10/18/24: Ezra Klein Reveals Biden Drop Out Backlash

Ryan and Emily sit down with NYTimes' Ezra Klein.

To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com

Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of
ways we can up our game for this critical election.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade
the studio ad staff give you, guys, the best independent
coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about,
it just means the absolute world to have your support.

Speaker 3 (00:20):
But enough with that, let's get to the show.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
I don't think the right has figured out if a
lot of the problems it is most concerned about are
even amenable to policy solutions in the first place. The
reason jd. Vance was so good in that debate is
he didn't sound like Jadavance at all. You go watch
him in all these podcast interviews and speeches and not
con conferences and whatever that he was doing on his
rise up, and he sounds like one guy, and then

(00:42):
when he needs to try to win over the general public,
he sounds totally different. This is where you see a real,
a real political problem. When the things you're actually saying
and the things you then need to say in public
develop that level of divergence from each other, then you
have an unresolved problem. Within not just your political coalition,
but your political thinking, because you're not going to be
able to do it if you can't even really talk

(01:02):
about it.

Speaker 3 (01:03):
You and I were both rattling the cages for some
type of an open process to nominate a replacement for Biden,
if he could be persuaded to drop out. Were we right?
On today's long form episode of Counterpoints, part of a
series that we're doing with independent journalists and also mainstream journalists.
Today we're joined by an independent slash mainstream one, Ezra

(01:27):
Kleine from The New York Times. Ezra, some people called
you the breakout star of the twenty twenty four election,
But when I saw it, I was like, wasn't as
there already? Kind of I think everybody kind of already
knew whoever it was. I don't think he needed the.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
Twenty I just got here. I'm having a great rookie year.
It's been a thrill, amazing first year.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
But thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
I'm glad to be here.

Speaker 3 (01:51):
Emily is joining us from a reporting trip she's doing
over in Rome. May not be able to stick around
for the entire episode. Hopeful she can obviously for people.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
Who don't know brutal I stayed for my whole episode
with Emily, but.

Speaker 4 (02:10):
Emily as soon as there's a hard conversation.

Speaker 3 (02:14):
So Emily, why don't you why don't you kick it
off since you said you might have to go, but
hopefully you can stick around for the for the whole thing. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:21):
Well, first of all, this all kind of came about
because as I was super kind and hosted me on
his extremely popular podcast, and we've talked a little bit
about the trend of postliberalism on the right part of
what I'm actually sort of here to think about in realm,
but Ezra, one of the things Ryan and I thought
might be interesting. A good place to start would be

(02:42):
some of our younger viewers and maybe even your younger
listeners might not know your origin story in journalism and
how tethered it is to the story of technology and
journalism in and of itself, and we kind of wanted
to ask you about what feels like a horseshoem of
almost a horse shoe moment from the blogging of the

(03:02):
Oughts to substack of today, and how independent thinkers, even
people who have found very mainstream platforms are adapting to
that environment with new technology and new delivery systems, and
how all of that is just shaking up basically the
industry for everyone. So I don't know if you have

(03:23):
any thoughts on whether the substack era, the substack moment
that we're in now the kind of journalism. Maybe are
we returning to what happened when the Internet first started
to change journalism in some sense?

Speaker 1 (03:40):
Oh man, I'm so much more interested in who you're
meeting in Rome than I am with my I want
to know about the Rome Post liberals. But okay, substack
and blogging. I came, I came into journalism. I didn't
intend to be a journalist, had no intention of getting
into getting into media, no even thought of getting into media.
I was just a blogger back when Bogin was young

(04:00):
and was not seen as a way you would do
anything right. People now like blog is a normal word,
but it's a strange word, and people looked at you
strangely when you said it. So I was like two
thousand and three when I began my first blog back
in my dorm room at UC Santa Cruz. There's a line,

(04:21):
it's not my line, that the media only does two things.
It bundles and it unbundles, and you're just always either
in a cycle of bundling or a cycle of unbundling.
The blogging era was a cycle of unbundling. Previously, in
order really to have an audience, in order to reach
many people, you had to be at a publication. You

(04:41):
had to be at some kind of bundle, a magazine,
a newspaper, television network, cable news network. And then the
rise of the Internet in many different ways, blogging being
only one of them, made it possible to do that independently.
You could have you know, ezra cliin dot blog spot
or dot typead. But soon after that you also had YouTube.

(05:03):
You had a rise of all kinds of you know,
Twitter was part of this Facebook, right, you have Instagram, pundits,
all that is possible. You then went into a period
of rebundling, and so a lot of the bloggers got
snapped up by different kinds of first very small publications.
I went to the American Prospect, and then overtime bigger

(05:23):
publications in my own career, the Washington Post. Then there
was another period where people who were making a name
inside these bigger publications, people like me and Nate Silver
and many others. Matt Iglesias would then, you know, kind
of Ben Smith leave and build our own outlets. Right,

(05:44):
This was a sort of a mixt of unbundling and rebundling.
It wasn't that easy to do it on your own.
At that point, blogging had sort of died. The blogsphere
had been eaten away by Twitter, by Facebook, and again
by the big players. But you had the rise of
things like Vox, BuzzFeed News under Ben Smith. You know,
five point thirty eight. You can name somebody's on the right,
like the free bacon, free Beacon, Weather and free bacon.

Speaker 4 (06:07):
There's no such thing as free bacon.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
That was an old there was an old joke that
somehow came to mind there. First you also had on
the right, the Federalist right under Ben Dominic and folks
like that, where I think you worked, Emily. And then
we sort of went back into the first cycle as
a lot of the money funding digital media dried up
as interest rates went up. A lot of these organizations

(06:30):
are still around. Box is still there, Federals are still there.
But but it it that that sort of idea that
they would become the next generation of major incumbents I
think didn't quite pan out the way a lot of
us hoped, and substack ros and that created I think
another moment of unbundling. So you had a lot of
these same people, including iglaciers, including Silver, including Ben Dominic,

(06:53):
go to substack where they could do something you couldn't
do in the blogosphere, which was monetize your audience. So
the blogs here is very good at creating traffic, very
good at creating interlinks between communities. You know, there's an
amazing link economy. It was a very generous ecosystem of media.
People would talk to each other, It was very easy
to follow arguments across different places. It really was I

(07:14):
think an ecosystem. Substack is not an ecosystem in that way,
but it does allow you to make a living the
thing that I think you see happening now, though I
don't think substack is really panning out except for a
small number of people independently. It is very hard for
me to come up with many substacks begun in the
last year that seemed to me to have developed, at
least in the news and politics space, a particularly significant audience.

