What Has Chris Rufo Wrought?

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

You could really make a case that Christopher Rufo is the most successful activist of this era, certainly on the right.

He initially rose in prominence as the central strategist in the right’s counterattack on D.E.I. initiatives. He’s very much behind a lot of the demonization of critical race theory.

Archival clip of Christopher Rufo: Critical race theory has become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people.

Archival clip of John Oliver: He claims C.R.T. is actually a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.

Rufo built that into a series of campaigns that have actually changed policy. He was very influential in Ron DeSantis’s governorship and in running Claudine Gay out of Harvard:

Archival clip of Rufo: Pushing out Claudine Gay, toppling the president of Harvard, for a journalist like me, is a big win.

And then, in Donald Trump’s second term, quite a lot has come out of Rufo’s work, for better and, from my perspective, for worse.

From many of Trump’s early executive orders:

Archival clip of Donald Trump: We’ve ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies all across the federal government and, indeed, the private sector and our military.

To some of the work that led to the ICE and C.B.P. deployments to Minnesota:

Archival clip of Rufo: This week, I published an exclusive story exposing the Somali fraud rings in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which are stealing billions of dollars from American taxpayers.

Whatever else you want to say about him, Rufo has quite significantly impacted the world we live in.

Rufo is a very smart and often quite honest analyst of his own side. One thing I appreciate about him is he always says what he is doing clearly and in public. And if you listen to him, he seems uneasy.

Archival clip of Rufo: Gone are the days when Tucker Carlson’s nightly monologue set the agenda for the entire right. Now we find ourselves in an escalating war of influencers trading conspiracies and counterconspiracies, driving the right into all different kinds of rabbit holes and dead ends.

You can feel a sort of disquiet, a sense that maybe the right, this right, is not becoming what he hoped it would be — that its attentional and informational sphere is polluted, that the administration is not getting as much done as he had hoped, intended, tried to help it do.

So I wanted to have Rufo on the show. Not because we agree on things — we obviously don’t. Not because I’m trying to talk him into my way of seeing things — I’m not going to do that. But to understand how he understands what he is doing, and also to interrogate it — to ask if the tactics he is using are actually working, or if he’s scoring short-term victories at the cost of helping to seed profound long-term problems.

Rufo is a senior fellow and director of the initiative on critical race theory at the Manhattan Institute. He’s a contributing editor of City Journal. He’s the co-host of the podcast “Rufo & Lomez,” and he’s the author of “America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.”

Ezra Klein: Chris Rufo, welcome to the show.

Christopher Rufo: Good to be with you.

So I want to begin with a piece you wrote in early 2024 titled “The New Right Activism: A Manifesto for the Counterrevolution.” There are a lot of interesting things in there, but the one I wanted to begin with is when you wrote: “No institution can be neutral.”

Tell me why.

That’s an obvious reality if you think about it for longer than a minute. And I think it’s important to say because there’s this mythology that we have in the United States — and it’s a small-L liberal mythology — that institutions can be neutral arbiters, that they can be valueless vessels that achieve some kinds of pragmatic or instrumental ends.

And my point is that no, in practice, institutions always have values, whether they’re implicit or explicit. And for those of us who are on the outside of many powerful institutions, there’s a lot of value in simply revealing the underlying reality. And in fact, political fights are, at heart, the fights for who determines the values, what values are installed in an institution and then, therefore, what kind of decisions get made.

I always take a lot of the arguments about institutions — particularly within the broad philosophical tradition of liberalism — to argue that they can have neutral treatment. They can have neutral rules. And a lot of, for better and worse, procedures in these institutions — everything from notice and comment periods to different ways that they have to create transparency — are about trying to create that capacity for people to be neutrally treated.

Do you think that’s possible?

No. I think “neutral” is the wrong word — I think what we’re looking for is “impartial.” And I would agree with that. Everyone should be treated equally as an individual under law, but that’s impartiality not neutrality.

In a criminal case, if you sentence somebody to the death penalty, you’re not treating them neutrally. You’re actually taking their life, because the underlying law is a kind of moral code.

So I think “neutral” and “impartial” are similar — but in this case critically different.

Another argument you make in that piece is: “The popular slogan that ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’ betrays similar problems” — the slogan being Ben Shapiro’s.

In reality, feelings almost always overpower facts. Reason is a slave of the passions.

Yes, that’s true, and we’ll caveat — we love Ben Shapiro. We’re Ben Shapiro fans, of course. But I think that he’s very wrong on that, and I think conservatives have made a fundamental error in latching on to that.

And really, what it is — it’s a rationalization for losing. It’s like: Yes, we may have lost the great political question that operates on emotions or passions, but we have the facts on our side, and if only people would read our white paper, our regression analysis or our rigorous logical argumentation, then we would be vindicated.

But look, while we should have the facts on our side, and while we should use logic, by itself, it’s insufficient. And, in fact, politics operates on a deeper level, an emotional level. And politics occurs on the field of sentiment and public opinion — much more on the field of abstract argumentation at the top.

Then you go on in the same piece to make an argument for “agitprop” — an old Soviet Union term for agitation and propaganda mashed up together.

It doesn’t have a great reputation — “agitprop” is usually not a term of endearment. But you say: “Agitprop doesn’t mean sacrificing the truth but, rather, channeling the truth toward victory.”

How do you define what agitprop is? And what are you trying to explain to your fellow conservatives about how to use it?

If you’re conducting, say, propaganda on behalf of a falsehood or evil or an unjust cause, it’s bad. My point is that’s not always necessarily true if you are pursuing a cause that is good and true and beautiful.

If you look at the word “propaganda,” the original meaning comes from the Catholic Church, and it was the propagation of the Gospels — the propagation of the truth. These are concepts that we can recover, because the reality is that all politics in the age of the printing press and onward depends on propaganda.

And how do you define what propaganda itself is?

Propaganda is simply the method of communicating a political narrative. Again, we’re using a neutral — I’m going to say a true — narrative to a mass audience through the means of modern media. It’s a rhetorical argument intended to persuade the majority of people to cobble together a majority of public opinion.

And look, this is, again, for conservatives, especially, not new. The founding fathers of this country wrote to each other about this. They wrote in public about this. We seem to have forgotten some of these lessons of how politics actually works. You have to persuade people.

What is persuasion? It’s rhetoric. What is rhetoric at an industrial scale? It’s propaganda.

You’ve been connecting the question of propaganda to whether or not the end it is aimed at is true. How do you think about a scenario where you have untrue propaganda unleashing intense passions toward a true aim?

That’s bad. Yeah, I don’t think that’s good. Aristotle has a great line in his book on rhetoric where he says that the truth has a tendency to prevail.

I love that. I love that because the truth doesn’t always prevail.

It’s a good line.

We can look at history, and sometimes lies prevail. In 2020, into 2024 — during the “woke” era — many lies prevailed. But what is so interesting about that line is: The truth has a tendency to prevail — and what I take from it is, therefore, you always want to be on the side of the truth, even for your own pragmatic political ends. You always want to be on the side of the truth.

Certainly, there are untrue elements or narratives on the right and on the left. A political movement, to succeed, has to have the discipline and integrity to go after it, but always to remember that if the truth has a tendency to prevail, that’s where you want to be.

And then your piece builds to this idea that: “In order to realize the ultimate promise of the political, there also must be something higher — a telos,” which is the Greek word for something like an ultimate end.

A final cause.

A final cause. So one reason I’ve been focusing on this piece is to understand the way you do your work and what your work is.

So what is your telos?

Well, politically speaking, and let’s leave it at that ——

Yes, I don’t mean your family ——

I want to have a restoration of the principles of our republic. If you’re thinking about our republic, you’re thinking about those guiding principles — where they have strayed over the last 250 years. I want to have a restoration of that, and so I’m constantly looking backward at the founding and trying to understand it better, to understand how to bring those principles forward.

You want to have the principles of liberty and equality. You want to have a functioning, healthy republic, and you want to have a culture that is organized according to virtue and, in particular, the virtues of our Western, Anglo-American civilization.

And through my personal observations around the world, as well as my study of the past, I think the Anglo-American civilization — the principles that have animated our republic for the last 250 years — are still the best that we could hope for.

From that perspective, we’re 17 months into Donald Trump’s second term.

Is that all?

[Laughs.] Tell me about it.

It feels like longer. [Laughs.] It feels like longer for you guys, probably.

Is this administration building the kind of country you want to see?

