Jane Coaston: The Culture War of Absurdity

Hello and welcome to the Borg podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller, and I'm delighted to be here with my fellow fellow at the University of Southern California, Jane Koston, contributing opinion writer to the New York Times and on air contributor to CNN.
Jane, thanks for doing this. Thanks so much for having me, Tim.
I'm so excited. It's funny because we have not yet seen each other in Los Angeles, the place where we reportedly both are often.
Are fellowing. Yeah, well, hopefully it will happen.
Hopefully it will happen in March. You're on a Lenten Twitter hiatus.
Tell me about that. I take a break every year from Twitter because I feel like it constricts your mind in such a way that it's really good to take 40 days and just be like, let's see what other people are doing.
And it's wild to me how little my life actually changes. I used to tell someone that like the trick to Twitter is to only tweet 10% of the things you think you want to tweet.
Oh, that's the trick. And it's even better if you just like don't say anything at all for a long period of time.
You know how many times there is a thing on Twitter, and then you try to explain it to someone who's not on Twitter. And you're like, this is just stupid.
It's nice to not do that. It's nice to not have a like, what is happening? Who is this person? Why are we all yelling at this one person? Because especially now that Twitter has been gamified to such an extent, like so much of it is like you have a blue checkmark verification and all you're just saying is stuff to drive engagement.
So people yell at you and you make money. And I'm like, I'm not going to help you make money.
No, I will not. So then why are you going back that's an excellent question and i think that's because i am an addict an addict i have a problem i'm also on blue sky which i enjoy even though like three-fourths of the conversations on blue sky are like did you see what what happened on Twitter? Oh, my God.
Did you see this fucking guy? This fucking guy said this fucking thing. And you're like, we all transferred out of a high school, but we can't stop talking about that high school? The addictive part of Twitter is the fighting, the winning, and the owning, right? And so if you go to a space where you're not fighting and winning, and that's what everybody says they want.
They're like, oh, what I really would like is a community where everybody agrees with me and we can talk and be good-natured about things. It turns out that is very boring.
Without the foes, what is the point? Well, it's interesting because Blue Sky is a place in which you have different foes. Blue Sky is where all the tankies are the tankies are oh really you wind up having arguments with like hardcore tanky leftists and you sound like a neocon but it just because like you are a person who thinks that maybe stalin had some downsides it's a fascinating place because it's like political ideologies that you're like i didn't even know know they made those.
Like, it's just like, you're a Peruvian Maoist. You know, I like, I have to go back and try to remember like post 1945 political ideological formations to just be like, who are you? I will say that what you were saying about how people, you know, like, oh, I don't want drama.
I don't want to fight or something like that. Yes, they do.
And the people who say that want it the most, it's like how, um, during this time I've, uh, decided apparently to watch all of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, which is amazing television in every way. But as with any reality franchise, the person who says, I don't want drama wants drama.
They want the most drama. They want to fight.
They want to fight all the time. Because if you don't want to fight generally, you don't have to say that.
Like you don't need to clarify that you do not want to have an argument. You just simply don't have an argument.
So the 40 days is good. It's funny, though, because the first time I did this was in 2020.
So I came back and I was like, Oh, global pandemic. So I'm really, really hoping that doesn't happen again.
Well, there hasn't been a global pandemic where you've been gone. But I regret to inform you that much of this podcast will be us talking about what people are doing on the internet.
I care deeply about it. I'm fascinated by it.
I'm convinced it matters in a way that I haven't yet been able to truly articulate. I wrote a piece in 2020, which I think still holds up that like Donald Trump was too online.
And like, we saw this again with Ron DeSantis, like there's a degree of being so online that you only refer to things that happen online and you think everyone knows what you're talking about, that's bad.

But there is a lot you can learn

from how people perform their politics

or their culture online.

And then they try to take it to normal people.

And many times they sound insane,

but it's still interesting and worth talking about.

Well, this transitions nicely

into one of the clips that I wanted to play for you when it comes to what is happening on the online right. I have become kind of fascinated with Charlie Kirk's podcast because he has a once a week episode.
It's called Thought Crime, where it's just a bunch of bros, just a bunch of white guys talking about some of their thoughts that maybe shouldn't be said out loud. And yet they're going to say it out loud every week.
And if you just bear with me, because I do think that we both agree on this, that it's easy and right to laugh and make fun of them about this, but also it's disturbingly influential and pernicious. So everybody just bear with us for a highlight reel of some of my favorites from Charlie Kirk.
It starts with him giving support for young children, as young as 12 years old, watching public executions and then just gets wavered from there. You could have like brought to you by Coca-Cola and no, I'm not kidding.
By the way, I would totally tune in to see some pedo get their head chopped off. Convicted by a jury.
By the way, that's going to get. I'm talking about a real thing.
I'm talking. I'm not talking about executions in Bellarice are by firearm.
That's no choice. Andrew's saying don't make kids watch it.
And I think, no, the absolute opposite. I think at a certain age, if you can drive, you can watch it.
No, but hold on. If all of a sudden you look at some of these savages, like in Indiana, there was this guy that went in and killed a pregnant woman and her three kids.
And you know what? I want to watch that execution. That'll make my day better.
I want to see him on a public block and get him be publicly executed. And I think that would be justice.
You think children should have, you should see it. What is the age? At what age should you start to see public executions? 16.
I think you could do it earlier. I think maybe at age 12, 6th grade or so.
We see this where mass shooters across the country who are trans, law enforcement is more interested in using the proper pronouns than actually finding justice or saying this despicable person doesn't deserve our attention. Who cares their pronouns you know what the pronouns are savage animal that's the pronouns has joel osteen come out and said that the wicked trans ideology is to blame for this no no he has not uh i have not seen him come out and say anything other than the good stuff is unfortunate what happened over under how long until uh Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey are no more? Over-under, Blake? Like until they're dead? I can see their suicide pact taking effect.
No, not that one. Not when the MRNA gene-altering shot makes Travis Kelsey drop in the middle of practice.
That one's way more fun. I'm talking about when will they no longer be together? I don't think they're together now.
I think this is all a psyop. What's the goal of the psyop?

