Episode 229: Sociopathic ‘You Got To Hand It To ’Em’ Punditry and the Rise of Politics as Sport
Citations Needed | October 1, 2025 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
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[Music]
Nima: “What Liberals Can Learn from Ron DeSantis,” opines New York Times columnist Pamela Paul. “I’ve had my disagreements with [Netanyahu], but he’s handled this remarkably well,” declares CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. “President Trump, in terms of raw accomplishments, crushed his first six months in historic ways,” argue Axios founders Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen.
Adam: There’s a recurring mode of punditry in elite media extolling the so-called tactics, accomplishments, and victories of far-right figures in global politics, whether they be Trump, Netanyahu, or a seemingly never-ending revolving door of cruel, mean, and violent Republican governors using their power to hurt vulnerable constituents. Media pundits put on the ESPN commentator cap and reduce the life-and-death domain of politics to a sport with winners and losers, and of course, the all-important horse race. And the savvy commentators in question, calling balls and strikes, we are led to believe, have no real skin in the game, are rooting for no particular outcome, but simply respect a winner when they see one.
Nima: So what’s at stake when major media personalities remove normative and moral context to applaud such deeply sinister people? How does this serve to rehabilitate war criminals and promote and downplay the human stakes of genocide, austerity regimes, and discrimination? And how does this mode of reducing deeply important issues of who is permitted to live and prosper and who is condemned to death and hardship to a sporting event, desensitize the public to politics, sow cynicism, and seek to turn us all into dispassionate observers of politics as merely a game?
Adam: On today’s episode, we’ll examine the trope of sociopathic punditry that prizes accomplishments over morality and human stakes, looking at how media outlets use praise of ostensibly neutral personality traits like intelligence or earned media or racking up wins to obscure urgent matters of ideology, and how the broader media trend of politics as sport is designed to naturalize a process of mass dispossession and death and reduce politics to something we game out, witness, and gawk at, rather than participate in.
Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be joined by Jack Mirkinson, senior editor at The Nation magazine and co-founder of Discourse Blog.
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Jack Mirkinson: Objectivity, it underscores the hollowness and the ever-shifting nature of what gets to be defined as objectivity and what doesn’t, and who is allowed to be deemed objective and who isn’t.
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Adam: So this is a spiritual sequel —
Nima: Patent pending, patent pending.
Adam: Patent pending — to Episode 87: Nate Silver and the Crisis of Pundit Brain, from September of 2019, where we went over a specific mode of pundit brain that abstracts out politics to issues of savviness and insider-ness and vague notions of accomplishment.
Nima: The, you gotta give it to them, right? You gotta hand it to them style of punditry.
Adam: Yeah, you gotta hand it to them. But what it does, more than anything, is it uses the language of description to smuggle in what we argue is normative claims. So what we’re arguing is that there is not some neat and clean distinction between descriptive and normative commentary in politics, and that oftentimes when we do talk about leaders as competent, the proverbial the trains run on time, or kind of executing an agenda with a qualifier of setting aside the morality of it, which is one trait we’ll see here, that really what you’re doing is you’re saying, This guy’s a winner. And if there’s one thing we know about Americans is they generally value competency and winning, and so these become backdoor statements, especially when they’re dealing with things like genocide and austerity and people’s basic, fundamental human rights, when these things are treated as a game, especially among vulnerable communities, right?
And we’ll discuss why that isn’t the inverse is not the case when we’re talking about those of privilege and status whose lives matter. When we discuss things in this kind of cold, calculated way, it’s seen as insensitive. But when it’s you know, whether or not we are savvy enough to deport immigrants or savvy enough to throw trans people under the bus, or savvy enough to keep supporting a genocide, it promotes this broader sociopathy in our politics that this is all kind of abstract and a game.
And in the age of the internet, things become even more detached. They become more remote, and you seem like you’re kind of playing a video game that you sort of listen and chime into politics to see if your team won that day and to see who’s really good at the game. And so what we argue is that this is not some kind of innocent posture. It is a) primarily because a lot of people are paid talk about politics, who, because of their wealth and privilege, really don’t have any skin in the game and it is largely academic to them, just as a matter of course. But b) it’s a way of reducing politics to a game with the implication that to kind of homer for one side is seen as anathema, that it’s seen as déclassé. It is seen as beneath a sort of high-status pundit, and it makes one the dreaded ‘I’ word: ideological.
Nima: This kind of framing has historically been applied to military officials, one of the most prominent of whom is Confederate General Robert E. Lee. For decades, and now over a century, media have characterized Lee as a brilliant tactician with either no mention of his defense of slavery, a mild and obligatory expression of disagreement, or sometimes even an outright denial of any immorality or impropriety, the reverence of Robert E Lee, in fact, had become widespread already by the first decades of the 20th century, just decades after the end of the Civil War, with some southern states observing Lee’s birthday, January 19, as a holiday.
On that day in 1928, in fact, the New York Times published a piece headlined, quote, “Lee the American,” end quote. In the piece, the Times wrote that Lee, who was commanding the Confederate Army six-and-a-half decades earlier, quote, “never fought for,” end quote, slavery and heralded his, quote, “devotion to the doctrine of states’ rights,” end quote. The Times in the piece elaborated this way. Quote,
after the surrender at Appomattox, General LEE used his great influence as the idol of his people to bring the seceding States back into the Union body and soul, and himself set the example of good citizenship.
End quote. In response to what had become such popular worship of Lee by that time, W.E.B. Du Bois offered an indispensable counter to this coverage, writing the following In that same year, 1928. Quote,
Each year on the 19th of January there is renewed effort to canonize Robert E. Lee, the greatest confederate general. His personal comeliness, his aristocratic birth and his military prowess all call for the verdict of greatness and genius. But one thing–one terrible fact–militates against this and that is the inescapable truth that Robert E. Lee led a bloody war to perpetuate slavery.
Copperheads like the New York Times may magisterially declare: “of course, he never fought for slavery.” Well, for what did he fight? State rights? Nonsense. The South cared only for State Rights as a weapon to defend slavery. If nationalism had been a stronger defense of the slave system than particularism, the South would have been as nationalistic in 1861 as it had been in 1812.
End quote.
Adam: I love the idea that they fought for this abstract political principle, and then you’re like, Well, what states’ rights? It’s like the chasing goose meme, right? Well, states’ rights. What states’ rights? There’s literally only one states’ rights they cared about. But again, this was the kind of consolation prize, this kind of faux, He was a patriot. He really cared for his people. He was fighting for his land.
Nima: He was torn, right? He was kind of a torn and tortured figure. He had affinity for Northern sensibilities. He studied at West Point. But, you know, Hey, man, he was a Virginian at heart, and he just couldn’t turn his back on, quote-unquote, “his people.”
Adam: I mean, ultimately, right? The reality is, what you want to do is you want to downplay the racist aspect, because it’s in everyone’s best interest to do that, or to downplay the ideological commitment to slavery as central to, you know, Southern ideology, and, of course, American founding. It’s a consolation prize. It’s like, okay, you lost, you were humiliated. But we’re going to praise Lee as this savvy guy, principled guy, because, I don’t know, we need to sort of throw you a bone so you feel good about yourself, I guess? I mean, this is political reconciliation and ego soothing, reverse-engineered from history, right? You’re sort of taking, you need to make a bunch of angry white guys feel good about themselves. We’re going to give you a consolation prize. Actually, he was a military genius.