(07:38):
You are seeing substack emerge now as a platform on
which to create new bundles, with probably the Free Press
under Berry Weiss and the Dispatch under Sam Stein being
the best examples of that. But you know, you also
see it with work. You know, there's like obviously a
new Ryan Grimm site, and YouTube is of course a
big player here too. So now I think you're seeing

(07:59):
a turn to some of these you know, mid level
this sort of like the media middle that got somewhat
decimated by the rise of interest rates in the collapse
of media venture capital trying to find a way again.
As it turns out that the independent path is pretty
tough on sub stacks, specifically because once people subscribe to
a bunch of them, they stop wanting to subscribe to more.

(08:21):
The subscriptions are expensive. I think it's a distribution channel
that max is out at a pretty low level, unlike
the original blogosphere, where it was sort of costless to
keep like surfing over to new sites. So that's where
I think we are at the moment. And you know,
in one of the endless turns of this endless media recursion.

Speaker 3 (08:40):
Yeah, and there was a period if.

Speaker 4 (08:41):
You don't mind, well, I was just say I have
a quick follow up is there and maybe Ryan, this
goes well with what you were going to ask, so
maybe you just tag it on to the end of this.
I wonder if they're a cynical person might say this
is just like Dylan going electric. This is you know,
the it's not that the mainstream media has become more
tolerant sort of independent voices. It's that the independent voices

(09:02):
have found their way into the mainstream because you know,
there might be like a Chomsky criticism, like they've become
part of the machine. And I don't think that's quite right.
And Ryan, do you I mean, do you have a okay, Yeah,
what do you make of that? Azrael? Like, just in
terms of the content of what's expressed when you go
from one platform to another, because my perspective actually is

(09:25):
that it probably has become the mainstream has seen in
the market there's an interest in these different opinions and
ideas from outside, you know, their usual gates, and brought
those voices in because they know they can market them,
they know there's an appetite for them. But I'm curious
what you make of that.

Speaker 1 (09:43):
This just doesn't strike me as as a new phenomena.
The major institutions are always looking around to try to
see who is gaining audience, what is resonating with their audiences,
and in what way so it can become part of
their product. That's capitalism at its finest. It happens in music,
it happens in movies, it happens in television, it happens
in media, right. I mean my own story in journalism

(10:06):
is part of that. I think there was a moment
of substack explosion when there were particular ideological fights that
were blowing up media organizations, right. And I think this
is a period where you see things like Andrew Sullivan
go into substack from New York Magazine. That moment is
not that true, right, It's not how these organizations currently

(10:28):
feel from the inside. It doesn't feel like the ideological
strictures lay down, at least in exactly that way. And
so at this juncture, I don't particularly find substack offering
me a hugely different ideological set of perspectives, and I
can get elsewhere, and often I can get them else

(10:48):
with better editing. As an example, right in the thing
that you were on my show to talk about, Emily.
I follow the post liberals, but I follow them mostly
through journals and I follow them in their writing places
like The New Statesman, and I do follow the substacks,
but I find a lot of the substacks to be
tiresome to follow and not the best expression of those

(11:09):
ideas over time. And so you know. But but First
Things can be a very useful magazine, I think, to
read in a regular way, the clear amount you know,
review of books is an interesting journal to read right now.
So I don't find this to be a particularly new phenomena.
There's always a bit of a lag between what is
finding new audience in the more independent sphere and what

(11:33):
is finding its way into mainstream institutions. But I typically
view that as a as much more of a lag
as places you know, come to to understand, you know,
what you could really call, in a sentic way, the
market signals, rather than typically a chomp sky and manufactured
consent approach or or a model or a you know,
some kind of model of the constantly acused censorship.

Speaker 3 (11:57):
And through through through all those different gigs that you
mentioned that you've gone through. At each step you somebody
watching from the background, or maybe even let's say you
as like a college student would say, oh wow, I've
made it. This is the place where I need to be,
and now I can just do my work, Like even
at the very beginning of getting you know, the Washington Post,

(12:21):
when when we were growing up in the eighties nineties,
like being a Washington Post columnist was like the pinnacle
of opinion writing, journalistic success that was equivalent to the
New York Times. People might find that shocking now, like
nobody ever really talks about the Washington Post opinion section
the way they do New York Times anymore. But yet

(12:41):
after several years of that, you moved on then started Vox,
very you know, extremely successful, you know, independent online news organization,
which maybe you could say, well now now we made it. Now,
now this is what I'm going to do, and then
you moved on again. So are you restless? Did you just? Like,
what was the thing that was moving you from place

(13:04):
to place?

Speaker 1 (13:05):
I don't think I'm restless, at least I don't feel it.
But I feel it is tired. What I feel is
profoundly tired all the time. When I went from the
Post to Vox, I believed, and in some ways this
was born out. In some ways it wouldn't. It wasn't
that we could use the growing tools of digital media

(13:26):
to do new things in the news. What you know,
I always say I fundamentally left the Washington Post for
a different content management system, and we wanted to build
this explanatory layer underneath the work. This constantly updated. I mean,
when you really think of what you can do online
that you can't do in print, in text, and most

(13:48):
of the early phase of online journalism was simply moving
what you did in print into a computer, the opportunities
are remarkable, right. It's still to me the untapped opportunity
of you can update a webpage and as such, a
single story can change and grow over time. Sometimes people
look at that as some way of pulling one over

(14:09):
on the audience, but that's because we've given the audience
expectations from a different era, right.

Speaker 2 (14:14):
You know.

