Writer Noah Berlatsky from
and joins me as we defy the authoritarian state and frankly discuss Charlie Kirk and his posthumous deification. (Editor’s Note: It might look as if I’m filming in an undisclosed location, but that’s just because the windows were being replaced in my usual recording spot.)Like, share, and subscribe. It’s more important than ever.
Edited excerpts from our conversation:
NOAH: The reason that Ezra Klein is so excited about talking to Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk is that there’s this feeling that our problem is partisanship. Our problem is that we’re too divided, and what we need to do is to build bridges.
And [for white people] what does that mean? It means that white people kind of need to come together and just accept that Black people aren't going to advance. Trans people aren’t going to advance. Immigrants aren’t going to advance. We’re going to, sweep them all aside and it’s going to be white people uniting. Obviously, that’s not really how they want to think about it. But Martin Luther King talks about how you can't have like peace without justice.
SER: But they talk about the family unit, right? Sort of like the Civil War, brother versus brother. They like Jessica Tarlov on Fox News debating Jesse Watters. This is just the liberal sister and the MAGA brother. But they otherwise get along. That is very encouraging to them, even though where they disagree is on the fundamental humanity of other people.
NOAH: Can you lower the political temperature when you’ve got ICE agents running around Chicago kidnapping people? What are we uniting on?
SER: And to your point, it’s interesting where bipartisanship is. Joe Manchin had reared his particularly annoying head about this recently. But bipartisanship is never just, “Hey, you know, I’m a Republican. I just want to give rich people tax cuts. Why do I care about what amounts to two percent of the population being able to live with dignity. I’ll sign on to that, and nd let me screw some poor people.”
But when you get the bipartisan crusaders — all of them white men and some white women — they think the issue is that LGBTQ rights is too divisive. Don’t talk about Blackness too much. Shouldn’t that be “bipartisan”?
NOAH: I think it’s pretty telling that Joe Manchin’s big push for bipartisanship was “we’re not going to get rid of the filibuster.” So, what did that mean? It’s still okay to disenfranchise Black people. The bipartisanship is disenfranchising Black people. The bipartisanship is gutting abortion rights. The bipartisanship is we can come together and agree that these other people shouldn't vote or these other people shouldn’t have bodily autonomy. That’s what Neo-Confederacy was.