World domination.

Do you agree, Jack?

That just to make money?

She's nasty.

She's ugly.

Nobody likes her.

She looks like Taylor.

Nobody likes her.

She looks like a teenage boy.

Like, dudes don't like her.

Like, if you put her in front of her, like, she's ugly.

That's true.

Yeah, does Taylor Swift have any eggs left?

I don't know if she had to start with.

Riveting wisdom.

Yeah.

Great camp.

Children should watch executions.

Taylor Swift, I guess, doesn't have any eggs.

It's too old.

Travis Kelsey, Super Bowl champion, is going to die from the fake vaccine.

I had to cut out the clip about how we talked too much about Martin Luther King Day and the Civil Rights Act. You know, just a lot of wisdom there.
Just kind of rate your level of disturbance versus desire to give a wedgie after listening to that. I think it's extremely important to make fun of giant bad dorks.
Like, I think it's very important. Like, I refuse to respond to, say, like, neo-Nazis marching in Nashville by being afraid of them.
These are America's biggest dorks, and they should be mocked. Imagine hanging on to an ideology that was supposed to last 1,000 years and lasted for 12.
Like, come on. Like, it couldn't even make it into a pg-13 movie i'm not gonna be afraid of these people i refuse and it's also indicative of the fact that like charlie kirk has probably never really had like an actual group of friends because all of their conversations seem like they're trying to have like normal bro time but it's like a normal bro time if you told an alien what dudes talk about.
And then he was like, all right, I'll interpret it. But like, it is concerning to me because I think that it is a fascinating example of audience capture.
A couple of years ago, Charlie Kirk, he was doing a college tour with Turning Point USA. And he and I think it was also Donald Trump Jr.
was with him. And also Dan Crenshaw, Representative Dan Crenshaw.
And they were getting just berated by this Groyper movement. Groypers are white nationalist followers of Nick Fuentes, one of America's great dorks, racist, awful person.
Anyway, every event, these people would show up and start screaming like anti-Semitic

conspiracy theories at Charlie Kirk and at Crenshaw and Donald Trump Jr. It was a giant issue for TPUSA.
And you've seen over the last couple of years that Charlie Kirk has basically decided like, you know what, I think they were right. I think the people talking about Israelis celebrating after 9-11.
Those people, good points, good points. And so I think it's a really good example of segmented audience capture.
Like, this doesn't sell. There are not millions of Americans who are like, you know what? I want to hear more about how Martin Luther King is a bad person.
Like, that's just not a thing people want. But it is something that a segment of this audience wants so much that they overwhelm anyone else.
And you've seen that with TPUSA. They've had to disband their ambassadors program because their ambassadors kept being like, I think Jews hate Jesus.
Like, they kept just going wilding out on the internet. I mean, I'm sure that they actually hold these views, but also because the way audience capture works.
And I keep using that term because I think it's so interesting. There's a great sub stack on the subject, which is basically that like, once you have an audience, you don't have them, they have you.
And if you say you're a content creator on YouTube, if you are like, all I want to do is cook sometimes, you will wind up like cooking 20 meals a day and doing all these videos about how you cook 20 times a day or something like that. Like the audience will drive you deeper into whatever it is that you're doing.
And so your audience, they want to see more and they want to see bigger versions of whatever content you create. And I think that what has happened to Charlie Kirk is that the audience that he has now is simultaneously people who hate him and people who desperately want and will continue to demand more fringe, red pill, racist content.
They want to hear about how Taylor Swift is too ugly to live. And they want to hear about how you would not want to get on a plane with a black pilot, like they want to hear this.
And so the more that everyday people, everyday conservatives even are pushed away from this type of content, the more the people who really like it are like, yes, yes, give me more of that. I will reshare it and retweet it.
And it's sad in a way. It's not like, oh, I wish Charlie Kirk could do better.
Because I'm like, I don't know if there is a better. But it is sad to me to see that the content has been driven into this awful well.
Do better, Charlie Kirk. You know, and I really should have included the I'm scared of black pilots now from that was a thought crime classic from Charlie Kirk.
I want to push back a little bit on one element though. I do think some of this is audience capture.
But I also think that there is audience molding that's happening. Having gone now for many years to various TPUSA events.
I'm banned for TPUSA events. Maybe after this podcast, I'll be banned too.
But luckily, they still welcome me. And the same question I always ask every kid, the first one I see is, why are you here? What animates you? Besides potentially getting to have some kissy time with somebody else, with a MAGA girl or boy, depending on the proclivities.
And the answers have gotten weirder every year. I do have to say.
And so I do think that they're being molded by this stuff. They're being radicalized to a certain extent.
And it is true that even though this group is a subsect of a subset, they are the subset that's going to go like work for congressmen, run for state legislature. If God forbid Donald Trump wins again, like some of these people are going to be in the Trump administration.
To me, that is the part that makes it like a little bit more dangerous than just simply audience capture. And like when you say things like, oh, these guys are just so weird.
It's not popular. And they're turning people off.
It's like, yeah, that's true, but they might still be popular enough to get elected in certain places and to be staffers in certain places, and that's pretty alarming. I think that both could be true.
Yes, they are very disconnected from what normal people do. I had a conversation with someone, Charles C.W.
Cook, who writes for National Review, talking about the like MAGA conspiracy theories around the Super Bowl. And he talked about how these people have a totalitarian mindset, not like Stalinist, but the idea that everything should have to be about politics.
Like you cannot talk about anything, any movie, any sporting event. You don't go to sporting events because, you know, unless you can make it into a political activity.
I think it's particularly telling also that so much of this has been aimed at activities and people who are generally popular. Like, I am not a huge Taylor Swift fan, but I've heard that lots of people like Taylor Swift.
They are also turned off by normal people. Like, talking about how cool they are for the fact that they don't listen to mainstream music, they don't watch mainstream television, they don't watch sports.
Like, they're basically hipsters, but way worse. White nationalist hipsters.