Speaker 1 (14:14):
One of our big views at Box was what if
we could have this story that is a fundamental part
of a story, right, not the new piece of news,
but the context for all those new pieces of news.
What if we had that growing and changing we call
those card stacks. What really made that hard? And I
mean there were certain workflow issues that we're just really
really difficult about keeping up that many of them when

(14:36):
you were a small organization. I think you needed to
be something the size of The New York Times to
really make that work. But the other was that there was,
at least for a period, a real split into the platforms,
and there was this phase driven by traffic on Facebook
and traffic elsewhere where we weren't just publishing. And this
is true for Box, but also true for The New

(14:57):
York Times, for the Washington Post, for everybody. You weren't
just publishing to your site. You were publishing to Facebook
incident articles, you were publishing to Google Amp, you were
publishing into Apple News, you're publishing onto Snapchat in a
very different way. And in publishing it to all these
different places, you no longer control over the underlying system.
So a lot of that burst of enthusiasm for what

(15:20):
you could build and how you can make it different
by taking advantage of your ability to code the underlying
content management and code and recode the website and change
what was possible that just didn't pan out. A lot
of other things did pan out, And I'm super proud
of a lot of things that we did when I
was at Vox, and a lot of things that the
Box is doing now. I mean it was built to

(15:40):
be a organization focused on contextual journalism or explanatory journalism,
and I think that ended up not just both being
good for it, but good for the broader media, where
a lot of things that we pioneered have been absorbed
at a pretty deep level and are now commonplace. But
the reason I personally left was in and it was
sort of the opposite of restlessness but exhaustion. Managing a

(16:03):
startup for seven or eight years is really hard, and
I was editor in chief for about half of that
and then editor at large. But when you're one of
the founders of something, you're sort of always a key
manager of it when you're there, and I wanted to
be able to focus back on my own work just
as a person and not really be a manager of
an organization that at that point was one hundred and
fifty people, And in order to both do that for

(16:25):
myself and also to create space for the people who
would be managing vox to really have full freedom right
not have people constantly coming to me and saying, hey,
I'm not sure this is really you know, how we
started out, or should we really be doing this, or
we'd love to have you in this meeting or what
do you think about this? At some point it's really
hard to manage around a founder, you know, when the

(16:46):
founder is sitting there and still doing a bunch of
the an immediate organization, the journalism, so both. So I
could no longer be a manager and the managers could
truly be the managers. It was time for me to
move on.

Speaker 3 (17:00):
Interesting piece of Internet history. In the earlier part of
what you said that I think people who are newer
to this, you know, need to understand part of it.
You talked about the early link economy, with the with
the Bloggi sphere, and the difference with substact being that
you can actually make make a living. There was a
period of time maybe you weren't making a lot of money,
but where you could act. There were actually bloggers who

(17:21):
were making money from ads, uh and kind of overnight
and you might even remember this the Google ad Sense
apocalypse or whatever the bloggers at the time called it.
Google basically just said, no, what, we're actually not doing
that anymore. We've decided we're going to We're going to
keep the money now. And because everything was at that
point monopolized by Google, they could they could simply just

(17:45):
do that, and then we witnessed, you know it kind
of a parasitic takeover of of digital media organization revenue
years later, in the exact way that you've talked about,
where the platforms successfully persuaded individually all of these different
news organizations, some of them to quote unquote pivot to video,

(18:06):
which was its own criminal debacle, I believe.

Speaker 1 (18:09):
Yeah, who wants to watch video?

Speaker 3 (18:11):
Yeah, exactly, Well, so the pivot to video, if people
don't remember this was this was driven by Facebook, which
spent enormous amounts of money giving it directly to news organizations,
basically funding their journalism to pivot to creating these online

(18:33):
these online videos that they would put on Facebook, and
then Facebook, we now know because a lot of the
records are now public, was completely lying about the views
that they were getting. I remember one of the first
ones I did over at Hugh Post. They said it
got like one hundred and fifty thousand live viewers.

Speaker 4 (18:51):
Is this top Post Live?

Speaker 3 (18:53):
No, this is this is pre huff Post It Actually,
I think it helped kill huff Post Live and that
what it did is that killed a lot of organic
ideas that journalists had, like yourself over at fox hof
Post Live, for instance, trying to build an actual, like
native live video audience and pushed it into this Facebook

(19:14):
video operation. And then Facebook got tired of that a
couple of years later. But by that point they had
gobbled up all of the revenue and the audience and
there was nothing left for digital news organizations. They raised,
they raised interest rates, the money drives up, and they
all and they all disappear, like it's that's more or
less like the collapse, the rise and the collapse, and

(19:37):
then the kind of platforms walk away with with uh
with with most of the audience. H what remains though?
The New York Times, like somehow out of that fire,
you know, emerges this phoenix that looked like it might
not make it at some point. And you know, look
at the Los Angeles Times, look at the Chicago Trimmune.

(19:58):
Yet the New York Times has been become almost a
platform onto itself. Do you think that's becoming increasingly interesting
way to think about the Times rather than as a
news organization that's interesting.

Speaker 1 (20:12):
Is it a platform? I don't think it's a platform,
because I think a platform implies within it the ability
for others to build on it, I will say I
largely agree with your history there of the twenty tens.
The only thing I would say to it is that
I don't even think Facebook, at least in my experience,
Facebook put some money into help into encouraging people to
bring things to video, but for most media organizations, they

(20:34):
didn't give them that much money. They weren't that interested
in us. What they were doing is both inflating views
and just in Facebook and really everywhere, the promise of
that era was that you were building these huge audiences
on these platforms and that eventually they build the revenue
mechanisms so you can monetize that. Right, if you think

(20:56):
about what BuzzFeed was, what Vice was, what everything was,
well huff Post, right, everything was sort of designed now
on this theory that having used you know, have Facebook
and Twitter and whatever to reach more readers, viewers, whatever
it might have been, than we ever had before, we
would turn that into money. And at a certain point

(21:18):
in each one of these cases, a platform said came
in and said, I know what we've been telling you,
but actually we're going to turn that into money. And
that was the end of it. Right that ultimately those
business models couldn't work. And that speaks to what you
just said about The New York Times, because the Times
fairly early in this process, building off of its own

(21:40):
centrality in the media world, its own size, and the
quality of the offering, they made a decision that at
the time they made it was highly controversial in journalism,
which was they were going to try to get people
to pay for The New York Times, and they were
going to put articles behind a paywall, and they were
going to go virtually all in on the idea that
you could build a subscription busines business to media digitally,

(22:02):
even though all your competitors were free, right, even though
somebody could easily just substitute in the Washington Post, the
La Times, the Atlantic Right, choose your you know, choose
your media organization. The Times wasn't the only one. The
Journal and the Financial Times had been doing subscriptions, but
there was a view that these publications that were a
little bit more like trade publications for the financial press

(22:25):
could make subscriptions work, whereas something that was as easily
substitutable as news could not. And the absolute core of
the New York Times success was making the paywall work
and making subscriptions work, and then that informs a lot
of subsequent strategy, which is obviously, you know, not mostly
stuff that happened before I came here, and I have
no role in any of it even now. But when

(22:46):
you think of things like games and cooking, the Times
has this model which is in a way almost more
like the Netflix model.

