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

27:19Left is over-formed by institutions. The right is under-formed. 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.

27:56That'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.

28:42But conservatives have found themselves on the outside of institutions. And so when we're talking about this concept of counterrevolution, it's a paradox, right? Because a counterrevolution 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 galas. They attend the events at the country club. They eat the salmon dinner at the whatever Hilton ballroom.

29:22And I'm always looking around at these. 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 the Elks Lodge was still the formative institution of the United States. 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 this is a problem i i don't i can't say that there's a snap your finger solution um and so you have to start where you start you know i work for an institution that i think is either the best in in the business the manhattan institute i think we We do good work that has a high degree of accuracy and rigor and intelligence.

30:10And 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. I think in the Trump era it is. OK, well, make the case. There's a falling in line behind Donald Trump. So here's 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.

30:51Were you pro-life? Did you believe in low taxes? You know, what was your foreign policy, etc.? And certainly the multidimensional agenda test you see on the left down 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, bro. You could be a Christian traditionalist. You could be RFK 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're useful to him, you could be on the team.

31:37Now, 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, a Kamala Harris, a Tim Walz, Joe Biden were much more box checking, right? The sort of multidimensional loyalty test that the left uses. And so on 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 in a meeting.

32:22And 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 he's with you. You're you're you. You cross him and he'll he'll he'll attack you. You could be Kim Jong Un and be a there are buddies. Right. It's like a nice buddy comedy. Yeah.

32:58I feel like there'd be a buddy comedy. He likes Kim Jong Un more than he likes Mark Carney. Yeah. Well, you know, fair, 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 work with, the people I talk to, my friends and neighbors. But so, yeah, I think it's over overdrawn. I think this is just a question of political organization from the top.

33:35And 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.

34:18But 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.

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35:25That's JoinMIDI.com. MIDI, the care women deserve. I'm Peter Baker. I'm Chief White House Correspondent for The New York Times. I've covered the president of the United States, and I've covered every president since 1996. The pressure on an independent press today feels greater than at any time I've seen it in four decades as a journalist. All that pressure, though, is just a reminder of why journalism matters. Our job is to bring home facts, help our readers understand what's happening, regardless of what the consequences may be to us. And if they punish us, so be it. We will still go out there and report as honestly and aggressively and fairly and truthfully as we can.

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36:26I'm going to go back to Tucker. 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 8 p.m. 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 in the Fox News era is that he was beginning to bring a white national strain into centrality in the Republican Party.

37:12That, you know, there were all these Daily Stormer 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.

37:45Now, I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become 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 at this moment is a kind of like a strange unwillingness to either grapple with one or the other.

38:26So tell me how you see it. Yeah, I don't see it that way. I mean, when Tucker 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 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, gave a kind of opening monologue with Tucker.

39:17President 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. 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 has a kind of disciplinary function. And I think especially after 2020 has become even more cognizant of, okay, message discipline is important.

39:57Moving 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 played this role when he was on Fox News. But the thing that many of us who, I mean, I knew tucker before many of us who had watched him for a long time from a good time libertarian but what what specific you you i can't you're invoking like the daily it's like i don't know anything about the daily storm or beyond he talked a bunch about great replacement 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 i would called a cabal of elites importing brown voters to replace you, that you were 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.

41:03Fox News is reporting tonight that the administration awarded$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 now and I see Tucker then, And I agree, the shackles are 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.

41:41I don't think that's right. And I think 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 charge. But let's take the but the narrative that you're portraying. I don't think that that's exactly how I would put it, certainly. But the underlying facts are either true or not true. And in this case, demographic 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 is exemplifies bigotry or discrimination, of course.

42:23But you can also do it in a way that isn't 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 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 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 is a white nationalist is due to all the white nationalism.

43:12Well, let me ask a question. Hold on, though. Let me ask a question fairly for you. No, because that is a huge charge. And I just, again, what is the evidence of that? 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's view is that the... Take Tucker out of it. Just make an in-general argument. A general argument of what a white nationalist is. And then you can kind of layer in Tucker. So I think that there is a straightforward view in white nationalism, that there is such a thing as a white race.

43:50That 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 this country. There are harder and softer versions of this, right? In some versions, Jews are included in that white race. 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? If you have too much of a country not sharing a common heritage, you lose solidarity.

