But ultimately, if the basis of competition is, do I enjoy chatting with this chat bot? It could start gassing me up with all kinds of bullshit.

Well, I mean, it's hard because it's like right now, I think the...

So I lean in the direction that AI will be more of a centralizing technology rather than a decentralizing one like social media has been.

And so in the way that social media really fragmented our information ecosystem, I imagine AI will do the opposite in part because like...

I imagine the ones that are consumer facing will be so capital intensive and expensive to make that you're not going to have like thousands and thousands of them in the same way.

And so you're going to have like just one or two, like chat, Claude, like whatever the next version of this deep seek, whatever these things are.

And yeah, you can tell like Elon really, really wants to make a right wing Grok.

But how do you get, you know, a leveling up of conduct rather than, you know, tit for tat? I don't

It's true.

Well, I'll just interject right there.

So I run a new magazine company called The Argument.

And I started out in digital media at the first kind of wave of insurgent digital media that is now absorbed into the legacy media.

So Vox Media, which is now being absorbed into New York Magazine and a broader media ecosystem.

And then I worked at The Atlantic, which is very much an old legacy institution.

And then I founded my own company.

But I think part of the problem with this creator economy in the news business is there's so much misdis and malinformation out there.

Whose picture is on your scarf?

My scarf, yes.

Thank you for making that gender inclusive, Jonah.

No, but I, yeah, I mean, I think there are a few.

When I was starting the argument, I was pressed this question a lot about, you know, what does liberalism really even mean? And I've had the same kind of sense that you are pointing out when you talk to people who would be considered the giants of liberalism, whether they're, you know, major senators in the Democratic Party or they're major thought leaders, etc.

And I don't even mean this pejoratively, but if I was to ask them, hey, what do you think about John Stuart Mill? What do you think about Locke? And they would have, I'm sure, something to say, but it wasn't very interesting.

Or did they consider themselves liberals? Not really.

Yeah.

But, like, what was the path? What happened from Obama to that sort of prevailing notion that America is irrevocably broken? Or even if you don't think that, no one actually trying to replicate that kind of Jeremiah.

Yeah, I mean, I think a few things.

One, I mean, I made a joke about this earlier about feeling like as an immigrant, you know, and a black woman like kind of inoculated from like anti-American kind of sentiments.

I think in some ways that Barack Obama as a black president was able to make arguments about America having this core ideal vision that we're trying to fulfill over generations, because he's obviously not dismissing the legacy of racism and harm that has happened in this country, the original sin of the United States, which is the harm that it's done to African-Americans.

And I think that for people who are coming from the majority, there's often a desire, and I think You know, I understand to explain that they're not writing that all off.

Right.

I think particularly post 2016, we see a lot of people recognizing, OK, there are a lot of real big harms that America has done to people, whether it's immigrants.

So how do you adjudicate whose America is the real one and what the founding really means without just asserting that ours is?

I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna use that as a headline.

[laughs] His, uh, yeah, he's, he's, what he does, I think, w- really well is, there's, um, for, in both directions, both from folks denigrating the developing nations, and folks coming from developing nations, there's been an attack on liberal thinking as being fundamentally a Western idea, that it just is not ori- like, it never arose in other cultures, this is fundamentally just from this one tradition, um, you know, Locke, Mills, et cetera, that everyone else is, like, you know, a prote- uh, you know, glomming onto Western tradition.

And like, of course, these people made massive contributions that, without which we would not have the, um, frameworks we have today.

I suppose that's questionable.

Maybe someone else would have done it.

But you know, that is the situation we live in.

And what Amartya Sen does is he goes and he traces, both in India and in South Africa, ways in which public reasoning, ways in which people were attempting to find d- liberal democratic ways of living together and thinking through those problems, and it just is something that I found particularly meaningful, because to me, liberalism is not, I mean, it comes from the West as a matter of history, but it is not something that is being imposed on everyone else.

Which is a kind of mix of, mix of both sides.

There's also some question about Kash Patel.

Patel.Yeah, I mean, I, the real thing is that there's a lot of chaos within the Trump administration, both in the first administration and second one.

People who are in favor of how he governs view it as a someone who's willing to make quick decisions and give up on someone if they're not working for whatever he wants to do.

Um, but I think this level of chaos makes it very hard to d- to actually, um, prosecute a specific policy over a long period of time.

When there's this kind of, um, turnover, A, it means that the political appointees at the agencies have much less control because, you know, now there's a deputy who's a interim person there.

