Opinion | Jon Stewart Looks Back With Sanity and/or Fear

If you go back to the Tea Party moment in 2010, Tucker Carlson had only just been hired by Fox News. He was two years out from being employed by MSNBC. Elon Musk was stanning for Barack Obama. You got Jon Stewart then into his second decade as a host of “The Daily Show.” And he and Stephen Colbert hosted the satirical Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. And Stewart gave this speech.

Archived clip of Jon Stewart: But we live now in hard times, not end times. [Applause.] And we can have animus and not be enemies. [Applause.] But unfortunately, one of our main tools in delineating the two broke.

When I look back now from the vantage point of the era we’re in and the eras we’ve been in, this moment, to me, it has this kind of Rosetta Stone quality. There’s so much in it that is going to blossom in such strange and terrifying ways.

And there’s something about the sanity/fear framing. It seemed like a joke then. In some ways, it doesn’t seem like a joke now. In the years since the rally, Stewart has continued to track the media’s tendency to amplify some of the worst, most divisive tendencies in American politics. He’s now back hosting “The Daily Show” sometimes. He’s got the podcast “The Weekly Show With Jon Stewart,” which is great.

So with very, very little time now before Election Day, I wanted to have him on the show to talk about his understanding of this arc of these decades, what he has seen, the way he has seen the media and some of the figures in it change and the way he has changed.

Note: The Washington Post is one of several news organizations mentioned in this conversation. We taped this interview before the recent controversy at the Washington Post over ending its practice of presidential endorsements — a decision made by the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos.

This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ezra Klein: So can we go on the way-back machine to the Rally for Fear and/or Sanity?

Jon Stewart: Oh, my God. That’s how many years?

We were all young.

We were all young and apparently getting a contact high.

That rally has a little bit of a Rosetta Stone quality for me. How did it come about? How did you decide to do a rally?

I’m trying to think back. I think what happened was, this was at the height of Glenn Beck, and he was doing these sort of oddly demagoguish rallies, where he would go down to Washington, and you would see like older Tea Partyers in lawn chairs sort of surrounding the wading pool. And I think it came of that.

I remember being on the phone with Stephen Colbert, and we were just laughing about it.

And I said, you know, we should just go down there and bang one of those out. I mean, it was an entire [expletive]. As you could tell from watching it, probably, the preparation was not, uh —

It has been very hard to get clean audio from it. Yes, that’s been a thing I’ve been running into. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] That morning — so Stephen and I — I was doing my show. He was doing “Colbert Report.” So we didn’t rehearse anything. We didn’t do anything. And that morning, we were driving over to the Mall early. And at that time, you really didn’t have a sense of if anybody would show up. And we’re driving in, and there’s a just a [expletive] ton of people pouring out of everywhere like, “Oh, what’s going on?”

And they were all going there. And we’d only set up, like, two large-screen TVs. That’s pretty much all we had. And so we sat in a little makeshift trailer with the Roots, Ozzy Osbourne, the O’Jays. and Yusuf Islam.

And we were literally walking those guys through the ideas. So the Roots are playing the songs, and we’re like, “Yusuf Islam, you’re going to come out and do ‘Peace Train.’ We’re going to do a whole thing. And then, Ozzy, you’re going to interrupt after two bar stanzas with ‘Crazy Train.’” And Yusuf is just looking at us like, “But ‘Peace Train’ is a beautiful song. Why would you interrupt?” The whole thing was bonkers.

There’s something about that rally I thought a lot about in the years after, because in some weird way after that — I mean, maybe it was happening then, too — the political coalitions split into the aesthetics of sanity — institutions, systems, “In this house we believe in science” — and the aesthetics of fear, conspiracy, rage, anger, a kind of nativist populism. And you were beginning to see it, right? Glenn Beck was the weird thing happening on Fox News.

When you were looking at the landscape then, what did sanity mean to you, and what did fear mean to you in politics?

I’m trying to put myself back in the head space of all that. All of it was kind of a reaction to — and our show was a reaction to — what I saw as this, at that point, probably 40-year project of rebuilding parallel institutions to the left. People always talked about, like, “Your show, it degraded the discourse and poked fun at things.” And I’m like, “Do you have an AM radio?”

Because I drove to a lot of gigs doing stand-up. Your listeners may not know this, but show business is very glamorous. A lot of times you would get in what we would call a rental car and drive to Rochester. And then you would go to Buffalo, if you were lucky. And then all the towns in between — Poughkeepsie, Schenectady. You’d hit the old vaudeville circuit.

But I listened to a lot of AM radio, and the vitriol and nonstop fire hose of degradation toward anything left of — I want to say Lyndon LaRouche — but anything to the left of that was ubiquitous.

So I saw that cleaving — Roger Ailes sitting in the White House in 1972 or wherever, 1973 or 1974, going: I will never allow what the left did to Nixon to ever happen again. And so the right, very smartly, rebuilt their own institutions in their image — colleges, think tanks, media — and they portrayed anything that had been the standard institution as wildly left-wing and activist, even if it might not be, even if it just had the patina of notions of equality or fairness. The kinds of things that just don’t fly in those situations.

So you’re describing the fear side of this. I want to zoom you in on the sanity side because I think that that gets at something interesting that happens around then and is a big part of politics. It’s imbalanced in a way. It’s not good versus bad. The sort of aesthetic that emerged — and I think it emerged in media, too, at that time. There is a lot in right-wing media that is about fear. And left-wing media was not like, “We’re going to tax the billionaires.” Maybe it wants to do that. The Democrats have become this party —

Well, you have to define “left-wing media,” though.