Yeah.

When I was a hipster in college, I just listened to a lot of LCD sound system.

Like these people just suck.

Simultaneously, I think that audience capture plays such a big part of this.

I also think that there's a symbiotic relationship of telling your audience that all of your weirdest shit is cool and awesome.

And then your audience is like, we want weirderder shit and you just keep going back and forth forever into a world in which you know if we go full griper you start talking about how the gayest thing you can do is for a man to have sex with a woman you start being so intentionally off-putting and then telling yourself that you're off-putting because you're so brave and interesting.

No, you're just off-putting.

No one likes it.

It will seep into our political culture, but no one's going to enjoy that. Yeah, but it makes you feel good.
I agree. It was a lot less pernicious for us hipsters, you know, mentioning the fact that we liked, you know, name checking bands that they haven't heard of, like, you know, the heat and Gil Scott Heron and, you know, David Axelrod, the artist, political strategist, like, that made us feel cool.
Okay, but it was also really annoying. But it's empowering.
It's empowering, though. And so this is my problem with the Charlie Cook thing, though, which you see in that interview, is that the position of the National Review crowd, the Republican egghead crowd, right, is that like these people that we're talking about, you know, the Cernoviches and Charlie Kirks and people that are out there being like, we can't even watch football anymore.
and like it's gone too woke and don't show my kids Disney and we're only gonna watch Ben Shapiro movies now. The egghead Republican class,

when they talk about it,

like he is in that interview with you,

they're acting like those guys

are the weird minority fringe people. And like, I'm the mainstream.
And it's like, no, egghead Republican conservatives are an even tinier group and they're shrinking. And as annoying as those other people are, there is an appeal to younger conservatives who want to be contrarian, who want to be, who want to feel like they're a rebel or whatever.
And they're getting drawn down the Charlie Kirk pipeline, not the Charlie Cook pipeline. Oh, that was a good line.
That was a really good line. I just pulled it off right off the top of my head.
There have been intra-conservative battles for pretty much the entire history of conservatism. So the battle of who is the mainstream conservative, I think, really gets in the way of thinking about what does conservatism mean to any of these people? Charlie Kirk, he might describe himself as a conservative.
I mean, he's a Republican, but he's not a conservative but like we get into these like

definitional battles of what any of this means but i think at least the new generation the tp usa people have figured out oh wait no one cares nobody cares about the three-legged stool and tax policy and limited government and liberty no one cares about that what they want to hear is culture war and celebrity culture conversations and talking about how

