Richard Hanania on Trump's Genius, Antisemitism, and Election Predictions
In a June 2024 podcast hosted by Erik Torenberg, Richard Hanania discusses the growing, though still minority, support for Donald Trump among Silicon Valley elites, attributing it to backlash against wokenness, left‑wing economic policies, and a perceived anti‑tech stance by Democrats. He critiques both the left’s reflexive regulation of AI, crypto, and prediction markets and the right’s cultural grievances, nationalism, and religious right resurgence. Hanania explores his own political evolution, emphasizing a "human capital" or IQ gap between the parties, and argues that the Republican base is often hostile to change despite occasional libertarian instincts. He evaluates Trump’s political skill as a genius of power‑preservation and party manipulation, while noting his policy incoherence. He predicts betting markets give Trump a 55‑60% chance of winning 2024, but stresses uncertainty and the cultural fatigue surrounding Trump. The conversation moves to religion’s mixed societal impact, the complex causes of antisemitism, and the demographic and cultural factors influencing Jewish voting patterns. Hanania critiques DEI and color‑blind policies, favoring a French‑style norm of not tracking race, and discusses immigration, favoring a more open U.S. stance but recognizing European challenges. He reflects on the role of IQ versus common sense, dismisses the notion that high IQ alone ensures good governance, and speculates on the future dynamics of the right and left after a potential Trump victory. He uses a solar‑system metaphor, describing Trump as the sun whose gravitational pull holds the Republican party together, and wonders whether Trump acts as a "dam" holding back a liberal flood. He predicts that after Trump’s eventual exit, the Republican party may normalize around establishment figures like Nikki Haley, who he sees as more likable than DeSantis, while the Democratic side may benefit from moderate, business‑friendly governors such as Whitmer, Shapiro, and Newsom, giving them an electoral edge.
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Richard, welcome back to the podcast.
Glad to be here. Thanks for having me, Erik.
So Richard, we're talking in mid-June and David Sacks just hosted a fundraiser for Donald Trump. that had a surprising amount of Silicon Valley showing. In 2016 and even in 2020, there was barely any Trump support, or certainly no explicit Trump support, but it feels like there's now actual Silicon Valley support for Trump. It's still probably a minority, but among a lot of the CEOs I know or venture capitalists, it's much more than I would've expected. And the reasons they'll claim is because they like Trump's policies on the economy. They like Trump's foreign policy approach. And he's actually, you know, said some good things about crypto and AI and just generally seems more kind of encouraging of Silicon Valley. They don't like his aesthetics, or they don't like being seen to support his aesthetics or morals, but they're willing to bite the bullet this time. What do you make of it?
Yeah, it's sort of one of those things that's overdetermined. Uh, so the Silicon Valley, a lot of people didn't like wokeness. A lot of people were sort of fed up with what's going on in San Francisco. Uh, at the same time, the liberals have gone sort of, uh, the Democrats have gone further left on economics. Just the way they talk about rich people, um, and so forth has just become sort of, you know, even Biden's coming out, you know, saying things that'll never, uh, that'll never get passed, but things like a wealth tax. I mean, these things are getting, you know, floated around like they're serious ideas. And then there were an a time of sort of ferment and technological innovation, and just the Democrats have become sort of reflexively anti-tech and pro-regulation. You talk about AI and you talk about crypto. Yeah, it's just reflective at this point, whatever technology comes about. A small example that some people might have missed is prediction markets. So the Democrats on the CFTC, the ones appointed by Democrats, the commissioners, all voted recently to basically ban most kinds of prediction markets. And the 2 Republicans were against it. Now, nobody— we don't see that as a hot-button political issue, um, but it's, you know, there's a kind of just a reflexive anti-market, uh, sort of force on the left. So that's there. Uh, you know, I think Trump has just sort of, you know, benefited from not being on Twitter. I mean, if you follow the things he says on Truth Social, it's just, it's just insane. I mean, he's getting sort of crazier and crazier. But I get— I think these people just don't, don't see it. I mean, they're all on Twitter all day, um, and I wonder what it would be like if Trump was on was on Twitter himself and talking about locking up all his enemies and just coming across as a crazy person. But he's helped a little bit by that. The narrative from the media about Trump went from he's so intolerant in 2016 to like he's a threat to democracy in 2024. And I think the threat to democracy narrative isn't that ridiculous. But people from what I've seen in Silicon Valley who are right-leaning just don't buy that at all. And so maybe just that focus on Trump, maybe that's helping Trump in the general election too. But the idea that Trump is sort of a racist and this kind of, that kind of phobe, I mean, that's sort of fallen by the wayside.
Yeah. And you had a post where you talked about your political evolution. And if I was to summarize, you were very critical of wokeness and still remain sort of critical of certainly left-wing economics, but then also any sort of egalitarian sort of thinking by decree. But you've sort of got disillusioned by the right too, because of its sort of embrace of Russia and Putin during Ukraine, but then also, or probably more prominently, because of its sort of response to COVID with the sort of anti-vax stuff. But then more broadly, just what that is evidence for, for you, is just this this IQ problem or this human culture problem where the right is both dumber and kind of less ethical in your view. Is that accurate or how would you— what would you add?
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot there. I'm not really a conservative and I think where I agree with conservatives, it's often just because they reflexively oppose the left. So I don't think a lot of Republican voters are necessarily pro-technology or they like change or anything like that. I think they're hostile to change, maybe more hostile to change than a lot of the voters on the left. You know, they're just sort of motivated by cultural grievances and they don't like the people who are running society. Right. But, you know, the, you know, the sort of what's motivating, I think, Republican base and the Republican elite are sort of, you know, they cater to this and they partly believe in this, but then they have these sort of classical liberal ideas, too, at the top. You know, the— it's basically— it's nationalism. And I think we've seen— I think we've seen a comeback of sort of the influence of the religious right. I mean, it's always been there, but it's just become more prominent and visible since the Dobbs decision. And so, yeah, I think I had a tendency once to maybe sort of gloss over it. And I think that these Silicon Valley guys, I think a lot of them are doing this too. I think people do this in general. People are When they become tribal and they like one side or the other, they will, even if they don't switch their opinion on every single issue to accord with their new, their new group, they will often just sort of elide, you know, sort of, or just look away at the differences or try to explain them away and say, oh well, but actually there's a good point, or there's some political reason, or this thing that I actually don't agree with is somehow justified. And I think one thing I don't do, I do much less than other people, is any— anything like that. Right. And I think just sort of realizing like, wow, there's a lot of things I see conservatives doing that are just like either wrong ideologically, I just think morally are wrong or just like stupid. Right. So the stupid category, you have like the anti-vax thing, which is just stupid, which is really taking over the Republican Party. I see smart people, Silicon Valley smart people just saying bad things about the vaccine. And, you know, they're just— they're just going along with this. I mean, this is— I don't think they've looked much into the issue. And then some things are like a value thing, like the, you know, like the question of abortion, the question of euthanasia. I've seen the freakout over the Canadian program, which, if you look at the data, is completely sensible and humane. And so, yeah, these are sort of— I don't know if I changed that much in my political journey, but it's more like a coming realization, like, wow, there's a lot here on the right that I don't like.
Yeah.
