David Frum: Villains and Monsters

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Speaker 5 Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We are back today with Ring of Fame, Bulwark Podcast guest, David Fromm.

Speaker 5 He's a staff writer at The Atlantic, author of 10 books, including Trumpocalypse and Trumpocracy. What's happening, David?

Speaker 2 Hey there. Hello from Toronto.

Speaker 5 It is good to hear from you. And naturally, on the podcast home of the Never Trump movement, we will begin with Liz Cheney.

Speaker 5 Yesterday at Duke University, Bill Crystal is reporting in this morning's morning shots that her official announcement that she was going to be supporting and voting for Kamala Harris was not an accident or some leaked video, but that she'd seen some of her fellow Trump skeptical conservatives shying away from actually endorsing and wanted to make her position clear.

Speaker 5 So let's take a listen to what Liz Chaney said yesterday at Duke University.

Speaker 6 As a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this. And because of the danger that Donald Trump poses,

Speaker 6 not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris.

Speaker 5 There's another little bite in there where she says, I don't believe we have the luxury of of writing in candidates' names. Just felt like a very pointed comment.
David, what did you think?

Speaker 2 There's a line in one of Sherlock Holmes' stories, or the great detective explains, how to solve a mystery.

Speaker 2 And his answer is, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the correct answer.

Speaker 2 And so I think that process of elimination is going on for a lot of people. The writing in names is a way of absenting oneself, but it's not a way of affirming affirming a meaningful choice.

Speaker 2 And so Liz Cheney, who's always understood that politics is about the possible, politics is about the effective, is asking that question.

Speaker 2 And I don't think she is denying the very important differences that she would have with Kamala Harris.

Speaker 2 She's probably assuming that there will be many opportunities in the future to cast votes on the issue she cares about.

Speaker 2 I think one of the things we've all explained to many of our current coalition partners is: should the day come when the most important questions are the size of the state, the cost of the state, how the state is financed, how much debt is acceptable versus how much should we reduce spending?

Speaker 2 All of us in the never-Trump world, most of us have held on to traditional views on those questions. But those are not the most urgent questions of the moment.

Speaker 2 And anyway, those are questions where the Trump alternative is never better and often worse than the Democratic alternative.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, we are confronted with America's role in the world, the trade system, the Constitution at home, and the basic question is if you lose an election, should you surrender power?

Speaker 5 Yeah, and Liz got into that a little bit yesterday as well, you know, talking about the fact that like

Speaker 5 even if the question comes to the policies, I'm like, this is absurd, right?

Speaker 5 Like Donald Trump is raising the debt more than anybody, to use that example that you just laid, the tariffs that he's putting forth, the foreign policy.

Speaker 5 I think that it's important that somebody like Liz Cheney, who has been a doctrinaire conservative, not a squish like me, and kind of you, though you're squish in a different way than me, a air conservative is out there saying, no, reject the talking point that says if you're looking at the policies and you put character aside, that Trump is the right answer.

Speaker 5 She says no to that. Kamala Harris is still the correct answer.

Speaker 2 Economists have a concept called revealed preference.

Speaker 2 And the concept is to illustrate this basic notion, which is we have lots of preferences and they sometimes come into conflict and we don't always sort them out in advance.

Speaker 2 So somebody might say, I want to eat healthier, but I also don't want to spend more than half an hour preparing the meal, and I don't want to spend more than a certain amount of money.

Speaker 2 So those are three different sets of preferences.

Speaker 2 And we don't know which is going to come out on top until you're actually confronted with the moment of choice where you have to stack eat healthier, spend more time, spend more money.

Speaker 2 And then you reveal what your truest preference is. And I think this has been very much the story of the Trump era.

Speaker 2 You know, you want a low-tax government, you want a low-spending government, you want free trade, you want to maintain alliances, and you believe in the democratic and constitutional system.

Speaker 2 And you've never had to worry before that those things might come into conflict. But what if they do?

Speaker 2 And one of the things that has been very disappointing about many of our former allies in the conservative world is their revealed preference does not put defending the constitutional democratic system at the top.

Speaker 2 They have other things that they value more highly. And look, that's their right.
But you don't have to applaud when people exercise their rights in ways you disapprove of.

Speaker 5 Thinking about people that are a little bit disappointing, like what say you to some of your fellow colleagues for the Bush era?

Speaker 5 You know, we both worked for different Bushes, but Condoleezza Rice was out on Fox this week talking about the perils of isolationism.

Speaker 5 She talked about the four horsemen of the apocalypse, isolationism, nativism, populism, and protectionism. And I'm going, who, who are you talking about there exactly?

Speaker 5 That she managed to go on Fox without saying the name of he who shall not be named. Why is that? Why are so many of these people so conscious? I get it if.

Speaker 5 You're Nikki Haley and you're fantasizing that you have a future in politics that you don't have, but Condoleezza Rice is 70 years old. Like, where are some of these other folks?

Speaker 2 Well, Condoleezza Rice didn't get to be the person who she is today by taking any kind of chance at all.

Speaker 2 She has always been someone who is about ingratiating herself with people with more power and concealing her true views. So why would that change now?

Speaker 2 The reason you and I are not sitting on boards at Davos is because we speak our minds.

Speaker 5 So she was Secretary of State while we're podcasters or failed speech writers because of this various traits.

Speaker 2 Got it.