And the New York Times would keep perpetuating this narrative. Again on his birthday, in 1957, January, 19, 1957, a New York Times headline would read, quote, “Lee’s Greatness Lay in Ideas; Military Genius Inspired South,” and it would write, quote,
One military analyst suggested that Lee’s generalship was one of the most costly examples of genius the United States had ever fostered. Because of the brilliance of Lee’s strategy and tactics, he estimated, the South was able to prolong its war against the North for more than a year and a half after the conflict would otherwise have ended.
Unquote. The Times didn’t criticize this analysis, but rather implicitly endorsed it. The implication here is that it was good that the Confederates didn’t surrender earlier, because this was a testament to Lee’s tactical acuity. Readers were thus invited not to view Lee as having prolonged the system of slavery and prolonged a bloody war to end slavery, but as simply being the product of someone who’s just such a goddamn military genius he couldn’t help but to be the scrappy underdog.
Again, all this is pursuant to removing the moral content of the Civil War. You could make the argument generously, it’s to sort of reconcile two opposing geographic–but really it’s just about making white people feel good about themselves, because that’s how you sort of smooth things over in this country.
Nima: And it is this kind of commentary and this kind of narrative when perpetuated again here by northern press, by the New York Times, no less, that allows the dismantling of Reconstruction. It allows the ongoing terror of lynchings across the South, and also not just in the South in the decades after the Civil War, all the way up to when this article was published in the late ’50s. It allows Jim Crow to sustain itself because you are insisting on lauding the traitorous general of the seceding states, the Confederacy of the United States, that caused the Civil War, but when you praise the military prowess and tactical genius of its military commander, we see this a lot more with Lee than with, say, Jefferson Davis, who was the president of the Confederacy, right? That, Hey, we’re just talking about military strategy here, guys, and you gotta hand it to him. The guy was a genius. Doing that perpetuates the narrative that even what he was doing had some sort of nobility to it, right? It had some sort of strategy and some sort of intelligence behind it. It was not just purely to defend a system of slavery.
Adam: Well, the you-gotta-hand-it-to-him-ism is fundamentally a way of trivializing the moral content of the objection, right? Because, look, if we’re in an academic setting, let’s say you’re in a military strategy class at Harvard, and you want, I mean, okay, fine, you can do you-gotta-hand-it-to-him-ism in that context, but in a broad popular sense, the you-gotta-hand-it-to-him-ism, whether it’s Robert E. Lee or, you know, or DeSantis or Trump or other people we’ll talk about, is clearly designed to make a backdoor normative statement, or at least trivialize the normative objections to those people to say, Well, yeah, but you gotta hand it to them. It’s like the you gotta hand it to ISIS thing. It’s clearly like, Okay, we’re going to kind of reconcile these two warring sides by hand-waving away their fundamental differences, and saying, Yeah, but he was confident. He was good at his job. And then you sort of morph into, Actually, he wasn’t really fighting for slavery. It was for, you know, states’ rights. Well, again, W.E.B. Du Bois, what states’ rights? Which one in particular was it, the right to grow crops in a certain direction?
Nima: Hitler really cared about German sovereignty, and he made the trains run on time. So you gotta hand it to him, Holocaust aside.
Adam: Yeah, I mean, the you gotta hand it to him stuff, and anyone who studies Holocaust studies or white supremacist corners of the internet knows that you-gotta-hand-it-to-him-ism is the gateway drug to saying, Well, actually, you know, blah, blah, right? Like you got to hand it to him, you know, he was a really savvy general. And it’s like, Okay.
Nima: He was upset over the, you know, terms that ended World War I, and so blah, blah, blah, blah blah.
Adam: Yeah, and outside a specific academic context, this really only serves one functional purpose, and it’s to trivialize the moral stakes of the thing you’re discussing. Obviously. I mean, this is what’s done. And now, moving into the ’90s and 2000s, this became an increasingly popular mode of reportage and punditry to kind of sell the liberals or centrists on Republicans. A Detroit Free Press editorial dated June 6, 1999, elevated John McCain from a low-tier presidential candidate to the high tier for the 2000 election. Editor Ron Zwonkowski celebrated McCain for his perceived decency, which would become a very popular framing of McCain. Specifically Jake Tapper, who at that point was a cub reporter for Salon magazine, who followed him around. Now, Zwonkowski wrote this, quote,
You may not agree with McCain, but you always know where he stands, and that is downright refreshing in politics. While generally conservative, he has bucked his party to pursue damage money from Big Tobacco and to push for significant campaign finance reform. He has been bluntly critical of the U.S. war effort in Yugoslavia, and is a diehard free-trader, even with Vietnam, where McCain was a prisoner of war for five years.
In an age of sound bites that say nothing or screaming rhetoric intended to attract attention, McCain is blunt, original, and–it appears–genuine.
Unquote.
Nima: [Laughs] I like how it says, “it appears.”
Adam: Yeah. And to be clear, the line about it being critical of the US war effort in Yugoslavia makes it seem as though he opposed the war, or at least had reservations about it. But it’s quite the opposite. Just weeks before this was published, in April of 1999, McCain had lobbied for the US to, quote, “use all necessary force and other means in Yugoslavia,” unquote, no matter how many people it may kill. And also, evidently, we are made to believe McCain’s pro-free-trade position is not a standard neoliberal political position, but as some sort of noble act of forgiveness to Vietnam, I guess, who flew all the way to Arizona to kidnap him and put him in a prison–Oh, wait, no, he came, he went over there.
Nima: [Laughs]
Adam: So anyway, we have this sort of idea that, Say what you will about him, McCain’s a straight shooter.
Nima: And this is what we mean by these normative statements that are smuggled into ideological positions, right, Adam? So the idea that, the, you know, blunt critique of the US war effort or die-hard free-trader, these are ascribed as bona fides. These are noble positions, which makes McCain more sympathetic, which makes him seem like he, you know, stands on principle and allows the author of this piece, Ron Zwonkowski, to talk about his own ideology and what he thinks is important by ascribing it to McCain’s personality traits and then say that this bluntness and originality and genuine decency is therefore an important aspect of his character, which then sets him apart from the kind of common understanding of the conservative Republican.
We saw this praise for McCain continue and even kind of increase when he was then running for president against Barack Obama in 2008. And we saw this kind of praise transferred over to his eventual running mate, Sarah Palin, the then governor of Alaska. In October of 2008, shortly before the election, the Washington Post proclaimed this in a headline, quote, “Ideologies aside, this has been the year of the political woman,” end quote. The Post’s Lois Romano wrote this, quote,
Palin’s candidacy has sent a jolt through traditional liberal women’s organizations as she tries to redefine feminism, suggesting that the old movement has become detached from the hockey moms Palin champions. The mother of five and former beauty queen, is the antithesis of the bra-burning militant libbers of the ’60s, and she is adamantly anti-abortion. Yet Palin has grabbed the feminist label vigorously and has been hailed as one by the thousands of supportive women who wave their lipstick tubes at her rallies.
End quote. Now the Post really couldn’t be bothered to consider that Palin’s attempts to frame her politics as, “quote-unquote,” feminist might be, I don’t know, a little disingenuous, and trying to claim a label to which she absolutely has no affinity. By the Post’s estimate, though, restricting people’s reproductive freedom is not an assault on people’s fundamental rights, right? That’s not anti-feminist, that’s not anti-women’s rights, that’s not anti-people’s rights, that’s not anti-human rights. No, no, this is now Feminism 2.0, Palin version, and Palin should be commended for pioneering it. After all, as it said, Ideologies aside, hey, she’s a woman in politics who’s made it kind of far.
