Thomas Chatterton Williams: How MAGA Learned to Love Cancel Culture

Want a bourbon with the story?

American-made wild turkey never compromises.

Kentucky born with 100 years of know-how.

Our pre-prohibition-style bourbons are distilled and barreled at a low proof to retain the most flavor.

Most bourbons aren't.

Well, we aren't most bourbons.

Wild Turkey 101 bourbon makes an old-fashioned or bold-fashioned for bold nights out or at home.

Now, that's a story worth telling.

Wild turkey, trust your spirit.

Copyright 2025, Capari America, New York, New York.

Never compromise, drink responsibly.

A happy place comes in many colors.

Whatever your color, bring happiness home with Certopro Painters.

Get started today at Certapro.com.

Each Certapro Painters business is independently owned and operated.

Contractor license and registration information is available at Certapro.com.

Hello, and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Delighted to welcome yet another staff writer at the Atlantic.

His new book is titled Some of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse.

It's Thomas Chatterton Williams.

What's up, man?

Hey, how are you doing, Tim?

I'm doing well.

I got to put cards on the table with you for a second here at the start, though, before we get into the terrible news.

And that is, we went through a period of time where you kind of annoyed me.

We don't know each other, actually, but your social media presence presence did, because I was of the camp, obviously, here at the Bulwark, who was like, the Trump threat is so great.

We have to focus on this.

There are these guys over here that are worried about Landon at Wesleyan, having to suffer a woke pylon, and that that's the big problem.

And I think that, like, with the benefit of hindsight, future has kind of proven both of us right in a weird way.

But

I wonder what you would have said to me had we been podcasting then about that critique.

I think we would actually agree on much more than we would disagree on.

I would concede that

those were low-stakes kind of arguments that shouldn't have been given the attention they were.

And that one of the reasons why I thought it was really important not to have those kinds of arguments and not to be so excessive in the desire to impose a kind of set of newfangled values and norms was that it actually was going to create quite a backlash, which I, you know, I admit is much worse than what preceded it.

But

one of the things I'm really trying to do, and it's very difficult these days, is to make sense of how what had preceded Trump's return to power became so attractive to enough Americans that they decided, knowing everything about Trump, they preferred his vision to what had been on offer before that.

I feel like sometimes there are these, it's the narcissism of small differences, you know, where I get a little bit more mad at people like that I probably do agree with on like 90% of things, right?

But it's like a lot of times people that were really focused on the excesses of woke culture, most of them didn't like Trump either, right?

And it was exactly, you know, and it was just like, it was just like, I'm spending all my time talking about Trump and I was annoyed that they were talking about the other, and then vice versa.

You know, you get the resentments that go in vice versa.

So, anyway, we, we can hash that all out once we get, uh, once we get through the news.

But, um, the right-wing cancel culture, uh, as you mentioned, the backlash to the woke lash seems to be in full effect right now.

I guess I'm wondering your initial reaction to Kimmel, and then we'll kind of run through some of the other stuff that's out there.

I find it terrifying.

You know, the blatant disregard for a free press, for people to be able to even to make mistakes on air, you know, the idea that everybody has to kind of be aware that if they insult the dear leader, that they could get their FCC license revoked or it could hurt their shareholders bottom line.

I mean, this is...

unprecedented stuff in my lifetime.

So I find it very alarming.

I know people privately saying that they're not sure if they want to go on, you know, cable news appearances or things like that.

It's just not worth it to potentially criticize Donald Trump.

That's a new kind of thing that I had never heard before.

And so there's a kind of self-censorship that this immediately imposes.

We only talk about the cases that break through the actual cancellations, but with all cancel culture, there's that kind of larger onlooker effect that really stifles debate.

And that worries me quite a lot.

The other thing about the Kimmel element that I talked about this a little bit yesterday with Brian Stelter, but it kind of is this Frankenstein monster of the populist right, where in addition to just the straight free speech threats to it, there's this, it's also a straight corruption.

I mean, it's a kleptocracy fight, right?

Like it's the

local affiliates, you know, that want to merge and create like essentially a quasi-monopoly of local affiliates.

I think that if the merger happened, they would own like 80% of the local TV affiliates.

And they were the ones that Carr

suggested strongly should act on this.

And they were the ones that did act first.

And then that eventually kind of bubbled up to Disney.

And that is kind of related to

what we saw from CBS as well.

Well, like authoritarianism thrives amidst corruption, right?

That's what you see in Russia.

That's what you see in all these regimes is that once neutral procedures are swept aside, then you have consolidation of power with the leader.

I want to play for you, the vice president, a couple of things that he said recently.

This was him, it was on Charlie Kirk's podcast.

So after Kirk was assassinated, the vice president did a guest, whatever, hosting appearance on it.

And here's something that he said about the people that had been saying untoward things about Kirk after he was killed.

Civil society, Charlie understood this well, is not just something that flows from the government.

It flows from each and every one of us.

It flows from all of us.

So when you see someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out in hell.

Call their employer.

We don't believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.

That is crazy.

And there have been plenty of examples of Democrats trying to go after, you know, criticize speech or, you know, do things that I thought were inappropriate.

But like, I can't think of any precedent of somebody being that direct about it.

It's one of the most hair-raising things I've heard from an elected politician, the vice president telling Americans to inform on each other.

You know, that's actually

framing that thing.

That's a civil society, framing that as what civil society should be.

That is fascistic.

That is crazy.

Yeah, I mean, that's what you see.

The precedents for that type of idea are in Germany, in East Germany, and in the Soviet Union.

You know, this kind of this kind of mutual condemnation, which, of course, inspires all types of terrible incentives.

But that's a kind of change in American culture that happened much faster than I would have predicted a few weeks ago was possible, even after the election of Donald Trump.

I didn't think stuff like that was actually possible.

Things are moving so fast now.

It's alarming.

I don't think that that got nearly enough attention either when J.D.

Vance said it.

It kind of was swept up in a lot of other, you know, Pam Bondi was a bigger story in what she said about hate speech.

But what J.D.

Vance said was actually more disturbing.

It's worth talking about those two things, because what Bondi was suggesting was more of a direct affront to the First Amendment, right?

It was like that the Department of Justice would go after you for hate speech, which is, I think, why maybe that ended up, you know, becoming more of a lightning rod for people.

What JD is suggesting is this kind of soft.

or soft stifling of speech, like that your neighbors should stifle your speech, that you should be worried

that you might be ratted out.

And I was listening to you.

Oh, shit.

I listened to a couple of your different interviews recently before this.

I forget which one it was, but you were talking about how I think it was Jon Stuart Mill said that it was like that type of threats to speech is actually more alarming, right?

And those threats are potentially greater.

