10/18/24: Ezra Klein Reveals Biden Drop Out Backlash
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Hey guys, ready or not, 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that, let's get to the show. I don't

think the right has figured out if a lot of the problems it is most concerned about are even amenable to policy solutions in the first place. The reason J.D. Vance was so good in that debate is he didn't sound like J.D. Vance at all. You go watch him in all these podcast interviews and speeches and NatCon conferences and whatever that he was doing on his rise up, and he sounds like one guy. And then when he needs to try to win over the general public, he sounds totally different. This is where you see a real political problem.

When the things you are actually saying and the things you then need to say in public develop that level of divergence from each other, then you have an unresolved problem within not just your political coalition, but your political thinking, because you're not going to be able to do it if you can't even really talk about it. You and I were both rattling the cages for some type of an open process to nominate a replacement for Biden if he could be persuaded to drop out. Were we right?

On today's long-form episode of CounterPoints, part of a series that we're doing with independent journalists and also mainstream journalists. Today, we're joined by an independent slash mainstream one, Ezra Klein from the New York Times. Ezra, some people called you the breakout star of the 2024 election. When I saw that, I was like, wasn't Ezra already kind of a

I think everybody kind of already knew who Ezra was. I don't think he needed the 20. I just got here. I'm having a great rookie year. It's been a thrill. Amazing first year. But thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. I'm glad to be here.

Emily is joining us from a reporting trip she's doing over in Rome. May not be able to stick around for the entire episode. Hopefully she can. Obviously, for people who don't know. That's brutal. I stayed for my whole episode with Emily. I know. I know. I'll leave as soon as there's a hard conversation. So, Emily, why don't you kick it off since you might have to go, but hopefully you can stick around for the whole thing.

Yeah, well, first of all, this all kind of came about because Ezra was super kind and hosted me on his extremely popular podcast. And we talked a little bit about the trend of post-liberalism on the right, part of what I'm actually sort of here to think about.

in Rome, but Ezra, one of the things Ryan and I thought might be interesting, a good place to start would be some of our younger viewers and maybe even your younger listeners might not know your origin story in journalism and how tethered it is to the story of technology and journalism in and of itself. And we kind of wanted to ask you,

about what feels like almost a horseshoe moment from the blogging of the aughts to Substack of today, and how independent thinkers, even people who have found very mainstream platforms, are adapting to that environment with new technology and new delivery systems, and how all of that is just shaking up basically the industry for everyone. So, Ezra, I don't know if you have any thoughts

thoughts on whether the substack era, the substack moment that we're in now, the kind of journalism, maybe are we returning to what happened when the internet first started to change journalism in some sense? Oh man, I'm so much more interested in who you're meeting in Rome than I am with my, I want to know about the Rome post-liberals, but okay, substack and blogging.

So I came into journalism. I did not intend to be a journalist, had no intention of getting into media, no even thought of getting into media. I was just a blogger back when blogging was young and was not seen as a way you would do anything, right? People now, like blog is a normal word, but it's a strange word and people looked at you strangely when you said it. So that was like 2003 when I began my first blog back in my dorm room at UC Santa Cruz.

There's a line, it's not my line, that the media only does two things. It bundles and it unbundles. And you're just always either in a cycle of bundling or a cycle of unbundling. The blogging era was a cycle of unbundling. Previously, in order really to have an audience, in order to reach many people, you had to be at a publication. You had to be at some kind of bundle, a magazine, a newspaper, television network, cable news network.

And then the rise of the Internet in many different ways, blogging being only one of them, made it possible to do that independently. You could have, you know, Ezra Klein dot blogspot or dot type pad. But soon after that, you also had YouTube. You had a rise of all kinds of, you know, Twitter was part of this Facebook. Right. You have Instagram pundits. All that is possible.

You then went into a period of rebundling. And so a lot of the bloggers got snapped up by different kinds of first very small publications. I went to the American Prospect and then over time, bigger publications in my own career, The Washington Post. Then there was another period where people who were making a name inside these bigger publications, people like me and Nate Silver and many others, Matt Iglesias, would

Then, you know, kind of Ben Smith, leave and build our own outlets, right? This was a sort of a mix of unbundling and rebundling. It wasn't that easy to do it on your own at that point. Blogging had sort of died. The blogosphere had been eaten away by Twitter, by Facebook, and again, by the big players. But you had the rise of things like Vox, BuzzFeed News under Ben Smith, you know, FiveThirtyEight. You can name some of these on the right, like the Free Bacon, Free Beacon rather, and

Free bacon. There's no such thing as free bacon. That was an old joke that somehow came to mind there. First, you also had on the right, the Federalist right under Ben Dominick and folks like that.

Where I think you worked, Emily. And then we sort of went back into the first cycle as a lot of the money funding digital media dried up as interest rates went up. A lot of these organizations are still around. Vox is still there. Federalist is still there. But that sort of idea that they would become the next generation of major incumbents, I think, didn't quite pan out the way a lot of us hoped.

And Substack rose. And that created, I think, another moment of unbundling. So you had a lot of these same people, including Iglesias, including Silver, including Ben Dominick, go to Substack, where they could do something you couldn't do in the blogosphere, where they could do something you couldn't do in the blogosphere.

which was monetize your audience. So the blog series is very good at creating traffic, very good at creating interlinks between communities. You know, there's an amazing link economy. It was a very generous ecosystem of media. People would talk to each other. It was very easy to follow arguments across different places. It really was, I think, an ecosystem. Substack is not an ecosystem in that way, but it does allow you to make a living.