Yes, I think so, and here’s how I would assess it: On the elements within Article II — so the executive power — Donald Trump has done almost everything he could do. Great people within the administration have done almost everything they could do to advance this kind of vision of the country ——

Liberty, equality, virtue.

Yes. And I think that the momentum was strong in Year 1. It has trailed off in Year 2.

Could it be that the executive has lost some of its energy? Yes. Could it be that public opinion has softened? Yes. Could it be that some of the foreign adventures — or misadventures, depending on whom you talk to — have distracted focus? I think yes.

But ultimately, the problem is that the president has a majority in Congress but not 60 votes in the Senate, and so fundamental transformative legislation that I would like to see is impossible.

Make the case to me that Donald Trump is restoring virtue.

[Laughs.] This is a hard case because what you’re going to say is that Trump does not exhibit Christian virtues in his personal life, right?

I’m not even thinking about his personal life. I’m thinking about his public life.

OK. Well, you tell me ——

I didn’t claim he exhibits virtue. You said that they’re doing a pretty good job bringing back liberty, equality and virtue.

Correct.

Make the case to me.

Sure, I’ll make the case, and I’ll make it through the particular example that I’m most familiar with.

One of my big campaigns the last couple of years was the fight to abolish D.E.I.

Diversity, equity and inclusion was this idea that had been germinating in the 1990s and in the 2000s, but it really exploded into public life with universal adoption by most large institutions after 2020. And it was this idea that’s very simple: that there are oppressor groups and oppressed groups in the United States because of the historical realities of our country, and therefore, to achieve and to move toward equal outcomes, you have to treat individuals unequally according to their group identity.

And the president, on Day 1, issued an executive order that was very much in line with the work that we have been doing — to go and wipe out the D.E.I. bureaucracy throughout the federal government.

In that case, you could argue that the principle of equality and impartiality, as we were discussing earlier, had been restored. Not totally — we still have some problems with the underlying statutory law.

Just recently, in the last couple of weeks, the Department of Justice has taken a buzz saw to so-called disparate impact doctrine. Same idea: If there are unequal outcomes, it must, therefore, by definition, be because of discrimination, therefore, you have to remedy it by treating people unequally.

In this case, and because this is the issue I’ve worked on and have been passionate about, I think that you can make an argument that liberty, equality and virtue have been restored.

Are there other problems? Of course. Are we all the way there? No. But on the issues that I personally care about, that I personally have worked on, I think the country is in a much better place than it was two years ago.

I guess one thing I think about, when I think about Donald Trump and virtue, is corruption.

I see Trump taking a luxury aircraft from Qatar, I see his family getting involved in all kinds of crypto schemes — where the investors in their crypto schemes, in many cases, seem to be people who have business before the family, business before the country.

The New Yorker did, I think, a quite conservative tallying up of how much money the Trump family and Trump have made, or how much their net worth has increased, in connection with the presidency. The number was about $4 billion in this term.

It doesn’t look virtuous.

Yeah. Look, here’s my general perspective, and I’ll lay it out to you as honestly as I can.

There are the issues that I work on, that I’m passionate about, that I feel like I have some control over or influence over, and there are the issues that I don’t. And I think I’ve been very straightforward in the areas where I think the administration has fallen short.

And certainly, the perception, and we’ll see over time — I’m sure that there will be inquiries, investigations, etc., into these business enterprises — the perception is bad. You’re not going to get me to defend it. I’m perfectly happy calling out the administration where I think it has strayed or erred. And this is one of those places.

I remember the crypto launch. It was during the transition, I think, where they launched the Trump coin. And I thought: I don’t like this. I don’t want to see this. They shouldn’t be doing that.

And, yeah, you’re not going to get me to defend it.

Well, one of the things I’m touching on here is, I’ve been watching your show, and I see a growing vein of discomfort from you on at least what parts of the right are becoming.

Sure.

In December, you posted on X:

The right’s media apparatus is how the right teaches its followers how to think, and it’s currently getting consumed by conspiracy, psychodrama and tabloid conflicts. If left unchecked, it will turn the audience into the equivalent of a third world click farm.

Tell me about that. What’s been alarming you?

Sometimes, man, you hear your quotes, and you’re like: Oh, that’s very lively language.

This is a huge problem, and I’ll put it this way: There’s a growing split between the institutional right and the online right. The institutional right actually deserves credit for gatekeeping some of these bad tendencies out of our institutions, and I think that’s good. However, the online ——

The institutional right being Fox News and — well, who are you thinking of?

Yes. Conservative think tanks — the Manhattan Institute — the institutional layer of the professional right, let’s say. It’s done a very good job at gatekeeping some of these bad psychological and political tendencies out of our institutions.

The problem that we’re grappling with, though, is that the traditional way of thinking about political media is always as an outgrowth of institutions. So you’d have your magazines, your newsletters, your think tanks, policy papers.

The internet has created costs and benefits. One of the benefits is the ease of communication with a large audience. But one of the negatives is that you have the proliferation of insanity — madness, psychopathology.

And on the right, I think this went into hyperdrive after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It was bubbling up before then but really then took a turn.

You have this tendency on the right, historically: You have a Bircher tendency in the postwar era, and then it waxes and wanes over time. And right now you have, in the online right, someone like Candace Owens, who has departed so far from reality and yet has a massive audience.

It’s doing a disservice to the public, and even more, say, self-interestedly, doing a very grave disservice to the right. Because if you can’t teach your audience, your followers, your political base, how to think properly, they’re not going to behave properly, and you’re not going to have proper outcomes.

It’s important for us on the right to have this internal fight, which is to say, if you think that Israel assassinated Charlie Kirk, or whatever handful of conspiracy theories you have, it means you’re on the outside. You’re not within the movement.

And this is a fight that is happening now. Given a sufficient amount of time, I think we’ll win.

Why do you think you’ll win? Because I look at the right, and I see Tucker Carlson in his current guise, which is a much more conspiratorial guise than he’s had before. He has become a more and more dominant figure. As you note, Candace Owens’s success has been startling.

I’d ask this question in two dimensions: What is the audience demand that they are meeting? What is it that they are providing that people want?

And then the second question is: Why do you think you’ll win?

Yeah, great question. First of all, the audience for conspiracy theories is enormous. Before his legal troubles, someone like Alex Jones was making, apparently, millions of dollars selling vitamins and survival supplies. And if you think about it, to generate that kind of revenue requires a massive, if quiet, under-the-surface audience.

So I think they’re really tapping into that side of the audience. It’s right wing, but not exclusively right wing. And, in fact, a lot of the people who have come over to these conspiracy theories are in that part of the horseshoe where their politics are, let’s say, sub-ideological. They’re more of a feeling, a perception — a set of resentments.

Second, how do conspiracy theories work? Conspiracy theories work for people who want to forfeit agency, for people who do not see the possibility of constructive action in their personal life or in public life. And therefore, the conspiracy theory gives them the rationalization and justification for their nihilism.

It’s “insert here,” right? It’s this group, it’s that group, it’s this other group that is controlling the world, making everything impossible, assassinating our heroes. And this gives them a psychological key that is self-reinforcing. Because a conspiracy theory, for conspiracy theorists, can never be debunked. It’s just one layer of the onion that gets peeled.

I’ll tell you why I think we’re going to win: Because I’ve noticed this even for people in my one degree of separation: Conspiracy theories, and, in particular, antisemitic conspiracy theories, eventually fry your brain. So I think that we’ll see a lot of these personalities, a lot of these psychological tendencies, burn out on their own. And on top of that, as an extra layer of confidence ——

That is an optimistic view on the history of antisemitism right there.

Yeah. Well, OK, I’m saying in the near term, these things wax and wane. But what I’ve seen in the United States is a greater set of antibodies than you might find elsewhere.

And then institutionally, for our side, on the right — look, the people who run institutions are aware of the problem, they’re confronting the problem, we’re dealing with it. And to me, this is inevitable.

Political coalitions are going to have some kind of mixture of the good and the bad, and the question is: Who’s in a position of leadership? What kind of courage and integrity do they have — and can they succeed?

When I look at the field as it is, I think this, say, faction is less powerful than it was six months ago or a year ago, and I hope that trend continues.

There’s an interesting question on institutions on the right here. There’s a G.K. Chesterton quote that’s something like: When men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing; when men stop believing in God, they believe in everything.

There’s a dimension of that around institutions, where the right has become much more anti-institutional. The view that institutions cannot be neutral and largely cannot even be impartial is much more widely held, and there’s been a coordinated attack on many of the institutions in American life.