Talk about that a little bit.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

In On Liberty, Mill makes the distinction between the kind of state-sanctioned limits on speech that I guess Pambandi would represent, but says that actually the kind of informal censoriousness that comes from the bottom-up amongst your fellow citizens is actually much more pernicious because there's actually fewer fewer spaces that you can escape from it.

The state actually can't reach into all the spaces that your neighbors and your coworkers can.

And so when you get a kind of situation that Vance is actually explicitly encouraging of kind of self-policing and reporting on each other, that becomes

much more difficult to overcome.

I want to play another audio from Vance that has gotten even less attention than the suggestion that people should rat on their neighbors to their employers, but that I also want to get your opinion on.

we know joe biden's fbi was investigating charlie kirk maybe they should have been investigating the networks that motivated inspired and maybe even funded charlie kirk's murder if they had charlie kirk might be alive today i mean that's insane in addition to wanting people to rat and tattle on their neighbors for wrong speak and and get them fired from their jobs the vice president wants

I guess is essentially fabricating a conspiracy of what was behind the Charlie Kirk assassination and wants to use federal law enforcement to target political foes under the fake pretense that they motivated or even funded potentially this killer when there's no evidence for that.

I mean, that's one of the things that's so disturbing.

I mean, what day was that clip from

the evidence

has we don't even know.

all of the evidence involved in the shooting and they've they're so close.

It was from Wednesday, I think.

It was after we saw the text messages, right?

And we know enough about the kid, but yeah, I I think it was from a couple days ago.

Yeah.

They're so ready to already use this event to consolidate power and to crack down on who they view as their opponents.

It's quite alarming the speed with which the event is being utilized for political ends, irrespective of what the particular motivations of Tyler Robinson were.

There's another news story today that's related in a way.

And by the time this is published this afternoon, it's possible that this will be official.

But we have really credible reporting.

The Trump administration is preparing to fire the U.S.

Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia today over his refusal to bring charges against New York Attorney General Tish James, who obviously had brought charges against Trump.

The career prosecutors don't believe any charges are warranted.

And I bring that up in combination with this because it's like this weaponization of the Justice Department to go after political foes, weaponization of the FBI to go after political foes, even on, excuse the pun, like Trumped-up pretenses, is

we're going back a half century or more more for any precedent to this.

Yeah.

What's so alarming to me is how you can kind of list all of these abuses that are happening.

And there are so many people, and I know Twitter isn't real life, but there are so many people that you see, and some of them have large followings who embrace this.

And I've been thinking so much in recent days about how Trump ran explicitly on

being your revenge.

And his campaign was predicated that he would come and he would start punishing people and institutions that it seems quite a lot of Americans are fine with being punished and don't really want to stand up for and protect.

This stuff doesn't actually bother an enormous amount of our fellow citizens.

So we talk about it over and over again on podcasts and we write op-eds against it.

But when you go on X, you see a lot of people say, I welcome that.

It's about time.

Tish James deserves that.

You know, it's actually not unpopular.

I guess that's maybe true.

I guess the question is, is that true, or is it because

this stuff is not getting attention outside of a certain type of whatever elite, college-educated, liberal bubble?

You know what I mean?

Like,

not to undermine the thinking powers of our fellow Americans, but can people be made to be riled up about things, right?

If you think about kind of people with big platforms who in a different world five, 10 years ago before the 2020 summer you write about in your book would have been outraged by this, your Joe Rogans, your Elon Musks, people with huge, huge platforms that were civil libertarians, expressed general civil libertarian views.

You know, if they latched on to this and treated it with the gravity that some of us treat it with, I don't know.

Don't you think that might change?

Or do you think inside the American people there is a desire for authoritarianism?

I do suspect there might be more of a desire for authoritarianism than I would have thought.

But I also think that

one of the things that

authoritarians really profit from is this idea that everybody does it.

So whatever they're doing is actually, you can find the same thing being done before.

So, you know, there was such a sense, I think, that the Biden administration had also targeted enemies.

You know, there's a sense that Trump had been so unfairly targeted.

And, you know, he was kicked off Twitter and he was prosecuted with, you know, with some...

questionable criminal cases and there's a sense that you know turn about is fair play and I think a lot of people that don't spend their lives thinking about politics all the time probably end at that, that just everybody does this, and Trump is just

doing what politicians do.

And that's fundamental to Trumpism.

Yes.

And Trump was laying the groundwork for that before they even went for him, really.

Like during the campaign, I remember Scarborough was interviewing him.

This was such a different era.

This was when he was getting the I Can Call Into Morning Joe treatment from Scarborough.

So this is many years ago.

So forgive me if I don't get the quote exactly right.

But scarborough is asking about putin and russia and and scarborough says something to the effect of putin's a killer he's a murderer you can't like trust him and trump says something to the effect of like oh are we are we any better like we're all killers look at what we've done in the past so that premise of like there are no real like principles or values we need to aspire to it's all just the most base hobbesian real politique like that and that was what trump pitched initially and and i guess your point is that that worked.

I mean, that stuff plays well.

I think it goes over well with a lot of Americans.

It's surprising how, you know, if you kind of disregard the idea that there are higher ideals, it gives you quite a lot of room to maneuver.

All right, y'all, you know the product.

You know, I know you know the product because I already told you that story about the bartender at the Holland Wolf that asked me if I had my Z-Biotics before I was able to order my bourbon and Coke.

Our sponsor today is Z-Biotics.

It's a game-changing product.

And to their pre-alcohol probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic it was invented by phd scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking Here's how it works.

When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut.

It's a buildup of this byproduct, not dehydration, that's to blame for rough next days after drinking.

Pre-alcohol produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down.

Just remember to make pre-alcohol your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow.

Not only was it the bartender at the Holland Wolf, but I was at the Daddy Daughter Dance this weekend.

It was so cute.

It was just so damn cute.

The daddy daughter dance in New Orleans.

I don't know what the daddy daughter dance vibes are like in, you know, St.

Paul or Fargo or, you know, Augusta, Georgia.

But in New Orleans, the dads are partying.

I mean, the dads are letting loose.

There's an open bar.

You know, people are getting served, I guess I'll say.

And I had a dad came up to me.

Said that he had a z-biotics.

Did

doing z-biotics before the dandy daughter dance.

That is commitment.

That is New Orleans.

So I appreciate that, Dad, for listening and for supporting our sponsors.

Go to zbiotics.com/slash the bulwark to learn more and get 15% off your first order when you use the bulwark at checkout.

Zbiotics is backed with 100% money-back guarantee.

So if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money.

No questions asked.

Remember to head to zbiotics.com/slash the bulwark and use the code the bulwark at checkout for 15% off.

