Ezra Klein

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Ezra Klein’s tweets, articles, clips and podcasts on Bluesky.

Enough people have asked me about the Peter Thiel-Dialog story that I think it's worth saying what it is, or at least what I saw it to be. So: –Dialog is a conference. I went once in 2018 and once in 2022. No one ever asked me to keep it or my presence a secret. –My understanding was Thiel was one of its founders but no longer involved by the time I went. I never saw or talked to him in connection with Dialog. –Nor did I see the other names I’ve heard mentioned, like Ted Cruz or Elon Musk or Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Jared Kushner. Dialog was not sold to me as a bunch of big names, which is part of why I went. I don’t need to go to a conference to hear what Ted Cruz thinks. –You could be a Dialog member, but I wasn’t. I don’t think joining got you much except guaranteed invitations to future Dialogs. There were occasional dinners and webinars, but I never went to one. I would not have described it as a secret or a society. –The panels were largely self-organized, so people would propose panels and hold them. I went to one on being a working parent and another on whether crypto had any real use cases and another on how to accelerate scientific breakthroughs. You’d usually have 8 or 10 people in a room. It was all very TED-talk adjacent. –In 2018, I found it very optimistic, with an idealistic hacker-ish vibe. In 2022, I found the conversations and vibe more curdled and resentful. I didn’t enjoy it, and I didn’t go back. (That did prove a pretty good signal of where tech’s politics were going though, maybe I should’ve paid more attention.)
Excerpt from Op-Ed: Political violence is a virus. It is contagious. We have been through periods in this country when it was endemic. In the 1960s there were the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy and Medgar Evers. In the 1970s, Gov. George Wallace was shot by a would-be assassin but survived, and Gerald Ford faced two assassination attempts in one month. In 1981 Ronald Reagan survived after John Hinckley Jr.’s bullet ricocheted off his rib and punctured his lung. These assassins and would-be assassins had different motives, different politics and different levels of mental stability. When political violence becomes imaginable, either as a tool of politics or a ladder for fame, it begins to infect hosts heedlessly. American politics has sides. There is no use pretending it doesn’t. But both sides are meant to be on the same side of a larger project — we are all, or most of us, anyway, trying to maintain the viability of the American experiment. We can live with losing an election because we believe in the promise of the next election; we can live with losing an argument because we believe that there will be another argument. Political violence imperils that. Kirk and I were on different sides of most political arguments. We were on the same side on the continued possibility of American politics. It is supposed to be an argument, not a war; it is supposed to be won with words, not ended with bullets. I wanted Kirk to be safe for his sake, but I also wanted him to be safe for mine and for the sake of our larger shared project. The same is true for Shapiro, for Hoffman, for Hortman, for Thompson, for Trump, for Pelosi, for Whitmer. We are all safe, or none of us are.
Excerpt from Op-Ed linked in post. You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it. Slowly, then all at once, he did. College-age voters shifted sharply right in the 2024 election. That was not all Kirk’s doing, but he was central in laying the groundwork for it. I did not know Kirk, and I am not the right person to eulogize him. But I envied what he built. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness. In the inaugural episode of his podcast, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California hosted Kirk, admitting that his son was a huge fan. What a testament to Kirk’s project. On social media, I’ve seen mostly decent reactions to Kirk’s murder. There is grief and shock from both the left and the right. But I’ve seen two forms of reaction that are misguided, however comprehensible the rage or horror that provoked them. One is a move on the left to wrap Kirk’s death around his views — after all, he defended the Second Amendment, even admitting it meant accepting innocent deaths. Another is on the right, to turn his murder into a justification for an all-out war, a Reichstag fire for our time. But as the list above reveals, there is no world in which political violence escalates but is contained to just your foes. Even if that were possible, it would still be a world of horrors, a society that had collapsed into the most irreversible form of unfreedom.
Tweet from Ezra: In the last few years we've seen: - The plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer - The Storming of the Capitol and pipe bombs left at the RNC and DNC - The break-in to kidnap Nancy Pelosi and the brutal on Paul Pelosi - Multiple assassination attempts against Trump - The assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and the shooting of on State Senator John Hoffman and his wife - Luigi Mangione's assassination of Brian Thompson - The assassination of Charlie Kirk Political violence is contagious. It is spreading. It is not confined to one side or belief system. It should terrify us all. The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in it without fear of violence. Political violence is always an attack against us all. You have to be so blind not to see that.
