is good. But I'm certainly not going to forget the emotional tone and the political. vulnerabilities of that era.

And again, the SPLC that was coming after me because of God knows what was at the same time giving money to neo-Nazis and white nationalists to keep them afloat. And what that shows me is that the supply of racism in the United States and including racism on the right in the United States has dwindled to such a small degree in real life that it took the SPLC to actually inject cash into that ecosystem merely to keep it alive.

And so I just, I just don't, yeah, I mean it's not persuasive. One way of thinking about that period that I think is how I think about it is that two things were sort of true at the same time. So one, there was way too much speech policing.

There was too much cancellation. There was too much that Instead of being willing to have arguments, people just tried to make the arguments unhappable. That all happened, right? I don't deny any of it. And on the other hand, a lot of what people more on the left in that moment were afraid of or what they predicted also happened. The alt-right moved much more from the fringe to the center. I always think about-

The alt-right was totally destroyed after Charlottesville. I think maybe we have a different view of what the all-right represented, which is fair enough. But I think a lot of ideas that were very, very, very far from the center. I think about Elon Musk and him writing, and I mean, later he had to like try to figure out how to apologize for this. But when some of basics said, like, the Jews have been funding the grace replacement. Did Elon Musk say that? Yeah. No, Elon Musk didn't say that. What he said was underneath that. He said to whoever had tweeted that, you have spoken the truth. And then he to go tour Auschwitz and things like that.

Oh, yeah. The Auschwitz, uh, yeah. The Auschwitz apology tour. So, but, you know, even now, Elon Musk is very conspiratorial and where he is in 2026, now the world's first trillionaire owning, you know, what used to be Twitter. Um, and the things he like kind of pumps into the attentional stream would have been considered incredibly marginal, even in Trump's first term.

So two things I think were true, right? I think there are many ways which left went too far. And the forces the left was worried were there are much closer to the center. Yes, there are parts of the alt-right that are not significant today. Richard Spencer is not a significant figure. Nick Fuentes has a bigger audience than Richard Spencer ever did. Sure. And there is, I mean, when I'm on X in other places, the amount of just constant anti-Semitism

and anti-Indian racism I see just happening in people's mentions is, wild to me. And I mean, I don't think he'll win, but you look at Fishback, who's running for governor in Florida. It's sort of almost unimaginable to think of somebody like him being a figure in Republican Party politics who would be commanding the support of particularly anybody. And I think the reason that people worry about him is they don't think he's going to win, but he seems to be doing very well among the young right. Sure. And so I think you can hold your view, which I at least partially share, that there are many ways in which the left and the speech policing and the, you know, boundaries went too far. And also, a lot of the people who were most hair on fire

in that period had a point and some of their more kind of wild predictions. I was thinking about, like, if you had told me that Trump was going to make Robert F. Kennedy Jr.., HHS secretary and Tulsi Gabbard, DNI, and try to make the triumph of bipartisanship, and try to make Matt Bill Gates, attorney general, I would have thought that was like an unhinged, like, resistant substack take, and then it all happened. So it's like the fact, you can have these things be true at the same time. Yes. I think I think you're kind of understating, kind of understating the dynamic on one side. I mean, it wasn't just about speech policing. The, after 2020, the left maintained kind of apparatus of social annihilation. And I went through it myself. I had the

ACLU subpoena me and harassed me with a lawfare campaign that cost me a lot of money. I had the SPLC and the ADL put me on some sort of hate list that was totally bogus trying to destroy my reputation. And so I had people, you know, threats of violence against me that were very credible at the time. And so, you know, people trying to get, you know, going after my family, my kids. I mean, we shouldn't forget just. just how awful that period was and how insane that period was. And unfortunately, while I think that many of the institutions on the left have learned after having suffered some consequences for enabling that,

the movements that they have sparked are in fact alive and well. And look, I think the difference that maybe you're not seeing is that the radical, nihilistic and violent, left-wing movements, have the full support of the left's institutions. And what we're talking about is a radical, nihilistic movements on the right do not have any institutional support. And bubble up in your Twitter comments, which, again, don't agree, but is different in kind, not just in quantity.

And in the case of someone like James Fishback, I think it's a great test. Fishback is very charismatic. I think we would all agree on that. I talk with your colleague, Michelle Goldberg, about this. But even with a kind of individual charisma, if he's like the Groyper candidate for governor of Florida, which is, again, like kind of a crazy thing that is happening, I want to see the actual vote tally

because that's going to show me where he is, where he stands with the actual conservative population, the conservative voter, the conservative movement as a whole, I suspect that he's going to get absolutely trounced. happened with Vivek Ramaswamy running against a guy Casey Pooch in Ohio. He got blown out by, I don't know, 60, 70 points. And so by contrast, you look at something like the kind of trans ideological movement that I think is both kind of a lie. It's grounded in a series of falsehoods. Maintained this suppressive, threatening, censorious power in the kind of pre-Elon Musk Twitter days

and in the general kind of woke years. And then look, another uncomfortable fact per capita has committed more mass violence than any other group. And so I am willing to indulge in and think it's important to have a kind of criticism of, let's say, you know, the elements of my own side. But I also think that if we were to just measure it out, to put it on a scale, you know, it's looking a lot more like this. Assassinations attempt against President Trump, the assassination of Charlie. Kirk, the kind of security posture that's required for conservatives just to go on a college campus. That's how I measure it. It's like I'm looking at it. I'm feeling it. I'm seeing it with my colleagues. After Charlie Kirk was killed, I called all the people, friends and colleagues in the

business, and I just like was completely distraught for weeks. And again, like, while I don't support, you know, James Fishback for governor, again, I think that it's kind of an empty symbolism where I was on the other side. It feels like these ideologies have the support of the institutions. They wielded power irresponsibly in the past and still have the kind of ultimate political threat, threat of violence that I know everybody in my world, you know, has seen, has experienced, has feared. And so that grounds me. Do you not see that? Is that? I don't. I don't. I don't have the same view of it, but let me hold as saying that your experience of it, I understand, right? And as somebody who also, you know, sometimes deals with threats of violence and other things of that nature.

I think the way this often looks to people on the left, a party looks right now, is that when you say these nihilistic, I think you called them, ideals, ideas are not held at high levels of the right. they're only supported institution on the left. I see it the opposite way. Really? I see it the opposite way, and I'll explain why. I don't see the SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, as like a powerful potent left-wing actor. They're not like...