Speaker 2 exactly exactly so i don't know how profitable it is to reproach anybody else for what they do or don't do i mean the the thing we all need to focus on is what what are we going to do what are our choices what are our decisions and you know we thought this moment of the end of the trump era would come long ago this really does seem to be the definitive moment the choice is presented now in its most excruciating form.

Speaker 2 We all can see what the cost of a second Trump president will be.

Speaker 2 It's a collapse of the American legal system as Trump uses the powers of the presidency to defeat the many criminal and civil indictments against him to try to uproot state as well as federal legal systems.

Speaker 2 It means the abandonment of Ukraine. It means the end of the world trade system.
It means the end of alliances. It also means, by the way, an incredibly profligate and irresponsible economy at home.

Speaker 2 Not that that's equivalent in concern to those other things, but it means that too. And it means just generally impulsiveness and fecklessness and bad temper and corruption, massive taking of bribes.

Speaker 2 And that's what we're confronted with. And so you have to say, you know, will you say yes? Will you say no? Or will you say present?

Speaker 5 Just to be clear, I'm the failed strategist. You were a successful speech strategist.
You were at least in the White House walls. All I had was L's on the way there.

Speaker 5 I expect we'll see more from Liz Cheney on this very point.

Speaker 5 I guess just my final thought on this is that I think that this is not going to be a ⁇ I was on a panel at Duke, and that's good enough moment for her. And I do think that's worth noting.

Speaker 2 I've been thinking this for a long time. In a way, one of the responses we we can have to the Trump era is one of gratitude, that it's not always true that your political choices matter that much.

Speaker 2 In fact, the healthier your democracy, the less the choices do matter. When a democratic system is working well, you know, it's the Christian Democrats against the Social Democrats.

Speaker 2 It's, you know, slightly lower taxes versus slightly cheaper bus fares. That's a healthy democratic system.

Speaker 2 And people are constantly making these move the ship of state slightly to this side or slightly to that side choices.

Speaker 2 That's successful. But it also means that the individual choice doesn't matter that much.
In this moment, we've been living through for nearly a decade. Your choices really matter.

Speaker 2 And we will remember the people who made good choices at tremendous sacrifice, as Liz Cheney did. And we will remember the cowards and the time servers.

Speaker 2 And we will, of course, remember also the villains and the monsters because we've had no shortage of those.

Speaker 5 Speaking of the villains and the monsters, we have the latest in the Russia hoax. You've heard a lot about the Russia hoax.

Speaker 5 If you consume mega media, or even just some of our old regular Fox, old regular old conservative media have now bought in on the Russia hoax. But yesterday, there was in an indictment.

Speaker 5 Federal officials are alleging that Russian nationals funded and directed a scheme that paid MAGA influencers through the Tennant Media Company.

Speaker 5 It was organized in part by a woman, Lauren Chin, who's an internet personality.

Speaker 5 If you spend any time on the internet, among the people that she got to partner with her were Tim Poole, very successful podcaster on the far right, Benny Johnson, former colleague of mine, and he works with TPOSA and Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 5 Dave Rubin, kind of more of a heterodox center-right podcaster. Lauren Southern, the partners claimed that they did so unwittingly.
Let's just listen to one clip from their output.

Speaker 5 Here's Tim Poole talking about the Russia-Ukraine war.

Speaker 7 Ukraine is the greatest threat to this nation and to the world. We should rescind all funding and financing, pull out all military support, and we should apologize to Russia.

Speaker 2 That's subtle davis well whether they were unwitting or not 48 hours ago they are not unwitting today so my question to all of them is now that you know how indignant are you are you keeping the money for example because one of the things i think it was obvious at the time but it's certainly obvious in retrospect is the finances of these companies and and i don't think tenant is the only one don't make a lot of sense i work at the atlantic we have a million paid customers we know what our revenues look like we know what we're able to do.

Speaker 2 You are as intimately familiar with the economics of the bulwark. And then you see these other companies.
It can't be true.

Speaker 2 You can't have these resources from the actual earned honest revenues you get from your listeners. So the money must come from somewhere else.
And aren't you curious?

Speaker 2 where that somewhere else is in this world of dangerous dirty money aren't you curious okay so maybe not everyone that who worked at tenant media was a genius and often people choose not to be curious about things that they decide it's better not to know about.

Speaker 2 But they know now. They know now.
And so while you could say someone was an unwitting Russian agent the day before the indictment is filed, the day after they are a witting recipient of Russian money.

Speaker 2 And I imagine we're going to discover that this ramifies all through the MAGA influencer world. Now, not every MAGA influencer is a Russian apologist.

Speaker 2 Some are neo-Nazis, although those often do converge. MAGA has pretty obviously been a non-organic phenomenon.
It can't exist with its own resources of votes, of money.

Speaker 2 It draws from other places, and we're getting some idea of where it's drawing from.

Speaker 5 Just some anecdotes on that point about how the money doesn't make sense. Tim Poole was making $100,000 per video.

Speaker 5 Speaking of pools, I'd be able to have one at my house if that was the kind of money videos were paying. Benny Johnson was making $400,000 a month.

Speaker 5 Some of these videos weren't even getting that many views. And I mean, these guys also have their own media companies, right?

Speaker 5 So they're familiar with the economics of, you know, video media and of the kind of content that they put out.