Speaker 4 (22:54):
Right.

Speaker 1 (22:54):
If they can make the package worth paying for, then
the whole thing work. And so anything that makes a
package more incrementally valuable is very, very valuable to The
Times and to me it's one of the And now
they're putting podcast like mine behind a paywall. I mean,
the new episodes are free, but the older ones are
going into this paywalled archive because of you. Is the

(23:15):
only thing that is really reliable in funding journalism is
persuading the audience to pay for it at some level.
Anything else, be it advertising where the advertisers have a
lot of views understandably so on what they want to
advertise next to it's like, you don't want the brand
association between Lexis to be the devastation of Gaza, right.
So it's very hard to get really strong advertising for

(23:39):
a lot of hard and important news stories, and the
platforms are completely unreliable partners. So if you don't want
to be completely subject to the whims of one of
those two businesses or partnerships, you have to be able
to make convincing people to pay for the thing you're
making for them work.

Speaker 4 (23:56):
So what's really interesting I think about all of that,
and I'm curious about your take on this. I think
what made your writing so compelling in the blog days
and still now was a sense that the neoliberal consensus,
if we can call it that, sort of taken on
more of a profound or popular meaning now, but at

(24:19):
the time in the Bush era, there was a sense
that it wasn't really working. People in the Bloggis Fair
were writing about privacy and data and aftermath of nine
to eleven and adventurism abroad and all of that, And
I kind of wonder you've written about family policy, or
you've talked about family policy, right, and I wanted to
ask you about that too. There's a sense on the

(24:39):
right that came after the Bush era, in fact, really
after the Obama era, that suddenly this neoliberal consensus that
they had defended so doggedly, whether it was the FBI
or the Patriot Act, really wasn't working, or anti welfare
policies really wasn't working. And there's some thinking in that
space now about how conservatives can use policy is to

(25:01):
shape a world that they see as more conservative on
family level, on community level. So I guess I wonder
if you think you were sort of the right is
kind of a Johnny come lately to what in some sense,
not exactly obviously in your policy prescriptions are wildly different
in some cases, but we're you sensing Do you think

(25:21):
you were ahead as someone who is center left, Were
you ahead of sensing something that the right is now
kind of catching up to.

Speaker 1 (25:31):
I'd have to think about that. It's funny because I
my initial instinct is to say no. As much as
I'd like to sell you on on my own prescience, well,
I'm not sure I would totally buy that that version
of what made my writing useful over these over these years.
But let me not make this about me. I do

(25:52):
think that the right is dealing with its own set
of failures, and one of the things that I think
is interesting about where it has ended up is it
has a lot of trouble then distinguishing what it actually
wants to do about them. From banal prescriptions on the left.
And I think if you want to see this very

(26:12):
clearly among the ideological post liberals, you go listen to
the podcast episode I did with Patrick Deneen, you know,
eighteen months ago, a year ago, And in that episode, Daneen,
who is very close to Jade Vance and has become
one of these people who you know, talks about, you know,
the liberals who have been in charge, as if to

(26:37):
say they've betrayed the country and the people would be
too too gentle for how he frames it in my view.
But then you talk to him and it was very
hard to figure out where he really differed from Joe Biden,
And if you then read his subsequent book, it was
still very hard to figure it out. It's like you're
going to expand the House of Representatives to a thousand people,
You're going to do national service, like this is your

(26:57):
big set of ideas. These are again like they've been everywhere.
But I don't think it's because the center left or
the left since to these problems earlier. Necessarily, I don't
think the right has figured out if a lot of
the problems it is most concerned about are even amenable
to policy solutions in the first place, Right, if you're

(27:18):
worried about family breakdown, which people have been worried about
in different contexts for a very long time, right, I
think you can really understand JD. Vance's Hillbilly elegy as
an extension of what had been written about black communities
for a very long time and is bringing a lot
of that same research. Somebody described it to me the
other day as like the Mooin to Hand report for
white people. And this family breakdown is a very very

(27:43):
hard problem to solve. People have tried lots of different
things on the right and the left, and it's not
really worked. Fertility rates, which are a big question on
the right right now, there are a lot of countries
have been going through much more profound fertility collapse and
anything we're seeing in the United States. They have a
much more intense set of incentives to do something about it,
and nothing they have tried. If you're looking at places

(28:04):
like South Korea and Japan and Italy and others, none
of it has worked. And by the way, that's true
on the you know, more liberal solutions too. A lot
of times liberals will say, well, if you want to
do something about fertility rates, you need universal childcare and
this and that, but they're not higher in the Nordic
countries where you do see those kinds of wrap around
social policies. So I think there are a bunch of

(28:24):
things people on the right are worried about. Some of
them you could solve in more liberal ways, right, I mean,
you could get wages up using a number of the
just normal policies like the ear in income tax credit.
You know, in the child tax credit. You can get
effectively the amount of money people have to spend up
by using tax transfers. We know how to do that.
But in terms of some of the broader community dimensions,

(28:47):
family dimensions that I think truly sit at the core
of things people on the right are worried about, I
don't think they have. They've only, I think, begun to
recognize the scale of the problem. They definitely have not
thought up, or worked through or trialed out solutions that
fit the problem. And to a bunch of things we
talked about. When you're on my show, then you get

(29:08):
into the cultural dimensions of the rot the right or
the postable right, or whatever you want to call it.
The new right is seeing and on the other hand,
they've tied themselves to Donald Trump and barstool sports and
a bunch of aggressive accelerators of that cultural rot and
so the contradictions become even more profound within that movement.

(29:30):
So I think the ideological difficulty of what of what
the sort of new right is trying to grapple with
is at this point like frankly underappreciated.