That’s totally fair. But let me say, Democrats, the Obama-era Democratic Party, the way the Democratic coalition is changing is not a class warfare coalition. It is a coalition that makes a big point about technocracy: If we could just come together and listen to the experts and look at the right charts — I am part of this at Wonk Blog — we’d all come to the right conclusion. Can we just be sane about this, common sense about this? It’s a pro-system coalition.

And so in this weird way, you develop this new aesthetic and politics that you guys pick up on. It’s not like, “Oh, the right wants to go to war against Communism, and the left wants to tax rich people.” It has this other cultural dimension. It’s like the left or the experts were smart. We think about things. The right, they’re the heartland. They’re the “real” Americans. They’re tough.

And it’s this whole other slightly orthogonal but now very dominant way that politics cleaves that is almost barely related to what people want to do.

First of all, I cannot tell you how often people just throw the word “orthogonal” at me.

Do you enjoy it or no?

Everywhere I go — no, I don’t know what it means. Tell me what that means.

See, this is a problem with the left-wing coalition over here.

[Laughs.]

Existing separately from. It’s a totally different space.

Ah, OK. So I think that’s really a nice, perceptive analysis of those Obama years. I would probably go further and say that was the foundation of the left from — I mean, I think that’s what the Goldwater revolution was more about. This idea that the best and the brightest — the Kennedy idea of “We’re going to get the best and the brightest, and that’s going to get us Vietnam.” [Chuckles.]

But I think, in some ways, what you’re describing is that original cleaving that I think Obama maybe represented but is much more about that Kennedy coalition that came in and the Goldwater coalition that rose up to oppose it. I mean, Roosevelt, to some extent, when you think about the New Deal, and maybe that’s what they would consider the original sin of the left — this idea that government will expand to help people, which was a huge sin. The idea that, “Hey, wait, that guy’s hungry. What if we gave him soup?” And people would be like, “What? No, that is the job of the Sisters of the Poor. Government can’t do that.”

But ultimately, that’s been the battle.

I want to play you a bit of your speech that day I was going back and listening to it, and one thing that struck me about it —

Oh, dear God. Nothing worse than this for me.

Yeah, I’m so sorry.

This is a terrible, terrible nightmare that I’m about to experience. By the way, the Rally to Restore Sanity — here’s what I think social media exists for. Social media exists for people to remind you what they will never forgive you for. What we thought was kind of a larf and we’re going to have a fun day has turned into there’s very little I can do, even today, that people won’t come on — so I get two things on social media in the comment section. One is, “You’re a Jew.” No matter what happens, whether I put out, like, “This is a picture of my dog.” And somebody’s going to come in the comment and be like, “Why did you change your name, Jew?”

And the second is, “I will never forgive you for that [expletive] stupid Rally to Restore Sanity that apparently handed control of Congress to the Republicans.”

You know what sucks for you? It has become the worst thing of all: a text. And that is how that is how we are treating it here. You’ve created a text.

Yes!

I want to play you a bit of your speech. I’m very sorry. But one of the interesting things about your speech there — and about your show in that time, about Stephen Colbert — is it’s not really about the right. It’s about the media and the way that the media amplifies hostility and distorts relationships between Americans.

Archived clip of Stewart: Because the image of Americans that is reflected back to us by our political and media process is false. It is us through a fun-house mirror — and not the good kind that makes you look slim in the waist and maybe taller. But the kind where you have a giant forehead and an [expletive] shaped like a month-old pumpkin and one eyeball. So why would we work together? Why would you reach across the aisle to a pumpkin-[expletive] forehead eyeball monster? If the picture of us were true, of course our inability to solve problems would actually be quite sane and reasonable. Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our Constitution? Or racists and homophobes who see no one’s humanity but their own?

How does that hit for you now?

Geez. There is very little in this world more unappealing than the sound of your own voice being, at moments, sincere. It’s very hard to listen to yourself projecting into a field. It’s like a bizarro campaign speech where you’re like, “Oh, it has the rhythm and tone and volume of a campaign speech, but I’m talking about a pumpkin [expletive].”

There was a big idea at that time — Barack Obama used to talk about this all the time. It’s the subject of the famous ’04 Democratic National Convention speech that launches him to national politics. It’s that cable news — and later Twitter and the 24-hour news cycle and all the rest of it — distorts us. It’s a fun-house mirror. We get pumpkin [expletive] and single eyeballs — and it’s wrong.

I’m so sorry about that. [Laughs.] That is not the appropriate reference.

It’s a vivid image. And then on the other hand, as time went on, and I wonder sometimes whether the media was cause or effect here. Politics begins to feel a little more — not pumpkin-[expletive], but when I watch people in politics, when I watch Donald Trump, when I watch people acting in Congress now, I wonder which of us are the real us. It doesn’t seem always that our conflicts are so overstated that the enmity is a distortion. Did you feel it is something that the media amplified and then it became reality? Or do you feel like it’s still not reality?

It’s probably not as black and white as any of that, in terms of “Is it reality?” But I can tell you this. I live in deep MAGA country where I am. New Jersey is a blue state, but there are really red pockets, and I live in one on a day-to-day basis.

So if you’re telling me, do I think my neighbors have an enmity and an unpleasantness that I can’t cut? No, I don’t think that at all. I have wonderful and meaningful relationships with people, and there’s certain topics that you try to avoid, and there are other topics that you don’t avoid at all and you give each other tremendous amounts of [expletive] for.