The thing that I think you see happening now, though, I don't think Substack is really panning out except for a small number of people independently. It is very hard for me to come up with many Substacks begun in the last year that seem to me to have developed, at least in the news and politics space, a particularly significant audience. You are seeing Substack emerge now as a platform on which to create new bundles with probably the Free Press under Barry Weiss and the Dispatch under Sam Stein.

being the best examples of that. But, you know, you also see it with work. You know, there's like obviously a new Ryan Grim site and YouTube is, of course, a big player here, too. So now I think you're seeing a return to some of these, you know, mid-level, this sort of like the media middle that got somewhat decimated by the rise of interest rates and the collapse of media venture capital, trying to find a way again, as it turns out, that the independent path is

is pretty tough on Substack specifically because once people subscribe to a bunch of them, they stop wanting to subscribe to more. The subscriptions are expensive. I think it's a distribution channel that maxes out at a pretty low level, unlike the original blogosphere where it was sort of costless to keep surfing over to new sites. So that's where I think we are at the moment in one of the endless turns of this endless media recursion. Yeah, and there was a period of time...

Well, I just have a quick follow-up. Is there, and maybe Ryan, this goes well with what you were going to ask, so maybe you just tag it on to the end of this. I wonder if there, a cynical person might say, this is just like Dylan going electric. This is, you know, the, it's not that the mainstream media has become more tolerant of sort of independent voices. It's that the independent voices have found their way into the mainstream because, you know, there might be like a Chomsky criticism, like they've become part of the machine. And I don't think that's quite right. And Ryan, do you, I mean,

Do you have a--

Okay, yeah. What do you make of that, Ezra, just in terms of the content of what's expressed when you go from one platform to another? Because my perspective actually is that it probably has become, the mainstream has seen in the market there's an interest in these different opinions and ideas from outside their usual gates and brought those voices in because they know they can market them. They know there's an appetite for them. But I'm curious what you make of that.

This just doesn't strike me as a new phenomena. The major institutions are always looking around to try to see who is gaining audience, what is resonating with their audiences, and in what ways those can become part of their product. That's capitalism at its finest. It happens in music. It happens in movies. It happens in television. It happens in media, right? I mean, my own story in journalism is part of that.

I think there was a moment of Substack explosion when there were particular ideological fights that were blowing up media organizations. Right. And I think this is a period where you see things like Andrew Sullivan going to Substack from New York magazine. That moment is not that

It's not how these organizations currently feel from the inside. It doesn't feel like the ideological strictures lay down, at least in exactly that way. And so at this juncture, I don't particularly find Substack offering me a hugely different ideological set of perspectives than I can get elsewhere. And often I can get them elsewhere with better editing. As an example, right, in the thing that you were on my show to talk about, Emily,

I follow the post-liberals, but I follow them mostly through journals. And I follow them in their writing in places like The New Statesman. And I do follow the substacks, but I find a lot of the substacks to be tiresome to follow and not the best expression of those ideas over time.

And so, you know, but First Things can be a very useful magazine, I think, to read in a regular way. The Claremont Review of Books is an interesting journal to read right now. So I don't find this to be a particularly new phenomena. There's always a bit of a lag between what is interesting.

finding new audience in the more independent sphere and what is finding its way into mainstream institutions. But I typically view that as much more of a lag as places come to understand what you could really call in a cynical way the market signals rather than typically a Chomsky and manufactured consent approach or a model or some kind of model of the constantly accused censorship.

And through all those different gigs that you mentioned that you've gone through, at each step, somebody watching from the background or maybe even let's say you as like a college student would say, oh, wow, I've made it. This is the place where I need to be. And now I can just do my work. Like even at the very beginning of getting, you know, the Washington Post, when we were growing up in the 80s, 90s, like, yeah.

Being a Washington Post columnist was like the pinnacle of opinion writing journalistic success that was equivalent to the New York Times. People might find that shocking now, like nobody ever really talks about the Washington Post opinion section the way they do New York Times anymore. But yet after several years of that, you moved on then started Vox, extremely successful, independent online news organization.

Which maybe you could say, well, now we've made it. Now this is what I'm going to do. And then you moved on again. So are you restless? What was the thing that was moving you from place to place? I don't think I'm restless. At least I don't feel it. But I feel it's tired. But I feel it's profoundly tired all the time. When I went from The Post to Vox...

I believed, and in some ways this was borne out, in some ways it wasn't, that we could use the growing tools of digital media to do new things in the news. I always say I fundamentally left The Washington Post for a different content management system.

And we wanted to build this explanatory layer underneath the work that's constantly updated. I mean, when you really think of what you can do online that you can't do in print, in text, and most of the early phase of online journalism was simply moving what you did in print into a computer, the opportunities are remarkable.

Right. The still to me, the untapped opportunity of you can update a Web page and as such, a single story can change and grow over time. Sometimes people look at that as some way of pulling one over on the audience. But that's because we've given the audience expectations from from a different era. Right. You know, one of our big views at Vox is.

was what if we could have this story that is a fundamental part of a story, right? Not the new piece of news, but the context for all those new pieces of news. What if we had that growing and changing? We call those card stacks. What really made that hard? And I mean, there were certain workflow issues that were just really, really difficult about keeping up that many of them when you were a small organization. I think you needed to be something the size of the New York Times to really make that work.

But the other was that there was, at least for a period, a real split into the platforms. And there was this phase driven by traffic on Facebook and traffic elsewhere where we weren't just publishing. And this is true for Vox, but also true for The New York Times, for The Washington Post, for everybody. You weren't just publishing to your site. You were publishing to Facebook Instant Articles. You were publishing to Google AMP. You were publishing into Apple News. You're publishing onto Snapchat in a very different way.

And in publishing it to all these different places, you no longer had control over the underlying system. So a lot of that burst of enthusiasm for what you could build and how you could make it different by taking advantage of your ability to code the underlying content management and code and recode the website and change what was possible, that just didn't pan out.

out. A lot of other things did pan out. And I'm super proud of a lot of things that we did when I was at Vox and a lot of things that Vox is doing now. I mean, it was built to be a organization focused on contextual journalism or explanatory journalism. And I think that ended up not just both being good for it, but good for the broader media, where a lot of things that we pioneered have been absorbed at a pretty deep level and are now commonplace. But

The reason I personally left was sort of the opposite of restlessness, but exhaustion. Managing a startup for seven or eight years is really hard. And I was editor-in-chief for about half of that and then editor-at-large. But when you're one of the founders of something, you're sort of always a key manager of it when you're there. And I wanted to be able to focus back on my own work just as a personalization.