Adam: Ideology aside. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Switching to the 2020s, Ron DeSantis got a lot of this coverage early in his nascent career of being a rightwing demagogue. A January 2023 New York Times article positioned Ron DeSantis as a savvy iconoclast featuring this headline, quote, “DeSantis Takes On the Education Establishment, and Builds His Brand,” unquote. So to be clear, the education establishment is not the billionaires who have been trying to privatize education for decades. It’s the establishment evile teachers’ unions. So here are some examples from the Times report:
DeSantis, quote, “banned instruction about gender identity and sexual orientation in kindergarten through third grade,” unquote. He, quote, “limited what schools and employers can teach about racism and other aspects of history and rejected math textbooks en masse for what the state called indoctrination,’” unquote. He also, quote, “banned the College Board’s Advanced Placement courses in African American studies for high school students,” unquote.
Aside from a few critical quotes, the Times has little interest in emphasizing the severe dangers of these policies, preferring instead to a) contextualize them within DeSantis’s own political career, as if that’s somehow of moral or journalistic import, that he’s somehow ascending on the Right because of his hard-nosed tactics or whatever, and b) to depict DeSantis as some sort of visionary facing off against a frozen and rigid education system. Apparently, attempts to destroy public education, as we know, is just a sign of being a, quote, “culture warrior” who, quote, “vows to take on liberal orthodoxy,” unquote.
So there’s this, a lot of this sort of you-got-to-hand-it-to-him reporting frames vulnerable groups, Black people, LGBTQ, immigrants, as part of some liberal establishment that has some proxy of power versus the vague sense that their baseline humanity is acknowledged by the system. And then Republicans are bucking this trend.
Nima: Exactly. That’s the dominant power structure, apparently. And so DeSantis, white guy in Florida, is able to push against that from a, you know, conservative Republican viewpoint, and this is how he’s doing it, and it’s not framed as being discriminatory and oppressive and racist. You know, I mean banning AP courses in African American studies for high school students. Doing that is all about indoctrination and ideology. But that is not the way that these articles then frame those efforts. They frame it as, Oh, he’s pretty savvy. He’s pretty savvy. He’s giving his supporters what they want.
Adam: Nobody wants to say this is a rich guy funded by other rich guys, you know, sort of 80-year-old white guys who own, you know, natural gas companies and car dealerships, to pick on people they perceive as being weak and inferior to them, because that sounds kind of mean. So everything has to be some plucky upstart taking on Big Liberalism. And it’s like, where? What Big Liberalism? This is Florida. What are you talking about?
And the following month, New York Times columnist Pamela Paul would write a now infamous piece entitled, quote, “What Liberals Can Learn from Ron DeSantis.” The New York Times columnist sort of acknowledged that DeSantis was sort of devoid of charisma, and obviously liberals wouldn’t like him, but he actually was sort of brimming with positive attributes. Paul called DeSantis, quote, “demonstrably intelligent and industrious,” unquote, citing that, he, quote, “worked his way through Yale while playing baseball and graduated magna cum laude,” unquote. So he’s a bootstrap case because he worked his way through Yale, I guess, playing baseball? This is a man who’s sort of made it his explicit mission in life to immiserate gay people, trans people, immigrants, right? Alligator Alcatraz. He’s one of the most cruel, vindictive, gratuitously mean human beings short of Trump who, Yeah, but he’s looking, look, he’s got, he’s really scrappy. He worked his way through law school. Again, these are not sort of puffy profiles we do of people who punish the people who are in power, sort of perceived as being in power, which, again, we’ll get into later.
And we see this a lot with overt racist demagogues like Randy Fine, who’s also in Florida, a congressman there. So Randy Fine has, just to give you a quick review, has called Rashida Tlaib, a quote, “terrorist,” who, quote, “shouldn’t be in America.” Tlaib was born in Detroit. He said, representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, quote, “might consider leaving before I get [to Congress]. #BombsAway,” unquote. He has advocated running over and killing pro-Palestinian protesters. He’s called Palestinians, quote, “animals.” He’s referred to Muslims as, quote, “rapists.” And as of late, he has openly cheer-led starvation in Gaza. In an online tirade a few months ago, Fine engaged in another racist attack on Rashida Tlaib posting on Twitter in response to Talib criticizing Israel starvation campaign. Quote, “Tell your fellow Muslim terrorists to release the hostages and surrender. Until then, #StarveAway,” unquote.
Now, this is someone who said horribly incendiary racist things for years. In 2021, he advocated running over Palestinians. Again, he’s called them animals, called them rapists, called Muslims inherently rapists. But this is how Politico wrote a puff piece on him when he came to Congress earlier this year in the special election. Quote, “DC, get ready for Randy Fine: ‘Hardest right hook in the business,’” unquote, and framed Fine as a, quote, “firebrand and confrontational lawmaker,” unquote, who has, quote, “gained a reputation for his bare-knuckle style of politics and spats with local officials,” unquote. Again, these are spats that are based on homophobia and racism, right? The piece detailed Fine’s bigoted statements, but never referred to them as such. The word ‘racist,’ ‘bigoted’ and ‘sexist,’ ‘homophobic,’ ‘Islamophobic,’ appears nowhere in the Politico puff piece. He’s just rough around the edges and quote, smart and quote, “articulates policy in ways people can easily understand,” unquote.
So again, racism, bigotry, demagoguery are framed as a tough right hook, right? He’s sort of a tough guy. You know, Say what you will about is racism, but you know, this, again, the purpose of these pieces is to neutralize what should be an intuitive liberal, or not even liberal, just kind of decent outrage for overt racism, to put it into the world of Okay, say what you will about his comments, which are “controversial,” but isn’t he really tough and fights hard for the people he represents? And this, of course, has backdoor normative content. It is designed to numb you to overt bigotry and to accept it as some kind of other political ideology, which we should all broadly accept as legitimate.
Nima: Now we’ve seen this, of course, with Trump for years, the way that elite media has written about him, giving endless, endless coverage that, even if it’s sort of, you know, nods to him being uncouth or again, a firebrand, is really just meant to dull what is animating his now numerous campaigns and now, unfortunately, two presidential administrations. Now, even recently, what we see from a lot of corporate outlets is the celebration of what they are deeming to be Trump, quote-unquote, “wins.”
So the New York Times, for example, ran a July 4 2025, story, right, Independence Day. July 4, 2025, story headlined quote, “From Court to Congress to the Mideast, Trump Tallies His Wins,” end quote. Now throughout this piece, the paper was overwhelmingly kind of agog at Trump’s list of, quote-unquote, “accomplishments.” It was enthralled by what he had allegedly achieved, which included, as the Times put it, the following:
Ordering the bombing of Iran, which the Times said, quote, “set back that nation’s nuclear program without triggering a broader conflict,” end quote.
He got the Supreme Court’s support to expand his executive power.
His administration has terrorized immigrants and potential immigrants, but the Times, preferring to frame this as–what else? — a, quote-unquote, “win,” put these policies this way, quote, “Illegal border crossings plummeted last month to the lowest numbers seen in decades,” end quote.