terrible liberty. No one cares about that.
What they want to hear is culture war and celebrity culture conversations and talking about how terrible this new thing is and how much better it would be if something else happened. They figured out that this sells better and they're going to keep doing it and people will keep responding to it.
And there's no off ramp. As much as nobody cares about just like the definitional fights about the word conservative and the details of that, even fewer people care about that with regards to libertarianism.
But we are going to cover that topic at the end of this podcast. But before we have to do a little bit of news stuff on the inter-Nicene fights, you interviewed Don Bacon a little while ago now.
But we have this fight going on in the House. And there was one thing that struck me from his interview with you, which was he still identifies in these inter-Nicene conservative fights as, well, you know, we've got some national security conservatives and we've got some social conservatives and we've got some moderate conservatives.
Then we also have this other group over here called the populists and some of them have gotten in as well and and he's like we're all fighting it out and we're all kind of working through it all this is a paraphrase of how he described the house conference to you and that is not right the house conference is is entirely run by the populists that he was trying to act like are kind of a fringe group and then everyone else just decides to what extent that they want to go along with them is essentially how I see it. But I'm curious how you assess kind of the power dynamics in the internal fights in the House, particularly with the upcoming Ukraine and border fight that's going to be happening.
Well, it's fascinating because the House GOP is in this funny position where everyone hates them and yet they have no reason to stop doing the thing that everybody hates. People are furious at them all the time.
And it's been fascinating to see how the fury aimed at them from wide swaths of movement conservatism is in no way moving them past the things that are making everybody else so mad especially because trump is fine with it trump's fine with it so like whatever i mean it's been funny seeing people being like oh for speaker mccarthy well like speaker mccarthy is off like i don't know telling people weird things about nancy mace and matt gates yeah Kevinvin mccarthy is talking a lot about matt gates and nancy mace's sex life and his retirement one that's the worst sentence i've heard in a really long time two there is something that happens to republicans once they either are like kicked out of the speakership or retire or something where they just said they're like the chattiest bitches in the history of time like these are just the messiest bitches they want to go on the confessional and they've got a lot to say and if you're john boehner you live your best life just drinking red wine in somebody's backyard while selling marijuana adjacent products through some other means but i i do think though that the business of the house has been ignored for the new business of the house, which is generating media content and creating personalities. Yes.
I've long argued that culture war is perfect for certain politicians because culture wars don't have an end. You can't guarantee an end to a culture war.
It's an ongoing issue that you could always fundraise off of. And you can talk about in such big strokes that it's unsolvable.
If you think America has turned away from God, there is not like a policy prescription to get America back into God. Well, integralism.
True. You've seen the House GOP basically become like they treat every issue like that.
They treat every single issue as if it is a giant unsolvable morass that they just simply will not deal with. You could say that this funding really matters to us.
We will get it passed. You could do that.
Or you could not do anything and yell a lot which I mean I understand I also enjoy not doing anything and yelling a lot but like I'm not a representative member of Congress yeah it's interesting because I was listening to your I read your bacon interview and then I was listening earlier to interview Dan Crenshaw was doing with Jamie Weinstein. And those are guys that if they had their druthers would do something, right? They would like to do something if they had their druthers.
Right. And yet they're unable to do anything.
But they also seem unable to be able to correctly identify the cause of why they can't do anything. And that being Donald Trump and the majority or strong plurality of Donald Trump, Alkalite cultists in their conference, because if they did that, then they would be cast out.
And so they end up in this like place of permanent ennui and frustration, right? Where it's like, I want to do something. I can't really do anything.
But I can't address why I can't do anything. So in these interviews where they, you know, sometimes say sensible things, they also end up having to not, you know, they can't really explain.
Like they have to be like, well, there's Joe Biden, you know, it's like smoke and mirrors. Like, well, there's Joe Bideniden and the democrats are also and they've gone and then the squad is also and right you know and congress and dc and you know and here we are right no it's interesting because it's gotten to the point now where i'm like why are you here like what is the point when mike gallagher said you this week you're right i'm gone that's i mean i think it's i think it is a very bad sign that basically every Republican who is like, I would like to complete a task.
It's like, oh, this isn't a task completing place. This is a task ignoring place.
And that is very telling that there are so many people who don't want to deal with this anymore. I have long said that if you want to be in Congress or if you want to be president, that's a sign that you shouldn't be like, we should just randomly assign people to serve in Congress or as president, just be like, Oh, shit, it's your day.
Sorry. Because I think that we've seen that.
And you know, I've spoken with Representative Crenshaw before. And I've, you know, some of these people, it's, they are so hamstrung by their purported allies.
Right. They have infinitely better relationships with centrist Democrats that they need to pretend that they hate and believe are like assassins of Satan.
They have so much better relationships with Democrats than they do with like House Freedom Caucus people. Yeah.
And it's fascinating to watch Republicans get into Congress and realize that the problem with the Republican Party is Republicans. Oh, yeah.
And they can't be where they are. Like Weinstein is asking him about Crenshaw's answer to all this.
Like the context around all this is why the Ukraine thing can't get passed. And Crenshaw's like, well, I mean, Tucker, I wouldn't even call Tucker a Republican.
The stuff that Tucker is doing is just, he's totally a populist demagogue. And Jamie Weinstein replies to me, he's like, Tucker is on the VP shortlist.
I'm screaming into my car at radio, I want Jamie to be like, and also mention that you, Dan Crenshaw, have no chance to be on the VP shortlist. Because shouldn't that tell you something? Maybe Tucker is not a classically liberal Reagan Republican, but a party is what it's currently constituted at.
Yeah, it's not what you want it to be. It's not dreams and wishes.
This is what it actually is. And there are more people who are more interested in the Tucker Carlson-esque embrace of a very specific form of populism, which this is going to make me sound like a pretentious asshole.
But when I think about populism, like in the history of American populism, there's like the populist movement of the early 20th century and talking about William Jennings Bryan and farmers. And this populism seems to be so reliant on a populi that I, know i live in utah i know people i'm with the people and the populism as represented by tucker carlson and some folks seem so untethered to the populace that i live around like why is the little mermaid having to be white a populist issue? Like, I don't see the connection.
When I talk to people in line at Sprouts or something like that, people are not saying that our big issue is that there's like a background lesbian kiss in the Buzz Lightyear movie. Like, come on.
It's fascinating to watch a populism that seems completely unwilling. Like there's an invented populism that I see some writers talking about how like Trump really stands for the working class.
But then you see Trump and he's like, I got sneakers and I'm really mad about this depiction of me in some meme. And it's fascinating to watch how so many writers are so focused on this idea of populism among Republicans.
Like this idea that they want to expand the social safety net or talk about unions. And then you get actual Republicans who are like, actually, I don't want to do any of those things at all.
I have to interrupt you there because you're so good at this already at the podcast transition that I need to let you know that when it comes to the Populous Sneakers, we just have a little bit of audio for you. For those who have missed it, there was an autographed version of the Populous Sneakers, and I want to hear from the winner.
So what was your winning bid? $5,000. And let's see the signature.
All right. Congratulations.
Thank you. Congratulations.
A $9,000 bid on the Populous sneakers. Do you know, have you been able to see yet who the bidder was? No, I have not.
New York Post finally comes through this afternoon. Roman Scharf, the founder and CEO of luxury watch dealer Luxury Bazaar, walked away with the Never Surrender high tops.
That watchmaker, that watch company, Russian. A Russian luxury watch CEO has won the winning bid.
I think that pretty much encapsulates the state of play. I will never forget how the 2020 campaign turned into a campaign about boat parades and the beautiful boaters.
This all checks out. This all checks out.
Most Americans don't vote. And those Americans that do, they think about politics in sort of like an adjacent way, unless it's local.
Like I live in Salt Lake City, where apparently, as far as I can tell, one of the big issues is that people are furious about gondolas. Oh my God.
They want to put a gondola in Cottonwood Canyon and people are very mad about it. And then people are mad at the people who are mad about it.
And I'm just like, what is gondolas? It's all anyone wants to talk about. So like, in general, people will be like local issues that might affect them.
The thing that gets me about kind of culture war style populism