And not really be a manager of an organization that at that point was 150 people. And in order to both do that for myself and also to create space for the people who would be managing Vox to really have full freedom, right, not have people constantly coming to me and saying, hey, I'm not sure this is really, you know, how we started out or should we really be doing this or we'd love to have you in this meeting or what do you think about this? Right.

At some point, it's really hard to manage around a founder, you know, when the founder is sitting there and still doing a bunch of the, in a media organization, the journalism. So both so I could no longer be a manager and the managers could truly be the managers, it was time for me to move on.

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There's an interesting piece of internet history in the earlier part of what you said there. I think people who are newer to this need to understand part of it. You talked about the early link economy with the blogosphere and the difference with Substack being that you can actually make a living. There was a period of time you weren't making a lot of money, but there were actually bloggers who were making money from ads.

And kind of overnight, and you might even remember this, the Google AdSense apocalypse or whatever the bloggers at the time called it. Google basically just said, no, we're actually not doing that anymore. We've decided we're going to keep the money now. And because everything was at that point monopolized by Google, they could simply just do that. And then we witnessed, you know, a kind of a parasitic takeover of the

of digital media organization revenue years later in the exact way that you've talked about where the platforms successfully persuaded individually all of these different news organizations, some of them to quote unquote pivot to video, which was its own criminal debacle, I believe. Yeah, who wants to watch a video?

Exactly. Well, so the pivot to video, if people don't remember this, was driven by Facebook, which spent enormous amounts of money giving it directly to news organizations and

basically funding their journalism to pivot to creating these online videos that they would put on Facebook. And then Facebook, we now know because a lot of the records are now public, was completely lying about the views that they were getting. I remember one of the first ones I did over at HuffPost, they said it got like 150,000 live viewers. Is this HuffPost Live?

No, this is pre-HuffPost. It actually, I think, helped kill HuffPost Live. And what it did is it killed a lot of organic ideas that journalists had, like yourself over at Fox, HuffPost Live, for instance, trying to build an actual native live video audience and pushed it into this Facebook video operation. And then Facebook got tired of that a couple of years later. But by that point, they had

Gobbled up all of the revenue and the audience and there was nothing left for digital news organizations They raised they raised interest rates the money dries up and they all and they all disappear like it's that's more or less like the Collapse the rise and the collapse and then the kind of platforms walk away with with with with most of the audience What remains those in New York Times like I?

Somehow out of that fire, you know emerges this Phoenix that looked like it might not make it at some point and you know Look at the Los Angeles Times look at Chicago Tribune yet. The New York Times has become almost a platform Unto itself. Do you think that's becoming increasingly? interesting way to think about the times rather than a as a news organization or

That's interesting. Is it a platform? I don't think it's a platform because I think a platform implies within it the ability for others to build on it. I will say I largely agree with your history there of the 2010s. The only thing I would say to it is that

I don't even think Facebook, at least in my experience, Facebook put some money into help into encouraging people to bring things to video. But for most media organizations, they didn't give them that much money. They weren't that interested in us. What they were doing is both inflating views and just in Facebook and really everywhere. The promise of that era was that you were building these huge audiences on these platforms and that eventually they'd build the, uh,

revenue mechanisms that you could monetize that, right? If you think about what BuzzFeed was, what Vice was, what everything was, HuffPost, right? Everything was sort of designed now on this theory that having used, you know, Facebook and Twitter and whatever,

To reach more readers, viewers, whatever it might have been than we ever had before, we would turn that into money. And at a certain point in each one of these cases, a platform came in and said, I know what we've been telling you, but actually we're going to turn that into money.

And that was the end of it, right? Ultimately, those business models couldn't work. And that speaks to what you just said about The New York Times, because The Times fairly early in this process, building off of

its own centrality in the media world, its own size and the quality of the offering, they made a decision that at the time they made it was highly controversial in journalism, which was that they were going to try to get people to pay for the New York Times. And they were going to put articles behind a paywall. And they were going to go virtually all in on

on the idea that you could build a subscription business to media digitally, even though all your competitors were free, right? Even though somebody could easily just substitute in the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Atlantic,

Right. Choose your, you know, choose your media organization. The Times wasn't the only one. The Journal and the Financial Times had been doing subscriptions. But there was a view that these publications are a little bit more like trade publications for the financial press could make subscriptions work, whereas something that was as easily substitutable as news could not.

And the absolute core of the New York Times success was making the paywall work and making subscriptions work. And then that informs a lot of subsequent strategy, which is obviously, you know, not mostly stuff that happened before I came here. And I have no role in any of it even now. But when you think of things like games and cooking,

The Times has this model, which is in a way almost more like the Netflix model, right? If they can make the package worth paying for, then the whole thing works. And so anything that makes a package more incrementally valuable is very, very valuable to the Times. And to me, it's one of the—and now they're putting podcasts like mine behind a paywall. I mean, the new episodes are free, but the older ones are going into this paywalled archive—

Because of you is the only thing that is really reliable in funding journalism is persuading the audience to pay for it at some level. Anything else, be it advertising where the advertisers have a lot of views, understandably so, on what they want to advertise next to. It's like you don't want the brand association between Lexus to be the devastation of

Gaza. Right. So it's very hard to get really strong advertising for a lot of hard and important news stories. And the platforms are completely unreliable partners. So if you don't want to be completely subject to the whims of one of those two businesses or partnerships, you have to be able to make convincing people to pay for the thing you're making for them work.