Like, okay, so now you have much less ability to prosecute the president's, um, uh, role, uh, goals at, uh, a DHS or wherever it is that he wants to, to do that.

And so I think that, like, in many ways, his own supporters who want to see mass deportations or whatever it is that they wanna see from the president are gonna have a hard time getting their policy preferences through if he can't keep a cabinet together for more than six months.

Mm-hmm

Can you just walk us through the top line results?

Yes, so, um, it's actually a very, very long poll, so I'll draw out, I think, what was, um, causing a lot of controversy, uh, because we were trying to poll on a bunch of different issues regarding gender, um, that we haven't even gotten to, to fully, um, explore.

But the poll centers on these questions of trans policy and also people's views, their own personal values about how they think gender roles should function, and it finds a bunch of depressing things.

Like, one thing that it finds is that, um, what used to be a majority issue, which is that people didn't really want to see bathroom bills.

They didn't like the idea of, like, the government getting involved in w- what p- bathroom people were using.

Um, now you see that's flipped.

Uh, you see the majority of Americans saying that people should, uh, be required to use the bathroom that corresponds with the sex they were assigned at birth.

Like, right now, it just does feel like there's still this tension where, uh, if you even wanna have this conversation, you are pretty well, like, attacked as being kind of, uh, uh, ununs- uh, like, unsafe to the movement.

Yeah.

"... classical liberal project.

Like, what is actually different about this?" I think there's two things.

Like, one is that I think much of the classical liberal project has actually been sort of like a defense of institutions, right? Like, we are gonna, we're casting ourselves as the small C conservatives.

There are all these great liberal institutions and we want to defend them and we want to protect them against the populist right.

Um, and I think this, like, institutional frame is actually really, really wrong.

Um, liberalism is not like a cent- it's not centrism.

Has a lot of influence in the country?

Like-

I don't even think that that's true.

Like, I'm a renter, and because I'm a renter, it means I can live in a nicer area than I could otherwise afford.

I live in a part of Northwest DC that the house that I'm living in, there's just, like, absolutely no way that my husband and I could afford it if we had to buy that house.

Uh, it's just, like, absurd to us (laughs) like, to even imagine that happening.

And so what that means is, like, I'm much closer to my friends.

I can...

I guess beyond that financial investment, what do you think is going on there? Why is home ownership so wrapped up in our identities as Americans?

And they like markets, they like smart, smart economic policies, uh, housing deregulation, better government, right? So, how does a, the Abundance world feel about, uh, a kind of a free-everything Democratic Socialist becoming the new hotness in the Democratic Party and the avatar of victory and what works?

So, I think that the, um, the, you know, there's like, a big split that's happening within Abundance, which has always been there.

I mean, when you think about the roots of YIMBYism, the Yes In My Backyard movement, the pro-housing movement in this country, I mean, it comes out of very liberal spaces in this country, very progressive areas like San Francisco; Boulder, Colorado; Boston, Massachusetts; Washington, D.C.

I mean, these are not, you know, uh, you know, moderate areas of the country, and these movements are often staffed with people who are very far to the left as well.

And so, I think the way that you have to think about the divide is that it's not really that Abundance has seen itself as anti-socialist, but it's often been anti-the type of leftist that is, um, rejects the existence of trade-offs.

Um, it is possible, for instance, to be a socialist who cares a lot about housing abundance, to get rid of all the regulatory morass that, that shackles the government as well as private sector from being able to deliver, um, housing and to deliver energy and to deliver, um, transit projects at cost and at scale.

Um, you could imagine that happening.

Sorry, go ahead.

Um, what's your, what's your pitch? What, what are you guys hoping to achieve? What gap are you hoping to fill?

Yeah, so The Argument is, is a new publication.

You can find us at theargumentmag.com. And what we are doing is trying to make a positive combative case for liberalism, and we're doing that by focusing on the issues people really, really care about.

So things around cost of living and abundance, um, which, you know, great new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, but has built on a movement of pro-housing YIMBY and pro-energy abundance, uh, activists for a long time.

Um, so focusing on those issues, focusing on technology and society, like the ways that technology is rapidly changing our society.

And, like, most of the coverage around this is, like, quite doomery, and, like, it's not to say that that's not, you know, a reasonable view to have, that like, hey, like, it's really messing up the job market, et cetera.