The Times also wrote about how Trump got a $16 million dollar settlement from Paramount, CBS’s parent company. This is effectively bribery, as we know. But so what? The Times really, you know, understands this as a victory for Trump. And of course, the Times talks about the passing of the, quote-unquote, “Big Beautiful Bill,” potentially the most hated piece of major US legislation within the last 35 years. But of course, the Times had a rosier view to share on Independence Day, stating that the bill’s passage, quote, “demonstrated once more [Trump’s] dominance of the Republican Party and set fiscal and social policy for years or decades to come,” end quote.
Now, yes, it is worth reading also the article’s subheadline, which is this, quote, “There are serious questions about the wisdom and durability of President Trump’s policies, but on his terms, he can point to a string of accomplishments,” end quote.
Adam: Now the Times has perfunctory concerns about, quote, “wisdom and durability,” unquote, primarily related to Trump’s quote, “polarization effect,” another kind of great ideology-avoidance term, and quote, “ever-swelling government debt,” another great backdoor rightwing ideological conceit, with no mention whatsoever of the cruelty of Trump’s policies domestically and abroad, in terms of who they actually harm, the people subject to these so called savvy, winning. There are people in the business end of this who are suffering from these policies. The Times was able to have its cake and eat it too, could preserve some sense of vague liberal credibility by gently criticizing Trump, but also preserve its institutional access by celebrating the world’s most powerful person as someone who, quote-unquote, “gets things done.”
Axios founders Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen have turned this mode of punditry and reportage into almost a religion. They shared the sentiment in one July 2025 column headlined “Behind the Curtain: Losing by winning,” unquote. The two opened with this, quote,
President Trump, in terms of raw accomplishments, crushed his first six months in historic ways. Massive tax cuts. Record-low border crossings. Surging tariff revenue. Stunning air strikes in Iran. Modest inflation.
Unquote. Now to call these “raw accomplishments” is to ignore the immense suffering these policies have leveled on working people and poor people overseas whose taxes are being cut. What does this mean for programs like Medicaid and the people who rely on Medicaid to survive? What about the violence required to quote, “keep border crossings at a record low?,” unquote. How many hundreds of people that were killed in these airstrikes on Iran just to promote the Dahiya doctrine of punishing civilians through deterrence? All of these concerns are not mentioned at all. It’s just this abstract game that Trump is winning at. The human stakes of his policies, to delve into those, to discuss those, to even mention them, really is to do the dreaded ‘I’ word. But of course, we already are doing the dreaded ‘I’ word by promoting these things as sterile, ESPN-type commentary that it’s like, he’s just winning.
Now the Axios founders would go on to write, quote, “Yet poll after poll suggests most Americans aren’t impressed. In fact, they seem tired of all the winning.” Unquote. Yes, and causing worldwide immiseration and supporting pointless wars is a form of winning and getting things done, but people maybe don’t like those things. They don’t like to have Medicare cuts. They don’t like to have pointless bombings of Iran. They don’t like tax cuts for the rich.
Nima: Yeah, and they, even, you know, acknowledge that Trump’s immigration policy was what they refer to as, quote-unquote, “harsh,” and they say that the tariffs imposed were, quote-unquote, “high,” and that these might be, I don’t know, contributing factors to polls showing widespread disapproval of Trump’s second presidency, already a 42% disapproval rating overall and a 95% disapproval rating among Democrats. But still, the Axios founders who wrote this piece decided it was just as important, really, to explain the numbers using flimsy pop-psychology notions by writing this, quote,
Some of Trump’s unpopularity reflects the law of thermostatic public opinion — voters demand change, then flinch when it arrives too fast or too hard.
End quote.
Adam: There’s very few topics where this level of sociopathy is leveled than on immigration. Immigration, as we’ve noted in the show in several episodes, is not spoken about as something that impacts human beings’ lives. It is not something that when you, quote-unquote, “militarize the border,” or, quote-unquote, “clamp down on the border,” that again, you may think the tradeoffs are worth it, right? You may sort of morally argue that this human suffering is worth it, but there’s no sense that there’s any actual human suffering. On the other end of this, that people’s lives are, people die in the desert. People are, families are torn apart. There are human stakes. Here it is talked about as just another lever you pull as a politician to win votes.
So Sahil Kapur at NBC News did a, I would say, a pretty bog-standard version of this when he tweeted out in January of 2024, he was referencing a poll that came out, a Quinnipiac poll showing that more Democratic voters in Pennsylvania want harsher immigration policies, which, of course, when they’re polled, are also polled euphemistically. Quote,
John Fetterman was blasted online for endorsing tougher immigration laws, but to Pennsylvania voters in this Quinnipiac poll? It’s a net positive. Voters say net +26 they view him more favorably for it. Not just Republicans and indys, even among *Democrats* it improves his image.
Okay, so the people criticizing him online for being cruel on immigration weren’t doing so because they thought it polled badly. What does this have to do with anything? A lot of things that are evil poll badly, right? Anti-miscegenation laws polled great until the ’70s. So what? And this kind of, again, sociopathic posture, because Kapur is ignoring the fact that that’s not why he was roasted online. What does it have to do with anything? He was roasted online because, ostensibly, as a progressive, he’s supposed to defend people who can’t defend themselves, not add to a Trumpian pile-on on an already very vulnerable group. And now we’re, of course, we’re seeing the fruits of that, right with respect to these ICE mass deportations and ripping people apart from families and going to Home Depot and sending people to gulags in El Salvador. There’s human stakes to this triangulation. There are people on the other end of that.
And instead of spending the resources finding out what that was, interviewing families whose lives can be upended. And that’s not to say that NBC News never does that. They do that occasionally, but it’s what, 10 to one, 20 to one, you get this kind of bullshit horserace coverage about, Well, cruelty polls well. Taking every 100th person and putting them into the city square and shooting them in the back of the head is trending at 67% right now. It’s like, Yeah, but what’s the point of politics? The point of politics is to improve people’s lives. It isn’t necessarily to chase polls. And this, again, this kind of institutional sociopath is designed inherently to dehumanize and to abstract out the suffering caused by these policies. It is designed to minimize and to gloss over the human stakes of the actual, very high stakes, human stakes. Because, again, American policy doesn’t just affect Americans. It affects the whole world of the people that are on the bad end of these so-called popular positions that you know are savvy and are winning and poll well.
Now, we see this a lot with Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which is routinely spoken about in these savvy, hard-nosed, winning and losing terms. In the summer of 2025, the Aspen Institute, which is funded by foundations led by Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, the Walton family, as well as scores of corporations, including Boeing, Exxon Mobil, it held its annual Aspen Ideas Festival. At one event there, Fareed Zakaria, the CNN commentator and Washington Post columnist, sat down with Economist editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in which Zakaria lavished praise on Benjamin Netanyahu, even though he sometimes, quote, “disagreed” with him. Again, this is someone who has killed upwards of probably 150 to 250,000, Palestinians, Yemeni, Syrian, Iranians, but hey, man, he’s just calling balls and strikes. Let’s listen to that clip right here.
[Begin clip]
Fareed Zakaria: And let’s personalize it, because I do think the big winner out of all this is Bibi Netanyahu, and let’s be honest. You know you have had your disagreements with him. I’ve had my disagreements with him. He has handled this remarkably well. Put aside, put aside the Gaza issue for a moment, which is its own very complicated issue, and certainly a humanitarian catastrophe. But in the North, what Bibi did was fundamentally change the balance of power in the region. He went after Hezbollah, they collapsed. Turned out to be a paper tiger. He goes out. He continues his strikes on Syria. The Syrian regime collapses. He goes after Iran’s air defenses. The Iranians turn out to be a paper tiger as well, can barely respond to those, to those attacks on their air defenses. And then decides to go after Iran itself.