So what's really interesting, I think, about all of that, and I'm curious about your take on this, I think what made your writing so compelling in the blog days and still now was a sense that the neoliberal consensus, if we can call it that, sort of taken on more of a...

profound or popular meaning now, but at the time in the Bush era, there was this sense that it wasn't really working. People in the blogosphere were writing about privacy and data and the aftermath of 9-11 and adventurism abroad and all of that. And I kind of wonder, you've written about family policy or you've talked about family policy. Ryan and I wanted to ask you about that too. There's a sense on the right that came after 9-11.

the Bush era, in fact, really after the Obama era, that suddenly this neoliberal consensus that they had defended so doggedly, whether it was the FBI or the Patriot Act, really wasn't working, or anti-welfare policies really wasn't working. And there's some thinking in that space now about how conservatives can use government policies to shape a world that they see as more conservative on family level, on community level. So I guess I wonder if you think

you were sort of the right is kind of a Johnny come lately to what, in some sense, not exactly, obviously, in your policy prescriptions are wildly different in some cases. But were you sensing do you think you were ahead as someone who was center left? Were you ahead of sensing something that the right is now kind of catching up to? I'd have to think about that. It's funny because I

My initial instinct is to say no, as much as I'd like to sell you on my own prescience. One, I'm not sure I would totally buy that version of what made my writing useful over these years, but let me not make this about me. I do think that the right is dealing with its own set of failures, right?

And one of the things that I think is interesting about where it has ended up is it has a lot of trouble then distinguishing what it actually wants to do about them from banal prescriptions on the left. And I think if you want to see this very clearly among the ideological post-liberals, you go listen to the podcast episode I did with Patrick Deneen, you know, 18 months ago, a year ago.

And in that episode, Deneen, who is very close to J.D. Vance and has become one of these people who talks about the liberals who have been in charge as if –

to say they betrayed the country and the people would be too gentle for how he frames it, in my view. But then you talk to him, and it was very hard to figure out where he really differed from Joe Biden. And if you then read his subsequent book, it was still very hard to figure it out. It's like, you're going to expand the House of Representatives to a thousand people? You're going to do national service? Like, this is your big set of ideas? These are, again, like they've been everywhere. But I don't think it's because the center-left or the left

Right. If you're worried about family breakdown, which people have been worried about in different contexts for a very long time.

I think you can really understand J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy as an extension of what had been written about black communities for a very long time and is bringing a lot of that same research. Somebody described it to me the other day as like the Moynihan Report for White People.

And that's family breakdown is a very, very hard problem to solve. People have tried lots of different things on the right and the left, and it's not really worked. Fertility rates, which are a big question on the right right now. There are a lot of countries have been going through much more profound fertility collapse than anything we're seeing in the United States. They have a much more intense set of incentives to do something about it and nothing they have tried. If you're looking at places like South Korea and Japan and

And Italy and others, none of it has worked. And by the way, that's true on the more liberal solutions, too. A lot of times liberals will say, well, if you want to do something about fertility rates, you need universal child care and this and that. But they're not higher in the Nordic countries where you do see those kinds of wraparound social policies. So I think there are a bunch of things people on the right are worried about.

Some of them you could solve in more liberal ways, right? I mean, you could get wages up using a number of the just normal policies like the earned income tax credit, you know, and the child tax credit. You could get effectively the amount of money people have to spend up by using tax transfers. We know how to do that.

But in terms of some of the broader community dimensions, family dimensions that I think truly sit at the core of things people on the right are worried about, I don't think they have. They've only, I think, begun to recognize the scale of the problem. They definitely have not thought up or worked through or trialed out solutions that fit the problem. And a bunch of things we talked about when you were on my show earlier.

then you get into the cultural dimensions of the rot, the right, or the possible right, or whatever you want to call it, the new right, is seeing. And on the other hand, they've tied themselves to Donald Trump and barstool sports and a bunch of aggressive accelerators of that cultural rot. And so the contradictions become even more profound within that movement. So I think the ideological difficulty of

of what the sort of new right is trying to grapple with is at this point, like, frankly, underappreciated. Yeah, maybe that's a good question for Emily then. I thought, tell me if you agree, Ezra, that J.D. Vance's performance in the vice presidential debate in a lot of moments was actually the most eloquent articulation of Biden's economic policy and Biden's economic agenda ever.

that anybody had put forward, except it would then be done with a line also that Biden is destroying the country. It's like, okay, fine, but everything you just said is something that they have embraced and done and would like to do. And to the point that it might not be enough to do the cultural things that he's arguing for. Emily, is it, like, that goes back to the question of how real is it? And is some of this just cover for actually

wanting to smuggle in the cultural stuff under the guise of the kind of economic populism, but understanding that you need both to make them more palatable. Like what, like how do you move forward as the new right there?

I think there's a cynical interpretation where there are some people who are genuinely engaged in the project of smuggling. I think there are other people, I would include myself, I would include JD in this, who see them as inextricably intertwined, the sort of project of economic populism and a more conservative culture. But what's really interesting about that comparison, I'm very curious as we think about this too, is it's

It shows what's untenable, I think, about ultimately the realignment between right and left, because you could see the J.D. Vance defense of the Biden policy, I think, being true if Biden was explicitly doing it to reduce single parent households, to improve marriage rates, to make people more interested in getting married and less interested in getting divorced, to ultimately boost the cause of

let's say like community, civic society and all of that. And I guess Biden might say it was about civil society as well, but marriage and children in particular, we see the Harris campaign, understandably latching onto J.D.'s childless cat lady quote. And I think that's the fundamental difference between J.D.'s, his defense of economic populism and Biden's defense of economic populism. And I actually think that what, that's what makes it sort of untenable, the realignment.

in the long term. And I think it's a huge problem for those of us on the new right who want to sell these policies to the public. It's just the public's really not with us on some of those questions of cultural conservatism. Here's, I think, an interesting way of thinking about this. I think it's worth thinking of Pete Buttigieg and J.D. Vance as having certain echoes of each other, which I think both people, both of them would really hate. But it's one reason they hate each other so much.

But if you look at and go listen to the podcast episodes that Pete Buttigieg did while Pete Buttigieg was rising up in politics over the past, you know, five or six years...