Is it fair to say you're sort of a free market biorealist, which is to say whichever party is more market-oriented or more liberty-oriented while also taking into account just facts about human nature and how different groups—
Yeah, I don't even care. I mean, I don't even care about the latter point. You could think whatever you want about different groups and why they end up one way or the other. I really think that this is sort of— you shouldn't form politics based on scientific views, because translating scientific views to policy is a long way. There's an essay I'm going to write, Erik, and it might, might or might not be out by the time this gets released. But I think that one thing, like one thing, my instinctual conservatism, I think a lot of conservatives are like this. Whenever I watch a movie or like a clip or a newsreel or something from the '80s or '90s, the thing that angers me is you know, the people are thinner and they don't have tattoos and they don't, um, have weird colored hair. And like, I think a lot of people become reactionaries just that way. They remember their people didn't look so stupid and weird when they were younger, and then they just become a Republican and they think, oh, you know, Biden is, um, you know, Biden is, uh, destroying the country by importing illegal immigrants and the inflation is out of control and, you know, and make America great again. And like, there's no connection with this thing and, you know, all your views that you've now, um, that you've now come to. But it's just a sort of a reaction. And so I think that my conservatism is something that I share, I think, an instinct with a lot of conservatives. Um, but they haven't figured out that what the, the political causes they care about are not going to bring back what they like, and, and it's not going to affect sort of the policy. You know, the policy is not the sort of battle, the sort of plane on which they've lost. Um, and I think I, I think I share that, uh, with them, like the concern, but there's just like not a lot of serious thinking of like why this happened and what we're gonna do about it.
Right. And, um, why this happened, you cover a lot in your, in your book. Um, but how do you think— you've talked about the IQ problem or sort of the human capital problem on the right. What do you think are the best levers to try to change that? Or how could you imagine that being changed?
Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, it's like such a trite answer. Like, you just have to sort of— yeah, I don't know, because this is sort of independent. You know, it's the— you know, first of all, I mean, I think there's like the way that happened with the left, it was sort of organically. I mean, it was— I think it was just sort of we funded education and we had mass education, we had people going to college. And then there was just sort of a natural tendency for the kind of people who wanted to work, uh, you know, they're in effect government employees if you work for a public university. I mean, not technically— you're technically a scholar. I mean, technically you are, uh, uh, you are a government employee, but we don't think of them that way, but that's what they are. And, you know, there's just a natural sort of tendency— I think this happened in the, you know, in the second half of the 20th century— for those people to drift left towards, uh, towards a kind of, uh, uh, statism. Um, and so A human capital problem is just like IQ, right versus left. It wasn't bad, you know, during when Mitt Romney was the nominee. College-educated whites voted majority for Mitt Romney. This is something that's very kind of specific to the Trump era. Now, Romney had a difficult time in that primary because the voters— this thing was happening, this kind of education polarization was happening. And so you have one party which is like, you know, the angry, the angry people, the angry— you know, I always imagine the Republican base is sort of, uh, old people living on Social Security checks, just like staring at the TV and getting angry, right? Or, you know, the, the, you know, the, uh, the Facebook, uh, boomer boomer poster, right? And that just, you know, that's just not seen as appealing to a lot of people who are young and smart, uh, And idealistic. You know, I think that it has to sort of be top down. There's not an organic. There's not like an organic demand.
Would it naturally happen if Vivek or Elon was a presidential candidate? Like Trump's gonna die at some point. And do you think just a young smart?
Yes. Who is who's on the top? Who is the representative of the of sort of each side is very important. So, yeah, I think Elon Musk probably, you know, encouraged some people to find their courage and become more, you know, open in their sort of more conservative political views. So, sure, if Elon Musk, you know, can't run for president, obviously, but if he could and he was sort of the face of conservatism, yeah, that would help. But I think the nature of that, like, you know, I think the left, you know, they attract people who will be happy to make $50,000 a year writing hit pieces for The Guardian. About this conference had this speaker who once said this bad thing and they were associated with this person. And conservatism doesn't have that. I mean, that's, that's partly human capital. It's human capital. You know, it's activism. It's journalism slash activism. And the left has that. And I think that's sort of inherent to sort of what the left is at that point. And so that, I think, is not going to be solved. I did write a piece you probably saw called Coping with Low Human Capital. You know, the path is, I don't think, to recapture media and academia. I think those things are going to be what they are. It's just trying to find ways to sort of go around them and to sort of reconfigure sort of power relations in society and between institutions.
Though it does seem that certainly the last few months there's been more of a challenge to academia. I don't know if you would call that going around it, but attempts to delegitimize it or challenge it in some way. And similarly, or maybe differently in media, There does seem to be a more emerging sort of right-wing counter-elite form of media which aims to—
Yeah.
And Twitter, I mean, Twitter was on the side of the left and then Elon bought it. And now Twitter suppresses links, which I don't like. I mean, I want people to be able to read news stories and for people to be able to reach my Substack and so forth. But it has taken power away from the media. And yeah, you look at someone like Not all these things are good, but I mean, Joe Rogan, or you look at, you know, Nick Fuentes just had a conference. I mean, it really is out of— I mean, anyone could have, anyone could have an audience now. And, you know, same thing with academia. I mean, like, it's— I mean, how much influence do professors really have over students compared to everything else that's going on in the social media these days? I don't know if it's that much, or influence on society. So I think these sort of sort of stale kind of established institutions. I think that they're gradually losing power. And what's gaining power is the internet and streamers and other things. And then wherever the money goes, because when you have money, you can influence public opinion.
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You, you've written about how there's some element of religious thinking that just kind of repulses you or repels you because of the sort of illogical nature. And I think maybe Tucker Carlson has embodied this recently, judging by some of your tweets. But I'm curious, Tyler Cowen calls himself a pro-religious non-believer.
Yeah.
Do you have more appreciation for sort of them when it comes to, or in light of sort of the fertility statistics, um, when you look at certain, certain groups and how they procreate, and, and you've written a lot about our fertility crisis, um, is becoming religious potentially a solution or, or, or no?
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of ways in which religion is a positive force on society. Now, there's some things that I just dislike, like the Catholic sort of philosophy of life. I wish we could excise that Part for you know abortion and euthanasia, especially euthanasia. I just I wrote a piece recently. I mean, I just have such a reaction to opposite to the idea that you government forces people to live. To me, this is the fundamental and the right to suicide is the first is the first and most fundamental right. Deciding yes, a you know a or b. I exist or I don't exist. This is the most fundamental right. And given the state of society and like you know how people keep you know lose their dignity and are hooked up to machines for decades and decades. I mean, I just think it's. It's so important. Not that euthanasia is that life of an issue in the US, but I mean, their conservatives are so opposed to it, they're just following Canada, you know, very closely and then getting upset at what's going on there. So there are things in, you know, conservatism that, you know, genuinely hurt people and are bad for society. And then instinctually, I'm not religious, and I just don't have, you know, the ability to sort of sympathize or really just put myself in the shoes of somebody who has that has that worldview. It's just very difficult for me. At the same time, you know, I'm a liberal and I understand not everyone is like me. And, you know, religion often gives people comfort and it gives them community. And we've seen in years— I mean, we've seen, you know, the increase in singledom and people not having children and not forming families and, you know, being lonely, even like things like number of friends is going down. We've seen sort of the dangers of not having some kind of coordination mechanisms in society around which people can, you know, meet other people and form lives, everything from friendships to marriage and family and children. And so, yeah, I'm not hostile to religion. I think it has some bad effects on specific policy areas, but I think if society became more religious, I'm not sure how I would feel about that. There would be good and bad things. I wouldn't have an instinct this was a terrible thing or a great thing. I wouldn't be that strongly in either direction.