Speaker 5 And to your point about who they're mad at and revealed preferences, like they're out there on Twitter today, like mad at the people that are pointing fingers at them, right?

Speaker 5 Like not mad at the people that duped them. One other person that was just tangentially part of this, it's worth noting.
Don Jr.

Speaker 5 was among the people that was interviewed for tenant on the actual tenant platform with Betty Johnson. But then he was also interviewed separately with Tim Poole.
And I want to listen to that one.

Speaker 8 What's your opinion on the solution to the Ukraine war?

Speaker 9 Cut off the money. It's the only way you get them to the table.
Right? As long as,

Speaker 9 I mean, we're literally creating the oligarch class of billionaire in Ukraine with whatever is being siphoned off, whether it's Zelensky, whether it's this, while they send young men to die as cannon fodder on the front lines because they couldn't care less.

Speaker 9 It's fucking disgusting what's going on there that it's allowed to happen, that we shut down anything. It's so obvious.
Nothing's ever going to change there if the money keeps flowing.

Speaker 9 My father would have been like, hey, you got like one more month of this, and if you're not at the table, it's done.

Speaker 5 I mean, are we going to split hairs here? Like the Trumps are part of the Russian disinfo op.

Speaker 2 What we also need to do here is jump the brain barrier into the world of electoral politics and to understand a vote for Trump is a vote to betray and abandon Ukraine, which is a vote to blow up NATO.

Speaker 2 It's a vote to abandon self-defense. It's a vote to abandon Taiwan.

Speaker 2 Because there are people in the Trump orbit who will say, look, the reason we want to abandon Ukraine is to hoard our money so we have extra money to defend Taiwan.

Speaker 2 And I say, that's like someone saying, look, I want to impress my mortgage company.

Speaker 2 And so to impress them with my creditworthiness, I'm going to not pay the utility bill, not pay the cable bill, not pay any of my debts. And that way, I'll have more money to pay the mortgage.

Speaker 2 Won't they be impressed? Mortgage companies will say, we want to see that you pay all your debts.

Speaker 2 We don't believe that a person who defaults on many of the debts is going to pay the debt to us. We want to see them pay to all the debts.
The defense of Taiwan begins in Ukraine and vice versa.

Speaker 2 When we are credible in Taiwan, we are more credible in Europe.

Speaker 2 And I think one of the things, I mean, for those of us who have Israel as a special place in our heart, the Trump people are always trying to assure us that Israel will be the exception.

Speaker 2 That will be the one ally they would never betray.

Speaker 2 But when you look at the degree, and this is another thing you want to talk about today, in which paranoid and even murderous anti-Semitism is part of the intellectual furniture of the MAGA world, I don't think anyone who cares about Israel should be confident that the people who want to abandon Ukraine, abandon Taiwan, abandon Europe, abandon every ally everywhere are going to have a carve-out for Israel.

Speaker 5 Yeah, let's talk about that. So, this is all related.
So, Lauren Chin, who is the organizer of those influencers, people who do not exist in this world are going to need me to create a map for them.

Speaker 5 She also has dambled in some anti-Semitism stuff with Candace Owens.

Speaker 5 And then we had over the weekend, Tucker Carlson interviewing this fellow, Daryl Cooper, who's a historian that was arguing that Churchill was the villain of World War II. And J.D.

Speaker 5 Vance is also tied up in all this. But just first, where are you at on that, on Churchill being villain of World War II?

Speaker 5 Are you a no on that?

Speaker 2 I'm a no on that. What I'm struck by is World War II is a very studied historical phenomenon.

Speaker 2 And even if you're an amateur, In the clip that everyone has seen, Daryl Cooper is trying to make the point that the Nazis were somehow victims of their own success, that they had no plan for, he's very vague about whether he's talking about Jews or Russian Russian civilians or Soviet citizens of war.

Speaker 2 The Nazi crimes included the mass starvation of Soviet POWs. And indeed, some of the first people who were victims of gassing were Soviet POWs, soldiers captured in June and July and August of 1941.

Speaker 2 Now, if you have read like a book, and don't get all your information from YouTube videos, you'll know that the Nazi plan to use starvation as a deliberate weapon, not against Jews, but against Soviet civilians of the Soviet army, was put in writing in May of 1941, a month and a half before the military campaign against the Soviet Union started.

Speaker 2 You can read about that in such best-selling books as Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

Speaker 2 So what's going on here is kind of intentional lying or casual and negligent lying.

Speaker 2 But I'm ashamed almost to get into these points because what is going on here is, as the person who was interviewed has made clear in other contexts, he is motivated by merciless, murderous anti-Semitism.

Speaker 2 The Jews rejected Jesus and they have brought all their troubles upon themselves.

Speaker 2 And this has not been mainstream Christian theology for a long time, but it flourishes in the crackpot world and it flourishes in places where Tucker Carlson would not have been surprised by what this person was saying on his podcast when the person came on.

Speaker 2 And he certainly wasn't shocked or displeased. He chose to take someone who is a smaller fish in the internet world than Tucker Carlson is and make him a bigger fish.

Speaker 2 And then Elon Musk made them both bigger fishes. than ever before.

Speaker 2 Some of this may be in service of other kinds of goals, but one of the jokes I, I, grim jokes I often make, is I'm, of course, I'm Ashkenazi Jewish on both my father's and mother's side.