is that it's issues that don't affect you and you don't live anywhere near. And yet you're like, you know, America will fall because some Seattle school teacher decided to tell somebody about Angela Davis or something like that.
Like, it is telling how disconnected that is, you know, from the beautiful boaters to $9,000 bids for ugly ass shoes.

It is telling. telling how disconnected that is, you know, from the beautiful boaters to $9,000 bids for

ugly ass shoes. It is telling how this movement that we, I believe, were supposed to believe was

a movement of like some sort of silent majority. It's not a silent majority.
It's the really loud

people who own a bunch of car dealerships in Dayton.

Or a gray market luxury watch dealer. I do want to congratulate Roman.
That is good. Okay, in more serious news, the culture war of absurdity occasionally intersects with the culture war of very serious limits on people's rights.
And that happened also this week. Alabama Supreme Court ruled Friday that frozen embryos are people, and someone can be held liable for destroying them.
Decision will imperil in vitro fertilization IVF, and affect hundreds of 1000s of patients who get treatments like it thoughts. I think back to how right after the Dobbs decision leaked I do not know that there was an actual literal memo I do know that there used to be a time at Salem Media which ran a bunch of like right-wing radio shows that they literally would have a memo go out every day being like don't talk about this you should talk about this I do not think that there was a literal memo in this case but there there seemed to be this universal thing of like, actually, if we overturn Roe versus Wade, that's not that big a deal.
I had a conversation with Kevin Williamson about this in which he was like, you know, we're just going to have the abortion laws of France, which, you know, the pro-life movement has always said, we want French abortion law. I remember that.
That was a big deal. It was the March for French abortion laws.
And I think it was Eric Erickson who said something like, no, people won't really notice. It's just not a big deal.
People won't really notice any changes at all. And as I have said again and again and again, this is the biggest dog catching the car moment in, I think, American political history.
And why I bring this up is that it was never just about abortion. It was always going to be about birth control.
It was always going to be about IVF and reproductive assistance technologies. You know, I grew up Catholic and spent a long time in high school trying to be an evangelical Christian, ineffectively.
And you read a lot about snowflake children, which are embryos that people adopt because every single embryo is a human life, every single one. And so you just adopt them and have them implanted and you have rescued a snowflake child.
That sounds nice, actually. Is something wrong with that? That sounds nice.
I mean, great if you would like to do that, but it also indicates to me a general belief that, one, IVF is evil, because IVF requires that some embryos will not be implanted.

Right, got it.

And there has long been a strain of specifically among social conservatives about saying like all of this is evil and awful.