Ten years ago, they could nuke you. I'll go through my thing. ADL, I don't even see is on the left, which is a different question. I understand. But I see the Trump administration is, powerfully and potently extreme and willing to use the power of the federal government from, you know, deploying ICE and CPP agents to different cities, to directing the DOJ,

who to investigate and go after, to after Charlie Kirk's murder, trying to get people fired, who are just sort of random people who had done shitty tweets. I do not see a world in which there is this huge separation, between the extreme elements of the right and this administration, I keep hearing from people like you, right, who I think has talked about this, that there's a huge number of Goyper's working in House and Senate offices in Congress, that, you know, Bronze Age pervert is one of the most popular people to read if you're a Trump staffer. And I see those things actually moving into things like national security strategies, you know, about the civilizational suicide of Europe. Now, I recognize we're not going to agree on all this, right?

This part, I'm not going to try to, like, bridge the gap. What I will say is that the other thing I think people on the left see has been a sort of movement from, you know, 2016 to 2024 where it's almost unbelievable how far things have gone, right? Even Trump 1 to Trump 2 are very, very different beasts. And so all of a sudden, it doesn't look impossible to imagine that Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson and Fishback are. are the future, not the fringe. I think a lesson that has been burned into many of us is it, it is dangerous to dismiss something that seems to have a lot of energy around it as a fringe because what is today's fringe is tomorrow's, maybe not center, but much more live and potent political force.

And would you say that you saw that that happened on the left between, you know, 2014 and in 2024. Absolutely. In part, I think you guys are about to learn some lessons we learned. Yeah. I mean, maybe so, but I would argue that actually the right has done a better job at managing it.

And I think we'll see, and I hope I'm right, that with something like the fishback campaign, you know, I think of James Fishback as a human meme. It's like amazing. He's like, if you take the memetic energy from that corner of the online discourse and turned it into a human being, it's like it would look and sound like, James Fishback. But the reality is that once those ideas gain contact with the people, the culture, the institutions on the right, they're not going anywhere. Let me try to frame this more in terms of let me try to frame this more in terms of arguments I've seen you making. Sure. And tell me,

if I get a chain in this wrong, you tell me where. I will. Right. I think you think you now have a problem with a racialist right. I think watching the take of conspiracies after Kirk's murder has been sobering or scary for a lot of people on the right. To watch people accusing Israel of it, to eventually see people accusing turning points USA of it, or some kind of plot from the people around him, I think has been for major, major figures on the right to be making those arguments has seemed to me to be a kind of shocking moment for a lot of you. And then I've watched you and others, you know, on X and elsewhere, like, look in your mentions and be like, oh, shit, there's a lot of racism here. Something's happening.

So you tell me which part of this you don't agree with. Yeah. Well, I mean, here's how I see it. And your general analysis is correct. So there is a racialist right, let's say. I've been writing about this for a number of years. But I think a lot of it is something of an optical illusion. where, and you see this on the, on, let's say, on the left, where a small group of people that is very loud online appears to represent a larger share of a political coalition or the general population than it really does.

And so, look, I don't want a racialist right. That is, that is like a clear position on my part. And I think to the extent that we have like anti-Semitic conspiracy theories bubbling up from the digital sphere. It's a problem that we have to deal with, of untruth or a falsehood that should be called out for what it is. And what I think it is at heart is that, and I've talked to a lot of young right-wing guys. So sometimes I'll have lunch or dinner when I'm in D.C. or elsewhere with younger guys and just say, hey, you know, kind of walk me through like what's happening for people. Like, we're older now. You and I, you and I are middle age now. So I say, hey, walk me through this thinking. And it's kind of non-judgmental, just kind of help me understand what's happening.

with some of the more kind of radical or racialist young man. And this is the description that they give. They say, you know, these are guys who hit high school during COVID. They kind of transitioned into an almost purely digital life with all of their rabbit holes you could get into. They came of age as a function of your kind of entering adulthood during the kind of Floyd hysteria, where there are teachers at school, their media, you know, institutions, the government, everyone was saying, you know, you're a young white man, you're the problem, you're the oppressor, you're evil. You should be denied opportunities because of your biology, because of your your ancestry. And essentially that they were programmed by the kind of George Floyd hysteria into thinking racially. And instead of what I think is the the, the, the, the, the, the proverbs. and the correct response, which is to say, we've got to move beyond this.

We're going to fight this racialist thinking on the left, on the right, wherever it comes from. They essentially psychologically submitted to it, but then reverse the polarity. I don't think that's a good way to pursue it. I don't think on the kind of philosophical question, it's right. I don't think that from the practical political conception, it's fruitful. But in a certain way, it's like, I get it. it. Young people are, you know, kind of in a position of growing up and having a chip on your shoulder, I think it's extremely destructive. And what I see as the antidote to this, at least within

my political coalition, is to be, you know, an older brother figure to say, hey, I could get why you think that. However, the actual path to success is this other way. So I don't think that, I don't think that this is like predetermined. I actually think that young people have, you know, their brain isn't still, their brain isn't locked in its ways. And so I think you, you want to bring people who are frustrated towards a better path. And, and I think that someone like Candace Owens who's just like driving people into a ditch, you have to kind of guide them away from that. So I think first, there's truth to that narrative. I do think that one of the things that happened over the past decade or so. And this is, you know, something I talk about in my

first book, Why We're Polarized, is there is a huge upsurge in telling people that the right way to understand life, America is all through the lens of identity groups. And when you tell people to look at identity groups, they will form a more coherent sense of their own. And a line I have in that book is identity activates under threat. Sure. And so the more you tell people that their identity is a problem, the more they're going to begin to defend that identity and feel that identity and begin to self-define around that identity. So I think all of that happened. And I think that you would also agree, perhaps, that, you know, the institutions, the legal system, the prevailing narrative at universities, corporations, et cetera,

was explicitly anti-white for a number of years that for these young people were formative. I think it's sometimes moved into being anti-white. I would not say it was all explicitly anti-white. I mean, I did hundreds of reports on this from institutions, from banks, corporations, universities, white men bad. If you wanted to just put it into kindergarten language, white man bad. And that was the dominant position for the institutional left.

I remember telling people around me that this thing where people are putting, out, like, papers on what are the negative traits of whiteness was a disaster, right? So I don't necessarily disagree with that. I think there's truth to it. And legally, affirmative action, DEI was institutional government-backed discrimination against one racial group. So the thing that I am interested in, though, here is that you're now in power. And a lot of- Me personally? No, I live on a farm in Washington State. I'm personally not in power.

Your executive orders get passed, the whole thing. And these things can all go in better or worse directions. These are all longstanding energies in American life. The sort of argument I'm going to make to be cards on the table about what I'm doing is that I think the empirical and epistemological structures on the right and the habits they took on in order to win. are playing with passions that are very dangerous. Like, I'll give a good example of this.