I want to get into just a little bit more of the

kind of direct parallels to the cancel culture.

I mean, I think that we sort of both agree that the Kimmel advance situation is really a category difference from kind of the left-wing cancel culture, right?

Given the structure coming from the government and the financial stakes in it, et cetera.

Yeah.

You wrote a piece on it this week in the Atlantic titled The Right is Changing the Rules of the Culture War for Conservatives.

Cancel Culture is In.

About what you're already seeing, this is kind of before this, you know, Kimmel Bruhaha from the right

from people like Chris Ruffo and others who are engaging in this kind of material.

We talked about that a little bit.

Well, even prior to the

horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk, you know, Chris Ruffo had spent the month of August digging up 10-year-old tweets by the New Yorker staff writer Doreen St.

Felix and tried to do a kind of classic textbook cancel culture campaign to get her fired, presumably, for having written just a kind of article about Sidney Sweeney, if you remember that controversy that you might roll your eyes at, but that had said that she was being made into an Aryan princess of the right.

And so I wrote this just response to that, just saying that, you know, this is really rich.

You know, people who had spent a decade or more railing against exactly that kind of cancel culture coming from the left are now openly and explicitly embracing the very same techniques and essentially saying, you know, one of the things that I do credit Rufo with is that he actually doesn't dissimulate.

He tells you straight up, this is what I'm doing.

He writes in City Journal that actually now, actually, it seems like it might be more expedient for the right to just do away with high ideals and just embrace cancel culture explicitly because we have the upper hand and we have the power.

I think some conservatives still try to say that they don't want to actually replicate the worst excesses of the social justice left, but in point of fact, they were already doing it before.

Kirk was killed.

I guess, what does that make you think about the

outrage, like the initial outrage?

Like whether it was genuine, is this really a tit-for-tat thing?

Or was it power politics always?

And, you know, and obviously it's probably different for different people, but just as far as the broad trend on the right, does it make you reassess how serious they were about, you know, cancel culture critiques in the first place?

I've thought a lot about this, and I do think that different people have very different

relationships to this.

But I think that one thing, when I talk to liberals and people to the left of liberals, I think one thing that's really important to appreciate is how much resentment and anger had been festering.

I think

a lot of people who basically already agree on certain values don't understand how upsetting it was for people in institutions to, you know, for example, if you were hired at a university and you had to sign a DEI statement and you were compelled to certain kind of to embrace or espouse certain orthodoxies, orthodoxies, that's upsetting.

I think people saw people not being able to say what they really think for years.

So, you know, we have so much evidence of preference falsification.

It's why every time in the past three elections, Donald Trump got more votes than people had expected him to get, or he grew his coalition with blacks and Latinos, because no one was actually saying what they really think, because there was a kind of sense that there were real repercussions if people thought that you had the wrong views.

I think that that built up so much ill will and frustration that a lot of people

what I'm seeing is a lot of people say, I don't like this on the right either,

but they're getting a taste of their own medicine and I'm not completely mad at that.

So it's kind of complicated.

I think it's very difficult for most people to completely live in accord with principles.

And I don't know that everybody outrightly celebrates this idea that this is fine, what the right is doing, but they think that it exists in a kind of context where it's not irrational that people, once they would be able to pick up the weapon they've been being beaten with, would try to lash out with it against their opponents.

I don't object to the notion that resentment existed, that people felt that resentment towards whatever you want to call it, left-wing elites, you know, who they felt like were kind of bullying and hectoring about various views.

I think that definitely existed.

And I also think, as I just said before, that particularly in the professional right, a lot of the outrage was performative for

engagement purposes and power politics.

I do wonder, though, like how much of that,

you know, this, and I guess this is more of a sociological question than anything, but like a lot of it was people tricking themselves into thinking that they couldn't have said stuff, like in some ways, right?

That they were, that they were self-censoring for reasons that were like not really necessary, maybe because people don't like to be criticized.

I feel as somebody who's putting myself into the public all the time, I feel myself like get my backup when like somebody, when I like a comment comes across on a thing, and I think it's like an unfair judgment upon my view or upon my, you know, my values.

And I get my backup.

But like,

there was no harm done by that.

Like, no actual harm was done to me.

My feelings were hurt a little bit.

Right.

And I, and I kind of think to like, there was this interview I've brought up a couple of times because it just really struck me.

It was Malcolm Gladwell said recently that he felt like he had to self-censor his view about girls and trans sports.

And I was like, no, you didn't.

I don't think.

You are a contrarian, you're kind of a contrarian heterodox thinker who has tens of tens of millions of dollars, sold lots of books.

That was a view that was like pretty popular.

It's at least mixed views out there in the public.

It wasn't like this was that unpopular of an issue to say that you had questions about the ability of trans girls to play in girls' sports.

And yet

he claims that he was self-censored because he was scared.

And I was like, that fear is pretty irrational, I think.

I feel like the worst case scenario for him would have been people sending nasty tweets at him.

I guess maybe he made that his central issue of his life.

Like if he written a book on that, or had he done what J.K.

Rowling has done, like, tweeted about it constantly, I think potentially there could have been some repercussion.

But, like, to express that view on a panel and have that fear, I think that that fear was irrational at some level.

What do you make of that?

Right.

We're social creatures.

So, social opprobrium really does actually carry a cost with it.

You know, I think a lot of people don't have the appetite to really endure stigmatization the way that someone like J.K.

Rowling has been able to.

Malcolm Gladwell and J.K.

Rowling are really in very particular situations where they're essentially uncancelable economically, as you point out.

But,

you know, Malcolm Gladwell is probably saying something that is much more relevant to a lot of people like in my situation, or even people with less of a kind of platform than I have, who really couldn't afford to be iced out in their workplace or to not get a certain type of promotion or to lose out on a book deal.

And, you know, not everybody works in publishing or in media for sure.

But, you know, if you said what Malcolm Gladwell said he didn't feel he was able to articulate a few years ago, I'm pretty confident if you weren't the author of Blink or something like that, you might not get a book deal.

I'm very confident that things like that could, you know, your professional opportunities could be circumscribed in ways that most people don't have the ability to endure.

And so it's kind of helpful that even that someone like him would say that because it might be hyperbolic for him, but he's articulating something I think that resonates with a lot of people that you really couldn't say or be perceived to think certain things.

I'll speak from my own experience.

Like, I know I've lost out on opportunities, and I don't even get into the gender stuff, but because I don't have the views around like the racial discourse that one is supposed to have in my position, the only thing that I think has actually prevented me from full out having professional consequences I couldn't recover from is that I am descended from African slaves.

So I'm not actually speaking against the identity group.