You wrote about some things, this sort of idea of the return philosophy, i.e., we need to go back to the 1950s, gets right and gets wrong. I'm curious if you think there's some sort of line of statistics that say something like women were happier in the '50s. And so this is sort of the Louise Perry line of thinking. And then there was some people who respond to that and say either that's not true, or even if that is true, either there is no going back or we shouldn't go back and would rather live in a world where We have a fertility crisis, or people are just less happy, but at least they're more free. How do you react to that?
Yeah, I mean, like, the idea that women are, you know, like, the idea you could just tell people, do this and then you will be happy. It's, you know, in the 1950s, they didn't have a sort of, you know, they didn't have an idea of the possibility that it actually could be different. I don't think it just struck people's mind that you would have a world where women and men are, you know, entering the labor force in equal numbers in their, in their early 20s. I think that, yeah, I mean, I think that marriage and family do give people meaning. I think that people should be encouraged to, you know, not get tattoos and not get fat and get married and have children and, you know, behave in ways that are traditionally considered, you know, acceptable or attractive for their own sex. I think we're wired to sort of find that attractive in other people and then be happy with ourselves when we live up to those, to those standards. And so, yeah, I mean, I think there is sort of, you know, there is something to this idea that, like, things got worse in some ways. Now, in that piece, I argue that, you know, they become just, like, very stupid and just reject everything about modernity. They say, you know, they say that, you know, because we focus too much on the economy, we were too materialistic. We didn't, you know, we didn't protect the jobs from the immigrants or some other, you know, some nonsense like that. There's always this implication that, like, every single thing we did wrong, or like material prosperity, um, is the problem. And, and that I would, that I would reject. I mean, that's just not really based in reality.
The—
I want to go to Trump, and I'm curious, you mentioned earlier in this conversation that you actually, um, do think there's some legitimacy to the idea that he is a real threat to democracy.
It's interesting.
Some people, Peter Thiel famously said, take him seriously, not literally. And some people will ascribe this hidden genius to him, his instincts around the Middle East, his instincts around China. He's just early to different trends. But then others will see the obvious things that he says and say, wow, this person's really dumb or really vile or You know, I think, you know, I think they understand Trump, whether he's genius or, or an idiot.
I think he is a legitimate genius when it comes to politics and his instinct for self-preservation and power. Does he have some secret wisdom about, like, international relations or something like that? Usually not. But I was surprised, actually, you know, to see, like, when the story came out of what he was doing after the 2020 election and between that and January 6th. I mean, it was really an organized effort to overturn the election. I studied his policy, you know, his sort of performance in policy areas. He didn't show that kind of sort of, you know, level of attention to detail when he was trying to, you know, formulate a foreign policy or this or economic policy or this or that. It was when it came to like me, Trump, stay in power. He was sort of genius at this. And then the other thing he did was a genius. I mean, just the way he sort of played the Republican Party. He made everyone— I've written about this. He made everyone say that he was the legitimate president, that he won 2020. He made them afraid to say anything different. And then 2024 comes along. Everyone is running against Trump. They've spent 4 years saying Trump is the legitimate president and the whole deep state is out to get him because he is the only person who threatens them. And they're still saying this during the campaign, basically. And like DeSantis, I mean, when Trump gets indicted for the first time, first few times, Trump attacks, you know, DeSantis attacks. It sounds like Trump. He attacks the prosecutor who's indicting him. How do you expect to knock the guy off like this? But I think there was some kind of genius, like, I've got to. And not only that, not only he made people— I mean, he made people say that he went and he would endorse candidates or attack people based on whether they said, you know, he won the 2020 election, whether they went wrong with his idea about ideas about vote fraud. And this is really— this is just sort of— this is genius. I mean, he, he basically dominated the party and basically stayed as its leader until 2024. I saw this. I mean, I talked about like, you're going to have to challenge him. He's just going to cruise to the nomination. You guys treat him like a god. And, you know, you think that like one day you're just going to say, okay, it's 2024 now. It's Iowa, New Hampshire. Oh, vote for me, by the way. Trump is great. But, you know, look at me, DeSantis. I passed a law that says don't teach gender identity to 3rd graders. That's cool, right? Like, no, these people, you made it the Trump cult. Like, they don't— they're not going to care what you, you know, what you did in Florida. So the man is— the man is a genius. I mean, he is— he is a savant at sort of controlling and manipulating Republicans and the Republican Party. I mean, people didn't see this. So, you know, Mitch McConnell, I think either he said it or was reported about him that he could have voted. He could have tried to whip the votes to convict him after the second impeachment, after January 6th stuff. But they just assumed that he would just go away. That after January 6th, I mean, you remember, like, all these, all these companies were like saying they weren't going to donate to, like, Republicans who even voted not to certify the election. It was like there was like the whole— all the walls were closing and everyone was like, Trump was such an embarrassment. Even people like on Tucker the next day would say, oh, you know, it's so terrible what happened, what happened the other day. And they say, you know, we don't have to incur the wrath of the voters. We don't have to vote to convict him. He's just going away. This is the end of Trump. They just— they don't see it. They've been fools. Since 2015, they've wanted him to go away. And so yes, as you can tell, I'm very just sort of just sort of amazed at Trump's and my own genius because I've predicted this sort of every step of the way. But Trump's genius too. He's definitely got that. Now whether you know when it comes to policy, yeah, it's all over the place. I mean, he's basically he doesn't care that much. You know, he sees doing you know what what he's going to do. Yeah, he said I mean he signed all those giant you know COVID relief bills. I mean, you know when the pressure is on, he'll just. You know, he says he's gonna build the wall, he never builds the wall. I mean, with the, you know, he gives the Federalist Society the judges they want, and then McConnell confirms them. I mean, he's, he's the least— a path of least resistance and just sort of, you know, not doing anything too stupid, but just sort of, you know, doing the, uh, you know, just path of least resistance in the policy area, but then genius, genius at, uh, achieving and holding power.
We, we still have plenty of time before the election, but you had to pick in mid-June, you have to put your odds on Trump versus Biden, what would you put? And more importantly, how would you, if you had to guess or predict sort of the major differences between a Biden presidency and a Trump presidency in terms of its impact on the US, what might that be?