But new ones haven’t emerged. You could imagine the right and the left having parallel institutions that have different core values — because I do agree with you, actually, that institutions do always have values at their heart. When you don’t think they do, it just means you don’t know what they are.

Correct. Or they’re being deliberately obscured, as a tactic.

Yeah. Tucker Carlson is an interesting figure here, somebody who came up institutionally.

I think sometimes about this speech he gave at the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference:

Archival clip of Tucker Carlson: I saw conservatives create many of their own media organizations, and I saw many of those organizations prosper, and I saw some of them fail. And here’s the difference. The ones that failed refused to put accuracy first. This is the hard truth, and conservatives need to deal with this. I believe this.

I’m as conservative as any person in this room. I am literally in the process of stockpiling weapons and food and moving to Idaho. So I’m not in any way going to take a second seat to anybody in this room ideologically. But I will say, honestly, if you create a news organization whose primary objective is not to deliver accurate news, you will fail.

You will fail. The New York Times is a liberal paper — and it is to its core a liberal paper. It’s also a paper that cares about whether they spell people’s names right, by and large. It’s a paper that actually cares about accuracy. Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions, that are — that’s, that’s the truth. You don’t believe me?

Put aside the special pleading for The New York Times here. Carlson tried to build his own media institution, The Daily Caller. My impression of it is that it did not become a place that put accuracy first, or become a kind of conservative New York Times.

Over time, he went in darker and darker directions as he chased the audience, and now he’s fully without institution. He has emerged, I’ll put it this way, into a form — when I listen to your show — that you find more concerning and problematic.

What do you think went wrong there?

Well, look — this is a long-term trend. This didn’t emerge in 2009 or 2020. I think of it this way: The left is over-institutionalized, and the right is under-institutionalized.

I say this all the time, man. The left is overformed by institutions, the right is underformed.

Correct. And so we have opposite problems. I think of it also in this way — I wrote a piece about this 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, who essentially sets the direction of the right, for better or for worse, through personal, charismatic power and his relationship with the conservative base. There are really no mediating institutions in the way that you would see elsewhere.

That’s where conservatives have figured out this formula, for at least the time being, to achieve political victory. It has benefits, it has problems.

The left has the opposite problem. The reason I think you get presidential candidates on the left who seem to be devoid of traditional charisma is because it’s organized as an institutional apparatus, or a capital-P Party.

So conservatives have a problem with institutions. Conservatives have a problem building institutions. And this is the deepest irony: That conservatives in a healthy republic would be the ones who are preserving the institutions, restoring the institutions, maintaining the institutions. But conservatives have found themselves on the outside of institutions.

When we’re talking about this concept of counterrevolution, it’s a paradox. 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 counterrevolution rather than a revolution.

But conservatives are in this really interesting position where you have a lot of people on the intellectual right who attend the black-tie galas, they attend the events at the country club, they eat the salmon dinner at the, whatever, Hilton ballroom.

And 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. 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 you claim to represent.

Look, this is a problem. I can’t say that there’s a snap-your-fingers solution. So you have to start where you start.

I work for an institution that I think is the best in the business, the Manhattan Institute. I think we do good work that has a high degree of accuracy and rigor and intelligence. And I think that we’ve put up practical political victories in a way that few others have.

Another version of this is the line: 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 ——

Let me give you a response: I think in the Trump era it is.

OK. Well, make the case.

There is a falling in line behind Donald Trump.

Here is my view of the two coalitions right now. The genius of Donald Trump in the 2024 election was he collapsed the multidimensional test of party loyalty that existed in the previous Republican Party: Were you pro-life? Did you believe in low taxes? 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, like Elon Musk ——

A podcast bro.

You could be a Christian traditionalist. You could be Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had been running as a Democrat just a year or two before. But also you could be Ted Cruz.

And what held that together is that the line that you could not cross was Trump himself. But as long as you were useful to him, you could be on the team.

Now that has obvious issues when you move into governance, and I think some of them have emerged. But it gave him and them a freedom of movement across other issues.

Whereas a Kamala Harris, a Tim Walz, a Joe Biden, were much more box-checking — this sort of multidimensional loyalty test that the left uses. On the left, you end up with — and I mean here not the democratic social stuff, but the left coalition in this country, the broad Democratic Party — you end up with people who have all of the right views and have an institutional personality: somewhat risk averse, worried about getting in trouble at a meeting.

And on the right, you have people who will go crazy in a meeting. You can be Bill Pulte. But as long as the boss likes you, you’re safe.

OK. 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 — the great litmus test for him is personal loyalty. We’ve seen that: You’re with Trump, he’s with you. You cross him, he’ll attack you.

You could be Kim Jong-un and be a friend in good standing.

They were buddies, right? It was like a nice buddy comedy.

Yeah. He likes Kim Jong-un more than he likes Mark Carney.

[Laughs.] Yeah. Well, fair enough as personal chemistry goes.

There’s some truth to that, but 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. So I think it’s overdrawn — I think this is just a question of political organization from the top.

And I don’t think it’s totally just personal loyalty. Trump wants immigration restrictions, strong national borders — to build a wall. He wants American national-interest-based foreign policy, although that is a little bit on the outs.

And then he represents, or at least championed, a lot of the causes that I care about — on D.E.I., on higher education, on cultural institutions — and a whole host of other subissues that he really grabbed on to.

And look, this is good. You have to work with what is there. You always want to plan for the future, build for the future. But ultimately, you’re faced with decisions in the moment. On the whole, in those areas where we have had more freedom of movement, more ability to execute policy, I think things have been going quite well.

I’m going to go back to Tucker Carlson. 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 giving his 8 p.m. monologues — in that era, they were a unifying script for the right. 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 — that there were all these Daily Stormer articles about how much of what he was saying was exactly what they thought. He was talking about the great replacement theory.

Archival clip of Carlson: 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?

Archival clip of Carlson: They are flooding this country with immigrants in order to change the demography to maintain political power for themselves.

Archival clip of Carlson: 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.

Archival clip of Carlson: Now I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term “replacement.”

Archival clip of Carlson: 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 was then are a straight line from each other. The passions he was unleashing — reason, of course, being a slave of such passions — they were 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 strange unwillingness to either grapple with one or the other.

So tell me how you see it.

Yeah, I don’t see it that way. When Tucker was on Fox at 8 p.m. Eastern time — the 5 p.m. Western time slot for me — it really did feel like a kind of Schelling point for the right. It was like a quarterback calling the plays every night at eight o’clock in that first five to 10 minutes, where Tucker condensed the opinion, represented the opinion, reflected back the opinion, and then everyone had a central coherent point to think about, to talk about, to mobilize on.

And it was very effective. Even in my own experience, when I first started reporting on critical race theory in the institutions, I went on Tucker and gave a kind of opening monologue with Tucker. President Trump was watching it, and I 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 — even in my personal experience, the loop on that was less than 12 hours.

There’s a very tight loop between Tucker and the White House.

A very tight loop. Also what I’ve learned about Fox News is that, to its great credit, Fox News has a kind of disciplinary function. Especially after 2020, it has become even more cognizant that message discipline is important. Moving the message forward is important. Here are the 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, specifically — I don’t know anything about The Daily Stormer beyond ——

He talked a bunch about the great replacement theory. This has been exhaustively 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 of what’s called a cabal of elites importing brown voters to replace you — that you are being betrayed by elites representing foreign interests and foreign people to alter the culture of this country to their benefit — was something he hammered all the time.

Archival clip of Carlson: Fox News is reporting tonight that the administration awarded a $172 million grant to a George Soros-linked organization, which exists to “help young border crossers avoid deportation.” Why is some foreign-born billionaire allowed to change our country fundamentally? That’s the big question.

A relentless focus on crime from immigrants, a relentless focus on George Soros.

To me, I see Tucker now, and I see Tucker then, and I agree, the shackles were off a little bit. But I see him calling the same play. He’s just had to turn up the dial a little bit because he doesn’t have Fox News.

I don’t think that’s right. You’re presenting it in a way that is very charged, and I don’t think is quite fair. But let’s take the ——

I mean, Tucker is a charged figure.

But the narrative that you’re portraying, I don’t think that’s exactly how I would put it, certainly. But the underlying facts are either true or not true, and in this case, 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 10 years. And you could do it in a way that exemplifies bigotry or discrimination, of course, but you can also do it in a way that isn’t an expression of bigotry or discrimination.

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 and who doesn’t come in.

So I don’t think that it is right to say that someone who is concerned about rapid and large-scale demographic change is a white nationalist. That seems like a kind of smear ——

No, I’m saying that the reason I think Tucker is a white nationalist is due to all the white nationalism.