That I'm, do you see what I'm saying?

I'm that actually is like the one safety that

ironically, you know, that kind of identity politics saved me from a kind of cancellation that I would have had otherwise, I believe.

And I've seen enough evidence.

I mean, I just give you all some context, because you have talked about,

I guess, some of the overreach of identity politics and in particular, like, you know, sort of excessive focus on blackness and et cetera.

And you're saying, had you been a white writer writing that, then you would have suffered professional consequences for that, is essentially what you're saying.

Yeah, I really do think so.

I wouldn't be given the very kind of like small benefit of the doubt that I've been accorded.

I think it's really high stakes.

And it was something that, you know, in 2020.

2019, 2018, there were orthodoxies.

There are ways you speak about certain issues.

You know, I've been in spaces, I won't name an institution, but you you know, where I'm unable to be platformed or my course is unable to be listed because it can't be that I am the only black point of view because it's the wrong black point of view.

That's just my personal experience, but people have felt this stuff in many circumstances and many institutions.

And I think what we're seeing is that there is a kind of exploitation of the grievance that many people have felt that, you know, J.D.

Vance and Donald Trump are using to consolidate their own power, but that is coming from a real and genuine sense of unfairness that

had obtained during this social justice era.

Hey, everybody, you've probably heard me mention that the bulwark is headed back on the road this fall, but we've got some big updates that I want you to hear.

First, most importantly, we are adding a show in Toronto.

I told you, Canadians, I was doing my best to make it happen.

I'm so thrilled by the response we've had from our Canadian friends and wanted to make sure if you wanted to be able to come, you could.

So we added a matinee, a brunch show, whatever you want to call it, maybe a drag brunch.

Don't tell JD Vance the next day.

No promises on drag queens there, but you know, maybe the spirit of a drag brunch.

And so that will be Saturday the 27th.

Go to thebulwark.com slash events to get all the details and to get your tickets for that encore show in Toronto.

Also, New York, that's going to sell out here any minute.

So if you want to see us in New York on October 11th, get your tickets ASAP.

There's still a bunch of tickets left for D.C.

on October 8th, but we've got some exciting guest announcements coming soon.

So if you're interested in coming to D.C., get on that as well.

All of information available at thebulwark.com slash events.

It's me, Sarah and Sam up in Toronto.

Me, Sarah, and JVL and some of our other Bulwark friends.

a special guest in Washington, D.C.

Look forward to seeing you all out on the road.

We'll catch you soon.

Get those tickets now.

I do not, we're way afield from what I want to talk about today, but that's great.

I'm sorry, Tom.

No, no, no.

That means it's an interesting, that makes, that means it's an interesting podcast for folks who, uh, folks who just want, you can go to the bulwark tanks feed if you want more on Jimmy Kimmel.

I've done like seven pictures.

I think that that resentment is real.

Right.

And I think that those things happened, right?

Like, obviously, right?

Like the idea that, you know, there was racial quotas in higher education for various things and that people like didn't, you know, what was it that somebody said recently that like if you look at the fiction submissions to the New Yorker, like there's not been a white male fiction submission accepted to the New Yorker in 20 years or something.

I'm making that up, but it's some like insane.

Oh, white male under like like my age or younger, like like mid-40s or younger.

There hasn't been in some in decades.

You know, something crazy.

Right.

Because

all of there were a ton of white male writers in the New Yorker forever, and they needed to bring racial balance to it.

And then so the door was shut for.

Anyway, so there are these niche areas where that has happened.

It happens.

Like, I get it.

Like, you know, we've all seen the white lotus, you know, episode where the mom's worried about her white son not being able to get into the good school because of other, because of quote, affirmative action.

And I think those resentments are real.

I also just think on the cancel culture stuff, though, that now, like, the complaints about that have gotten so intense that there is now a, once again, a backlash to the backlash.

Like, from where I sit, I'm like, okay, man, but sure.

But you, had you really wanted to lean into your, you know, anti-BLM views, like you could have got a Fox show probably or been on the Federalist or the free press or like, there's no shortage of like places for that position to be published right now.

It's not

ghettoized to Fox.

Sure.

I mean, people could say you're ghettoized at SMBC.

I mean, like, right now we're just a belt.

We're just a series of ghettos now in one sense, right?

Like, everybody's in their own bubble.

You know, there's not a lot of monoculture.

And, you know, you look at the comedians who complained about this, for example.

I remember when I was thinking about this a couple years ago, because I was driving into New Orleans, I was moving into town, and like at the basketball arena, on the, you know, they were promoting who is coming.

And it was like, Joe Rogan is here in three weeks, and then Dave Chappelle is here in two months, and then Theo Vaughn is here in three months.

And I'm like, I don't know.

It seems like the people with contrarian views in comedy on that moment are doing pretty well.

And like the woke comedians are playing at House of Blues, and nothing wrong with that.

But I guess my point is that while in micro, the grievances are legit, and like macro, we've seen people with contrarian, heterodox, sometimes noxious views like celebrated and they succeed.

Our whole fucking government is run by these people now.

Unfortunately, our whole government is being run by like kind of trolls who got back in power, internet trolls,

and they govern for the kind of edgelord wing of Twitter.

But, you know, I don't want to beat a dead horse.

And, you know, I largely agree with you, but I think that I don't want to give short shift to the power of the onlooker effect.

Dave Chappelle is the greatest comedic talent of his generation.

He's not going to get canceled.

But when you see the way that Dave Chappelle is criticized, it might actually affect the way up-and-coming comedians engage with culture and what they feel like is possible to say.

I know that that's the case with someone like J.K.

Rowling and up-and-coming authors and women without her platform thinking what they can say.

The Overton window has really shifted on that and people's lives were ruined for saying things that now are acceptable to say again.

I don't think that we give enough weight to what it means for one person to have their life ruined for

making a point that is considered cancelable.

In 2020, some friends and I, we wrote an open letter that was published in Harper's Magazine, and we got a lot of people to sign it.

And we were simply trying to say then that, you know, Donald Trump represents the greatest threat to liberalism in this country, but there is a creeping censoriousness on the left as well.

And if you don't actually allow, you know, a diverse array of viewpoints, and if people are afraid to say what they really think, this is going to further empower the kind of illiberalism on the right that we all oppose.

We were really trying to sound the alarm.

We thought we were doing something.

It was a kind of anodyne statement that angered the left to such a degree that to this day, people still bring up that they can't engage with somebody's ideas because they signed the Harper's letter.

You know what I mean?

I just want to say I wasn't invited then.

My podcast was lower in the rankings, but I would have signed the Harper's Letter had I been invited.

Oh, well, we would have loved to have you.

You'd still be dealing with people criticizing you for doing it had you done it.