Again, that’s anecdotal, not data, so I can’t tell you what’s what. I can only tell you my experience. But in my experience, media has an effect. It has a weight, and it has an ability to warp perceptions. Cable news, to me, was mind-blowing. Twenty-four-hour news cycle is good for one thing, and that’s 9/11. When 9/11 happens, you want that [expletive] station to be on all day, and you want something, because the world is so tenuous in that moment.

But in the absence of it, how are you going to keep people watching? Well, you have to, in some ways, impose a contrived urgency or a fear. And it’s nothing new. It’s just a question of degrees. How many times, in the olden days of Roger Mudd and “Eyewitness News,” it was, “Do you have children? Well, you won’t believe the dangers in your bathroom”? And you’re like, “Well, I would. I [expletive] there. Like, I would think it’s probably not hygienic.” But it’s always been about “How do we keep the eyeballs?”

May I use a not-safe-for-work and somewhat tawdry example here, Ezra?

Before now, this has all been safe for work? This has been your version of PG?

This is a classy program.

You do what you need to do.

Ezra, you’re a good man.

Thank you.

When I was a young man, 13, 14 years old, if I got a hold of the Sears catalog and there was a picture of a woman in a bra in it, I was like, “This is the most sexually exciting and arousing image.” And as you get older, that doesn’t work on you anymore. And you get to that point where you’re like, “Three people, a goat and someone singing Pavarotti.”

You have to keep stimulating people further and further to different extremities to get that same hit of dopamine. And those apps and that media, especially now, are scientifically designed purposefully — like the woman who was blowing the whistle on Facebook, like our food is designed to escape that part of your brain that says, “I should stop eating right now.” Like, this is purposeful.

The way that we are divided as people, some of it is political and weaponized by political actors, but the majority of it is capitalism. Capitalism with the idea of “How do I generate the most income out of engagement?” And it turns out fear and anger and hate and outrage pay huge.

I’m not suggesting that a monkey washing a cat isn’t a tremendous video, and that will also get clicks, but that’s not a business model. The business model is creating an atmosphere of outrage and anger. And so when you ask, does that have an effect? It absolutely does. And I think it does rewire the brains of the users.

When I was on your show, we were talking about a piece of this, actually. You were saying there was AM radio, and then there was Fox News. And one thing that has happened in my lifetime — and I’m 40 — is this tremendous segmentation. The media broke into these little competitive slices, and competition can be great in the sense that it creates a lot of innovation. And if the innovation is how to get your little slice away from everybody else, sometimes the competition can become warping.

And one of the things I always think people get really wrong about the media is they think that it is stronger and more self-directed than it is, particularly when it has gotten very, very competitive.

When you say “self-directed,” what do you mean by that?

I’ve been involved in lots of different media over the years, and something that has surprised me, going from somebody who reads it to somebody who makes it, is watching the way the media comes to reflect its audience, unless a tremendous amount of editorial strength is applied in the opposite direction. So the sense of the media driving the audience is not quite right.

You just named the game. And I think we talked about this. A lie travels eight times faster than the truth, but that means that the truth has to work nine or 10 times harder than a lie. And lies are the thing that are most weaponized. The truth is rarely weaponized, but the lies sure as [expletive] are, because that’s what propaganda is.

So the thing that you just said about the media not being self-directed, I think is probably putting your finger on, in my mind, exactly what is troubling: that they themselves are victims of the incentivized algorithm that they’re trying to compete with, as opposed to viewing it as part of an ongoing battle to combat lies.

Your show has existed in two forms over time. There’s the form on Comedy Central and then the chopped-up form that goes on YouTube. Does YouTube change it at all? Do you understand the YouTube difference’s audience? And do you think that the fact that it has this other life has shifted the way, in its earlier incarnation or in its current one, the show gets made or what gets on it?

It hasn’t changed the way we make it. I don’t know if chopping it up changes the way people experience it. I would guess it does. You mean like, because people get shorter and shorter —

Not only do they get shorter and shorter, but in an episode — I think about this all the time in my work. When I was running Vox, when I was at The Washington Post, it used to be that you bought the paper as a whole or the magazine — I was at The American Prospect. You got the thing as a whole.

And so as an editor at one of those places, you would balance things out — the stuff that was really appealing with the stuff that was maybe a bit more vegetables, the stuff that was a little bit more right and the stuff that was a little bit more left — across the bundle that you are offering people.

But when the way things worked was you grabbed one article and shared it around, and that article is then how people understood you, your ability to exercise editorial control over the whole of the thing went away.

So maybe you do an episode that has different things in it for different people or, as a whole, it exists in some way. But then the fact that each segment has its own life if I’m watching it on YouTube, which is often where I watch it, that sort of control, that ability to give you the balanced diet, it’s actually just not in your control any longer.

Boy, that’s a good one. Television is so different than — I think your background is probably more in writing and how people consume. But reading is such a more active process than viewership. And so I think because I have always been in stand-up or television, I assume a more passive audience. And so I never think quite about, “Did they get the whole thing?” Because I just always assume they’re doing something else.

Especially, you know, it’s 11 at night. It’s 11:30 at night. I just always assumed that I was a mild form of foreplay. [Chuckles.] So I think the interesting thing about our process that’s maybe different than what you’re describing is how little we think about who might watch it and how they might watch it.

And someone asked me this once. They said, “Has the social media or any of those other things changed the way people consume your show?” And I was like, “I don’t know. I don’t know them.” I know this: It hasn’t changed the way we make it, which is probably stupid. It has changed the way we try to publicize it. If there’s a good joke chunk, we’ll send that out there, and maybe people consume that as a way to maybe entice them.