Speaker 3 (29:41):
Yeah, maybe that's a good question for Emily then is
I thought, tell me if you agree as with that.
Jade Vance's performance in the vice presidential debate, in a
lot of moments, was actually the most eloquent articulation of
Biden's economic policy and Biden's economic agenda that anybody had
put forward, except it would then be done with a

(30:05):
line also that Biden is destroying the country. It's like, okay, fine,
but everything you just said is something that they have
embraced and done and would like to and would like
to do, and to the point that it might not
be enough to do the cultural things that he's arguing
for Emily, is it like that goes back to the
question of how real is it? And is some of

(30:27):
this just cover for actually wanting to smuggle in the
cultural stuff under the guise of the kind of economic populism,
but understanding that you need both to make them more palatable,
like what like, how do you move forward as the
new right?

Speaker 4 (30:45):
There I think, I think there's a cynical interpretation where
there are some people who are genuinely engaged in the
project of smuggling. I think there are other people I
would include myself, I would include JD and this who
see them as inextricably intertwined the sort of project of
economic populism and a more conservative culture. But what's really

(31:06):
interesting about that comparison. I'm very curious as we thinking
about this too, is it shows what's untenable I think
about ultimately the realignment between right and left, because you
could see the JD vance defense of the Biden policy
I think being true if Biden was explicitly doing it
to reduce single parent households, to improve marriage rates, to

(31:30):
make people more interested in getting married and less interested
in getting divorced, to you know, ultimately boost the cause
of let's say like community, civic society and all that.
And I guess Biden might say it was about civil
society as well, but marriage and children in particular. We
see the Harris campaign, you know, understandably latching onto JD's

(31:52):
childless cat lady quote. And I think that's the fundamental
difference between JD's his defense of economic populism and Biden's
defense of economic populism. And I actually think that that's
what makes it sort of untenable the realignment in the
long term. And I think it's a huge problem for
those of us on a new Right who want to
sell these policies to the public. It's just the public's

(32:14):
really not with us on some of those were those
questions of cultural conservatism.

Speaker 1 (32:19):
Here's I think an interesting way of thinking about this.
I think it's worth thinking of Pete Boodhajedge and JD
Vance as having certain echoes of each other, which I
think both people, both of them would really hate. But
it's one reason they hate each other so much. But
if you look at and go listen to the podcast
episodes that Pete Bootajedge did while Pete boota judge was
rising up in politics over the past you know, five

(32:41):
or six years, you go listen to the things he
did with people like me and on you know liberal
shows that where the audience is a liberal and he
was not quite as well known as he is today.
And he sounds the way he does when he just
did my show a month ago. Right, he sounds the
way he does when he goes on Fox News more
or less. Right, he sounds the same. The thing that liberals,

(33:03):
even to somebody the left, are saying internally is the
same as what they are saying externally. They believe that
what they are saying to each other is actually a
thing they can say to the public. You look at
the problem Jady Vance has had and then what he
did in that debate, And the reason Jady Vance was
so good in that debate is he didn't sound like
Jady Vance at all. He did an amazing job not

(33:26):
sounding like Jadvance and also not sounding like Donald Trump.
So what he did was you go watch him in
all these podcast interviews and speeches and nat Con conferences
and whatever that he was doing on his rise up,
and he sounds like one guy, and then when he
needs to try to win over the general public, he
sounds totally different. Now, there's always obviously a certain amount
of running to the center that happens in political campaigns.

(33:48):
You can certainly see it with Kamala Harris but there
is something deeper here happening that is of particular difficulty,
I think for the right, where part of what the
right I think has persuaded itself of is it modern
American culture is decadent and perverse. And part of maybe
what you need to do about that has to do

(34:09):
with calling it decadent and perverse. And so in their
own fora we'll call it decadent and perverse and talk
about the miserable, childless cat ladies and all the terrible
choices are making in their own lives. And then they
have to win over an actual voter. They shut the
hell up about that and run from it as fast
as they possibly can. And the problem Vance has had

(34:30):
is that it's not that easy for him to run
for it. But this is where you see a real,
a real political problem. When the things you are actually
saying and the things you then need to say in
public develop that level of divergence from each other, then
you have an unresolved problem within not just your political
coalition but your political thinking, because you're not going to

(34:50):
be able to do it if you can't even really
talk about it.

Speaker 3 (34:55):
Is that something that people are grappling with on the right.
And I'm curious how much of the the different presentations,
let's say, is on a right wing podcast versus and
the vice presidential debate, how much of those different presentations
reflect fundamentally different politics, and how much of it reflects
what he would argue is the same politics and the
same policies but kind of dressed up differently messaging purposes

(35:21):
for different audiences.

Speaker 4 (35:23):
Well, I think for JD it's definitely different messaging purposes
for different audiences, and it's like exactly correct about him.
I think for some people, I mean, I actually get this.
Sometimes it's like you you it's it's in good faith
because you know that there's such a massive gulf between
where you are in terms of like your faith and

(35:43):
where you are where you're whoever you're talking to, whatever
audience you're talking to, is you know, if you're talking
to an audience, for example, that has people who who
could have you know, trans family members, which is basically
any audience right now, like you you can't talk to
them like you would be talking to them. The right
wing podcasts would be like just be rude more than
you know, being unappealing, It would just be rude and uncharitable.

(36:06):
So I think there's there's some of that that happens
when media is siloed in the technological ways that we
were talking about, and some of these these social gaps
are so significant. But I think, you know, for politicians
like JD. Vance, watching him is fascinating because there's some
of the stuff that conservatives really thought in the aftermath

(36:27):
of twenty twenty when there was some you know what
people have called quote unquote woe flash, when there were
some of that, conservatives thought, this is it, this is
our ticket. We have found the way to sell and
Jdvans very much ran on this platform. We have found
a way to sell this new right agenda of economic
populism and cultural conservatism. The public is ready for it,
and that quickly they became it quickly became clear that

(36:47):
that was not true. And so some of it right
now I think absolutely isn't bad faith. It is you know,
just talking to different audiences with messages that are in
some ways deceptive, right deceptive, And it's a I think
it's a really interesting point.

Speaker 3 (37:04):
And as we're actually I'm curious for your take on
the on the from the inside of the New York
Times and the on the woe the woe clash, as
Emily called it. I hadn't actually heard that phrase before,
but I but I love it with but we we
we can all, we can all feel it happening. That
it felt like the center left kind of overstepped when
it came to identity politics and has is now very

(37:27):
quietly stepping back, but not doing so overtly, Like there's
nobody is out there necessarily kind of renouncing any of
the bumper stickers or yard signs that they have, but
they're just not putting up fresh ones. I'm curious if
you're if you're seeing that unfold inside the inside the

(37:48):
the ecosystems where you kind of operate.