44:34In some cases, we're talking about something much darker than that. There are people who just don't like the way their community is changing. And there's the KKK. Everything exists on a spectrum. But would you say someone who is, for example, hesitant about rapid, large-scale demographic change is just a kind of 1 % 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 maybe to be more specific about Tucker. So you just had on the right wing writer Scott Greer.

45:11He'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 a white national site were dug up. And he once said of Tucker, so this is Greer speaking, Tucker 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 ride, who have in some ways seen the errors of that way of ideological thinking.

46:00And to me, you always want to leave people room to 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. And 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?

46:39What's the way to demystify, to defang, to kind of delegitimize 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 interviewing Greer. I'm saying that I looked at Tucker in that period and thought, huh, he's going in this direction that I understand this to be the argument of, you know, a V-Dare of, and they all celebrated him.

47:26But I guess the question is whether, to phrase the 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, OK, huge point. I would break it down in a couple of ways. One, I don't think that's that's quite accurate. I actually think that the statement you're reading and you could probably read it from a number of other people.

48:09Right. If you remember in 2016, Richard Spencer famously held some sort of conference or group, and he said, oh, yes, Trump has adopted—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 this relationship because they desperately want to believe it. And I think that, you know, someone like Tucker, I don't think it's accurate to say that Tucker on Fox in 2021 was laundering in talking points from American Renaissance. I just I don't think that's true.

49:02I think it's conflating a kind of maybe superficial opposition to immigration. And the conflation game is really, 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 deplatformed 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.

49:45And 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 the 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.

50:40And so I just don't, yeah, to me 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 unhavable. 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.

51:25I 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 somebody said like the Jews have been funding the grace replacement. Did Elon say that? Yeah. No, Elon 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 had to go tour Auschwitz and things like that.

52:04Okay. The Auschwitz, yeah. The Auschwitz apology tour. But, you know, even now, Musk is very conspiratorial and where he is in 2026, now the world's first trillionaire owning, you know, what used to be Twitter. 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 the 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.

52:45Nick Fuentes has a bigger audience than Richard Spencer ever did. And there is, I mean, when I'm on X and 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.

53:24And 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 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 always think about, like, if you had told me that Trump was going to make RFK Jr. HHS secretary and Tulsi Gabbard DNI and try to make the triumph of bipartisanship. And try to make Matt Gaetz attorney general. I would have thought that was like an unhinged, like resistance substack take. And then it all happened.

54:05So it's like the fact you can have these things be true at the same time. Yes, I think you're kind of understating the dynamic on one side. I mean, it wasn't just about speech policing. After 2020, the left maintained a kind of apparatus of social annihilation. And I went through it myself. I had the ACLU subpoena me and harass 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, you know, threats of violence against me that were very credible at the time.

54:49And so, you know, people trying to get, you know, going after my family, my kids. I mean, we shouldn't forget 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.

55:41And our 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 talked 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 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.

56:23I suspect that he's going to get absolutely trounced. It happened with Vivek running against a guy, Casey Putsch 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 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 and think it's important to have a kind of criticism of, let's say, the elements of my own side.

57:13But 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.

57:57It 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, the 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? 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, particularly looks right now, is that when you say these nihilistic, I think you called them, ideas are not held at high levels of the right.

58:49They're only supported institutionally 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 - Really? They could, 10 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 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.

59:42It's 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 gropers 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?

1:00:17This 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 2016 to 2024 where it's almost unbelievable how far things have gone. Even Trump one to Trump two are very, very different beasts. And so all of a sudden, it doesn't look impossible to imagine that Fuentes and Carlson and Fishback are the future, not the fringe. I think a lesson that has been burned into many of us is that 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.

1:01:09And would you say that you saw that that happen on the left between, you know, 2014 and 2024? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. 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, I think of James Fishback as a human meme. It's 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.

1:01:46But 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 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. And I think watching the takeover 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.

1:02:41and 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 and your your general analysis is correct so there is a racialist uh 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.

1:03:25And so, look, I don't want a racialist right. That is that is like a clear, 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 that 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 DC 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 are middle aged now so say hey walk me through this thinking and then not kind of non-judgmental just kind of help me understand what's happening with some of the more kind of radical or racialist uh young young man and this is the the description that they give um they say you know these are guys who hit high school during covid they they kind of transitioned into an almost a purely digital life with all of the various rabbit holes you could get into.