But, like, what is the liberal answer to this? Like, how do we wanna regulate these industries? Like, what do we wanna do? I mean, to me, a very basic question is why isn't it, like, massively financially costly that a chatbot has sexual interactions with a minor? Like, immediately, why aren't there, like, millions of dollars of fines immediately levied against these companies? And there's obviously questions here about, like, how would you operationalize this, how would this work, et cetera.

Talk to me about your beefs with the post-liberal left, uh, as you've talked about at The Argument.

this is gonna be something in the public eye and then also be fought out in courts.

I think it's also like, this story is not really just about one person, will they be fired by a president or not fired.

Obviously there are legal concerns that matter for Lisa and the country, but the big thing is central bank independence.

The problem right now is that the entire stock market has been pretty like chill about Donald Trump's various forays into tariff policy because they largely believe that even if he oversteps, the Federal Reserve is independent, no one will really go that far and interfere with them being able to stabilize the macro economy.

But his willingness to do this, his scared markets, you're already seeing the 10-year yield go up, which in English means that like, your 30-year mortgage is more expensive now.

This has real ramifications for people on the ground if the stock market begins to believe, oh my gosh, the United States is no longer caring about making sure that despite its insane politics, the federal bank can do what it's going to do.

We should say Jerome

China's been doing this for years, owning companies with the golden share.

Standing athwart history yelling, "Stop."

...

History, yelling stop.

And it's funny 'cause like now you think about, like, who's yelling stop all the time, right? And like, I'm yelling stop too, so like I get it, like, we're like, uh, well it's like there's just too much going on, that we feel like culture is moving really quickly in ways we don't like, technology is progressing in ways we don't like, that our institutions are shifting in ways we don't like, and like, we go to protest and we say, "We're upset about this and we want it to stop." And like, of course, protest is always a part of the American fabric, but there's a level to which too when you think about a lot of my reporting when it comes to NIMBYism in, uh, Democratic cities and opposing housing and clean energy construction and opposing, you know, uh, a transit stops being built in your neighborhoods when you're in Los Angeles, Karen Basses, um, come out against legislation that would make it easier to build housing near transit.

So like, this has become, I think, an increasing definition of what it means to be a liberal in the modern era, is that you kind of oppose stuff and the biggest version of this, of course, is that liberalism largely means you're anti-Trump now, right? And I'm anti-Trump, I think that he is the greatest threat to American democracy, but at the same time I'm more than that.

Like, we have an ideology that used to really animate people across the political spectrum, and liberalism wasn't just being left wing, it was a belief in individualism and respect for human rights and all these different, um, great principles and to me, like, we've really lost our way for a few reasons.

One is that liberalism became dominant in a way that was always going to inspire backlash from people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is a complete abrogation of, like, what has meant to be an American for, like, decades.

Like, you can go back to, like, speeches people are making.

Like, obviously, we have not lived up to the promise of America for a very long time.

This is a very common theme of, like, civil rights leaders, like, activists pointing out that like, "Hey, you have all of these values and this here constitution.

Like, doesn't seem like you're really doing this for everyone." Like, that is obviously true.

But there's a difference between like, oh, like, someone saying they're for egalitaries and they're for a vision of America that is expansive and that we can absorb people from different places, and then we take the greatness of the world and we make it our own.

Talk about why you brought that up and about that case in particular.

And because we are seeing more and more Republican support on Capitol Hill, it's interesting to me as we watch the speaker falling in line with what the president clearly wants, we are not seeing it from some of his traditionally more vocal supporters as you're seeing more and more people shift to this call.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, it's an 80-90 issue, as Mike said.

But more importantly, I mean, this is a comment that was made by a MAGA supporter that Trump's population, the MAGA population, has been trained to be invested in the Jeffrey Epstein story.

I mean, Trump himself has brought this up independently.

questioning Bill Clinton's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein before he was even running for president.

So there's a level in which, you know, you've inculcated this in your own political base, and now you're losing control of the narrative.

Is there a concern that you're hearing among lawmakers that this push for a very public showing of cost cutting, which again, most Americans would agree with, is potentially putting lives at risk?

What do you find in like the polling, how people are thinking about it, irrespective of Democrats? How are people perceiving this?

Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing is how few people seem to know about what's in the bill, despite the fact that there's been near constant messaging about this.

I mean, you see on the front page of papers, you see it in Democratic messaging all over the country.

