AMA: Peter Thiel, Chris Rufo and the D.S.A.

Produced by Claire GordonKristin Lin and Emma Kehlbeck

I Answer Your Questions on Peter Thiel, Chris Rufo and the D.S.A.

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

Ezra Klein: Welcome to one of our “Ask Me Anything” episodes.

I am joined by our fantastic executive producer, Claire Gordon, who has sharpened all of your questions into darts she will throw at me and force me to answer. [Laughs.]

But we appreciate everything you all sent in. We have tried to look at the questions to see which ones were the most common and which seemed to have the most interest, and we’re going to get started.

Claire, welcome to the other side of the show.

Claire Gordon: Thank you for having me. It’s uncomfortable to be here.

We will be getting to the question on everyone’s mind, which is the secret society you’re a member of, Dialog. [Laughs.]

Klein: When have I spoken to Peter Thiel, and what did we say? [Laughs.]

Gordon: Exactly. But first, this is from Scott K., who has noticed that you seem to have a very intense relationship with electronic music, as we all have.

Is musicianship something you’ve ever been drawn to? You are clearly not a passive listener. What does music do to your craft, and why do you think you feel so at home in such a specific genre of music?

Is musicianship something you’ve ever been drawn to? You are clearly not a passive listener. What does music do to your craft, and why do you think you feel so at home in such a specific genre of music?

Klein: Musicianship is not something I’ve been heavily drawn to, but I did, for the first time ever, recently take a singing lesson.

Klein: And it was such a beautiful experience because I’ve never felt I can sing at all. The fact that I make my living, in part, now, on my voice is surprising. Because the way I speak and how I sound has always been a point of real insecurity for me — when I was growing up, particularly.

Gordon: You felt like — you thought you sounded — what about it?

Klein: A lot about it — without letting people into my private insecurities. [Laughs.]

But it’s really amazing to take a singing lesson. I’d always thought I could not ever find a tune or a note, and it turned out I could. I was just wrong about that, about myself, which was a cool thing to learn.

I played the flute a bit when I was young, but, you know, as a kid.

I tried to learn the guitar when I lived in D.C. as an adult, and I loved doing that. I loved it. I should really pick it back up.

Gordon: Like bring it out at parties?

Klein: [Laughs.] Playing “Crash Into Me” for women?

No, I did not play in front of other people. But the guy who was teaching me was just hungover too often to come, and so it kind of just filtered out.

I’d like to learn something. I wouldn’t try to learn how to do electronic music.

This show, in particular, can colonize everything I love. You know, I can read a great novel, and then it’s like: Well, we should have the novelist on the show.

And I think it’s good to be an appreciator of some things and not try to make them another thing you are learning how to do. I have, in my life, an excess of energy that is oriented toward productivity, accomplishment, doing — being angry at myself for not doing things well enough or not doing enough of them.

And so having spaces where I am an experiencer, not a creator, is important for me. I don’t really know how to answer why I feel at home in it. It just is the music.

I mean, I’ve been listening to — oh my God, it’s so good, but it’s such a hard album to tell people how to find.

So Four Tet, who’s an amazing producer, has an alias that is entirely composed of Wingdings. I recognize how this sounds. So he’s got this new album out, but both the artist on the album and every song on the album cannot be pronounced or even searched, but you can find it on platforms by searching “Four Tet.” And ——

Gordon: But it means: Sept. 11 was an inside job.

Klein: [Laughs.] It means Ezra Klein and Peter Thiel are in a secret society.

And I just love the album. I’ve actually had two experiences like this on the show, one with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, another with Brian Eno, talking to them individually about a song they had done.

For Tweedy, “Impossible Germany,” I think it’s called. For Eno, “Cmon,” with Fred Again. And learning that the incredibly intense experience I had with that music was totally different than the way they understood that music. And I find that really beautiful.

So whatever my experience is with music I like here, it’s just mine. It’s not, I think, legible. Other people don’t have the same one.

But why these songs do this set of things to me, the ones that I like — which is not all of them. I mean, there’s both a lot of bad electronic music but also a lot of electronic music that just doesn’t do it for me.

But I think it is a thing best left illegible, even to the self. There’s a lot of art that what you want to do is just allow yourself to feel differently and not try to pin the different feeling like a butterfly to a board.