So yeah, I think the betting markets are really confident about Trump. They give him 55%, 60%. I tend to think that's a little You know, I tend to think that's a little high, but it's not too far off. You know, maybe I'll take the maybe I'll take the low end of that. And you know which way we go is maybe just whatever the economic news in the coming months. Yeah, Trump has become you know he's like there's it's a problem with Biden because in all the polls, all the senators and running states do better than Biden is doing. They're all outrunning him. It's not that the polls show people love Trump; it's that. Biden, people think Biden is senile. People think Biden is just completely out of it. I mean, I think that that's sort of what the left is in denial about. And so, yeah, I mean, it's a close race, but, you know, the polls could be off 3 or 4 points in either direction. That, that, that's a norm. That's a normal polling miss. I don't have really strong— you know, you could say, you say, well, they missed, they underestimated Trump in 2016, they underestimated Trump in 2020. That logic is not good because in 2022, you know, we were saying they over— you know, they underestimated the Republicans the last few times. And actually, their polls were probably underestimated the Democrats a bit in the last midterm. So you never know. It's hard to predict based on the direction of the error. And so, yeah, so what a Trump presidency or what a Biden presidency means, we're going to get some— the technology sort of regulation, I think, is a big deal. So the administrative state can do a lot. On things we've talked about, crypto prediction markets, AI. You're basically going to have more of a laissez-faire approach if the Republicans are in power. And that's also just sort of judges, you know, really Republican control of the judiciary. I mean, you know, one of these other liberal judges might not— their health might not hold up or whatever. I mean, you're going to have 4 more years of Republicans, of Trump appointing judges and Republicans. Trump wins the presidency, there's almost no way they don't also have the Senate. And so, yeah, you're going to get sort of, I think, a tech accelerationism. I think you're going to get sort of Israel just being able to do what it wants in Gaza. I mean, I think that there's some confusion here about what kind of President Trump will be on Middle East policy. I think that if you paid any attention to the first administration, you should not be confused. you know, if you're voting for Trump as sort of like the antiwar candidate in the Israel-Gaza situation, I mean, I think you're probably misinformed and you're probably going to be disappointed there. The China stuff, you know, probably it's probably going to be, you know, less different than most other areas. It seems like Democrats and Republicans both want to get tough on China. I'll be interested to, to see what the cultural impact will be. I think, you know, so people will, you know, when Trump won in 2016, there were these giant, uh, protests, uh, watching them on the news and like New York City and all these, all these places, um, and people were really upset and it sort of became the, you know, the, the cultural energy became frantic. You watch, you know, the Emmys or like a late night TV show and it was all like, you know, we're living under fascism, we're all gonna die, this and that, um, and you know, that was still there. I mean, 2020, it still hadn't burned out. 2020, obviously we had George Floyd and we had, uh, you know, was the probably the peak of the craziness. But I think that what happened was it was like a TV show that had the same cast of characters for too long and people lost interest. So we had Trump 2016, Trump 2020, Trump is the nominee in 2024, you have another threat of a Trump presidency. And I think it's like very hard for people to maintain that frantic energy for a long period of time. And so like the media is saying, oh my goodness, Trump is saying he's going to arrest all his enemies and this and that, and they're freaking out about the people within Washington and sort of the establishment media and, you know, government bureaucrats and employees and so forth. But the cultural energy is just not there. Like, Trump is like hanging out like at UFC. I mean, Trump is doing this, Trump is doing that. I mean, he's hanging out with— I think it was— was it some streamer, Jake Paul or something? And yeah, yeah. And like 2020, that sort of would have been unthinkable. Like anyone would have been canceled if even though Trump was president, like if you hung out with the president, you would get canceled. Sort of canceled. It was like the cultural force was like that strong. And he's just like, he's just there. He's just in the culture. He sort of became normalized and sort of harmless. And so, yeah, we might be entering an era of like— I think this will happen if Biden wins too, where it's just like it's been the same cast of characters for too long. Sort of the frantic energy of, I don't know, 2014 to 2020, 2021 burned itself out. And I hope we have a somewhat less politicized era. Yeah.
Do you think Jews go to the right sort of as a clear bloc, or is it still mixed?
I would think so. I would think they would go more to the right. There was one poll I saw that suggested not, but then I looked at the end that got a lot of attention on Twitter that said they were, I don't know, still 75% going to vote for Biden or something like that. I would be surprised if that's true. I looked for some other polls and the results were much, much closer, uh, than that. I mean, yeah, I mean, anecdotally it seems— I mean, anecdotally, look, there's, there's people, whenever they're— they have some kind of ethnic background and it's involved in a geopolitical conflict, a lot of people will have their politics sort of center around that issue, uh, right? And so, you know, traditionally it was Democrats and Republicans were about equal in their support for Israel. Now there is a clear partisan split, and that has to have an influence. So anecdotally, we see people like Bill Ackman and so forth who say, I was, you know, I was a Democrat and now my eyes have been opened and I see this antisemitism and I see how it's connected to DEI and all this other stuff. You know, that's anecdotally, there's a few of these guys. I would be surprised if it didn't, you know, affect the general population. So I don't know, like, I think, you know, If Trump didn't get like 40% of Jews, I think I would be surprised. Who knows? I mean, Jews have very high intermarriage rates. So there might be a lot of people now with 1/8 Jewish ancestry or something, and they're answering polls and they say they're Jewish, but then they're just liberal white people in other ways. So yeah, you'd have to look into that a little bit because secular Jews had, for a while, have had an intermarriage rate of like 50%. So who actually is Jewish and what is the Jewish community is actually sort of a a complicated question. I think the most Jewish Jews, the ones who identify most with their community, yeah, I'd be surprised if they didn't shift Republican in the coming years.
Yeah, it's interesting. I'm Jewish, my dad is Israeli, and I find myself often disagreeing with American Jews a lot on sort of both axes. I find myself, one, proposing Israel to do more aggressive things to protect itself than American Jews are typically comfortable with, or they typically want Israel to be more left-wing than I do, separate from even this conflict, or more secular even. At the same time, I find that American Jews also, in the US, in my humble opinion, even before this crisis, before October 7th, tend to inflate the concern of antisemitism.
Yeah.
And I wonder if antisemitism in the US, not to say Europe or elsewhere, is mostly a form of anti-whiteness, but we've just been so conditioned to ignore anti-whiteness or sort of this oppressor-oppressed. It just fits into the sort of kind of left-wing sort of paradigm that Jews have often supported when it was other groups. And this is why a lot of right-wing people like Tucker Carlson, etc., are mad at Jews for sort of being hypocritical on this element. Do you sympathize with that sort of self-critique that I'm giving, or what do you think?
Yeah, the antisemitism thing. I mean, I think it's just from a completely fair sort of neutral observer perspective, the idea that these Protests on university campuses and so forth are motivated by anti-Semitism. I don't, I don't buy that at all. It's oppressor-oppressed framework. It's seeing as you know whites versus non-whites, and like the number of things that you know, you know, like there's all these protests, and you can build a narrative from like individual videos. I mean, it's like I saw one guy is like this guy is like praised Hitler during this college protest, and it was like one black guy looked like he probably wasn't even a student. He comes in, he says, "You know Hitler was right," or something like that, and then everyone's like. Sort of looking around uncomfortably. It wasn't like everyone in the protest was like chanting for Hitler because these are leftists. These, these are leftists. I mean, it is a thing. They're not, you know, genocidal looking for the minority group to go bash their heads in. They, they see Palestinians as the victim and they fit it into their, um, they fit it into their worldview. Now, I mean, it's very interesting that you see, you know, Congress having hearings on antisemitism and invoking civil rights law and all this and saying, you know, there's hostile environment for Jews. I think that's probably politically, you know, the smart thing to be doing because what, like, it's just the currency is like who could be the biggest victim. And like, if you can say, okay, our group is, you know, the one being discriminated against, this is even going to reach a lot of Democrats, um, who are Jewish or who are sympathetic to Israel. Uh, so it's a, it's a smart political, uh, strategy. But the idea that, you know, Jews are, you know, facing— I see crazy, you see crazy things. I mean, you see hysteria. I mean, it's like I saw one guy like you don't know how bad it can get in America. Come to Israel where you'll be safe. I don't think you're going to be safer in Israel than America. I think that, you know, anyone who thinks that is, is sort of has lost their mind. Um, but yeah, I, I think people do believe this though, and that's bound to have a political impact.