[End clip]
Adam: So again, setting aside all the human misery and destruction and destabilization and unleashing of sectarian forces and paying ISIS in Gaza, setting all that aside, the hundreds of thousands of dead people, the maimed children, the children without arms and legs, setting all that aside, can’t we agree that he’s a big winner out of all–? I mean, what is the point of that type of commentary?
Nima: And the wins, the wins that Zakaria even mentioned? I mean, there’s a, sounds like a fucking maniac talking. This is, this is a crazy thing to say, but he knows what room he’s in. He knows how this is going to be received. This is the, quote-unquote “elite opinion,” right? And the accomplishments that he is cataloging here for Netanyahu, every single one of them is a war crime. Bombing other countries and assassinating political and military leaders in places where you are not, you know, even officially at war. I mean, even if you were, there are all sorts of problems there, of course, obviously, but this idea of Gaza aside, because that’s a whole issue, and it’s a humanitarian disaster, even itself, that term elides the responsibility of Netanyahu and his government and all of Israel in perpetuating not only a genocide, but decades-long apartheid systems, decades-long occupation and ethnic cleansing, over a century of colonization.
Like, Oh, yeah, but sure, setting that aside. Now there’s just some humanitarian crisis, but, you know, we can talk about that later. That’s more about just like, how many you know, trucks of food can get in. It’s not part and parcel to an exterminationist policy that this guy is now presiding over, that Zakaria is, you know, basically praising him for destroying what, you know, and we’ve talked about this on the show before, Adam, the so-called Shia Crescent, right? The power axis emanating from Tehran through Beirut that now this, again, ideological statement masked as normative account, that is seen as just being good. Hezbollah collapsing, good. Iran being bombed, good. These are just statements that are made without any kind of context because when you are making these statements to this kind of audience, and when you have this kind of perspective that CNN, Washington Post’s Fareed Zakaria, when he’s talking to the fucking editor-in-chief of The Economist, when he’s talking to Thomas Friedman in a room at Aspen Ideas Festival, this is the shit you can get away with. You can say, you know, Genocide aside, he’s such a big winner for us.
Adam: And we know it’s offensive, and we know it’s vulgar, because when the shoe is on the other foot, Western media has a total meltdown. So we’ll just give you one, I think, really, really telling example. When Joseph Massad, a professor at Columbia University who Bari Weiss, when she was a student there, spent years trying to get him fired, he is a Palestinian writer. He wrote for Electronic Intifada an article on October 8, 2023, giving the October 7 attack the same treatment that Zakaria and Axios and numerous other Western pundits give the killing of brown people every day. He gave Israel that treatment, and it led to countless shock and faux-outrage and pearl-clutching. So he wrote the article“Just another battle or the Palestinian war of liberation?”, in which Massad outlined the attack of October 7, considering them coldly and honestly as a military operation of resistance, rather than, you know, a kind of cartoon terror plot for just the purposes of sadistic glee.
Now, in response, major media outlets had a meltdown over this, viewing it as being callous and cruel and dehumanizing to the victims of October 7. Here are some examples.
Jerusalem Post, Oct. 13, 2023, “Columbia professor praises Hamas attacks on civilians.”
Which he did not, but not that that really matters.
Business Insider from Oct. 16, 2023, “A Columbia professor called Hamas terror attacks ‘awesome’ and ‘astounding’ in an article. A petition for his removal has passed 34,000 signatures.”
The Business Insider piece opened up with this:
A Columbia professor who praised Hamas’ “awesome” terror attacks on Israel in an online article is facing calls for his removal in an online petition that has now surpassed 30,000 signatures.
But Massad didn’t praise the attacks. Here’s the sentence in which the word ‘astounding’ appeared. Quote,
The sight of the Palestinian resistance fighters storming Israeli checkpoints separating Gaza from Israel was astounding, not only to the Israelis but especially to the Palestinian and Arab peoples who came out across the region to march in support of the Palestinians in their battle against their cruel colonizers.
Unquote. If the site was astounding to Israelis as well, then astounding means shocking, not cool or great or awesome. Here’s the sentence in which the word ‘awesome’ appears. Quote,
No less awesome were the scenes witnessed by millions of jubilant Arabs who spent the day watching the news, of Palestinian fighters from Gaza breaking through Israel’s prison fence or gliding over it by air.
Unquote. Awesome, again, doesn’t mean cool or good. This is a common usage of the word. It literally means awesome, as in, to create awe. So it is astounding. It is awesome in that sense. And when you read it in context, it doesn’t really even sound that provocative.
In another example, The New York Times stated this in a piece from October 24, 2023, quote, “In an anti-Zionist publication, the Electronic Intifada, Professor Massad described the Hamas attack as a ‘stunning victory.’” Unquote. it would help if the Times had published some, again, more context. Massad wrote this, quote,
the stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance over the Israeli military on the first day of fighting is a historic event both for Israel, as Netanyahu admitted, and for the Palestinians.
Again, ‘stunning’ here means shocking or staggering. It doesn’t necessarily invoke normative value. But again, and this is key here, they were so outraged that they got the cold, calculated, just-calling-balls-and-strikes treatment, right? That brown people who get murdered every day get every single day in Western media, because it seemed to implicitly endorse the normative content of the October 7 attack. Now, doesn’t that seem familiar? Doesn’t that seem like something that’s being done all the time? But when the shoe is on the other foot, it’s again, pearl-clutching, reach for the smelling salts, How dare you? But again, if you read Massad’s piece, it is just a cold piece of analytical military strategic assessment. And when it’s done, one for the other 10,000 that are done for talking about how savvy and strategic, again, the New York Times runs one of these every day for Israel, does this kind of gaming out strategy. How many people do they need to starve?
Nima: Every time Israel has assassinated civilian scientists, we get the, Oh, we’re going to see how they James Bond-ed this. And we get a play-by-play that’s been leaked directly to New York Times reporters by Israeli intelligence and military officials. And we get this very, very cool rundown of how they were murdering people alongside their families. But again, when you see it the other way, straight to the fainting couch.
Adam: Yeah, and of course, they’re all decontextualized. They take these descriptive words, they give them normative purchase, normative value. Again, something that’s never done for the thousands and thousands of, let’s game out how many brown people we can bomb.
Nima: To discuss this more, we’re now going to be joined by Jack Mirkinson, senior editor at The Nation magazine and co-founder of Discourse Blog. Jack will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
[Music]
We are now joined by Jack Mirkinson, Jack, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Jack Mirkinson: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.
Adam: So in our discussion of politics as game, politics as kind of ESPN sports punditry, where the pundit in question, or the even sometimes reporter or journalist, kind of sets aside value judgments, or normative judgments, and just kind of games out politics, like who’s kind of winning, who’s losing. We discussed the top of the show that it’s popular with Trump, Netanyahu, others, consistent with Matt Yglesias’s style of punditry, where you kind of backdoor-in normative claims under the pretense of just calling balls and strikes or kind of doing descriptive analysis. Because Americans like winners. They like people who win. You know, there’s polling that actually shows this. It’s obviously a form of normative analysis. You’re saying that this guy’s a winner. And you see this most acutely and most, I think, callously, with Netanyahu, where, after he assassinated, again, after killing thousands and thousands of children, the head of Hezbollah or the head of Hamas, there was this flood of takes talking about how Netanyahu was on a winning streak. He was winning.