1:04:32They came of age as a function of your kind of entering adulthood during the kind of George Floyd hysteria, where their teachers at school, their media 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 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 proper 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.

1:05:16They essentially psychologically submitted to it, but then reversed 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. I understand 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.

1:05:59However, 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 have, you know, their brain isn't still their brain isn't locked in its ways. And so I think you want to bring people who are frustrated towards a better path. 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 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.

1:06:53And 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. 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 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.

1:07:38I 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. I will say that there was a white man 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.

1:08:13And 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. Personally, I live on a farm in Washington state. Your executive orders get past the whole thing. And these things can all go in better or worse directions. These are all long-standing 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.

1:09:01I'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.

1:09:45Maybe in Dayton, Ohio, there was somebody who wasn't Haitian. who maybe somebody thought, but other people didn't think, had eaten a cat. But somebody and other people is quite important. People can read your piece. They can read the DropSite News article. I'm not going to convince you one way or the other. But the DropSite News article, they went out to debunk my story and they ended up finding another independent corroborating witness. That's not how I read it. Not how I read the Reddit. 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.

1:10:30You are going to unleash forms of anger and hatred and fear that are not controllable. And I think one of the mistakes the right 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 mimetic containers, that then you say, well, the real issue here is 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, J.D. Vance said this very explicitly, is that, well, people really care about the cats and dogs.

1:11:11The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I start talking about cat memes. 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.

1:11:47We 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 you 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 movement. 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 world click farm, is quite dangerous and quite grim.

1:12:35And 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 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, etc.

1:13:16Look, if it's true, it's fair game. And there is 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 is 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.

1:14:04But second, the predictions have always been, you know, that it's going to unleash some kind of horrible nativist violence sentiment, etc. 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 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, those of us on the right who are in this business probably have to have a little bit more firmness to say, no, the facts are not on your side in this argument.

1:14:56So 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, I mean, arguments like the Haitian cats and dogs, we'll talk about others in a second. Which is fine. Yeah, yeah. And 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.

1:15:39I'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 the guy who raised his profile. Which I think was a mistake. I think it is legitimate to say Tucker 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, here's one thing I don't underestimate with Tucker. He's fucking good. He's a good interviewer. He has 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.

1:16:16Those 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 things. Of those who bless the government of Israel? Those who bless Israel is what it says. It doesn't say the government of, 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 scripture off the tip of mine. You pull out the phone and use the Bible. It's in Genesis, but... So you're quoting a Bible phrase. You don't have context for it. You don't know where in the Bible it is, but that's like your theology.

1:16:48I'm confused. And he didn't because I think Tucker understands quite well where the passions are and where the energy is. And 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 to, you know, in the 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 sure 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?

1:17:37I'll give you a little bit more. 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, is you can read my writings on the question. You read my writings on this on this exact question. I think he's a 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.

1:18:16Obviously, we don't love Hitler. We're not, neither of us are 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 hyper real 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 there. Therefore, a symbolic of where people where the right is going as a whole.

1:19:06I think hyper real is doing work in this argument that is not actually connected to what what hyper real means. I can imagine somebody sitting in front of me, even sitting in front of me here in 2015 and us younger, handsomer. Ah, 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 hyper-real, 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-real and the real were going to converge in the life that we actually lead here, I would have said...

1:19:49No, 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. a ridiculous, hyper-real 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.

1:20:27And then it became clear in the Tucker Carlson moment, and given where Tucker 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 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.

1:21:13You 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 but that's the end point. There's no actual bridge that that can go over. And look, that's because they're changed minds. 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.

1:21:54And 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, you know, when I see the kind of online right and the and the New York Times both doing like puff pieces on the latest kind of right wing figure. 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.

1:22:37And I just refuse to take the bait. 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 sub-stack 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, Samuel 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.

1:23:17He did not come that far from winning for Louisiana governor in the 90s. And, you know, there was a style of politics that they got kind of quite good at figuring out. And Ganz'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 is a pain in the ass. Nobody wants it. Nobody likes it. Nobody believes in it.

1:23:55And in fact, that figure, as 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. A hundred percent. I think that's ridiculous. 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 was this kind of smear effect where the media would go out and say this bad person, you know, supports your campaign.