You know, this question is even, uh, known— the streets call it victim blaming. But is, you know, any curious person can't help but ask, why are Jews discriminated against everywhere they go. Is it fair to say some combination of like, they do so well, so people are jealous, but they're also so insular and really support each other, so people feel like they're not assimilating, and thus, you know, um, like, what do you think? Or is it really there are no causal explanations that are instructive or helpful? Why do we—
It doesn't seem that, you know, a minority religious group in Europe, like Middle Eastern, uh, medieval Europe that's like economically successful. Like, I don't think there's a lot— like, you know, people are xenophobic and they're jealous of successful groups, and Jews have been sort of a wandering minority, uh, without their own land who have done well in European countries. I don't think it's that sort of, um, mysterious, like the history of like antisemitism in Europe. And then when there's, you know, and then when you have the Enlightenment, when you move away from Christianity and sort of these, you know, premodern ways of looking at the world, the antisemitism sort of clears up. So you have Napoleon and the American founders, and they were all, you know, either, you know, they were, they were, you know, philosemitic in many cases. And so this is not, you know, that hard to explain. I think there's like, you know, there's like an anti-Gypsy prejudice. I mean, you have from the other direction, you have a minority group in Europe that's been poor and sort of, you know, sort of dependent on society or known for crime and stealing and so forth. And they're not well liked, but, you know, there's not a lot of gypsies in Hollywood or academia writing books on anti-gypsyism. It's just a prejudice that's there. So it seems like a minority group, they do well or they do poorly. Uh, people don't like them. Anti-gypsyism is probably just as universal as antisemitism. They're just not as successful. And so people don't, uh—
What about Asians? Asians are also very successful. Are they as discriminated against or do they do different?
Well, I mean, yeah, in places where they have a long history of being a successful minority. Yeah. I mean, in these Southeast Asian countries. So it's another good example. You could just say when you're a minority group and you're, especially when there's a religion, you know, there's an ethnic difference, and especially when there's a religious difference, people don't like you. And then in the Muslim world, I mean, you do, you have this, you have the same thing. And then you have sort of, you know, there's, there's parts of the Quran that are very sort of explicitly, you know, directly connected to antisemitism. You know, much of your audience probably knows the lines. And so, yeah, you give a religious sort of sanction to it, then yeah, it's not too hard to explain.
Yeah, it's interesting. Zooming out a little bit, you wrote about how in one of your pieces, this idea of calling people demons is bad. And I've gone back and forth on this idea of the midwit curve, right? Is it like the sort of excessive rationality, rationalism, mistake theory as opposed to conflict theory, it feels dismissively— it's sometimes dismissed as Redditism or something approach to arguments. I'm not sure if that's on the middle of the bell curve or the right side of the bell curve, because I have very smart friends who are both sides. One is evaluate everything on its merits, and the other is like, no, there's a there's a side that's directionally right and there's a side that is wrong and you need to be on the good side. And there's like a spectrum there. And I'm curious how you've— yeah, how do you think about that?
Yeah, I mean, so I've been recently rereading a little bit of Ayn Rand at the recommendation of a friend. I read a collection of her essays called The Romantic Manifesto. And so Ayn Rand is probably one of the most famous people for sort of painting a picture of villainy that right-wingers can really get behind and that appeals to them. And, you know, I think that when I hear demon, you know, I think I'm more— it's my reaction is less about the sort of, less about the sort of the idea of whether it's, you know, it's too much, too much of attacking the other side or too personal. More it represents a sort of It more represents a sort of premodern, sort of primitive worldview. Like Alex Jones, like, you know, it's not metaphorical. Like, you have to check whether the person is metaphorical or literal. Like, there's a clip I've seen of Alex Jones where he's like, no, no, literally demons. This is not a metaphor. I mean, he goes into it and he like gives details. So a lot of these people believe that they're literal demons. I mean, Tucker Carlson, he had a, you know, when you listen to him talk about UFOs, he believes there's evil spirits in the world. And so that I reject just because I believe in the Enlightenment and I don't believe in, you know, magic spirits fighting on this earth. And but then I think the question you're— I think your question is sort of getting at is more along the lines of like, how much should we think our opponents are just motivated by bad things or they have evil instincts? And how much should we just think that they're making mistakes? And that's, you know, that's more— that's a more Complicated question. I, I don't— I think right-left is too crude. Like, I don't— I dislike that. But if you wanna like just make it a, you know, just sort of, uh, zoom in a little bit more, that's like too, you know, it's, it's too high of a level, right? Left capitalists versus socialists, right? Egalitarians versus anti-egalitarians. These things sometimes cross, you know, right-left lines. If you do that, you know, I'm more comfortable saying no, just some people are just directionally wrong and you should not be listening to them.
Right. And then I guess I wonder if you have sympathy to the idea that, like, are Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson just directionally right on some things or a bunch of things that even though they're literally wrong, it's—
I mean, anyone could be directionally right on some things. Yes. I mean, everyone is. Kendi, Ibram Kendi, directionally right on some things. Yeah. Yeah.
Is he directionally right on things that are helpful or instructive or that we should follow? I don't know. for Kendi, but like, does, is Jones, was he early to identify like a cabal of elites who are pedophiles? I'm just teasing about the pedophiles, but who are controlling things and like mandating, like, you know, was he directionally right on some key things that thus, you know, do you take that?
Yeah.
I mean, seriously, but not literally point. It's a contrast to the intellectual yet idiot.
I mean, I, I mean, I believe I'm— Kendi is Look, I can make the case for Ibram Kendi. I mean, he believes in sort of secularism. He believes in the Enlightenment. He doesn't think his opponents are literal demons. You know, he doesn't— he's not a, you know, a crazy, crazy person who wants to, you know, regulate people's, you know, decisions about, you know, whether they can eat lab-grown meat or these other weird right-wing cultural sort of things that they want to do. So, yeah, Ibram Kendi is directionally right. I could find ways that I could find— I could pick— I could pick and choose policy areas. where I think Alex Jones is directionally right, um, that he, you know, that I agree with. Uh, I think that they're— I think that the, the— what Tucker and I think Alex Jones represent, and, you know, you could pick and say, oh, they're right about this or they're wrong about that, they represent fundamentally a conspiratorial, um, worldview. And I think that's just wrong. I think this just sort of melts the brain. Um, and I don't think that's— I, I just don't think it's good epistemology.
I don't—
I think that they're, you know, wrong on a lot of things. They just get their basic facts wrong about like who, what, where, and why what happened. And then their view that sort of elites are sort of all in cahoots and pushing society in a certain direction, and to give sort of planning to this idea and sort of tie in transgender policy. Well, you know, it's like a Tucker rant will be like, you know, they call you racist for not wanting immigration, and then they change your— they tell your son to change his sex, and then they ship them off to Ukraine to go and fight for Zelensky. And it's like, it's so stupid. I mean, just thinking like this, you're just— your brain is rotted and you're like not understanding the world. You're just— you're, you're, you're literally a crazy conspiracy theorist. And we used to— we used to stigmatize that, um, and we should stigmatize this type of thinking. No, not directionally right. No, it's, it's a stupid worldview and it should be called what it is.
Do you sympathize with the idea that— or the mistake that they make when they talk about these conspiracies is that they, to your point, they ascribe too much order to it or too much planning to it. But it doesn't discount that maybe via emergent collusion, some of these things are actually happening.
Yeah. So what do you mean emergent collusion? These things are like, what does that mean in concrete terms?