Now, this comes off, I think, for people who are on the other end of these genocidal policies or violent policies, whether it’s Trump or Netanyahu or whoever, can come off kind of callous. And it does seem like it serves a purpose of desensitizing people to the sort of human stakes. I think it’s a sort of recurring theme on the show where violence leveled out by the Good Guys is kind of anodyne and clinical and not emotionally charged. So talk about this kind of politics as a game, politics as an ESPN analyst on one of those panels where they have, like, 16 people yelling. What do you think this sort of does to the broader political discourse?
Jack Mirkinson: I think it makes it pretty morally bankrupt, for one. I know that we’ve all seen, for instance, the video of Fareed Zakaria from CNN, which, I hadn’t realized exactly who he was talking to in that clip until I was rewatching it in preparation for this. He’s talking to Thomas Friedman and the editor of The Economist.
Nima: It was, like, created in a lab for Citations Needed.
Jack Mirkinson: Yes, a true murderer’s row of horribleness. And the phrase that really stuck out to me in what he said was something like, Let’s put the Gaza issue aside for a moment and just talk about how he’s been on this big winning streak, how he’s done extraordinarily well. And in that little phrase, Let’s put aside the Gaza issue. First of all, it’s not an issue. It is, whatever you want to call it, a complete nightmare being unleashed on people in Gaza. And secondly, in what world is it deemed to be any kind of substantive or useful political or geopolitical analysis to put aside what is clearly the main issue when it comes to Netanyahu?
Nima: Yeah, putting aside Jefferson Davis’s Presidency of the Confederacy and anything having to do with the Civil War, we should really see that he’s been winning lately.
Jack Mirkinson: Yeah, put aside the slavery issue, the South really did a good job for a long time.
Adam: Yeah. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Jack Mirkinson: Right. And so I think, first of all, it is a reflection of just how disconnected all of these sort of powerful pundits and media figures are from any sort of real-world concerns. They are able and eager to treat politics as a game, because for them, it is a game. It is not something that affects people they know. It’s not something that reaches into their inner circle. It’s not something that impacts their lives, because they are part of the class of people who get to skate above the rest of us, no matter what happens. So when Donald Trump is unleashing whatever latest horror of the day he happens to feel like doing, it doesn’t matter to them, because they are at a remove from any of the impacts of those decisions.
When Republicans and Democrats are fighting over how terrible to make a piece of legislation in Congress, it’s exciting for them on a very abstract level, because what do they care if Medicaid gets cut to smithereens? They have premium healthcare that they can afford, no matter how much it costs. So I think it is a reflection of how insular and how privileged this class of media figures is, and it’s a reflection of what sort of rewarding this kind of subservience to power, and what role having that much money, really, in your life, while being tasked with analyzing the world for the rest of us does to you.
And finally, I think it allows them to pretend like they don’t have any sort of stake in any of these outcomes beyond just sort of an intellectual interest, and that they don’t have a role in shaping the perception of those outcomes. If you are just sort of able to step back and say, Well, take out any moral judgments. That’s not what I do. I just call balls and strikes, then you get to pretend like you don’t have your thumb on the scale. But as we know from John Roberts, who famously said he just called balls and strikes, that’s nonsense. These people are in a position of considerable power in terms of their ability to shape how the rest of us see events, interpret events, they are sort of tasked, or they have tasked themselves with helping the rest of the world understand what is going on, and so for them to be able to both do that and then at the same time claim that they actually are just sort of these passive analysts of the world, rather than people at the heart of shaping everyone else’s perception about how we see the world, they’re able to get away with a great deal of really pernicious behavior.
I don’t know if you saw this guy, Harry Enten on CNN. This clip went around a lot, and he was talking about how the polling around Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t really making a hit on his overall popularity. And he said, Oh, the Epstein story is clearly a political nothingburger, and Trump has some of the best political instincts that I’ve ever seen. And he realized that people weren’t going to care about this over the long term. Now, to be fair to him, he also says like, Oh, he’s underwater on inflation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He’s not doing well on these issues. But he is part of a whole group of people whose job it is to sort of say, Well, all I’m doing is looking at polling.
Adam: Right. And we saw this a lot, of course, in 2024, when it was like, which has now been almost, I think, thoroughly debunked, Harris and Biden don’t really have to worry about Gaza. The polls don’t really show it’s that important. And what they would point to is like, What’s your top priority? And people would not rank it in the top five, but the people for whom it was a top priority, they were overwhelmingly swing voters, like, disaffected Democrats, think people you need to win, and then other polls would show the exact opposite, especially after the election. But there was this idea that, like, Oh, it’s a nothingburger. It’s a way of, kind of avoiding the ideological content in a way of dismissing things that are inconvenient under the auspices of just yeah, just doing pundit brain, just kind of being savvy and calling balls and strikes.
Nima: Netanyahu eats three Palestinian babies for breakfast every day. But you know what? It doesn’t seem like Israeli society really cares about that, so therefore it’s a nothingburger.
Jack Mirkinson: Right. Or, Say what you will, but Trump is racking up a lot of wins. You may not think that the wins are good. You may have a problem with him sending every immigrant he can to a gulag, but in Nebraska, 55% of people love the gulag. So I guess it’s probably okay.
Nima: Now let’s look at this from the other side, though, Jack. So what is kind of very telling, what kind of gives this game away, is that when you do this with individuals, organizations, entire nations that are deemed Official Enemies of, say, the US imperial state, it solicits outrage and is viewed as a tacit, if not explicit, moral endorsement of those entities that you are commenting on, that you are no longer looking through the glass at a museum exhibition and just sort of analyzing it. You are now part of that exhibition. You are now hand-in-glove with exactly what you are talking about. It is no longer this sort of removed analysis when it’s about Official Enemies of the United States and our allies, it becomes, You are now implicated in your own commentary.
So here’s one example. On October 8, 2023, renowned scholar and Columbia University Professor Joseph Massad wrote an analysis of the October 7 attack for the Electronic Intifada entitled, quote, “Just another battle or the Palestinian war of liberation?” And in the piece, Massad did a cold, analytical breakdown of the logic and goals of the October 7 attack that, again, had just happened, but at no point endorsed it. The article led to a full-blown media meltdown–surprise, surprise–and was the central argument seeking Professor Massad’s firing from Columbia. It was also exhibit A in Congress when members of Congress tried to get him and Columbia’s president fired. This was what was referred to as being basically, you know, in league with Hamas. So Jack, can you talk about this clear double standard and how when you talk about, quote-unquote, “allies,” you can do this sort of calling balls and strikes. It’s all a horse race, who’s winning, who’s losing, even if there are no ideological issues to actually contend with here, let’s just talk about it, you know, kind of in the abstract. But you can’t do that when it comes to, quote-unquote, “enemies.” Why do you think this is? [Chuckles] And, you know, clearly what kind of ideological work is this doing?
Jack Mirkinson: When I was thinking about this, one example that really came to mind, and I almost hate bringing this up, because he’s so horrible now, but was Bill Maher, right after 9/11, when he said, essentially, Say what you will about al-Qaeda, but they were not cowardly for carrying out September 11. They took a big risk, and it’s the Americans who are cowardly for lobbing cruise missiles from far away to kill the people they want to kill. And you know, that was not an endorsement of 9/11, unless I’m very much mistaken about what Bill Maher actually thinks. But it completely destroyed his career for a long time.