But at the same time, you see very small numbers of people who are able to even identify in polls that Medicaid cuts are a part of this program.

And it feels very different than in 2017 when the entire fight was billed as repealing the ACA.

So I'm not sure how this ends up playing out in the long term, but in the short run right now, the fact that there's nothing in the bill that says, we are cutting Medicaid, instead it points to, we're making these procedural changes to how Medicaid works, seems to be working in Republicans' favor, but I don't think it's going to last that long.

Yeah, the longer they talk about it.

But we also found that money doesn't buy everything, right? He tried to buy the Wisconsin

So how do you see the way that the president has been defending his strikes?

I mean, it's a difficult situation for people who are trying to figure out the facts like ourselves because every party has an interest in saying, oh, we moved the nuclear material before the bombing happened.

That's Iran's line.

Or the Trump administration obviously admitting that the bombing was a failure is really embarrassing because Trump loves to get a deal and have that done immediately.

And I mean, right now we're seeing a situation where this, of course, leaked Pentagon report.

I mean, leaks happen for all number of reasons.

And it's an early assessment.

And I think that we're going to see today just what that spin is going to look like.

He did not do anything wrong.

Yes.

I mean, we see in the past that cases like this can really galvanize action because, you know, if you have someone who is sympathetic where there's really not much evidence that they're a gang member or a criminal, I mean, the American people are pretty positive on deporting criminals.

But what we're seeing, I mean, there was a 60 Minutes report that showed that 75 percent of the Venezuelans sent to the El Salvadorian prison have no evidence of any criminal history.

And once that becomes known, I think that it's gonna take a lot of effort for the administration to keep Americans okay with this.

And this has happened in the past.

There's a case of Mark Little several years ago where he was deported.

And why do you think this is worth paying attention to our nation's chief law enforcement officer?

Yeah,

I mean, I think this is one of those things, like Jasmine is saying, where the president has clearly over and over again not wanted to give the media, the public, the ability to determine his staff.

The idea that a shaming campaign or an outrage campaign or even just a response to an actual scandal like this one would cause him to have to make a personnel decision, that feels anathema to him.

He likes the idea that universities are bending to his will, law firms are bending to his will.

The Atlantic choosing to respond and just publishing those texts was in defiance.

I see

When Republicans started to listen to Tea Party activists, it changed the direction of the party, right? What do you see in this moment?

Well, when you're listening to Governor Pritzker talk right there, you can hear this growing anxiety within the Democratic Party, which says when voters look to Chicago, when they look to San Francisco or Los Angeles, do they see places that show them the direction of the country? Yes, if they want to.

WHAT ELSE ARE YOU HEARING?

Yeah, I mean, it's a difficult situation for Democrats because their voters are looking for a fight.

They want a resistance.

And I mean, we all remember what happened in 2016 after the election, after the inauguration.

There were a lot of points of energy where Democrats were able to show that they were fighting and opposing Trump.

But there really is not that availability right now.

But is it

And of

What do you think you're seeing in your reporting?

Yeah.

I mean, I think there's a sense in the Trump administration that part of why they won was to enact an agenda of responding on cultural issues.

And that was a part of the election.

But most voters voted to bring down prices.

They were upset about the economy.

They were upset about immigration.

remember Carter was a president like this, where he also felt like there should be, because he was fighting obviously kind of Republican Congresses, and he felt like, I need more power here.

Are there any points that you see, Jerusalem, where there may be a nominee, and I'm actually thinking about RFK Jr. in this case, who actually gets crosswise with Republicans, which seems to likely be the biggest potential risk?

I mean, RFK is clearly the person who might receive the most Republican defections because of, you know, I mean, he's not really a traditional member of the Republican coalition, but I think we just have to remember it's very rare.

He is a Kennedy, a longtime member of a massive Democratic dynasty.

Yes.

yeah but it is you said it is very rare for someone is actually happy I think one time under HW Bush was also a Department of Defense nominee I think John Tower and he similarly had alcohol and womanizing allegations sexual on harassment allegations to and that's the only time in history that we've seen in America a nominee actually get voted down by the Senate and so it's just not something we should expect to see happen and people usually will pull their names rather than have that happen to them

And one way or another, I think one of the lasting images of this fire is the fact that there was not water coming out of the fire hydrants.

Yeah.

But I think it's important, like, there's distinction between the, there's legitimate criticism to make about governance in California, whether it's about the inability to bury the power lines, or it's about water policy, or whatever it is.