Well, hold on, though ——

Let me ask the question fairly to you ——

No, no, no, because that is a huge charge. And again, what is the evidence of that? Can you be concerned about mass demographic change without being racist? I think the answer is yes, right?

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 a general argument ——

A general argument of what a white nationalist is ——

And then you can kind of layer in Tucker.

Sure. I think that there is a straightforward view in white nationalism that there is such a thing as a white race. That race is fundamentally European, came here and founded this country. That race has, depending on the variant of white nationalism we’re talking about, genetic advantages or cultural advantages, and that 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.

Sure.

In some versions, they are not included in that white race. In some versions, we are talking about something I would describe primarily as a kind of nationalism: If you have too much of a country not sharing a common heritage, you lose solidarity.

In some cases, we’re talking about something much darker than that. There are people who just don’t like the way their community is changing, and then there’s the K.K.K. Everything exists on a spectrum.

But would you say someone who is, for example, hesitant about rapid, large-scale demographic change is just a 1 percent white nationalist?

No, I don’t believe that.

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.

To maybe be more specific about Tucker: You just had on the right-wing writer Scott Greer. He’s got a book coming out about the online right called “Whitepill.”

Greer was a former deputy editor at The Daily Caller. He left in 2018 after past writings for a white nationalist site were dug up. And Greer once said of Tucker:

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 VDARE or American Renaissance a few years ago.

These are both white nationalist sites.

What do you make of that?

Yeah, so I’ll tell you what I make of it. Here’s what I think is really interesting about some of these figures who were on the once-fringe elements of the right, who have in some ways seen the errors of that way of ideological thinking.

And to me, you always want to leave people room to grow up, room to leave bad ideas behind, room for critical self-reflection and then to integrate back into the mainstream thinking.

Scott Greer is interesting. One of the reasons we interviewed him was to chart out this trajectory. There are a lot of people who have had more radical politics, and then they moderate over time. I was very interested in understanding that process of ideological development and growth and then really scrutinizing.

You want to actually try to figure out: All right, well, what’s the way out of that? What’s the way to demystify, to defang, to delegitimize that way of thinking?

It’s interesting to talk to people who once had those ideas.

I’m not against you talking to him at all. What I’m saying is not that you shouldn’t interview Scott Greer. I think many people change their politics dramatically — and one of the big problems that the left actually has is not giving people space to change. And putting people into a box, where they’re held based on who they were as opposed to who they may become.

My problem is not with your interviewing Greer. I am saying that I looked at Tucker in that period and thought: Huh, he’s going in this direction that I understand to be the argument of a VDARE. And they all celebrated him.

But 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 toward a politics that was much more, let’s call it, white-identity focused.

OK. Huge point — I would break it down in a couple of ways.

One, I don’t think 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 — if you remember in 2016, Richard Spencer famously held some sort of conference or group, and he said: Ah, yes, Trump is a creation of the alt-right.

Archival clip of Richard Spencer: We willed Donald Trump into office. We made this dream our reality. And if we will it, it is no dream, a quote I’m sure our friends at the Anti-Defamation League know very well.

It was completely delusional, totally self-serving and a product of narcissism that I wouldn’t take at face value.

So I think a lot of the radical elements you’re talking about overstate this relationship because they desperately want to believe it. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that Tucker on Fox in 2021 was laundering talking points from American Renaissance. I don’t think that’s true.

I think it’s conflating a maybe superficial opposition to immigration, and the conflation game is really, I think, dishonest. And unfortunately, for a lot of the time, it worked.

I think that, in fact, we’re in a much better place than in the past. And I remember some of these groups, like the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Media Matters for America — they came after me with many smears, trying to destroy my reputation, trying to get me deplatformed from social media, trying to eliminate me from the public sphere. None of it worked, thankfully. The A.C.L.U., I would also add.

In fact, as I look back, the arguments that they were making were preposterous, and they only succeeded because people felt fear. And so I’m glad that we don’t live in that condition of fear anymore. 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.

Again, the S.P.L.C. — which 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, including racism on the right in the United States, has dwindled to such a small degree in real life that it took the S.P.L.C. to actually inject cash into that ecosystem merely to keep it alive.

So, to me, it’s not persuasive.

One way of thinking about that period — how I think about it — is that two things were true at the same time.

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 unhaveable. That all happened. I don’t deny any of it.

And on the other hand, a lot of what people — more on the left in that moment — were afraid of, or what they predicted, also happened. The alt-right moved much more from the fringe to the center. I always think about ——

The alt-right was totally destroyed after Charlottesville.

I think maybe we have a different view of what the alt-right represented, which is fair enough.

OK. Yeah.

But I think a lot of ideas that were very far from the center — I think about Elon Musk writing — and later he had to try to figure out how to apologize for this, but — when somebody basically said: The Jews have been funding the great replacement.

Did Elon say that?

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.

Oh, yeah.

The Auschwitz apology tour. Yeah.

Oh, God.

Yeah. But even now, Musk is very conspiratorial, and where he is in 2026, now the world’s first trillionaire, owning what used to be Twitter ——

Good job, Elon.

And the things he pumps into the attentional stream would have been considered incredibly marginal, even in Trump’s first term.

So two things were true: There are many ways in which the left went too far, and the forces the left were worried about are much closer to the center.

Yes, there are parts of the alt-right that are not significant today. Richard Spencer is not a significant figure. Nick Fuentes has a bigger audience than Richard Spencer ever did.

Sure.

When I’m on X and other places, the amount of constant antisemitism and anti-Indian racism I see happening in people’s mentions is wild to me.

I don’t think he’ll win, but you look at James Fishback, who’s running for governor in Florida — it’s almost unimaginable to think of somebody like him being a figure in Republican Party politics who would be commanding the support of, particularly, anybody. And I think the reason that people worry about him is they don’t think he’s going to win, but he seems to be doing very well among the young right.

Sure.

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 the most “hair on fire” in that period had a point in some of their more wild predictions.

I always think about: If you had told me that Trump was going to make R.F.K. Jr. H.H.S. secretary and Tulsi Gabbard director of national intelligence ——

The triumph of bipartisanship.

And try to make Matt Gaetz attorney general, I would have thought that was an unhinged, resistance Substack take. And then it all happened.

You can have these things be true at the same time.

Yes. I think you’re 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 A.C.L.U. subpoena me and harass me with a lawfare campaign that cost me a lot of money. I had the S.P.L.C. and then the A.D.L. put me on some sort of hate list that was totally bogus, trying to destroy my reputation. I had threats of violence against me that were very credible at the time. And people trying to go after my family, my kids.

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.

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: Radical nihilistic movements on the right do not have any institutional support. They’ll bubble up in your Twitter comments. Which, again, I don’t agree with, but is different in kind, and not just in quantity.

In the case of someone like James Fishback, 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 individual charisma, if he’s the Groyper candidate for governor of Florida — which is, again, a crazy thing that is happening — I want to see the actual vote tally. Because that’s going to show me where he stands with the actual conservative population, the conservative voter, the conservative movement as a whole.

I suspect that he’s going to get absolutely trounced. It happened with Vivek Ramaswamy running against Casey Putsch in Ohio. He got blown out by, I don’t know, 60 or 70 points.

By contrast, you look at something like the trans ideological movement, that I think is a lie — it’s grounded in a series of falsehoods — and maintained this suppressive, threatening, censorious power in the pre-Elon Twitter days, and in the general woke years. And then look, another uncomfortable fact: Per capita, this group has committed more mass violence than any other group.

And so I am willing to indulge in, and think it’s important to have a criticism of, let’s say, elements of my own side. But I also think, if we were to just measure it out, to put it on a scale, it’s looking a lot more like this: Assassination attempts against President Trump, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the security posture that’s required for conservatives just to go on a college campus — that’s how I measure it.

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 was completely distraught for weeks.

And again, while I don’t support James Fishback for governor, I think that it’s kind of an empty symbolism. Whereas on the other side, it feels like these ideologies have the support of the institutions — they wielded power irresponsibly in the past and still have the ultimate political threat: the threat of violence, that I know everybody in my world has seen, has experienced, has feared. That grounds me.

I guess ——

Do you not see that? Would you disagree with this?

I don’t have the same view of it. But let me hold by saying: Your experience of it, I understand, as somebody who also sometimes deals with threats of violence and other things of that nature.

Sure.

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, and they’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 S.P.L.C., the Southern Poverty Law Center, as a powerful, potent left-wing actor. They’re not ——

Really? Ten years ago, they could nuke you. If they put you on their list, you were dead ——

I’ll go through my thing.