Adam: Unfortunately not long enough.
Jack Mirkinson: Unfortunately not long enough. He did come back, you know, which, yeah, this is one place where it would have been maybe better if the repression machine had worked. [Laughs]
Nima: Right. If cancel culture were real.
Jack Mirkinson: Exactly. But, I mean, I remember that very vividly, you know, and the White House press secretary at the time said, People need to watch what they say. You know, it was this huge scandal, but that was because he had made the fatal mistake of treating this event with a sort of analytical distance, and you were not supposed to do that.
Nima: With context, with history, right?
Jack Mirkinson: Yes, you know. And also just saying, Listen, hijacking a plane and flying it into a tower is taking pretty direct personal responsibility for something. It’s horrifying, but on an objective level, that’s what’s going on.
Adam: Right. Because, again, it’s when the shoe is on the other foot, right? It’s very obvious that there is moral content to this particular posture. If I’m living in a fucking refugee camp and have lost half of my family to Israeli bombs, and I hear Fareed Zakaria talk about how Netanyahu is on a winning streak, obviously, that’s insensitive. And when Joseph Massad writes this article that is, again, not even, it’s not glib or anything, but it’s coldly analytical, it’s like, what is the logic? What is the Palestinian resistance movement thinking? What was their thought process? It was perceived on this very visceral, I think he even says, this was an awesome attack in the sense of the word ‘awesome,’ like, it creates awe. Not ‘awesome’ like he’s a California surfer guy from the ‘80s.
Nima: Like ‘rad.’
Adam: Yeah. And then Bari Weiss says, Joseph Massad thinks it’s awesome that Israeli women are raped, whatever, they’re sort of distorted into this cartoon. And it’s like, it kind of sucks when it’s about people you care about and your, you know, quote-unquote, “your side.” It sort of seems very glib, doesn’t it?
Nima: Right. Shock and awe is not a rah-rah, Mission Accomplished thing when you actually care about the people who are being shocked and awed.
Adam: To me, it was very illustrative of, very much, how this sort of faux-objective, faux-neutral balls-and-strikes guy probably comes across, again, fairly glib and racist to the vast majority of the world to sort of project onto them.
Jack Mirkinson: Yeah, and I’m really glad that you mentioned objectivity. It underscores the hollowness and the ever-shifting nature of what gets to be defined as objectivity and what doesn’t, and who is allowed to be deemed objective and who isn’t. You know, I mean, Bari Weiss, who, I think, correct me, if I’m wrong, has history with Joseph Massad from her Columbia days.
Nima: Oh, indeed. Has been trying to get him fired for a very long time.
Jack Mirkinson: Right. And has run this genocidal rag now for a bunch of years. It has been in very serious talks to be bought out by CBS News. So if you talk about Palestinians in the way that Bari Weiss does, you get to be not only deemed permissible by mainstream media standards, but you get maybe a huge payout, and you get to be part of one of the oldest and previously most respected mainstream news organizations in America. If you have the audacity to say that on a military level, on an intelligence level, October 7 was a pretty significant event, whatever you want to say about how it played out, and to be clear, I do not endorse October 7, for anyone who might be listening, that will get you completely smeared, blackballed, it’ll have politicians running after you.
And the gap between the very, very intense scrutiny of even the most minor sort of deviations from mainstream consensus around these things that is placed upon people, for instance, on the pro-Palestinian side, you know, I mean, I read that Massad story, and it is very cold and analytical. But he also says there’s a horrifying human toll on all sides, which is a hell of a lot more of a concession to the lives of Israeli civilians who were killed on October 7, then the vast majority of things that people like Bari Weiss have published about people in Gaza. I mean, Bari Weiss, the Free Press published a piece recently, sort of backhandedly admitting that there was a famine in Gaza that led off by saying, Unlike all the previous times when everyone in Gaza has been lying about a humanitarian catastrophe, this one might be real.
Adam: Well, they have to say that since in May, they published the article “The Gaza Famine Myth.”
Jack Mirkinson: Right, you know. And so if you’re that kind of person, if you’re Bret Stephens, you know, who’s able to just publish whatever genocide-glorifying propaganda he wants at any time of the day, then you get to be in the New York Times as much as you wish. And so you really see in moments like this, and particularly around the issue of Gaza, because it is so self-evidently a moral catastrophe as well as a humanitarian catastrophe that is being rained down upon people in Gaza, you really see who is deemed to matter more and who is deemed to matter less, and who it is acceptable to speak about in completely dehumanized terms.
I mean, I think if people wanted that piece in the Electronic Intifada to take account more of what was going on with the emotions of Israelis, or to have more space for the fact that hundreds of Israeli civilians were killed, I’ve heard more illegitimate beefs than that about a piece of writing, but if you are going to say that, then you also have to say that there needs to be equal amounts of space for the suffering of Palestinians, and when you have a death toll in Gaza that massively dwarfs anything that has happened in Israel, and when you have a level of suffering and continuous suffering that is sort of beyond the scope of any of us who are not in Gaza to even conceive of, and then asking for even balance between those two things is deemed to be somehow amoral or sickening, then you really see how the media narrative gets created, and you really see who is valued and who isn’t.
Adam: I mean, because it’s not as if–I want to be clear. It’s not as if I don’t think there is a place for cold analysis on, you know, matters of war, quote-unquote, “war,” right? I don’t think Massad is out of place doing that. He analyzes Palestinian resistance movements, that makes sense. And obviously people who write for specific, you know, military. But there’s kind of two things going on here, which is that the people who traffic in this, your kind of Fareed Zakarias. Your Matt Yglesiases. They’re not actual analysts of any of these things. They’re just pundits. Right? And there’s the second issue, which I think is far more important, which is the issue of incumbency, if you’re situated and oriented in a very powerful country that is carrying out a genocide, and you’re talking about the subjects of that, obviously, Fareed Zakaria doesn’t work for the US government per se, but he’s very much positioned within that power structure.
Jack Mirkinson: Yeah. Emphasis on per se.
[Laughter]
Adam: Goes to parties. Knows them. So it’s like you have a sort of added, Joseph Massad, for example, doesn’t work for Hamas. He doesn’t work for Iran or whatever, right? So it’s like you have an added, I think, obligation, honestly, sensitive, because I don’t want to think we’re being overly precious here, but it definitely begins to promote a level of sociopathy, a level of dehumanization and a level of disconnect between the actual human stakes of what it is you’re talking about. And I think it does so through a process we’ve talked about in the show. We have a whole episode on, Episode 70 and 71 are on laundering imperial violence through anodyne foreign-policy speak, where we talk about the ways in which terms like no-fly zone, modernize the military, all options on the table. There is a sort of foreign-policy speak that emerges among Western pundits that they begin to adopt, just like beat reporters adopt cop speak. It’s sort of, and cop speak serves the same purpose, which is to sterilize–
Nima: ‘Combat-aged male.’
Adam: ‘Combat-aged males.’ And among, you know, dozens of others. This is part of a broader regime of, Fareed Zakaria just talks to Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken all day. He’s not in a fucking refugee camp in Rafah. And all the other pundits, your sort of Jake Tappers, your Matt Yglesiases, your kind of high-status pundits, they don’t give a shit about the human cost. To them, it’s just a fucking pawn on a chessboard. I mean, quite frankly, I really do believe that. We could argue that, I don’t think they’re sort of, I don’t think they’re genuinely sociopathic, but I think a sociopathic worldview, epistemology, begins to emerge when you’re seeped in that kind of rhetoric, those kinds of nice, glossy, glassy rooms where decisions are made in Brussels and Washington and Tel Aviv.