You go listen to the things he did with people like me and on liberal shows where the audience is a liberal and he was not quite as well known as he is today. And he sounds the way he does when he just did my show a month ago. Right. He sounds the way he does when he goes on Fox News, more or less. Right. He sounds the same. The thing that liberals, even to some degree the left, are saying internally is

is the same as what they are saying externally. They believe that what they are saying to each other is actually a thing they can say to the public. You look at the problem J.D. Vance has had and then what he did in that debate. And the reason J.D. Vance was so good in that debate is he didn't sound like J.D. Vance at all. He did an amazing job not sounding like J.D. Vance and also not sounding like Donald Trump.

So what he did was you go watch him in all these, you know, podcast interviews and speeches and NatCon conferences and whatever that he was doing on his rise up. And he sounds like one guy. And then when he needs to try to win over the general public, he sounds totally different. Now, there's always obviously a certain amount of running to the center that happens in political campaigns. You can certainly see it with Kamala Harris. But there is something deeper here happening that is of particular difficulty, I think, for the right, where politics

part of what the right, I think, has persuaded itself of is that modern American culture is decadent and perverse. And part of maybe what you need to do about that has to do with calling it decadent and perverse. And so in their own fora, we'll call it decadent and perverse and talk about the miserable childless cat ladies and all the terrible choices they're making in their own lives. And then they have to win over an actual voter to

They shut the hell up about that and run from it as fast as they possibly can. And the problem Vance has had is that it's not that easy for him to run for it. But this is where you see a real political problem. When the things you are actually saying and the things you then need to say in public are

develop that level of divergence from each other, then you have an unresolved problem within not just your political coalition, but your political thinking, because you're not going to be able to do it if you can't even really talk about it.

Thank you.

Hey, Bo. Hey, Matt. Are you ready to tell the readers about the extra special episode we have coming up? Three, two, one.

I'll see you soon. But you can do that kind of spooky scary. Well, yeah, but it's also because it's a ride. Yeah, I know. But you're in it, you know? Yeah, exactly. You're in the spook. I think we have to let them in on our little surprise. Yeah, if you haven't already figured it out, can't believe this, Mariah Carey will be joining us this week.

I say, oh, I want to go work with such and such from across town. Yeah, from across town. My girl across town. Yeah, across town. I know a guy across town. I know a guy. Readers, publicists, Katie's, and finalists, tune in to maybe the most unforgettable episode of Lost Cultures this year. There's one more question, which I promised myself I would ask.

Can you drop that grunge album? I'm so mad that I haven't done that yet. But you don't have to be mad because you're in control. I am, but who do I drop it with? Should we start a label? Maybe. Wow. Listen to Las Culturistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jay Shetty and I'm the host of On Purpose. My latest episode is with Jelly Roll. This episode is one of the most honest and raw interviews I've ever had. We go deep into Jelly Roll's life story from being in and out of prison from the age of 13 to being one of today's biggest artists. We talk about guilt, shame, body image, and huge life transformations.

I was a desperate, delusional dreamer. And the desperate part got me in a lot of trouble. I encourage delusional dreamers. Be a delusional dreamer. Just don't be a desperate, delusional dreamer. I just had such an anger. I was just so mad at life. Everything that wasn't right was everybody's fault but mine. I had such a victim mentality. I took zero accountability for anything in my life. I was the kid that if you asked what happened, I immediately started with everything but me. It took years for me to break that. Like years of work.

Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Trust me, you won't want to miss this one. Is that something that people are grappling with on the right? And I'm curious how much of the different presentations, let's say he's on a right-wing podcast versus in the vice presidential debate, how much of those different presentations reflect fundamentally different politics and how much of it reflects...

what he would argue is the same politics and the same policies but kind of dressed up differently for messaging purposes for different audiences.

Well, I think for JD, it's definitely different messaging purposes for different audiences. And I think what Ezra just said is like exactly correct about him. I think for some people, I mean, I actually get this sometimes. It's like you, it's in good faith because you know that there's such a massive gulf between where you are in terms of like your faith

and where you are, where your, whoever you're talking to, whatever audience you're talking to is, you know, if you're talking to an audience, for example, that has people who, who could have, you know, trans family members, which is basically any audience right now. Like you, you can't talk to them. Like you would be talking to them in a right way in podcasts. It would be like, it would just be rude.

more than being unappealing. It would just be rude and uncharitable. So I think there's some of that that happens when media is siloed in the technological ways that we were talking about and some of these social gaps are so significant. But I

I think for politicians like J.D. Vance, watching him is fascinating because there's some of the stuff that conservatives really thought in the aftermath of 2020 when there was some, what people have called quote unquote "wokelash," when there were some of that, conservatives thought, "This is it. This is our ticket. We have found the way to sell." And J.D. Vance very much ran on this platform.

We have found a way to sell this new right agenda of economic populism and cultural conservatism. The public is ready for it. And that quickly became clear that that was not true. And so some of it right now, I think, absolutely isn't bad faith. It is just talking to different audiences with messages that are in some ways deceptive, outright deceptive. And I think it's a really interesting point.

And as we're actually I'm curious for your take on the on the from the inside of The New York Times and on the woke the woke lashes Emily called it. I hadn't actually heard that phrase before but I but I love it with but we could all feel it happening that it felt like the center-left kind of overstepped when it came to identity politics and Has is now very quietly stepping back but not doing so

overtly. Nobody is out there necessarily kind of renouncing any of the bumper stickers or yard signs that they have, but they're just not putting up fresh ones. I'm curious if you're seeing that unfold inside the ecosystems where you kind of operate. I say nothing about the inside of The New York Times and nothing I say here will be about the inside of The New York Times. I will say I think you can look around

the media, politics generally, and yeah, see a huge change. I think there are a couple dimensions to this. One is that there is a difference between what people came to believe and how they came to act, or at least how they came to be pushed on those beliefs. And the core thing here, in my view, is actually technological. You had this two-dimensional

new things hit the media in a fairly compressed period of time and also many other corporate environments or institutional environments too. Obviously, Ryan, you wrote a huge and very, very influential piece on progressive movement politics about this. But I would call it Slack and Twitter.