You can believe what you want about whether or not the immigration of Haitians into Springfield, Ohio, was good or bad. The people that city had mixed views on it. I mean, the mayor and others were very pro, and it had been good for the economy, and Springfield had been in a period of decline, and then you had a large Haitian influx. And then you get into this thing that happened in 2024 about, Haitians eating cats and dogs, where there's a Facebook post and the right all the way up to Donald Trump in one of the debates begins adopting it. You sort of go on a quest to try to figure out if it's true and, you know, to shorthand a long story. Maybe in Dayton, Ohio, there was somebody who wasn't Haitian. Correct.

Who maybe somebody thought, but other people didn't think had eaten a cat. But somebody and other people is quite, is quite, is quite. People can read your piece. They can read the DropSite News article. I'm not going to convince you one way to the other. But the Dropside News article, they went out to debunk my story and they ended up finding another independent corroborating witness. It's not how I read it, not how I read it. But I on some level am not even focused on that. What I'm saying is that when you get very into moves like, we are going to accuse broad communities of eating cats and dogs, which I think we can all agree. Haitians are not in general eating cats and dogs, you are going to unleash forms of anger and hatred and fear

that are not controllable. And I think one of the mistakes the Wright has made, and frankly people like you have made, is thinking these passions can then be corralled again. This idea that you can find these really high passion, like memetic containers, that then you say, well, the real issue here just we want to have a conversation about how much is the appropriate level of Haitian immigration

into Springfield, Ohio. But that the way you get people to care about it, JD Vance said this very explicitly, is that well, people really care about the cats and dogs. The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to, if I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast. Which, again, I think my view is that there's never been any hard evidence of that happening in the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio. Like, nobody has substantiated that, and nor have you. Correct. Yeah. I haven't made that. And in fact, I've said,

look, there's no evidence of this particular claim. We should be more careful. And so there's been a kind of consistent, like, this idea that you could unleash, like, really, I think quite terrible passions and then hold it to a level that is controllable. And what you're seeing with Candace Owens, what you're seeing with the new Tucker Carlson or the old Tucker Carlson, however we want to call it, what you're seeing with Nick Fuentes and the rise of Nick Fuentes, who we've not really talked about, but I think is a necessary figure of thinking in the way we think about this, is that there wasn't a way to stop that move. Like once people began to move in that direction and there weren't sort of institutions

that were strong enough and respected enough to stop it, that the place it's going on the right, when you talk about it becoming a third-wled click farm, is quite dangerous and quite grim. And now I will let you say everything you think. Oh, man. All right. Where do I start? A couple of huge problems. I gave you a lot there.

A couple of huge problems. I mean, one is that, you know, and I'm doing reporting in California right now that has, that has stories that have a similar kind of, let's say, shock value. For example, we did a story on migrants from Mexico and Honduras who come to San Francisco and get free sex change surgeries from the California state medical system. This is a kind of explosive story that is true that represents, I think, a lot of these underlying questions about homelessness policy, about immigration, et cetera. Look, if it's true, it's fair game. and there's a way to handle these stories in a responsible way that you ensure the facts, that you present it fairly,

and that you use it as a method of changing public opinion. That's how it's supposed to work. And so I think that the idea that there are taboos that cannot be crossed because they will unleash these kind of unspecified or vague, dangerous passions, I think it's a problem in two regards. One is that if you're going for truth-seeking, if you're playing a kind of responsible rhetorical game,

no, I don't think that these questions are out of bounds at all. But second, the predictions have always been, you know, that it's going to unleash some kind of horrible nativist violence sentiment, et cetera. But the only example of an ideological-driven assassination that we've talked about today is the assassination of Charlie Kirk. This kind of prophecy of political violence is really comes from the institutional ideologies on the left,

not the institutional ideologies on the right. And I think that fact has been hammered home over and over and over these last few years. And look, like those of us on the right who are in this business, you know, probably have to have like, a little bit more firmness to say, no, the facts are not on this, on your side in this argument. So let me be more specific about what I'm saying, because I'm not making a vague prophecy of

political violence. And I'm also not saying that there are these taboos you shouldn't touch. I think where I'm disagreeing is to say that there actually isn't truth seeking here. There isn't enough truth in these arguments. There's too much of an attraction. Which arguments? So the, I mean, arguments like the Haitian cats and dogs, we'll talk about others in a second. Which is fine. Yeah, yeah.

And that the thing I'm worried about has arrived, right? I'm not talking about an unspecified future in which I am concerned. The right will increasingly be taken over by conspiratorial, racist, misogynistic elements. I'm looking at a world where Nick Fuentes is a major figure on the American right. Well, you guys are doing a great job at raising his profile. Tucker Carlson is a guy who raised his profile, which I think was a mistake. I think it is legitimate to say Tucker Carlson is the biggest figure in right-wing media. And he brought on Nick Fuentes because, and gave him such a gentle, kind interview.

And Tucker Carlson, here's one thing I don't underestimate with Tucker Carlson. He's fucking good. He's a good interviewer. He is incredible talent as a media figure. If you wanted to cut that guy apart, he could have, as he did to Mike Huckabee when he wanted to do that or to Ted Cruz when he wanted to do that. Those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed. And from my perspective, I want to be on the blessing side of thing. Of those who bless Israel is what it says.

It doesn't say the government of it. It says the nation of Israel. So that's in the Bible. As a Christian, I believe that. Where is that? I can find it to you. I don't have the description. off the tip of mine. You pull out the phone and use the... It's in Genesis, but... So you're quoting a

Bible phrase. You don't have context for it and you don't know where in the Bible it is, but that's like your theology? I'm confused. And he didn't. Because I think Tucker Carlson understands quite well where the passions are and where the energy is. And I, when I hear you sometimes, I hear you being more concerned about this. You're a little chiller in this, and I recognize you're talking in a New York Times podcast studio. But what I'm saying is I actually don't think the balance is right. That I think for some time people have been,

you know, and Donald Trump himself is like the king of this. There's a view to, you know, it's the old take him seriously, not literally view. That, yeah, the thing that is being said maybe doesn't hold up. I'm hoping that you can give me a little bit more, though, because I'm saying, well, what are you actually saying? I'll give you a little bit more here. Nick Fuentes was on a podcast.

I mean, are you saying Nick Fuentes is not a big figure now and is not influential among young people on the right? Is that really, would you really make that argument? No, I would make a slightly different argument. I think that Nick Fuentes is not a fundamentally political figure. He's a hyper real figure of spectacle. That, again, you can read my writing. Are we sure those things are different now? You can read my writings on this exact question.