Speaker 2 I say there are very few Ashkenazi optimists because we are genetically engineered for pessimism. The optimists stayed, the pessimists left.

Speaker 2 The optimists didn't have grandchildren, the pessimists did. So you just get a very good sense for who,

Speaker 2 you know, that remark, was that funny? Or is that danger? You had a good sense for that.

Speaker 2 And I don't know how you spend any time in the Maga world as someone who's serious about Jewish Jewish heritage or Jewish faith and not say, I just feel danger everywhere.

Speaker 5 And, you know, some people might say, okay, well, look, Tucker has become a crank. He's off Fox.
He's on the sidelines. And his reach certainly has been limited.

Speaker 5 But I got to tell you, like, the scariest part about the whole thing to me and the seriousness of this is I'm pretty deep in this stuff. I'd never heard of the Daryl Cooper guy.

Speaker 5 And Tucker, right now, as we're taping this, like the numbers are always moving on like the Apple podcast charts.

Speaker 5 Tucker had the number one podcast on the charts overall until he was surpassed by Daryl Cooper's random crank podcast.

Speaker 5 Because after he, after he platformed him, I guess Tucker's listeners went and went and found that guy's podcast and listened to it. So now they're one and two on the charts.
Meanwhile, J.D.

Speaker 5 Vance had, a couple years before he was a VP nominee, had quote tweeted this guy whose Twitter handle is MartyrMaid, who did some long thread defending the Stop the Steal stuff. And And J.D.

Speaker 5 Vance had quote-tweeted him saying, like, this is a thoughtful thread. Will my liberal fans even listen to this? So, like, there is no seven degrees of Kevin Bacon here between the president.

Speaker 2 He gets closer than that. And here's something where this really does jump the barrier from the world of the internet to the world of active politics.

Speaker 2 So, you've got this crank, Holocaust denier, and anti-Semite. He gets promoted by the Tucker Carlson podcast.
On what day was that? September 3rd?

Speaker 2 On September 21st, vice presidential presidential candidate of the Republican Party, J.D.

Speaker 2 Vance, is scheduled to do an event in Hershey, Pennsylvania with a man who promoted and praised a Holocaust denier and anti-Semite.

Speaker 2 And so in the world of normal politics, look, people get past the barriers of a campaign all the time, as you know.

Speaker 2 But in normal politics, when one of these intruders gets past the barriers, the claxins start sounding, the red lights start flaring, you know, and they isolate, they move the candidate away from the crackpot.

Speaker 2 And then sometimes apologies have to be issued. Sometimes individual staffers have to be disciplined or fired.
How did that happen?

Speaker 2 But I think it's going to be a valid question on the Trump-Harris debate on September 10th, that your vice president, your vice presidential candidate is, as of the day we talk, September 5th, scheduled to do an event on September 21st with someone who praised and platformed a Holocaust denier.

Speaker 2 Are you comfortable with that? Because it's not just about what is on the internet. It is not just about podcasts.
J.D. Vance is the running mate in great part because of Tucker Carlson's influence.

Speaker 2 Maybe Tucker Carlson's more than anybody else. So this is not just about what cranks and kooks are hearing on the internet.

Speaker 2 This is about who's going to be the next president and vice president of the United States. And are we going to have this kind of craziness and this kind of bigotry?

Speaker 2 We've had it once, but the version we're getting 2.0 is a much more

Speaker 2 highly refined version of this particular methamphetamine.

Speaker 5 Which, again, kind of brings us back to the Connies and the Patumis of the World Nice You.

Speaker 5 And I was talking to Margaret Hoover on Friday, last Friday's podcast about Joni Ernst and how there's still some delusion among some in that crowd that more traditional national security types will be around Trump or whatever.

Speaker 5 And it's like literally the president and the vice president nominees, like the ticket, like they are palling around with the Holocaust deniers, with the people that are on Russia's payroll.

Speaker 5 That is the reason why J.D. Vance was selected.

Speaker 5 How could you possibly still be deluding yourself into thinking that

Speaker 5 somebody like H.R. McMaster will have any influence in the second Trump administration?

Speaker 2 I mean, I haven't finished reading H.R. McMaster's book, but one of the things he is forced to concede about himself, and sometimes between the lines, is that H.R.
McMaster was not very effective.

Speaker 2 And indeed, H.R. McMaster was not the hero that he makes himself out to be.
He has a lot of complaints about the Mattis-Tillerson alliance that promptly formed. Those guys really were the heroes.

Speaker 2 And, you know, both Mattis and Tillerson have talked about this publicly, that Mattis, they approached each other and realized, we are in charge of the foreign policy of the United States.

Speaker 2 We need an unbridgeable alliance. State and defense historically don't get along that well.
And they would have breakfast once a week. Mattis referred to Tillerson as St.
Rex.

Speaker 2 That was his nickname for him. And they just, they formed a pact.

Speaker 2 And one of the things that was so important about that is I've observed some of these simulations that some good government groups have run about what would happen if Trump did this or what would happen if Trump did that.

Speaker 2 And one of the things that you see in the simulations is obviously people in the line of fire have to obey a lawful order from the president.

Speaker 2 But many of Trump's orders were impossible or illegal. And at that point, a question comes up.
Do you help him solve the problem or not?

Speaker 2 You get a very different result when the person who receives the illegal or improper or impossible order says, sir, we cannot do that. Period.
Full stop.