But the other part of it is, you’re looking at the totality of analysis and news that makes up writing, a considered art form that you’re really able to express a variety of different elements, and you need the totality of that to actualize your readers.

“The Daily Show” really was like one Op-Ed. The evolution of “The Daily Show” wasn’t that we became a series of monologue jokes that became slightly more essayistic. It was always just one essay. So the burden of carrying that larger information world we never felt, if that makes sense.

And because we were steeped in television, you don’t think of it in the same intellectual way that you might as you’re building Vox or as you’re thinking about The New York Times.

The other thing that makes me think about, which is a more private thought I’ve had over the years, is one of the dangerous things, as media went online, you always want to be selling something that isn’t the politics as your service to the audience.

Which is to say you were selling jokes as your first service to the audience. And there was politics and analysis alongside that. But they could come for the jokes. They didn’t have to agree with the politics.

The New York Times, that’s reporting. You might hate what you understand to be The New York Times’s politics, but there’s a ton of international reporting, and we have people all over. The New Yorker, it’s the narrative journalism. There’s a politics to The New Yorker. But you can come for the stories first.

And when you’re just selling the politics, when you distill it down to that, you were sort of making this about lies and truths, but I think once it just becomes politics, you have to be in agreement. If you’re a highly ideological organization and you have an audience, you have to be in agreement with the audience, or they have to be in agreement with you, or you’re going to die. And the way that the internet unbundled everything, you couldn’t just be coming for the sports. It made that so it’s much more intense.

So it’s chicken and the egg there. So again, that’s when we talk about weaponization. I would say rather than lies and truth, maybe the binary that I would talk about is good faith/bad faith. Are you a purely political actor, or do you believe there’s utility in information or utility in good-faith argumentation?

I would say that a lot of the media is not good-faith argumentation. It’s political actors weaponizing forms of communication for the desired goal of shifting a political conversation toward one side. And there’s different parameters to that. You can do that by heightening your side’s political thing. You can do that by demonizing the other side’s political thing. You can do that by undercutting. You can do that by warping. But that’s the real difference. I think media doesn’t know how to deal with bad actors and bad-faith actors that have weaponized it.

It reminds me of every Supreme Court confirmation hearing, where the person that has achieved this level of accolade as a lawyer or as a judge or whatever it is sits there and they say, “What do you think about this?” And they go, “I am an umpire, and I would call balls and strikes, and I would stare decisis the precedent.” And then they get on the court and they’re like, “I hate women.” You know, it’s all a [expletive] show that’s bad faith.

You may remember — or actually many people may not remember — there was a show on CNN called “Crossfire” for a period.

Now that I’m not familiar with, but it sounds fantastic. I like any show that is named after what innocent bystanders get caught in — let’s say, gang violence.

[Laughs.] For somebody who’s never seen “Crossfire” because it ended up getting taken off the air because of the actions of a rogue comedian, what was it?

What it started out as was this idea of good-faith argumentation between people of differing political viewpoints. The original premise of that is not, by definition, a bad thing. I don’t necessarily think that the binary of right and left or liberal and conservative is a particularly useful one, but —

And it was Michael Kinsley and Patrick Buchanan, the original sanity versus fear, actually.

Exactly right. Slate versus Father Coughlin. But what it turned into was — and the critique of “Crossfire” that I think everyone has misunderstood, was this idea of — I wasn’t calling for civility. I was calling for a non-Kabuki-theater version. That debate, of course, should be robust and at times angry, but it should be in a modicum of good faith. And what it had become was this very weaponized, incentivized theater.

So when you ask, again, back to the original question, what comes first, the chicken or the egg? Well, what came first was an intention of having really interesting argumentation that could be illuminating and articulate differences. And what the business model of 24-hour cable news turned it into was a perverse exercise in cynical, weaponized, divisive conversation.

You’re going to enjoy this. I’m going to play a clip for you.

Please, no. This is not fun!

You’ve done a lot to deserve this. It’s karma. You do this for other people.

This is unpleasant! You have listeners out there.

Has this not happened to you?

No.

Really?

No.

Yeah. Unfortunately, it’s happening now.

I have not had a “This Is Your Life” like this, where you play things that — my wife, after “Crossfire” — and this was before everything became viral and things like that. Like, that really hadn’t happened at that point. This was a long time ago. This was, like, 2004 — I don’t know, 2006, 2008. I have no idea. My wife called me — called me, not texted me on my iPhone. Like, none of that [expletive] existed. She called me and said, “Don’t you ever do something like that again.”

And I tried not to —

Well, I’m going to play, first, what you did, and then we can talk about it.

Oh, boy.

Sorry. You can cover your ears.

Archived clip of Stewart: I’m here to confront you because we need help from the media and they’re hurting us. And it’s the idea is —


Paul Begala: Let me get this straight. If the indictment is — and I have seen you say this — that “Crossfire” reduces everything, as I said in the intro, to left, right, black, white. Well, it’s because we’re a debate show. It’s like saying —


Stewart: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That’d be great. I would love to see a debate show. But that’s like saying pro wrestling is a show about athletic competition.


Tucker Carlson: I think you’re a good comedian. I think your lectures are boring. Let me ask you a question on the news.


Stewart: No, this is theater. I mean, it’s obvious. How old are you?


Carlson: 35.


Stewart: And you wear a bow tie.


[Laughter.]