I think he's a bad influence. what I've cautioned people on the right about that genre of personality is that when someone goes on a video and says, you know, I love Hitler, obviously we don't love Hitler. We're not, neither of us are our fans of Hitler. But you should resist the temptation to be scandalized and shocked and lose your capacity to reason and perceive it correctly. Because what this is, it is a hyperreal spectacle optimized for digital. algorithms to harvest attention and to harvest clicks. It's not actually political in that sense. It's not optimized towards any political outcomes. I just reject this idea that, you know, some dumb kid that has, you know, hijacked the algorithm with like superficial ideological spectacle

is somehow therefore a symbolic of where people, where the right is going as a whole. I think hyperreal is doing work in this argument that is not actually connected to what hyperreal means. I can imagine somebody sitting in front of me, even sitting in front of me here in 2015, and us younger, handsomer. Yes, yeah. And you tell me this about Donald Trump. Tell me what. Tell you what. That, listen, you all are being easily provoked.

You're looking at a hyperreal algorithmically oriented, attentional spectacle and treating it like it's a. serious political force. And then maybe if I had been wiser about what Donald Trump represented and the way in which the hyper-reel and the real were going to converge in the life that we actually lead here, I would have said, no, attention is the fundamental currency of modern American politics. Sure. Things that are, we have actually fewer defenses against things that feel fundamentally ridiculous, things that are, this is an era of the trickster spirit, not the earnest energies. And many people like me, I mean, you may remember this. Huffington Post initially would only cover Donald Trump's campaign in its celebrity and entertainment news section. Is that right?

I don't remember that. That's very funny. Yeah. A ridiculous hyperreal spectacle and to treat it as a serious thing would have been absurd. I think many of us were perfectly willing to say Nick Fuentes is a marginal absurdist figure. And then it became clear in the Tucker Carlson moment and given where Tucker Carlson has gone that there's like a conveyor. belt of these ideas. And they go from the fringe to the far right, to the slightly less far right, to Donald Trump. Okay. Well, here's where I would, here's where I would, where I would disagree. And you actually have a real world test, right? These kind of ideological media figures are playing a very different game than Donald Trump was playing. And you know that because Donald Trump actually played the game. He announced for president. And he against the odds, against many of the institutions. he won. And so you have to say, yeah, Trump also uses media, but that's like, you know, that's a superficial comparison. You have to say, what is the actual goal? And the goal for like the streamers

is not to pass legislation. It's not to win elections. It's not to cobble together a majority. But it's in fact, it's kind of a narcissistic endeavor to get personal attention. And so, but that's the end point. There's no actual bridge that that can go over. And look, that's because they're- But can to change minds and can't it change people's politics? It could change minds, but like, you know, not to the extent that you think, because people look at it more as a form of entertainment, soap opera, personality drama, than an actual viable political move.

And so, yeah, I think that you're kind of conflating the media spectacle with the fundamental political arena. And I think that boundary is not as permeable as you're suggesting. And in fact, to make that boundary more explicit is better, in my view, for my own kind of political desire, but also better for the country. And so when I see the online, right, and the New York Times both doing like puff pieces on the latest, the kind of right wing figure, right? Right? It was David Duke and then it was Richard Spencer and now it's Nick Fuentes. This is a stock character in American discourse and I just refuse to take the base. I don't think David Duke is a marginal figure. I mean, I will say this.

You don't think David Duke is a marginal figure. Here's what I mean. I think John Gans, who's a sort of, he's a great substack and is a sort of interesting history-based theorist of American politics. He's got this book about the 90s called When the Clock Broke, I believe. And I've had him on to talk about the book. And the argument he would make about David Duke about a bunch of figures who rose in that period, Patrick Buchanan, Sam of Francis, is that if you look at what they were figuring out about politics, I mean, David Duke, by the way, we should note, ran for office. He did not come that far from winning for Louisiana governor. Yeah, in the 90s. Sure.

And, you know, there was a style of politics that they got kind of quite good at figuring out. And Gans's view, and I agree with this view, is it much of what the populist right is today is built on that, often quite explicitly with Samuel Francis and others. Okay, make your case. Absolutely not. I mean, look, for those of us who are, look, I'm in the institutional right. I know the people. I know the personalities. I know the organizations. That figure is a pain in the ass. Nobody wants it. Nobody likes it. Nobody believes in it. And in fact, that figure, as we're we found out recently with the revelations about the Southern Poverty Law Center is not only a useful tool for institutions on the left, but in many cases was actually secretly funded by the kind of left-wing civil rights outfit known as the SPLC. Which we were talking about David Duke? Not David Duke in particular, who knows? But I'm saying that... You're saying David Duke is maybe a left-wing plant? Yes. I think that's ridiculous. I'm not saying that I'm not saying that, I'm not saying

that in the sense of totally wholly created, but certainly used by, right? The whole idea was this kind of smear effect where the media would go out and say, this bad person, you know, supports your campaign and then you'd have to disavow and go through this whole, this whole, this whole kind of routine. But the point I'm kind of interested in here is, I mean, my view, and I think this is a fairly wide-held view is my worry is that the institutional right is getting steamrolled. By whom? Yeah. By, well, one, to the, in many cases, in order to survive, it is dramatically changing what it is, like the Heritage Foundation. Sure. In other cases, by Donald Trump, Donald Trump was not the candidate of the institutional right. The institutional

right had its way, Jeb Bush would have been the nominee. I mean, the idea that the institutional right has been racking up victory after victory is ridiculous. I mean, the Republicans all speaker after speaker after speaker until they got one who was more like properly completely. client. Sure. The institutional right has not had a strong winning record. And again, part of my argument here is that I think this is because it keeps thinking it can maybe control these forces and it can't.

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You asked me earlier to sort of be more specific on a story. So I want to talk about a story you did. In November, you wrote a piece with the title, The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer. Tell me what the piece was about. Sure. So this was a feature investigation that we did in Minnesota looking into organized Somali fraud.

And so we spent a number of months on this piece. We went out to Minnesota. We reviewed court documents. We interviewed law enforcement, both on the record, on background. And then our story, and this had been kind of bubbling up in local press and bits and pieces, was that, in fact, Somali fraudsters were exploiting Minnesota and federal welfare programs. autism programs, daycare programs, Medicaid programs, and looting billions of dollars from American taxpayers. And this was the story that really blew open the Somali fraud story on the national

stage. And then since then, as sometimes happens when you report on an explosive story, it kind of ricocheted into an entire movement, really looking at large-scale fraud in American public institutions. So there's a couple pieces of this. So as you note, the fraud had been, you know, reported elsewhere at the Star Tribune and it had been in national news. Yeah, there are bits and pieces. There were prosecutions, right, which is where a lot of the information came from that began in 2022 under the Biden administration. The big sort of move you made in this was to say, this is financing foreign terrorism. What was that argument? Sure. I mean, the argument is pretty simple. And the mechanics of it are this. So we have billions of

being stolen by Somali fraudsters in Minnesota. We then have huge amounts of money being transported out of Minneapolis Airport, Seattle Airport, in cash, in actual physical currency in suitcases that goes to Mogadishu. And then when in Mogadishu, it is distributed through various parts of the country through what is called the Hawala Network. Huala Network is the name for kind of informal cash-based, clan-based financial institutions. They don't have a strong formal banking system in Somalia. It's a rough part of the world.