And what Slack did was created internal capacity for workers to talk and to organize, right? Not organize necessarily in the labor union term of the sense, but organize in a more informal term. And managers can't, right? The way Slack works in institutions-

was at least in that period was there was a lot of, you know, emojis coming in under things people said, but, but the managers are much more, you know, checking what they say by HR and the lawyers and so on. So first you had this sort of communication gulf changing, right? It used to be that it's fairly easy for the boss to kind of call everybody into the room and make some speech. And it's actually harder for the sense of the employees to be, to, to, to be

passed back back up slack made that very easy and then twitter made it easy for that to spill out particularly in high visibility industries into public and so the thing that a lot of these institutions had no immunity to was what did you do when these sort of internal slack fights became external public relations problems or perceived public relations problems on twitter

And a lot of them just were folding kind of left and right. They were firing people. They were acting in ways that were afraid. They were putting out statements they didn't necessarily believe. Now, that doesn't mean they didn't believe a set of the underlying things about there being huge levels of systemic racism in society, that there were all kinds of problems and inequities that should be addressed. And I do think part of the step back has been a step back from some of the ways that

institutions without any immune system to this sort of new era kind of would overreact to, I think in my view, fairly modest levels of public criticism. But that does not mean I think there's been a step back from believing a lot of the things that were not believed about society in, say, 2013 and 2014. So, for instance, I think the view that there is systemic

racism in policing is widely held, but the view that you defund the police is not now widely held.

But I think 10 years ago, neither view was all that widely held or at least not talked about that often in public. And I think you could find a lot of different things like this where the ideological priors have been like absorbed into or the ideological arguments up to a point have been absorbed into the system such that they're now kind of common sense when they weren't at another time. I think organizations think about representation very differently than they did when I got into the media in 2005, for instance.

But the sense that your employees are going to, you know, in a progressive nonprofit or a media organization or even a corporation like Nike, their employees are going to put a bunch of like slack faces under something somebody said and then, you know, go public on Twitter. And that's going to be terrible.

treated as a problem for the organization to deal with, as a problem for the employee to now have to deal with with their bosses. I think that has changed. So my view is administrators and managers have a very different approach to dealing with these things. And some of the sort of inability to say, well, hey, wait, is that actually a good idea has gone away. But it's not like we've gone all the way back

to how people understood the situation to be in 2010. I think there's a very, very different sense of what is required of and should be thought about in a lot of both key decisions and in society at large. Yeah, and Emily, I think the left had gone a little, still bananas for a while, that the right felt like it had a really easy target

And I feel like that target has been taken away. I'm curious from the right, like if as you grapple with the left and go out and target this, like the wokeism and all that stuff, if it feels harder for the right to hit it now, like if it feels like, and almost I could imagine from the right's perspective in almost an unfair way, 'cause it's like, wait a minute, we never talked about it on the rise up. There was, everybody kept saying there is no such thing as cancel culture. Obviously there was.

But that makes it harder for then people to talk about its recession at the same time because something that was never here can't go away. Almost like you're fighting these ghosts. But now they might be actual ghosts. So I'm curious from your perspective if it feels like a tougher target to hit now.

I think there's something to that because one of the trends that I've observed going back to the beginning of this conversation is I think some of mainstream media responding to the market pressures that when you see people doing really well on a platform like Substack, if you're in your time, so you see Barry Weiss doing really well on a platform like Substack, I think you realize that the...

the people who were complaining about coverage that undercut the consensus position on like puberty blockers for just to take one example is acceptable. And that there, you know, that there are more people who are open to having a reasonable discussion than the sample of people in the

publication slack or the slack at the Washington Post or the LA Times or the Associated Press. The country more broadly is comfortable with having a conversation that everyone in your newsroom might not be. So whether some of these elite opinions, be they at Disney or somewhere else, is ultimately representative

representative of a larger trend among young people, was probably, was overestimating the public support for some of those really radical or harder left positions. And I think also, just a really quick final point, would

would be that media in general makes it hard for the right to come to a policy position, like to actually have a firm position on a lot of policies because so much of our energy is understandably tied up in picking apart media coverage and finding bias and arguing against bias that we all sort of end up looking around and saying, "Okay, but what do we actually think about this? What should we actually do about this?" And oftentimes you just never get to that point because the first step is like going through the bad coverage.

I think two things about this. One, I think it'd be really, really healthy for the right if it didn't tell itself that. If the right would spend more time creating good media organizations and do good reporting at a high level of factual accuracy instead of complaining so much about the media, it'd be so much healthier. I remember when Tucker Carlson came out and said he was building the Daily Caller right and it was going to be the conservative New York Times and good Lord, what that became, right? There's like a real...

level of empirical and epistemic standards that the right does not hold itself to, which is not a thing the left does to it, but is an actual problem on its own side. And that, in my view, is what makes it hard for the right to come to strong policy positions because it doesn't have strong internal standards for its own debates. And one way of thinking about this

to connect it to what we were just talking about, is there are all kinds of things that, you know, were coming, were ideological waves happening on the left and the Democratic Party in 2020. The Democratic Party and the sort of broader left, central left, whatever you want to call it, liberal coalition has metabolized. It's sort of said, OK, we're taking this part, we're leaving this part behind. That's not true for the right from what it was dealing with in 2020. J.D. Vance will not currently say that

that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Mike Pence was not at this year's Republican National Convention. And so one actual asymmetry to me between the parties, when you think back to their condition in 2020, was both parties were having a very, very hard year for a bunch of different reasons. I also think the pandemic year was very hard on both parties, right? There was a lot going on in American society that had pushed kind of everybody into a very strange place.