Yeah.

The A.D.L. I don’t even see as on the left, which is a different question.

But I see the Trump administration as powerfully and potently extreme and willing to use the power of the federal government — from deploying ICE and C.B.P. agents to different cities, to directing the D.O.J. on who to investigate and go after, to, after Charlie Kirk’s murder, trying to get people fired who are just random people who had posted [expletive] tweets.

I do not see a world in which there is this huge separation between the extreme elements of the right and this administration. I keep hearing from people like you, who I think have talked about this, that there’s a huge number of Groypers working in House and Senate offices in Congress — 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 — about the civilizational suicide of Europe. Now, I recognize we’re not going to agree on all this. This part I’m not going to try to bridge the gap on.

What I will say is, the other thing I think people on the left see has been a movement from 2016 to 2024, where it’s almost unbelievable how far things have gone: Even Trump 1.0 to Trump 2.0 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 a much more live and potent political force.

And would you say that you saw that happen on the left between 2014 and 2024?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

In part, I think you guys are about to learn some lessons we learned.

[Laughs.] Yeah, 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 — if you took the memetic energy from that corner of the online discourse and turned it into a human being, it would look and sound like James Fishback. But the reality is that once those ideas gain contact with the people, the culture, the institutions on the right, they’re not going anywhere.

Let me try to frame this more in terms of arguments I’ve seen you making.

Sure.

And tell me, if I get a chain in this wrong, you tell me where.

I will.

I think you think you now have a problem with a racialist right. 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 Point USA of it, or some kind of plot from the people around him — for major figures on the right to be making those arguments, it has seemed to me to be a kind of shocking moment for a lot of you.

And then I’ve watched you and others, on X and elsewhere, look in your mentions and be like: Oh, [expletive], there’s a lot of racism here. Something’s happening.

Sure.

Tell me which part of this you don’t agree with.

Yeah. Well, here’s how I see it — and your general analysis is correct.

There is a racialist right, let’s say. I’ve been writing about this for a number of years.

But I think a lot of it is something of an optical illusion — and you see this on, let’s say, 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.

Look, I don’t want a racialist right. That is a clear position on my part. And to the extent that we have antisemitic conspiracy theories bubbling up from the digital sphere, it’s a problem that we have to deal with — an untruth or a falsehood that should be called out for what it is.

What I think it is at heart — and I’ve talked to a lot of young right-wing guys — sometimes I’ll have lunch or dinner when I’m in D.C. or elsewhere with younger guys and just say: Hey, walk me through what’s happening for people. Like, we’re older now ——

We’re old.

You and I are middle-aged now. So I say: Hey, walk me through this thinking — in a nonjudgmental way — just help me understand what’s happening with some of the more radical or racialist young men.

And this is the description they give. They say: These are guys who hit high school during Covid. They transitioned into an almost purely digital life, with all of the various rabbit holes you could get into. They’re entering adulthood during the George Floyd hysteria, where their teachers at school, their media, institutions, the government, everyone was saying: 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.

Essentially, they were programmed by the George Floyd hysteria into thinking racially, instead of what I think is the proper and correct response, which is to say: We’ve got to move beyond this. We’re going to fight this racialist thinking on the left, on the right, wherever it comes from.

They essentially psychologically submitted to it, but then reversed the polarity. I don’t think that’s a good way to pursue it. I don’t think, on the philosophical question, it’s right, and I don’t think that from the practical, political conception, that it’s fruitful.

But in a certain way, I get it. I understand it. Young people are in a position of growing up and having a chip on their shoulder. It’s extremely destructive, and what I see as the antidote to this, at least within my political coalition, is to be an older brother figure and to say: Hey, I could get why you think that. However, the actual path to success is this other way.

I don’t think that this is predetermined. I actually think that young people, their brains aren’t locked in their ways. You want to bring people who are frustrated toward a better path — and someone like Candace Owens, who’s just driving people into a ditch — you have to guide them away from that.

So I think, first, there’s truth to that narrative. 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 was a huge upsurge in telling people that the right way to understand life, and America, is all through the lens of identity groups. And when you tell people to look at identity groups, they will form a more coherent sense of their own. And a line I have in that book is something like: Identity activates under threat.

Sure.

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 you would also agree, perhaps, that the institutions, the legal system, the prevailing narrative at universities, corporations, etc., was explicitly anti-white for a number of years that for these young people were formative.

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 ——

It was: white man bad. If you wanted to just put it into kindergarten language: white man bad. That was the dominant position of the institutional left.

I remember telling people around me that this thing where people are putting out papers on what the negative traits of whiteness are was a disaster.

So I don’t necessarily disagree with that. I think there’s truth to it.

And legally, affirmative action, D.E.I., 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 ——

Me, personally?

You, personally.

I live on a farm in Washington State. I’m personally not in power. [Laughs.]

Your executive orders get signed, the whole thing.

And these things can all go in better or worse directions. These are all longstanding energies in American life.

The 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.

I’ll give a good example of this: You can believe what you want about whether or not the immigration of Haitians into Springfield, Ohio, was good or bad. The people of that city had mixed views on it. 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 was a Facebook post, and the right, all the way up to Donald Trump, in one of the debates, began adopting it.

You go on a quest to try to figure out if it’s true and, to shorthand a long story, maybe in Dayton, Ohio, there was somebody who wasn’t Haitian who maybe somebody thought, but other people didn’t think, had eaten a cat.

Correct. That “somebody” and “other people” is quite important.

People can read your piece. They can read the Drop Site News article. I’m not going to convince you one way or the other.

But the Drop Site News article went out to debunk my story, and they ended up finding another independent corroborating witness. So, yeah.

It’s not how I read it. But on some level, I 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, here or there, eating cats and dogs — then you are going to unleash forms of anger and hatred and fear that are not controllable.

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, memetic containers.

But 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 the way you get people to care about it — JD Vance said this very explicitly — is that, well, people really care about the cats and dogs.

Archival clip of JD Vance: The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.

Dana Bash: But it wasn’t just a meme, sir.

Vance: 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, my view is that there’s never been any hard evidence of that happening in the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio.

Nobody has substantiated that — nor have you.

Correct. Yeah. Right. In fact, I’ve said: Look, there’s no evidence of this particular claim. We should be more careful.

So there’s been a consistent idea that you could unleash really 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 — whom we’ve not really talked about, but I think is a necessary figure in the way we think about this — is that there wasn’t a way to stop that move.

Once people began to move in that direction, and there weren’t institutions that were strong enough and respected enough to stop it — 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.

And now I will let you say everything you think.

OK. Well, oh, man. All right. Where do I start? A couple of huge problems.

[Laughs.] I gave you a lot there.

One is that — and I’m doing reporting in California right now that has stories that have a similar, 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 Medi-Cal system. This is an explosive story that is true, that represents a lot of these underlying questions about homelessness policy, about immigration, etc.

Look, if it’s true, it’s fair game, and there’s a way to handle these stories in a responsible way: that you ensure the facts, that you present it fairly and that you use it as a method of changing public opinion. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

The idea that there are taboos that cannot be crossed because they will unleash these unspecified or vague, dangerous passions, is a problem in two regards.

One is that if you’re going for truth-seeking, if you’re playing a responsible rhetorical game, then no, I don’t think that these questions are out of bounds at all.

Second, the predictions have always been that it’s going to unleash some kind of horrible, nativist, violent sentiment, etc. But the only example of an ideologically driven assassination that we’ve talked about today is the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

This prophecy of political violence really comes from the institutional ideologies on the left, not the institutional ideologies on the right. That fact has been hammered home 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.

So let me be more specific about what I’m saying, because I’m not making a vague prophecy of political violence. And I’m also not saying that there are these taboos you shouldn’t touch.

I think where I’m disagreeing is to say: There actually isn’t truth-seeking here. There isn’t enough truth in these arguments. There’s too much of an attraction ——

Which arguments?

I mean arguments like the Haitians and cats and dogs. We’ll talk about others in a second.

Which is fine.

The thing I’m worried about has arrived. I’m not talking about an unspecified future in which I am concerned the right will increasingly be taken over by conspiratorial, racist, misogynistic elements.

I’m looking at a world where Nick Fuentes is a major figure on the American right.

Well, you guys are doing a great job at raising his profile.

Listen, 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 and gave him such a gentle, kind interview.

Here’s one thing I don’t underestimate with Tucker: He’s [expletive] good. He’s a good interviewer. He has incredible talent as a media figure. If he 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.