And so they have these couriers that move money and cash. And all kinds of think tanks, military, U.S. government, Department of Justice, Republicans and Democrats, have essentially made the case that al-Shabaab is taking a cut. of Huala financing. And so when we talked with federal law enforcement agents and investigators who have been working on this case, they told us that the flow of funds was this, from the taxpayer, out of the airport and in suitcases, to the Huala networks in Somalia, and therefore to the al-Shabaab terror networks taking their cut, essentially.

Like, we have Visa that takes like 3% of your credit card transactions in parts of Somalia al-Shabaab takes a cut. Not exactly sure how much that is. And federal investigators say, hey, once it exits the country into the Huala system, you can't claw that money back. There are no, there are no, you know, written receipts or banking transactions. But the scale of that money that was remittances from fraud was so enormous that over time we're talking about huge sums of money. So I wanted to take a beat on whether or not this turned out to be true. So the key named source in your story was a retired terrorism investigator named Glenn Kearns. He later came out, claimed that he was misquoted. He said later the store was bullshit and that he did know on the ground

investigating in Minnesota. The two top prosecutors of the fraud of Minnesota said the perpetrators are motivated by greed. There's no evidence of terrorist financing. Do you still stand by the story? Of course I do. Yeah. And a couple things. So the Glenn Kearns detective is very odd. We have him on the record. We have, you know, a transcript of his interview. I'm not sure what happened. My suspicion is that when this story blew up into a huge national story, he got spooked or scared or or, but, you know, the, the paper in Minneapolis tried to go through our piece and, and with a kind of criticism, couldn't lay a glove on it, didn't, didn't debunk or even really contradict any of our points. You had, you know, one source who, who knows, don't know what, don't know his personal circumstances. But, you know. But he was the only name. He was, I don't think he was the only named source in the piece. He was the only name source making this terrorism argument. Well, incorrect.

So, so we had multiple, multiple high-level federal officials who confirmed to us the flow of funds. We substantiated it with contextual reporting from Foundation for Defense of Democracies, from the United States Military Academy, from the Department of Justice. We were saying simply, logically, if we know from. a variety of sources that al-Shabaab is skimming off the Hawala network, and we know from a variety of sources that money is moving through that network from fraud committed in the United States. It's a logical syllogism, right? A, B, C. And so we know that this to be true. And I think that idea that because they weren't motivated by terrorism is not something we alleged and is

essentially irrelevant. The facts as they played out, um, were that the al-Shabaab terror network benefits from fraud in the United States that has passed through their financial system. Your piece is actually quite careful, right? I've read the piece. I've read it carefully. And you're right, you don't allege that the point of this is to fund terrorists. Then when you sort of promote the piece, your tweet is, Somalis are stealing billions of dollars from American taxpayers and sending cash to terrorists back home. It's time for at real Donald Trump to revoke temporary protected status for all Somali national. in the United States, it's time for them to go home. And I have, I think, two or three issues here. Two or three, all right.

Let's go there one by one. Yeah, we'll do them. We'll do them. I'll give them to you all. You have a limited number of people, right, committing crimes. They're being prosecuted, right? The prosecutions begin under Biden. This was not like a swept under the rug thing.

You guys did not come up with this. You didn't find it yourself. And they are. They were stealing a lot of money. I mean, that part is true. The sending cash tariffs back home, as you say, you have a more complicated view. I link to the piece and then you could, like, your rhetorical. And then, and then none of the people, as far as I get how we're doing this,

were under temporary protected status, which is only about 750 people. Right. So there's this move to say it's not just like some criminals, it's Somalis. And it's not just some money is being skimmed because of a weak banking sector. it's their funding terrorism. And then it's to get Donald Trump to deport people who are unrelated to the crime. Okay. So a couple points on that particular argument.

So the point of the piece broadly, it raises the question of immigration, cultural compatibility. And if you talk to people with an expert in Somali culture, as we did, and the history of Somalia, we did, you get the clear sense that in Somalia, there is a kind of kinship and clan-based culture that is prevalent for variety of historical and social reasons. And because there has been a weak central government, contested central government in Somalia in the modern period, there is a feeling that exploiting the central government is permissible. And I think the the underlying point, which is very uncomfortable, not just for people who are small ill-liberals, but even for many conservatives, is that actually all national cultures are not equal.

And in fact, because immigration is a group-based or national border-based system, you have to be prudent in which nations of origin you prioritize in immigration. And so I think the record on Somalis in the United States and elsewhere on many of those metrics is not good. You have low levels of education, high levels of welfare dependency, and you have these cultural incompatibilities, let's say. And so, again, in a prudent national interest-based immigration policy, I would put Somalis down lower on the list. And I think that's perfectly defensible. I don't have a problem saying that American immigration policy should serve our interests. Sure.

Should not just be omnidirectional. What I am saying is that to take a crime committed by a limited number of people, then say, this is something about an entire group of people, and you should deport these unrelated people, like, that that is a bad thing to do and to yoke this sort of larger argument you're making to this. much more kind of tendentious, well, some of the money that goes because of this fucked up system back in Somalia can get taken by al-Shabaab to finish the thought, and then I'll let you take it where you want to take it. That is, and that's part of this larger point I'm trying to make to you, which is that you are not putting like passion and service of reason. You're unleashing things here that are like first going to really harm people. Who, did nothing wrong, right? These Somali temporary protected

study, I mean, many, as you say, Somali is a tough place. Many people flee it for completely reasonable reasons and we honor them for doing so and trying to make a better life for them and their families. Like, they did nothing wrong. I think you actually do believe from many things you've written in

the primacy of thinking about the individual. If you want to say that our immigration policy should not favor Somalis, fine, fair enough. But our immigration, the temporary protected status is, is based on group designations. And in fact, Somalis, Haitians,

but the people are going on who did not do this crime. We agree on that part, right? Hold on. Well, let me take it, let me take it in pieces. So a couple kind of factual problems here. You said a limited number of people committed these crimes. I'm actually not sure that that's true. And I'll explain it why I believe that. If you look at the actual schemes committed by Somalis, for example, for autism services, you had members of the Somali community opening up fake clinics with It's fake patients that were receiving, you know, kind of fake treatment.