Ezra on twitter, paying tribute to the late Kevin Drum: When I started out as a blogger, one of my definitions of success was to get a single link, just one, from Calpundit. It was hard. It took time. I was so damn proud when it happened. Kevin Drum was an inspiration to so many of us. A lot of the later turns towards wonkery and chart-blogging has its roots in his work. He influenced a generation of young writers — he was fair and independent and took the evidence seriously and and he did the work to see old things in new ways. He will be so missed.
“The tech right is pro-American,” he said. But it’s pro-American in the sense that they see America as “an empire that takes over the world and goes interplanetary.” This was too rationalist of an approach for many on the MAGA side, which is shaped in large part by Christian faith and, at least for some, a belief that America should be a homeland for “heritage” Americans, of Northern European extraction. They are “not excited about the American Empire,” he said, or racing into space. They care more about the values of a “pre-1960s America, the values of a Western civilization.” Both sides see their path as the best approach to make America more dynamic — the MAGA intellectuals through a hoped-for refounding that would restore a sense of national identity and purpose and the tech right through drawing the best talent from a worldwide pool and letting competition and capitalism rip. Mr. Trump himself has kept something like a kingly remove from the early squabbles of the aristocracy emerging in his shadow. His vice president, JD Vance, might be able to act as an intermediary between these rival wings. A former venture capitalist married to the daughter of Indian immigrants, he nonetheless adopted the populist-nationalist style of politics.
I think Mark Zuckerberg is basically correct that the "fact-checking" information control response to the problem of misinformation spreading on social media has basically been a failure. But the fact that social media sharing puts people who try to be scrupulous and accurate at a competitive disadvantage to people who try to be sensationalistic and prejudice-flattering is a real problem. I sympathized with almost everything he said about this to Ezra Klein during his lib turn in 2018, as well as with almost everything he said about it to Joe Rogan as part of his MAGA turn this winter. The underlying problem is that while technological progress is good in the aggregate, not every specific innovation is good. Zuckerberg just happens to be cursed with the reality that he became very rich at a very young age by being a pioneer in a technology that is basically harmful. He strikes me as a genuinely well-meaning person, and Meta has gone on to do lots of things that are more interesting and more promising than its core Facebook/Instagram business. But there's no way around the fact that an information ecosystem based on virality - whether Facebook or TikTok or Twitter or anything else - exacerbates the flaws of establishment media rather than improving them. But then there is the specific conservative angle, which is that conservatives have come to believe (accurately) that the baseline moral values of the academic expert community are hostile to them and therefore (inaccurately) that expert views should be categorically dismissed.
“Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story, but they're like poison to the filmmaker or artist. They're like a vise grip on creativity. If you're in that grip, you can hardly get out of bed, much less experience the flow of creativity and ideas. You must have clarity to create. You have to be able to catch ideas."
The front cover of David Lynch's book - "Catching the Big Fish"
Excerpt from Ezra's recent NYT op-ed: Donald Trump is returning, artificial intelligence is maturing, the planet is warming, and the global fertility rate is collapsing. To look at any of these stories in isolation is to miss what they collectively represent: the unsteady, unpredictable emergence of a different world. Much that we took for granted over the last 50 years — from the climate to birthrates to political institutions — is breaking down; movements and technologies that seek to upend the next 50 years are breaking through.
Screenshot of passage from Ezra’s NYT Op-Ed, gift-linked in bluesky post: Trump’s great virtue, as a public figure, is his literalism. His statements may be littered with lies, but he is honest about who he is and what he intends. When he lost the Iowa caucus to Cruz in 2016, he declared that “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it.” When it seemed likely he would lose the presidential election to Hillary Clinton, he began calling the election rigged. When he wanted the president of Ukraine to open a corruption investigation into Joe Biden, he made the demand directly, on a taped call. When he was asked, during the presidential debates in 2020, if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event of a loss, he refused. There was no subterfuge from Trump leading up to the terrible events of Jan. 6. He called this shot, over and over again, and then he took it. The Republican Party that has aided and abetted Trump is all the more contemptible because it fills the press with quotes making certain that we know that it knows better. In a line that will come to define this sordid era (and sordid party), a senior Republican told The Washington Post, “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change.” What happened on Wednesday in Washington is the downside. Millions of Americans will take you literally. They will not know you are “humoring” the most powerful man in the world.