Carlson: Yeah, I do. I do. I do. No, no, I know.


Stewart: Listen, I’m not suggesting that you’re not a smart guy, because those are not easy to tie. But the thing is that you’re doing theater when you should be doing debate, which would be great. It’s not honest. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery.

I knew Tucker Carlson in those days, and his signal characteristic, to me, the thing I think you were picking up on, particularly about him, is he treated it all as a joke.

You can go back and read Tucker Carlson’s old magazine journalism, and it’s great, hilarious magazine journalism. He was a very, very good magazine writer when he was young. And he went through all these very quick transformations. He was on MSNBC for a while. People forget that. Rachel Maddow, one of her early breaks was that she was a regular contributor to Tucker Carlson’s show on MSNBC. He was this kind of good-times libertarian type. And he was a guy who treated it all kind of as a game.

I guess what I will say for him now is I don’t think it’s a joke to him now. Something happened there. I think his politics are much more serious and much more real and, obviously for that, much more dangerous.

Humiliation happened.

Yeah. I’m curious how you understand what happened to him psychologically.

I hate to do this to you, Ezra. I’m going to describe this to you in professional wrestling terms, since that was one of the analogies that I used on there.

See, this is actually the sport I know.

OK, Ezra, you and I are going to have a good time here.

We’re in good shape here. Kayfabe, I got it.

Beautiful. So, what I was complaining about on “Crossfire” was kayfabe — this idea that this is just theater and everybody’s playing a character and nobody’s a blah, blah, blah.

But the other way to describe it for them is there’s an establishment, and then there’s the anti-establishment, the disrupters and the rebels. Tucker Carlson was establishment, and he tried to be a face. He was a heel. Like, Fox News, Megyn Kelly, same thing.

“Face” being a good guy, “heel” being a bad guy.

That’s right. So she’s on the heel network, Fox, but she’s kind of the face on Fox. She’s the one that, like, every now and again will say something, and the establishment or liberals will go, like, “Wow, that’s empathy. That’s interesting” or “Oh, she’s not toeing a dogmatic party line.”

So they decide like, “Oh, I will live amongst the faces. I will join them. I will be a part of the establishment.” And the establishment and the faces reject them — they feel wrongly — and with a dogmatic litmus test, and it’s never good enough, and it’s their intolerance that put them in that position.

So they tried to live amongst the normies. And when that blows up and creates humiliation and returns them to, I think, their truer selves. I prefer them the way they are right now. I kind of dig it.

Explain that.

I’d rather someone not pretend to be Barbie and just be who she is, which is, I think, Ursula from “The Little Mermaid.” See, I went from pro wrestling to “The Little Mermaid.”

In many ways, Ezra, I am still stuck in the same entertainment options that I was using when my kids were little. I am frozen in that time. But do you get my point about, like, what happened is, they view — and Donald Trump in the same way. He views that there’s this world that is excluding them, and they are excluding them purely for dogmatic and “They think they’re better than me, and they hold these views that they think their [expletive] doesn’t stink. And I stepped into that world and tried to be amongst them, and they rejected that because they’re [expletive]. And now I can just be in my own world and be as angry and as vicious as I think I was treated.” And I think that’s kind of the way it goes.

I think it’s so interesting. I don’t know Megyn Kelly’s story as well as I know or have watched Carlson and Trump.

I think it’s very similar. Her moment was “I joined NBC.”

Archived “Today” clip: This morning is the launch of “Megyn Kelly Today,” just about six minutes from now.

Show didn’t go that well.

And this is after being run out of Fox News, by the way, because she asked hard questions of Donald Trump at the first debate. She was rejected by the right first, because she was not sufficiently pro-Trump and he came after her. And within a year, she was out.

Right. And that’s what I was saying. That’s what I meant by she was a face. She became a face. So if you think about it, both Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly were rejected, and the reasoning behind their rejection, I think, is still misunderstood.

I didn’t get “Crossfire” canceled. “Crossfire” ratings sucked, and CNN looked for a way out, and that was a convenient flashpoint. And by the way, none of that had much to do with Tucker Carlson anyway. The person I really didn’t like there was Novak, but he just wasn’t on the show that day.

And Megyn Kelly in the same thing. Her show just wasn’t connecting on NBC.

Archived clip of Megyn Kelly: I’m Megyn Kelly, and I want to begin with two words. I’m sorry. You may have heard that yesterday we had a discussion here about political correctness and Halloween costumes.

And then she had that moment of — it was a blackface, I think, comment about the thing.

Archived clip of Kelly: I defended the idea, saying as long as it was respectful and part of a Halloween costume, it seemed OK. Well, I was wrong, and I am sorry.

If her show was killing it, they’d have found a way to forgive it. They’d have found a way to keep her on there. But they used it as a convenient excuse.

Archived clip: After public outcry stemming from controversial comments she made this week, all eyes are on what happens next for the anchor as her time with the “Today" show comes to an end.


Archived clip: The move comes four days after her blackface comments that provoked a firestorm leading to a tearful apology.


Archived clip: The chairman of NBC News condemned Kelly’s remarks during a staff town hall, according to Variety, saying, “There is no place on our air or in this workplace for them.”

I’m sure for her, it was incredibly painful and felt like a “canceled because of my viewpoints.” But the truth of the matter is, NBC executives and CNN executives, they aren’t woke. They aren’t any of those things. They’re [expletive] desperately trying to hold on to their jobs by generating ad revenue, by whatever means necessary.