And what we're looking at is actually a non-insignificant number of people that were involved or had knowledge of these schemes as they were unfolding. Because you're talking about thousands of patients, you know, larger family sizes. And secondarily, prosecutors told us over and over and over, we're just looking at the tip of the iceberg. We don't have the prosecutors. We don't have the investigators. don't have the manpower to actually unravel all of these fraud schemes.

And so let's just say the median estimate, kind of responsible estimate, is $5 billion. Well, they've only uncovered fraud schemes and maybe $300 million. And so that would indicate that actually the vast majority of the schemes were simply kind of vanishing through your fingers. And so you're actually getting what I believe is because also the small community is very concentrated and geographically, tightly integrated in kinship networks. I actually think you're getting the complicity or knowledge of actually a non-insignificant part of this community. Are most Somalis in Minnesota?

I think it's just logical. And I think that we can make this, we can make this, we can make the argument with a high degree of certainty based on the court documents, based on the total of fraud committed, and based on how these things are. are structured. And then, look, this is a mass fraud committed in Minnesota, committed now in other states that we're uncovering. And, you know, one, one West Coast police detective who has been looking into this said, you know, I've been looking into this for 30 years and organized fraud rings in his experience are committed to a massively disproportionate amount. by foreign nationals and groups of, you know, and groups of originating from migrant groups.

So this is a fact. It's uncomfortable. I didn't argue. I didn't argue that. And so the question. I've not done my own reporting on this. But hold on. But the question then is, how do we respond to that politically?

And so I actually think. Well, I want to talk about how it got responded to politically. So Donald Trump did what you wanted him to do. He put up a true social post on thanks. Day, which you call iconic. Is that right? You know this. You called it iconic.

Did I? In which he says, you sure did. All right. Let's hear it. In which he says, Refresh. Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once-grade state of Minnesota.

Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for prey as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping it's hope that they will be left alone. But then it kind of moves on from there. So then Nick Shirley, a right-wing influencer, launches his own investigation of Somali fraud in Minnesota, he starts going to daycares and knocking on them and being like, hey, is there, are there kids here? And these women come out and they don't speak English and they're like looking in him strangely. This gets, I think, like 130 million views across platforms. It goes crazily viral. But I want to play this clip. You did this podcast conversation with Richard

Hanani, where you guys were talking about this. And I think what you say is interesting. Sure. If you look at the Nick Shirley video and you really dig into it, there are two things happening. Okay, on the surface, he is raising, he's shining a spotlight on something that is very real, that is a kind of endemic form of corruption, and he's bringing it to life through kind of zoomer style, YouTube, kind of gonzo video production. Okay, it draws attention to a real issue. It's driving politics in the right direction. And it's, I think, overall, all beneficial. Granted, your critique of what's happening under the surface is also true.

I mean, I couldn't publish the conclude, you know, Nick Shirley gets in there, sees a building is empty, and then assumes, oh, they're committing $70 million of fraud or whatever. As a journalist, as someone who has to go through fact checking, legal review, kind of peer scrutiny, I kind of clam up and I'm like, oh, wow, man, you're going about to get sued because what you're saying is just not defensible as a journalistic process. So the reason I found that to be such an interesting quote is it, I feel like both sides of what we're talking about are in there. You know this video is not strong.

Let's put it that way. That there's a lot, you can't go and be like, show me your kids. And when they don't shave the kids, be like, this is a fraud. You don't have any kids. On the other hand, you have this contrary feeling that, well, it may not be true, but it puts attention towards something real. It's like in line with where I want politics to go. It does become a huge issue.

We'll talk about like what it leads to. And like I can feel this tension. So I mean, how do you balance that? Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, it's a free country. Everyone has a First Amendment right. And so therefore, I can't say, I don't like this for these reasons. Therefore, you shouldn't be able to do it. But I think this is just another instance, an example of the right being under-institutionalized.

And so what I would say is that an ideal, say, outcome or method would be to take someone that has charisma, that has courage, that has curiosity, someone like Nick Shirley, and then integrate that person into an institution to put up those guardrails to refine and really improve the product itself. and then to use that attention toward productive ends. And so that would be like the ideal. That's the kind of thing that I think would be good. But the reality is that on the right, the media is so fragmented. And the media institutions are not that strong, not that well developed. And in many cases, you know, highly risk averse for obvious reasons. And therefore, there's an entire territory that is ceded to people.

I don't even know if Nick Shirley is right wing. I'm not sure I would even categorize him as that. I think the story landed in that particular manner. But you have people independent. He's not left wing. Let's say citizen journalists. I think that was the phrase for a while. There was great hope and the citizen journalist.

You know, love citizens, love journalists. Citizen journalist is one of those things. Like, it sounds good in theory, but in practice there are some real limitations. And so it is what it is. What are you going to do about it? You know, this is the kind of thing. where as an individual, my only reaction is to say, you can put out a kind of remedy, suggestion for remedy, but it's not within my direct control.

I guess the thing I'm asking, not as an individual, but as an activist and an analyst and somebody influential in the administration that responds to these stories, yours, his, by deploying a giant ice and border patrol deployment to Minnesota. That deployment ultimately, and the fighting around it leaves Renee Good. Alex Preddy dead. Minneapolis calculated the economic impact of the raids at at least around $700 million. Joe Thompson, the acting U.S. attorney in Minnesota, who is leading the fraud investigations. He was quoted quite a bit in your original piece.

He resigns in anger after Trump's Department of Justice demands his office to investigate Renee Goods wife. So, I mean, to me, I look at all this and I say, like, that wasn't beneficial. This was catastrophic. I mean, it harmed people's lives. It led to people dying. it was bad for the Minnesota economy, it led to the fraud stuff getting completely sidelined and the person who was pushing it resigning, that this did not go in a good direction, in part because it wasn't based on good information. But now, like, looking back at the whole thing,

do you disagree with that? Yeah, I would disagree. So, well, I would agree with certain points, but I would refine them and disagree with others. So, I mean, the fraud, work is continuing. The vice president is now chairing an anti-fraud task force. They've significantly increased the manpower to look into fraud. That said, it was a bad strategic decision to deploy force, Customs and Border Patrol, ICE agents, with that kind of force posture, it's a no-in situation. And I was advising against it from even the previous summer, And so in that particular case, I would say it was ill-advised. And I think that finally the administration has learned that.