Tweet from Ezra, quoting a recent substack piece from Dwarkesh Patel. Link to the piece found in bluesky post. "China has basically the inverse problem as America. We subsidize demand and restrict supply. They subsidize supply and restrict demand. We can’t rebuild fallen bridges. They build bridges to nowhere. In the most desirable cities in this country, every random Victorian house and park bench is a historic site that can’t be disturbed. There, they’ll bulldoze a 500 year old temple to build an endless skyscraper complex that no one wants to live in." Nicely put, by @dwarkesh_sp.
Ezra on twitter: There was this view that Trump's second administration wouldn't be nearly as riven by factional infighting as his first, and I think we're already seeing why that theory was wrong. In Trump's first term, the dividing line among Republicans, even inside his administration, was whether you supported him. Plenty didn't. Ideological differences on the right were less important than whether you thought Trump should be president and saw your role as enabling or restraining him. In Trump's second term, the Republican Party is his party and his administration is filled with actual loyalists competing for his favor by constantly demonstrating their fealty and usefulness to him. That's making the ideological differences much more important because so many factions are understand how to clear that first bar of loyalty and usefulness to Trump. RFK Jr. or Elon Musk aren't MAGA as it was understood in 2016, but they are very useful to Trump, and that's what he cares about most. Trump is transactional. Now a much wider group of figures and interests understand how to transact with him and are eager to do so. So you're going to get more loyalty but much bigger ideological fights — as we're already seeing in this high-skill immigration fight.
Ezra on twitter, quoting an Atlantic profile of Kash Patel. Link to the Atlantic piece is in bluesky post. Ladies and gentlemen. meet Kash Patel, the president-elect's choice to run the FBI: "In The Plot Against the King, a children’s book, [Kash] Patel tells the story of a wizard named Kash who sets out to save King Donald from the sinister machinations of Hillary Queenton and a “shifty knight." "Patel produced 'Justice for All,' a version of the national anthem sung by jailed January 6 defendants and played by Trump at his first 2024 campaign rally." "Patel expressed no doubt about his capacity to deliver the goods. 'We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,' he said. 'Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections—we’re going to come after you.'” “'A lot of people say he’s crazy,' Trump once said of Patel, according to the longtime adviser. 'I think he’s kind of crazy. But sometimes you need a little crazy.'” "The prevailing sentiment in Trump’s inner circle, according to the longtime adviser, is that there is no upside to calling out Patel’s exaggerations or lies. By now, this person explained, Trump is entrenched in his view of Patel as a 'useful tool.' The former president, the adviser said, understands that 'Kash is the one you say to, ‘Hey, I’m not telling you to go break into the DNC. But…’ ”
Ezra on twitter, quoting a New York Times story. New York Times piece is linked in bluesky post. "According to the review, Mr. Epshteyn met with Mr. Bessent in February, at a time when it was widely known that he was interested in the Treasury post, and proposed $30,000 to $40,000 a month to 'promote' Mr. Bessent around Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s estate in Florida." Every organization takes on the character of its founder. The corruption and grifting we're going to see in this administration will be astonishing.
Excerpt from NYT article in post of transcript from The Ezra Klein Show.
Matt Zeitlin on twitter: I kinda think “abundance” and “supply side progressivism” are a bit of a red herring when talking about these recent election results, Asian and Latino voters in Queens aren’t voting Republican because of the second avenue subway taking forever and being over budget Ezra's quote tweet response to Matt's point: I think about abundance/SSP as where to go next rather than a key explanation of 2020-2024 vote shifts. But the anger that has built over decades in blue states and cities over housing costs, homelessness, crappy infrastructure, expensive energy, etc was real and waiting to express itself. Against a stronger Republican Party, I don't think Dems are anywhere near their bottom in the states and cities they govern. I know so many people in Los Angeles and SF who've gone from mainline, Pod-Save-Democrats, to truly disaffected, even enraged. But the CA Republican Party has become a Trumpist carnival that they'll never support. What if it hadn't? Dem losses in CA are held down by GOP dysfunction. And then there's the problems that need to get solved: We have to build millions of new homes in the next decade. We have to build far more clean energy and transmission lines. It's be nice to be able to get big public infrastructure jobs done fast and affordably. You need a vision that solves the problems you actually have.