And so that’s what they got caught up on. And by the way, though, the way that it happened attacked them at a core level. And that’s what’s created it. Like, I’ve been canceled a [expletive] ton of times. But the only reason I was canceled is the network executives just were like, “Yeah, this show sucks.” But they didn’t say, like, “You’re a bad person, and that’s why we’re canceling the show.” And that’s what they did to them.

The industry, rather than standing up for what was really going on there, which is, “You’re not generating enough revenue and interest to justify your large contract” or whatever it is, they turned it into “We’re getting rid of you for a moral failing or lapse.” And that was wrong.

Listen — I don’t care for what they do. I don’t care for their opinions. But what happened to them was wrong.

The executives are interesting here. I was thinking about this when you were relaying that story about Roger Ailes. There was a period in my life when I did a lot of MSNBC and was a guest host on a lot of the prime time programs there.

And so I knew the people who ran it pretty well. And what I would say about the people who ran MSNBC was they were, fundamentally, not that ideological. They were television executives. That’s why Tucker Carlson had a show and why they were so excited about Joe Scarborough and still are, why recently they tried to hire Ronna McDaniel, the sort of disgraced Republican National Committee chair. That didn’t end up working out because of revolt by people at the network.

Roger Ailes is honestly ideological. As he’s put it, he had a vision, a view about how things should be. He wanted to be successful, but he also actually knew what he was trying to achieve in the world. Those NBC executives who brought on Megyn Kelly — it was obvious to me that that show wasn’t going to work. But they wanted the look of bringing on Megyn Kelly because they are not that ideological and particularly don’t want to be seen as ideological.

But they’re lying to themselves because they place things in a moral universe when they really are just crass executives who are trying to sell — that’s the part where I think the critique — if there’s one critique of the media from the right that I do agree with, it is the moralizing nature, the idea that these media executives moralize their position. There may be no greater disparity between reality and whatever idealized moral image you have of yourselves — like the Washington Post putting on their masthead, “democracy dies in darkness.” Like, who the [expletive] do you think you are? You have a board up in your room that shows, like, who’s getting what clicks where. That’s just nonsense.

I mean, I would almost welcome — maybe not necessarily a more moral component but a component of the news media that is more forceful editorially. Ailes’s greatest trick was delegitimizing the idea of editorial authority while exercising almost complete editorial authority but doing it in a way that was really smart. There is no condescension and moralizing on Fox. It’s people on a couch asking questions. “Are you worried about how many terrorists are coming in on the border? Do you ever worry about that?”

Whereas if you turn on MSNBC, sometimes you’re like, it’s like birds descending at sea on a tuna boat, going, “That’s factually incorrect. Incorrect! Not correct! Incorrect!” And you’re just like, “Augh! I can’t listen to this.”

But that’s the brilliance of it. So when I say Megyn Kelly’s right, I do believe she’s right. They pretended that they had to get rid of her out of some moral obligation to enlightened racism, sensibility. Like, [expletive] you. That is so not what you did. If they’re making money, they’re making money, and they’ll let you get away with anything. Anything. As we see.

But when you ain’t making money anymore and they don’t, for some reason, have the temerity to just go, “Yeah, you’re not making us any money,” they find some pretense of your moral failing and yank you.

And so I get where some of that anger comes from from those folks. Don’t have a ton of sympathy, because I’ve been fired a bunch of times, too, but for the old-fashioned reasons of sucking.

When I think of Tucker Carlson now, I miss the triviality — that there was enough agreed upon that you could have the theater, the Kabuki. And now it feels like we’ve slipped down in this place where it’s like, will we be a white ethnonationalist state? That’s harder to have like a funny debate over.

But you always have to caution yourself against a nostalgia about this other time that existed, because William Hearst and yellow journalism and “Remember the Maine” can be just as damaging, even though it’s newspaper. Or think about, you know, radio in Rwanda or think about propaganda that was piped into soldiers’ ears during different times on the radio.

But again, media has to continue to raise the bar, in terms of the circadian rhythm of it, the cadence of it. It has to happen faster now. It happens more. And the difficulty is for the parts of media that we look at as utility.

Think about the checks and balances of the government. This is going to be a segue that doesn’t make any sense. But think about in the way that they describe the House of Representatives and the Senate. Somebody’s got to be the Senate. Not the Senate as it’s presently constituted. But the normal Senate, before it was an assisted-living facility. It has to be the, the saucer that cools the milk or whatever the [expletive] they want to describe it as.

And that’s what we’re missing, because what’s happening is everybody’s chasing that most dopamine-addled cocaine hamster sitting in a cage, tapping the bar. Whatever makes content becomes fodder for all the other outlets that make their bones on content.

So I don’t know what will be clipped from this. Generally something will be clipped. Generally it’s something that will reflect very little context about what we’re talking about. But could be considered the most divisive or confrontational or provocative or partisan moment. Right?

I did an interview with Tim Walz yesterday. What will get clipped out of that is I had a moment where I was like, “Do we need the Cheneys? Can we get rid of the Cheneys? We don’t need the Cheneys.” And that’s the moment that will be grabbed. Because how do those other outlets make their money? They don’t make their money by going, “Oh, I saw this interview and it had" blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They make their money by getting people to click.

So rather than cooling it or debating it in good faith or looking at the issues, they look for a moment that they can exploit. And I don’t look back with fond nostalgia over the early 2000s. Even The New York Times credulously published something, and Dick Cheney and his friends got to go on all the Sunday shows the next day and go, “Even The New York Times says Saddam Hussein is trying to make a nuclear weapon with these tubes that can only enrich uranium.” Like, I have no nostalgia that somehow this form of media can be more dangerous. Like, it can all be very dangerous.