But I think the institutions on the left are just frankly healthier and more able to engage in slightly reasoned and managed criticism and periods of renewal. And at least under Donald Trump on the right, that's not been as true. And frankly, the institutions on the right that have been trying to build some kind of structure for this, I think Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 really saw itself as one of these groups, right? They were going to take this kind of mess of things from 2020 and turn it into something. And it's become like a huge

catastrophe over there. But I do think Trump himself creates a lot of difficulty and the media dynamics themselves, right? I mean, the Fox News and Dominion settlements really tell you something. And now Tucker Carlson is over on X

You know, with Elon Musk, where, you know, he's still a very influential figure on the right, but has even less institutional strictures on what he can say or what level, you know, those statements are going to be held to. And so I do think institutional health is a very big part of this. And just a problem the right is facing is that it has not learned a lot from 2020. Right. I think the left actually has. Yeah.

Yeah, Emily, I'm curious for your take on that. There was this, I don't know if you know this speech that Tucker Carlson gave several years after he started the Daily Caller, Ezra, you might remember this too, where he basically said, I was wrong. Like the right doesn't want this. Like the right does not want a rigorous conservative New York Times. Like the right wants a warrior, you know, for the right. Like, and that's what it, and it sees right-wing journalism as a weapon to be wielded on behalf of the movement.

rather than on the left, it's like a check on the movement. It's like, and the journalism is first and the kind of ideology is second. That does seem to be an asymmetry. Not to speak ill of your colleagues, 'cause we're talking institutionally, not none of your particular colleagues at different institutions, but I'm curious if that's been your experience in the right-wing media ecosystem.

You know, I think part of it, so I'll say actually I think part of it is that Fox News is the elephant in the room because everyone is sort of like comparing themselves or Fox just has so much power and it's waned a little bit, but has so much power over the consumer. So it's hard to, you know, it's hard to kind of build conservative media. Especially when Tucker launched Daily Caller, Fox was like hegemonic. Yes.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Absolutely. And so that really set the tone for a lot of people in conservative media. I mean, obviously, there are a ton of conservative journalists and, you know, we would maybe disagree on some of them. I know a lot of people who are committed to pursuing truth as, you know, an open, biased conservative. But, you know, there are definitely I do. I agree that's a problem. I think the Dominion settlement point is really interesting because my sort of rebuttal to that would be the Republicans.

there was also the Covington Catholic settlement from CNN. And I just don't know, like for me, I see the forces that created the Dominion settlement, meaning Fox News' coverage of the 2020 election that led to the Dominion settlement, which in some cases really followed Trump's line. I see that as being downstream of the forces that created the Covington Catholic settlement, which came from CNN and,

kind of jumping the gun on what happened to Nick Sandman on the National Mall for reasons that were pretty clearly ideological. You guys might disagree. You know, journalists get things wrong sometimes. I thought that was a purely ideological error. So I think as conservatives are just constantly reacting, it becomes very hard for our institutions to reflect sort of first principles and then pursue a healthy debate over policy. So I kind of agree and disagree at the same time, I guess.

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See, so, but you can do that kind of spooky scary. Well, yeah, but it's also because it's a ride. Yeah, I know. But you're in it, you know? Yeah, exactly. You're in the spook. I think we have to let them in on our little surprise. Yeah, if you haven't already figured it out, can't believe this, Mariah Carey will be joining us this week.

I say, oh, I want to go work with such and such from across town. Yeah, from across town. My girl across town. Yeah, across town. I know a guy across town. I know a guy. Readers, publicists, Katie's, and finalists, tune in to maybe the most unforgettable episode of Lost Cultures this year. There's one more question, which I promised myself I would ask.

Can you drop that grunge album? I'm so mad that I haven't done that yet. But you don't have to be mad because you're in control. I am, but who do I drop it with? Should we start a label? Maybe. Wow. Listen to Las Culturistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And huge life transformations.

I was a desperate, delusional dreamer. And the desperate part got me in a lot of trouble. I encourage delusional dreamers. Be a delusional dreamer. Just don't be a desperate, delusional dreamer. I just had such an anger. I was just so mad at life. Everything that wasn't right was everybody's fault but mine. I had such a victim mentality. I took zero accountability for anything in my life. I was the kid that if you asked what happened, I immediately started with everything but me. It took years for me to break that. Like years of work.

Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Trust me, you won't want to miss this one. Ezra, before you go, you cover economic policy. That's your thing for decades, really, has been that area. So tell us, what is going on with Kamala Harris' campaign and Lena Kahn and Jonathan Cantor? Why haven't they just come out and said...

Of course, we're going to reappoint Lena Kahn and Jonathan Cantor. They have they have been central to this this pro worker antitrust policy that the Biden administration has pushed forward. What why won't they just do that? What do you hear? I don't think they would do that about any member of the administration. One, I think there's actually a rule you're not allowed to do that usually.

Uh, but they haven't said we're going to reappoint Janet Yellen, who's going to be, you know, who's been central to the economic recovery. Right. But also nobody on wall street is demanding. I think the actual, I, I, I think the actual line you're look, I think there's a version where, why have they not said, listen, that she's great. Lena cons, you know, approach is great versus we're definitely going to reappoint. I think those are pretty different questions. Um,

And the answer here is a little bit, I'm not sure. I don't know what I think Kamala Harris believes in her heart of hearts about antitrust policy. I don't think it's necessarily that, you know, Reed Hastings or Reed Hoffman, I forget which Reed was, Aunt Eileen O'Conn, gets to set FTC policy. But her, you know, I think one of the realities of the Kamala Harris campaign is it emerged in a matter of weeks that

Right. And so the work that a normal campaign would have done and that the candidate themselves would have done over the course of a primary and a year to kind of work every dimension of this out and give a series of major speeches laying out their thinking on it, they both not only didn't do, but didn't have to do.