And all of this is bad because at some point, if you believe that these embryos are equivalent to babies that you basically have to murder a baby as matter of course in order to go through IVF and you see that with people fighting against birth control The idea that birth control is a form of murder because it stops the fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus. That's not how any of this works.
But if you spent a lot of time in anti-abortion for life circles, you knew it wasn't just about abortion. It was about anything and everything that has to do with sex at all.
Yeah, right. And so it is interesting to me that right after Dobbs came out, you could see a bunch of people within social conservative circles seeing the writing on the wall that like, this thing we want so badly.
We have not 100% told everyone what it would mean for millions of other people, even the people who are very opposed to abortion. People who are opposed to abortion rights get IVS.
Yeah, I have plenty of those people in my life. Yeah, so have I.
And probably even more people who oppose abortion have also used birth control. And you're starting to see a narrative in certain conservative publications talking about how women are starting to reject birth control.
And then I think it was Charles Lehman, who's at the Manhattan Institute, was like, no, they aren't. What are you talking about? Like pulling out stats.
But like, you can see the narrative start building about like, you know, enforcing the Comstock laws, about sending information about birth control via the. Like, you can see where this comes from.
And so I always think back to how, you know, the leak of the Dobbs decision was talked about as being, you know, a five alarm fire for liberals and reproductive justice advocates. But among conservatives, there generally was this idea of like, shh, don't talk about it.
You can see, based on Alabama, you can see that if you are thinking about Dobbs as just an abortion decision, it's not. It's also a decision about IVF.
It's also about birth control. It's basically about anything having to do with people having sex with other people in a way that might result in the development of more people.
It's really interesting to see how people are reacting to that. It will always be deeply telling for me how among the first reactions to the end of Roe was people trying to tell other people that it'll be just like France.
Alabama and France don't have a lot in common. Hostility to laws that are going to limit people's ability to do IVF is one good thing about being a libertarian.
You were once a libertarian. You left the libertarian party right around the same time I left the Republican party.
I think I actually beat you to the punch if we're looking at the timeline. Oh man, you Irish goodbye before I did.
Yeah, I think I got right under the wire on that sub stack post. I saw a quote from Penn Jillette and I was like, I have to talk to Jane Kostman about this.
Like you're my number one person to talk to because Penn would, had been a prominent libertarian who'd go to libertarian party functions and you'd see him doing libertarian speeches and stuff. And he said this in an interview recently, I've not used the word libertarian in describing myself since I got an email during lockdown when a person from a libertarian organization wrote to me and said, we're doing an anti-mask demonstration in Vegas, and obviously we'd like you to head it.
Now, Penn, I looked at that email and I went, the fact that they sent me this email is something I need to be very ashamed of and I need to change. I love that.
I love anything that has self-reflection at that level. I was just wanting to hear kind of your reaction to that and your journey and how you assess kind of libertarian stuff these days.
Well, it's challenging because I think that many people, I would argue, are small L libertarians. Now, granted, because many people are small l libertarians for themselves and not for other people and we all do this like you everybody had i wrote about this years ago that everybody has like if i break laws it's fine if you break laws you should be shot but i think that for me libertarianism meant a civic libertarian, a libertarianism that said that like the power of the state can and is often used for bad purposes.
I think especially the more work I did thinking about restrictions to African Americans with regard to gun rights, thinking about the way that states and state power can be wielded against the least powerful, I think I still embrace a civic small L libertarianism. The problem for me with a libertarian party is, okay, it's manifold, but I'll stick to three things.
One, right now they have been taken over by the Mises caucus the Mises Caucus views popularity as a sign that they are doing something wrong. This was in response to, I think that there was some talk about RFK running as a libertarian, which would be hilarious because RFK is the least libertarian person to ever live in many respects, for good and for ill.
And the comment from, if I remember correctly, the comment from the Mizez caucus was, you know, we would never do this. We would never let him use our name.
When Gary Johnson ran and Gary Johnson ran as a libertarian in 2016, I interviewed him twice. He told me that he was 50% Donald Trump and 50% Bernie Sanders.
So everyone should love him. And I thought to myself, that's not how that works.
But he got more votes than any libertarian candidate in history. And many libertarians viewed him as being a giant squish because he said things like, maybe you should use a driver's license.
And like, there is a purity spiral that the libertarian party has been in for, I think, probably the past seven, eight years. And in a moment in which I think more people could have embraced civic libertarianism, not just after the summer of 2020 and the murder of, say, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd,yd but after uvalde after seeing a bunch of cops who literally were like should we go in and stop this person killing children or should we stand here and do nothing and then punish the people who tried to make us do things we will choose the latter and you actually saw a lot of people being like i didn't know cops did this like if this is is this why people are so mad at the police and like every civic you know i'm sure radley balco somewhere was like yeah yeah yeah right you know and i think that that was something that was a moment in which a libertarian party could have a version of the libertarian party that doesn't exist could have really embraced that.
Instead, the Libertarian Party has rejected the mainstream, kind of similar to our earlier conversation, and they've decided to double down on things like, basically that Putin and Biden are the same person, or that we should repeal every civil rights law, and we should make it illegal for LGBT people to be teachers. Lots of stuff about like repealing the 19th amendment so that women don't vote.
They responded to a moment in which more people were looking for libertarian ideas by saying, no, what we're going to give you is our shitty racist views. The thing that struck me, and I think that's my third point, is this was a moment in which I didn't know enough about the thing, and yet I signed up, which is almost every subscription service I have, and yet I did this for my political party.
I think that I had an idea that it's not going to become a Republican. And I was really displeased by how Democrats were viewing the role of state power.
Basically saying, you know, give us all of the power and being like, no, maybe none of you should be able to do any of this. And the Libertarian Party to me was like, ah, this is an option for, you know, I read read reason like i this was an option for people who were interesting and thoughtful and wanted to be kind of to make a statement about how there was another choice to be made this idea within libertarianism has always you know to me and obviously i don't know everything clearly but it seemed to be this battle between like we could make civic life better for more people or we could argue that it's okay to sell your own children and that actually we should let cops kill more people because those people just don't deserve to be alive and it's like what i mean i think that it goes to what pen let's talking about how, you know, it's not about government enforcing mask policies.
It's about having an anti-mask rally because you just hate masks. And I think that that was something where it's like, this has nothing to do with government enforcing anything.
This has to do with like, we just don't like it. And like becoming the party of we just don't like it becoming the party of oppositional defiance disorder like we already have one of those we don't need another one that's somehow weirder and worse well this is my like final question this is the thing that i kind of i meditate on this regards to Republican stuff and a bunch of things in my life is if there's no practical implication where something works, then maybe there's something fundamentally flawed about it.
I do wonder that about libertarianism, right? Because there's a lot of appealing things to me about libertarianism. I considered myself a libertarian-ish Republican at one point.
The question is, if any time something is put into practice, it gets warped into this like gross racist oppositional defiance disorder, you know, group, then does that say something about the idea at its fundamental level? Or can the idea still be pure, but it's the people who are about? Both. I think that there are ways in which libertarianism can influence policy in good ways.
For instance, having a loosey-goosey approach to say housing zoning is great. Something I really like about Salt Lake City is that, as far as I can tell, if you would like to build housing in a place and you're like, not, you know,