So it's not like there is a group of people, although sometimes there is, but a group of people who are determining sort of Let's say something like sort of the critical race theory stuff or the transgender stuff. Take some of the biggest complaints that the right has over the— we'll take out Ukraine for this one, but maybe some of the more social stuff that the left has been pushing. And they might say, hey, it's this cabal of people who's deciding everything. But actually, in some ways, it is sort of a minority of the country Speaking up or sort of dictating, you know, stuff on, on behalf— or I guess, do you not take the cathedral to be an instructive view of how sort of, uh, society operates in some ways? Or there's this like loose affiliation between media, academia, government?
Yeah, I mean, they have affiliations. Like, yes, I mean, okay, there's a left-wing media and there's left-wing activists and left-wing people sort of have Bad ideas. I mean, we could like you could talk about that, and you know that's largely true. I've never understood like calling it the cathedral. I've never like understood what that label does for you, how that helps sort of sharpen your thinking or like clarify things. And you know it's it's it's too much. Yeah, I mean it. I don't think it leads to good places. I mean, I think you become an idiot. You become easily manipulable. Someone can come along and say they're trying to take away your stakes, and they're trying to you know sterilize you with Klaus Schwab, and you'll go and you'll ban lab growth. You'll do anything. I mean, you'll do anything if as long as someone can wrap it up in one of these culture war discussions. So yeah, I don't think it's helpful for understanding the world. I don't think it. I think it makes people sort of dumb, and it just sort of makes them you know less effective and and and and you know undertaking bad policy. I'm just not a fan of this stuff. I try to find a you know a way to sort of. Be sympathetic. Okay, I mean, I really see how I could sort of— I could justify it in my way. I, I can't justify it in epistemological grounds that it's actually getting at truth, but I can justify it as maybe it's a way to motivate people. Like, maybe it's like a way to, uh, you know, like, I think that the Trump cult in the Republican Party, it's actually quite, you know, it's quite, uh, an electoral advantage. I mean, if you have 100% of people, they're all going to say every single every single indictment or everything he's been charged with or everything they say about him, they're going to take the line that it's bad. I mean, that's impressive. That's an impressive level of sort of discipline. And maybe people need a wider narrative. You don't have Christianity, and even on the right, you don't have Christianity as sort of a unifying worldview. But you need something. And maybe just like the leftists are evil people all pointing in the same direction and doing evil things, maybe that motivates activism, that motivates people to give money. And if you want Republicans to win, maybe it makes sense. So, yeah, there's perhaps a practical case for this, but I do think it hurts. And we talked about the human capital problem. I do think it's repulsive to high human capital. So you have to sort of balance all these things.
Yeah. Would you say that Elon has become more conspiratorial in the last year or so? And do you think that's That's a negative development or a positive one?
Yeah, I don't know. I think Elon, I mean, he's sometimes sort of, you know, I don't know, a little bit maybe sloppy. I don't know if he's conspiratorial. I'm trying to think back if I remember him saying anything. Can you think of an example of this?
I mean, what are things he's rallied around? He's, you know, 1350 posting crime stuff, immigration. He's been on that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, okay. Yeah, he does go into the, yeah, this stuff.
About white replacement theories.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that stuff I would consider pretty close to a conspiracy theory. I mean, especially he says, oh, they're just importing voters. I mean, I think he might have said so Biden could win, which is like, it's not— they're not going to be here and voting soon enough to help Biden win. So I don't know if Elon said this or he was like responding, you know, positively to someone who said that, but I do remember something like that. And so, yeah, I do think— I do think he is a little bit, you know, he keeps his head better than a lot of people. I've seen him, you know, go against right-wingers on You know, immigration, parts of immigration. I saw him, you know, defend, uh, uh, even defend euthanasia, uh, to a certain extent. I mean, he does— he's not completely, uh, brain melted. Um, it's hard to be on Twitter and sort of have strong political opinions and not sort of, uh, just buy into some crazy things.
Yeah, some people will, will post sort of, uh, things that maybe looked like they were conspiracies like, you know, 10, 15 years ago, that like, you know, gay marriage could lead to to sort of, uh, what's happened with trans or some of the race stuff could, you know, DEI could lead to BLM or things like that. Yeah.
Well, I mean, no, that's a good example of like how the, this is a sort of an error because they say, yeah, gay marriage, you know, leads to trans. Okay. You can say some of that. There's a lot of the gay marriage opponents predicted a lot of crazy things and not all of them happened. I mean, there's sex with animals, pedophilia. Like they think pedophilia is everywhere. I mean, they think pedophilia is about to be legalized. I mean, like, I don't see evidence of that. And so, yeah, I mean, these people, I mean, they might have some hits, but they also have a lot of misses and then sort of selective in what they remember.
It's like the economist who predicts like, you know, 8 of the last 2 recessions or something.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
The, I mean, it's still early. Pedophilia could, what would they call it? MAPs now? I forget what the term stands for, but yeah, minor attracted persons.
I've seen this, like I looked into it. It's like one academic. It's not like any state has like made this a category. It's weird. The pedophilia thing is funny because they're going in the opposite direction. They're saying age gaps, you know, are— it's like you can't even consent to sex if you're 25, if the, you know, your partner is 45. And so they're going in the opposite direction. I mean, it's like not even adults can consent to sex anymore. So I don't know how close we are to pedophilia.
It's anarcho-tyranny, but for sex, if it's the right, you know, minority, I'm sure, right person And I'm sure, you know, them at 16 is gonna be fine. At some point there'll be a Greta Thunberg-like character who is, you know, 16 and wants to just have sex with people.
Yeah. I mean, the, you saw the New York, they went after the French because the French have a sort of lower age of consent. I forgot what it was, but it was much, it was lower than the US. And like, and culturally, like people in their memoirs would say they had sex with teenage girls. And there was a big thing in the New York Times, like, oh my God, can you believe the French are doing this? And I think they, you know, under the pressure, they started denouncing all the people who had these, you know, experiences with underage girls. So like there was, we had an example of them like, canceling a culture for being too, quote unquote, friendly to pedophiles. You wouldn't even call that pedophilia 15 years ago. The expansion of what we call pedophilia is really another story here. But no, we're going at the opposite. Pedophilia, we are as far away from that as possible.
Let me tie up some loose ends before we wrap here. So on the Jew point, someone told me recently this interesting idea that Jews just tend to be the best activists. like for all sides, whether it's left-wing, right-wing, antisemite, pro-Israel, libertarian, Marxist, capitalist. Just Jews are the best arguers and they tend to be activists on all sides. And thus this is why maybe they tend to be less conservative. They're always trying to change things.
Yeah. I don't know if they're even that underrepresented. I mean, if you take the class of intellectuals and you take all the white Christian intellectuals and all the Jewish intellectuals are of the last, say, 100 years. Are the Jewish intellectuals to the left? I don't know, because you look at like the free market economists, like Milton Friedman, right? Like Richard Posner, like Law and Economics, the entire Mises Institute. These— Hayek. Was Hayek Jewish? No, I think Hayek actually wasn't Jewish. Someone correct me on that. But a lot of the sort of the free— Ayn Rand. I mean, a lot of these free market economists And philosophers, they were you know they were themselves Jewish. Yeah, I think that you know I had an article, the Great Jewish Realignment of 2023, and all you have to assume is Jews are higher on verbal IQ and they care more about politics, right? And I just think there's you know there is just this sort of, and I think Arabs are like this too, where there's just like more interest in politics, just more interest in sort of broad abstract ideas. I don't think it's a coincidence. This is sort of, you know, this connection is maybe sort of, maybe not, you know, obvious to people. But I've always believed this, that sort of it's not a coincidence that the 3 major, you know, the major monotheistic religions that sort of spread to the rest of the world all came from the Middle East. I think there's something about that region where people like to forge and argue. And you look at something like a country like Lebanon and Syria, they've got like this dizzying array of like 10 different religious groups. who all hate each other. And the Jews have their roots in this part of the world, and they come to the West and they're dominating, you know, every ideological sort of faction, even the antisemites. Ron Unz is, you know, one of the smartest antisemites now, is himself Jewish. And so, yeah, I mean, there is something to this idea that, you know, once you had sort of— you have free— it's emergent from a free society. Yeah, Jews were going to dominate sort of the intellectual space.