They reshuffled DHS. They reshuffled Customs and Border Patrol. And if you want to create deportations at scale of illegal immigrants, you have to do so in what I've kind of called an invisible manner, an impersonal manner. You have to change banking regulations, financial transfers, remittance fees, you know, employment, employment verification to incentivize self-deportation. Because the idea that you could deport people by simply like sending in armored cars with ice agents on the side is delusional. It's never going to happen. I think there's part of the right that wants that kind of macho imagery. But if you look at the underlying substantive policy that you want to enact, I think it's detrimental.

And in fact, the situation in Minneapolis, again, you know, in that sense, did not achieve the stated objective for reasons that I and others had predicted. We pick up on the front. And to me, it's also, it's annoying to me personally. Because we, I think fraud, huge winning issue. No one wants fraud. It's a huge problem in the country. If you could just focus on that, you could rally not only Republicans who are traditionally kind of, you know, small government, but you could also bring into the coalition, moderate

Democrats who want good governance. And so to me personally, I found it very, you know, very upsetting because it's like, hey, we have this winning issue, focus on the issue, execute the policy at scale, save the taxpayers money, you know, you're giving someone a nicely wrapped gift and you just wish that they would take it. In this case, it didn't happen that way. It feels to me like the fraud problem for you all is bigger than this. According to a Times analysis across two terms, Trump has granted clemency to more than 70 allies, donors, and others convicted in fraud cases, including Philip Sformis, who stole $1.3 billion for Medicare and Medicaid in a fraudulent billing scheme. It was the FBI's

largest ever criminal health care fraud case against individuals. Trump commuted his 20-year prison term. You're not going to get me to defend it. I would in fact- But I don't see you really attacking it either. I'll attack it right now. Okay. Shouldn't have done that. And in fact, you know, if these people were convicted of fraud at that scale, 20-year seems like a light prison sentence. I would double it personally. And so, yeah, this is. The push I'm making it. I recognize you're not going to defend this. But there is this movement on the right. right now to focus on fraud. You've been very much leading this. Meanwhile, I look at Trump, and he's gutted the machinery of anti-fraud enforcement all across the federal government. He gutted it at the IRS. There's a tremendous amount of fraud and tax returns. We all know that. And huge amounts of money are being stolen under those terms, because now the audit capacity has gone way down. He gutted inspectors general across the federal government, the people seeing what is happening

inside these organizations. He destroyed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which did a lot of anti-fraud work. Debatable. I recognize we would debate it, but what I don't think is debatable is that Trump and this administration have sort of systematically gone across a federal government and taken apart parts of the government that are supposed to watch if the government itself is committing fraud and if, you know, taxpayers and others are. I just, I look at the country right now. And I see Donald Trump has like, you like using piracy around the Somalis. I think of the Trump and the Trump family is pirates. I think that they are looting the country for their benefit. I think that that's what the Katari plane is. I think that's what the crypto investments are. I think that's how Trump and a family have increased their net worth by billions of dollars. And I'm not saying you support it. But I don't understand how you think you're going to have like a right that is doing good governance and that is taking. these things institutionally seriously, and have that be what is happening at the very top. Sure. And let's take, let's take pardons as the most concrete example. Yes, I agree.

I think you and I would agree. And, you know, I'm political, but in a sense not partisan in that way. I'm not going to reflexively defend every decision by someone in my camp or the president of the United States. And in fact, a lot of those pardons, ill-advised, shouldn't have done it. And because in the reporting that I've read, a number of those individuals had also been putting money into various lobbies and various attempts to influence and various campaign funds or committee funds or however the finances work, you create a perception of corruption that is not good and does in some ways undercut the good work of combating, systematic, social service fraud as a whole. But from my point of view and how I have to look at it is,

okay, you live in an imperfect world. You don't have ultimate control. My influence is great on the things I care about, on DEI, on higher education, defunding NPR, whatever. Like, go down the list of, you've been very influential, I agree. But the kind of implicit premise of your criticism, which, again, I take seriously and I think it's a fair criticism, is, oh, therefore, you know, you should give up, you should turn against the good work that's being done. It's kind of canceled out or invalidated because of something that's happening over here. And my personal policy is where there's necessary criticism,

I'll give the criticism. But I'm not going to stop to work in that little sphere of influence that I have to do good And so, you know, I'm kind of walking the line, right, where I will issue the criticism as necessary. And if that reduces my influence in a certain regard, I'm willing to accept it. And while I would certainly, you know, speak out against, I think the crypto thing was just, you know. And it is ongoing. It's ongoing. Yeah.

Their coin is still there. Their crypto plays are ongoing. World liberty and all the stuff is ongoing. Sure. Yeah. And at the end of the day, when I sit down in my office, you know, at 7.30 a.m. every morning, I'm like, all right, how can we win? How can we move the ball forward? How can we do good policy? And ultimately, at the end of the day, that's all that's within my control. And that's the attitude that I bring to the fight. I think you underestimate yourself. The point of making is, well, explain it to me. I will. The point of making is actually a little bit even larger than you. Look, the one reason I have you here for this conversation. is I think you're very, very good at what you do. I think you're probably the most successful activist,

certainly right-wing activist of this era. But maybe overall, you're saying? Huh? Maybe overall. Maybe left and right? In general. Maybe, right? I'll take it.

And, like, you and I are not going to agree on a million things, right? My point is not to convert you to my politics. I'm not going to do that. You should try. I mean, why not? I'm trying to convert you. Listen, we talk. But I think that the rights...

inability to hold itself to certain epistemological or institutional standards, standards of, let's not call it neutrality, let's call it impartiality at the institutional level, at the federal government level. What the right is accepting that Donald Trump is doing is insane in my view. Okay. And the epistemological standards and Nick Shirley's stuff is, and some of your things in my view, which go, again, I think you're careful in like the the body and then not always in the promotion and the weaponization of it. It, I think, careful in the, I think you were, I think you were, I think you were, that are defensible.

And I think I take the rhetorical flourish too far. And then beyond you, I think there's a generalized view that we need to unleash these passions. There's been too much that has been unsayable. And we need to make sure we can say it all again. And the result of this is like a like a hydraulic process, not like some future result. but a current result where when I look at the Spotify rankings, the right of center figures on the top have become highly conspiratorial.

And, you know, there are figures like Nick Fuentes rising. And we need a strong right in this country. I would, so I'd ask you a question then. Has the New York Times editorial line, right? The editorial line, has it moved more in my direction since 2020 or have I moved more in its direction since 2020? I'm not sure the way you have moved since 2020. I haven't moved at all.

So if I'm the baseline. So I think you're saying it's moved in your direction. Of course. Okay. You look at the big piece on DEI, you know, you had editorialists saying that I was, you know, some sort of villain on DEI. Let's agree. Let's agree.

Let's agree. ! entirely critique of democratic governance. And where the right has gone, I think, is not going to work. And what's interesting to me about you right now is I'll watch your show. And I can see you and your co-host wrestling with these questions. Sure.