it's not federal land or something like that, and you want to build a single family home or a multifamily domain, fine, go nuts. So you actually have in my neighborhood, you know, you have an apartment building next to a single family home and people don't explode.
Like people have started committing murder in the streets or something like that. I do think there are ways in which libertarianism can influence policy for good, but I do think that wielding libertarianism itself and attempting to make that an all-encompassing ideology I think is really a bad idea.
you know, you wind up in that kind of true libertarianism has never been tried kind of thing of like, ah, you know, if only the little father knew about how great it would be if I don't know, we all lived free and died harder or something. But like, I do think that libertarianism can be a helpful corrective.
Like, so many people do the, won't somebody take care of the kids, or someone should do something. Like, the someone should do something about that impetus is generally bad.
And I think libertarians are generally correct on that front, when it's like, hey, that bill that says it's going to keep our children safe, it probably won't keep our children safe. It's probably bad.
Any bill that's named about like rescue baby bunnies or keep our children safe from evil or something, it's probably bad. There should probably be fewer laws and how those laws are enforced should perhaps be more even and equal.
but i think that that's not libertarianism that's like libertarian those are two different things to me this is all to say that if a political party really appeals to you you should probably not join it you should probably if something appeals to you directly don't do it whatever it is no to be a joiner. No, don't join things.
It's sort of like how, like, if a religious group is, like, super interested in you, don't join it. Nope.
Nope. Nope.
Anyone who is interested in you, stay away. An individualist ethos is a wonderful way to end this podcast.
Jane, you are just a pleasure. And I don't know, we could probably do a full two hours on libertarianism sometimes.
So when you're just bored in Salt Lake, and you're just like, hey, I want to just spend my afternoon just shooting the shit, you know where to find me. Look, anytime.
Anytime. Absolutely anytime.
Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much.
That's Jane Koston. And we'll be back with a little bit from Heath Mayo.
Hey, I'm back with my friend Heath Mayo. He's the founder of Principles First, the grassroots group dedicated to restoring principled conservatism in America.
It's holding its annual summit in Washington, D.C. this weekend.
Some headliners, Asa Hutchinson, Adam Kinzinger, George Conway, Frank Fukuyama, Sarah Longwell, the whole Bulwark crew. It's going to be their biggest crowd ever.
Heath, are there still tickets available? Can folks still go? There's like one or two tickets. It may have already sold out in the time that we've been speaking.
So we're going to be jam-packed in the Conrad. We're really excited.
For folks who aren't familiar, just the elevator pitch for principles first and what you guys are doing. Well, I think the elevator pitch is probably just the current state of our politics as the antithesis of what we're doing, number one.
But number two, I think it's just a group of people who are frustrated with the current state, particularly of the Republican Party, the direction it's going. You know, this is frustrated Republican center-right folks getting together to just kind of vent the frustrations, yes, but also focus on what steps we can actually take to actually refocus, yes, the Republican Party to some degree, but also just our country on sort of the core principles that have been under threat increasingly from the Republican Party, things like America's role in the world, the Constitution, the rule of law, coming back together to talk about those things and realize that there actually is a wellspring of support out there for those things is really what it's all about.
Well, I've been following you guys from the start. I think that that's really important.
There's one thing that I've been wanting to chew over with you. Sadly, I've got to go to a funeral on Saturday, so I won't be able to join you guys.
So maybe we can have this conversation, have it be a little prompt for some of the convos on stage. How does that sound? That sounds great.
I get criticized sometimes, which I can take. We've all got thick skin.
And you think about our politics and how to engage with it right now. And we're all, maybe not all of us, but many of us are anti-tribal, right? We don't like the tribal nature of politics.
You got to pick a side, you got to put on a jersey, you got to fight for that jersey. It's something that obviously I've been very critical of, of my old Republican friends who kept the team jersey on in the face of all of the threats and awfulness from Donald Trump.
But sometimes people

look at me and say, well, Tim, you just changed jerseys, right? You're so upset at Trump that you're just rooting for the other side. And I guess when it comes to elections, there's something to that, right? Somebody's got to win in elections.
I think when it comes to talking about governing and policy, there are plenty of times where I and others have bulwark and you have criticisms of Biden and the left. But, you know, when it comes to elections, you do kind of have to put on a jersey, right? Like somebody does have to win the election.
And if you're looking at two teams and one of the team is a direct threat to the republic and is run by like a racist buffoon and the other team is like a basically normal left liberal team that you have some policy disagreements with. Well, like one team's obviously better, right? So how do you kind of process that? Like, how do you take a principled approach to that question of how to handle the team sport element of elections? That's a great question.
I mean, I agree with you that at the

end of the day, you know, elections are about making tough choices. You know, you can't have your cake and eat it too in terms of finding the perfect candidate.
You'll never find the perfect candidate. You got to sort of assess the threats that are out there and make the choice that you think is best for the country.
But I think it's important for all of us when we make those tough decisions to communicate why we're doing it beyond the things that we don't like about the other person. We really need to focus on the principles that drive the decisions that we make because that's ultimately, I think, what cracks through the tribalism.
If we just respond to tribalism with tribalism, and I know it's tough, and sometimes you have to engage in that food fight because that's just the nature of politics.