Speaker 5 Silence. Like the immigration regime in the Trump first administration, for example, versus what some of the other people did.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, that's what in the immigration regime, the Supreme Court did help them.

Speaker 2 The Supreme Court said, okay, what you're asking here is illegal, but here's how you could rewrite it so that it would be legal.

Speaker 2 And after three rounds of litigation, Trump finally got the message, here's how to do it. To me, the great example of this is Trump's military parade.

Speaker 2 Trump goes to Paris in the summer of 2017, and he sees the big Bastille Day parade that the French have. It's a strange custom from an American point of view.

Speaker 2 It feels very undemocratic, but it goes to deep traumas in French history. I think it started after the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.
So they do it. And Trump says, wow, that's fantastic.

Speaker 2 We need one of those. And the U.S.
military desperately wants not to do it. They want to not do it because, first, it's extremely expensive.
But second, above all, it looks very political.

Speaker 2 Because this is not a custom in the United States, it's never been done before.

Speaker 2 If Trump orders it, it looks like the armed might of the United States is being deployed at the personal behest of the president, i.e., you know, that

Speaker 2 not just commander-in-chief under the Constitution. The Constitution is what the soldiers swear an oath to, not the president.
But somehow this is his armed force. And so they found ways.

Speaker 2 They kept finding ways that they couldn't do it, and they didn't help him solve the problem. And he would say, you know, I want you to do it.

Speaker 2 The military would say, if we take tanks down Pennsylvania Avenue, we will rip up Pennsylvania Avenue and we don't have budget to repave Pennsylvania Avenue.

Speaker 2 And Trump would say, I've got a report here that says it'll only cost $2 million.

Speaker 2 The Pentagon would say, we have a report that says it's $80 million and you can read it because we've just given it to the Washington Post and they've put it on the front page.

Speaker 2 And finally,

Speaker 2 a compromise is achieved where on Trump's, I think, last 4th of July as president, the military does a fly past instead of a parade because, look, we do a fly past for the Ohio State game.

Speaker 2 We can do a fly past

Speaker 2 for the president, but we're not putting tanks on the streets of Washington, D.C. We are not doing that.
And they didn't, and they didn't help them.

Speaker 2 So Tillerson and Mattis were the architects of the don't give him alternatives strategy. If he gives an order, if it can be done, it has to be done.
But if it can't be done, it can't be done.

Speaker 2 And you don't help him.

Speaker 2 In term two, he'll be surrounded by people who want to help him, who want to anticipate him, and who will want to guess what he wants and go farther. And that's going to be a very different world.

Speaker 2 There won't be Mattis's. There won't be Tillerson's.

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Speaker 5 Including JD, and you know, you mentioned that the September 21st event was Tucker. You wrote in 2022 about the JD Vance that you knew.
He was an anonymous blogger on the From forum for a while.

Speaker 5 I'm just curious that we've had now two months of him.

Speaker 5 I mean, it has to be even worse than you would have imagined. I'm just wondering what your impressions are of what is going on with J.D.
Vance.

Speaker 2 I forget who's the author of the saying, sooner or later we become what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful about what we pretend to be.

Speaker 5 I think it's Vonnegut.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think he's ultimately, or he began as ultimately a very hollow person.

Speaker 2 very interested in exploring the possibilities that were open to someone of his genuine talents and gifts, but without a lot of core beliefs.

Speaker 2 There's this kind of lock-in that he spent a lot of time in these chat rooms. He's developed a lot of anger and resentment.
The feelings about women really are pathological.

Speaker 2 One of the things I'm struck by again and again is his ability to take something that you could phrase it in a way that everybody would find reasonable.

Speaker 2 You could say, you know, obviously the birth rates are down. Many American young people are not able to have the children that they want.
And we have to figure out ways that we can help them do that.

Speaker 2 It's an important goal in government policy.

Speaker 2 And you could say, however much joy and fulfillment you get from your career, let me tell you as a parent, nothing is equal to the joy and fulfillment you get from your children.

Speaker 2 And the resources of government should be available to help you.

Speaker 2 Great statements.

Speaker 5 I agree with all of that.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And apple pie, also good.

Speaker 2 The flag for that.

Speaker 2 How do you screw up that statement and make it a statement of aggression and contempt? But he's he's somehow able to.

Speaker 2 And he's saying things that ought to be the most basic and universally acceptable things in the world. And he makes them ugly in ways that are just startling.
Where does that come from?

Speaker 5 It comes from the chat rooms. Yeah, and that's what you're saying.
It comes from these influence, comes from this building bitterness and grievance.

Speaker 5 And people talk themselves into these sorts of things. Like if you're just online and you're sort of having these conversations, you're like, yes, yes, it is the childless women's fault.

Speaker 5 You know, it is the condescending person that I hated when I was trying to turn my book into a Hollywood treatment.

Speaker 5 And I had a couple of people that were condescending and mean that were coastal elites to me. It is them.
It is them that is the problem.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of rage. It's a genuine issue that young people are not finding each other.
And romance is becoming more difficult.

Speaker 2 And especially between the sexes, there are barriers and mistrust, and it's got complex social causes. And maybe the internet is making it worse.

Speaker 2 One of my children is married, but my children are in the marriage market. So I see all of this and all these problems.

Speaker 2 But there is something about the MAGA world where they speak to young men who somehow think that their entitlement to women is being thwarted by the women.

