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Notes -
Ezra Klein in the pages of the NYT on why the Democrats need to Shutdown the government.
TLDR: Trump is an authoritarian.
Back in March, Democrats justified keeping the government open by saying that the courts were restraining Trump, that a shutdown would only accelerate his executive power, and that markets were already punishing his recklessness re tarrifs. But now with Trump firing dissenters, using federal agencies against political enemies, and enriching himself and his allies through foreign investments and unchecked power, Klein says that none of those arguments hold anymore. The Supreme Court is now backing Trump on key issues, DOGE’s chaotic dismantling of the bureaucracy has slowed because Trump loyalists are running it, and the markets have largely adapted to the new normal.
Maybe the markets have normalized, but we shouldn't according to Klein. Democrats are politically and morally failing by continuing to fund a government that has become an instrument of authoritarianism. He outlines how Democrats could frame a compelling message around corruption and abuse of power, citing Senator Jon Ossoff’s July speech as an example of effective messaging that ties everyday struggles (like high medical costs and housing insecurity) to elite corruption. Specific examples the firing of agency heads like those at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Defense Intelligence Agency for political reasons, targeted investigations into critics such as Senator Adam Schiff and Attorney General Tish James, the FBI’s raid on Bolton’s home, masked ICE agents now conducting raids without identification or warrants, and National Guard troops being deployed to cities LA and DC.
I stopped listening to Ezra Klein ever since he appeared on Sam Harris’ podcast and looked like a complete moron.
Trump is a hiccup in our democracy. Until there comes a hard and fast dismantling of institutions, you can’t license the claim that he’s an authoritarian when the same system you approve of has also put all the candidates you’re palatable to in the same seat Trump is in right now.
That podcast episode kicked off the downward spiral of /r/SamHarris. It's also a great example of what reddit became across the entire site. The debate brought in tons of Klein apologists and progressives which turned the subreddit into a battleground. On one side you had liberals who simply accepted the available evidence (those siding with Harris), and on the other you had the anti-racists who alternated between the arguments of denying or questioning the data and labeling anyone who accepted it as racist (those siding with Klein). Boiled down, it was another example of secular evangelists spreading the framework of their religion: if data suggests uncomfortable conclusions about racial differences, the data is false and those who believe it are racist.
That debate and its aftermath had a significant impact on my perception of the social left. They weren't actually in favor of using objective truths to solve real world problems. They were only in favor of promoting specific moral "truths" while suppressing any evidence they deemed to be immoral.
Before that, the sub had a functional moratorium on all IQ topics on grounds of non-relevance to Sam Harris' work. After that...well, that went out the window and nothing good followed.
It really did seem to outrage people that a) it came up and b) we let the discussion go (I was a mod at the time). And those people never left and never got over Harris having the sheer gall.
But this wasn't the first place this happened. There really is something odd going on with reddit where a lot of subs end up degenerating into snark subs critical of the central figure.
It was especially a blow because of who Ezra Klein was supposed to be. Vox was supposed to be the smart, wonky wing of the Democrat's base. You're supposed to be able to get the counter-intuitive take or someone chasing the data to the end. But, on this issue, they took the Rutherfordian line of "just don't worry about it" (at best).
Colors the whole thing.
I can understand the avoidance of IQ topics, given the incendiary nature of them, and to that extent I probably agree with Sam (and maybe Ezra?) that they probably shouldn't be so openly talked about. Too many bad actors.
Ezra just came off so slippery in a bad way in that exchange.
Harris criticized the Vox article that was written by another journalist. Klein then claimed he was editor-in-chief at the time, but didn’t assign or edit it, but that he stood by it, but that it’s ultimately on him as editor-in-chief, but that it was a good article, but that he can only speak from his perspective.
He also said:
"And by the way I’m not here to say you’re racist, I don’t think you are. We have not called you one." Of course, after that he went on to explain all the racially damaging things he thought Sam had done. To Ezra, I guess Sam was (is) effectively a racist, not an intentional racist. That was really the progressive argument in a nutshell for about 10 years.
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