Malcolm was on there, by the way.

Our friend Malcolm Gladwell, who was too scared to give his opinion on trans rights, apparently,

wasn't too scared to sign the letter.

So there you go.

What does Zinn offer you?

Not just hands-free nicotine satisfaction, but the opportunity to be yourself, the chance to find connection, the freedom to do things your way.

When is the right time for Zin?

Anytime you need more time, more time for the moment, more time to find what moves you.

Smoke-free, device-free time for you.

Why bring Zin into your life?

Because America's number one one nicotine pouch opens up the endless possibilities of right now.

From the night out you're waiting to have, to the friends you need to catch up with, to the project you're thinking about starting, and the satisfaction that will come once you do.

With Zin, you don't just find freedom, you keep finding it again and again.

Find your Zen.

Learn more at Zinn.com.

Morning, this product contains nicotine.

Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

A happy place comes in many colors.

Whatever your color, bring happiness home with Certopro Painters.

Get started today at Certapro.com.

Each Certapro Painters business is independently owned and operated.

Contractor license and registration information is available at Certapro.com.

It's funny.

So when I was teasing this at the top, I agree with your point.

And I hope that listeners that don't agree with it at least sit with it for a little bit, which is that the part that you were right about was that this censoriousness and wokeness and illiberalism on the left, I use wokeness kind of whatever, pejoratively, obviously there's some good elements of it, empowered Trump.

Oh, 100%.

Period.

And I'm not doing the Nazi meme thing where it's just like, oh, you called me a Nazi, so I have to become a Nazi.

I'm not doing that.

There is a lot of fake shit on the right where they blame the left for their own cruelty and ghoulishness and horrible behavior.

I'm not doing that.

I'm talking about how

people who are not that politically engaged

didn't read the Harper's Letter, frankly, right?

Who listened to The Auvan show or whatever,

who had been Obama Democrats, just did not like the

oppressive culture that they felt that they were in.

And I can say that maybe that was stupid, but it was real, right?

And their feelings were real.

And

Donald Trump preyed on their grievances very successfully.

Yeah, he's got a kind of, you know, he'll be studied for a long time, his kind of political instincts and how to exploit resentments and grievances and how to find whole new groups that are aggrieved.

You know, I think that it's really interesting, though, and we should talk about how he was able to make such gains with normie and non-college educated blacks and Latinos who I think felt extraordinarily alienated from the kind of social justice etiquette and manners that was gatekeeping on the left.

You know, this idea that he just swept back into power off of white racism is

really not nearly sophisticated enough.

He did, but white racism.

I'm not saying it didn't exist, but like it was not, but yeah, that's not, that wasn't the key engagement.

It wasn't sufficient.

It was necessary, but not sufficient.

There you go.

He had quite a lot of

people like

I got two buddies back home who were attracted to his kind of open disregard for the kind of elite manners that they felt excluded from.

Two black friends friends from back home, Scottish Plains, New Jersey, you know, who I text with.

And texting with them, I thought in the summer leading up to the election, that is really crazy.

He is the way they're talking about him,

I don't think that Democrats are going to be able to win.

And then you see that he actually increased his, what is it, 25% of

the black male vote he got.

This is the least racially polarized election since the 1970s.

He has a multi-ethnic coalition behind him.

It just happens to be more of a non-elite coalition of blacks and Latinas.

Are your buddies changing their tune at all?

I don't think so.

Can we text them right now?

Can we text them right now and see if they answer by the end of the show?

Let's text them right now and see if they answer by the end of the show.

What do they think?

Nine months in?

Just open, open-ended.

We'll do a quick focus script.

Non-scientific, but yeah, unscientific, but

my two twin brother friends from back home.

Yeah, man, why not?

We are seeing something with Hispanic voters.

And I do, again,

I think sometimes people conflate what should be and what is, you know, and it's important, particularly in politics, if you want to win, to like live in what is.

And I think that's been a mistake that the left has made a bet over the last decade.

And not to beat a dead horse on this, but the real example of that is what ought to be is that we should have a society where nobody is brutalized by police.

What is is that we have a society where neighborhoods where people are unfairly brutalized are also sadly neighborhoods where people are brutalized by their neighbors and by teenagers who are holding the whole community hostage.

And that those people living there are both upset with the kind of heavy-handed policing they have to endure, but they also need police officers present because they're the first victims of the violence that would explode were we to actually abolish police departments.

And so there's this kind of tension between this ideal like left utopia and the facts on the ground.

And so you have this crazy situation where community members in Minneapolis are actually insisting that they don't abolish the police because it's kind of nice sounding idea in theory that would actually that we actually saw what happened when the police when they pulled back a bit, homicides exploded within six months.

So this idea that

I think that Raymond Aron, the French sociologist of the 20th century, had the best point, which is that a lot of these kind of like utopian projects are disproved by their successes more than their failures.

When you actually implement a lot of what the social justice left advocated for, whether it's abolishing or defunding police departments, whether it's getting rid of meritocracy and standardized exams, what actually follows is so disreputable that the whole program is invalidated.

And then you have people moving over towards Trump who says he's going to fix it and he makes it worse.

It's kind of crazy the degree to which the whole program was invalidated so quickly, actually.

Yeah.

And like almost nobody is for defunding the police right now.

Yeah.

Like, honestly.

And you go back to that 2020 Democratic presidential debate and like some of the views that were being expressed on that stage will be

verboted in 2020.

Like assuming, God willing, we have free elections and real debates and free speeches.

Like, you know, and J.D.

Vance's vision for an authoritarian America isn't realized by 2028 spring.

But if so, the Democratic, the candidates on the Democratic debate stage are going to sound very different on a variety of these issues.

I asked Susan Rice about this earlier this week and she really didn't want to talk about it, which is totally her right.

And I appreciate it.

So, she might be smarter than me if I answer.

Yeah, right.

I don't know.

Yeah, it's cool.

I was like, This is a podcast.

You can uh, we can pod on this stuff, or we can, whatever.

Uh, we can pod on something.

I'd rather, I always tell guests when they're coming on, I was like, I want to make good pod.

I want to pod on stuff you are, you have interesting things to say about you are engaged and passionate about.

So, uh, I respect her right to abstain from this question.

But I wanted to ask you about it because I heard you talk about this too.

Around this whole

in the wake of Kirk, right?

Like, there's there's a discussion that's happening about

kind of this or the origin of our, of this just extreme, you know, partisan anger, right?

And that ties into what we've just been discussing on race and like kind of how we went from like the Obama 2004 speech, which was just kind of about trying to erase some of these lines and trying to unite more to like where we are now.

And

Ben Shapiro, who show you that, you're a rare person to appear on both of our programs.