Yeah. 2 more questions and we'll get out of here. One is Silicon Valley, Alexander Wang, CEO of Scale AI, just tweeted about how he's going to not hire based on DEI and just purely on merit. And a lot of other CEOs are starting to step forward as well. Do you think that we should operate like France where we don't even sort of track sort of gaps or racial categories when it comes to hiring? You had this interesting post where you talked about how Black nationalism is the only sort of thing that actually matters when it comes to DEI. What's your perspective on this?
Yeah, I wrote a piece, something about the French colorblindness is like a second best solution. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if government needs to enforce it, but a norm that you don't even think about racial statistics, and yet government is actually the source of a lot of these Statistics that get counted as sort of evidence of discrimination, and so yeah, that's one of my that's one of the arguments of my book that like we should just not be counting this stuff, and sort of what we count ends up being what we focus on. So the government, for you know historically contingent reasons, doesn't count religion and like how many Protestants or Catholics or so forth are in any particular job, and we don't count different categories of white people or different kinds of. Hispanics, and people don't care about those disparities. We care specifically about race because of a specific history of the Civil Rights Act and the way that the decisions that were made bureaucratically in the 1960s and 1970s. And yes, it would be better if we just got away from these classifications as much as possible. Yeah.
What's your most recent book? Of course, The Origin of Woke. What's your next book? going to be about, or what are some of the big intellectual topics that, um, you're looking forward to spending a lot more time on?
Yeah, I mean, I'm interested— one of the things I'm really interested in is like the, the degree to which America works, like the degree to which it works even though you have a lot of reasons for thinking it shouldn't work. Uh, you know, high crime rate, uh, inner cities are just like completely, you know, war zones, um, elites that are sort of dumb and, you know, We see politicians are just very stupid and they all hate each other and great polarization. And somehow this country just keeps working. I mean, our economic engine is sort of the envy of the world. We're growing much faster than anyone else in Europe. And, you know, we're demographically healthier. And, you know, culturally, I think we still dominate and we're still important in international institutions, even though, you know, relatively, you're probably going to lose power over time. And I have some theories about why this works, and I've touched on this a little bit. And I think that sort of this dynamic tension within society is healthy. I actually think that a lot of these things that seem like weaknesses, like the political polarization and sort of like the, you know, the low quality of people going into politics and maybe a few other things, and even like some of the violence and like, you know, the drug use, I think these things are sort of related to sort of our dynamism and our ability to sort of resilience as a society. So I don't know if that'll be a book, but, you know, I, I'll probably have a couple essays on that and see how it goes.
It's interesting. It's sometimes hard to know whether we're succeeding in spite of something or, or because of it.
Yeah, yeah. It's not much— it's not— it's not— doesn't get enough— it doesn't get enough thought. I mean, we really, especially the last 3, 4 years, the American economy versus Europe. I mean, it's just such a, you know, such a difference in performance. And yeah, there's not enough, you know, there's not enough thought about this. I mean, this is something that people should understand and we should try, you know, can help us sort of cultivate. I think some of the things people want to do, they might, you know, they often want more order. They want to bring, you know, like Fred Brian Chau says, what has chaos and needs more order, what has more order needs more chaos. People keep trying to bring more order to America. Maybe the chaos is the Yeah, fascinating.
By the way, just on immigration, is your view that we should— Bryan Caplan is an open borders person. You mentioned how he influenced your worldview. Are you an open borders person, or are you of the view that our immigration policy should be that of a company, which is if the person is good for our society, net positive, we should take them in, and if they're not, we should not, which would then, you know, you could then from there imply that like US, you know, immigrants are actually pretty good for, for what we have going on here, but Europe actually does have an immigration problem, um, in terms of the people that are, you know, immigrating and how they're immigrating and how they're not assimilating and the sort of human capital. Or, or do you think that Europe immigration problems are actually overstated? And are you an open borders person or sympathetic to that?
Yeah, I, uh, yeah, I mean, You know, I'm not like a big into like, I don't know, like open borders. It's such a, it's such a, you know, I don't identify with that because it always has to depend on historical context and it always has to depend on sort of the nature of the immigrants and how many and what exactly is happening in the world. I, you know, I'll say sort of directionally which way I think American policy should be. I think American policy should be more open to immigration because I think a lot of the problems are exaggerated. I think that, you know, a bigger a bigger country, a bigger economy. I think we need low-skilled labor. I think that there's no evidence that this is, you know, a bad thing or hurting the, hurting the country, or there's very little evidence of that. And the crime wave that they keep predicting from immigrants, you know, these dangerous military-age males— immigrants go to cities and the crime rate pretty much always goes down. Um, and so in the US, you know, I think we have a healthy mix. Uh, in Europe, it's a little bit— it's different because a lot of these, uh, You know, you look at the crime rate between, uh, you know, North Africans and native, uh, French, um, and you look at sort of the cultural differences and you look at sort of, you know, the societal tensions, they seem a lot realer than what we have in the United States. Now, in Germany, I mean, there was a lot of Syrians that came around, you know, 2015, and it doesn't seem to have worked out too badly. France, it seems to not have worked out as, uh, as well. Um, but yeah, I, I generally am more sympathetic to to more immigration, although I understand that there are certain circumstances where, you know, you could have too much. I do want— I think, like, you know, ideally, like, one country would— one or two countries in Europe would just have completely closed borders. And then just in case, like, you know, somehow it just, you know, destroys everything. Like, I don't think that's a high possibility, but whatever. Like Hungary.
Okay.
You could be to yourself. You're not that great. Not many people get there anyway. And, you know, it's good if it works out and people love Hungary and it turns out to be a great success for that. Yeah.
We'll all learn something.
Yeah.
Last question. What would you say to an imagined critique that says that you're something of like a, uh, that you overvalue the importance of IQ and maybe undervalue the importance of common sense? Like if you take, I don't know, I'm trying to think, 2 quote unquote extreme people, uh, like, uh, Tucker Carlson on the right, and for lack of a better word, like one, like a Will Wilkinson on the left. Obviously, you know, I should say obviously, or maybe the Alex Jones on the right, you know, Tucker Carlson, sorry. Will Wilkinson is probably much higher IQ than Alex Jones, and thus I would take his perspective more seriously on maybe economic perspectives, although he's leftist, so maybe that's the wrong analogy, but probably less so on social. Basically, I guess, do you take seriously the Nassim Taleb intellectual yet idiot? Sometimes high IQ people just come up with just dumb ideas or policies, but common sense people just Have, you know, or street smart, this idea they don't understand, they, they might use terms like demons or something, but they have just like a basic understanding of how things should operate. Or feel free to push back on this.