And that’s why we have to, in whatever moment we’re living in, fight like [expletive] hell to take the danger out of it and to get better understanding into it. And we have the mechanisms, and we have the talent, and we have the people. We just need the will.

Roger Ailes built Fox News Media out of tenacity and will and skill as a producer. We have to match that with the same intentionality that he brought to it. I sat in his office one day, and we yelled at each other for an hour. But my takeaway from it was that empire was built out of the back of his head purposefully with an idea to delegitimize any media that may take away from his vision of what the world should be.

God, there’s so much there. When you were when you were talking about nostalgia — I will die on the hill of fighting the George W. Bush revisionist nostalgia. Donald Trump is the fault of Dick Cheney. We would not have Donald Trump if we had not had Dick Cheney and the Iraq war and the delegitimization of the entire upper echelons of the Republican Party that came out of that much failure. So something about seeing Dick Cheney, now endorsing Harris, and Liz Cheney — who, to be fair, I do admire that Liz Cheney was willing to lose her seat to oppose Donald Trump’s antidemocratic movements.

Think about the bar that sets, though, Ezra. I applaud the courage of someone who recognizes a coup and decides to say something about it.

Yeah, but how many of the others didn’t?

No, that’s what I’m saying. Like, that is the lowest bar.

But there is this way it’s like between recognizing there’s something important there and the genuine absence of accountability. I mean, there is something —

Oh, I think other people recognize there’s something important. I just think they put the project over the principle.

Yes.

Look, we’re in a different world now, man. Like the old world Communism versus capitalism moment is over. And by the way, it was a fight that had more death and destruction in it than, I think, was probably ever necessary.

All that really I think this country needed to fend off Communism and socialism is a decent social safety net, which I think was demonstrated. But now we’re in a different world where the alignment is, I think, woke versus unwoke. And the interesting thing is, the unwoke people think they’re the defenders of classic liberalism, when all of their allies in it, like Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin — that’s the new alignment of the world: woke versus unwoke. And the classic defenders, the people in the media and in government who say, “I’m the defenders of the Constitution and free speech and would like to align myself with Orban and Putin” — the cognitive dissonance that occurs there is mind-blowing.

I remember when Elon Musk took over Twitter to protect free speech and make sure Twitter was politically neutral, and now here we are.

But it’s in many ways a cynical exercise. And you can say to them, “Donald Trump is threatening broadcast license because he doesn’t like that they’re critical of him” or “Donald Trump is calling people the enemy within — and not migrant gangs. He’s talking about Nancy Pelosi.” And you say, “So how are you the defender of the First Amendment and that’s the guy you’re throwing —?” “Well, that’s just bluster. Oh, he doesn’t mean that. He doesn’t think —” You know, none of this particularly makes any sense.

And if you want to talk about cancel culture, there is no greater cancel culture than being a Republican and speaking out even in the mildest forms against Donald Trump. Where’s the free speech in any of this? None of this makes any [expletive] sense, Ezra. Make sense of it, Ezra. You’re very smart. Please help me.

I like the cut you’re making. I do think there’s something to the woke/unwoke. We were talking about this when I was on your show. It’s funny because we’re circling some of the same topics here. It is one of the oldest findings of political science that people are not that ideological.

I definitely agree with that.

The people who experience politics as this well-connected sense of this web of policies that all go together — you pick the liberal web or the conservative web, that’s, like, 10 percent of the population. Most people, that is just not how they experience politics or the world.

And one of the things that bugs me is the endless — at this point, I don’t think people should still be surprised that Donald Trump has appeal. We’ve seen Donald Trump, like figures in too many other countries — the fact that he doesn’t appeal to you. But if you believe Donald Trump should be losing this election 65 to 35 and it’s just, like, a failure of political strategy on Kamala Harris’s part, I think you’ve missed the boat. You’ve missed the actual appeal of strongman politics, which have been there forever. You’ve missed the appeal of people who say, “I don’t like how all this is changing, and I want it to stop.”

There are people I love who support Donald Trump. And it’s one of the best things in my politics that I have them in my life, because, one, it keeps my sense of people’s complexity alive, but, two, one thing you hear is just people saying, “Everything’s different now, and I don’t feel like I have a place in it.”

And on some level, Donald Trump agrees with them. “It was better before. Make America Great Again.” And that’s a politics that sometimes gets policies attached to it. But it’s not really a politics that is about policies or even about any one thing.

I mean, vibes, a sense of “Do you fit in the world and where it’s going? Do you have status in the world and where it’s going?”

“I don’t mind a strongman, as long as it’s my strongman.” As long as it’s following along. To that point, Ezra — I’m not in a swing state, so I don’t know exactly, but we still have down-ballot races that are being communicated all the time. The big clamoring about Kamala Harris was, “She has to define who she is through a series of policy things that appeal to the American people, and that will help them get comfortable with her as a leader” and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

Every commercial that I see on my television, there’s only two arguments the Republicans are making. Republican candidates are making two arguments: “We’re all going to die because of people coming over from the border” and “Kamala Harris is for they/them; Donald Trump is for you.” Those are the only two commercials: trans people and migration. That’s it.