Speaker 1 (37:52):
I say nothing about the inside of the New York Times,
and nothing I say here will be about the inside
of the New York Times. I will say I think
you can look around the media politics generally, and yeah,
see a huge change. I think there are a couple
dimensions to this. One is that there is a difference
between what people came to believe and how they came

(38:12):
to act, or at least how they came to be
pushed on those beliefs. And the core thing here in
My view was actually technological. You had this two new
things hit the media in a fairly compressed period of time,
and also many other corporate environments or institutional environments too. Obviously, Ryan,
you were at a huge and very very influential piece

(38:33):
on progressive movement politics about this. But I would call
it Slack and Twitter. And what Slack did was created
internal capacity for workers to talk and to organize, right,
not organized necessarily the labor union term of the sense,
but organized in a more informal term, and managers can't right.

(38:53):
The way the Slack works and institutions was, at least
in that period was there was a lot of you know,
emojis coming in under things people said. But but the
managers are much more you know, checking what they say
by HR and the lawyers and so on. So first
you had this sort of communication gulf changing.

Speaker 2 (39:10):
Right.

Speaker 1 (39:10):
It used to be that it is fairly easy for
the boss to kind of call everybody into the room
and make some speech, and it's actually harder for the
sense of the employees to be to be passed back up.
Slack made that very easy, and then Twitter made it
easy for that to spill out, particularly in high visibility
industries into public and so the thing that a lot

(39:31):
of these institutions had no immunity to was what did
you do when these sort of internal slack fights became
external public relations problems or perceived public relations problems on Twitter,
and a lot of them just were folding kind of
left and right. They you know, were firing people, They
were acting in ways that were afraid. They were putting
out statements they didn't necessarily believe. Now that doesn't mean

(39:53):
they didn't believe the under a set of the underlying
things about there being huge levels of systemic racism in society.
You know that there were all kinds of problems and
inequities that should be addressed. And I do think part
of the step back has been a step back from
some of the ways that institutions without any immune system

(40:14):
to this sort of new era kind of would overreact
to I think, in my view, fairly modest levels of
public criticism. But that does not mean I think there's
been a step back from believing a lot of the
things that were not believed about society in say, twenty
and thirteen, in twenty fourteen, so, for instance, I think
the view that there is systemic racism in policing is

(40:38):
widely held, but the view that you defund the police
is not now widely held. But I think ten years ago,
neither view was all that widely held, or at least
not talked about that often in public. And I think
you could find a lot of different things like this
where the idiological priors have been absorbed into or the
ideological arguments up to a point, have been absorbed into

(40:59):
the system. They are now kind of common sense when
they weren't at another time. I think organizations think about
representation very differently than they did when I got into
the media in two thousand and five, for instance. But
the sense that your employees are going to, you know,
in a progressive nonprofit or a media organization or even

(41:19):
a corporation like Nike, your employees are going to put
a bunch of like slack faces under something somebody said
and then you know, go public on Twitter, and that's
going to be treated as a problem for the organization
to deal with, as a problem for the employee to
now have to deal with their bosses. I think that
has changed, so my views, administrators and managers have a
very different approach to dealing with these things, and some

(41:41):
of the sort of inability to say, well, hey, wait,
is that actually a good idea has gone away. But
it's not like we've gone all the way back to
how people understood the situation to be in twenty ten.
I think there's a very very different sense of what
is required of and should be thought about in a
lot of both key decisions and and in society at large.

Speaker 3 (42:02):
Yeah, and Emily, I think the left had gone a
little so bananas for a while that the right felt
like it had a really easy target, and I feel
like that target has been taken away. I'm curious from
the right, like if, as you grapple with the left
and go out and target this like the wocism and

(42:22):
all that stuff, if it feels harder for the right
to hit it now, Like if it feels like and
almost I could imagine from the right's perspective in almost
an unfair way, because it's like, wait a minute, we
never talked about it on the rise up there was
that everybody kept saying there is no such thing as
cancel culture. Obviously there was, but that makes it harder
for then people to talk about its recession at the

(42:44):
same time because something that was never here, can't go away.
It was like you're fighting these ghosts, but now they
might be actual ghosts. So I'm curious from your perspective
if it feels like a tougher target to hit now.

Speaker 4 (43:00):
I think there's something to that because one of the
one of the trends that I've observed going back to
the beginning of this conversation is I think some of
mainstream media responding to the market pressures that when you
see people doing really well on a platform like substack.
If you're the New York Times and you see Barry
weis doing really well on a platform like substack, I
think you realize that the the people who are complaining

(43:23):
about coverage that undercut the consensus position on like puberty blockers,
for just to take one example, is acceptable, and that
there you know that there are more people who are
open to having a reasonable discussion than the sample of
people in the publications slack or you know, the slack

(43:45):
at the Washington Post or the LA Times or the
Associated Press that the country more broadly is is comfortable
with having a conversation that everyone in your newsroom might
not be. So whether some of these elite opinions be
they at Disney or somewhere else, is ultimately representative of
a larger trend and young people. It was probably the

(44:12):
was overestimating the public support for some of those really
radical or harder left positions. And I think also just
really quick final point would be that media in general
makes it hard for the right to come to a
policy position, like to actually have a firm position on
a lot of policies, because so much of our energy
is understandably tied up in picking apart media coverage and

(44:34):
finding bias and arguing against bias, that we all sort
of end up looking around and saying, okay, but what
do we actually what do we actually think about this?
What should we actually do about this? And oftentimes you
just never get to that point because the first step
is like going through the bad coverage.