I don't think you're comfortable. But ultimately, there's like two problems that I see the right having that it really does not know how to solve. One problem is its attentional sphere. Yes. is pathological. Parts of it are. Parts of it are.

And it doesn't have a lot of institutional strength there. And the second is that you cannot challenge Donald Trump. You can sort of say some things he's doing you don't like. You know, maybe wouldn't fully support. But Donald Trump is the sun king and he has to be obeyed. Or you get, if you go too hard and if he's shown his ability to do it, if you go too hard, you get pushed out in a way maybe you can't come back from. And those two things are allowing a tremendous amount of bad ideas, of actual corruption, of just institutional and non-institutional rot to occur.

And like, we're all going to pay for it because right now we're all living under right-wing governance. So I have a lot of worry about this, right? I don't need just like, my point is not you should become a liberal, but the right has some real issues. I would agree that the right has some real challenges. And this is universal, right? There's no entirely virtuous, effective, discipline, political movement. Every political movement has a certain fermentation, a certain amount of internal conflict. You have to figure out how to resolve disputes, settle questions. And what I've tried to do, especially in the last, say, year and a is bring a lot of those conversations into the open.

And I think that while there are these real challenges, the epistemological machine of the right has some real weak spots, some real flaws, some real vulnerabilities, while Trump's kind of highly individualized charismatic presidency that is charismatic rather than legal, rational, or traditional, the Max Weber, you know, triangle of legitimacy and authority.

The reality is that, okay, then let's solve it. This is the conversation we need to have. These are the problems we need to grapple with. The charismatic leadership has enormous benefits. It also creates a series of underlying problems to solve. But I think that all of these can be resolved productively. I think the people in charge of the conservative institutions still in general have good epistemological judgment. intuitions, attitudes.

And I think that, you know, politics moves forward. And I think actually after, you know, Trump is in his last term, depending on how things go to the House, this might be the really last kind of truly effective moment for the Trump presidency. And then we ask the next question. And so the reality is that you have to move forward. You have to work within imperfect conditions. One of my critiques of the right right now. And I have my own of the left and I've talked about many of them.

but I think the right likes to talk about virtue and doesn't insist on it. And virtue, to go back to what we were talking about around telos and your telos, is very much in part about restraining the passions and channeling them productively. There's a lot of talk about virtue, but the people who are leaders on the right, Donald Trump, very much included, are not virtuous often. And if they have enough power, that has looked past. If they have enough strength to their passions, that is fine. And similarly, in the informational sphere, in the attentional sphere, there is a lot of playing with stories that are designed, like, memetically constructed to arouse very, very, very base passions.

Those stories are often much more complicated, if they're true, beneath them. And there's a view that that can be channeled in the right direction. And I think the opposite is happening, that in fact, the people who are restrained are really losing out in the right attentional sphere because it's this constant, you can't get hurt if you're not now playing this game of incredibly weaponized, like, explosive allegations, which of course is going where that ultimately always goes, which is towards. anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, like the oldest potential to move in the book. You're raising, I think, a really important philosophical question, and the conservative tradition offers a lot of good debate, discourse on this question. The question is this. You have what we might say, Aristotelian virtue or Christian virtue, and then Machiavellian virtue, which is a totally, it's the same word, but a totally different conception. And for Machiavelli,

virtue, the political virtue was the virtue of how to win power, how to maintain stability, and in his book on republics, how to have a flourishing republic, which often requires cunning, ambition, design. And so politics is always a conversation between virtue and virtue. And you're essentially reconciling means and ends. And there are people who will argue, academics in particular, even those on the right, well, we need to have deontological principles that you can make, you know, the ends, the means always have to be 100% pure, towards 100% pure ends. And I laugh. It's like, well, only an academic could really, you know, make such a case because the reality is that in politics, it's an imperfect world and you're constantly balancing means and ends. You're constantly taking the measure of virtue and virtue. And so you have to figure that out. You have to figure out where you're personally comfortable, where you personally can feel that your work is justified. And then as a movement as a whole, this is a constant negotiation. And look, in my mind, political leaders are not your friends. Political leaders are not your priest. You know, political leaders are kind of blunt instruments. Political leaders are means to an end.

there's no easy answer there. There's no immediate answer there. But what I would say is that those are the people that are my compatriots, the people that I'm fighting every day alongside and along with, are high integrity people, very smart people, conservative institutionalists who understand the moment, who understand that we need to to kind of deliver tangible political victories. We can't retreat just to abstract speculation. And who, you know, look, we're playing the game. And in my view, the game is simultaneously to improve our own capacities, but also to win in the arena.

And so I oftentimes, and this conversation is interesting because you're oftentimes you're moving forward. All right, what are we going to do? How are we going to hit this? Where are we going to push next? what kind of victory is available. And you have to do that, knowing that the system you're operating in

is littered with imperfections. And again, at the end of the day, my calculation is, I'm very mindful and even try to be, some people wouldn't believe this, try to even be humble as to the little part of the world that I can influence. And I think I've changed it for the better.

I think institutions that I'm working with are improving over time. And I think this epistemological question and the individual charismatic question are questions that can be and will be resolved in the, say, short to medium term. I'll leave it there. I really appreciate you doing this conversation. Always our final question. What are a few books you recommend to the audience? Okay. So we're going to do three books from Rufo's personal conservative canon.

The first I would recommend is a book by my mentor, John Marini. Claremont Institute, a scholar called Unmasking the Administrative State, which I think has helped me more than anything understand the deeper philosophical and political underpinnings of our modern dilemma. The second book that I think all conservatives should read and all liberals should read is a biography by Stacey Schiff called The Revolutionary, which is a biography of the American founder Samuel Adams. And Adams is the most political founder. I think he kind of clarifies through example all the questions that we've been talking about, about propaganda, about passion, about institutions, about political change. He's the kind of key and the forgotten founder, really. He's been downgraded for centuries now.

But I think he's actually the most important founder. And then, you know, third, I would recommend a number of books by the kind of conservative journalist, former. NYU professor, James Burnham, wrote a book called managerial revolution, another called the Machiavellians, another called Suicide of the West. And for me, Burnham is someone who has the kind of sophisticated analysis that helps illuminate these questions. His work is quite good and might even be interesting for people who don't share, you know, my political convictions. But which book of his would you start with? I would start with managerial revolution, again, because it just, it kind of described, it's in the 1940s, it's unbelievable. You read it

now. And he's describing the world we live in, but he's describing it from a point of kind of American optimism, but he already saw some of the problems that we're starting to emerge. Chris Rufo, thank you very much. Thank you.

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