Ezra Klein Reacts To Democrats Tweeting “You Ugly F*ck”
CChris Williamson
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Transcript
00:00:00Did you see that tweet earlier on today?
00:00:02The very, very bottom, it's hiding down there.
00:00:03I did, yes.
00:00:04I saw both of those.
00:00:05Yeah.
00:00:05So I had to double check that at the Democrats is the Democrats' official proper-
00:00:12Democratic National Committee.
00:00:13Correct.
00:00:13Yeah.
00:00:14And I'm like, is this a parody account?
00:00:16It's got to be.
00:00:17So the Democrats' tweet, fired up, ready to go.
00:00:21It's time to take back Texas.
00:00:22Stephen Miller replies and says, the Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their
00:00:25first transgender Senate candidate.
00:00:28And at the Democrats' reply, shut up, you ugly fuck.
00:00:32And that reached at least 50 million people.
00:00:35It's like 300,000 likes.
00:00:37I get it.
00:00:40The he did it first thing of pointing from one side to the other.
00:00:44But maybe this is just my sort of British properness coming through.
00:00:50The thought that the online representative account for one of the parties saying, shut up, you
00:00:59ugly fuck, is that not absurd?
00:01:02Like that feels kind of deranged to me.
00:01:04It is deranged.
00:01:05But this is a little bit what I mean about the whole medium, right?
00:01:07Because one thing that does, one thing that every movement like this does, and I take Donald
00:01:11Trump honestly as a bit of a first mover here, is it is shifting people's sense of what political
00:01:15communication should sound like.
00:01:17Agreed.
00:01:18So, I mean, that is the outcome, I would say, of a long process of learning that if you tweet
00:01:26like a normal, sober, stolid, senior institution, boring.
00:01:33Barack Obama is, I'm a big Barack Obama fan.
00:01:36That guy's Twitter account, not great.
00:01:38Not sexy enough.
00:01:38Not sexy enough.
00:01:39And so this is the way everything changes.
00:01:41Like it actually, it changes the expectations, it changes the people, and it changes what can
00:01:45succeed.
00:01:46And so, you know, sometimes maybe they, I mean, I guess you can ask the Democrats, at the
00:01:50Democrats if they went too far or not.
00:01:51Maybe to them it's a huge success.
00:01:54But this is what I mean when you have to think about these mediums, you have to think about
00:01:58the attention, you have to think about the norms, you have to think about the discourse
00:02:00as a kind of public good.
00:02:02What that is doing, like that right there is a tragedy of the commons problem.
00:02:06It's very hard for at the Democrats to be noticed.
00:02:08There's a huge cacophony of voices.
00:02:11The voices that get noticed are extreme.
00:02:13So here's the thing.
00:02:14You noticed them.
00:02:16We are here talking about at the Democrats rejoinder to Stephen Miller.
00:02:20I can't remember the last time that I talked about at the Democrats.
00:02:22So they probably just succeeded.
00:02:24But it's a tragedy of the commons.
00:02:27Like Stephen Miller, by the way, a deputy chief of staff to the president, is tweeting about
00:02:32James Tallarico, who, whatever else you want to say about Tallarico, an incredibly decent
00:02:36person, an incredibly decent man in politics who tries very hard to treat people on both
00:02:41sides with respect.
00:02:42Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff, his reaction to Ken Paxton, by the way, it wasn't
00:02:47even like Tallarico won the primary last night.
00:02:49It was, or a couple of nights ago, it was Paxton was first transgender candidate.
00:02:55So again, the, you know, I don't want to sit here and just like tut tut and chin stroke,
00:03:00but it is a degradation of the entire system.
00:03:04It sounds so uncool.
00:03:05I can even feel my own sort of cringometer of being out of touch occurring as we're talking
00:03:10about it.
00:03:11Like, what do you mean both within a couple of years of each other?
00:03:15Are you really going to be the footy duddies finger wagging at people, these kids on the
00:03:18internet having fun or whatever?
00:03:20I'm like, I don't know, man.
00:03:22It feels like extracting from a system that it shouldn't be.
00:03:25It feels like there's something that's going wrong with regards to that.