Speaker 1 (44:50):
I think two things about this one. I think it
would be really really healthy for the right if it
didn't tell itself that if the right would spend more
time creating good media organizations to do good reporting at
a high level of factual accuracy instead of complaining so
much about the media, it'd be so much healthier. I
remember when Tucker Carlson came out and said he was
building the Daily Caller right and it was going to

(45:12):
be the conservative New York Times, and good lord, but
that became right. There's like a real level of empirical
and epistemic standards that the right does not hold itself to,
which is not a thing the left does to it,
but is an actual problem on its own side. And that,
in my view, is what makes it hard for the
right to come to strong policy positions, because it doesn't

(45:33):
have strong internal internal standards for its own debates. And
one way of thinking about this, to connect it to
what we were just talking about, is there all kinds
of things that you know we're coming were ideological waves
happening on the left and the Democratic Party in twenty twenty.
The Democratic Party and the sort of broader left, central left,

(45:55):
whatever you want to call it, liberal coalition has metabolized.
It's kind of said, Okay, we're taking this part, even
this part behind. That's not true for the right from
what it was dealing within twenty twenty. Jd Vance will
not currently say that Donald trumb lost a twenty twenty election.
Mike Pence was not at this year's Republican National Convention,
and so one actual asymmetry to me between the parties

(46:17):
when you think back to their condition in twenty twenty
was both parties were having a very very hard year
for a bunch of different reasons. I also think the
pandemic year is very hard on both parties. Right, There's
a lot going on in American society that had had
pushed kind of everybody into a very strange place. But
I think the institutions on the left are just frankly
healthier and more able to engage in slightly reasoned and

(46:40):
managed criticism and periods of renewal, and at least under
Donald Trump on the right, that's not been as true.
And frankly the institutions on the right that have been
trying to build some kind of structure for this. I
think Heritage Foundation and Project twenty twenty five really saw
itself as one of these groups, right, they were going
to take this kind of mess of things from twenty
twenty and turn it into some thing, and it's become

(47:01):
like a huge catastrophe over there. But I do think
Trump himself creates a lot of difficulty and the media
dynamics themselves, right, I mean the Fox News and Dominion
like settlements really tell you something. And now Tucker Carlson
is over on X you know, with Elon Musk, where
you know, he's still a very influential figure on the right,
but has even less institutional strictures on what he can

(47:24):
say or what level you know, those statements are going
to be held to. And so I do think institutional
health is a very big part of this, and just
a problem the right is facing is that it has
not learned a lot from twenty twenty right. I think
the left actually has.

Speaker 3 (47:40):
Yeah, I'm curious for your take on that, because there
was this I don't know if you know this speech
that Tucker Carlson gave several years after he started the
Daily Caller, as you might remember this too, where he
basically said I was wrong. Like the right doesn't want this,
Like the right does not want a rigorous conservative New
York Times. The right ones a warrior, you know, for

(48:03):
the right, like and that's what it And it sees
right wing journalism as a weapon to be wielded on
behalf of the movement rather than on the left. It's
it's kind of it's like a check on the movement.
It's like and the journalism is first and the and
the kind of ideology is a second that does seem
to be an asymmetry. Not to speak ill of your colleagues,

(48:25):
as we're talking institutionally, not not colleagues, not none of
your particular colleagues at different institutions. But I'm curious if
that's been your uh if if that's been your experience
on the in in the right, in the right wing
media ecosystem, you know.

Speaker 4 (48:40):
I think part of it, so I'll say, actually, I
think part of it is that Fox News is the
elephant in the room because everyone is sort of like
comparing themselves or the Fox just has so much power
and it's waned a little bit, but has so much
power over the consumer. So it's hard to you it's
it's it's hard to kind of build conservative media.

Speaker 3 (49:03):
From especially when Tucker launch Daily Caller that Fox was
like hegemonic.

Speaker 4 (49:07):
Yes, yeah, oh my gosh. Absolutely, And so that really
set the tone for a lot of people in conservative media.
I mean, obviously there are a ton of conservative journalists,
and you know, we would maybe disagree on some of them.
I know a lot of people who are committed to
pursuing truth. As you know, an open biased conservative but
you know, there are definitely I do. I agree that's

(49:28):
a problem. I think the dominion settlement point is really
interesting because my sort of rebuttal that would be there
was also the Covington Catholic Settlement from CNN, and I
just don't know. For me, I see the forces that
created the dominion settlement, meaning Fox News's coverage of the
twenty twenty election that led to the dominion settlement, which

(49:49):
in some cases really followed Trump's line. I see that
as being downstream of the forces that created the Covington
Catholic Settlement, which came from CNN kind of jumping the
gun on what happened to Nick Sandmen on the National
Mall for reasons that were pretty clearly ideological. You guys
might disagree, you know, journalists get things drunk sometimes. I

(50:10):
thought that was purely ideological error. So I think conservatives
are just constantly reacting. It becomes very hard for our
institutions to reflect sort of first principles and then pursue
a healthy debate over policies. So I kind of agree
and disagree at the same time.

Speaker 3 (50:27):
I guess as were before you go, uh, I did
you know you covered you cover economic policy that's, you know,
your thing for decades really has been that area. So
tell us, like what is going on with Kamala Harris's
campaign and Lena Khan and Jonathan Cantor, Like, why why
haven't they just come out and said, of course we're

(50:50):
going to reappoint Lena Khan and Jonathan Cantor. They have
they have been central to this this pro worker, anti
trust policy that the Biden administration is pushed forward. What
why won't they just do that?

Speaker 1 (51:03):
Like, what do you hear? I don't think they would
do that about any member of the administration, like one.
I think there's actually a rule you're not allowed to
do that usually. Uh, but they haven't said we're going
to repoint Jennet Yellen, who's going to be you know,
who's been central to the economic recovery.

Speaker 3 (51:17):
Right, But also nobody on Wall Street is demanding that.

Speaker 1 (51:20):
I just I think the actual I think the actual
line you're look, I think there's a version where why
have they not said, listen, Lena Khan's you know, approach
is great versus we're definitely going.

Speaker 3 (51:32):
To Rea think those are.

Speaker 1 (51:34):
Pretty different questions, and the answer here is a little
bit I'm not sure. I don't know what I think
Kamala Harris believes in her harder hearts about anti trust policy.
I don't think it's necessarily that you know, read Hastings
or read Hoffmann. I forget which read was Antilena Kon
gets to set FDC policy, but her, you know. I

(51:55):
think one of the realities of the Kamala Harris campaign
is it emerged in matter of weeks, right, and so
the work that a normal campaign would have done and
that the candidate themselves would have done over the course
of a primary and a year to kind of work
every dimension of this out and give a series of
major speeches laying out there thinking on it, they both
not only didn't do, but didn't have to do. And

(52:18):
a lot of that is done because you have to
do it right. In some ways, it's strategically valuable to
be ambiguous. The people who would be upset if you
didn't reappoint Lenicon or someone like her, If you tell
them we're not going to appoint Lenikon or someone like her,
they're really mad, Whereas if you don't say anything at all,
they're not happy, but they're still there in the coalition

(52:39):
trying to influence the coalition, and so the fact that
Harris did not have a primary process were pushed from
the left or from the right, she had to distinguish
which side of somebody. These divides she's been on has
given them the opportunity to maintain a high level strategic ambiguity.
So they maintain to some degree, given the Donald Trump
is the opponent, the loyalty of the people and the

(52:59):
lean con wing of the Democratic Party, even if that
loyalty is currently suspicious and a little bit frustrated, but
also the donors that that maybe don't want that, and
then if they win the election, then they're gonna have
to make some choices, you know, at the moment, they
don't have to make.