Speaker 2 And I mean, I'm kind of a skeptic of American self-improvement culture. But one of the good things about American self-improvement culture is its message is always the problem is you.

Speaker 2 The problem is you.

Speaker 2 Go fix you. Maybe society is a little bit to blame.

Speaker 2 You know, maybe if there are like some kinds of income support, that might help. But so we have this excessive almost call like the Tony Robbins, Unleash the Tiger Within.

Speaker 2 Well, what if I'm not really a tiger?

Speaker 5 The gorilla mindsets, Mike Cernovich. Yeah.

Speaker 2 The one thing it does that is good about American self-improvement culture is it sees the danger of blaming others for one's own problems.

Speaker 2 And whether or not it's entirely true that you are capable of infinite self-improvement, it's a better way to approach the world. And mega culture is just the opposite.
If

Speaker 2 you don't get a date, it's women are holding out on you. And at the extreme, that can lead to murder.

Speaker 2 and certainly leads to a lot of violence and it's certainly it's not attractive i i gotta say people who are gripped by the idea that women are holding out on them are gonna find that the women continue to hold out on them because women are highly

Speaker 5 just as jews are highly sensitive to paranoid anti-semitism women are highly attuned to men who might want to hurt them it's not even just his tone it's also the policy he was with charlie kirk yesterday and they're having some kind of interview at a live turning point usa event let's just play the audio

Speaker 11 can we do about lowering the cost of daycare Hayden, obviously, a working family, and it's very hard for working families to get by. How will we lower the cost of daycare?

Speaker 8 You know, such an important question, Charlie. And I think one of the things that we can do is make it easier for family models to choose, or for families to choose whatever model they want, right?

Speaker 8 So, one of the ways that you might be able to relieve a little bit of pressure on people who are paying so much for daycare is make it so that, you know, maybe like grandma or grandpa wants to help out a little bit more, or maybe there's an aunt or uncle that wants to help out a little bit more.

Speaker 8 If that happens, you relieve some of of the pressure on all the resources that we're spending in daycare. Now, you talk about just daycare.

Speaker 8 Let's say you don't have somebody who can provide that extra set of hands. What we've got to do is actually empower people to get trained in the skills that they need for the 21st century.

Speaker 5 I thought he was supposed to be the working class ReformaCon candidate. Anyway, there's so much to unpack there.
I'm just curious your thoughts.

Speaker 2 What you could see there was he's read an article. What if there were a refundable tax credit for child care that you could give to a family member? That's an idea.

Speaker 2 I haven't thought about it enough to know whether it's a good idea or bad, but that's an idea and people have written it.

Speaker 2 And so he's got that on the tip of his tongue, but he also understands, wait a minute, that means spending money. And that's going to be a no-go area for some of the people who are listening.

Speaker 2 So what he makes it sound like is that he's got an idea, but he doesn't quite dare say it. And then he hastily skeeters on.

Speaker 2 And the impression he leaves behind behind is the whole question of, well, how will children be cared for? Which is kind of an imperative question.

Speaker 2 It's the kind of thing that every young family struggles with, and not just children, by the way.

Speaker 2 And one of the things I think that is a real area of public policy we need to be thinking about is how do we care for the rapidly growing population over 80?

Speaker 2 If we had healthier politics, it was not about how do we get away with overthrowing the Constitution. One of the things that the party should be arguing about.
is people over 80 need more care.

Speaker 2 They're growing incredibly fast, which is a triumph of human flourishing, but raises some costs. How will those costs be met? It's a rich society.
There are a lot of ways to answer the question.

Speaker 2 We have philosophical differences. So there are a lot of things to debate, but you can have a productive debate and not just

Speaker 2 skip past the hard question on your way to pointing fingers and blaming people.

Speaker 5 I enjoyed the little aside about how we should encourage different types of family formations. It's not talking about gays, by the way.
We're talking about that.

Speaker 5 The different types of family formations is, yeah, maybe you can have your uncle come in and help raise the kid kid for you. Good luck.

Speaker 2 But, you know, J.D. Vance would once upon a time have actually acknowledged that.
Like the 2015 or 2016 version of J.D. Vance would have had some room for that.

Speaker 2 And sometimes just saying something, it opens the door. So when George W.

Speaker 2 Bush was campaigning for president in 2000, one of the things he always made a point of doing was saying, churches, synagogues, and mosques.

Speaker 2 Now, he didn't have any particular policy. He was just saying, you're proud of America.
Proud of America. I don't have an offer.

Speaker 2 I'm not even sure there's a question.

Speaker 5 Just being minimally welcome actually is a step improvement over tearing down and saying that actually, you know, you're less than if you're a single childless cat lady, you know.

Speaker 2 And like a lot of people say, actually, I like the single childless cat lady says, I don't necessarily even want anything from you.

Speaker 5 Right.

Speaker 2 I don't have an ask. I just want not to be insulted.
How hard is that?

Speaker 5 Very hard for JD Vance.

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Speaker 5 All right, I want to end the squashing, but we haven't done any Kamla.

Speaker 5 I'm curious, just David Fromm's top-line impressions of her over the past six weeks, seven weeks, and any concerns you have policy, campaign-wise, otherwise.

Speaker 2 In 2004, in the Bush-Kerry race, I had a friend who was working on the Kerry campaign, and I said, you know, what's your message? And his message is, he'll do.