But yeah, I feel at home in this music because it makes me feel things I don’t feel elsewhere.

Gordon: Happy? [Laughs.]

Klein: No, often not. I don’t actually go for that much music that primarily makes me feel happy. In some ways, I think I use the music to feel things I have more trouble feeling. A lot of the music I like is a little bit discordant and difficult for me. Other people can experience it how they experience it.

Gordon: I’ve noticed when you take out your headphones or I actually hear it blasting from your laptop, I’m like: That’s a choice. That’s a choice of vibe for your Tuesday afternoon.

Klein: [Laughs.] Yeah, and I think the music holding very contrasting emotions actually is important for me because the work I do often has to hold very contrasting emotions.

There can be beauty and fear and anxiety and hope and all these things at the same time. And so a lot of the music I go for — I mean, some of it I just use to calm down my nervous system. I love Ólafur Arnalds’s work, and most of it for me is very soothing. So a lot of music I do listen to, it’s soothing.

My wife is always like: That’s really sad. But I don’t find it sad. I find it sometimes a little bit melancholy, but in a way I enjoy, and then oftentimes really, really calming and really beautiful.

But then a lot of the music is actually helping me hold things that are hard to feel at the same time, so that I can infuse the work I’m doing with the contradictory emotions that it sometimes needs to have.

Gordon: Let’s talk about the feedback to the Chris Rufo episode, which, of our recent episodes, got the most questions, the most comments.

Klein: Bifurcated feedback.

Gordon: Bifurcated feedback. So this question is from Jason, and it requires a little bit of setup:

I listened to your recent episode with Chris Rufo. Then, out of curiosity, I went and listened to a few episodes of his podcast, “Rufo & Lomez.” In one of the episodes, Rufo reflected on his conversation with you. I found his interpretation of the conversation wildly different from mine.

I listened to your recent episode with Chris Rufo. Then, out of curiosity, I went and listened to a few episodes of his podcast, “Rufo & Lomez.” In one of the episodes, Rufo reflected on his conversation with you. I found his interpretation of the conversation wildly different from mine.

So I’m going to play two clips here.

So the first clip is from our episode with Chris Rufo, and you describe Tucker Carlson as a white nationalist. Rufo then asked you to define “white nationalism,” and this is what you said:

Archival clip of “The Ezra Klein Show”:Ezra Klein: In some versions, they’re not included in that white race. In some versions, we are talking about something I would describe primarily as a kind of nationalism. You know, if you have too much of a country not sharing a common heritage, you lose solidarity.In some cases, we’re talking about something much darker than that. There are people who just don’t like the way their community is changing, and then there’s the K.K.K. Everything exists on a spectrum.Chris Rufo: But would you say someone who is, for example, hesitant about rapid, large-scale demographic change is just a kind of 1-percent white nationalist?Klein: No, I don’t believe that.Rufo: Yeah, because that would be like the majority of the country.Klein: Yes. I don’t think it is a problem or unfair or even wrong to worry about large-scale, rapid demographic change.

Archival clip of “The Ezra Klein Show”:

Ezra Klein: In some versions, they’re not included in that white race. In some versions, we are talking about something I would describe primarily as a kind of nationalism. You know, if you have too much of a country not sharing a common heritage, you lose solidarity.

In some cases, we’re talking about something much darker than that. There are people who just don’t like the way their community is changing, and then there’s the K.K.K. Everything exists on a spectrum.

Chris Rufo: But would you say someone who is, for example, hesitant about rapid, large-scale demographic change is just a kind of 1-percent white nationalist?

Klein: No, I don’t believe that.

Rufo: Yeah, because that would be like the majority of the country.

Klein: Yes. I don’t think it is a problem or unfair or even wrong to worry about large-scale, rapid demographic change.

Gordon: And then here’s Rufo’s response:

Archival clip of “Rufo & Lomez”:Rufo: A couple years ago, you would not hear a prominent New York Times voice saying that it is totally legitimate, reasonable and understandable to be concerned about large-scale, rapid demographic change. I mean, that was a right-wing talking point for many years, and the left-wing criticism was: That was the Great Replacement Theory — that was white nationalism, that was K.K.K.-style white supremacy.And so is this a concession? Is this going to be the left’s — kind of moderate left’s or the establishment left’s — new position moving forward?