Archival clip:

Ted Cruz: Those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed. And from my perspective, I want to be on the blessing side of things.

Carlson: Those who bless the government of Israel?

Cruz: Those who bless Israel is what it says. Doesn’t say the government of it, says the nation of Israel. So that’s in the Bible. As a Christian, I believe that.

Carlson: Where is that?

Cruz: I can find it to you. I don’t have the Scripture off the tip of my — you pull out the phone and use the Google.

Carlson: 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? I’m confused.

And he didn’t — because I think Tucker understands quite well where the passions are and where the energy is.

Sometimes I hear you being more concerned about this. You’re a little chiller in this, and I recognize you’re talking in a New York Times podcast studio, but what I’m saying is: I actually don’t think the balance is right.

Donald Trump himself is the king of this. It’s the old “Take him seriously, not literally” view. That the thing that is being said that maybe doesn’t hold up ——

I’m hoping that you can give me a little bit more, though. What are you actually saying? Nick Fuentes was on a podcast ——

Are you saying Nick Fuentes is not a big figure now and is not influential among young people on the right? Would you really make that argument?

No, I would make a slightly different argument.

OK.

I think that Nick Fuentes is not a fundamentally political figure. He’s a hyperreal figure of spectacle that — again, you can read my writings on the question ——

Are we sure those things are different now?

You can read my writings on this exact question. I think he’s a bad influence.

What I’ve cautioned people on the right about that genre of personality is that when someone goes on a video and says: I love Hitler.

Obviously, we don’t love Hitler. 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 hyperreal spectacle, optimized for digital algorithms to harvest attention and to harvest clicks. It’s not actually political in that sense. It’s not optimized toward any political outcomes.

I just reject this idea that some dumb kid who has hijacked the algorithm with superficial ideological spectacle is somehow, therefore, symbolic of where the right is going as a whole.

I think “hyperreal” is doing work in this argument that is not actually connected to what “hyperreal” means. I can imagine somebody sitting in front of me, even sitting in front of me here in 2015, and us — younger, handsomer ——

Ah, yes. Yeah.

And your telling me this about Donald Trump.

Telling you what?

That: Listen, you all are being easily provoked. You’re looking at a hyperreal, algorithmically oriented, attentional spectacle and treating it like it’s a serious political force.

And then maybe if I had been wiser about what Donald Trump represented and the way in which the hyperreal and the real were going to converge in the life that we actually lead here, I would have said: No, attention is the fundamental currency of modern American politics.

Sure.

We actually have fewer defenses against things that feel fundamentally ridiculous. This is an era of the trickster spirit, not the earnest energies.

And many people like me — I mean, you may remember this, The 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.

Because he was a ridiculous, hyperreal spectacle, and to treat it as a serious thing would have been absurd.

I think many of us were perfectly willing to say Nick Fuentes is a marginal, absurdist figure. And then it became clear in the Tucker Carlson moment — and given where Tucker has gone — that there’s 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.

OK. Well, here’s where I would disagree. And you actually have a real-world test: These 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 against the odds, against many of the institutions, he won. And so you have to say: Yeah, Trump also uses media. But that’s a superficial comparison.

You have to ask: What is the actual goal? And the goal for 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, a narcissistic endeavor to get personal attention.

But that’s the endpoint. There’s no actual bridge that can go over.

But can’t it change minds? Can’t it change people’s politics?

It could change minds, but 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.

So I think that you’re 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 political desire but also better for the country.

When I see the online right and The New York Times both doing puff pieces on the latest right-wing figure — it was David Duke, and then it was Richard Spencer, and now it’s Nick Fuentes — this is a stock character in American discourse, and I just refuse to take the bait.

I don’t think David Duke is a marginal figure.

You don’t think David Duke is a marginal figure?

Here’s what I mean. John Ganz — he has a great Substack and is an interesting, history-based theorist of American politics — he’s got this book about the 1990s called “When the Clock Broke.”

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 and did not come that far from winning for Louisiana governor in the 1990s.

Sure.

There was a style of politics that they got quite good at figuring out, and Ganz’s view, and I agree with this view, is that much of what the populist right is today is built on that.

No, no.

Often quite explicitly with Samuel Francis and others.

OK, make your case.

Absolutely not. I mean, look, for those of us who are — I’m in the institutional right. I know the people, I know the personalities, I know the organizations. That figure is a pain in the [expletive]. Nobody wants it. Nobody likes it. Nobody believes in it.

And 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 left-wing civil rights outfit known as the S.P.L.C.

Are we 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? [Laughs.]

Yes. One hundred percent.

I think that’s ridiculous.

I’m not saying that in the sense of totally, wholly created, but certainly used by, right?

The whole idea was this kind of smear effect, where the media would go out and say: This bad person supports your campaign, and then you’d have to disavow and go through this whole routine.

But the point I’m interested in here — and I think this is a fairly widely held view — is my worry that the institutional right is getting steamrolled.

By whom?

Well, 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. If the institutional right had its way, Jeb Bush would have been the nominee.

The idea that the institutional right has been racking up victory after victory is ridiculous. I mean, the Republicans saw speaker after speaker after speaker until they got one who was more 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 keeps thinking it can maybe control these forces. And it can’t.

You asked me earlier to 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. This was a feature investigation that we did in Minnesota looking into organized Somali fraud.

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

Since then, as sometimes happens when you report on an explosive story, it ricocheted into an entire movement, really, looking at large-scale fraud in American public institutions.

There are a couple of pieces to this. The fraud had also been reported on by The Star Tribune, and it had been in national news.

In bits and pieces, yeah.

In bits and pieces. There were prosecutions, which is where a lot of the information came from — that began in 2022 under the Biden administration. The big move you made in this was to say: This is financing foreign terrorism.

Correct.

What was that argument?

The argument is pretty simple, and the mechanics of it are this: We have billions of dollars being stolen by Somali fraudsters in Minnesota. We then have huge amounts of money being transported out of Minneapolis airport, Seattle airport, in cash — in actual physical currency, in suitcases — that goes to Mogadishu. And then, when in Mogadishu, it is distributed through various parts of the country through what is called the hawala network.

The hawala network is the name for informal, cash-based, clan-based financial institutions. They don’t have a strong formal banking system in Somalia — it’s a rough part of the world. And so they have these couriers who move money and cash. And all kinds of think tanks, the military, the U.S. government, the Department of Justice, Republicans and Democrats — all have essentially made the case that Al Shabab is taking a cut of hawala financing.

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 in suitcases to the hawala networks in Somalia and, therefore, to the Al Shabab terror networks taking their cut, essentially.

We have Visa, which takes 3 percent of your credit card transactions. In parts of Somalia, Al Shabab takes a cut — not exactly sure how much that is. And federal investigators say: Hey, once it exits the country into the hawala system, you can’t claw that money back. There are no written receipts or banking transactions.

But the scale of that money that was remittances from fraud was so enormous, that over time, we’re talking about huge sums of money.

I want to take a beat on whether or not this turned out to be true.

The key named source in your story was a retired terrorism investigator named Glenn Kerns. He later came out and claimed that he was misquoted. He said later the story was [expletive], and that he did no on-the-ground investigating in Minnesota.

The two top prosecutors of the fraud in Minnesota said the perpetrators were motivated by greed — there’s no evidence of terrorist financing.

Do you still stand by that story?

Of course, I do, yeah. A couple things: The Glenn Kerns detective is very odd. We have him on the record. We have 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.

But the paper in Minneapolis tried to go through our piece with criticism and couldn’t lay a glove on it. They didn’t debunk or even really contradict any of our points. You had one source who — who knows? Don’t know his personal circumstances, but ——

But he was the only named source.

I don’t think he was the only named source in the piece.

He was the only named source making this terrorism argument.

Well, incorrect. We had multiple high-level federal officials who confirmed to us the flow of funds. We substantiated it with contextual reporting from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, from the United States Military Academy, from the Department of Justice.

We were saying simply, logically, if we know from a variety of sources that Al Shabab 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. A, B, C. And so we know this to be true.

That idea that because they weren’t motivated by terrorism — it’s not something we alleged and is essentially irrelevant. The facts as they played out were that the Al Shabab terror network benefits from fraud in the United States that is passed through their financial system.

Your piece is actually quite careful. I’ve read the piece carefully, and you’re right, you don’t allege that the point of this is to fund terrorists.

Then when you 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 @realDonaldTrump to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for all Somali nationals in the United States. It’s time for them to go home.

And I have, I think, two or three issues here.