Speaker 2 And I said, I feel like I am not enthusiastic about the coming Harris presidency. I know

Speaker 2 it's going to be more protectionists than I like, and it's going to be more expensive than I like. There are going to be all kinds of petty things they're going to do that are going to bother me.

Speaker 2 And that's tomorrow's problem. That's tomorrow's problem.
Today's problem is you have to save the Constitution, save NATO, save trade, save American leadership in the world.

Speaker 5 You mentioned about Israel having a special place in your heart. I do think it's been interesting.

Speaker 5 There was based on kind of nothing, there was like scuttle that Harris was maybe not as supportive of Israel as Biden had been, which is interesting, giving her husband Doug Emhoff being Jewish and having spoken out on anti-Semitism.

Speaker 5 Since she's been the nominee, she's shown no evidence of that. But I know you have people in those kind of circles who would have concerns about her policy there.

Speaker 5 Is there anything that has jumped out to you, good, bad, or otherwise?

Speaker 2 One of the things I argue with some of my friends in the more conservative Jewish spaces is Biden has done more for the state of Israel than any American president ever, and by an enormous bound.

Speaker 2 And I think people sometimes forget what the historical relationship between U.S.

Speaker 2 presidents and Israel was like, but there has never been a degree of support that Israel has gotten from an American president since October 7th, as compared to what it's gotten since two presidential visits, twice as much in material aid as Nixon sent in 1973.

Speaker 2 It was like 25,000 tons of aid, 50,000 days, limitless intelligence help, backing for extended periods of time. Israel always has a very strict time limit on its military operations.

Speaker 2 This one, there has been no time limit. And Biden's had comments that were differed from the Israeli government's views.

Speaker 2 But given the degree of support, given the fact that American carrier groups have been deployed to protect Israel and that American weapons have been fired to intercept missiles heading Israel, you get a right to some opinions after all that.

Speaker 2 So will Harris be as pro-Israel as that?

Speaker 2 I don't know. I think sometimes when someone breaks the record, the record

Speaker 2 stays on the record

Speaker 2 for a while. And let's also hope that no one ever needs to be as pro-Israel as Biden has been because nothing as terrible as this ever happens again.

Speaker 2 My guess is that when you look at the people around her, they are even more cautious than the people around Biden,

Speaker 2 even more risk-averse than the people around Biden have been. So I'm guessing there'll be some kind of drawback.
But, you know, that question of does she take Israel's security seriously?

Speaker 2 Does she understand the need to defend the security and survival of the world's only Jewish state? Yeah, I don't see any reason to have any anxieties about any of that.

Speaker 5 I also enjoyed your criticism on the other side in the Atlantic recently of the lefty protesters, the defeat Harris, get Trump politics of protest.

Speaker 2 I think at the Democratic Convention, there was this push to have a pro-Palestinian speaker. I think Harris probably wanted to say yes.
But sometimes you're dealing with people who don't want yes.

Speaker 5 Don't want to take yes for an answer.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So if you say, look, all we're looking for here is a speaker who's...
Palestinian or oriented to the Palestinian cause, who has no previous record of incitement of violence.

Speaker 2 If you can find us one, oh, well, now you've spoiled everything.

Speaker 2 And they wouldn't do it. And this proposal, by the way, comes up like on, it's six months of saying, we're going to destroy your convention.
We're going to cause riots.

Speaker 2 We're going to provoke the police. We're going to make the thing a shambles and use the convention to elect Trump.

Speaker 2 And then when all of that fails, on the third day of the convention, you say, oh, by the way, can you schedule time on the fourth day, the nominee's day for one of our people?

Speaker 2 And we'll try to find someone who doesn't have a record of inciting violence. So she was trapped.

Speaker 5 I think she handled it quite deftly. And I think that the people were expecting so much worse from those protests and they completely fizzled.

Speaker 5 And I think that there are obviously people in the audience that have genuine humanitarian concerns about what is happening in Gaza.

Speaker 5 And that concern was reflected in several speeches and was received well in the room. And I think that was totally appropriate.

Speaker 2 I wrote in April of 24 that this fantasy that there was going to be a replay of Chicago 68 was crazy.

Speaker 2 And I actually did some real work on, I talked to people who'd been there at Chicago 68 in the the Democratic Congress. What lessons were learned?

Speaker 2 Security in 1968 was delivered by the Chicago Police Force, which was a poorly trained, poorly motivated force driven by people full of cultural grievances.

Speaker 2 So security is, there's now a $50 million federal grant to each convention. Security is organized or planned by the Secret Service.
It's super professional.

Speaker 2 You know, every branch of the federal capability is there.

Speaker 2 And the whole system of how do you protect the right to peacefully protest while also honoring the business of the convention, there are zones for protest where it's allowed and people can go there.

Speaker 2 And the creation of the zone means that if someone steps outside the zone, they don't have to attack a police officer before you're allowed to arrest them.

Speaker 2 If they're outside the zone where they're allowed to be, you can arrest them and not send them to prison, but give them a ticket, detain them, and say, you broke the rules that have been in place for every convention since 68.

Speaker 5 So the final topic, there's a school shooting in Georgia at Appalachie High yesterday. A 14-year-old's in custody, four dead, two students, two teachers.

Speaker 5 He was on the radar of the FBI for making threats at the age of 13. You know, to me, this relates to what we were talking about, about the angry young men online.