1:24:40And 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, 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 compliant 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 it keeps thinking it can maybe control these forces and it can't

1:25:56hi new york times i would be very interested in having separate logins for a shared subscription I'm 35 years old. I still share my parents' New York Times subscription. I think if my teenagers were to have their own logins, we could share articles. It doesn't let us play the same games as each other. I play the stoku. I do the crossword. I do the spelling bee. I do the wordle. Please help. Having our own accounts would be amazing. My mom could save her own recipes. My friends could save their recipes. I want to get the weekly newsletter, but they seem to always go to my husband and then he doesn't forward them to me.

1:26:33We both love cooking. I'm a 30-minute and under dinner girly. My boyfriend is very elaborate. I think him having his own profile would be great. We love the New York Times, and we would love to love it individually. Listeners, we heard you. It's why we created the New York Times Family Subscription. One subscription, up to four separate logins for anyone in your life. Find out more at nytimes.com slash family.

1:27:01You 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, you know, 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.

1:27:55and 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 know, the fraud had been reported elsewhere at the Star Tribune and it had been in national news. There are bits and pieces. There are prosecutions, right, which is where a lot of the information came from that began in 2022 under the Biden administration.

1:28:36The 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 dollars being stolen by 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. Hawala Network is the name for kind of informal cash based clan based financial institutions.

1:29:25They 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 in 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 Hawala 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 Hawala networks in Somalia and therefore to the Al-Shabaab terror networks taking their cut, essentially.

1:30:11Like 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 written receipts or banking transactions. But the scale of that money that was that was remittances from fraud was so enormous that over time we're talking about huge sums of money. So I want 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.

1:30:50He later came out, claimed that he was misquoted. He said later the story was bullshit and that he didn't know on the ground investigating in Minnesota. The two top prosecutors of the fraud in Minnesota said the perpetrators are motivated by greed. There's no evidence of terrorist financing. Do you still stand by that? Of course I do. Yeah. And a couple of 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.

1:31:25But, 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, he was the only name source. He was I don't think he was the only name source in the piece. He was the only name source making this terrorism argument. Well, incorrect. 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.

1:32:13We were saying simply, logically, if we know from a variety of sources that 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 were that the Al-Shabaab terror network benefits from fraud in the United States that has passed through their financial system.

1:32:55Your 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 nationals in the United States. It's time for them to go home. And 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.

1:33:27I'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.

1:33:45And 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 linked to the piece and then you could, you're rhetorical. And then, and then, and then, none of the people, as far as I can tell, we're doing this, we're 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 they're funding terrorism. And then it's to get Donald Trump to deport people who are unrelated to the crime.

1:34:22Okay, 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, as we did, you get the clear sense that in Somalia, there is a kind of kinship and clan based culture that is prevalent for a 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.

1:35:11And I think the underlying point, which is very uncomfortable, not just for people who are small-L 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.

1:36:06And I think that's perfectly defensible. I don't have a problem saying that American immigration policy should serve our interests, 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, 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 they'll let you take it where you want to take it.

1:36:48That 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 in 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 studies. I mean, many, as you say, Somalia 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 like the primacy of thinking about the individual.

1:37:28If you want to say that our immigration policy should not favor Somalis, fine, fair enough. But our immigration, the temporary protected status is based on group designations. And in fact, Somalis, Haitians, Venezuelans. But the people you're going with did not do this crime. We agree on that part, right? Hold on. Well, let me take it in pieces. So a couple of 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 fake patients that were receiving, you know, kind of fake treatment.

1:38:11And 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. We 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.

1:38:51And 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 Somali 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 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 structured.

1:39:34And then, look, this is mass fraud committed in Minnesota, committed now in other states that we're uncovering. And one West Coast police detective who has been looking into this said, 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. It's uncomfortable. I didn't argue. I didn't argue with it. 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?

1:40:26And 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 Thanksgiving 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 great 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 hoped that they will be left alone.

1:40:55But 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, are there kids here? And these women come out and they don't speak English and they're looking at 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?

1:41:31On 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 beneficial. Granted, your critique of what's happening under the surface is also true. I mean, I couldn't publish the conclusion. Nick Shirley gets in there, sees a building as empty, and then assumes, oh, they're committing$70 million of fraud or whatever.

1:42:16As 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 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 that 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 say 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.