Two or three? All right. Let’s go through them one by one. [Laughs.]

Yeah, we’ll do them all.

You have a limited number of people committing crimes. They’re being prosecuted. The prosecutions begin under Biden. This was not a swept-under-the-rug thing.

Correct.

You guys did not come up with this. You didn’t find it yourself.

And they were stealing a lot of money, that part is true. The sending cash to terrorists back home — as you say, you have a more complicated view ——

I link to the piece — and your rhetorical ——

And then, none of the people, as far as I can tell, who were doing this were under temporary protected status. Which is only about 750 people anyway.

So there’s this move, to say: It’s not just some criminals — it’s Somalis. And it’s not just: Some money is being scammed 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.

OK, so a couple of points on that particular argument. The point of the piece, broadly — it raises the question of immigration and cultural compatibility.

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 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 — a contested central government in Somalia in the modern period — there is a feeling that exploiting the central government is permissible. And 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.

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 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.

Again, in a prudent, national-interest-based immigration policy, I would put Somalis lower down on the list, and I think that’s perfectly defensible.

I don’t have a problem saying that American immigration policy should serve our interests and should not just be omnidirectional.

What I am saying is that, to take a crime committed by a limited number of people, and then say: This concerns an entire group of people, and you should deport these unrelated people — that is a bad thing to do.

And to yoke this larger argument you’re making to this much more tendentious assertion of: Well, some of the money that goes out, because of this [expletive] up system back in Somalia, can get taken by Al Shabab.

To finish the thought, and then I’ll let you take it where you want to take it — that’s part of this larger point I’m trying to make to you, which is that you are not putting passion in service of reason. You’re unleashing things here that are, first, going to really harm people who did nothing wrong — these Somalis with temporary protected status.

As you say, Somalia is a tough place. Many people flee it for completely reasonable reasons, and we honor them for doing so and for trying to make a better life for themselves and their families. They did nothing wrong.

I think you actually do believe, from many things you’ve written, in the primacy of thinking about the individual. If you want to say that our immigration policy should not favor Somalis — fine, fair enough, but ——

But the temporary protected status is based on group designations, and in fact, Somalis, Haitians, Venezuelans ——

But the people you’re going after did not do this crime. We agree on that part, right?

Hold on. Well, let me take it in pieces.

A couple of factual problems here: You said a limited number of people committed these crimes. I’m actually not sure that’s true, and I’ll explain 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 who were receiving fake treatment.

And what we’re looking at is actually a not insignificant number of people who were involved or had knowledge of these schemes as they were unfolding. Because you’re talking about thousands of patients — larger family sizes.

And secondarily, prosecutors told us 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.

So let’s just say the median estimate — the responsible estimate — is $5 billion. Well, they’ve only uncovered fraud schemes of maybe $300 million. And so that would indicate that actually the vast majority of the schemes were simply vanishing through your fingers.

Because the Somali community is also very concentrated and geographically tightly integrated in kinship networks, I actually think you’re getting the complicity, or knowledge of, a not insignificant part of this community. Are most Somalis in Minnesota ——

But you don’t have proof of that.

I think it’s just logical, and I think that we can make the argument with a high degree of certainty based on the court documents, based on the total amount of fraud committed, and based on how these things are structured.

Look, this is a mass fraud committed in Minnesota — committed now in other states that we’re uncovering. One West Coast police detective who has been looking into this said: You know, I’ve been looking into this for 30 years. And organized fraud rings, in his experience, are committed, to a massively disproportionate amount, by foreign nationals and groups originating from migrant groups.

This is a fact. It’s uncomfortable ——

I didn’t argue with it. I’ve not done my own reporting on this, but ——

But hold on. But the question then is: How do we respond to that politically? And I actually think ——

Well, I want to talk about how it got responded to politically.

Donald Trump did what you wanted him to do. He put up a Truth Social post on Thanksgiving Day that you called iconic.

Is that right?

You know this. You called it iconic.

Did I?

You sure did.

All right, let’s hear it. Refresh ——

In which he says:

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 against hope that they will be left alone.

OK, I remember this now ——

But then it moves on from there.

Nick Shirley, a right-wing influencer, launches his own investigation of Somali fraud in Minnesota. He starts going to day cares, knocking on doors and asking: 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, 130 million views across platforms ——

Yeah, it’s big. Yeah.

It goes crazily viral. But I want to play this clip. You did this podcast conversation with Richard Hanania, where you guys were talking about this, and I think what you say is interesting.

Sure.

Archival clip of Rufo: If you look at the Nick Shirley video and you really dig into it, there are two things happening, OK?

On the surface, he is raising — he’s shining a spotlight on something that is very real, that is a kind of endemic form of corruption, and he’s bringing it to life through kind of Zoomer-style, YouTube kind of gonzo video production. OK. 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 — you know, Nick Shirley gets in there, sees the building is empty and then assumes: Oh, they’re committing $70 million of fraud — or whatever.

As a journalist, as someone who has to go through fact-checking, legal review, 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.

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. You can’t go to a day care and say: Show me your kids. And when they don’t show you kids to then 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 toward something real, it’s in line with where I want politics to go. It does become a huge issue — we’ll talk about what it leads to.

I can feel this tension. So how do you balance that?

Yeah. 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 and example of the right being under-institutionalized. An ideal outcome or method would be to take someone who has charisma, who has courage, who has curiosity — someone like Nick Shirley — and then integrate that person into an institution, to put up those guardrails to refine and really improve the product itself, and then to use that attention toward productive ends.

That would be the ideal. That’s the kind of thing that 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.

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. The story landed in that particular manner, but you have people, independent ——

He’s not left-wing ——

Let’s say, “citizen journalists” — I think that was the phrase for a while. There was great hope in the citizen journalist — love citizens, love journalists. Citizen journalist is one of those things that 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?

This is the kind of thing where, as an individual, my only reaction is to say: You can put out a suggestion for a remedy, but it’s not within my direct control.

I guess the thing I’m asking, not as an individual, but as an activist and an analyst and somebody influential in the administration — an administration that responds to these stories — yours, Nick Shirley’s — with a giant ICE and border patrol deployment to Minnesota. That deployment, ultimately, and the fighting around it, leaves Renee Good and Alex Pretti dead.

Minneapolis calculated the economic impact of the raids 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.

I look at all this and say: That wasn’t beneficial. This was catastrophic. It harmed people’s lives. It led to people dying. It was bad for the Minnesota economy. It led to the fraud stuff getting completely sidelined, and to the person who was pushing it resigning.

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. Well, I would agree with certain points, but I would refine them and disagree with others.

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 Protection, ICE agents. With that force posture, it’s a no-win situation, and I was advising against it from even the previous summer.

In that particular case, I would say it was ill-advised. And I think that, finally, the administration has learned that. They reshuffled D.H.S., they reshuffled Customs and Border Protection.

And if you want to create deportations, at scale, of illegal immigrants, you have to do so in what I’ve 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 sending in armored cars with ICE agents on the side is delusional. It’s never going to happen.

I think there’s a part of the right that wants that macho imagery. But if you look at the underlying, substantive policy that you want to enact, it’s detrimental. And, in fact, the situation in Minneapolis, again, in that sense, did not achieve the stated objective for reasons that I and others had predicted.

Let me pick up on the fraud part.

It’s annoying to me personally because fraud is a huge winning issue. No one wants fraud. It’s a huge problem in the country. If you could just focus on that, you could rally not only Republicans, who are traditionally for small government, but you could also bring into the coalition moderate Democrats who want good governance.

To me, personally, I found it 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’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 his two terms, Trump has granted clemency to more than 70 allies, donors and others convicted in fraud cases, including Philip Esformes, who stole $1.3 billion from Medicare and Medicaid in a fraudulent billing scheme.

It was the F.B.I.’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 ——

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, if these people were convicted of fraud at that scale, 20 years seems like a light prison sentence. I would double it, personally.

The push I’m making, and I recognize you’re not going to defend this, but there is this movement on the right now to focus on fraud. You’ve been very much leading this.

Meanwhile, I look at Trump, and he has gutted the machinery of anti-fraud enforcement all across the federal government. He gutted it at the I.R.S. — there’s a tremendous amount of fraud in 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 has gutted inspectors general across the federal government — the people seeing what is happening inside these organizations. He destroyed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which did a lot of anti-fraud work.

Eh — debatable.

I recognize we would debate it. But what I don’t think is debatable is that Trump and this administration have 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 taxpayers and others are.