Yeah, I don't, I don't think I'm, I love IQ as much as that, that critique suggests. Like, I'm not a big fan of, yeah, these people at like, you know, Poria, if you read that magazine, they have a thing about how great China is because they only select the high IQ leaders. And I was criticizing that article a lot. That's the best argument against IQ. I've ever seen the way that China is run. And, you know, it's a high IQ society with high IQ leaders, and it's not good. I mean, there's there's there's bad things in that selection process. Yeah, I mean, I mean, like I don't know why you have to go to Alex Jones or Tucker Carlson. Just like a normal businessman who built like well, maybe maybe these people are all Alex Jones fans at this point, but twenty years ago they were not. They were more sane, and they had this sort of you know salt of the earth American common sense. And like to take them over like a, you know, uh, you know, sociology professor. Like, yeah, that's great. I mean, the problem is, you know, those people all became Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson fans, and somehow they became crazier than the, the, than the intellectuals. Now, it depends on the issue, and it depends on exactly which intellectual you're talking about, uh, and, and so forth. But yeah, I don't just, you know, sort of blindly worship, you know, whatever group has the highest IQ, they should, they should rule us. I mean, there are very specific problems to the left, uh, that come from not low IQ, but I think some really bad assumptions about the world and some really bad moral values. And then you have on the right, you have your own problems. Like some of them are just, you know, they have a scam problem. They have a sort of more lax moral standards if you're going to compare, say, your conservative media space compared to the liberals. And yes, you know, not being as smart is going to have a, you know, is going to have some negative impacts on your sort of the mini culture. culture that you build. But I see it like any other trait, not the be-all and end-all of human existence.
Okay, actual last question. Give me a couple of minutes on what you think about for the future of the right and the left in a post-Biden or Trump world, whether that's 2028 or whenever these guys die. Assume Trump wins 2024 and then he dies by 2028 or something.
Do you have thoughts on Yeah, I mean, the Biden thing is interesting. I mean, I think the Democrats— each side has this sort of, you know, the question is how much the Democrats can hold. So, okay, so I think I've made this analogy before. I might have even made it on this show where Trump is like the sun, right? It's like, it's like a gravitational force in our solar system. And like, you remove the sun, like, how is Jupiter relative to Mars? Like, it's like, okay, you've— all the rules don't apply to him. He's such an amazing force of nature.
Right.
And so it's hard to sort of predict what happens when Trump goes away. I don't think he goes away for a while. I think he's still— he's going to be, you know, if he loses in 2034, I've always said he'll run and win the nomination in 2028. And otherwise he'll be president and then he'll be— he'll leave office in 2028 if he wins and he'll go 2029 and he'll be put on trial. The trials will still be the center of Republican politics. Right. So, you know, he's not going away for a while. Um, I do think— okay, so yeah, we can start with the Republicans. There's— I sort of think it would go back to normal. I mean, Nikki Haley ended up being pretty much second place. She went, you know, she did better than Ron DeSantis, and then just maybe everyone who liked DeSantis liked Trump. But I think that, like, you know, before Trump, it was like you always had these crazy people within the Republican Party, you know, but they didn't, um, have someone to coalesce around. He was just such a focal point that they all would coalesce around. And like, if you take that away, you end up with a problem. You end up with an issue where, like, the establishment Nikki Haley types are a lot smarter and a lot more competent and can sort of co-opt the sort of nationalist, sort of conspiratorial, more conspiratorial right. So Ted Cruz was in second place in 2016. He's sort of— he's a person who straddles these two worlds, but mostly I would say is more of a movement conservative. Type from that perspective. And then in 2024, you had Nikki Haley was in second place. It could be just like Nikki Haley could be the most likely nominee in 2028. I don't think that's unlike— I don't think it's necessarily DeSantis. I think charisma ends up mattering a lot more. So whoever ends up winning, it's going to be— I think Haley's just a more likable candidate to more people than DeSantis is. And so, yeah, you could just see sort of a normalization, like normal as in like crazy, like Republicans are crazy, but like the establishment is sort of in control and then, you know, adopts some things like co-opts some things from the nationalist right, like, you know, on immigration, on wokeness and so forth. Nikki Haley, you know, when she ran for— she opened her presidential campaign, she had a video where she said wokeness is, you know, the greatest threat to America or something. I mean, like, you know, people think of Nikki Haley as establishment, but no, she's like talking like DeSantis on these things. And so that, you know, that battle within the Republican Party is, is won. Okay. And so the Democrats, I mean, they're in an interesting place in that their most talented politicians seem to be more moderate. And so, you know, they still have at the state level the ability— and Republicans have this too— like state governance tends to work better where they have these governors who don't come across as crazy people who are far left on like abortion, which you can be because public opinion is pretty left-wing. They're usually a little bit more pro-Israel than the Democratic norm. And they're slightly more friendly to business than the Democratic norm. And so I'm thinking of, you know, they're sort of neoliberals or they're probably people who read, you know, Yglesias or their staff reads Yglesias or whatever. Right. So it's like Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Gavin Newsom, a little bit more left-wing. But, you know, he sort of presents as a sort of very moderate guy. talks about the freedom agenda in California. I don't think it's much freedom, but, you know, that's how he presents himself. And so those are like the best politicians on the right. I think there's— I think the— I think they have the upper hand. I think that Gretchen Whitmer/Newt types over like the AOC, Cori Bush types, I think those people are sort of, you know, they're from a different culture. I think they're the— I think that that's not the majority of of Democratic Party. I mean, all the Republicans have is sort of Fox News and talk radio and so forth. The Democrats have, you know, the sort of more intellectual culture of Vox and the New York Times, Washington Post. And I think that like somebody like, you know, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, that's, you know, perfect for there. Um, and so I guess what I'm saying is the Democrats, when Trump is gone, Democrats are going to win every election because they have, uh, they have, uh, you know, their, their smartest, uh, candidates and their more most broadly appealing candidates. Uh, tend to rise to the top, and Republicans are just sort of an insane sort of free-for-all. And I really wonder— people think Trump hurts the Republicans. I wonder if he's the, he's the, he's the, uh, he's the dam. He's just holding back the liberal flood because he has unique talents, unique political talents, and a unique appeal to large parts of the country, and importantly, a sort of unifying effect on the Republican Party, which is a political advantage. When he goes, I mean, I think I would be more optimistic about the Democrats in the long run.
Trump as the savior will end up—
The sort of the source of stability in our politics, in the Republican Party, the only thing holding back the left takeover. I guess all these people are directionally right, maybe after all.
Yeah, you and Alex Jones actually agree. I'm just teasing. Richard, this has been a great discussion. For people who enjoyed the conversation, highly recommend following Richard on Twitter and on Substack. And check out Richard's new streaming activities as well. Is there anything else you want to plug? Of course, obviously the book Origin of Woke we covered last time, but anything else you want to cover?
Yeah, I mean, yeah, the Twitter and the Substack are the important places. Twitter is a little bit less serious, but the Substack is where I sort of flesh out these ideas more. So, yes, you could just— richardhanania.com, Twitter, Richard Hanania. Very easy to find.
Excellent. Richard, thanks for coming on.
Thank you.
Upstream with Erik Torenberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution. If you like the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store. Hey everyone, Erik here. At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from our AI and investing cluster of podcasts to shows that drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, investors, and influencers like Econ 102 with Noah Smith. We're launching new shows every week and we're looking for industry-leading sponsors. If you think that might be you and your company, email me at erikaterpentine.co. That's E-R-I-K at turpentine.co, and let's partner together.
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