1:42:55It's like in line with where I want politics to go. It does become a huge issue. We'll talk about what it leads to. And 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.

1:43:53and 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, 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.

1:44:33Let's say citizen journalists. I think that was the phrase for a while. There was great hope in 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. 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.

1:45:18That deployment ultimately and the fighting around it leaves Renee Good and Alex Peretti 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 investigate Renee Good's 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.

1:45:53It led to the fraud stuff getting completely sidelined. and the person who is pushing it resigning, that this did not go in a good direction, in part because it wasn't based on good information. But now, 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.

1:46:44Um, it's a no-win situation. Uh, and I was advising against it from even the previous summer. Uh, and so in, 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, 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.

1:47:42It'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. Pick up on the fraud. 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 had 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.

1:48:32And so to me personally, I found it very, you know, very, 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 S. Formas, who stole$1.3 billion from Medicare and Medicaid in a fraudulent billing scheme.

1:49:14It 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. OK. Shouldn't have done that. And in fact, you know, if these people were convicted of fraud at that scale, 20 years seems like a light prison sentence. I would double it personally. And so, yeah, this is. The push I'm making, and I recognize you're not going to defend this, but there is this movement on the right right now to focus on fraud.

1:49:46You'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, 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 the 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 and and others are i just i look at the country right now.

1:50:43And I see Donald Trump has like you like using piracy around the Somalis. I think of the Trump and the Trump family as pirates. I think that they are looting the country for their benefit. I think that that's what the Qatari plane is. I think that's what the crypto investments are. I think that's how Trump and the assembly 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.

1:51:17Sure. And 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.

1:52:15But 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.

1:52:54And 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. Yeah, their crypto plays are ongoing. World liberty and all this stuff is ongoing. Sure. Yeah. And at the end of the day, when I sit down in my office at 7.30 a.m.

1:53:43every 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. Why? Well, explain it to me. I will. The point I'm making is actually a little bit even larger than you. um 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 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?

1:54:27I'm trying to convert you. Listen, we talk. But I think that the right's 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 the body and then not always in the promotion and the weaponization of it. it i think careful and the i think you're i think pieces 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.

1:55:36When 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 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. Okay. 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.

1:56:16Let's agree. And then the Times kind of moves back. Let's agree you've won some fights. I am saying that they're like the right, in my view, right, as somebody who I think actually has a good record of criticizing my own. Right. I pushed Joe Biden to, you know, when that was like a much more dangerous thing for me to do. Agreed. I wrote Abundance, which is 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.

1:56:51Sure. Right. 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 it'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.

1:57:35And those two things are allowing a tremendous amount of bad ideas, of actual corruption, of just institutional and non-institutional rot to occur. And 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. 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, disciplined political movement. Every political movement has a certain fermentation, a certain amount of internal conflict.

1:58:20You 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 half since Trump has become president again, 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 triangle of legitimacy and authority. The reality is that, OK, then let's solve it.

1:59:09This 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 politics moves forward. And I think actually after, you know, Trump is in his last term, depending on how things go with the House, this might be the really last kind of truly effective moment for the Trump presidency.

1:59:50And 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.

2:00:25And if they have enough power, that is look past. If they have enough strength to their passions, that is fine. um and similarly in the informational sphere in the attentional sphere there is a lot of playing with stories that are designed like mimetically constructed to arouse very very very base passions those stories are often much more complicated if they're true beneath them um 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 like 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 intentional move in the book.

2:01:33You'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 virtu, 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.

2:02:18And 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.

2:03:02And 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 your, your, your priest, um, you know, political leaders are, are kind of blunt instruments. Uh, political leaders are means to, to an end and there's no easy answer there. Uh, there's no immediate answer there, but, 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, um, are high integrity people, very smart people, conservative institutionalists who understand the moment, who understand that we need to deliver tangible political victories.

2:03:51We 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 So I oftentimes, and this conversation is interesting because... And 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, what I, 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.

2:04:43And 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 three books you'd 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 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.

2:05:31The 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.

2:06:22And 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 my political ambitions. But which book of his would you start with? I would start with Managerial Revolution. Again, because it just, it kind of describes, 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 optimism, American optimism, but he already saw some of the problems that were starting to emerge. Chris Ruffo, thank you very much.

2:07:01Thank you.

2:07:22Thank you.