And they all talk about “Trans people shouldn’t be in sports,” as though that is the dominant theme of high school athletics now. My kids were high school age a couple years ago. I don’t recall there ever being a trans person playing the sport or dominating or having any consequential action on that. But I will tell you this: If you’re concerned about competition and fairness, I’ve seen a lot of parents who reclass their kids to drop them down a grade not because they can’t handle the social aspect of it, not because they can’t handle the academics but because it will make them a more appealing athletic prospect.

So 19-year-olds are beating the [expletive] out of 14-year-olds in high school sports. You want to do something about competition? Do that. But what they’ve done is they’ve taken a kind of nonproblem and blown it into a catastrophic emblem of a society in decline.

But “emblem” is such an important word there. I am fully happy to say if we could agree on giving people rights and protection from discrimination, we can then have some conversations about the right way to manage swimming at the N.C.A.A. level.

Whoa!

A society could say sports are arbitrary; we’re going to figure something out. But it’s all a signal, like, “They are turning society into something you don’t understand anymore.” It’s not a policy.

What they do, though, is they blow it out anecdotally through these social media apps with their algorithms and incentives. That is the whole point, as we circle back to the thing, is they are able to take those uncomfortable feelings of change and create an urgency.

I have anxiety and insomnia — had it my whole life. What it does is actually physical. Your mind will take you to places that you believe in your body are now happening. Cortisol is flowing, and you feel an urgency and almost a fear and a panic, whether or not what you’re experiencing is real, imminent, impossible — it doesn’t matter.

And what the algorithms do that is so destructive and brilliant is what people in white lab coats do to Lay’s potato chips. The algorithm finds a way to take a piece of information and put it into your body in a way that drags you into a rabbit hole and creates in your body that sense of panic and fear. They physicalize it in a way that a newspaper never could. And that’s the danger here.

And always, by the way, the most vulnerable populations. You notice that it’s not just anybody but, like, the people with the fewest defenders. Always.

Always. I want to end on not how everybody else changed but how you did. And when I go back to old Jon Stewart, I’m not going to play anything at you. You’re safe now.

Please. [Laughs.]

There was this sort of sanity, “Let’s have some common sense here. Let’s not be idiots.” You have this great long traffic analogy in your sanity speech about us all on the road together. And I listen to you now, listen to the podcast, got to appear on it, which was a thrill. And you’re more of a populist now, left populist. But it feels, to me, like the sense that —

Politically, I think I’ve always been —

I think politically. But there’s a sense that I did not used to get from you that I would describe your politics much more now not as technocratic but as “Power concedes nothing without a fight.”

That I completely agree with. I think the difference is in the populations that I’m talking about. The idea has always been, you know, 80 to 90 percent of the people can find some ability to work together on common ground and move forward in a productive fashion, and the other 10 to 15 percent of those people run the place. And that has always been my position. And I think some of it has been informed by having to go down to Washington to try and accomplish something not in the media world but in the real world. And the realities of what it takes to move a machine that is built for the status quo and built for the disconnect between their power structure and the needs of the people that they purport to represent.

There is certainly a more sober view of what it takes to move that machine, but I have never thought there was anything other than the people and the machine. And what’s so frustrating about that is: we the people, by the people, for the people, of the people. And what is it about that process that removes us from them?

That’s the part that, I think, is so difficult. So now when I think of solutions, I think less of those processes and changing it in more fundamental ways. I think less of “We got to get more unionizing, got to get more people” and think like, “No, the whole [expletive] structure has to change.” They need to be able to participate in the investment and shareholder economy at that table. Whatever feast is being had there must be had here. Poor people shouldn’t have to get better lobbyists. Veterans who are struggling with toxic exposure shouldn’t have to find public figures. None of this [expletive] should be the way that you permeate that bubble.

But I don’t think the fundamental truth that people inherently, in day-to-day lives, have an ability to be with each other healthily — that hasn’t changed for me, I don’t think.

That’s a great place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

“I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This” by Chelsea Devantez. That’s what I have there.

Well, that sounded like you were telling me a secret. The book is called “I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This” by Chelsea Devantez.

Oh, yes. She’s a friend of mine who is a wonderful comedian and a writer, and her memoir, she’s just written, I think, a few months ago, and it’s absolutely wonderful.

Chelsea Devantez was her name?

Chelsea Devantez. Yeah. Fabulous comedian.

Whenever I recommend books, I always go back to the books of my youth.

That’s great.

And so it’s always Kurt Vonnegut. Get your hands on Vonnegut. If there is anyone that I think more impressed my worldview, it was Vonnegut. This idea of a guy who had been through World War II and Dresden and yet still maintained a hopeful, humanistic approach, even tinged with the cynicism that obviously comes through people like George Carlin.

And any book by Carlin or Vonnegut. I know those sound disparate.

Where do you start? Give me a Vonnegut.

I would start “Breakfast of Champions” with Vonnegut. Or maybe “Player Piano.” Boy, you just can’t go wrong. “Cat’s Cradle.” You can’t go wrong. “Slaughterhouse Five.” Whatever you want to do. “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.” Whatever you want. It just doesn’t matter, because you’ll dive in, and you’ll be transported to that world of a hopeful, heartbroken man writing about what he thinks people could be.

It’s the William Shatner Blue Origin moment, when he goes up in space and he looks down on the earth and goes, “How are we blowing this? How the [expletive]? In this dark expanse of nothingness, we have the one —” it’s the same thing, I think, as when they always say, like, “We’re going to Mars.” And you’re like, “But the water and the food is here. Why don’t we just stay here and make this work? What’s wrong with that?”

A hopeful, heartbroken man. Jon Stewart, thank you very much.

All right.

You can listen to our conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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