So try to talk to everybody yeah man kudos to you for that uh ben shapiro was with ezra klein earlier this week and i i was like i was struck by what he said about this because i find it to be to be

but i think you agree with it so i want to i i want to hash it out together and here is ben shapiro explaining why he thinks the right was radicalized um during the obama era And my son could have been Trayvon.

And people on the right saw that as like, well, but that's not true.

You are an upper-class black man who is who is living in the White House.

And unless your son was mistaken for a prowler going around at night in a neighborhood then no that that that actually wouldn't happen

i kind of feel like that sentence is self-refuting right like ben shapiro on the one hand is like i'm mad i'm mad because obama mentioned that trayvon could have been his son and and and the next breath is like well he couldn't have been your son because your son wouldn't have been mistaken for a prowler gulking around the neighborhood and i was like i want to i'm like i want to do the that's racist meme.

I'm like, why, well, why was Trayvon mistaken for a prowler?

Like, he wouldn't have been mistaken for a prowler if he was Ben Shapiro's son.

I don't, I don't believe.

I guess, how do you adjudicate that fight?

Because to me, I just, I'm very unsatisfied by the fact that our rancor was driven by like a stray comment that Barack Obama made out of a place of human empathy and the fact that he had to have a beer summit with a cop and a professor.

That feels so quaint compared to where we are.

And too quaint to accept.

But what do you make of that?

Yeah, it was almost as scandalous as the tan suit, right?

This was a really controversial president.

No, but

I think about this a lot because I tend to agree with you.

And I understand,

and I write about this in my book.

I understand the sentiment Obama was saying, but I think he was specifically in a bad position to do this.

And, you know,

in retrospect, it becomes much clearer than in the moment.

Barack Obama was elected with extraordinary enthusiasm on the promise that he was going to help usher us into a post-racial American future where these situations would be adjudicated without reference to identity politics.

That's not to say that racism was solved.

That's not to say that identity doesn't matter.

But it is to say that the first post-racial president was not supposed to take the instance of something happening and frame it through the lens of identity.

Whether that's fair or not fair.

That seemed to have been a breach of the bargain.

Well, I mean,

it is not fair.

Like, here's my problem with it.

Like, just as a human, like, Barack Obama was a human.

We're humans listening to it.

Everybody in a partisan place is humans.

We can all, look, let's just not be,

let's not be crazy about all this.

Like, Ben Shapiro responds more emotionally to anti-Semitic crimes.

He just does.

That's fine.

I've had many people tell me in my comments that I've been too emotional in response to Charlie Kirk's death because he's also a podcaster and I could envision myself getting assassinated.

That's true.

I was much more responsive to the issue of the gay hairstylist from Venezuela that we sent to a gulag because he was gay.

And I could imagine as a gay man what that would have been like.

Like, that's just human.

We relate to people that we have connection with.

It could be about race or religion or life experience.

If somebody's from Denver, I probably would

have a little bit more of an emotional reaction to their tragedy than if they were from Chicago.

So, like, it was a throwaway line.

And Barack Obama barely talked about his race, like, in the grand scheme of things.

He talked about it a lot less than his advisors wanted him to.

That's true.

And I think that he had no latitude.

I always stress this.

I think that he was in an impossible position, actually.

And I think he really conducted himself extraordinarily well, all things considered.

But let me ask you, just because I do wonder what you think about this.

If when Lake and Riley was killed in Georgia, right, by this undocumented immigrant, and had Trump said, said, well, he has many children, but if I had a daughter with Melania, she would look like Lincoln Ryan.

Lincoln Orange.

And I don't remember what kind of makeup she fought.

I'm sorry.

I don't mean to be real.

Had I had a daughter with a Cheeto, she would.

That would have been very strange because

it would have been Donald Trump showing empathy.

When he was asked about Charlie Kirk's death this week, he started talking about the new dining room that he was building.

Right.

I hear what you're saying.

I know where you're going with this.

I think that there's some, for some good reasons,

there is a little bit of a social stigma about white identity politics in particular.

There used to be.

Yeah, right.

And maybe, whatever.

We could probably do a whole podcast and hash this out on whether that created a backlash and maybe we should have let white identity groups proliferate.

I don't think we should have.

I don't think we should have.

I do think that,

and many of us did warn about this.

Glenn Lowry did for years.

I do think when you have a situation in which every single identity is foregrounded and is told that this is the lens through which you need to interact with the world, except for one identity.

And that identity needs to be quiet just to listen, be an ally, reflect on its privilege.

I think that that can't help but create a kind of explosive reaction down the road.

And I think we're living through exactly that.

There was an identity fetishization for every other group.

I'm with you on the identity fetishization and I am against it.

I guess I'm just saying that to your point of why that would have been weird for Trump to say that about Lake and Riley is I just

think that it's okay to have like a specific social stigma in this country around engaging with people over their skin color, just solely based on their skin color if they're white.

Like a different example of that would have been like, I don't know, if a Catholic kid had been murdered and John F.

Kennedy had said something about it.

You know what I mean?

I just, I think that would have been fair.

It does fit.

You know what I mean?

Like there's something specific about the white identity element of that that does make it a little uncomfortable.

That would rankle us.

Yeah, for sure.

And And it would, and it also would rankle us.

I think it's fair to say, particularly coming from Trump, who said a lot of racist shit about other races, right?

I don't, you know what I mean?

Like, again, I think if it was an empathetic white president, if it was Joe Biden and it was back when he was more coherent, he did a lot of gaffes, right?

If it was Joe Biden, you ain't really black.

Yeah, he missed a lot of eulogies.

If he was eulogizing, you know, and he eulogized people of all races.

And if during a eulogy of a young white girl, he had said something like that, I'm sure there would have been some tweets about it.

But I don't think we'd be talking about a pod on a podcast 10 years later.

You know what I mean?

I think there's context that is appropriate.

I agree.

I think that Obama really,

there was a tragedy to his presidency.

I didn't see it at the time.

To me, it felt like the most extraordinary moment to be

alive.

Actually,

when I was in my early 20s and I was canvassing for him in 2008, and I thought that, you know, I'm actually alive at the moment where I can see the curve of the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice.

It felt overwhelming.

And in retrospect, it was tragic because I think he showed us a vision of the country that I believe we will be, but he was ahead of his time.

Clearly, we were not a post-racial country yet, or we took the wrong turn when we had the opportunity to become one.

I think back to the Obama part, and I wrote about this in my book.

I was voting for McCain, but I remember I...

I was living in D.C.

at the time, and I was going to vote, and I was voting at a school.

It was mostly black kids at school.

And it was the morning, you know, and that school hadn't started yet.