But I look at the country right now, and I see Donald Trump as — you like using piracy comparisons around the Somalis — I think of Trump and the Trump family as pirates. I think that they are looting the country for their benefit.

I think that’s what the Qatari plane is. I think that’s what the crypto investments are. I think that’s how Trump and his family have increased their net worth by billions of dollars.

I’m not saying you support it, but I don’t understand how you think you’re going to have a right that is doing good governance and that is taking these things institutionally seriously, and have that be what is happening at the very top.

Sure. And let’s take pardons as the most concrete example.

Yes, I agree. I think you and I would agree — and 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 were ill-advised — shouldn’t have done it. In the reporting that I’ve read, a number of those individuals had also been putting money into various lobbies and various attempts to influence and various campaign funds or committee funds or however the finances work.

You create a perception of corruption that is not good and does, in some ways, undercut the good work of combating systematic social service fraud as a whole. But from my point of view, and how I have to look at it is: OK, you live in an imperfect world. You don’t have ultimate control. My influence is great on the things I care about — on D.E.I., on higher education, defunding N.P.R., whatever. Go down the list.

You’ve been very influential, I agree.

But the implicit premise of your criticism, which again, I take seriously, and I think it’s a fair criticism, is: Oh, therefore, you should give up, you should turn against the good work that’s being done — it’s canceled out or invalidated because of something that’s happening over here.

And my personal policy is: Where there’s necessary criticism, I’ll give the criticism, but I’m not going to stop the work in that little sphere of influence that I have to do good.

So I’m walking the line 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 speak out against — I mean, the crypto thing was just, you know ——

And is ongoing.

It’s ongoing, yeah. The coin is still there.

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. every morning: All right, how can we win? How can we move the ball forward? How can we make good policy?

And ultimately, at the end of the day, that’s all that’s within my control. That’s the attitude that I bring to the fight.

I think you underestimate yourself.

Well, explain it to me.

I will. The point I’m making is actually a little bit even larger than you.

Look, 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.

[Laughs.] Maybe.

I’ll take it.

And look, you and I are not going to agree on a million things. My point is not to convert you to my politics. I’m not going to do that.

You should try. I mean, why not? I’m trying to convert you.

Listen, we talk. But I think that the 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.

OK.

It is insane. And the epistemological standards in Nick Shirley’s stuff, and some of your things, in my view — which, again, I think you’re careful in the body and then not always in the promotion and the weaponization of it.

Meaning, careful in that the written pieces are defensible, but you think I take the rhetorical flourish too far? Is that what you’re saying?

Then beyond you, 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 a hydraulic process — not some future result, but a current result, where when I look at the Spotify rankings, the right-of-center figures on the top have become highly conspiratorial, and there are figures like Fuentes rising.

We need a strong right in this country.

I’d ask you a question, then. Has the New York Times editorial line 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.

OK.

So if I’m the base line ——

I think you’re saying it has moved in your direction.

Of course. You look at the big piece on D.E.I. — you had editorialists saying that I was some sort of villain on D.E.I. And then the Times moves back.

Let’s agree you’ve won some fights.

I am saying that the right, in my view, as somebody who I think actually has a good record of criticizing my own ——

Agreed.

I pushed Joe Biden, when that was a much more dangerous thing for me to do.

Agreed.

I wrote “Abundance,” which is entirely a critique of Democratic governance.

And where the right has gone, I think, is not going to work. What’s interesting to me about you right now is, I’ll watch your show, and I can see you and your co-host wrestling with these questions.

Sure.

I don’t think you’re comfortable.

But ultimately, there are two problems that I see the right having that it really does not know how to solve. One problem is, its attentional sphere is pathological.

Yeah. Parts of it are.

Parts of it are, and it doesn’t have a lot of institutional strength there. The second is that you cannot challenge Donald Trump. You can say some things he’s doing you don’t like, or maybe wouldn’t fully support, but Donald Trump is the Sun King, and he has to be obeyed. If you go too hard, and he’s shown his ability to do it ——

[Laughs.] I don’t think that ——

If you go too hard, you get pushed out in a way that maybe you can’t come back from.

And those two things are allowing a tremendous amount of bad ideas, of actual corruption, of institutional and noninstitutional rot to occur. And we’re all going to pay for it, because right now we’re all living under right-wing governance.

I have a lot of worry about this. 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. There’s no entirely virtuous, effective, disciplined political movement.

Every political movement has a certain fermentation, a certain amount of internal conflict. You have to figure out how to resolve disputes, settle questions. And what I’ve tried to do, especially in the last year and a half since Trump became president again, is bring a lot of those conversations into the open. 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 has a highly individualized, charismatic presidency — which is charismatic rather than legal, rational or traditional — the Max Weber triangle of legitimacy and authority — the reality is: OK, then let’s solve it. This is the conversation we need to have. These are the problems we need to grapple with.

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 and attitudes.

Politics moves forward. Trump is in his last term. Depending on how things go with the House, this might be the last truly effective moment for the Trump presidency. And then we ask the next question.

But 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 — is very much, in part, about restraining the passions and channeling them productively.

There’s a lot of talk about virtue, but the people who are leaders on the right — Donald Trump very much included — are not virtuous often, and if they have enough power, that is looked past. If they have enough strength to their passions, that is fine.

And similarly in the informational sphere — in the attentional sphere — there is a lot of playing with stories that are designed — mimetically constructed — to arouse very, very base passions. Those stories are often much more complicated — if they’re true — beneath the surface.

There’s a view that can be channeled in the right direction. But I think the opposite is happening — that in fact, the people who are restrained are really losing out in the right’s attentional sphere.

Because it’s this constant problem — you can’t get heard if you’re not now playing this game of incredibly weaponized, explosive allegations, which of course is going where that ultimately always goes, which is toward antisemitic conspiracy theories — the oldest attentional move in the book.

You’re raising a really important philosophical question, and the conservative tradition offers a lot of good debate and discourse on this question.

The question is this: You have what we might say Aristotelian virtue or Christian virtue, and then Machiavellian virtù. It’s the same word, but a totally different conception.

For Machiavelli, 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 and design.

Politics is always a conversation between virtue and virtù, and you’re essentially reconciling means and ends. And there are people who will argue — academics, in particular, even those on the right: Well, we need to have deontological principles that you can make. The means always have to be 100 percent pure, toward 100 percent pure ends.

And I laugh. Only an academic could really 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 virtù and virtue.

And so you have to figure that out. You have to figure out where you’re personally comfortable, where you personally can feel that your work is justified. And then as a movement, as a whole, this is a constant negotiation.

And look, in my mind, political leaders are not your friends. Political leaders are not your priest. Political leaders are blunt instruments. Political leaders are a means to an end.

And there’s no easy answer there. There’s no immediate answer there. But what I would say is that those are the people who are my compatriots. The people I’m fighting every day alongside and along with are high-integrity people, very smart people, conservative institutionalists who understand the moment, who understand that we need to deliver tangible political victories. We can’t retreat to abstract speculation.

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.

This conversation is interesting because you’re oftentimes 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? You have to do that knowing that the system you’re operating in is littered with imperfections.

Again, at the end of the day, my calculation is: I’m very mindful and even try to be — some people wouldn’t believe this — try to even be humble as to the little part of the world that I can influence. And I think I’ve changed it for the better. I think institutions that I’m working with are improving over time.

And I think this epistemological question, and the individual charismatic question, are questions that can be and will be resolved in the short to medium term.

I’ll leave it there. I really appreciate your doing this conversation.

Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

OK, 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, the Claremont Institute scholar, called “Unmasking the Administrative State,” which has helped me, more than anything, understand the deeper philosophical and political underpinnings of our modern dilemma.

The second book that I think all conservatives should read, and all liberals should read, is a biography by Stacy Schiff called “The Revolutionary,” which is a biography of the American founder Samuel Adams.

Adams is the most political founder. He clarifies, through example, all the questions that we’ve been talking about — about propaganda, about passion, about institutions, about political change. He’s the 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, third, I would recommend a number of books by the conservative journalist and former N.Y.U. professor James Burnham. He wrote a book called “The Managerial Revolution,” another called “The Machiavellians,” another called “Suicide of the West.”

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 convictions.

But which book of his would you start with?

I would start with “The Managerial Revolution.” It was published 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 optimism — American optimism. But he already saw some of the problems that were starting to emerge.

Chris Rufo, thank you very much.

Thank you.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Julie Beer. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Mixing by Pat McCusker, Efim Shapiro, and Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Kate Wilkinson and Marlaine Glicksman.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.

The post What Has Chris Rufo Wrought? appeared first on New York Times.