Archival clip of “Rufo & Lomez”:

Rufo: A couple years ago, you would not hear a prominent New York Times voice saying that it is totally legitimate, reasonable and understandable to be concerned about large-scale, rapid demographic change. I mean, that was a right-wing talking point for many years, and the left-wing criticism was: That was the Great Replacement Theory — that was white nationalism, that was K.K.K.-style white supremacy.

And so is this a concession? Is this going to be the left’s — kind of moderate left’s or the establishment left’s — new position moving forward?

Gordon: I’ll also add that episode of “Rufo & Lomez” was called “Ezra Klein Admits The New York Times Was Wrong on Woke,” and the first two chapters on YouTube were called “Ezra Klein’s Great Replacement Moment,” and “What Ezra Now Admits Was Once Branded White Nationalism.”

So with all that setup, Jason’s question is:

It seemed that “Rufo & Lomez” equated your statement with a full endorsement of the Great Replacement Theory. To me, this is a ridiculous misinterpretation of your point. When you have guests with broad platforms, like Rufo, do you engage with them after an interview? And if so, how at all do you respond if you feel that someone is misrepresenting your position?

It seemed that “Rufo & Lomez” equated your statement with a full endorsement of the Great Replacement Theory. To me, this is a ridiculous misinterpretation of your point. When you have guests with broad platforms, like Rufo, do you engage with them after an interview? And if so, how at all do you respond if you feel that someone is misrepresenting your position?

Klein: I don’t, for the most part. I’ll say a couple things here.

One is that a major thread of my interview with Chris Rufo is that Rufo is a propagandist. We begin with his discussion of agitprop. Then a lot of the conversation is me unspooling with him the way he does that and the consequences I think it has and the way it often misrepresents and then worsens reality and has worsened the political party that he’s part of.

But I’m not, then, going to sit here and be surprised that a person who is a proud propagandist — maybe the way he responds to that interview is by focusing on the parts he thinks he can turn into propaganda.

I did find that particular take, which I actually saw from other people, too, very surprising.

I have for many, many years — and in fact it’s part of my first book, “Why We’re Polarized” — not just believed but talked a lot about how the immigration issue gets sanitized as about economics — but that it is actually about people’s discomfort with demographic change. I wrote a big piece for Vox called “White Threat in a Browning America.”

I think I’ve been very attentive for a long time to the fact that it is very politically destabilizing for the nature of a place, for who lives in it, to change fairly rapidly — and it has changed, on a kind of generational level, fairly rapidly. So in the 1970s, 4.7 percent of America was foreign-born. Now it’s around 15 percent — so it has gone from a low to near a high. I have written a lot over the years about how that is a major driver of what Donald Trump is.

I just cannot say this more flatly: That it is a normal, constant and legitimate dimension of politics in a nation for people to have views on who lives in their community and how it’s changing.

I think the Great Replacement Theory is a white nationalist theory. The thing that I’m critiquing Rufo for in that section is footsiing with Tucker Carlson at the time when Tucker Carlson is offering all these theories — and then later on, being shocked that Tucker Carlson has gone as far as he has.

So I’m saying: This was all happening, and you seem perfectly happy with the trend that it was on. And now you’re like: Oh, my God, how did we end up with this conspiratorial, racialist right? And I’m saying: It was right there in front of you.

Gordon: To follow up on that: I disagreed with Jason in his question of saying that Rufo was suggesting that you were fully endorsing the Great Replacement Theory. He’s saying that what you said you believe is what people on the right like him have been saying for years, and they have been branded white nationalists for it.

Klein: It’s hard for me to know which position Rufo is trying to ascribe to me or even to the broader left here.

But I guess the only thing I can say is: I think you can have normal concerns, and it’s just a normal part of politics, that people notice and have views on when their communities change.

I think you can do that without it being understood as white nationalism. I think if you brand that as white nationalism, or any kind of racialist view, then you have basically taken a huge amount of contestation in every nation we know of and tried to make it politically unsayable. I have personally never done that and have never believed that’s a usable way to think about politics.

Of course, you can then take that and turn it into a white nationalist version, and the white........

© The New York Times