And the the kids were out there playing on the basketball hoop.

And like, just for kicks, like, I shouted through the fence at them while I was fighting mine.

I was like, who should I vote for?

And like, they all go, everybody yells, Obama, Obama, Obama.

And I just, like, I thought about how cool that was and how great that moment was.

And while I hear, well, like, I understand why there were a few things during those eight years that rankled to Ben Shapiros of the world and the right.

I just think that they pale in comparison to like the overt efforts by his opponents to divide the country along racial lines and to

weaponize the fact that he was black and to go after him

and extremely racial terms in ways that the responsible Republican politicians at the time, the presidential candidates, McCain and Romney, resisted, but that their allies didn't.

And I just, I look back at that and I'm like, I just, I'm sorry.

I'm like Ben Shafiro, I think it was you actually that is to blame.

I don't think it was Barack Obama's beer summits with Henry Louis Cates.

And I don't mean Bencher in particular, but like

him and his ilk.

And I was a Republican at the time.

And so this is, I'm indicting myself, but I just like look back on it.

I just, it's hard for me to see it another way.

I mean, I think that in the post-Obama era, I think that there's some legitimate complaints about the forefronting of...

of racial identity to a degree that was maybe unhelpful during the awokening.

That is a critique that I both will listen to and not entirely, but agree with in large part.

But I think the Obama critique is just this post-hoc rationalization for fucking right-wing racism is really what I think of this.

I mean, I tend to agree with you.

trace the kind of the failure of the Obama era, not specifically to Barack Obama himself, but to the kind of, in retrospect, inevitable disillusionment that bloomed on both the left and the right.

That, in fact, this, you know, this was supposed to be the culmination of like kind of the liberal project in many ways.

You know, like we were supposed to, on the left, we were supposed supposed to have, you know, elected a black president and that would fundamentally remake our society.

And then you have the proliferation of videos of unarmed black men being killed and that you have a kind of dissatisfaction that we didn't get the change and the hope and all of these.

The society is still the same society that we've been in and it still is bedeviled by racism.

And that was on the left.

And then on the right, I think you had this kind of Maybe we have to be very honest about the fact that even people that voted for Barack Obama and were optimistic about moving towards a post-racial, multi-ethnic society liked it more in theory than they liked it in practice when he was actually in the White House governing them.

Maybe there's some of that.

I think you can't discount the fact that the person that was supposed to radically transform our society also just kind of set up Hillary Clinton to succeed him in a way that I think really wasn't very hopeful to many Americans coming out of the financial crisis and who didn't want more of the same, right?

So this kind of disillusionment started in his second term, and you know i don't think we ever recovered from that

what does zinn offer you not just hands-free nicotine satisfaction but the opportunity to be yourself the chance to find connection the freedom to do things your way when is the right time for zin anytime you need more time more time for the moment more time to find what moves you.

Smoke-free, device-free time for you.

Why bring Zin into your life?

Because America's number one nicotine pouch opens up the endless possibilities of right now.

From the night out you're waiting to have, to the friends you need to catch up with, to the project you're thinking about starting, and the satisfaction that will come once you do.

With Zinn, you don't just find freedom.

You keep finding it again and again.

Find your Zen.

Learn more at Zinn.com.

Morning, this product contains nicotine.

Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

It's time your hard-earned money works harder for you.

With the Wealthfront cash account, your uninvested cash earns a 3.75% APY, which is higher than the average savings rate.

No account fees, no minimums, and free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts anytime.

Join over a million people who trust Wealthfront to build wealth at wealthfront.com.

Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, member FINRA SIPC, and is not a bank.

APY on deposits as of September 26th, 2025 is representative, subject subject to change, and requires no minimum.

Funds are swept to program banks where they earn the variable APY.

Two other things I want to get to before I let you go.

Well, one is just circling back.

We got way, we got way, way laid.

But

I did want to get back to kind of what is happening on campus now and it's kind of the right-wing cancel culture stuff and the kind of conversation about that.

There's news this week that

Texas A ⁇ M's president is stepping down after turmoil.

There was a children's literature course.

Again, it was a course for college kids, but about children's literature

had some views on there being more than two genders.

The president's been kicked out after this.

Bruha has Mark Welsh.

She is a 72-year-old former Northrop Grumman, former member of the board of directors of Northrop Grummond, chief of staff of the U.S.

Air Force.

I don't know.

He doesn't really look like a woke person to me.

He was the dean of the Bush School.

To me,

it is crazy.

The degree to this stuff has happened.

And there was some discourse that was going around in the wake of all this about how,

in order to balance the scales, we now need conservative affirmative action at schools.

And like there needs to be an effort to get rid of these liberal professors and students.

Polly Hemingway at the Federal Hemingway was with the free press said this.

Jerusalem Demson, the argument who's been on the show, kind of expressed like maybe some openness to that, not to the canceling of the A ⁇ M professor, but the fact that colleges should be more thoughtful about bringing in different viewpoints.

What do you make about that kind of whole, you know, where the debate has gone as far as campus politics?

It's crazy.

We're going to have ideological litmus tests in hiring.

I've been opposed to that my whole life.

And, you know, I'm talking as somebody who is on campuses where my viewpoints are not always welcome.

But how does that work in practice?

How do you actually identify and promote conservatives?

And how do you guarantee that 50%, as Hemingway of the Federalists angrily suggested on Twitter, how do you guarantee that you have at least 50% conservatives?

Who defines conservative?

You I think it's just this desire for revenge.

It really is.

It's a sense that is actually not completely irrational, that these spaces are extraordinarily intolerant to views that are not even conservative, but are even, I would say, just fundamentally illiberal sometimes.

And it's a desire to force people who have been in control to feel what it's like to be dictated to.

There's a desire for punishment and revenge.

I think it's really unhealthy.

I'm not in favor of any type of litmus test, full stop.

The other thing that we've seen, it's been interesting, like some of the biggest,

most prominent proponents of the

backlash against woke culture, you know, at the New York Times and on college campuses and elsewhere are the folks over at the Free Press and Barry Weiss, et cetera.

Again, like I said, I agreed with a lot of their critiques at the time.

They started a new college spin-off over this, like concerns about cancellation of people's ability to speak freely on campus.

They started University of Austin.

And yet we've seen this year, 2025, like one of the big areas where there's a crackdown on speech is on the Israel-Palestine issue.

And a lot of the same folks have been cheerlating that,

you know, both when it comes to, you know, whether it be Roman Aztark getting detained or Mahmoud Khalil getting deported, Marco's now new plan to get a green card.

You can't have bad speak about Israel or Charlie Kirk on your, you know, in your social media history.

What, I guess is my question.

What?

Like, how is it?