And I think that this type of punditry is not something that necessarily the public and the CNN-watching viewer is clamoring for, although it is fairly cheap to do. It is, I think part of them talking to themselves. It’s a culture of dehumanization that is conditioned in international-studies programs and the universities. And, I hate to say it, but Alec Karakatsanis writes about this a lot, in law schools, how you sort of talk about people going to prison for 30, 40, years, like it’s some kind of fucking academic exercise. This particular mode of punditry very much promotes that worldview, that there’s kind of people who, there’s deciders, there’s people who make decisions, and there’s people on the business end of those decisions, and it’s unfortunate for them and in some vague sense, they may feel some pang of sympathy, but mostly they just don’t give a shit.
Jack Mirkinson: Right? I think the other thing is that it’s sort of beyond the idea that we don’t take political positions, that’s all another thing, though it’s obviously part of it, but it’s also this sort of implicit sense that having firm moral stances on most things is not only a breach of the notions of objectivity, but it’s also what stupid people do, or naive people do, or unserious people do. And so if you are really going to be a serious and legitimate analyzer of the world or of politics, then you have to be placing yourself sort of above these petty moral and ethical values that the little people have, because really, you are on the same level or in the same sort of community as those deciders that you were talking about.
And I think the other reason that these journalists adopt the terminology of the people that they’re covering is because it makes them feel like they’re in the Situation Room, or they’re around the negotiating table in Congress, they’re trying to send a message that they have a rarefied, specialized knowledge of the way the world really works, and inherent in that is that it works at a remove from the sort of unserious moral or ethical concerns of everyday people.
And so like, one of my least favorite constructions of all time that you see all the time, is like, Oh well, he’s not an idealist. He’s a pragmatist. You know, and pragmatism is deemed to be the best sort of political outlook you can have, whatever that means in practice, you know, there is just this complete worship of the idea that people are cold, ruthless, Kissinger-esque actors upon the world, rather than making the severe mistake of actually giving a shit about anything that goes on in the world.
Nima: Well, it’s like they’re the living, breathing embodiment of what we hear is kind of the evil Stalinist idea of, you know, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. But they do that kind of day in and day out, on their broadcast, in their commentary, in their columns and on social media, but obviously don’t see themselves as the bad guys, but then kind of apply that outwardly.
Jack Mirkinson: Yeah, and I do think going back to the Joseph Massad piece, I mean, like I said, you are allowed to disagree with having a more sort of removed take on October 7, if you want. It’s a very charged emotional issue. So I understand why people might react to a sort of unemotional analysis of it negatively. But if you do that, then you at least have to ask yourself, why is it that that is deemed to be completely off-limits, verboten, whatever you want to call it, and Fareed Zakaria literally saying, Let’s forget about the genocide for a moment. Hasn’t Netanyahu really been killing it lately?, is not only deemed acceptable, but completely noncontroversial.
Nima: It’s only ideological if it’s not your ideology.
Jack Mirkinson: Right? You know, and there were no mass calls for Fareed Zakaria to be kicked off of CNN, Congress didn’t get involved. It was a big nothing beyond the corner of the world that we all operate in. I mean, a lot of people were horrified, but nobody who actually has a material impact on whether Fareed Zakaria keeps his job or not cared at all, you know, and the fact that he felt so comfortable saying that, you know, and sitting in Aspen like one of the big citadels of the ruling class in the United States and just sort of chatting about this with the editor of The Economist and Tom Friedman, as if they were discussing tactics on a football field, really says sort of everything you need to know.
And so even if you are going to say, Well, I don’t like how this piece handled October 7, you do have to step back and say, Okay, even if I didn’t like that, why is it that something that takes that sort of approach and supercharges it in a way, by sort of lavishing praise on Netanyahu for the way that he is carrying out not only genocide, but this broader campaign of complete murder and destabilization and imperialism across the entire Middle East. Why is that okay, and talking about the sort of military aspects of October 7 is not okay? And I think the distinction between those two points is so baked into the elite media discourse in the way that it operates, that nobody ever is asked to actually step back and account for that.
Nima: Well, I think that is a good place to leave it. Thank you so much, Jack, for joining us today. We’ve been speaking with Jack Mirkinson, senior editor at The Nation and co-founder of Discourse Blog. Jack, thank you really so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Jack Mirkinson: Thank you so much for having me.
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Adam: Yeah, I think this concept, or this media convention, is very much also a product of competency porn, which we discussed with Luke Savage when we talked about the West Wing, which is this idea of working hard and being confident as being a high, if not the highest, moral order, like you’re sort of good at your job.
Nima: Doesn’t matter what your job is, but if you’re doing it with competence, if you’re doing it reliably, consistently, if the goals that you set for yourself are goals that you achieve, regardless of how they affect other people, then apparently you are a success, and that can be kind of siloed from the acts that you’re actually undertaking.
Adam: Yeah, you know, Say what you will about Jeffrey Dahmer, but he was a prolific and successful serial killer. And it’s like, yeah, but if you don’t preface that statement, because, if you want to have some abstract debate around competency, I think there’s context where that’s probably fine, because, you know, again, I think we have to be sober about the world. But if you don’t preface it with some kind of moral position on the thing you’re talking about, it definitely seems like a compliment. It definitely seems like you’re doing ideological work in favor of that particular person. Because, again, Americans value competency. They value the perception of winning. And when you poll people about Trump who say, like, you know, I hate him. He’s a piece of shit, he’s vulgar, he’s a rapist, he’s ugly, but dammit, he gets stuff done. It’s like, Yeah, well, that’s part of his appeal, right? Part of his appeal is that he’s competent. So when you parrot those lines, when you parrot the same thing with Netanyahu, right? Within Israel, he’s like, Look, you may not like me. I may be too right wing or too vulgar for your taste, but I, you know, I protect you, right? I’m the sort of great father. I make the trains run on time. So when you traffic in that kind of competency porn, all you’re doing is basically just providing PR for fascists.
Nima: Right, because that is their line, so don’t do their thing for them, right? So then you have that Fareed Zakaria thing where, you know, it’s like, Well, you know, genocide aside, he’s getting stuff done, which, I think, to be able to traffic in that kind of relativism, or, like I said, being able to silo certain things and kind of look at one thing and disregard the rest, and kind of have a positive take, or have an analysis of that certain thing, I think also to be able to do that, and to want to do that, you’re also endorsing part of what that thing is, right? There’s a bit of laundering that’s going on in that it’s not just sort of, egghead highbrow. Oh, well, let’s not, you know, I’m not talking about the morals of this. Let’s actually just break it down by the numbers. And it’s like, to do that, you really, actually have to be implicitly endorsing part of that. Because if you’re going to say, you know, fascists make the trains run on time, you’re saying that there are aspects of fascism that can really make things work for the better, and therefore disregarding ways that things can work for the better, maybe not through those particularly oppressive systems. So you’re kind of setting up a binary that does your ideological work for you.
But that will do it for this episode of Citations Needed. Thank you all again for listening. We are now into our ninth season. Thanks for sticking with us. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and please do, if you have not already, become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. We are 100% listener-funded, and we are able to do the show because of the ongoing support of listeners like you.
I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone.
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This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, October 1, 2025.