00:03:28I guess one of the other, one of the biggest talking points that we've had over the last
00:03:30couple of years was around what happened in the 2024 election, especially independent media
00:03:35sort of being involved in that.
00:03:37Do you think if the left had had its own version of Joe Rogan, that the last election would
00:03:44have really changed?
00:03:46The election was close enough in the battleground states that I think you end up in a situation
00:03:54where you can change any variable and imagine moving, I don't remember the exact number, but
00:03:59something like you would have needed, I think 150,000 votes to switch.
00:04:02I mean, those votes would have had to have been correctly like distributed, but it was in
00:04:07just a handful of states.
00:04:10So maybe not just Joe Rogan, like I would say that the way to think about this is not a liberal
00:04:14or illiberal Joe Rogan.
00:04:16It's candidates who are comfortable in the kinds of spaces that we mean when we talk about
00:04:20Rogan.
00:04:21Like the point is not getting like one guy who is more on your side.
00:04:25The point is, you know, Harris and Walls having been everywhere and having been capable of
00:04:30talking more effectively, a different kind of person.
00:04:34But let me pull back on something you said a second ago.
00:04:39I've been thinking a lot about virtue and politics.
00:04:43And virtue, I was going to say it's not a word we use that much, but I actually think
00:04:47particularly like in your corners of the blogosphere.
00:04:50We were talking about blogs before we started of the podcastosphere.
00:04:54RIP.
00:04:54It is something we talk about.
00:04:56And I was just doing a show that'll come out shortly about a bunch of the kind of more
00:05:03masculinist philosophies on the right.
00:05:05People like Bronze Age Pervert and Rog Nationalist.
00:05:07And one of the things I was thinking about is how much those visions of masculinity have a
00:05:14primitivism to them, right?
00:05:16It's this desire to rediscover a stereotypically testosterone-soaked, much more competitive,
00:05:22dominance-oriented, aggressive, right?
00:05:25There's a view that modern man has been warped into and constrained into this soft, cooperative,
00:05:34like against their own instincts.
00:05:35Okay.
00:05:36The thing that I was noticing how when I actually read what these guys were writing, the thing
00:05:42that I was noticing was so absent was the idea of self-mastery and self-discipline as a
00:05:48fundamental dimension, not just of like manhood or masculinity, but just of humanity.
00:05:53In fact, a lot of these places seem to take self-discipline and self-mastery, with the
00:06:00exception maybe of like a homosocial weightlifting component, as a negative, right?
00:06:04It was evidence of the way modernity had warped us into this attenuated shape that works for,
00:06:14you know, modern feminizable democracy, right?
00:06:17That's the argument.
00:06:18And so you see, I think this is particularly true around Trump, and you see it with Stephen
00:06:22Miller, this gleeful rejection of norms of behavior that once sort of reflected, I think,
00:06:32a kind of self-disciplined, right?
00:06:35Politicians don't talk the way Donald Trump talks, right?
00:06:37They are disciplined.
00:06:38They know not to just unleash on the people they don't like in a way that is destructive,
00:06:42most of them.
00:06:43And it was this wiping away of that as a kind of show of that you would not be held back
00:06:52by the system as it existed.
00:06:54And so there's a message in what Miller is saying, and then now you see like the Democrats
00:06:59trying to ape it.
00:07:01But what I do think it's going to create, I think what it's already creating, is going
00:07:05to be a swing back to a desire to see political virtue, to see social virtue demonstrated in
00:07:12leaders.
00:07:13Everything creates its opposite in politics always.
00:07:16And so-
00:07:16It's sort of statesman-like, a bit more decorum.
00:07:19Yeah.
00:07:19It'll have to be a version that works for today.
00:07:21It'll still need to be sexy.
00:07:22You've got to have aura.
00:07:23You need to have aura.
00:07:24It can't be Kear Stormer.
00:07:24You need to have aura.
00:07:25Correct.
00:07:25But Tallarico, I mean, the reason Tallarico is dangerous to them, and I'm not saying he's
00:07:28going to win.
00:07:29Texas is a hard state for a Democrat to win in.