How are these the same people?

I mean, my position has always been that

you have to be against these things in every situation.

If you're against cancellation, if you're against purges, if you're against litmus tests, that has to apply even when your preferred group is poised to benefit from using these techniques.

So I think that it's actually one of the things we've seen as the kind of pendulum swings back and forth is that there are

not as many people who are willing to defend their opponents for the sake of a principle as we would have hoped.

I've been seeing that left and right.

Even the most prominent advocates, though, I guess that's my point.

Like the most prominent advocates for this.

I like the whole premise of the news outlet, the free press, and the college, University of Austin, was that people should be able to freely debate.

I'm not a spokesman for either of those institutions.

I have seen them argue among themselves in those institutions.

I think that

there's a kind of very human tendency that it's the job of people like yourself, and it's the job of, I think, the type of

center-left and center-right,

broadly speaking, liberals to call out.

You know, there are people that are very clear on abuses when they can see it in their opponents, but it's very difficult for them to apply that same type of rigor to their own identity group because it seems like an exception to them, because this issue is so urgent.

This issue is so pressing.

And that's why I think it's always important to exercise restraint and to be as objective as possible.

It'd be like me saying we get to deport, if we get back in charge, we get to deport homophobes.

Right, exactly.

We need to make sure that if anybody comes into this country at a green card, they can't have a view of tradition of marriage different from mine or whatever.

And that would be insane.

But like that's what the policy of the country is right now.

But that's why it's so difficult to be a centrist because you're not actually on a team and no one protects you when they're advocating specifically for their own team.

Because your job is actually to advocate for no teams.

The numbers are small in this position, but

you know that very well.

My team is against the illiberals.

Unfortunately,

that's mostly in one party, they're in charge of the party.

And in the other party, they are at the grassroots level.

So that makes it easy, I guess, in a political, right now for me, in my position, I feel like, in the straight campaign politics sense, but it's, it is a little more challenging in the broader cultural debate.

It can be.

May I share with you my, my, my, one of my

responses?

Let's end with it.

I was actually going to end with, um, you did an interesting tweet.

We'll have to do it another time, which was, uh, we were lucky not on social media at 9-11.

What a cancer on society.

Full stop.

We're all complicit.

I'm just going to leave as an opinion on that.

Next time you come on, we'll do a whole social media conversation about what we're going to do about that.

Because

we don't have time to do that.

So let's close with

what your friend said, what did we learn?

Yeah.

And next time we can talk some basketball too, I hope.

Oh, yeah.

Well, let's do that.

We can do that right now.

So he says,

I was never pro-Trump.

I was vehemently opposed to everything Democrats was doing and saying I would have voted for Dick Cheney based on how Democrats were moving.

I was more anti-Kamala than pro-Trump.

All right.

Well, that's so.

So that's.

what I mean by the Democrats and the kind of the way they allowed themselves to be captured by a social justice activism that was so unattractive that people that weren't even necessarily predisposed to love Trump found him more his vision more attractive than to reproduce that activism again on the one side that's very frustrating on the other side that I'm going to spin it because it's Friday's show is hopeful because that person feels gettable The person feels gettable against Trump, to be honest.

And so there you go.

All right.

Well, give me a basketball hot take.

Let's go to basketball.

What's your NBA finals preview for this year?

Oh, the finals preview

uh i i man i'm my so i've got a seven-year-old son uh

he's being raised in paris and wembenyama is his is his is his idol and so i just want the spurs to be as competitive as possible i'm a spurs fan now wemby is unbelievable well we should take

the kids to the game my daughter's seven and uh we just put up a hoop in the backyard and so you know who knows what we're we're kind of hoping for an angel reese future there we'll see how it turns out um and uh hopefully better at layups actually than than angel reese she loved i took him to her to wemby's first game here in new orleans oh really yeah just because it's like

crazy yeah and it's like he is unbelievable like he's unbelievable like he just he looks like a mutant he literally does not look like a full human just that the his size and proportions and how smoothly he moves and how he talks about black holes and plays chess in washington square park i mean the guy's a class act full stop he's amazing his interviews are unlabeled too like he disappeared for a while to be like to do some monkish stuff this summer for a couple couple days and uh but no when you watch him on a court it's just um it's not like minute bowl or yao ming or these other old school tall guys like he just flows his flow he just looks so natural and so i hope you just got to cheat coffee i don't know the first time i ever saw wemby clip was when he's you know playing in the french league whatever team he was on yeah yeah and it was like somebody sent me the clip and you're and i you you watch it i started on my phone and it's like he's so tall and long that he wasn't even in the screen on the beginning of the picture i was like which guy is him and then like out of nowhere three seconds in like he comes into the screen an arm emerges

into the screen so anyway all right man well um i appreciate the time i appreciate coming on the yeah you too too and um hope to do it again soon all right cool and i just it's a testament to talking with people you you hated me on twitter we talked now we're gonna take our kids to see a basketball hayed was wrong Hayden was wrong.

I was like, are you annoyed?

Annoyed.

And like, whatever, man.

You are not like, it's easy to be annoyed.

I'm sure people annoy, I annoy people on Twitter, you know?

If you're not looking for Trump Derrangement Syndrome on Twitter, then you probably don't like my material either.

So I get it.

Nah, man, we're all good.

I appreciate you going on.

And everybody else, we'll be back here Monday for another edition of the Bullwork Podcast.

See y'all then.

Peace.

away my pride

so long.

You made a day away for some.

So long,

you make it hard for boy like that.

No one,

I'm wishing I could make this mine.

Oh,

if you want it, yeah.

You take hand

up

in me.

Ooh,

we can make it all.

Yeah, if you want it,

you can have it.

No say won't say

it's creepy.

They gon' find you.

Come catch you sleeping.

Ooh, I stay on.

Little screeching,

don't you close your eyes?

How it gets so scared.

How it gets so scared.

The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Drew and Sue in Eminem's Minis.

And baking the surprise birthday cake for Lou.

And Sue forgetting that her oven doesn't really work.

And Drew remembering that they don't have flour.

And Lou getting home early from work, which he never does.

And Drew and Sue using the rest rest of the tubes of Eminem's minis as party poppers instead.

I think this is one of those moments where people say it's the thought that counts.

M ⁇ Ms, it's more fun together.

What does Zinn really give you?

Not just smoke-free nicotine satisfaction, but also real freedom to do more of what you love, when and where you want to do it.

Why bring Zen along for the ride?

Because America's number one nicotine pouch opens up all the possibilities of right now.

With Zinn, you don't just find freedom, you keep finding it.

Find your Zen.

Learn more at zinn.com.

Warning, this product contains nicotine.

Nicotine is an addictive chemical.