Saikat Chakrabarti: Whenever I hear about how Democrats listened too much to the left, I think often about the Loan Shark Prevention Act I worked on that AOC and Bernie introduced into Congress. It would put a 15% cap on payday and credit card loans. When we polled it, it was hugely popular everywhere but especially in red and purple districts. But even faced with these facts, none of the more establishment Democrats wanted to sign on to it. And now Trump is proposing a 10% cap on credit cards, and if he does it, it'll be a very popular win. My take is the problem isn't that Democrats got too left. They are just too cowardly, and that cowardice defines too much of the party. When it was less cowardly to take an unpopular 'left' position, they did. But in the majority of cases where there is an option to do nothing with no political downside, the default very often is to do nothing because that is the 'safer' thing to do.
Ezra on Twitter, responding to an excerpt of a Vox article he wrote in 2016 after Hillary Clinton’s defeat: And Republicans didn't win in 2016 by following the RNC autopsy of 2012. You don't win the next election by trying to win the last election! (Vox article linked in bluesky post)
Post from Ezra on twitter: Which isn't to say some fights don't end up being ideological. But I think it's better to think of a lot of this in terms of @nicholas_bagley's "procedural fetish" framework. Dems have evolved to be very, very process-and-institutions oriented both in how they govern and how they manage their coalition. The outer edges of the wokeness debate get more cultural attention, but I think this process-over-outcomes dynamic has been more poisonous in how blue states and cities are governed, which is why Dems lost so much support there.
Ezra on Twitter, quote tweeting an excerpt from his preamble to the latest episode of The Ezra Klein Show podcast: And that's just a preamble to Jen Pahlka and Steve Teles saying much smarter, more important, things. Listen or read here: (NYT link provided in bluesky post)
Tweet from Ezra on twitter: Donald Trump had exactly one, you-gotta-hand-it-to-him, that was an insanely successful policy that saved countless lives and we should do it again and again: Operation Warp Speed. And it's the only policy from his first term he has completely disowned and is now salting the earth over. it's like if George W. Bush decided his entire presidency was perfect except for PEPFAR.
Ezra reacts to article endorsing Matt Gaetz for AG due to his positioning on anti trust and corporate consolidation: It is worth running this thought experiment when reading these pieces: If you'd asked 10 people who care deeply about antitrust to draw up a shortlist of people Trump should nominate to lead the Justice Department, would any of them have named Matt Gaetz? There are many ways in which Gaetz is an unusual, even extraordinary, figure in Washington. His views on Google are not one of them. This is Trump choosing a hatchet man, not shocking the world by nominating Zephyr Teachout.
Reply from Ezra on Twitter under his original tweet. Robert: FWIW, even the the 20->24 shifts need more than inflation. There's still geographic and demographic variation that isn't mopped up by economic conditions alone. Nice thing about all this is that with millions of voters, you can have distinct things happening. Ezra: I don't disagree, but if Dems had performed 2.5 points better because there was no extended price rise they win the election and a lot of this discourse doesn't happen. But they'd still be losing the working class and huge numbers of voters they claim to represent!
Support for Trump Increases As News Consumption Decreases. Find graph and image inside link cited in post from DataForProgress.
Excerpt from Atlantic piece by Charles cited in post.
The esteemed Bloomberg commentator Joe Wiesenthal on twitter: Incredible read about how mobile gambling apps are ravaging Brazil. 20% of a recent social assistance program have been spent on gambling, with some bettors taking out credit at rates exceeding 400% Excerpt from the Bloomberg article linked.
Data journalist Owen Winter of The Economist on twitter: This year's presidential election had the lowest variation in state swings (in two-party margin) of any presidential election in at least 44 years.