Speaker 5 These stories just always enrage me as they do everybody. But I think back to the, again, to the shooter that tried to assassinate Donald Trump.

Speaker 5 And he's not 14, but he's 20 and had access to weapon, access to bullets. And yet all the conversation after that attempt was around rhetoric and what the pundits were saying.

Speaker 5 And it's just like, how many times do we have to do this when

Speaker 5 it's the same story? It's the same story over and over again. I don't know.
I know that you have thoughts on this, so I'm just curious.

Speaker 2 I've written about this a lot. And do they have angry young men in South Korea? They do.
Do they have video games in Japan? They do. Do they have marijuana and other drugs in Germany and Sweden?

Speaker 2 They do. When you're solving a problem, when the United States is unique in one regard, you look for the variable where the United States is different from other peer societies.

Speaker 2 And the answer to why the United States has so many of these terrible events in other countries, it's so obvious.

Speaker 2 And the amount of ingenuity that goes into denying the obvious thing, there's a kind of willed stupidity where you say, well, it's video games.

Speaker 2 Are there video games in Japan?

Speaker 2 It's angry young men. Are there angry young men in South Korea?

Speaker 2 How is the United States, there's only one way the United States is different from every other peer country, and that's that there are at this point something like 450 million weapons floating around the country.

Speaker 2 Huge increase just in the two years 2020 and 2021. Anybody can get them.
The majority of gun owners do not store their weapons safely, so weapons are stole. And people say, well,

Speaker 2 it was an illegal weapon.

Speaker 2 The way every illegal weapon, or almost everyone, started as a legal weapon that was improperly stashed. Somebody stole it and it went into the channels of illegal commerce.

Speaker 2 The country seems really determined not to notice the obvious answer and not to do anything about it. And that's tragic.

Speaker 2 And there will be more of these terrible, terrible events until one day Americans decide. We don't want to live like this anymore.
And then it will be stopped because it can be.

Speaker 2 Everyone else stops it.

Speaker 5 And there are other deterrents. Like, you know, we've cut down on drunk driving and and there's still a lot of beer in the country, right? There are other ways to do deterrence.

Speaker 5 The FBI, I think, showed up to the house of the suspect last year and talked to the father. The father said, yes, I have guns, but you know, the child is never around the guns by themselves.

Speaker 5 And like, here we are. And I mean, there are ways to punish that father.

Speaker 5 There are ways to make sure that young people can't carry guns outside the home at any time, that it's punishable by law, just like an open container is, all of this.

Speaker 2 You can't do it in a context of a society where the default rule is guns everywhere. Canada, where I am now, has a lot of guns, probably about half as many per capita as the United States.

Speaker 2 But the guns are overwhelmingly long guns and they're overwhelmingly hunting pieces.

Speaker 2 It's very rare that, very rare for Canadians to have handguns, and almost impossible for them to have AR-15s and weapons like that.

Speaker 2 And I live in a part of the world where probably almost all of my neighbors own a long gun of one kind or another. Long guns fire single shots at a time.

Speaker 2 They're not very useful useful for school massacres. The weapons that are useful are difficult to get.

Speaker 2 So I tell Americans a story about what is one of the differences in the gun process in the two countries. Again, a lot of guns in Canada.

Speaker 2 And Americans flip out, and this, I think, reveals a lot of what's going on.

Speaker 2 If you want a handgun in Canada, part of the process is anyone you have lived with in the past five years, any domestic partner, must fill out a form in which she, visits usually a she, says, I am unbothered by having a gun in the house.

Speaker 2 And if the police read that form and have any reason to doubt that this was given freely and sincerely, they will interview the partner. And I say, are you quite sure?

Speaker 2 Because the overwhelmingly most probable use of a firearm in the United States is to threaten domestic partners.

Speaker 2 And when I tell them that the police would come and interview your wife or girlfriend and ask them whether she feels comfortable with you having a weapon.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like that's that's how you get gun safety is by making sure that the kind of person whose wife or girlfriend is afraid of him doesn't get the weapon. That's a great, great start.

Speaker 2 But Americans regard this as like, as if Canada were operating concentration camps. They would ask a wife or girlfriend, are you comfortable with a weapon in your house?

Speaker 2 In your house, too, by the way, the house you live.

Speaker 5 David Fromm, wanting to bring Canadian-style statism to America.

Speaker 5 I appreciate you very much. Thank you, as always, for coming on the Bullwick podcast.
Tomorrow, we're going to be live in Dallas tonight. I've got Kinzinger, Crystal, Sarah Longwell.

Speaker 5 We'll be playing the show for you guys tomorrow. Check it out then.
I'm interviewing Colin Allred on Saturday. You'll get that over the weekend weekend or on Monday as well.
We'll see you all then.

Speaker 5 Thanks for listening. Peace.

Speaker 5 Going into the bottom cell phone, they move that I don't even know what.

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Speaker 5 Stadty works a long day.

Speaker 5 He's coming home late. And he's coming on late.
And he's bringing me a surprise.

Speaker 5 This is dinner in the kitchen. And it's like you'd celebrate it for a long time.

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Speaker 5 All the other kids with a woman, kicks, you better run, better run, faster than my mother.

Speaker 5 All the other kids with a woman, kicksies, baby, run, let it run, and now run like that.

Speaker 5 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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