And a lot of that is done because you have to do it, right? In some ways, it's strategically valuable to be ambiguous. The people who would be upset if you didn't reappoint Lena Kahn or someone like her, if you tell them we're not going to appoint Lena Kahn or someone like her, they're really mad. Whereas if you don't say anything at all,

They're not happy, but they're still there in the coalition trying to influence the coalition. And so the fact that Harris did not have a primary process where pushed from the left or from the right, she had to distinguish which side of some of these divides she's been on has given them the opportunity to maintain a high level of strategic ambiguity. So they maintain to some degree, particularly given that Donald Trump is the opponent,

the loyalty of the people in the Lena Kahn wing of the Democratic Party, even if that loyalty is currently suspicious and a little bit frustrated, but also the donors that maybe don't want that. And then if they win the election, then they're going to have to make some choices at the moment they don't have to make. And speaking of that open primary, you and I were both rattling the cages for some type of an open process.

to nominate a replacement for Biden if he could be persuaded to drop out. Were we right at the time, you think? I mean, are we right now? I think early we were right. I mean, I think early it was the right thing. Are we still? No, I don't think they should do an open primary right now. Not now, but like in hindsight, were we right?

I don't know. I think two things about this are one, we don't know if Kamala Harris is going to win the election. And if it turns out that the polling is systematically, you know, getting Trump wrong by three points in the Midwest,

I think there's gonna be a lot of people who say, yeah, you know, either she should have picked Josh Shapiro or in fact running a sort of a liberal San Franciscan politician, you know, in the industrial Midwest is not what the party should have been doing this year, which is why there was actually so much resistance to having Joe Biden step down and Kamala Harris step up much earlier in the process. I mean, as you know, because you were doing some of this work, too.

The big thing in the party was not that Joe Biden at 81 or 82 is an effective candidate, but there was very, very little faith that Harris could step into his place effectively, given where Democrats needed to win. Now, Harris was clearly underrated. I made that point back in February. I made that point consistently after February. But we don't exactly know how underrated. And so if she wins, I think people are going to say that was all ridiculous. Harris is great, particularly if she wins convincingly.

And if she doesn't, people are going to say that, you know, Joe Biden should have stepped down earlier and the party should have been able to go through a competitive process to figure out, you know, which kind of candidate could best compete in the place that Democrats need to win. But by the time Joe Biden actually stepped down.

Given how late in the game it was, I mean, you were talking weeks before the Democratic Convention at that point. And given how exhausted the party was by what it took to get him to step aside and his endorsement, like there was no there was no possibility or opening for that. Right. If he had stepped down in March or decided not to run for reelection at all, that would have been a different question. How much how much heat did you get for that that February piece calling for

Biden to step aside by the power center. Because I'm at a place now in my career where- So crushing. I'm at a place in my career where those folks, they used to give me hell all the time, like the center left world. They've kind of given up on me. They're like, we're not influencing this guy. We're not even gonna waste our breath anymore.

But, you know, that also means that when I say like, you know, Joe Biden's too old and he should step aside, they're like, well, that's what he says. Like we understand, we guess, we already know he feels that way. But when you say it, it packs more punch. What kind of counterpunch did you get at the time? I mean, a lot of people were not happy with me. Look, I always want to, I'm not like,

I sit at a desk and I write things and I say them into a microphone. It's not a job of tremendous courage. There are people who are pissed at me and there are a lot of people who privately were thinking about these questions and wanted to talk about it, but what they really felt was that I had not sufficiently considered how bad the alternatives were. That was the real private reaction I got. Probably there are people who are like, fuck that guy, but they said it on Twitter, right? You can go look at people calling me all sorts of things on Twitter, but because I don't

read I don't really read social media reaction in that way I actually missed a lot of it is funny that when things sort of turned on this argument people came to me like oh my god I'm so sorry for how everybody treated you and I was like they treated me that badly I hadn't actually totally totally clocked how bad people must have been although you know then people sent me when did you stop like when did you stop like tuning into Twitter

I'll read it. I don't read stuff about me on it. I don't think the human mind is well adapted for that level of feedback. And I find that I am a less independent thinker if I am tightly tuned in to the reaction people have to the things that I think or say or do. But in private, right, I had a lot of conversations, including with Biden administration people about.

And, you know, they were they thought I was wrong, but they thought I was wrong because one, I was underestimating Joe Biden. They thought I was wrong, too, because I was overestimating Kamala Harris. And they thought I was wrong, three, because there's no way the Democratic Party could manage an open convention that if Kamala Harris was weak, would pass around Kamala Harris. And if you believe all three of those things, then I was definitely wrong.

But but I didn't you know, people knew Joe Biden's age was a problem. So in the more reflective spaces in which I tended to like actually have conversations, you know, in a way I that I cared about, you know, it was it was a little bit more interesting. I did find that people thought I was like a total fucking idiot said so in public and people who didn't said so in private. But, you know, I got to have the benefit of both sides of that.

Cool. Emily, anything else? I know Ezra's got to run pretty soon. No, I just want to say thank you. This was fantastic, and we really appreciate you coming on the show. I'm touched you stayed through the whole thing, Emily, and I'm excited to hear what you find from the Rome post-liberals. Yeah, tell us real quick, what are you hearing, Emily? Anything new from your Roman friends? I think a lot of this is going to change based on what happens in November, so...

Okay. Say that for a lot of things right now. All right. Well, Ezra Klein, host of The Ezra Klein Show, New York Times columnist. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you all.

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Hey, Bo. Hey, Matt. Are you ready to tell the readers about the extra special episode we have coming up? I think we have to let them in on our little surprise. Yeah, if you haven't already figured it out, the queen of Christmas herself, can't believe this, Mariah Carey, will be joining us this week. Wow. Readers, publicists, Katie's, and finalists, tune in to maybe the most unforgettable episode of Lost Cultures this yet.

Listen to Las Culturistas on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Cheryl Swoops. And I'm Tarika Foster-Brasby. And on our new podcast, we're talking about the real obstacles women face day to day. Because no matter who you are, there are levels to what we experience as women. And T and I have a lot to say.

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