But to the extent that we can, I think it's important for leaders in this space to focus on the principles that, you know, Trumpism is abandoning and focus on the things that we want to conserve and explain our choices through that lens, because I think it makes people understand where we're coming from, and it has the ability to persuade more effectively than does sort of the typical tribal rhetoric that you see sort of just from both sides, people going into their camps and just attacking the other group. I think that's key, is using the language of principles and ideas to explain why we ultimately make the strategic election choices that we make.
Because I agree with you, look, the threat in 2024 is pretty clear. If Donald Trump is the nominee, we got to do everything that we can to keep him from getting into the White House.
But the reason that I think that is, I think that he will abandon the constitution, which has allowed our, you know, American democracy to be the greatest experiment in self-governance in the world. There's a set of principles there that I feel that I'm upholding by opposing Donald Trump's candidacy.
And I think those are much more persuasive to people than some of the rote tribalism that you see. Yeah.
What do you say to the people that come to the event that are cross-pressured on a principled standpoint? They're like, well, I'm deeply pro-life, but I'm pro-constitution. Or you could give a million examples of this.
How are folks supposed to process that as they assess making practical, real-world political choices? Because that's just where I struggle with all this. Because it's easy to say, sometimes you can get on your high horse and be like, well, I'm just going to not be part of this political process.
I'm just going to be above it all and speak on my principles. But like, okay, well, what purpose does that serve, right? And so how do you kind of talk to people that come to the event that do feel cross pressured a bit by how to navigate their various ideological principles.
One of the things that I've learned in this whole experience of leading principles first and bringing these people together is that in order to really grow a movement and build a community of support around a new idea, you have to be willing to meet people where they are and understand that there is that cross-principle tension that you're talking about. And you got to be willing to kind of go into that messy, nuanced space with them.
Look, because I mean, I agree, there's some principles that by voting for Joe Biden, if Trump is a nominee that I'm, you know, setting aside and in the interest of others, but it's everybody has to make that choice. And to the pro-lifer out there, I would say, look, you know, to the extent that you want

to defend life, if we don't have a constitution, if we don't have rules of law and we don't have

courts that we trust, any pro-life legislation or anything that you think that you're going to

implement on the back end is just going to fall apart because we don't even have the system

of self-governance that we have. You got to start to use the language of principles and sort of

Thank you. you're going to implement on the back end is just going to fall apart because we don't even have the system of self-governance that we have.
You got to start to use the language of principles and sort of which ones are most important and core versus which are a little bit less important and then threat to really make the argument, I think. Yeah, I'm with you, man.
These conversations are messy. Okay, you're going to be having them this weekend.
Talk to us about kind of what you have in store and for folks that are going to come or might want to come to a future event, kind of what you want to get out of it. So it's going to be this weekend.
We'll be at the Conrad Saturday and Sunday. We'll go from 9 to 4.
There'll be a mix of panels and keynote speeches from leaders. We'll have, as you mentioned, some of the folks, Adam Kinzinger, Asa Hutchinson, Judge Ludig, just up and down the spectrum, we'll talk about foreign policy, we'll talk about 2024, economic policy.
We'll kind of touch on a little bit of everything, but we've also got Friday night, we'll be at Hill Country Barbecue with a welcome reception. The Bulwark folks are going to host that and all our speakers will be there.
So it's going to be a mix of serious substantive discussions about the big choice that we have this year in the election, but also just some relaxed fun for the folks in this lane to kind of get together and make common cause with each other. We could use a little fun.
We could use a little fun. That doesn't happen all the time.
It's a lot of dread and despair. Sometimes the norms crowd can be a little severe.
You know, I try to mix in a little fun on here okay speaking of fun here's my final thing i have a breaking breaking item for you we have a tweet from carrie lake team she said that we are reading this bright bar news article about bitter never trumpers holding a globalist counter summit to cpac any any response to our friends from Cary Lake about your bitter globalist counter summit to CPAC. Any response to our friends from Carrie Lake about your bitter globalist counter summit? Exactly.
Our good friend, Carrie Lake, she likes to harp on Stephen Richer, I guess, but the one difference that she spots there between herself and Stephen is that he actually is an elected official. He's actually won an election.
I understand the projection of bitterness, but this is a lady who is continuing to run and lose and suing people in court and losing. I mean, she is a consummate loser that has helped drive the Arizona Republican Party into the absolute gutter.
So I can understand the frustration that she feels over there. Other than that, I don't really have a response.
What's more bitter than being on a multi-year effort to pretend like your loss was actually a win? I don't know. Hard to say.
Our man, Stephen Richard, the Maricopa County recorder, he'll be their principals first. And he really gets under Carrie Lake's skin because he did the right thing and actually counted votes and protected our democracy.
Heath, I'm sad I won't be able to be there with you. I'll be monitoring online.
Hope to see you soon. And thanks for all your work.
All right. Thanks, Tim.
Appreciate it.

All right. Thanks to Heath Mayo and Jane Koston.
We'll be back here tomorrow with a very special

episode from a big name, somebody you'll enjoy. So get back here then.
See ya.

The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio

engineering and editing by Jason Brett. To my edge, to the kids from France and from London But I was there I was there in 1968 I was there at the first Cannes show in Cologne But I was there in 1974 Outro Music