00:07:31But the reason Tallarico popped in the first place, the reason he ended up on Joe Rogan
00:07:35in the first place, is he is able to talk through a kind of progressive Christianity in
00:07:40a language of morality and virtue that people found exciting and that you didn't really
00:07:44hear from Democrats anymore.
00:07:45And I think he was one of the first moments, and he's raised more, I think, than any Senate
00:07:49candidate in the country based on this.
00:07:51And I think he's one of the first moments where you really see where the pendulum is going
00:07:54to swing back to, because I think people are looking around and they're seeing what
00:07:59it looks like when we unleash ourselves in a way that conforms to algorithmic media.
00:08:05And I'm not saying everybody dislikes it.
00:08:07Some people feel real excited by it.
00:08:09But I think most people dislike it.
00:08:11Even people I know who are Trump supporters, they don't like the way this all feels.
00:08:14You like it in the way that you like having a McDonald's, that at the time it's kind
00:08:18of enticing, but afterward you feel a bit shitty.
00:08:21And if you have too many of them in a row, you actually start to reject the system a little
00:08:25bit.
00:08:26What's interesting is having this conversation with Arthur Brooks yesterday, and he was saying
00:08:29the moment that you break any kind of addictive cycle, the first thing that you have to do,
00:08:33at least following evidence for a broad range of aggregated addictions, is you have to get
00:08:38mad.
00:08:39You have to be angry at the thing.
00:08:41Like, I'm sick of being at the mercy of this thing.
00:08:43I'm sick of being at the mercy of porn.
00:08:45I'm sick of being at the mercy of drugs.
00:08:46I'm sick of being at the mercy of alcohol.
00:08:48Sick of being at the mercy of scrolling on my phone.
00:08:50Getting mad is a really effective first step.
00:08:53And I wonder at what point people just get bored.
00:08:56Like, cause this is evolutionary arms race of like bullshittery that keeps on happening
00:09:02online.
00:09:03Like now, if the Democrats tweet, shut up, you ugly fuck again, it gets a 10th as much
00:09:09attention.
00:09:09So we've already seen it.
00:09:10Yeah.
00:09:11So unless you're going to continue to play that game, okay, well, what's new?
00:09:14Well, what's new is the equivalent of a sundress and a cake, right?
00:09:19You know what I mean?
00:09:20Like it's something that feels a little bit more kind of vestigial.
00:09:23I feel like there's been a move.
00:09:25And again, you don't see that tweet set where we're, we're using as our text here, a rich
00:09:30text if spare.
00:09:33I already think there's a move towards something sunnier.
00:09:36I mean, if you had to use one word to describe the aesthetic of Momdani, it's sunny.
00:09:41You can say a lot of other things about him, right?
00:09:43And people disagree with him and you know, you, everybody can have their arguments about
00:09:46what he believes.
00:09:47You never saw that guy without a smile.
00:09:51He didn't, I mean, if you ever just looked at the Momdani smile, it's like Trump had this
00:09:54scowl, even in his second presidential portrait, this is not me ragging on him.
00:09:59He has a portrait in which he's scowling.
00:10:02It's a very unusual portrait.
00:10:03It's just kind of like looking down and Momdani, the smile and on gear at artists had this
00:10:08great piece in his sub stack the ink about like the red Momdani smile as rhetoric and
00:10:15Tallarico Momdani, you start to see something new working.
00:10:21And of course it will only work for so long and we'll see where it goes.
00:10:23It's not the only thing working.
00:10:24Mm-hmm.
00:10:24But that Stephen Miller, the Democrats exchange, it sucks, right?
00:10:30Like who, who wants to feel that way?
00:10:32No one.
00:10:33And so that's a, it's a way in, not a way out.
00:10:36And I do think the winning move in politics in the next couple of years is going to be the
00:10:41way out, not the way in.
00:10:43At best, it's a sort of gleeful dancing over somebody else.
00:10:46They're done in the same way as two bullies fighting against each other, kind of take
00:10:52a degree of satisfaction from having a pop, but it's not, yeah, it's not sunny.
00:10:57It's, it's performing sunniness, right?
00:11:00I care less about what you think of me.
00:11:03Oh no, actually we care even less about what you think of us than you think that we do.
00:11:07Yeah.
00:11:07This arms race sucks.
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