Speaker 3 (53:16):
Speaking of that open primary, you and I were both
rattling the cages for some type of an open process
to nominate a replacement for Biden, if he could be
persuaded to drop out. Were we right at the time?
You think? I mean, I.

Speaker 1 (53:30):
Think early we were right. I mean I think Early
still right the right thing? Are we still No? I
don't think they should do an open primary.

Speaker 3 (53:37):
Or not now, But like in hindsight, were we right?

Speaker 1 (53:41):
I don't know. I think two things about this hard One.
We don't know if Kamala Harris is going to win
the election, and if it turns out that the polling
is systematically, you know, getting Trump wrong by three points
in the Midwest, I think there's gonna be a lot
of people who say, yeah, you know, either she should
have picked Jos Shapiro or or in fact running a

(54:01):
sort of a liberal San Franciscan politician, you know, in
the industrial Midwest is not what the party should have
been doing this year, which is why there was actually
so much resistance to having Joe Biden stepped down and
Kamala Harris step up much earlier in the process. I mean,
as you know, because you were doing some of this
work too. The big thing in the party was not
that Joe Biden at eighty one or eighty two is

(54:22):
an effective candidate, but there was very very little faith
that Harris could step into his place effectively given where
Democrats needed to win. Now, Harris was clearly underrated. I
made that point back in February. I made that point
consistently after February. But we don't exactly know how underrated,
and so if she wins, I think people are going
to say that was all ridiculous. Harris is great particly

(54:45):
she wins convincingly, and if she doesn't, people are going
to say that. You know, Joe Biden should have stepped
down earlier in the party, should have been able to
go through a competitive process to figure out, you know,
which kind of candidate could best compete in the places
Democrats need to win. But by the time Joe Biden
actually stepped down, given how late in the game it was,

(55:05):
I mean you were talking weeks before the Democratic Convention
at that point, and given how exhausted the party was
by what it took to get him to step aside
and his endorsement, like, there was no uh, there was
no possibility or opening for that right. If he had
stepped down in March or decided not to run for
reelection at all, that would have been a different question.

Speaker 3 (55:25):
How much how much heat did you get for that
that February piece calling for Biden to step aside by
the Power Center, It's like I'm at a place now
in my career. I'm a a at a place my career.
Those those folks used they used to give me hell
all the time, Like the like Center Left World they've
kind of given up on me. Like they're like, we're

(55:45):
not we're not we're not influencing this guy, but we're
not even gonna waste waste our breath anymore. But you
know that also means that when I say, like, you know,
Joe bidens to old hat step aside, they're like, well,
that's what he says, Like we dont understand. We guess
we already know he feels that way, but when you
say it, it packs more punch. What kind of counter

(56:06):
punch did you get at the time.

Speaker 1 (56:10):
I mean, a lot of people were not happy with me. Look,
I always want to I'm not like I sit at
ESK and I write things and I say them into
a microphone. It's not a job of tremendous courage. There
are people are pissed at me. And there were a
lot of people privately, you know, we're thinking about these
questions and wanted to talk about it. But but what
they really felt was that I had not sufficiently considered
how bad the alternatives were. That was the real private

(56:32):
reaction I got. Probably are people were like fuck that guy,
but they said it on Twitter. Right, you can go
look at people you know calling me all sorts of
things on Twitter. But because I don't read, I don't
really read social media reaction in that way. I actually
missed a lot of It is funny that when things
sort of turned on this argument, people came to me like,
oh my god, I'm so sorry for how everybody treated you,
and I was like, they treated me that badly. I

(56:53):
hadn't actually totally totally clocked how bad people must have been.
Although you know, then people sent me when.

Speaker 4 (56:58):
Did you stop? Why didn't you stop tuning into Twitter?

Speaker 1 (57:05):
I'll read it. I don't read stuff about me on it.
I don't think the human mind is well adapted for
that level of feedback. And I find that I am
a less independent thinker if I am tightly tuned in
to the reaction people have to the things that I think,
or say or do. But in private, right and I
had a lot of conversations, including with Biden administration people,

(57:26):
and you know, they were they thought I was wrong.
But they thought I was wrong because one, I was
underestimating Joe Biden. They thought I was wrong. Two because
I was overestimating Kamala Harris, and they thought I was wrong.
Three because there's no way that a party could manage
an open convention that if Kamala Harris was weak, would
pass around Kamala Harris and if you believed all three
of those things. And I was definitely wrong, But but

(57:49):
I didn't. You know, people knew Joe Biden's age was
a problem. So in the more reflective spaces in which
I tended to like actually have conversations, you know, in
a way I that I cared about, you know, it
was it was a little bit more interesting. I did
find that people thought I was like a total fucking idiot,

(58:09):
said so in public and people who didn't said so
in private. But you know, I got to have the
benefit of both sides of that.

Speaker 3 (58:18):
Cool Emily, anything else, I know, as there's got to
run pretty soon.

Speaker 4 (58:25):
No, I just want to say thank you. This was
fantastic and we really appreciate you coming on the show.

Speaker 1 (58:30):
I'm touched you stay through the whole thing, Emily, and
I'm excited to hear to hear what you find from
from from the Rome Post a little.

Speaker 3 (58:36):
Bit wall give us tell us real quick, what are
you hearing, Emily, anything new from your from your Roman friends.

Speaker 4 (58:45):
I think a lot of this is going to change
based on what happens in November.

Speaker 3 (58:48):
So okay, that's a lot of things right now. All right, well,
Ezra Kleine, host of the Ezra Klines Show, New York
Times columnist, thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 1 (59:00):
A Gill